CHAPTER XXV

LANDSCAPE FROM 1830

That same Salon of 1822 in which Delacroix exhibited his “Dante’s Bark” brought to Frenchmen a knowledge of the powerful movement which had taken place on the opposite side of the Channel. English water-colour painting was brilliantly represented by Bonington, who sent his “View of Lillebonne” and his “View of Havre.” Copley Fielding, Robson, and John Varley also contributed works; and these easy, spirited productions, with their skies washed in broadly and their bright, clear tones, were like a revelation to the young French artists of the period. The horizon was felt to be growing clear. In 1824, at the time when Delacroix’s “Massacre of Chios” appeared, the sun actually rose, bringing a flood of light. The English had learnt the way to France, and took the Louvre by storm. John Constable was represented by three pictures, and Bonington, Copley Fielding, Harding, Samuel Prout, and Varley were also accorded a place. This exhibition gave the deathblow to Classical landscape painting. Michallon had died young in 1822; and men like Bidault and Watelet could do nothing against such a battalion of colourists. Constable alone passed sentence upon them of eternal condemnation. Familiar neither with Georges Michel nor with the great Dutch painters, the French had not remarked that a landscape has need of a sky expressive of the spirit of the hour and the character of the season. Even what was done by Michel seemed a kind of diffident calligraphy when set beside the fresh strand-pieces of Bonington, the creations of the water-colour artists, bathed as they were in light, and the bold pictures of the Bergholt master, with their bright green and their cloudy horizon. The French landscape painters, who had been so timid until then, recognised that their painting had been a convention, despite all their striving after truth to nature.

Constable had been the first to free himself from every stereotyped rule, and he was an influence in France. The younger generation were in ecstasies over this intense green, the agitated clouds, this effervescent power inspiring everything with life. Though as yet but little esteemed even in England, Constable received the gold medal in Paris, and from that time took a fancy to Parisian exhibitions, and still in 1827 exhibited in the Louvre by the side of Bonington, who had but one year more in which to give admirable lessons by his bright plains and clear shining skies. At the same time Bonington’s friend and compatriot, William Reynolds, then likewise domiciled in Paris, contributed some of his powerful and often delicate landscape studies, the tender grey notes of which are like anticipations of Corot. This influence of the English upon the creators of paysage intime has long been an acknowledged fact, since Delacroix himself, in his article “Questions sur le Beau” in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1854, has affirmed it frankly.

L’Art.

THÉODORE ROUSSEAU.

The very next years announced what a ferment Constable had stirred in the more restless spirits. The period from 1827 to 1830 showed the birth-throes of French landscape painting. In 1831 it was born. In this year, for ever marked in the annals of French, and indeed of European art, there appeared together in the Salon, for the first time, all those young artists who are now honoured as the greatest in the century: all, or almost all, were children of Paris, the sons of small townsmen or of humble artisans; all were born in the old quarter of the city or in its suburbs, in the midst of a desolate wilderness of houses, and destined for that very reason to be great landscape painters. For it is not through chance that paysage intime immediately passed from London, the city of smoke, to Paris, the second great modern capital, and reached Germany from thence only at a much later time.

“Do you remember the time,” asks BÜrger-ThorÉ of ThÉodore Rousseau in the dedicatory letter to his Salon of 1844,—“do you still recall the years when we sat on the window-ledges of our attics in the Rue de Taitbout, and let our feet dangle at the edge of the roof, contemplating the chaos of houses and chimneys, which you with a twinkle in your eye compared to mountains, trees, and outlines of the earth? You were not able to go to the Alps, into the cheerful country, and so you created picturesque landscapes for yourself out of these horrible skeletons of wall. Do you still recall the little tree in Rothschild’s garden, which we caught sight of between two roofs? It was the one green thing that we could see; every fresh shoot of the little poplar wakened our interest in spring, and in autumn we counted the falling leaves.”

From this mood sprang modern landscape painting with its delicate reserve in subject, and its vigorously heightened love of nature. Up to the middle of the century nature was too commonplace and ordinary for the Germans; and it was therefore hard for them to establish a spiritual relationship with her. Landscape painting recognised its function in appealing to the understanding by the execution of points of geographical interest, or exciting a frigid curiosity by brilliant fireworks. But these children of the city, who with a heartfelt sympathy counted the budding and falling leaves of a single tree descried from their little attic window; these dreamers, who in their imagination constructed beautiful landscapes from the moss-crusted gutters of the roof and the chimneys and chimney smoke, were sufficiently schooled, when they came into the country, to feel the breath of the great mother of all, even where it was but faintly exhaled. Where a man’s heart is full he does not think about geographical information, and no roll of tom-toms is needed to attract the attention of those whose eyes are opened. Their spirit was sensitive, and their imagination sufficiently alert to catch with ecstasy, even from the most delicate and reserved notes, the harmony of that heavenly concert which nature executes on all its earthly instruments, at every moment and in all places.

ROUSSEAU.	MORNING.

ROUSSEAU.	LANDSCAPE, MORNING EFFECT.

Thus they had none of them any further need for extensive pilgrimage; to seek impulse for work they had not far to go. Croissy, Bougival, Saint-Cloud, and Marly were their Arcadia. Their farthest journeys were to the banks of the Oise, the woods of L’Isle Adam, Auvergne, Normandy, and Brittany. But they cared most of all to stay in the forest of Fontainebleau, which—by one of those curious chances that so often recur in history—played for a second time a highly important part in the development of French art. A hundred years before, it was the brilliant centre of the French Renaissance, the resort of those Italian artists who found in the palace there a second Vatican, and in Francis I another Leo X. In the nineteenth century, too, the Renaissance of French painting was achieved in Fontainebleau, only it had nothing to do with a school of mannered figure painters, but with a group of the most delicate landscape artists. From a sense of one’s duty to art one studies in the palace the elegant goddesses of Primaticcio, the laughing bacchantes of Cellini, and all the golden, festal splendour of the Cinquecento; but the heart is not touched till one stands outside in the forest on the soil where Rousseau and Corot and Millet and Diaz painted. How much may be felt and thought when one saunters of a dreamy evening, lost in one’s own meditations, across the heath of the plateau de la Belle Croix and through the arching oaks of Bas BrÉau to Barbizon, the Mecca of modern art, where the secrets of paysage intime were revealed to the Parisian landscape painters by the nymph of Fontainebleau! There was a time when men built their Gothic cathedrals soaring into the sky, after the model of the majestic palaces of the trees. The dim and sacred mist of incense hovered about the lofty pointed arches, and through painted windows the broken daylight shone, inspiring awe; the fair picture of a saint beckoned from above the altar, touched by the gleam of lamps and candles; gilded carvings glimmered strangely, and overwhelming strains from the fugues of Bach reverberated in the peal of the organ throughout the consecrated space. But now the Gothic cathedrals are transformed once more into palaces of trees. The towering oaks are the buttresses, the tracery of branches the choir screen, the clouds the incense, the wind sighing through the boughs the peal of the organ, and the sun the altar-piece. Man is once more a fire-worshipper, as in his childhood; the church has become the world, and the world has become the church.

How the spirit soars at the trill of a blackbird beneath the leafy roof of mighty primÆval oaks! One feels as though one had been transplanted into the Saturnian age, when men lived a joyous, unchequered life in holy unison with nature. For this park is still primÆval, in spite of all the carriage roads by which it is now traversed, in spite of all the guides who lounge upon the granite blocks of the hollows of Opremont. Yellowish-green ferns varying in tint cover the soil like a carpet. The woods are broken by great wastes of rock. Perhaps there is no spot in the world where such splendid beeches and huge majestic oaks stretch their gnarled branches to the sky—in one place spreading forth in luxuriant glory, and in another scarred by lightning and bitten by the wintry cold. It is just such scenes of ravage that make the grandest, the wildest, and the most sombre pictures. The might of the great forces of nature, striking down the heads of oaks like thistles, is felt nowhere in the same degree.

Barbizon itself is a small village three miles to the north of Fontainebleau, and, according to old tradition, founded by robbers who formerly dwelt in the forest. On both sides of the road connecting it with the charming little villages of Dammarie and Chailly there stretch long rows of chestnut, apple, and acacia trees. There are barely a hundred houses in the place. Most of them are overgrown with wild vine, shut in by thick hedges of hawthorn, and have a garden in front, where roses bloom amid cabbages and cauliflowers. At nine o’clock in the evening all Barbizon is asleep, but before four in the morning it awakes once more for work in the fields.

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ROUSSEAU.	THE VILLAGE OF BECQUIGNY IN PICARDY.

 

Historians of after-years will occupy themselves in endeavouring to discover when the first immigration of Parisian painters to this spot took place. It is reported that one of David’s pupils painted in the forest of Fontainebleau and lived in Barbizon. The only lodging to be got at that time was in a barn, which the former tailor of the place, a man of the name of Ganne, turned into an inn in 1823. Here, after 1830, Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, Brascassat, and many others alighted when they came to follow their studies in Barbizon from the spring to the autumn. Of an evening they clambered up to their miserable bedroom, and fastened to the head of the bed with drawing-pins the studies made in the course of the day. It was only later that PÈre Copain, an old peasant, who had begun life as a shepherd with three francs a month, was struck with the apt idea of buying in a few acres and building upon them small houses to let to painters. By this enterprise the man became rich, and gradually grew to be a capitalist, lending money to all who, in spite of their standing as celebrated Parisian artists, did not enjoy the blessings of fortune. But the general place of assembly was still the old barn employed in Ganne’s establishment, and in the course of years its walls were covered with large charcoal drawings, studies, and pictures. Here, in a patriarchal, easy-going, homely fashion, artists gathered together with their wives and children of an evening. Festivities also were held in the place, in particular that ball when Ganne’s daughter, a godchild of Madame Rousseau, celebrated her wedding. Rousseau and Millet were the decorators of the room; the entire space of the barn served as ball-room, the walls being adorned with ivy. Corot, always full of fun and high spirits, led the polonaise, which moved through a labyrinth of bottles placed on the floor.

L’Art.
ROUSSEAU.	LA HUTTE.

They painted in the forest. But they did not take the trouble to carry the instruments of their art home again. They kept breakfast, canvas, and brushes in holes in the rocks. Never before, probably, have men so lost themselves in nature. At every hour of the day, in the cool light of morning, at sunny noon, in the golden dusk, even in the twilight of blue moonlight nights, they were out in the field and the forest, learning to surprise everlasting nature at every moment of her mysterious life. The forest was their studio, and revealed to them all its secrets.

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ROUSSEAU.	EVENING.

The result of this life en plein air became at once the same as it had been with Constable. Earlier artists worked with the conception and the technique of Waterloo, Ruysdael, and Everdingen, and believed themselves incapable of doing anything without gnarled, heroic oaks. Even Michel was hard-bound in the gallery style of the Dutch, and for Decamps atmosphere was still a thing unknown or non-existent. He placed a harsh light, opaque as plaster, against a background as black as coal. Even the colours of Delacroix were merely tones of the palette; he wanted to create preconceived decorative harmonies, and not simply to interpret reality. Following the English, the masters of Fontainebleau made the discovery of air and light. They did not paint the world, like the other Romanticists, in exuberantly varying hues recalling the old masters: they saw it entourÉ d’air, and tempered by the tones of the atmosphere. And since their time the “harmony of light and air with that of which they are the life and illumination” has become the great problem of painting. Through this art grew young again, and works of art received the breathing life, the fresh bloom, and the delicate harmony which are to be found everywhere in nature itself, and which are only reached with much difficulty by any artificial method of tuning into accord. After Constable they were the first who recognised that the beauty of a landscape does not lie in objects themselves, but in the lights that are cast upon them. Of course, there is also an articulation of forms in nature. When Boecklin paints a grove with tall and solemn trees in the evening, when he forms to himself a vision of the mysterious haunts of his “Fire-worshippers,” there is scarcely any need of colour. The outline alone is so majestically stern that it makes man feel his littleness utterly, and summons him to devotional thoughts. But the subtle essence by which nature appeals either joyously or sorrowfully to the spirit depends still more on the light or gloom in which she is bathed; and this mood is not marked by an inquisitive eye: the introspective gaze, the imagination itself, secretes it in nature. And here a second point is touched.

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ROUSSEAU.	SUNSET.

The peculiarity of all these masters, who on their first appearance were often despised as realists or naturalists, consists precisely in this: they never represented, at least in the works of their later period in which they thoroughly expressed themselves,—they never represented actual nature in the manner of photography, but freely painted their own moods from memory, just as Goethe when he stood in the little house in the Kikelhahn near Ilmenau, instead of elaborating a prosaic description of the Kikelhahn, wrote the verses Ueber allen Wipfeln ist Ruh. In this poem of Goethe one does not learn how the summits looked, and there is no allusion to the play of light, and yet the forest, dimly illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, is presented clearly to the inward eye. Any poet before Goethe’s time would have made a broad and epical description, and produced a picture by the addition of details; but here the very music of the words creates a picture of rest and quietude. The works of the Fontainebleau artists are Goethe-like poems of nature in pigments. They are as far removed from the Æsthetic aridness of the older landscape of composition, pieced together from studies, as from the flat, prosaic fidelity to nature of that “entirely null and void, spuriously realistic painting of the so-called guardians of woods and waters.” They were neither concerned to master nature and compose a picture from her according to conventional rules, nor pedantically to draw the portrait of any given region. They did not think of topographical accuracy, or of preparing a map of their country. A landscape was not for them a piece of scenery, but a condition of soul. They represent the victory of lyricism over dry though inflated prose. Impressed by some vision of nature, they warm to their work and produce pictures that could not have been anticipated. And thus they fathomed art to its profoundest depths. Their works were fragrant poems sprung from moods of spirit which had risen in them during a walk in the forest. Perhaps only Titian, Rubens, and Watteau had previously looked upon nature with the same eyes. And as in the case of these artists, so also in that of the Fontainebleau painters, it was necessary that a genuine realistic art, a long period of the most intimate study of nature, should have to be gone through before they reached this height.

Seemann, Leipzig.
ROUSSEAU.	THE LAKE AMONG THE ROCKS AT BARBIZON.

L’Art.
ROUSSEAU.	A POND, FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU.

In the presence of nature one saturates one’s self with truth; and after returning to the studio one squeezes the sponge, as Jules DuprÉ expressed it. Only after they had satiated themselves with the knowledge of truth, only after nature with all her individual phenomena had been interwoven with their inmost being, could they, without effort, and without the purpose of representing determined objects, paint from personal sentiment, and give expression to their humour, in the mere gratification of impulse. Thence comes their wide difference from each other. Painters who work according to fixed rules resemble one another, and those who aim at a distinct copy of nature resemble one another no less. But each one of the Fontainebleau painters, according to his character and his mood for the time being, received different impressions from the same spot in nature, and at the same moment of time. Each found a landscape and a moment which appealed to his sentiment more perceptibly than any other. One delighted in spring and dewy morning, another in a cold, clear day, another in the threatening majesty of storm, another in the sparkling effects of sportive sunbeams, and another in evening after sundown, when colours have faded and forms are dim. Each one obeyed his peculiar temperament, and adapted his technique to the altogether personal expression of his way of seeing and feeling. Each one is entirely himself, each one an original mind, each picture a spiritual revelation, and often one of touching simplicity and greatness: homo additus naturÆ. And having dedicated themselves, more than all their predecessors, to personality creating in and for itself, they have become the founders of the new creed in art.

L’Art.

CAMILLE COROT.

That strong and firmly rooted master ThÉodore Rousseau was the epic poet, the plastic artist of the PleÏades. “Le chÊne des roches” was one of his masterpieces, and he stands himself amid the art of his time like an oak embedded in rocks. His father was a tailor who lived in the Rue Neuve-Saint Eustache, Nr. 4 au quatriÈme. As a boy he is said to have specially devoted himself to mathematics, and to have aimed at becoming a student at the Polytechnic Institute. Thus the dangerous, doctrinaire tendency, which beset him in his last years, of making art more of a science than is really practicable, and of referring everything to some law, lay even in his boyish tastes. He grew up in the studio of the Classicist LethiÈre, and looked on whilst the latter painted both his large Louvre pictures, “The Death of Brutus” and “The Death of Virginia.” He even thought himself of competing for the Prix de Rome. But the composition of his “historical landscape” was not a success. Then he took his paint-boxes, left LethiÈre’s studio, and wandered over to Montmartre. Even his first little picture, “The Telegraph Tower” of 1826, announced the aim which he was tentatively endeavouring to reach.

At the very time when Watelet’s metallic waterfalls and zinc trees were being drawn up in line, when the pupils of Bertin hunted the Calydonian boar, or drowned Zenobia in the waves of the Araxes, Rousseau, set free from the ambition of winning the Prix de Rome, was painting humble plains within the precincts of Paris, with little brooks in the neighbourhood which had nothing that deserved the name of waves.

His first excursion to Fontainebleau occurred in the year 1833, and in 1834 he painted his first masterpiece, the “CÔtÉs de Grandville,” that picture, replete with deep and powerful feeling for nature, which seems the great triumphant title-page of all his work. A firm resolve to accept reality as it is, and a remarkable eye for the local character of landscape and for the structure and anatomy of the earth—all qualities revealing the Rousseau of later years—were here to be seen in their full impressiveness and straightforward actuality. He received for this work a medal of the third class. At the same time his works were excluded from making any further appearance in the Salon for many years to come. Concession might be made to a beginner; but the master seemed dangerous to the academicians. Two pictures, “Cows descending in the Upper Jura” and “The Chestnut Avenue,” which he had destined for the Salon of 1835, were rejected by the hanging committee, and during twelve years his works met with a similar fate, although the leading critical intellects of Paris, ThorÉ, Gustave PlanchÉ, and ThÉophile Gautier, broke their lances in his behalf. Amongst the rejected of the present century, ThÉodore Rousseau is probably the most famous. At that period he was selling his pictures for five and ten louis-d’or. It was only after the February Revolution of 1848, when the Academic Committee had fallen with the bourgeois king, that the doors of the Salon were opened to him again, and in the meanwhile his pictures had made their way quietly and by their unassisted merit. In the sequestered solitude of Barbizon he had matured into an artistic individuality of the highest calibre, and become a painter to whom the history of art must accord a place by the side of Ruysdael, Hobbema, and Constable.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
COROT.	THE BRIDGE OF ST. ANGELO, ROME.

He painted everything in Barbizon—the plains and the hills, the river and the forest, all the seasons of the year and all the hours of the day. The succession of his moods is as inexhaustible as boundless nature herself. Skies gilded by the setting sun, phases of dewy morning, plains basking in light, woods in the russet-yellow foliage of autumn: these are the subjects of ThÉodore Rousseau—an endless procession of poetic effects, expressed at first by the mere instinct of emotion and later with a mathematical precision which is often a little strained, though always irresistibly forcible. Marvellous are his autumn landscapes with their ruddy foliage of beech; majestic are those pictures in which he expressed the profound sentiment of solitude as it passes over you in the inviolate tangle of the forest, inviting the spirit to commune with itself; but especially characteristic of Rousseau are those plains with huge isolated trees, over which the mere light of common day rests almost coldly and dispassionately.

COROT AT WORK.		COROT.	DAPHNIS AND CHLOE.

It is an artistic or psychological anomaly that in this romantic generation a man could be born in whom there was nothing of the Romanticist. ThÉodore Rousseau was an experimentalist, a great worker, a restless and seeking spirit, ever tormented and unsatisfied with itself, a nature wholly without sentimentality and impassionless, the very opposite of his predecessor Huet. Huet made nature the mirror of the passions, the melancholy and the tragic suffering which agitate the human spirit with their rage. Whilst he celebrated the irresistible powers and blind forces, the elemental genii which rule the skies and the waters, he wanted to waken an impression of terror and desolation in the spirit of the beholder. He piled together masses of rock, lent dramatic passion to the clouds, and revelled with delight in the sharpest contrasts. Rousseau’s pervasive characteristic is absolute plainness and actuality. Such a simplicity of shadow had never existed before. Since the Renaissance artists had systematically heightened the intensity of shadows for the sake of effect; Rousseau relied on the true and simple doctrine that may be formulated in the phrase: the more light there is the fainter and more transparent are the shadows, not the darker, as Decamps and Huet painted them. Or, to speak more generally, in nature the intensity of shadows stands in an inverse relation to the intensity of the light.

COROT.   VUE DE TOSCANE.

Rousseau does not force on the spectator any preconceived mood of his own, but leaves him before a picture with all the freedom and capacity for personal feeling which he would have received from the spectacle of nature herself. The painter does not address him directly, but lets nature have free play, just as a medium merely acts as the vehicle of a spirit. So personal in execution and so absolutely impersonal in conception are Rousseau’s pictures. Huet translated his moods by the assistance of nature; Rousseau is an incomparable witness, confining himself strictly to the event, and giving his report of it in brief, virile speech, in clear-cut style. Huet puts one out of humour, because it is his own humour which he is determined to force. Rousseau seldom fails of effect, because he renders the effect which has struck him, faithfully and without marginal notes. Only in the convincing power of representation, and never in the forcing of a calculated mood, does the “mood” of his landscape lie. Or, to take an illustration from the province of portrait painting, when Lenbach paints Prince Bismarck, it is Lenbach’s Bismarck; as an intellectual painter he has given an entirely subjective rendering of Bismarck, and compels the spectator so to see him. Holbein, when he painted Henry VIII, proceeded in the opposite way: for him characterisation depended on his revealing his own character as little as possible; he completely subordinated himself to his subject, surrendered himself, and religiously painted all that he saw, leaving it to others to carry away from the picture what they pleased. And ThÉodore Rousseau, too, was possessed by the spirit of the old German portrait painter. He set his whole force of purpose to the task of letting nature manifest herself, free from any preconceived interpretation. His pictures are absolutely without effective point, but there is so much power and deep truth, so much simplicity, boldness, and sincerity in his manner of seeing and painting nature, and of feeling her intense and forceful life, that they have become great works of art by this alone, like the portraits of Holbein. More impressive tones, loftier imagination, more moving tenderness, and more intoxicating harmonies are at the command of other masters, but few had truer or more profound articulation, and not one has been so sincere as ThÉodore Rousseau. Rousseau saw into the inmost being of nature, as Holbein into Henry VIII, and the impression he received, the emotion he felt, is a thing which he communicates broadly, boldly, and entirely. He is a portrait painter who knows his model through and through; moreover, he is a connoisseur of the old masters who knows what it is to make a picture. Every production of Rousseau is a deliberate and well-considered work, a cannon-shot, and no mere dropping fusilade of small arms; not a light feuilleton, but an earnest treatise of strong character. Though a powerful colourist, he works by the simplest means, and has at bottom the feeling of a draughtsman; which is principally the reason why, at the present day, when one looks at Rousseau’s pictures, one thinks rather of Hobbema than of Billotte and Claude Monet.

His absolute mastery over drawing even induced him in his last years to abandon painting altogether. He designated it contemptuously as falsehood, because it smeared over the truth, the anatomy of nature.

In Rousseau there was even more the genius of a sculptor than of a portrait painter. His spirit, positive, exact, like that of a mathematician, and far more equipped with artistic precision than pictorial qualities, delighted in everything sharply defined, plastic, and full of repose: moss-grown stones, oaks of the growth of centuries, marshes and standing water, rude granite blocks of the forest of Fontainebleau, and trees bedded in the rocks of the glens of Opremont. In a quite peculiar sense was the oak his favourite tree—the mighty, wide-branching, primÆval oak which occupies the centre of one of his masterpieces, “A Pond,” and spreads its great gnarled boughs to the cloudy sky in almost every one of his pictures. It is only Rembrandt’s three oaks that stand in like manner, firm and broad of stem, as though they were living personalities of the North, in a lonely field beneath the hissing rain. To ensure the absolute vitality of organisms was for Rousseau the object of unintermittent toil.

COROT.	AT SUNSET.

Plants, trees, and rocks were not forms summarily observed and clumped together in an arbitrary fashion; for him they were beings gifted with a soul, breathing creatures, each one of which had its physiognomy, its individuality, its part to play, and its distinction of being in the great harmony of universal nature. “By the harmony of air and light with that of which they are the life and the illumination I will make you hear the trees moaning beneath the North wind and the birds calling to their young.” To achieve that aim he thought that he could not do too much. As DÜrer worked seven times on the same scenes of the Passion until he had found the simplest and most speaking expression, so Rousseau treated the same motives ten and twenty times. Restless are his efforts to discover different phases of the same subject, to approach his model from the most various points of view, and to do justice to it on every side. He begins an interrupted picture again and again, and adds something to it to heighten the expression, as Leonardo died with the consciousness that there was something yet to be done to his “Joconda.” Sometimes a laboured effect is brought into his works by this method, but in other ways he has gained in this struggle with reality a power of exposition, a capacity of expression, a force of appeal, and such a remarkable insight for rightness of effect that every one of his good pictures could be hung without detriment in a gallery of old masters; the nineteenth century did not see many arise who could bear such a proximity in every respect. His landscapes are as full of sap as creation itself; they reveal a forcible condensation of nature. The only words which can be used to describe him are strength, health, and energy. “It ought to be: in the beginning was the Power.”

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COROT.	THE RUIN.

From his youth upwards ThÉodore Rousseau was a masculine spirit; even as a stripling he was a man above all juvenile follies—one might almost say, a philosopher without ideals. In literature Turgenief’s conception of nature might be most readily compared with that of Rousseau. In Turgenief’s Diary of a Sportsman, written in 1852, everything is so fresh and full of sap that one could imagine it was not so much the work of a human pen as a direct revelation from the forest and the steppes. Though men are elsewhere habituated to see their joys and sorrows reflected in nature, the sentiment of his own personality falls from Turgenief when he contemplates the eternal spectacle of the elements. He plunges into nature and loses the consciousness of his own being in hers; and he becomes a part of what he contemplates. For him the majesty of nature lies in her treating everything, from the worm to the human being, with impassiveness. Man receives neither love nor hatred at her hands; she neither rejoices in the good that he does nor complains of sin and crime, but looks beyond him with her deep, earnest eyes because he is an object of complete indifference to her. “The last of thy brothers might vanish off the face of the earth and not a needle of the pine branches would tremble.” Nature has something icy, apathetic, terrible; and the fear which she can inspire through this indifference of hers ceases only when we begin to understand the relationship in which we are to our surroundings, when we begin to comprehend that man and animal, tree and flower, bird and fish, owe their existence to this one Mother. So Turgenief came to the same point as Spinoza.

COROT.	EVENING.

And Rousseau did the same. The nature of ThÉodore Rousseau was devoid of all excitable enthusiasm. Thus the world he painted became something austere, earnest, and inaccessible beneath his hands. He lived in it alone, fleeing from his fellows, and for this reason human figures are seldom to be found in his pictures. He loved to paint nature on cold, grey impassive days, when the trees cast great shadows and forms stand out forcibly against the sky. He is not the painter of morning and evening twilight. There is no awakening and no dawn, no charm in these landscapes and no youth. Children would not laugh here, nor lovers venture to caress. In these trees the birds would build no nests, nor their fledglings twitter. His oaks stand as if they had so stood from eternity.

“Die unbegrieflich hohen Werke Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.”

Like Turgenief, Rousseau ended in Pantheism.

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COROT.	AN EVENING IN NORMANDY.

He familiarised himself more and more with the endless variety of plants and trees, of the earth and the sky at the differing hours of the day: he made his forms even more precise. He wished to paint the organic life of inanimate nature—the life which heaves unconsciously everywhere, sighing in the air, streaming from the bosom of the earth, and vibrating in the tiniest blade of grass as positively as it palpitates through the branches of the old oaks. These trees and herbs are not human, but they are characterised by their peculiar features, just as though they were men. The poplars grow like pyramids, and have green and silvered leaves, the oaks dark foliage and gnarled far-reaching boughs. The oaks stand fixed and immovable against the storm, whilst the slender poplars bend pliantly before it. This curious distinction in all the forms of nature, each one of which fulfils a course of existence like that of man, was a problem which pursued Rousseau throughout his life as a vast riddle. Observe his trees: they are not dead things; the sap of life mounts unseen through their strong trunks to the smallest branches and shoots, which spread from the extremity of the boughs like clawing fingers. The soil works and alters; every plant reveals the inner structure of the organism which produced it. And this striving even became a curse to him in his last period. Nature became for him an organism which he studied as an anatomist studies a corpse, an organism all the members of which act one upon the other according to logical laws, like the wheels of a machine; and for the proper operation of this machine the smallest plants seemed as necessary as the mightiest oaks, the gravel as important as the most tremendous rock.

Hanfstaengl.
COROT.	THE DANCE OF THE NYMPHS.

Convinced that there was nothing in nature either indifferent or without its purpose, and that everything had a justification for its existence and played a part in the movement of universal life, he believed also that in everything, however small it might be, there was a special pictorial significance; and he toiled to discover this, to make it evident, and often forgot the while that art must make sacrifices if it is to move and charm. In his boundless veneration for the logical organism of nature he held, as a kind of categorical imperative, that it was right to give the same importance to the infinitely small as to the infinitely great. The notion was chimerical, and it wrecked him. In his last period the only things that will preserve their artistic reputation are his marvellously powerful drawings. No one ever had such a feeling for values, and thus he knew how to give his drawings—quite apart from their pithy weight of stroke—an effect of light which was forcibly striking. Just as admirable were the water-colours produced under the influence of Japanese picture-books. The pictures of petty detail which belong to these years have only an historical interest, and that merely because it is instructive to see how a great genius can deceive himself. One of his last works, the view of Mont Blanc, with the boundless horizon and the countless carefully and scrupulously delineated planes of ground, has neither pictorial beauty nor majesty. In the presence of this bizarre work one feels astonishment at the artist’s endurance and strength of will, but disappointment at the result. He wanted to win the secret of its being from every undulation of the ground, from every blade of grass, and from every leaf; he was anxiously bent upon what he called planimÉtrie, upon the importance of horizontal planes, and he accentuated detail and accessory work beyond measure. His pantheistic faith in nature brought ThÉodore Rousseau to his fall. Those who did not know him spoke of his childish stippling and of the decline of his talent. Those who did know him saw in this stippling the issue of the same endeavours which poor Charles de la Berge had made before him, and of the principles on which the landscape of the English Pre-Raphaelites was being based about this time. If one looks at his works and then reads his life one almost comes to have for him a kind of religious veneration. There is something of the martyr in this insatiable observer, whose life was one long struggle, and to whom the study of the earth’s construction and the anatomy of branches was almost a religion.

Seemann, Leipzig.
COROT.	A DANCE.

J. B. C. COROT.	LANDSCAPE.

At first he had to struggle for ten years for bread and recognition. It seems hardly credible that his landscapes, even after 1848, when they had obtained entry into the Salon, were a source of irritation there for years, simply because they were green. The public was so accustomed to brown trees and brown grass, that every other colour in the landscape was an offence against decency, and before a green picture the Philistine immediately cried out, “Spinage!” “Allez, c’Était dur d’ouvrir la brÊche,” said he, in his later years. And at last, at the World Exhibition of 1855, when he had made it clear to Europe who ThÉodore Rousseau was, the evening of his life was saddened by pain and illness. He had married a poor unfortunate creature, a wild child of the forest, the only feminine being that he had found time to love during his life of toil. After a few years of marriage she became insane, and whilst he tended her Rousseau himself fell a victim to an affection of the brain which darkened his last years. Death came to his release in 1867. As he lay dying his mad wife danced and trilled to the screaming of her parrot. He rests “dans le plain calme de la nature” in the village churchyard at Chailly, near Barbizon, buried in front of his much-loved forest. Millet erected the headstone—a simple cross upon an unhewn block of sandstone, with a tablet of brass on which are inscribed the words:

Hanjstaengl.
COROT.	LA ROUTE D’ARRAS.

THÉODORE ROUSSEAU, PEINTRE.

“Rousseau c’est un aigle. Quant À moi, je ne suis qu’une alouette qui pousse de petites chansons dans mes nuages gris.” With these words Camille Corot has indicated the distinction between Rousseau and himself. They denote the two opposite poles of modern landscape. What attracted the plastic artists, Rousseau, Ruysdael, and Hobbema—the relief of objects, the power of contours, the solidity of forms—was not Corot’s concern. Whilst Rousseau never spoke about colour with his pupils, but as ceterum censeo invariably repeated, “Enfin, la forme est la premiÈre chose À observer,” Corot himself admitted that drawing was not his strong point. When he tried to paint rocks he was but moderately effective, and all his efforts at drawing the human figure were seldom crowned with real success, although in his last years he returned to the task with continuous zeal. Apart from such peculiar exceptions as that wonderful picture “The Toilet,” his figures are always the weakest part of his landscapes, and only have a good effect when in the background they reveal their delicate outlines, half lost in rosy haze. He was not much more felicitous with his animals, and in particular there often appear in his pictures great heavy cows, which are badly planted on their feet, and which one wishes that he had left out. Amongst trees he did not care to paint the oak, the favourite tree with all artists who have a passion for form, nor the chestnut, nor the elm, but preferred to summon, amid the delicate play of sunbeams, the aspen, the poplar, the alder, the birch with its white slender stem and its pale, tremulous leaves, and the willow with its light foliage. In Rousseau a tree is a proud, toughly knotted personality, a noble, self-conscious creation; in Corot it is a soft tremulous being rocking in the fragrant air, in which it whispers and murmurs of love and joy. His favourite season was not the autumn, when the turning leaves, hard as steel, stand out with firm lines, quiet and motionless, against the clear sky, but the early spring, when the farthest twigs upon the boughs deck themselves with little leaves of tender green, which vibrate and quiver with the least breath of air. He had, moreover, a perfectly wonderful secret of rendering the effect of the tiny blades of grass and the flowers which grow upon the meadows in June; he delighted to paint the banks of a stream with tall bushes bending to the water, and he loved water itself in undetermined clearness and in the shifting glance of light, leaving it here in shadow and touching it there with brightness; the sky in the depths beneath wedded to the bright border of the pool or the vanishing outlines of the bank, and the clouds floating across the sky, and here and there embracing a light shining fragment of the blue. He loved morning before sunrise, when the white mists hover over pools like a light veil of gauze, and gradually disperse as the sun breaks through, but he had a passion for evening which was almost greater: he loved the soft vapours which gather in the gloom, thickening until they become pale grey velvet mantles, as peace and rest descend upon the earth with the drawing on of night.

L’Art.		L’Art.
JULES DUPRÉ.		THE HOUSE OF JULES DUPRÉ AT L’ISLE-ADAM.

In contradistinction from Rousseau his specialty was everything soft and wavering, everything that has neither determined form nor sharp lines, and that, by not appealing too clearly to the eye, is the more conducive to dreamy reveries. It is not the spirit of a sculptor that lives in Corot, but that of a poet, or still better, the spirit of a musician, since music is the least plastic of the arts. It is not surprising to read in his biography that, like Watteau, he had almost a greater passion for music than for painting, and that when he painted he had always an old song or an opera aria upon his lips, that when he spoke of his pictures he had a taste for drawing comparisons from music, and that he had a season-ticket at the Conservatoire, never missed a concert, and played upon the violin himself. Indeed, there is something of the tender note of this instrument in his pictures, which make such a sweetly solemn appeal through their delicious silver tone. Beside Rousseau, the plastic artist, PÈre Corot is an idyllic painter of melting grace; beside Rousseau, the realist, he seems a dreamy musician; beside Rousseau, the virile spirit earnestly making experiments in art, he appears like a bashful schoolgirl in love. Rousseau approached nature in broad daylight, with screws and levers, as a cool-headed man of science; Corot caressed and flattered her, sung her wooing love-songs till she descended to meet him in the twilight hours, and whispered to him, her beloved, the secrets which Rousseau was unable to wring from her by violence.

Corot was sixteen years senior to Rousseau. He still belonged to the eighteenth century, to the time when, under the dictatorship of David, Paris transformed herself into imperial Rome. David, GÉrard, GuÉrin, and Prudhon, artists so different in talent, were the painters whose works met his first eager glances, and no particular acuteness is needed to recognise in the Nymphs and Cupids with which Corot in after-years, especially in the evening of his life, dotted his fragrant landscapes, the direct issue of Prudhon’s charming goddesses, the reminiscences of his youth nourished on the antique. He, too, was a child of old Paris, with its narrow streets and corners. His father was a hairdresser in the Rue du Bac, number 37, and had made the acquaintance of a girl who lived at number 1 in the same street, close to the Pont Royal, and was shop-girl at a milliner’s. He carried on his barber’s shop until 1778, when Camille, the future painter, was two years old. Then Madame Corot herself undertook the millinery establishment in which she had once worked. There might be read on the front of the narrow little house, number 1 of the Rue du Bac, Madame Corot, Marchande de Modes. M. Corot, a polite and very correct little man, raised the business to great prosperity. The Tuileries were opposite, and under Napoleon I Corot became Court “modiste.” As such he must have attained a certain celebrity, as even the theatre took his name in vain. A piece which was then frequently played at the ComÉdie FranÇaise contains the passage: “I have just come from Corot, but could not speak to him; he was locked up in his private room occupied in composing a new spring hat.”

S. Low & Co.
DUPRÉ.	THE SETTING SUN.

Camille went to the high school in Rouen, and was then destined, according to the wish of his father, to adopt some serious calling “by which money was to be made.” He began his career with a yard-measure in a linen-draper’s establishment, ran through the suburbs of Paris with a book of patterns under his arm selling cloth—Couleur olive—and in his absence of mind made the clumsiest mistakes. After eight years of opposition his father consented to his becoming a painter. “You will have a yearly allowance of twelve hundred francs,” said old Corot, “and if you can live on that you may do as you please.” At the Pont Royal, behind his father’s house, he painted his first picture, amid the tittering of the little dressmaker’s apprentices who looked on with curiosity from the window, but one of whom, Mademoiselle Rose, remained his dear friend through life. This was in 1823, and twenty years went by before he returned to French soil in the pictures that he painted. Victor Bertin became his teacher; in other words, Classicism, style, and coldness. He sought diligently to do as others; he drew studies, composed historical landscapes, and painted as he saw the academicians painting around him. To conclude his orthodox course of training it only remained for him to make the pilgrimage to Italy, where Claude Lorrain had once painted and Poussin had invented the historical landscape. In 1825—when he was twenty-eight—he set out with Bertin and Aligny, remained long in Rome, and came to Naples. The Classicists, whose circle he entered with submissive veneration, welcomed him for his cheerful, even temper and the pretty songs which he sang in fine tenor voice. Early every morning he went into the Campagna, with a colour-box under his arm and a sentimental ditty on his lips, and there he drew the ruins with an architectural severity, just like Poussin. In 1827, after a sojourn of two years and a half in Italy, he was able to make an appearance in the Salon with his carefully balanced landscapes. In 1835 and 1843 he stayed again in Italy, and only after this third pilgrimage were his eyes opened to the charms of French landscape.

L’Art.

THE BRIDGE AT L’ISLE-ADAM.

One can pass rapidly over this first section of Corot’s work. His pictures of this period are not without merit, but to speak of them with justice they should be compared with contemporary Classical productions. Then one finds in them broad and sure drawing, and can recognise a powerful hand and notice an astonishing increase of ability. Even on his second sojourn in Italy he painted no longer as an ethnographical student, and no longer wasted his powers on detail. But it is in the pictures of his last twenty years that Corot first becomes the Theocritus of the nineteenth century. The second Corot has spoilt one’s enjoyment for the first. But who would care to pick a quarrel with him on that score! Beside his later pictures how hard are those studies from Rome, which the dying painter left to the Louvre, and which, as his maiden efforts, he regarded with great tenderness all through his life. How little they have of the delicate, harmonious light of his later works! The great historical landscape with Homer in it, where light and shadow are placed so trenchantly beside each other, the landscape “Aricia,” “Saint Jerome in the Desert,” the picture of the young girl sitting reading beside a mountain stream, “The Beggar” with that team in mad career which Decamps could not have painted with greater virtuosity,—they are all good pictures by the side of those of his contemporaries, but in comparison with real Corots they are like the exercises of a pupil, in their hard, dry painting, their black, coarse tones, and their chalky wall of atmosphere. There is neither breeze nor transparency nor life in the air; the trees are motionless, and look as if they were heavily cased in iron.

Baschet.
DUPRÉ.	NEAR SOUTHAMPTON.
(By permission of M. Jules Beer, the owner of the picture.)

Corot was approaching his fortieth year, an age at which a man’s ideas are generally fixed, when the great revolution of French landscape painting was accomplished under the influence of the English and of Rousseau. Trained in academical traditions, he might have remained steadfast in his own province. To follow the young school he had completely to learn his art again, and alter his method of treatment with the choice of subjects, and this casting of his slough demanded another fifteen years. When he passed from Italian to French landscape, after his return from his third journey to Rome in 1843, his pictures were still hard and heavy. He had already felt the influence of Bonington and Constable, by the side of whose works his first exhibited picture had hung in 1827. But he still lacked the power of rendering light and air, and his painting had neither softness nor light. Even in the choice of subject he was still undecided, returning more than once to the historical landscape and working on it with unequal success. His masterpiece of 1843, “The Baptism of Christ,” in the Church of Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris, is no more than a delicate imitation of the old masters. The “Christ upon the Mount of Olives” of 1844, in the Museum of Langres, is the first picture which seems like a convert’s confession of faith. In the centre of the picture, before a low hill, Christ kneels upon the ground praying; His disciples are around Him, and to the right, vanishing in the shadows, the olive trees stretch their gnarled branches over the darkened way. A dark blue sky, in which a star is flickering, broods tremulously over the landscape. One might pass the Christ over unobserved; but for the title He would be hard to recognise. But the star shining far away, the transparent clearness of the night sky, the light clouds, and the mysterious shadows gliding swiftly over the ground,—these have no more to do with the false and already announce the true Corot. From this time he found the way on which he went forward resolute and emancipated.

DUPRÉ.	THE PUNT.

For five-and-twenty years it was permitted to him to labour in perfect ripeness, freedom, and artistic independence. One thinks of Corot as though he had been a child until he was fifty and then first entered upon his adolescence. Up to 1846 he took from his father the yearly allowance of twelve hundred francs given him as a student, and in that year, when he received the Cross of the Legion of Honour, M. Corot doubled the sum for the future, observing: “Well, Camille seems to have talent after all.” About the same time his friends remarked that he went about Barbizon one day more meditatively than usual. “My dear fellow,” said he to one of them, “I am inconsolable. Till now I had a complete collection of Corots, and it has been broken to-day, for I have sold one for the first time.” And even at seventy-four he said: “How swiftly one’s life passes, and how much must one exert one’s self to do anything good!” The history of art has few examples to offer of so long a spring. Corot had the privilege of never growing old; his life was a continual rejuvenescence. The works which made him Corot are the youthful works of an old man, the matured creations of a grey-headed artist, who—like Titian—remained for ever young; and for their artistic appreciation it is not without importance to remember this.

Baschet.
DUPRÉ.	SUNSET.
(By permission of M. Jules Beer, the owner of the picture.)

Of all the Fontainebleau painters Corot was the least a realist: he was the least bound to the earth, and he was never bent upon any exact rendering of a part of nature. No doubt he worked much in the open air, but he worked far more in his studio; he painted many scenes as they lay before him, but more often those which he only saw in his own mind. He is reported to have said on his deathbed: “Last night I saw in a dream a landscape with a sky all rosy. It was charming, and still stands before me quite distinctly; it will be marvellous to paint.” How many landscapes may he not have thus dreamed, and painted from the recollected vision!

L’Art.
DUPRÉ.	THE HAY-WAIN.

For a young man this would be a very dangerous method. For Corot it was the only one which allowed him to remain Corot, because in this way no unnecessary detail disturbed the pure, poetic reverie. He had spent his whole life in a dallying courtship with nature, ever renewed. As a child he looked down from his attic window upon the wavering mists of the Seine; as a schoolboy in Rouen he wandered lost in his own fancies along the borders of the great river; when he had grown older he went every year with his sister to a little country-house in Ville d’Avray, which his father had bought for him in 1817. Here he stood at the open window, in the depth of the night, when every one was asleep, absorbed in looking at the sky and listening to the plash of waters and the rustling of leaves. Here he stayed quite alone. No sound disturbed his reveries, and unconsciously he drank in the soft, moist air and the delicate vapour rising from the neighbouring river. Everything was harmoniously reflected in his quick and eager spirit, and his eyes beheld the individual trait of nature floating in the universal life. He began not merely to see nature, but to feel her presence, like that of a beloved woman, to receive her very breath and to hear the beating of her heart.

Baschet.

DUPRÉ.   THE OLD OAK.

One knows the marvellous letter in which he describes the day of a landscape painter to Jules DuprÉ: “On se lÈve de bonne heure, À trois heures du matin, avant le soleil; on va s’asseoir au pied d’un arbre, on regarde et on attend. On ne voit pas grand’chose d’abord. La nature ressemble À une toile blanchÂtre oÙ s’esquissent À peine les profils de quelques masses: tout est embaumÉ, tout frisonne au souffle fraÎchi de l’aube. Bing! le soleil s’Éclaircit ... le soleil n’a pas encore dÉchirÉ la gaze derriÈre laquelle se cachent la prairie, le vallon, les collines de l’horizon.... Les vapeurs nocturnes rampent encore commes des flocons argentÉs sur les herbes d’un vert transi. Bing!... Bing!... un premier rayon de soleil ... un second rayon de soleil.... Les petites fleurettes semblent s’Éveiller joyeuses.... Elles out toutes leur goutte de rosÉe qui tremble ... les feuilles frileuses s’agitent au souffle du matin ... dans la feuillÉe, les oiseaux invisibles chantent.... Il semble que ce sont les fleurs qui font la priÈre. Les Amours À ailes de papillons s’Ébattent sur la prairie et font onduler les hautes herbes.... On ne voit rien ... tout y est. Le paysage est tout entier derriÈre la gaze transparente du brouillard, qui, au reste ... monte ... monte ... aspirÉ par le soleil ... et laisse, en se levant, voir la riviÈre lamÉe d’argent, les prÉs, les arbres, les maisonettes, le lointain fuyant.... On distingue enfin tout ce que l’on divinait d’abord.”

At the end there is an ode to evening which is perhaps to be reckoned amongst the most delicate pages of French lyrics: “La nature s’assoupit ... cependant l’air frais du soir soupire dans les feuilles ... la rosÉe emperle le velours des gazons.... Les nymphes fuient ... se cachent ... et dÉsirent Être vues.... Bing! une Étoile du ciel qui pique une tÊte dans l’Étang.... Charmante Étoile, dont le frÉmissement de l’eau augmente le scintillement, tu me regardes ... tu me souris en clignant de l’oeil.... Bing! une seconde Étoile apparaÎt dans l’eau; un second oeil s’ouvre. Soyez les bienvenues, fraÎches et charmantes Étoiles.... Bing! Bing! Bing! trois, six, vingt Étoiles.... Toutes les Étoiles du ciel se sont donnÉ rendez-vous dans cet heureux Étang.... Tout s’assombrit encore.... L’Étang seul scintille.... C’est un fourmillement d’Étoiles.... L’illusion se produit.... Le soleil Étant couchÉ, le soleil intÉrieur de l’Âme, le soleil de l’art se lÈve.... Bon! voil mon tableau fait.”

DUPRÉ.	THE POOL.

Any one who has never read anything about Corot except these lines may know him through them alone. Even that little word “Bing” comprises and elucidates his art by its clear, silvery resonance. The words vibrate like the strings of a violin that have been gently touched, and they want Mozart’s music as an accompaniment. I do not know any one who has described all the feminine tenderness of nature, the dishevelled leaves of the birches, the heaving bosom of the air, the fresh virginity of morning, the weary, sensuous charm of evening, with such seductive tenderness and such highly strung feeling, so voluptuously and yet so coyly.

To these impressions of Rouen, Ville d’Avray, and Barbizon were added finally those of Paris. For Corot was born in Paris, and, often as he left it, he always came back; he passed the greatest part of his life there, and there it was, perhaps, that in his last period he created his most poetic works. In these years he had no more need of actual landscapes; he needed only a sky and they rose before him. Every evening after sundown he left his studio just at the time when the dusk fell veiling everything. He raised his eyes to the sky, the only part of nature which remained visible. And how often does this twilight sky of Paris recur in Corot’s pictures! At the end of his life he could really give himself over to a dream. The drawings and countless studies of his youth bear witness to the care, patience, and exactitude of his preparation. They gave him in after-years, when he was sure of his hand, the right to simplify, because he knew everything thoroughly. Thus Boecklin paints his pictures without a model, and thus Corot painted his landscapes. The hardest problems are solved apparently as if he were improvising; and for that very reason the sight of a Corot gives such unspeakable pleasure, such an impression of charming ease. It is only a hand which has used a brush for forty years that can paint thus. All effects are attained with the minimum expenditure of strength and material. The drawing lies as if behind colour that has been blown on to the canvas; it is as if one looked through a thin gauze into the distance. Whoever has studied reality so many years, with patient and observant eye, as Corot did, whoever has daily satiated his imagination with the impressions of nature, may finally venture on painting, not this or that scenery, but the fragrance, the very essence of things, and render merely his own spirit and his own visions free from all earthly and retarding accessories. There is a temptation to do honour to Corot’s pictures merely as “the confessions of a beautiful soul.”

L’Art.

NARCISSE DIAZ.

But Corot was as great and strong as a Hercules. In his blue blouse, with his woollen cap and the inevitable short Corot pipe in his mouth—a pipe which has become historical—one would have taken him for a carter rather than a celebrated painter. At the same time he remained during his whole life—a girl: twenty years senior to all the great landscape painters of the epoch, he was at once a patriarch in their eyes and their younger comrade. His long white hair surrounded the innocent face of a ruddy country girl, and his kind and pleasant eyes were those of a child listening to a fairy-tale. In 1848, during the fighting on the barricades, he asked with childish astonishment: “What is the matter? Are we not satisfied with the Government?” And during the war in 1870 this great hoary-headed child of seventy-four bought a musket, to join in fighting against Germany. Benevolence was the joy of his old age. Every friend who begged for a picture was given one, while for money he had the indifference of a hermit who has no wants and neither sows nor reaps, but is fed by his Heavenly Father. He ran breathlessly after an acquaintance to whom, contrary to his wont, he had refused five thousand francs: “Forgive me,” he said; “I am a miser, but there they are.” And when a picture-dealer brought him ten thousand francs he gave him the following direction: “Send them,” he said, “to the widow of my friend Millet; only, she must believe that you have bought pictures from him.” His one passion was music, his whole life “an eternal song.” Corot was a happy man, and no one more deserved to be happy. In his kind-hearted vivacity and even good spirits he was a favourite with all who came near him and called him familiarly their Papa Corot. Everything in him was healthy and natural; his was a harmonious nature, living and working happily. This harmony is reflected in his art. And he saw the joy in nature which he had in himself.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
DIAZ.	THE DESCENT OF THE BOHEMIANS.

 

Everything that was coarse or horrible in nature he avoided, and his own life passed without romance or any terrible catastrophes. He has no picture in which there is a harassed tree vexed by the storm. Corot’s own spirit was touched neither by passions nor by the strokes of fate. There is air in his landscapes, but never storm; streams, but not torrents; waters, but not floods; plains, but not rugged mountains. All is soft and quiet as his own heart, whose peace the storm never troubled.

L’Art.
DIAZ.	AMONG THE FOLIAGE.	DIAZ.	A TREE TRUNK.

No man ever lived a more orderly, regular, and reasonable life. He was only spendthrift where others were concerned. No evening passed that he did not play a rubber of whist with his mother, who died only a little before him, and was loved by the old man with the devoted tenderness of a child. From an early age he had the confirmed habits which make the day long and prevent waste of time. The eight years which he passed in the linen-drapery establishment of M. Delalain had accustomed him to punctuality. Every morning he rose very early, and at three minutes to eight he was in his studio as punctually as he had been in earlier years at the counter, and went through his daily task without feverish haste or idleness, humming with that quietude which makes the furthest progress.

For that reason he had also an aversion to everything passionate in nature, to everything irregular, sudden, or languid, to the feverish burst of storm as to the relaxing languor of summer heat. He loved all that is quiet, symmetrical, and fresh, peaceful and blithe, everything that is enchanting by its repose: the bright, tender sky, the woods and meadows tinged with green, the streamlets and the hills, the regular awakening of spring, the soft, quiet hours of evening twilight, the dewy laughing morning, the delicate mists which form slowly the over surface of still waters, the joy of clear, starry nights, when all voices are silent and every breeze is at rest; and the cheerfulness of his own spirit is reflected in everything.

One might go further, and say that Corot’s goodness is mirrored in his pictures. Corot loved humanity and wished it well, and he shrank from no sacrifice in helping his friends. And even so did he love the country, and wished to see it animated, enlivened, and blest by human beings. That is the great distinction between him and Chintreuil, who is otherwise so like him. Chintreuil also painted nature when she quivers smiling beneath the gentle and vivifying glance of spring, but figures are wanting in his pictures. As a timid, fretful, unsociable man, he imagined that nature also felt happiest in solitude. The scenery in which Chintreuil delighted was thick, impenetrable copse, lonely haunts in the tangle of the thicket, from which now and then a startled hind stretches out its head, glancing uneasily. Corot, who could not endure solitude, being always the centre of a cheery social gathering, made nature a sociable being. Men, women, and children give animation to his woods and meadows. And at times he introduces peasants at work in the fields, but how little do they resemble the peasants of Millet! The rustics of the master of Gruchy are as hard and rough as they are actual; the burden of life has bowed their figures and lined their faces prematurely; they are old before their time, and weary every evening. Corot’s labourers never grow weary: lightly touched in rather than painted, dreamt of rather than seen, they carry on an ethereal existence in the open air, free and contented; they have never suffered, just as Corot himself knew no sufferings. But as a rule human beings were altogether out of place in the happy fields conjured up by his fairy fantasy; and then came the moment when Prudhon lived again. The nymphs and bacchantes whom he had met as a youth by the tomb of Virgil visited him in the evening of life in the forest of Fontainebleau and in the meadows of Ville d’Avray.

Cassell & Co.
DIAZ.	FOREST SCENE.

 

		L’Art.
CHARLES FRANÇOIS DAUBIGNY.		DAUBIGNY.	SPRINGTIME.

In his pictures he dreamed of pillars and altars near which mythical figures moved once more, dryads sleeping by the stream, dancing fauns, junctÆque nymphis gratiÆ decentes in classical raiment. In this sense he was a Classicist all his life. His nymphs, however, are no mere accessories; they have nothing in common with the faded troop of classic beings whose old age in the ruins of forsaken temples was so long tended by the Academy. In Corot they are the natural habitants of a world of harmony and light, the logical complement of his visions of nature: in the same way Beethoven at the close of the Ninth Symphony introduced the human voice. No sooner has he touched in the lines of his landscapes than the nymphs and tritons, the radiant children of the Greek idyllic poets, desert the faded leaves of books to populate Corot’s groves, and refresh themselves in the evening shadows of his forests.

For the evening dusk, the hour after sunset, is peculiarly the hour of Corot; his very preference for the harmonious beauty of dying light was the effluence of his own harmonious temperament. When he would, Corot was a colourist of the first order. The World Exhibition of 1889 contained pictures of women by his hand which resembled Feuerbach in their strict and austere beauty of countenance, and which recalled Delacroix in the liquid fulness of tone and their fantastic and variously coloured garb. But, compared with the orgies of colour indulged in by Romanticism, his works are generally characterised by the most delicate reserve in painting. A bright silvery sheet of water and the ivory skin of a nymph are usually the only touches of colour that hover in the pearly grey mist of his pictures. As a man Corot avoided all dramas and strong contrasts; everything abrupt or loud was repellent to his nature. Thus it was that the painter, too, preferred the clear grey hours of evening, in which nature envelops herself as if in a delicate, melting veil of gauze. Here he was able to be entirely Corot, and to paint without contours and almost without colours, and bathe in the soft, dusky atmosphere. He saw lines no longer; everything was breath, fragrance, vibration, and mystery. “Ce n’est plus une toile et ce n’est plus un peintre, c’est le bon Dieu et c’est le soir.” Elysian airs began to breathe, and the faint echo of the prattling streamlet sounded gently murmuring in the wood; the soft arms of the nymphs clung round him, and from the neighbouring thicket tender, melting melodies chimed forth like Æolian harps—

“Rege dich, du SchilfgeflÜster; Hauche leise, Rohrgeschwister; SÄuselt, leichte WeidenstrÄuche; Lispelt, Pappelzitterzweige Unterbroch’nen TrÄumen zu.”

His end was as harmonious as his life and his art. “Rien ne trouble sa fin, c’est le soir d’un beau jour.” His sister, with whom the old bachelor had lived, died in the October of 1874, and Corot could not endure loneliness. On 23rd February 1875—when he had just completed his seventy-ninth year—he was heard to say as he lay in bed drawing with his fingers in the air: “Mon Dieu, how beautiful that is; the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen.” When his old housekeeper wanted to bring him his breakfast he said with a smile: “To-day PÈre Corot will breakfast above.” Even his last illness robbed him of none of his cheerfulness, and when his friends brought him as he lay dying the medal struck to commemorate his jubilee as an artist of fifty years’ standing, he said with tears of joy in his eyes: “It makes one happy to know that one has been so loved; I have had good parents and dear friends. I am thankful to God.” With those words he passed away to his true home, the land of spirits—not the paradise of the Church, but the Elysian fields he had dreamt of and painted so often: “Largior hic campos Æther et lumine vestit purpureo.”

When they bore him from his house in the Faubour-PoissoniÈre and a passer-by asked who was being buried, a fat shopwoman standing at the door of her house answered: “I don’t know his name, but he was a good man.” Beethoven’s Symphony in C minor was played at his funeral, according to his own direction, and as the coffin was being lowered a lark rose exulting to the sky. “The artist will be replaced with difficulty, the man never,” said DuprÉ at Corot’s grave. On 27th May 1880 an unobtrusive monument to his memory was unveiled at the border of the lake at Ville d’Avray, in the midst of the dark forest where he had so often dreamed. He died in the fulness of his fame as an artist, but it was the forty pictures collected in the Centenary Exhibition of 1889 which first made the world fully conscious of what modern art possessed in Corot: a master of immortal masterpieces, the greatest poet and the tenderest soul of the nineteenth century, as Fra Angelico was the tenderest soul of the fifteenth, and Watteau the greatest poet of the eighteenth.

Baschet.
DAUBIGNY.	A LOCK IN THE VALLY OF OPTEVOZ.

Jules DuprÉ, a melancholy spirit, who was inwardly consumed by a lonely existence spent in passionate work, stands as the Beethoven of modern painting beside Corot, its Mozart. If ThÉodore Rousseau was the epic poet of the Fontainebleau school, and Corot the idyllic poet, DuprÉ seems its tragic dramatist. Rousseau’s nature is hard, rude, and indifferent to man. For Corot God is the great philanthropist, who wishes to see men happy, and lets the spring come and the warm winds blow only that children may have their pleasure in them. His soul is, as Goethe has it in Werther, “as blithe as those of sweet spring mornings.” Jules DuprÉ has neither Rousseau’s reality nor Corot’s tenderness; his tones are neither imperturbable nor subdued. “Quant derriÈre un tronc d’arbre ou derriÈre une pierre, vous ne trouvez pas un homme À quoi Ça sert-il de faire du paysage.” In Corot there is a charm as of the light melodies of the ZauberflÖte; in DuprÉ the ear is struck by the shattering notes of the Sinfonie Eroica. Rousseau looks into the heart of nature with widely dilated pupils and a critical glance. Corot woos her smiling, caressing, and dallying; DuprÉ courts her uttering impassioned complaint and with tears in his eyes. In him are heard the mighty fugues of Romanticism. The trees live, the waves laugh and weep, the sky sings and wails, and the sun, like a great conductor, determines the harmony of the concert. Even the two pictures with which he made an appearance in the Salon in 1835, after he had left the SÈvres china manufactory and become acquainted with Constable during a visit to England—the “Near Southampton” and “Pasture-land in the Limousin”—displayed him as an accomplished master. In “Near Southampton” everything moves and moans. Across an undulating country a dark tempest blusters, like a wild host, hurrying and sweeping forward in the gloom, tearing and scattering everything in its path, whirling leaves from the slender trees. Clouds big with rain hasten across the horizon as if on a forced march. The whole landscape seems to partake in the flight; the brushwood seems to bow its head like a traveller. In the background a few figures are recognisable: people overtaken by the storm at their work; horses with their manes flying in the wind; and a rider seeking refuge for himself and his beast. A stretch of sluggish water ruffles its waves as though it were frowning. Everything is alive and quaking in this majestic solitude, and in the mingled play of confused lights, hurrying clouds, fluttering branches, and trembling grass.

Cassell & Co.
DAUBIGNY.	ON THE OISE.

S. Low & Co.
DAUBIGNY.	SHEPHERD AND SHEPHERDESS.

“Pasture-land in the Limousin” had the same overpowering energy; it was an admirable picture in 1835, and it is admirable still. The fine old trees stand like huge pillars; the grass, drenched with rain, is of an intense green; nature seems to shudder as if in a fever. And through his whole life DuprÉ was possessed by the lyrical fever of Romanticism. As the last champion of Romanticism he bore the banner of the proud generation of 1830 through well-nigh two generations, and until his death in 1889 stood on the ground where Paul Huet had first placed French landscape; but Huet attained his pictorial effects by combining and by calculation, while DuprÉ is always a great, true, and convincing poet. Every evening he was seen in L’Isle Adam, where he settled in 1849, wandering alone across the fields, even in drenching rain. One of his pupils declares that once, when they stood at night on the bridge of the Oise during a storm, DuprÉ broke into a paroxysm of tears at the magnificent spectacle. He was a fanatic rejoicing in storms, one who watched the tragedies of the heaven with quivering emotion, a passionate spirit consumed by his inward force, and, like his literary counterpart Victor Hugo, he sought beauty of landscape only where it was wild and magnificent. He is the painter of nature vexed and harassed, and of the majestic silence that follows the storm. The theme of his pictures is at one time the whirling torture of the yellow leaves driven before the wind in eddying confusion; tormented and quivering they cleave to the furrows in the mad chase, fall into dykes, and cling against the trunks of trees, to find refuge from their persecutor. At another time he paints how the night wind whistles round an old church and whirls the screaming weather-cock round and round, how it moans and rattles with invisible hand against the doors, forces its way through the windows, and, once shut in its stony prison, seeks a way out again, howling and wailing. He paints sea-pieces in which the sea rages and mutters like some hoarse old monster; the colour of the water is dirty and pallid; the howling multitude of waves storms on like an innumerable army before which every human power gives way. Stones are torn loose and hurled crashing upon the shore. The clouds are dull and ghostly, here black as smoke, there of a shining whiteness, and swollen as though they must burst. He celebrates the commotion of the sky, nature in her angry majesty, and the most brilliant phenomena of atmospheric life. Rousseau’s highest aim was to avoid painting for effect, and Corot only cared for grace of tone; a picture of his consists “of a little grey and a certain je ne sais quoi.” Jules DuprÉ is peculiarly the colour-poet of the group, and sounds the most resonant notes in the romantic concert. His light does not beam in gently vibrating silver tones, but is concentrated in glaring red suns. “Ah, la lumiÈre, la lumiÈre!” Beside the flaming hues of evening red he paints the darkest shadows. He revels in contrasts. His favourite key of colour is that of a ghostly sunset, against which a gnarled oak or the dark sail of a tiny vessel rises like a phantom.

Trembling and yet with ardent desire he looks at the tumult of waters, and hears the roll and resonance of the moon-silvered tide. He delights in night, rain, and storm. Corot’s gentle rivulets become a rolling and whirling flood in his pictures, a headlong stream carrying all before it. The wind no longer sighs, but blusters across the valley, spreading ruin in its path. The clouds which in Corot are silvery and gentle, like white lambs, are in DuprÉ black and threatening, like demons of hell. In Corot the soft morning breeze faintly agitates the tender clouds in the sky; in DuprÉ a damp, cold wind of evening blows a spectral grey mist into the valley, and the hurricane tears apart the thunderclouds.

“Wenn ich fern auf nackter Haide wallte, Wo aus dÄmmernder GeklÜfte Schooss Der Titanensang der StrÖme schallte Und die Nacht der Wolken mich umschloss, Wenn der Sturm mit seinen Wetterwogen Mir vorÜber durch die Berge fuhr Und des Himmels Flammen mich umflogen, Da erscheinst du, Seele der Natur.”

DAUBIGNY.	LANDSCAPE: EVENING.

 

Baschet.

CHINTREUIL.   LANDSCAPE: MORNING.

The first of the brilliant pleiad who did not come from Paris itself is Diaz, who in his youth worked with DuprÉ in the china manufactory of SÈvres. Of noble Spanish origin—Narciso Virgilio Diaz de la PeÑa ran his high-sounding name in full—he was born in Bordeaux in 1807, after his parents had taken refuge from the Revolution across the Pyrenees, and in his landscapes, too, perhaps, his Spanish blood betrays him now and then. Diaz has in him a little of Fortuny. Beside the great genius wrestling for truth and the virile seriousness of Rousseau, beside the gloomy, powerful landscapes of DuprÉ with their deep, impassioned poetry, the sparkling and flattering pictures of Diaz seem to be rather light wares. For him nature is a keyboard on which to play capricious fantasies. His pictures have the effect of sparkling diamonds, and one must surrender one’s self to this charm without asking its cause; otherwise it evaporates. Diaz has perhaps rather too much of the talent of a juggler, the sparkle of a magic kaleidoscope. “You paint stinging nettles, and I prefer roses,” is the characteristic expression which he used to Millet. His painting is piquant and as iridescent as a peacock’s tail, but in this very iridescence there is often an unspeakable charm. It has the rocket-like brilliancy and the glancing chivalry which were part of the man himself, and made him the best of good company, the enfant terrible, the centre of all that was witty and spirited in the circle of Fontainebleau.

He, too, was long acquainted with poverty, as were his great brother-artists Rousseau and DuprÉ. Shortly after his birth he lost his father. Madame Diaz, left entirely without means, came to Paris, where she supported herself by giving lessons in Spanish and Italian. When he was ten years old the boy was left an orphan alone in the vast city. A Protestant clergyman in Bellevue then adopted him. And now occurred the misfortune which he was so fond of relating in after-years. In one of his wanderings through the wood he was bitten by a poisonous insect, and from that time he was obliged to hobble through life with a wooden leg, which he called his pilon. From his fifteenth year he worked, at first as a lame errand boy, and afterwards as a painter on china, together with DuprÉ, Raffet, and Cabat, in the manufactory of SÈvres. Before long he was dismissed as incompetent, for one day he took it into his head to decorate a vase entirely after his own taste. Then poverty began once more. Often when the evening drew on he wandered about the boulevards under cover of the darkness, opened the doors of carriages which had drawn up at the pavement, and stretched out his hand to beg. “What does it matter?” he said; “one day I shall have carriages and horses, and a golden crutch; my brush will win them for me.” He exhibited a picture on speculation at a picture-dealer’s, in the hope of making a hundred francs; it was “The Descent of the Bohemians,” that picturesque band of men, women, and children, who advance singing, laughing, and shouting by a steep woodland road, to descend on some neighbouring village like a swarm of locusts. A Parisian collector bought it for fifteen hundred francs. Diaz was saved, and he migrated to the forest of Fontainebleau.

L’Art.
HARPIGNIES.	MOONRISE.

His biography explains a great deal in the character of the painter’s art. His works are unequal. In his picture “Last Tears,” which appeared in the World Exhibition of 1855, and which stands to his landscapes as a huge block of copper to little ingots of gold, he entered upon a course in which he wandered long without any particular artistic result. He wanted to be a figure-painter, and with this object he concocted a style of painting by a mixture of various traditions, seeking to unite Prudhon, Correggio, and Leonardo. From the master of Cluny he borrowed the feminine type with a snub nose and long almond-shaped eyes, treated the hair like da Vinci, and placed over it the sfumato of Allegri. His drawing, usually so pictorial in its light sweep, became weak in his effort to be correct, and his colouring grew dull and monotonous by its imitation of the style of the Classicists. But during this period Diaz made a great deal of money, sold his pictures without intermission, and avenged himself, as he had determined to do, upon his former poverty. He, who had begged upon the boulevards, was able to buy weapons and costumes at the highest figure, and build himself a charming house in the Place Pigalle. In all that concerns his artistic position these works, which brought him an income of fifty thousand francs, and, for a long time, the fame of a new Prudhon, are nevertheless without importance. Faltering between the widely divergent influences of the old masters, he did not get beyond a wavering eclecticism, and was too weak in drawing to attain results worth mentioning. It is as a landscape painter that he will be known to posterity. He is said to have been the terror of all game as long as he was the house-mate of Rousseau and Millet in Fontainebleau, and wandered through the woods there with a gun on his arm to get a cheap supper. It is reported, too, that when his pictures were rejected by the Salon in those days he laughingly made a hole in the canvas with his wooden leg, saying: “What is the use of being rich? I can’t have a diamond set in my pilon!” It was however in the years before 1855, when he had nothing to do with any picture-dealer, that the immortal works of Diaz were executed.

L’Art.

CONSTANT TROYON.

The mention of his name conjures up before the mind the recesses of a wood, reddened by autumn, a wood where the sunbeams play, gilding the trunks of the trees; naked white forms repose amid mysterious lights, or on paths of golden sand appear gaily draped odalisques, their rich costume glittering in the rays of the sun. Few have won from the forest, as he did, its beauty of golden sunlight and verdant leaves. Others remained at the entrance of the forest; he was the first who really penetrated to its depths. The branches met over his head like the waves of the sea, the blue heaven vanished, and everything was shrouded. The sunbeams fell like the rain of DanaË through the green leaves, and the moss lay like a velvet mantle on the granite piles of rock. He settled down like a hermit in his verdant hollow. The leaves quivered green and red, and covered the ground, shining like gold in the furtive rays of the evening sun. Nothing was to be seen of the trees, nothing of the outline of their foliage, nothing of the majestic sweep of their boughs, but only the mossy stems touched by the radiance of the sun. The pictures of Diaz are not landscapes, for the land is wanting; they are “tree scapes,” and their poetry lies in the sunbeams which dance playing round them. “Have you seen my last stem?” he would himself inquire of the visitors to his studio.

These woodland recesses were the peculiar specialty of Diaz, and he but seldom abandoned them to paint warm, dreamy pictures of summer. For, like a true child of the South, he only cared to see nature on beautiful days. He knows nothing of spring with its light mist, and still less of the frozen desolation of winter. The summer alone does he know, the summer and the autumn; and the summers of Diaz are an everlasting song, like the springs of Corot. Beautiful nymphs and other beings from the golden age give animation to his emerald meadows and his sheltered woods bathed in the sun: here are little, homely-looking nixies, and there are pretty Cupids and Venuses and Dianas of charming grace. And none of these divinities think about anything or do anything; they are not piquant, like those of Boucher and Fragonard, and they know neither coquetry nor smiles. They are merely goddesses of the palette; their wish is to be nothing but shining spots of colour, and they love nothing except the silvery sunbeams which fall caressingly on their naked skin. If the painter wishes for more vivid colour they throw around them shining red, blue, yellowish-green, or gold-embroidered clothes, and immediately are transformed from nymphs into Oriental women, as in a magic theatre. A fragment of soft silk, gleaming with gold, and a red turban were means sufficient for him to conjure up his charming and fanciful land of Turks. Sometimes even simple mortals—wood-cutters, peasant girls, and gipsies—come into his pictures, that the sunbeams may play upon them, while their picturesque rags form piquant spots of colour.

L’Art.
TROYON.	IN NORMANDY: COWS GRAZING.

L’Art.
TROYON.	CROSSING THE STREAM.

Diaz belongs to the same category as Isabey and Fromentin, a fascinating artist, a great charmeur, and a feast to the eyes.

When in the far South, amid the eternal summer of Mentone, he closed his dark, shining eyes for ever, at dawn on 18th November 1876, a breath of sadness went through the tree-tops of the old royal forest of Fontainebleau. The forest had lost its hermit, the busy woodsman who penetrated farthest into its green depths; and it preserves his memory gratefully. Only go, in October, through the copse of Bas BrÉau, lose yourself amid the magnificent foliage of these century-old trees that glimmer with a thousand hues like gigantic bouquets, dark green and brown, or golden and purple, and at the sight of this brilliant gleam of autumn tones you can only say, A Diaz!

The youngest of the group, Daubigny, came when the battle was over, and plays a slighter rÔle, since he cannot be reckoned any longer among the discoverers; nevertheless he has a physiognomy of his own, and one of peculiar charm. The others were painters of nature; Daubigny is the painter of the country. If one goes from Munich to Dachau to see the apple trees blossom and the birches growing green, to breathe in the odour of the cow-house and the fragrance of the hay, to hear the tinkle of cow-bells, the croaking of frogs, and the hum of gnats, one does not say, “I want to see nature,” but “I am going into the country.” Jean Jacques Rousseau was the worshipper of nature, while Georges Sand, in certain of her novels, has celebrated country life. In this sense Daubigny is less an adorer of nature than a man fond of the country. His pictures give the feeling one has in standing at the window on a country excursion, and looking at the laughing and budding spring. One feels no veneration for the artist, but one would like to be a bird to perch on those boughs, a lizard to creep amongst this green, a cockchafer to fly humming from tree to tree.

L’Art.
TROYON.	THE RETURN TO THE FARM.

L’Art.
TROYON.	A COW SCRATCHING HERSELF.

Daubigny, possibly, has not the great and free creative power of the older artists, their magnificent simplicity in treating objects: the feminine element, the susceptibility to natural beauty, preponderates in him, and not the virile, creative power of embodiment, which at once discovers in itself a telling force of expression for the image received from nature. He seeks after no poetic emotions, like DuprÉ; he has not the profound, penetrative eye for nature, like Rousseau; in his charm and amiability he approaches Corot, except that mythological beings are no longer at home in his landscapes. They would take no pleasure in this odour of damp grass, the smell of the cow-byres, and the dilapidated old skiffs which rock, in Daubigny’s pictures, fastened to a swampy bank. Corot, light, delicate, and simple as a boy, sitting on a school-bench all his life, is always veiled and mysterious. Daubigny, heavier and technically better equipped, has more power and less grace; he dreams less and paints more. Corot made the apotheosis of nature: his silvery grey clouds bore him to the Elysian fields, where nothing had the heaviness of earth and everything melted in poetic vapour. Daubigny, borne by no wings of Icarus, seems like AntÆus beside him; he is bodily wedded to the earth. DuprÉ made the earth a mirror of the tears and passions of men. Corot surprised her before the peasant is up of a morning, in the hours when she belongs altogether to the nymphs and the fairies. In Daubigny the earth has once more become the possession of human beings. It is not often that figures move in his pictures. Even Rousseau more often finds a place in his landscapes for the rustic, but nature in him is hard, unapproachable, and deliberately indifferent to man. She looks down upon him austerely, closing and hardening her heart against him. In Daubigny nature is familiar with man, stands near him, and is kindly and serviceable. The skiffs rocking at the river’s brink betray that fishers are in the neighbourhood; even when they are empty his little houses suggest that their inhabitants are not far off, that they are but at work in the field and may come back at any moment. In Rousseau man is merely an atom of the infinite; here he is the lord of creation. Rousseau makes an effect which is simple and powerful, DuprÉ one which is impassioned and striking, Corot is divine, Diaz charming, and Daubigny idyllic, intimate, and familiar. He closed a period and enjoyed the fruits of what the others had called into being. One does not admire him—one loves him.

He had passed his youth with his nurse in a little village, surrounded with white-blossoming apple trees and waving fields of corn, near L’Isle Adam. Here as a boy he received the impressions which made him a painter of the country, and which were too strong to be obliterated by a sojourn in Italy. The best picture that he painted there showed a flat stretch of land with thistles. A view of the island of St. Louis was the work with which he first appeared in the Salon in 1838.

Daubigny is the painter of water, murmuring silver-grey between ashes and oaks, and reflecting the clouds of heaven in its clear mirror. He is the painter of the spring in its fragrance, when the meadows shine in the earliest verdure, and the leaves but newly unfolded stand out against the sky as bright green patches of colour, when the limes blossom and the crops begin to shoot. A field of green corn waving gently beneath budding apple trees in the breeze of spring, still rivers in which banks and bushy islands are reflected, mills beside little streams rippling in silvery clearness over shining white pebbles, cackling geese, and washerwomen neatly spreading out their linen, are things which Daubigny has painted with the delicate feeling of a most impressionable lover of nature. At the same time he had the secret of shedding over his pictures the most marvellous tint of delicate, vaporous air; especially in those representations, at once so poetic and so accurate, of evening by the water’s edge, or of bright moonlight nights, when all things are sharply illuminated, and yet softly shrouded with a dream-like exhalation. His favourite light was that of cool evening dusk, after the sun and every trace of the after-glow has vanished from the sky. Valmandois, where he passed his youth, and afterwards the Oise, with its green banks and vineyards and hedged gardens, the most charming and picturesque river in North France, are most frequently rendered in his pictures. Every day, when nature put on her spring garb, he sailed along the banks in a small craft, with his son Charles. His most vigorous works were executed in the cabin of this vessel: spirited sketches of regions delicately veiled in mist and bound with a magical charm of peace, regions with the moon above them, shedding its clear, silver light—refined etchings which assure him a place of honour in the history of modern etching. The painter of the banks of the Oise saw everything with the curiosity and the love of a child, and remained always a naÏve artist in spite of all his dexterity.

ROSA BONHEUR.	THE HORSE-FAIR.
(By permission of Mr. L. H. LefÈvre, the owner of the copyright.)

 

ROSA BONHEUR.	PLOUGHING IN NIVERNOIS.

After these great masters had opened up the path a tribe of landscape painters set themselves to render, each in his own way, the vigorous power, the tender charm, and the plaintive melancholy of the earth. Some loved dusk and light, the simple reproduction of ordinary places in their ordinary condition; others delighted in the struggle of the elements, the violent scudding of clouds, the parting glance of the sun, the sombre hours when nature shrouds her face with the mourning veil of a widow.

Although he never tasted the pleasures of fame, Antoine Chintreuil was the most refined of them all—an excessively sensitive spirit, who seized with as much delicacy as daring swiftly transient effects of nature, such as seldom appear: the moment when the sun casts a fleeting radiance in the midst of clouds, or when a shaft of light quivers for an instant through a dense mist; the effect of green fields touched by the first soft beams of the sun, or that of a rainbow spanning a fresh spring landscape. His pupil Jean Desbrosses was the painter of hills and valleys. Achard followed Rousseau in his pictures of lonely, austere, and mournful regions. FranÇais painted familiar corners in the neighbourhood of Paris with grace, although more heavily than Corot, and without the shining light which is poured through the works of that rare genius. The pictures of Harpignies are rather dry, and betray a heavy hand. He is rougher than his great predecessors, less seductive and indeed rather staid, but he has a convincing reality, and is loyal and simple. He is valuable as an honest, genial artist, a many-sided and sure-footed man of talent, somewhat inclined to Classicism. Émile Breton, the brother of Jules, delighted in the agitation of the elements, wild, out-of-the-way regions, and harsh climate. His execution is broad, his tones forcible, and he has both simplicity and largeness. Apart from his big, gloomy landscapes, LÉonce Chabry has also painted sea-pieces, with dark waves dashing against the cleft rocks.

VAN MARCKE.	LA FALAISE.

The representation of grazing animals plays a great part in the art of almost all of these painters. Some carried the love of animal painting so far that they never painted a landscape without introducing into the foreground their dearly loved herds of cows or flocks of sheep. The key of the landscape, the cheerful and sunny brilliancy of colour or the still melancholy of the evening dusk, is harmoniously repeated in the habits and being of these animals. Thus, too, new paths were opened to animal painting, which had suffered, no less than landscape, from the yoke of conventionality.

Up to the close of the eighteenth century French artists had contented themselves with adapting to French taste the light and superficial art of Nicolaus Berghem. Demarne, one of the last heirs of this Dutch artist, brought, even in the period of the Revolution, a little sunshine, blitheness, and country air amongst the large pictures in the classical manner. The animal painting of the ancien rÉgime expired in his arms, and the “noble style” of Classicism obstructed the rise of the new animal painting. The fact that the great Jupiter, father of gods and men, assumed the form of a four-footed creature when he led weak, feminine beings astray had no doubt given a certain justification to the animal picture during the reign of the school of David. But the artists preferred to hold aloof from it, either because animals are hard to idealise in themselves, or because the received antique sculpture of animals was difficult to employ directly in pictures. In landscapes, which gods and heroes alone honoured with their presence, idealised animals would have been altogether out of place. Only animals which are very difficult to draw correctly, such as sphinxes, sirens, and winged horses—beings which the old tragedians were fond of turning to account—are occasionally allowed to exist in the pictures of Bertin and Paul Flandrin. Carle Vernet, who composed cavalry charges and hunting scenes, had not talent enough seriously to make a breach, or to find disciples to follow his lead. GÉricault, the forerunner of Romanticism, was likewise the first eminent painter of horses; and although his great “Raft of the Medusa” is heavily fettered by the system of Classicism, his jockey pictures and horse races are as fresh, as vivid, and as unforced as if they had been painted yesterday instead of seventy years ago. In dashing animation, verve, and temperament GÉricault stands alone in these pictures; he is the very opposite of Raymond Brascassat, who was the first specialist of animal pieces with a landscape setting, and was much praised in the thirties on account of his neat and ornamental style of treatment. Brascassat was the Winterhalter of animal painting, neither Classicist nor Romanticist nor Realist, but the embodiment of mediocrity; a man honestly and sincerely regarding all nature with the eyes of a Philistine. His fame, which has so swiftly faded, was founded by those patrons of art who above all demand that a picture should be the bald, banal reproduction of fact, made with all the accuracy possible.

CHARLES JACQUE.	THE RETURN TO THE BYRE (ETCHING).
(By permission of M. FrÉdÉric Jacque, the owner of the copyright.)

L’Art.
CHARLES JACQUE.	A FLOCK OF SHEEP ON THE ROAD.
(By permission of M. FrÉdÉric Jacque, the owner of the copyright.)

It was only when the landscape school of Fontainebleau had initiated a new method of vision, feeling, and expression that France produced a new great painter of animals. As DuprÉ and Rousseau tower over their predecessors Cabat and Flandrin in landscape, so Constant Troyon rises above Brascassat in animal painting. In the latter there may be found a scrupulous pedantic observation in union with a thin, polished, academic, and carefully arranged style of painting; in the former, a large and broad technique in harmony with wild nature, and a directness and force of intuition without parallel in the history of art. Brascassat belongs to the same category as Denner, Troyon to that of Frans Hals and Brouwer.

There would be no purpose in saying anything of his labours in the china manufactory of SÈvres, of his industrial works, and of the little classical views with which he made a first appearance in the Salon in 1833, or of the impulse which he received from Roqueplan. He first found his own powers when he made the acquaintance of ThÉodore Rousseau and Jules DuprÉ, and migrated with them into the forest of Fontainebleau. At the headquarters of the new school his ideas underwent a revolution. Here, in the first instance, as a landscape painter, he was attracted by the massive forms of cattle, which make such a harmonious effect of colour in the atmosphere and against verdure, and the philosophic quietude of which gives such admirable completion to the dreamy spirit of nature. A journey to Holland and Belgium in 1847, in the course of which he became more familiar with the old animal painters, confirmed him in the resolve of devoting himself exclusively to this province. He was captivated not so much by Paul Potter as by Albert Cuyp, with his rich and powerful colouring, and his technique, which is at once so virile and so easy. But above all Rembrandt became his great ideal, and filled him with wonder. In his first masterpiece of 1849, “The Mill,” the influence of the great Dutch artist is clearly recognisable, and from that time up to 1855 it remained dominant. In this year, during a prolonged sojourn in Normandy, he became Troyon, and painted “Oxen going to their Work,” that mighty picture in the Louvre which displays him in the zenith of his creative power. Till then no animal painter had rendered with such a combination of strength and actuality the long, heavy gait, the philosophical indifference, and the quiet resignation of cattle, the poetry of autumnal light, and the mist of morning rising lightly from the earth and veiling the whole land with grey, silvery hues. The deeply furrowed smoking field makes an undulating ascent, so that one seems to be looking at the horizon over the broad face of the earth. A primitive, Homeric feeling rests over it.

Troyon is perhaps not so correct as Potter, nor so lucid as Albert Cuyp, but he is more forcible and impressive than either. No one has ever seized the poetry of these heavy masses of flesh, with their strong colour and largeness of outline, as he has done. What places him far above the old painters is his fundamental power as a landscapist, a power unequalled except in Rousseau. His landscapes have always the smell of the earth, and they smack of rusticity. At one time he paints the atmosphere, veiling the contours of objects with a light mist recalling Corot, and yet saturated with clear sunshine; at another he sends his heavy, fattened droves in the afternoon across field-paths bright in the sunlight and dark green meadows, or places them beneath a sky where dense thunderclouds are swiftly rolling up. Troyon is no poet, but a born painter, belonging to the irrepressibly forceful family of Jordaens and Courbet, a maÎtre peintre of strength and plastic genius, as healthy as he is splendid in colour. His “Cow scratching Herself” and his “Return to the Farm” will always be counted amongst the most forcible animal pictures of all ages.

When he died in 1865, after passing twelve years with a clouded intellect, Rosa Bonheur sought to fill the place which he had left vacant. She had already won the sympathies of the great public, as she united in her pictures all the qualities which were missed in Troyon, and had the art of pleasing where he was repellent. For a long time Troyon’s works were held by amateurs to be wanting in finish. They did not acknowledge to themselves that “finish” in artistic creations is, after all, only a work of patience, rather industrial than artistic, and at bottom invented for the purpose of enticing half-trained connoisseurs. Rosa Bonheur had this diligence, and is indebted to it for the spread of her fame through all Europe, when Troyon was only known as yet to the few. The position has now been altered. Without doubt it is a pleasure to look at her fresh and sunny maiden picture of 1840, “Ploughing in Nivernois,” with its yoke of six oxen, its rich red-brown soil turned up into furrows, and its wide, bright, simple, and laughing landscape beneath the clear blue sky. She had all the qualities which may be appreciated without one’s being an epicure of art—great anatomical knowledge, dexterous technique, charming and seductive colouring. And it is an isolated fact in the history of art that a woman has painted pictures so good as the “Hay Harvest in Auvergne” of 1853, with its brutes which are almost life-size, or the “Horse Fair” of 1855, which is perhaps her most brilliant work, and for which she made studies, going in man’s clothes for eighteen months, at all the Parisian manÈges, amongst stable-boys and horse-dealers. Until her death, from the ChÂteau By, between Thomery and Fontainebleau, she carried on an extensive transpontine export, and her pictures are by no means the worst of those which find their way from the Continent to England and America. She was perhaps the only feminine celebrity of the century who painted her pictures, instead of working at them like knitting. But Troyon is a strong master who suffers no rival. His landscapes, with their deep verdure, their powerful animals, and their skies traversed by heavy clouds, are the embodiment of power. Rosa Bonheur is an admirable painter with largeness of style and beauty of drawing, whose artistic position is between Troyon and Brascassat.

Troyon’s only pupil was Émile van Marcke, half a Belgian, who met the elder master in SÈvres, and for a long time worked by his side at Fontainebleau. He united the occupation of a painter with that of a landed proprietor. The cattle which he bred on an extensive scale at his property, Bouttencourt in Normandy, had a celebrity amongst French landowners, as he had the reputation of rearing the best fat cattle. He too had not the impressiveness of Troyon, though he was, none the less, a healthy and forcible master. His animals have no passions, no movement, and no battles. They seem lost in endless contemplation, gravely and sedately chewing the cud. Around them stretch the soft green Norman pastures, and above them arches the wide sky, which at the horizon imperceptibly melts into the sea.

Jadin is a painter of horses and dogs who had once a great reputation, though to-day his name is almost, if not entirely forgotten. He was fond of painting hunting scenes, and is not wanting in life and movement; but he is too impersonal to play a part in the history of painting. Having named him, some mention must likewise be made of EugÈne Lambert, the painter of cats, and Palizzi, who painted goats. Lambert, who was fond of introducing his little heroes as the actors of comical scenes, is by admission the chief amongst all those who were honoured amongst the different nations with the title of “Raphaels of the Cat.” Palizzi, an incisive master of almost brutal energy, a true son of the wild Abruzzo hills, delighted, like his compatriots Morelli and Michetti, in the blazing light of noon, shining over rocky heights, and throwing a dazzle of gold on the dark green copse. LanÇon, a rather arid painter, though a draughtsman with a broad and masculine stroke, was the greatest descendant of Delacroix in the representation of tigers, lions, bears, and hippopotamuses. An unobtrusive artist, though one of very genial talent, was Charles Jacque, the Troyon of sheep. He has been compared with the rageur of Bas BrÉau, the proud oak which stands alone in a clearing. A man of forcible character, over whom age had no power, he survived until 1894 as the last representative of the noble school of Barbizon. He has painted sheep in flocks or separately, in the pasture, on the verge of the field-path, or in the fold; and he loved most of all to paint them in the misty hours of evening twilight, at peace and amid peaceful nature. But in spirited etchings he has likewise represented old weather-beaten walls, the bright films of spring, the large outlines of peasant folk, the tender down of young chickens, the light play of the wind upon the sea, murmuring brooks, and quiet haunts of the wood. Like Millet, he had in an eminent degree the gift of simplification, the greatest quality that an artist can have. With three or four strokes he could plant a figure on its feet, give life to an animal, or construct a landscape. He was the most intimate friend of Jean FranÇois Millet, and painted part of what Millet painted also.

CHAPTER XXVI

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET

Whence has Millet come?

It was the time when art, still blind to the life around, could find no subjects worthy of it except in the past and in the distance. Then Millet came and overthrew an art vegetating in museums or astray in tropical countries. It was the time when Leopold Robert in Italy tested the noble pose of the school of David upon the peasant, and when the German painters of rustics recognised in the labourer an object for pleasantries and pathetic little scenes. Then Millet stepped forward and painted, with profound simplicity, the people at work in the field, or in their distress, without sentimentality and without beautifying or idealising them. That great utterance, “I work,” the utterance of the nineteenth century, is here spoken aloud for the first time. Rousseau and his fellow-artists were the painters of the country. Millet became the painter of the labourer. He, the great peasant, is the creator of that painting of peasants which is entwined with the deepest roots of intimate landscape. Misunderstood in the beginning, it proclaimed for the first time the new gospel of art before which the people of all nations bow at the present date. What others did later was merely to advance on the path opened by Millet. And as time passes the figure of this powerful man shines more and more brilliantly. The form of Jean FranÇois Millet rises so powerfully, so imperiously, and so suddenly that one might almost imagine him to have come from Ibsen’s third kingdom; for he is without forerunners in art. An attempt has been made to bring him into relation with the social and political movement of ideas in the forties, but certainly this is unjust. Millet was in no sense revolutionary. During his whole life he repudiated the designs which some of the democratic party imputed to him, as well as the conclusions which they drew from his works.

Millet’s life in itself explains his art. Never have heart and hand, a man and his work, tallied with each other as they did in him. He does not belong to those painters who, even when one admires them, give one nevertheless a sense that they could just as easily have produced something different. Let any one consider his works and read the letters published in Sensier’s book: the man whom one knows from the letters lives in his works, and these works are the natural illustration of the book in which the man has depicted himself. In the unity of man and artist lies the source of his strength, the secret of his greatness.

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JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET.	PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.

Even the circumstances over which he triumphed necessitated his being the painter that he actually was, if he became one at all. He was not born in a city where a child’s eyes are everywhere met by works of art—pictures which no doubt early awaken the feeling for art, but which just as easily disturb a free outlook into nature. Moreover, he did not spring from one of those families where art is itself practised, or where art is discussed and taste early guided upon definite lines. He was a peasant, whose father and grandfather were peasants before him, and whose brothers were farm labourers. He was born in 1814, far away from Paris, in a little Norman village hard by the sea, and there he grew up. The regular and majestic plunge of the waves against the granite rocks of the coast, the solemn murmurs of the ebb and flow of the sea, the moaning of the wind in the apple trees and the old oaks of his father’s garden, were the first sounds which struck upon the ear in Gruchy, near Cherbourg. It has been adduced that his father loved music, and had had success as the leader of the village choir. But though there may have always been a dim capacity for art in the youngster’s blood, there was nothing calculated to strengthen it in his education. Millet’s sturdy father had no idea of making an artist of his son; the boy saw no artist at work in the neighbourhood; nature and instinct guided him alone.

For a man brought up in a city and trained at an academy all things become hackneyed. Many centuries of artistic usage have dimmed their original freshness; and he finds a ready-made phrase coined for everything. Millet stood before the world like the first man in the day of creation. Everything seemed new to him; he was charmed and astonished, and a wild flood of impressions burst in upon him. He did not come under the influence of any tradition, but approached art like the man in the age of stone who first scratched the outline of a mammoth on a piece of ivory, or like the primÆval Greek who, according to the legend, invented painting by making a likeness of his beloved with a charred stick upon a wall. No one encouraged him in his first attempts. No one dreamt that this young man was destined to any life other than that of a peasant. From the time he was fourteen until he was eighteen he did every kind of field labour upon his father’s land in the same way as his brothers—hoeing, digging, ploughing, mowing, threshing, sowing the seed, and dressing the ground. But he always had his eyes about him; he drew upon a white patch of wall, without guidance, the picture of a tree, an orchard, or a peasant whom he had chanced to meet on a Sunday when going to church. And he drew so correctly that every one recognised the likenesses. A family council was held upon the matter. His father brought one of his son’s drawings to a certain M. Mouchel in Cherbourg, a strange personage who had once been a painter and had the reputation of being a connoisseur; and he was to decide whether FranÇois “had really enough talent for painting to gain his bread by it.” So Millet, the farm-hand, was twenty when he received his first lessons in drawing. He was learning the A B C of art, but humanly speaking he was already Millet. What had roused his talent and induced him to take a stump of charcoal in his hand was not the study of any work of art, but the sight of nature—nature, the great mother of all, who had embraced him, nature with whom and through whom he lived. Through her, visions and emotions were quickened in him, and he felt the secret impulse to give them expression.

MILLET.	THE HOUSE AT GRUCHY.

Of what concerned the manual part of his art he understood nothing, and his two teachers in Cherbourg, Mouchel and Langlois, who were half-barbarians themselves, gave him the less knowledge, as only two months later, in 1835, his father died, and the young man returned to his own people as a farm-labourer once more. And it was only after an interruption of three years that a subsidy from the community of Cherbourg, which was collected by his teacher Langlois, and a small sum saved by his parents—six hundred francs all told—enabled him to journey up to Paris. He was twenty-three years of age, a broad-chested Hercules in stature, for till that time he had breathed nothing but the pure, sharp sea air; his handsome face was framed in long fair locks, which fell wildly about his shoulders. What had this peasant to do in the capital! In Delaroche’s school he was called l’homme des bois. He had all the awkwardness of a provincial, and the artist was only to be surmised from the fire in the glance of his large dark blue eyes. At first Delaroche took peculiar pains with his new pupil. But to submit to training is to follow the lead of another person. A man like Millet, who knew what he wanted, was no longer to be guided upon set lines. The pictures of Delaroche made no appeal to him. They struck him as being “huge vignettes, theatrical effects without any real sentiment.” And Delaroche soon lost patience with the clumsy peasant, whom he—most unfairly—regarded as stiff-necked and obstinate.

Other aims floated before Millet, and he could not now learn to produce academical compositions, so, as these were alone demanded in the school of Delaroche, he never cleared himself from a reputation for mediocrity. It was the period of the war between the Classicists and the Romanticists. “An Ingres, a Delacroix!” was the battle-cry that rang through the Parisian studios. For Millet neither of these movements had any existence. His memory only clung to the plains of Normandy, and the labourers, shepherds, and fishermen of his home, with whom he mingled in spirit once more. Incessantly he believed himself to hear what he has called “le cri de la terre,” and neither Romanticists nor Classicists caught anything of this cry of the earth. He lived alone with his own thoughts, associating with none of his fellow-artists, and indeed keeping out of their way. Always prepared for some scornful attempt at witticism, he turned his easel round whenever he was approached, or gruffly cut all criticism short with the remark: “What does my painting matter to you? I don’t trouble my head about your bread and grease.” Thus it was that Delaroche certainly taught him very little of the technique of painting, though, at the same time, he taught him no mannerism. He did not learn to paint pretty pictures with beautiful poses, flattering colour, and faces inspired with intellect. He left the studio as he had entered it in 1837, painting with an awkward, thick, heavy, and laborious brush, though with the fresh, untroubled vision which he had had in earlier days. He was still the stranger, the incorrigible Norman peasant.

For a time he exerted himself to make concessions to the public. At seven-and-twenty he had married a Cherbourg girl, who died of consumption three years afterwards. Without acquaintances in Paris, and habituated to domestic life from his youth upwards, he married a second time in 1845. He had to earn his bread, to please, to paint what would sell. So he toiled over pretty pictures of nude women, like those which Diaz had painted with such great success—fair shepherdesses and gallant herdsmen, and bathing girls, in the genre of Boucher and Fragonard. And he who did this spoke of both of them afterwards as pornographists. But the attempt was vain, for he satisfied neither others nor himself. The peasant of Gruchy could not be piquant, easy, and charming; on the contrary, he remained helpless, awkward, and crude. “Your women bathing come from the cow-house” was the appropriate remark of Diaz in reference to these pictures. When Burger-ThorÉ, who was the first to take notice of Millet, declared, on the occasion of “The Milkmaid” being exhibited in 1844, that Boucher himself was surpassed in this picture, the critic took a literary licence, because he had a human pity for the poor painter. How little the picture has of the fragrance of the old masters! how laboured it seems! how obvious it is that it was painted without pleasure! Millet was not long at pains to conceal his personality. An “Œdipus” and “The Jewish Captives in Babylon” were his last rhetorical exercises. In 1848 he came forward with a manifesto—“The Winnower,” a peasant in movement and bearing, in his whole character and in the work on which he is employed. Millet returns here to the thoughts and feelings of his youth; for the future he will paint nothing but peasants in all the situations of their rude and simple life. In 1849 he made a great resolve.

F. JACQUE.	MILLET AT WORK IN HIS STUDIO.
(By permission of M. F. Jacque, the owner of the copyright.)

The sale of his “Winnower” had brought him five hundred francs, and these five hundred francs gave him courage to defy the world. “Better turn bricklayer than paint against conviction.” Charles Jacque, the painter of animals, who lived opposite to him in the Rue Rochechouard, wanted to quit Paris in 1849 on account of the outbreak of cholera. He proposed that Millet should go with him into the country for a short time; he did so, and the peasant’s son of former times became once more a peasant, to end his days amongst peasants. “In the middle of the forest of Fontainebleau,” said Jacque, “there is a little nest, with a name ending in ‘zon’—not far off and cheap,—Diaz has been telling me a great deal about it.” Millet consented. One fine June day they got into a heavy, rumbling omnibus, with their wives and their five children, and they arrived in Fontainebleau that evening after two hours’ journey. “To-morrow we are going in search of our ‘zon.’” And the next day they went forward on foot to Barbizon, Millet with his two little girls upon his shoulders, and his wife carrying in her arms the youngest child, a boy of five months old, having her skirt drawn over her head as a protection against the rain.

F. JACQUE.	MILLET’S HOUSE AT BARBIZON.
(By permission of M. F. Jacque, the owner of the copyright.)

As yet the forest had no walks laid out as it has to-day; it was virgin nature, which had never been disturbed. “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, que c’est beau!” cried Millet, exulting. Once more he stood in the presence of nature, the old love of his youth. The impressions of childhood rushed over him. Born in the country, he had to return to the country to be himself once again. He arrived at Ganne’s inn just as the dinner-hour had assembled twenty persons at the table, artists with their wives and children. “New painters! The pipe, the pipe!” was the cry which greeted the fresh arrivals. Diaz rose, and, in spite of his wooden leg, did the honours of the establishment to the two women with the dignity of a Spanish nobleman, and then turned gravely to Millet and Jacque, saying: “Citizens, you are invited to smoke the pipe of peace.” Whenever the colony of Barbizon received an addition this was always taken down from its sacred place above the door. An expressly appointed jury had then to decide from the ascending rings of smoke whether the new-comer was to be reckoned amongst the “Classicists” or the “Colourists.” Jacque was with one voice declared to be a “Colourist.” As to Millet’s relation to the schools, there was a discrepancy of opinion. “Eh bien,” said Millet, “si vous Êtes embarrassÉs, placez-moi dans la mienne.” Whereupon Diaz, as the others would not let this pass, cried: “Be quiet; it is a good retort, and the fellow looks powerful enough to found a school which will bury us all.” He was right, even though it was late before his prophecy was fulfilled.

Quantin, Paris.		Neurdein FrÈres, photo.
MILLET.	THE WINNOWER.	MILLET.	A MAN MAKING FAGGOTS.
(By permission of M. Charles Millet.)

Millet was thirty-five when he settled in Barbizon; he had reached the age which Dante calls the middle point of life. He had no further tie with the outward world; he had broken all the bridges behind him, and relied upon himself. He only went back to Paris on business, and he always did so unwillingly and for as short a time as possible. He lived at Barbizon in the midst of nature and in the midst of his models, and to his last day unreservedly gave himself up to the work which in youth he had felt himself called to fulfil. Neither criticism, mockery, nor contempt could lead him any more astray; even if he had wished it, he would have been incapable of following the paths of official art. “Mes critiques,” said he as though by way of excuse, “sont gens instruits et de goÛt, mais je ne peux me mettre dans leur peau, et comme je n’ai jamais vu de ma vie autre chose que les champs, je tÂche de dire comme je peux ce que j’y ai ÉprouvÉ quand j’y travaillais.” When such a man triumphs, when he succeeds in forcing upon the world his absolutely personal art, it is not Mahomet who has come to the mountain, but the mountain to Mahomet.

Millet’s life has been, in consequence, a continuous series of renunciations. It is melancholy to read in Sensier’s biography that such a master, even during his Paris days, was forced to turn out copies at twenty francs and portraits at five, and to paint tavern signs or placards for the booths of rope-dancers and horse-dealers, each one of which brought him in a roll of thick sous. When the Revolution of June broke out his capital consisted of thirty francs, which the owner of a small shop had paid him for a sign, and on this he and his family lived for a fortnight. In Barbizon he boarded with a peasant and lived with his family in a tiny room where wheat was stored and where bread was baked twice in the week; then he took a little house at a hundred and sixty francs a year. In winter he sat in a workroom without a fire, in thick straw shoes and with an old horse-cloth over his shoulders. Living like this he painted “The Sower,” that marvellous strophe in his great poem on the earth. By the produce of a vegetable garden he endeavoured to increase his income, lived on credit with grocer and butcher, and at last had creditors in every direction—in particular Gobillot, the baker of Chailly, from whom he often hid at his friend Jacque’s.

He was forced to accept a loaf from Rousseau for his famishing family, and small sums with which he was subsidised by Diaz. “I have received the hundred francs,” he writes in a letter to Sensier, “and they came just at the right time; neither my wife nor I had tasted food for four-and-twenty hours. It is a blessing that the little ones, at any rate, have not been in want.”

Levy et ses Fils, photo.
MILLET.	THE GLEANERS.

All his efforts to exhibit in Paris were vain. Even in 1859 “Death and the Woodcutter” was rejected by the Salon. The public laughed, being accustomed to peasants in a comic opera, and, at best, his pictures were honoured by a caricature in a humorous paper. Even the most delicate connoisseurs had not the right historical perspective to appreciate the greatness of Millet, so far was it in advance of the age. And all this is so much the sadder when one thinks of the price which his works fetched at a later period, when one reads that drawings for which he could get with difficulty from twenty to forty francs are the works for which as many thousands are now offered. It was only from the middle of the fifties that he began to sell at the rate of from two hundred and fifty to three hundred francs a picture. Rousseau was the first to offer him a large sum, buying his “Woodcutter” for four thousand francs, on the pretext that an American was the purchaser. DuprÉ helped him to dispose of “The Gleaners” for two thousand francs. An agreement which the picture-dealer Arthur Stevens, brother of Stevens the painter, concluded with him had to be dissolved six months afterwards, since Millet’s time had not yet come. At last, in 1863, when he painted four large decorative pictures—“The Four Seasons,” which are, by the way, his weakest works—for the dining-room of the architect Feydau, superfluity came in place of need. He was then in a position, like Rousseau and Jacque, to buy himself a little house in Barbizon, close to the road by which the place is entered and opposite Ganne’s inn. Wild vine, ivy, and jessamine clambered round it, and two bushes of white roses twisted their branches around the window. It was surrounded by a large garden, in which field-flowers bloomed amongst vegetables and fruit-trees, whilst a border of white roses and elders led to another little house which he used as a studio. Behind was a poultry-yard, and behind that again a thickly grown little shrubbery. Here he lived, simple and upright, with his art and his own belongings, as a peasant and a father of a family, like an Old Testament patriarch. His father had had nine children, and he himself had nine. While he painted the little ones played in the garden, the elder daughters worked, and when the younger children made too much noise, Jeanne, who was seven years old, would say with gravity, “Chut! Papa travaille.” After the evening meal he danced his youngest boy upon his knee and told Norman tales, or they all went out together into the forest, which the children called la forÊt noire, because it was so wild, gloomy, and magnificent.

Millet’s poverty was not quite so great as might be supposed from Sensier’s book. Chintreuil, ThÉodore Rousseau, and many others were acquainted with poverty likewise, and bore it with courage. It may even be said that, all things considered, success came to Millet early. The real misfortune for an artist is to have had success, to have been rich, and later to see himself forgotten when he is stricken with poverty. Millet’s course was the opposite. From the beginning of the sixties his reputation was no longer in question. At the World Exhibition of 1867 he was showered with all outward honours. He was represented by nine pictures and received the great medal. The whole world knew his name, subsistence was abundantly assured to him, and all the younger class of artists honoured him like a god. In the Salon of 1869 he was on the hanging committee. The picture-dealers, who had passed him by in earlier days, now beset his doors; he lived to see his “Woman with the Lamp” for which he had received a hundred and fifty francs, sold for thirty-eight thousand five hundred at Richard’s sale. “Allons, ils commencent À comprendre que c’est de la peinture serieuse.” M. de ChenneviÈres commissioned him to take part in the paintings in the PanthÉon, and he began the work. But strength was denied him; he was prostrated by a violent fever, and on 20th January 1875, at six o’clock in the morning, Millet was dead. He was then sixty.

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MILLET.	THE WOOD SAWYERS.

His funeral, indeed, was celebrated with no great parade, for it took place far from Paris. It was a cold, dull morning, and there was mist and rain. Not many friends had come, only a few painters and critics. At eleven o’clock the procession was set in order. And it moved in the rain quickly over the two centimÈtres from Barbizon to Chailly. Even those who had hastened from various villages, drawn by curiosity, could not half fill the church. But in Paris the announcement of death raised all the greater stir. When forty newspapers were displayed in a picture-dealer’s shop on the morning after his demise, all Paris assembled and the excitement was universal. In the critical notices he was named in the same breath with Watteau, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo. The auction which was held soon afterwards in the HÔtel Drouot for the disposal of the sketches which he had left behind him brought his family three hundred and twenty-one thousand francs. And in these days, the very drawings and pastels which were bought for six thousand francs immediately after his death have on the average risen in value to thirty thousand, while the greater number of his pictures rose to a figure beyond the reach of European purchasers, and passed across the ocean to the happy land of dollars. Under such circumstances to speak any longer of Millet being misunderstood, or to sing hymns of praise upon him as a counterblast to the undervaluation of Millet in the beginning, would be knocking at an open door. It is merely necessary to inquire in an entirely objective spirit what position he occupies in the history of modern painting, and what future generations will say of him.

L’Art.
MILLET.	VINE-DRESSER RESTING.
(By permission of M. Charles Millet.)

Millet’s importance is to some extent ethical; he is not the first who painted peasants, but he is the first who has represented them truthfully, in all their ruggedness, and likewise in their greatness—not for the amusement of others, but as they claim a right to their own existence. The spirit of the rustic is naturally grave and heavy, and the number of his ideas and emotions is small. He has neither wit nor sentimentalism. And when in his leisure moments he sometimes gives way to a broad, noisy merriment, his gaiety often resembles intoxication, and is not infrequently its consequence. His life, which forces him to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, always reminds him of the hard fundamental conditions of existence. He looks at everything in a spirit of calculation and strict economy. Even the earth he stands on wakens in him a mood of seriousness. It is gravely sublime, this nature with its wide horizon and its boundless sky. At certain seasons it wears a friendly smile, especially for those who have escaped for a few hours from town. But for him who always lives in its midst it is not the good, tender mother that the townsman fancies. It has its oppressive heats in summer and its bitter winter frosts; its majesty is austere. And nowhere more austere than in Millet’s home, amid those plains of Normandy, swept by the rude wind, where he spent his youth as a farm labourer.

From this peasant life, painting, before his time, had collected merely trivial anecdotes with a conventional optimism. It was through no very adequate conception of man that peasants, in those earlier pictures, had always to be celebrating marriages, golden weddings, and baptisms, dancing rustic dances, making comic proposals, behaving themselves awkwardly with advocates, or scuffling in the tavern for the amusement of those who frequent exhibitions. They had really won their right to existence by their labour. “The most joyful thing I know,” writes Millet in a celebrated letter to Sensier in 1851, “is the peace, the silence, that one enjoys in the woods or on the tilled lands. One sees a poor, heavily laden creature with a bundle of faggots advancing from a narrow path in the fields. The manner in which this figure comes suddenly before one is a momentary reminder of the fundamental condition of human life, toil. On the tilled land around one watches figures hoeing and digging. One sees how this or that one rises and wipes away the sweat with the back of his hand. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’ Is that merry, enlivening work, as some people would like to persuade us? And yet it is here that I find the true humanity, the great poetry.”

Perhaps in his conception of peasant life Millet has been even a little too serious; perhaps his melancholy spirit has looked too much on the sad side of the peasant’s life. For Millet was altogether a man of temperament and feelings. His family life had made him so even as a boy. To see this, one needs only to read in Sensier’s book of his old grandmother, who was his godmother likewise, to hear how he felt in after-years the news of his father’s death and of his mother’s, and how he burst into tears because he had not given his last embrace to the departed. Of course, a man who was so sad and dreamy might be expected to lay special stress on the dark side of rustic life, its toil and trouble and exhaustion. He had not that easy spirit which amara lento temperat risu. The passage beneath the peasant-picture in Holbein’s “Dance of Death” might stand as motto for his whole work—

“À la sueur de ton visage Tu gagneras ta pauvre vie; AprÈs travail et long usage Voici la mort qui te convie.”

Mansell, photo.
MILLET.	AT THE WELL.

 

Neudein FrÈres, photo.

MILLET.   BURNING WEEDS.

This grave and sad trait in Millet’s character sets him, for example, in abrupt contrast with Corot. Corot had a cheerful temperament, which noticed what was kindly in nature everywhere. His favourite hour was morning, when the sun rises and the lark exults, when the mists are dissipated and the shining dew lies upon the grass like pearls. His favourite season was spring, bringing with the new leaves life and joy upon the earth. And if he sometimes peopled this laughing world with peasant lads and maidens in place of the joyous creatures of his fancy, they were only those for whom life is a feast rather than a round of hard toil. Compared with so sanguine a man as Corot, Millet is melancholy all through; whilst the former renders the spring, the latter chooses the oppressive and enervating sultriness of summer. From experience he knew that hard toil which makes men old before their time, which kills body and spirit, and turns the image of God into an ugly, misshapen, and rheumatic thing; and perhaps he has been one-sided in seeing only this in the life of the peasant. Nevertheless, it is inapposite to cite as a parallel to Millet’s paintings of the peasant that cruel description of the rustic made in the time of Louis XIV by LabruyÈre: “One sees scattered over the field dwarfed creatures that look like some strange kind of animal, black, withered, and sun-burnt, fastened to the earth, in which they grub with invincible stubbornness; they have something resembling articulate language, and when they raise themselves they show a human countenance,—as a matter of fact they are men. At night they retire to their holes, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They save other men the trouble of sowing, ploughing, and gathering in the harvest, and so gain the advantage of not themselves being in want of the bread that they have sown.” Yes, Millet’s peasants toil, and they toil hard, but in bowing over the earth at their work they are, in a sense, proudly raised by their whole peasant nature. Millet has made human beings out of the manikins of illustrated humour, and in this lies his ethical greatness.

As his whole life passed without untruth or artificiality, so his whole endeavour as an artist was to keep artificiality and untruth at a distance. After a period of genre painting which disposed of things in an arbitrary manner, he opened a way for the new movement with its unconditional devotion to reality. The “historical painters” having conjured up the past with the assistance of old masterpieces, it was something to the credit of the genre painters that, instead of looking back, they began to look around them. Fragments of reality were arranged—in correspondence with the principle of Classical landscape painting—according to the rules of composition known to history to make tableaux vivants crowded with figures; and such pictures related a cheerful or a moving episode of the painter’s invention. Millet’s virtue is to have set emotion in the place of invention, to have set a part of nature grasped in its totality with spontaneous freshness in the place of composition pieced together from scattered observation and forcing life into inconsistent relations—to have set painting in the place of history and anecdote. As Rousseau and his fellows discovered the poetry of work-a-day nature, Millet discovered that of ordinary life. The foundation of modern art could only be laid on painting which no longer subjected the world to one-sided rules of beauty, but set itself piously to watch for the beauty of things as they were, and renounced all literary episodes. Millet does not appear to think that any one is listening to him; he communes with himself alone. He does not care to make his ideas thoroughly distinct and salient by repetitions and antitheses; he renders his emotion, and that is all. And thus painting receives new life from him: his pictures are not compositions that one sees, but emotions that one feels; it is not a painter who speaks through them, but, a man. From the first he had the faculty of seeing things simply, directly, and naturally; and to exercise himself in this faculty he began with the plainest things: a labourer in the field, resting upon his spade and looking straight before him; a sower amid the furrows, on which flights of birds are settling down; a man standing in a ploughed field, putting on his coat; a woman stitching in a room; a girl at the window behind a pot of marguerites. He is never weary of drawing land broken up for cultivation, and oftener still he draws huddled flocks of sheep upon a heath, their woolly backs stretching with an undulatory motion, and a shepherd lad or a girl in their midst.

“The Sower” (1850), “The Peasants going to their Work,” “The Hay-trussers,” “The Reapers,” “A Sheep-shearer,” “The Labourer grafting a Tree” (1855), “A Shepherd,” and “The Gleaners” (1857) are his principal works in the fifties. And what a deep intuition of nature is to be found in “The Gleaners”! They have no impassioned countenances, and their movements aim at no declamatory effect of contrast. They do not seek compassion, but merely do their work. It is this which gives them loftiness and dignity. They are themselves products of nature, plants of which the commonest is not without a certain pure and simple beauty. Look at their hands. They are not hands to be kissed, but to be cordially pressed. They are brave hands, which have done hard work from youth upwards—reddened with frost, chapped by soda, swollen with toil, or burnt by the sun.

Seemann, Leipzig.
MILLET.	THE ANGELUS.
(By permission of M. Georges Petit, the owner of the copyright.)

L’Art.

MILLET.   THE SHEPHERDESS AND HER SHEEP.

(By permission of M. Charles Millet.)

“The Labourer grafting a Tree” of 1855 is entirely idyllic. In the midst of one of those walled-in spaces which are half courtyard and half garden, separating in villages the barns from the house, there is standing a man who has cut a tree and is grafting a fresh twig. His wife is looking on, with their youngest child in her arms. Everything around bears the mark of order, cleanliness, and content. Their clothes have neither spot nor hole, and wear well under the anxious care of the wife. Here is the old French peasant, true to the soil, and living and dying in the place of his birth: it is a picture of patriarchal simplicity. In 1859 appeared “The Angelus,” that work which chimes like a low-toned and far-off peal of bells. “I mean,” he said—“I mean the bells to be heard sounding, and only natural truth of expression can produce the effect.” Nothing is wanting in these creations, neither simplicity nor truth. The longer they are looked at, the more something is seen in them which goes beyond reality. “The Man with the Mattock,” the celebrated picture of 1863, is altogether a work of great style; it recalls antique statues and the figures of Michael Angelo, without in any way resembling them. In his daring veracity Millet despised all the artificial grace and arbitrary beatification which others introduced into rustic life; and while, in turning from it, he rested only on the most conscientious reverence for nature, his profound draughtsmanlike knowledge of the human form has given a dignity and a large style to the motions of the peasant which no one discovered before his time. There is a simplicity, a harmony, and a largeness in the lines of his pictures such as only the greatest artists have had. He reached it in the same way as Rousseau and Corot reached their style in landscape: absorbed and saturated by reality, he was able, in the moment of creation, to dispense with the model without suffering for it, and to attain truth and condensation without being hindered by petty detail.

He himself went about in Barbizon like a peasant. And he might have been seen wandering over the woods and fields with an old, red cloak, wooden shoes, and a weather-beaten straw hat. He rose at sunrise, and wandered about the country as his parents had done. He guarded no flocks, drove no cows, and no yokes of oxen or horses; he carried neither mattock nor spade, but rested on his stick; he was equipped only with the faculty of observation and poetic intuition. He went about like the people he met, roamed round the houses, entered the courtyards, looked over the hedges, knew the gleaners and reapers, the girls who took care of the geese, and the shepherds in their big cloaks, as they stood motionless amongst their flocks, resting on a staff. He entered the wash-house, the bake-house, and the dairies where the butter was being churned. He witnessed the birth of a calf or the death of a pig, or leant with folded arms on the garden wall and looked into the setting sun, as it threw a rosy veil over field and forest. He heard the chime of vesper bells, watched the people pray and then return home. And he returned also, and read the Bible by lamplight, while his wife sewed and the children slept. When all was quiet he closed the book and began to dream. Once more he saw all that he had come across in the course of the day. He had gone out without canvas or colours; he had merely noted down in passing a few motives in his sketch-book: as a rule he never took his pencil from his pocket, but merely meditated, his mind being compelled to notice all that his eye saw. Then he went through it again in his memory. On the morrow he painted.

Quantin, Paris.
MILLET.	THE SHEPHERD AT THE PEN AT NIGHTFALL.
(By permission of M. Charles Millet.)

His study seems to have been an incessant exercise of the eye to see and to retain the essential, the great lines in nature as in the human body. Advancing upon Daumier’s path, he divested figures of all that is merely accidental, and simplified them, to bring the character and ground-note more into relief. This simplification, this marvellous way of expressing forcibly as much as possible with the smallest means, no one has ever understood like Millet. There is nothing superfluous, nothing petty, and everything bears witness to an epic spirit attracted by what is great and heroic. His drawing was never encumbered by what was subsidiary and anecdotic; his mind was fixed on the decisive lines which characterise a movement, and give it rhythm. It was just this feeling for rhythm which his harmonious nature possessed in the very highest degree. He did not give his peasants Grecian noses, and he never lost himself in arid and trivial observation; he simplified and sublimated their outlines, making them the heroes and martyrs of toil. His figures have a majesty of style, an august grandeur; and something almost resembling the antique style of relief is found in his pictures. It is no doubt characteristic that the only works of art which he had in his studio were plaster casts of the metopes of the Parthenon. He himself was like a man of antique times, both in the simplicity of his life and in his outward appearance—a peasant in wooden shoes who had, set upon his shoulders, the head of the Zeus of Otricoli. And as his biography reads like an Homeric poem, so his great and simple art sought for what was primitive, aboriginal, and heroic. Note the Michelangelesque motions of “The Sower.” The peasant, striding on with a firm tread, seems to show by his large movements his consciousness of the grandeur of his daily toil: he is the heroic embodiment of man, swaying the earth, making it fruitful and subservient to his own purposes.

“Il marche dans la plaine immense, Va, vient, lance la graine au loin, Rouvre sa main et recommence; Et je mÉdite, obscur tÉmoin, Pendant que dÉployant ses voiles L’ombre oÙ se mÊle une rumeur Semble Élargir jusqu’aux Étoiles Le geste auguste du semeur.”

L’Art.

MILLET.   A WOMAN FEEDING CHICKENS.

Note the epical quietude of “The Gleaners,” the three Fates of poverty, as Gautier called them, the priestly dignity of “The Woodcutter,” the almost Indian solemnity of “The Woman leading her Cow to Grass.” She stands in her wooden shoes as if on a pedestal, her dress falls into sculpturesque folds, and a grave and melancholy hebetude is imprinted on her countenance. Millet is the Michael Angelo of peasants. In their large simplicity his pictures make the appeal of religious painting, at once plastic and mystical.

But it is in no sense merely through instinct that Millet has attained this altitude of style. Although the son of a peasant, and himself a peasant and the painter of peasants, he knew thoroughly well what he wanted to do; and this aim of his he has not only formulated practically in his pictures, but has made theoretically clear in his letters and treatises. For Millet was not simply a man who had a turn for dreaming; he had, at the same time, a brooding, philosophic mind, in which the ideas of a thinker were harboured beside the emotions of a poet. In the portrait of himself, given on the title-page of Sensier’s book, a portrait in which he has something sickly, something ethereal and tinged with romance, only one side of his nature is expressed. The great medallion of Chappu reveals the other side: the keen, consecutive thinker, to be found in the luminous and remorselessly logical letters. In this respect he is the true representative of his race. In opposition to the esprit and graceful levity of the Parisian, a quieter and more healthy human understanding counts as the chief characteristic of the Norman; and this clear and precise capacity for thought was intensified in Millet by incessant intellectual training.

Mansell, photo.
MILLET.	THE SHEPHERDESS.

Even as a child he had received a good education from his uncle, who was an ecclesiastic, and he learnt enough Latin to read the Georgics of Virgil and other ancient authors in the original text. He knows them almost by heart, and cites them continually in his letters. When he came to Paris he spent long hours in the galleries, not copying this or that portion of a picture, but fathoming works of art to their inmost core with a clear eye. In Cherbourg he devoured the whole of Vasari in the library, and read all he could find about DÜrer, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Poussin. Even in Barbizon he remained throughout his whole life an eager reader. Shakespeare fills him with admiration; Theocritus and Burns are his favourite poets. “Theocritus makes it evident to me,” he says, “that one is never more Greek than when one simply renders one’s own impressions, let them come whence they may.” When not painting or studying nature he had always a book in his hand, and knew no more cordial pleasure than when a friend increased his little library by the present of a fresh one. Though in his youth he tilled the ground and ploughed, and in later days lived like a peasant, he was better instructed than most painters; he was a philosopher, a scholar. His manner in speaking was leisurely, quiet, persuasive, full of conviction, and impregnated by his own peculiar ideas, which he had thoroughly thought out.

“My dear Millet,” wrote a critic, “you must sometimes see good-looking peasants and pretty country girls.” To which Millet replied: “No doubt; but beauty does not lie in the face. It lies in the harmony between man and his industry. Your pretty country girls prefer to go up to town; it does not suit them to glean and gather faggots and pump water. Beauty is expression. When I paint a mother I try to render her beautiful by the mere look she gives her child.” He goes on to say that what has been once clearly seen is beautiful if it is simply and sincerely interpreted. Everything is beautiful which is in its place, and nothing is beautiful which appears out of place. Therefore no emasculation of characters is ever beautiful. Apollo is Apollo and Socrates is Socrates. Mingle them and they both lose, and become a mixture which is neither fish nor flesh. This was what brought about the decadence of modern art. “Au lieu de naturaliser l’art, ils artialisent la nature.” The Luxembourg Gallery had shown him that he ought not to go to the theatre to create true art. “Je voudrais que les Êtres que je reprÉsente aient l’air vouÉs À leur position; et qu’il soit impossible d’imaginer qu’il leur puisse venir À l’idÉe d’Être autre chose que ce qu’ils sont. On est dans un milieu d’un caractÈre ou d’un autre, mais celui qu’on adopte doit primer. On devrait Être habituÉ À ne recevoir de la nature ses impressions de quelque sorte qu’elles soient et quelque temperament qu’on ait. Il faut Être imprÉgnÉ et saturÉ d’elle, et ne penser que ce qu’elle vous fait penser. Il faut croire qu’elle est assez riche pour fournir À tout. Et oÙ puiserait-on, sinon À la source? Pourquoi donc À perpÉtuitÉ proposer aux gens, comme but suprÊme À atteindre, ce que de hautes intelligences ont dÉcouvert en elle. Voila donc qu’on rendrait les productions de quelques-uns le type et le but de toutes les productions À venir. Les gens de gÉnie sont comme douÉs de la baguette divinatoire; les uns dÉcouvrent que, dans la nature, ici se trouve cela, les autres autre chose ailleurs, selon le temperament de leur flair. Leurs productions vous assurent dans cette idÉe que celui-lÀ trouve qui est fait pour trouver, mais il est plaisant de voir, quand le trÉsor est dÉterrÉ et enlevÉ, que des gens viennent À perpÉtuitÉ gratter À cette place-lÀ. Il faut savoir dÉcouvrir oÙ il y a des truffes. Un chien qui n’a pas de flair ne peut que faire triste chasse, puisqu’il ne va qu’en voyant chasser celui qui sent la bÊte et qui naturellement va le premier.... Un immense orgueil ou une immense sottise seulement peut faire croire À certains hommes qu’ils sont de force À redresser les prÉtendus manques de goÛt et les erreurs de la nature. Les oeuvres que nous aimons, ce n’est qu’À cause qu’elles procÈdent d’elle. Les autres ne sont que des oeuvres pÉdantes et vides. On peut partir de tous les points pour arriver au sublime, et tout est propre À l’exprimer, si on a une assez haute visÉe. Alors ce que vous aimez avec le plus d’emportement et de passion devient votre beau À vous et qui s’impose aux autres. Que chacun apporte le sien. L’impression force l’expression. Tout l’arsenal de la nature est À la disposition des hommes. Qui oserait dÉcider qu’une pomme de terre est infÉrieure À une grenade.”

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
MILLET.	THE LABOURER GRAFTING A TREE.
(By permission of M. Charles Millet.)

L’Art.

MILLET.   A WOMAN KNITTING.

(By permission of M. Charles Millet.)

Thus he maintains that when a stunted tree grows upon sterile soil it is more beautiful in this particular place, because more natural, than a slender tree artificially transplanted. “The beautiful is that which is in keeping. Whether this is to be called realism or idealism I do not know. For me, there is only one manner of painting, and that is to paint with fidelity.” In what concerns poetry old Boileau has already expressed this in the phrase: “Nothing is beautiful except truth”; and Schiller has thrown it into the phrase, “Let us, ultimately, set up truth for beauty.” For the art of the nineteenth century Millet’s words mean the erection of a new principle, of a principle that had the effect of a novel force, that gave the consciousness of a new energy of artistic endeavour, that was a return to that which the earth was to AntÆus. And by formulating this principle—the principle that everything is beautiful so far as it is true, and nothing beautiful so far as it is untrue, that beauty is the blossom, but truth the tree—by clearly formulating this principle for the first time, Millet has become the father of the new French and, indeed, of European art, almost more than by his own pictures.

For—and here we come to the limitations of his talent—has Millet as a painter really achieved what he aimed at? No less a person than Fromentin has put this question in his MaÎtres d’autrefois. On his visit to Holland he chances for a moment to speak of Millet, and he writes:—

“An entirely original painter, high-minded and disposed to brooding, kind-hearted and genuinely rustic in nature, he has expressed things about the country and its inhabitants, about their toil, their melancholy, and the nobleness of their labour, which a Dutchman would never have discovered. He has represented them in a somewhat barbaric fashion, in a manner to which his ideas gave a more expressive force than his hand possessed. The world has been grateful for his intentions; it has recognised in his method something of the sensibility of a Burns who was a little awkward in expression. But has he left good pictures behind him or not? Has his articulation of form, his method of expression, I mean the envelopment without which his ideas could not exist, the qualities of a good style of painting, and does it afford an enduring testimony? He stands out as a deep thinker if he is compared with Potter and Cuyp; he is an enthralling dreamer if he is opposed to Terborch and Metsu, and he has something peculiarly noble compared with the trivialities of Steen, Ostade, and Brouwer. As a man he puts them all to the blush. Does he outweigh them as a painter?”

Neurdein FrÈres, photo.
MILLET.	THE RAINBOW.

If any one thinks of Millet as a draughtsman he will answer this question without hesitation in the affirmative. His power is firmly rooted in the drawings which constitute half his work. And he has not merely drawn to make sketches or preparations for pictures, like Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Watteau, or Delacroix; his drawings were for him real works of art complete in themselves; and his enduring and firmly grounded fame rests upon them. Michael Angelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Prudhon, Millet; that is, more or less, the roll of the greatest draughtsmen in the history of art. His pastels and etchings, his drawings in chalk, pencil, and charcoal, are astonishing through their eminent delicacy of technique. The simpler the medium the greater is the effect achieved. “The Woman Churning” in the Louvre; the quietude of his men reaping, and of his woman-reaper beside the heaps of corn; “The Water Carriers,” who are like Greek kanephorÆ; the peasant upon the potato-field, lighting his pipe with a flint and a piece of tinder; the woman sewing by the lamp beside her sleeping child; the vine-dresser resting; the little shepherdess sitting dreamily on a bundle of straw near her flock at pasture,—in all these works in black and white he is as great as he is as a colourist and as a painter in open air. There are no sportive and capricious sunbeams, as in Diaz. Millet’s sun is too serious merely to play over the fields; it is the austere day-star, ripening the harvest, forcing men to sweat over their toil and with no time to waste in jest. And as a landscape painter he differs from Corot in the same vital manner.

Corot, the old bachelor, dallies with nature; Millet, nine times a father, knows her only as the fertile mother, nourishing all her children. The temperament of the brooding, melancholy man breaks out in his very conception of nature: “Oh, if they knew how beautiful the forest is! I stroll into it sometimes of an evening, and always return with a sense of being overwhelmed. It has a quiet and majesty which are terrible, so that I have often a feeling of actual fear. I do not know what the trees talk about amongst themselves, but they say to each other something which we do not understand, because we do not speak the same language. That they are not making bad jokes seems certain.” He loved what Corot has never painted—the sod, the sod as sod, the sod which steams beneath the rays of the fertilising sun. And yet, despite all difference of temperament, he stands beside Corot as perhaps the greatest landscape painter of the century. His landscapes are vacant and devoid of charm; they smell of the earth rather than of jessamine, yet it is as if the Earth-Spirit itself were invisibly brooding over them. A few colours enable him to attain that great harmony which is elsewhere peculiar to Corot alone, and which, when his work was over, he so often discussed with his neighbour Rousseau. With a few brilliant and easily executed shadings he gives expression to the vibration of the atmosphere, the lustre of the sky at sunset, the massive structure of the ground, the blissful tremor upon the plain at sunrise. At one time he renders the morning mist lying over the fields, at another the haze of sultry noon, veiling and as it were absorbing the outlines and colours of all objects, the light of sunset streaming over field and woodland with a tender, tremulous glimmering, the delicate silver tone which veils the landscape on clear moonlight nights.

S. Low & Co.

THE BARBIZON STONE.

There is not another artist of the century who renders night as Millet does in his pastels. One of the most charming and poetic works is the biblical and mystical night-piece “The Flight into Egypt.” As he strides forward Saint Joseph holds upon his arm the Child, whose head is surrounded by a shining halo, whilst the Mother moves slowly along the banks of the Nile riding upon an ass. The stars twinkle, the moon throws its tremulous light uncertainly over the plain. Joseph and Mary are Barbizon peasants, and yet these great figures breathe of the Sistine Chapel and of Michael Angelo. And which of the old masters has so eloquently rendered the sacred silence of night as Millet has done in his “Shepherd at the Pen”? The landscapes which he has drawn awaken the impression of spaciousness as only Rembrandt’s etchings have done, and that of fine atmosphere as only Corot’s pictures. A marvellously transparent and tender evening sky rests over his picture of cows coming down to drink at the lake, and a liquid moonlight washes over the crests of the waves around “The Sailing Boat.” The garden in stormy light with a high-lying avenue spanned by a rainbow—the motive which he developed for the well-known picture in the Louvre—is found again and again in several pastels, which progress from a simple to a more complicated treatment of the theme. Everything is transparent and delicate, full of air and light, and the air and light are themselves full of magic and melting charm.

But it is a different matter when one attempts to answer Fromentin’s question in the form in which it is put. For without in any way detracting from Millet’s importance, one may quietly make the declaration: No, Millet was not a good painter. Later generations, with which he will no longer be in touch through his ethical greatness, if they consider his paintings alone, will scarcely understand the high estimation in which he is held at present. For although many works which have come into private collections in Boston, New York, and Baltimore are, in their original form, withdrawn from judgment, they are certainly not better than the many works brought together in the Millet Exhibition of 1886 or the World Exhibition of 1889. And these had collectively a clumsiness, and a dry and heavy colouring, which are not merely old-fashioned, primitive, and antediluvian in comparison with the works of modern painters, but which fall far below the level of their own time in the quality of colour. The conception in Millet’s paintings is always admirable, but never the technique; he makes his appeal as a poet only, and never as a painter. His painting is often anxiously careful, heavy, and thick, and looks as if it had been filled in with masonry; it is dirty and dismal, and wanting in free and airy tones. Sometimes it is brutal and hard, and occasionally it is curiously indecisive in effect. Even his best pictures—“The Angelus” not excepted—give no Æsthetic pleasure to the eye. The most ordinary fault in his painting is that it is soft, greasy, and woolly. He is not light enough with what should be light, nor fleeting enough with what is fleeting. And this defect is especially felt in his treatment of clothes. They are of a massive, distressing solidity, as if moulded in brass, and not woven from flax and wool. The same is true of his air, which has an oily and material effect. Even in “The Gleaners” the aspect is cold and gloomy; it is without the intensity of light which is shed through the atmosphere, and streams ever changing over the earth.

And this is a declaration of what was left for later artists to achieve. The problem of putting real human beings in their true surroundings was stated by Millet, solved in his pastels, and left unsolved in his oil paintings. This same problem had to be taken up afresh by his successors, and followed to its furthest consequences. At the same time, it was necessary to widen the choice of subject.

For it is characteristic of Millet, the great peasant, that his art is exclusively concerned with peasants. His sensitive spirit, which from youth upwards had compassion for the hard toil and misery of the country folk, was blind to the sufferings of the artisans of the city, amid whom he had lived in Paris in his student days. The ouvrier, too, has his poetry and his grandeur. As there is a cry of the earth, so is there also a cry, as loud and as eloquent, which goes up from the pavement of great cities. Millet lived in Paris during a critical and terrible time. He was there during the years of ferment at the close of the reign of Louis Philippe. Around him there muttered all the terrors of Socialism and Communism. He was there during the February Revolution and during the days of June. While the artisans fought on the barricades he was painting “The Winnower.” The misery of Paris and the sufferings of the populace did not move him. Millet, the peasant, had a heart only for the peasantry. He was blind to the sufferings, blind to the charms of modern city life. Paris seemed to him a “miserable, dirty nest.” There was no picturesque aspect of the great town that fascinated him. He felt neither its grace, its elegance and charming frivolity, nor remarked the mighty modern movement of ideas and the noble humanity which set their seal upon that humanitarian century. The development of French art had to move in both of these directions. It was partly necessary to take up afresh with improved instruments the problem of the modern conception of colour, touched on by Millet; it was partly necessary to extend from the painting of peasants to modern life the principle formulated by Millet, “Le beau c’est le vrai,” to transfer it from the forest of Fontainebleau to Paris, from the solitude to life, from the evening gloom to sunlight, from the softness of romance to hard reality.

The fourth book of this work will be devoted to the consideration of those masters who, acting on this principle, extended beyond the range of Millet and brought the art which he had created to fuller fruition.

BOOK IV

THE REALISTIC PAINTERS AND THE MODERN IDEALISTS

CHAPTER XXVII

REALISM IN FRANCE

To continue in Paris what Millet had begun in the solitude of the forest of Fontainebleau there was need of a man of the unscrupulous animal power of Gustave Courbet. The task assigned to him was similar to that which fell to Caravaggio in the seventeenth century. In that age, when the eclectic imitation of the Cinquecento had reached the acme of mannerism, when Carlo Dolci and Sassoferato devoted themselves in mythological pictures to watering down the types of Raphael by idealising, Caravaggio painted scenes amongst dregs of the people and the unbridled soldiery of his age. At a period when these artists indulged in false, artificial, and doctrinaire compositions, which, on a barren system, merely traced the performances of classic masters back to certain rules of art, Caravaggio created works which may have been coarse, but which had an earnest and fruitful veracity, and gave the entire art of the seventeenth century another direction by their healthy and powerful naturalism.

When Courbet appeared the situation was similar: Ingres, in whose frigid works the whole Cinquecento had been crystallised, was at the zenith of his fame. Couture had painted his “Decadent Romans” and Cabanel had recorded his first successes. Beside these stood that little Neo-Grecian school with Louis Hamon at its head—a school whose prim style of china painting had the peculiar admiration of the public. Courbet, with all his brutal weight, pushed between the large symmetrical figures of the thoroughbred Classicists and the pretty confectionery of the Neo-Grecian painters of beauty. But the old panacea is never without effect: in all periods when art has overlived its bloom and falls into mannerism it is met by a strong cross-current of realism pouring into it new life-blood. In painting, nature had been made artificial, and it was time for art to be made natural. Painters still strayed in the past, seeking to awaken the dead, and give life once more to history. The time had come for accentuating the claims of the present more sharply than before, and for setting art amid the seething life of modern cities: it was a development naturally and logically following that of political life; it is historically united with the unintermittent struggle for universal suffrage. Courbet merely fought the decisive battle in the great fight which Jeanron, Leleux, Octave Tassaert, and others had begun as skirmishing outposts. As a painter he towered over these elder artists, whose sentimental pictures had not been taken seriously as works of art, and challenged attention all the more by painting life-size. In this manner the last obstacle was removed which had stood in the way of the treatment of modern subjects. Scanty notice had been taken of Millet’s little peasant figures, which were merely reckoned as accessories to the landscape. But Courbet’s pictures first taught the Academy that the “picture of manners,” which had seemed so harmless, had begun to usurp the place of historical painting in all its pride.

At the same time—and this made Courbet’s appearance of still more consequence than that of his predecessors—a most effective literary propaganda went hand in hand with that which was artistic. Millet had been silent and was known only by his friends. He had never arranged for an exhibition of his works, and quietly suffered the rejections of the hanging committee and the derision of the public. Courbet blustered, beat the big drum, threw himself into forcible postures like a strong man juggling with cannon-balls, and announced in the press that he was the only serious artist of the century. No one could ever embÊter le bourgeois with such success, no one has called forth such a howl of passion, no one so complacently surrendered his private life to the curiosity of the great public, with the swaggering attitude of an athlete displaying his muscles in the circus. As regards this method of making an appearance—a method by which he became at times almost grotesque—one may take whatever view one pleases; but when he came he was necessary. In art revolutions are made with the same brutality as in life. People shout and sing, and break the windows of those who have windows to break. For every revolution has a character of inflexible harshness. Wisdom and reason have no part in the passions necessary for the work of destruction and rebuilding. Caravaggio was obliged to take to his weapons, and make sanguinary onslaughts. In our civilised nineteenth century everything was accomplished according to law, but not with less passion. One has to make great demands to receive even a little; this has been true in all times, and this is precisely what Courbet did. He was a remarkable character striving for high aims, an eccentric man of genius, a modern Narcissus for ever contemplating himself in his vanity, and yet he was the truest friend, the readiest to sacrifice himself; for the crowd a cynic and a reckless talker; at home an earnest and mighty toiler, bursting out like a child and appeased the very next moment; outwardly as brutal as he was inwardly sensitive, as egotistic as he was proud and independent; and being what he was, he formulated his purposes as incisively by his words as in his works. Full of fire and enthusiasm, destroying and inciting to fresh creation—a nature like Lorenz Gedon, whom he also resembled in appearance—he became the soul and motive power of the great realistic movement which flooded Europe from the beginning of the fifties. Altogether he was the man of whom art had need at that time: a doctor who brought health with him, shed it abroad, and poured blood into the veins of art. Both as man and artist his entry upon the arena is in some degree like the breaking in of an elemental force of nature. He comes from the country in wooden shoes, with the self-reliance of a peasant who is afraid of nothing. He is a great and powerful man, as sound and natural as the oxen of his birthplace. He had broad shoulders, with which he pushed aside everything standing in his way. His was an instinct rather than a reflecting brain, a peintre-animal, as he was called by a Frenchman. And such a plebeian was wanted to beat down the academic Olympus. In making him great and strong, nature had herself predestined him for the part he had to play: a man makes a breach the more easily for having big muscles. Furnished with the strength of a Samson wrecking the temple of the Philistines, he was himself “The Stone-breaker” of his art, and, like the men he painted, he has done a serviceable day’s work.

L’Art.		Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
GUSTAVE COURBET.		COURBET.	THE MAN WITH A LEATHER BELT.
		PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AS A YOUTH.

Gustave Courbet, the strong son of Franche-ComtÉ, was born in 1819, in Ornans, a little town near BesanÇon. Like his friend and fellow-countryman Proudhon, the socialist, he had a strain of German blood in his veins, and in their outward appearance it gave them both something Teutonic, rugged, and heavy, contrasting with French ease and elegance. On his massive frame was set a thick, athletic neck, and a broad countenance with black hair, and big, strong eyes like those of a lion-tamer, which sparkled like black diamonds. A strong man, who had never been stinted, he was of medium height, broad-shouldered, bluff, ruddy like a slaughterman, and, as the years passed, disposed to acquire a more liberal circumference of body. He went about working like Sisyphus, and never without a short pipe in his mouth, the classic brÛle-gueule, loaded with strong caporal. His movements were broad and heavy, and, being a little short in his breathing, he wheezed when he was excited, and perspired over his painting. His dress was comfortable, but not elegant; and his head was formed for a cap rather than the official tall hat. In speech he was cynical, and often broke into a contemptuous laugh. Both in his studio and at his tavern he moved more freely in his shirt-sleeves, and at the Munich Exhibition of 1869 he seemed to the German painters like a thorough old Bavarian, when he sat down to drink with them at the Deutsches Haus in his jovial way, and, by a rather Teutonic than Latin capacity for disposing of beer, threw the most inveterate of the men of Munich into the shade.

Originally destined for the law, he determined in 1837 to become a painter, and began his artistic studies under Flageoulot, a mediocre artist of the school of David, who had drifted into the provinces, and boastfully called himself le roi du dessin. In 1839 he came to Paris, already full of self-reliance, fire and strength. On his first turn through the Luxembourg Gallery he paused before Delacroix’s “Massacre of Chios,” glowing as it is in colour, and said it was not bad, but that he could do that style of thing whenever he liked. After a short time he acquired a power of execution full of bravura by studying the old masters in the Louvre. Self-taught in art, he was in life a democrat and in politics a republican. In 1848, during a battle in June, he had a fair prospect of being shot with a party of insurgents whom he had joined, if certain “right-minded” citizens had not interceded for their neighbour, who was popular as a man and already much talked about as a painter. In the beginning of the fifties he was to be found every evening at a brasserie much frequented by artists and students in the Rue Hautefeuille in the Quartier Latin, in the society of young authors of the school of Balzac. He had his studio at the end of the street, and is said to have been at the time a strong, fine, spirited young man, who made free use of the drastic slang of the studios.

“His notable features,” writes ThÉophile Silvestre of Courbet at this time,—“his notable features seem as though they had been modelled from an Assyrian bas-relief. His well-shaped and brilliant dark eyes, shadowed by long silken lashes, have the soft quiet light of an antelope’s. The moustache, scarcely traceable beneath his slightly curved aquiline nose, is joined by a fan-shaped beard, and borders his thick, sensuous lips; his complexion is olive-brown, but of a changing, sensitive tone. The round, curiously shaped head and prominent cheek-bones denote stubbornness, and the flexible nostrils passion.”

A great dispute over realism usually took the place of dessert at meal-times. Courbet never allowed himself to be drawn into controversy. He threw his opinion bluntly out, and when he was opposed cut the conversation short in an exceedingly forcible manner. It was another murder of the innocents when he spoke of the celebrities of his time. He designated historical painting as nonsense, style as humbug, and blew away all ideals, declaring that it was the greatest impudence to wish to paint things which one has never seen, and of the appearance of which one cannot have the faintest conception. Fancy was rubbish, and reality the one true muse.

L’Art.
COURBET.	A FUNERAL AT ORNANS.

“Our century,” he says, “will not recover from the fever of imitation by which it has been laid low. Phidias and Raphael have hooked themselves on to us. The galleries should remain closed for twenty years, so that the moderns might at last begin to see with their own eyes. For what can the old masters offer us? It is only Ribera, Zurbaran, and Velasquez that I admire; Ostade and Craesbeeck also allure me; and for Holbein, I feel veneration. As for M. Raphael, there is no doubt that he has painted some interesting portraits, but I cannot find any ideas in him. And the artistic kin, the heirs, or more properly the slaves of this great man, are really preceptors of the lowest art. What do they teach us? Nothing. A good picture will never come from their École des Beaux-Arts. The most precious thing is the originality, the independence of an artist. Schools have no right to exist; there are only painters. Independently of system and without attaching myself to any party, I have studied the art of the old masters and of the more modern. I have tried to imitate the one as little as I have tried to copy the other, but out of the total knowledge of tradition I have wished to draw a firm and independent sense of my own individuality. My object was by gaining knowledge to gain in ability; to have the power of expressing the ideas, the manners, and the aspect of our epoch according to an appreciation of my own, not merely to be a painter, but a man also—in a word, to practise living art is the compass of my design. I am not only a socialist, but also a democrat and a republican—that is to say, a supporter of every revolution; and moreover, a sheer realist, which means a loyal adherent to the vÉritÉ vraie. But the principle of realism is the negation of the ideal. And following all that comes from this negation of the ideal, I shall arrive at the emancipation of the individual, and, finally, at democracy. Realism, in its essence, is democratic art. It can only exist by the representation of things which the artist can see and handle. For painting is an entirely physical language, and an abstract, invisible, non-existent object does not come within its province. The grand painting which we have stands in contradiction with our social conditions, and ecclesiastical painting in contradiction with the spirit of the century. It is nonsensical for painters of more or less talent to dish up themes in which they have no belief, themes which could only have flourished in some epoch other than our own. Better paint railway stations with views of the places through which one travels, with likenesses of great men through whose birthplace one passes, with engine-houses, mines, and manufactories; for these are the saints and miracles of the nineteenth century.”

These doctrines fundamentally tallied with those which the Neapolitan and Spanish naturalists vindicated in the seventeenth century against the eclectics. For men like Poussin, Leseur, and Sassoferato, Raphael was “an angel and not a man,” and the Vatican “the academy of painters.” But Velasquez when he came to Rome found it wearisome. “What do you say of our Raphael? Do you not think him best of all, now that you have seen everything that is fair and beautiful in Italy?” Don Diego inclined his head ceremoniously, and observed: “To confess the truth, for I like to be candid and open, I must acknowledge that I do not care about Raphael at all.” There are reported utterances of Caravaggio which correspond almost word for word with those of Courbet. He, too, declaimed against the antique and Raphael, in whose shadow he saw so many shallow imitators sitting at their ease, and he declared, in a spirit of sharp opposition, that the objects of daily life were the only true teachers. He would owe all to nature and nothing to art. He held painting without the model to be absurd. So long as the model was out of sight, his hands and his spirit were idle. Moreover, he called himself a democratic painter, who brought the fourth estate into honour; he “would rather be the first of vulgar painters than second amongst the superfine.” And just as these naturalists in the seventeenth century were treated by the academical artists as rhyparographists, Courbet’s programme did not on the whole facilitate his acceptance in formal exhibitions as he desired that it should. A play must be acted, a manuscript printed, and a picture viewed. So Courbet had no desire to remain an outsider. When the picture committee of the World Exhibition of 1855 gave his pictures an unfavourable position, he withdrew them and offered them to public inspection separately in a wooden hut in the vicinity of the Pont de Jena, just at the entry of the exhibition. Upon the hut was written in big letters: REALISM—G. COURBET. And in the interior the theories which he had urged hitherto by his tongue and his pen, at the tavern and in his pamphlets, were demonstrated by thirty-eight large pictures, which elucidate his whole artistic development.

Baschet.
COURBET.	THE STONE-BREAKERS.

 

“Lot’s Daughters” and “Love in the Country” were followed in 1844 by the portrait of himself and the picture of his dog, in 1845 by “A Guitarrero,” in 1846 by the “Portrait of M. M——,” and in 1847 by “The Walpurgisnacht”; all works in which he was still groping his way. “The Sleeping Bathers,” “The Violoncello Player,” and a landscape from his native province, belonging to the year 1848, made a nearer approach to his realistic aim, and with the date 1849 there are seven portraits, landscapes, and pictures from popular national life: “The Painter,” “M. H. T—— looking over Engravings,” “The Vintage in Ornans below the Roche du Mont,” “The Valley of the Bue seen from the Roche du Mont,” “View of the ChÂteau of Saint-Denis,” “Evening in the Village of Scey-en-Varay,” and “Peasants returning from Mass near Flagey.” All these works had passed the doors of the Salon without demur.

The first picture which brought about a collision of opinion was “A Fire in Paris,” and, according to the account given by contemporaries, it must have been one of his finest works. Firemen, soldiers, artisans in jacket and blouse, were exerting themselves, according to Paul d’Abrest who describes the picture, around a burning house; even women helped in the work of rescue, and formed part of the chain handing buckets from the pump. Opposite stood a group of young dandies with girls upon their arms looking inactively upon the scene. An artillery captain, who was amongst Courbet’s acquaintances, had through several nights sounded the alarm for his men and exercised them on the scaffolding of a wall, so that the painter could make his studies. Courbet transferred his studio to the barracks and made sketches by torch-light. But he had reckoned without the police; scarcely was the picture finished before it was seized, as the Government recognised in it, for reasons which did not appear, “an incitement to the people of the town.” This was after the coup d’État of 1851.

So Courbet’s manifesto was not “The Fire in Paris.” “The Stone-breakers,” two men in the dress of artisans, in a plain evening landscape, occupied once more the first place in the exhibition of 1855, having already made the effect, amongst its classical surroundings in the Salon of 1851, of a rough, true, and honest word, spoken amid elaborate society phrases. There was also to be seen “Afternoon at Ornans,”—a gathering of humble folk sitting after meal-time at a table laid out in a rustic kitchen. A picture which became celebrated under the title of “Bonjour, M. Courbet” dealt with a scene from Courbet’s native town. Courbet, just arrived, is alighting from a carriage in his travelling costume, looking composedly about him with a pipe in his mouth. A respectable prosperous gentleman, accompanied by a servant in livery, who is carrying his overcoat, is stretching out his hand to him. This gentleman is M. Bryas, the MÆcenas of Ornans, who for long was Courbet’s only patron, and who had a whim for having his portrait taken by forty Parisian painters in order to learn the “manners” of the various artists. And there was further to be seen the “Demoiselles de Village” of 1852, three country beauties giving a piece of cake to a peasant-girl. Finally, as masterpieces, there were “The Funeral at Ornans,” which now hangs in the Louvre, and that great canvas, designated in the catalogue as “a true allegory,” “My Studio after Seven Years of Artistic Life,” the master himself painting a landscape. Behind him is a nude model, and in front of him a beggar-woman with her child. Around are portrait figures of his friends, and the heroes of his pictures, a poacher, a parson, a sexton, labourers, and artisans.

L’Art.
COURBET.	THE RETURN FROM MARKET.

The exhibition was, at all events, a success with young painters, and Courbet set up a teaching studio, at the opening of which he again issued a kind of manifesto in the Courrier du Dimanche. “Beauty,” he wrote, “lies in nature, and it is to be met with under the most various forms. As soon as it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it. But the painter has no right to add to this expression of nature, to alter the form of it and thereby weaken it. The beauty offered by nature stands high above all artistic convention. That is the basis of my views of art.” It is said that his first model was an ox. When his pupils wanted another, Courbet said: “Very well, gentlemen, next time let us study a courtier.” The break-up of the school is supposed to have taken place when one day the ox ran away and was not to be recaptured.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
COURBET.	THE BATTLE OF THE STAGS.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.

COURBET.   A WOMAN BATHING.

(By permission of M. Sainctelette, of Brussels, the owner of the picture.)

Courbet did not trouble himself over such ridicule, but painted quietly on, the many-sidedness of his talent soon giving him a firm seat in every saddle. After the scandal of the separate exhibition of 1855 he was excluded from the Salon until 1861, and during this time exhibited in Paris and BesanÇon upon his own account. “The Funeral at Ornans” was followed by “The Return from Market,” a party of peasants on the high-road, and in 1860 by “The Return from the Conference,” in which a number of French country priests have celebrated their meeting with a hearty lunch and set out on the way back in a condition which is far too jovial. In 1861, when the gates of the Champs ElysÉes were thrown open to him once more, he received the medal for his “Battle of the Stags,” and regularly contributed to the Salon until 1870. In these years he attempted pictures with many figures less frequently, and painted by preference hunting and animal pieces, landscapes, and the nude figures of women. “The Woman with the Parrot,” a female figure mantled with long hair, lying undressed amid the cushions of a couch playing with her gaudily feathered favourite, “The Fox Hunt,” a coast scene in Provence, the portrait of Proudhon and his family, “The Valley of the Puits-Noir,” “Roche Pagnan,” “The Roe Hunt,” “The Charity of a Beggar,” the picture of women bathing in the gloom of the forest, and “The Wave,” afterwards acquired by the Luxembourg, belong to his principal works in the sixties.

These works gradually made him so well known that after 1866 his pictures came to have a considerable sale. The critics began to take him seriously. Castagnary made his dÉbut in the SiÈcle with a study of Courbet; Champfleury, the apostle of literary realism, devoted to him a whole series of feuilletons in the Messager de l’AssemblÉe, and from his intercourse with him Proudhon derived the fundamental principles of his book on Realism. The son of Franche-ComtÉ triumphed, and there was a beam in his laughing eyes, always like those of a deer. His talent began more and more to unfold its wings in the sun of success, and his power of production seemed inexhaustible. When the custom arose of publishing in the Parisian papers accounts of the budget of painters, he took care to communicate that in six months he had made a hundred and twenty-three thousand francs. Incessantly busy, he had in his hand at one moment the brush and at another the chisel. And when he gave another special exhibition of his works in 1867, at the time of the great World Exhibition—he had a mania for wooden booths—he was able to put on view no less than a hundred and thirty-two pictures in addition to numerous pieces of sculpture. In 1869 the committee of the Munich Exhibition set apart a whole room for his works. With a self-satisfied smile he put on the Order of Michael, and was the hero of the day whom all eyes followed upon the boulevards.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
COURBET.	DEER IN COVERT.

The nature of the bullfighter was developed in him more strongly than before, and he stretched his powerful limbs, prepared to do battle against all existing opinions. Naturally the events of the following years found no idle spectator in such a firebrand as Courbet; and accordingly he rushed into those follies which embittered the evening of his life. The maÎtre peintre d’Ornans became Courbet le colonnard. First came the sensational protest with which he returned to the Emperor Napoleon the Order of the Legion of Honour. Four weeks after Courbet had plunged into this affair the war broke out. Eight weeks later came Sedan and the proclamation of the Republic, and shortly afterwards the siege of Paris and the insurrection. On 4th September 1870 the Provisional Government appointed him Director of the Fine Arts. Afterwards he became a member of the Commune, and dominated everywhere, with the brÛle-gueule in his mouth, by the power of his voice; and France has to thank him for the rescue of a large number of her most famous treasures of art. He had the rich collections of Thiers placed in the Louvre, to protect them from the rough and ready violence of the populace. But to save the Luxembourg he sacrificed the column of the VendÔme. When the Commune fell, however, Courbet alone was held responsible for the destruction of the column. He was brought before the court-martial of Versailles, and, although Thiers undertook his defence, he was condemned to six months’ imprisonment. Having undergone this punishment he received his freedom once more, but the artist had still to suffer a mortal blow. The pictures which he had destined for the Salon of 1873 were rejected by the committee, because Courbet was held morally unworthy to take part in the exhibition.

Baschet.
COURBET.	GIRLS LYING ON THE BANK OF THE SEINE.

Soon after this an action was brought against him, on the initiative of certain reactionary papers, for the payment of damages connected with the overthrow of the VendÔme column, and the painter lost his case. For the recovery of these damages, which were assessed at three hundred and thirty-four thousand francs, the Government brought to the hammer his furniture and the pictures that were in his studio, at a compulsory sale at the HÔtel Drouot, where they fetched the absurdly trifling figure of twelve thousand one hundred and eighteen francs fifty centimes. The loss of his case drove him from France to Switzerland. He gave the town of Vevay, where he settled, a bust of Helvetia, as a mark of his gratitude for the hospitality it had extended towards him. But the artist was crushed in him. “They have killed me,” he said; “I feel that I shall never do anything good again.” And thus the jovial, laughing Courbet, that honoured leader of a brilliant pleiad of disciples, the friend and companion of Corot, Decamps, Gustave PlanchÉ, Baudelaire, ThÉophile Gautier, Silvestre, Proudhon, and Champfleury; the enthusiastic patriot and idol of the fickle Parisians, passed his last years in melancholy solitude, forgotten by his adherents and scorned by his adversaries. He was attacked by a disease of the liver, and privation, disillusionment, and depression came all at once. Moreover, the French Government began again to make claims for indemnification. His heart broke in a prolonged mortal struggle. Shortly before his death he said to a friend: “What am I to live upon, and how am I to pay for the column? I have saved Thiers more than a million francs, and the State more than ten millions, and now they are at my heels—they are baiting me to death. I can do no more. To work one must have peace of spirit, and I am a ruined man.” And Champfleury writes, referring to the last visit which he paid to the dying exile on 19th December 1877: “His beard and hair were white, and all that remained of the handsome, all-powerful Courbet whom I had known was that notable Assyrian profile, which he raised to the snow of the Alps, as I sat beside him and saw it for the last time. The sight of such pain and misery as this premature wreck of the whole man was overwhelming.”

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
COURBET.	A RECUMBENT WOMAN.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.

COURBET.   BERLIOZ.

The Lake of Geneva, over which he looked from his window in Vevay, was the subject of the last picture that he painted in Switzerland. Far from home and amid indifferent strangers he closed his eyes, which had once been so brilliant, in endless grief of spirit. The apostle of Realism died of a broken heart, the herculean son of Franche-ComtÉ could not suffer disillusionment. Courbet passed away, more or less forgotten, upon New Year’s Eve in 1877, in that chilly hour of morning when the lake which he had learnt to love trembles beneath the first beams of the sun. It was only in Belgium, where he had often stayed and where his influence was considerable, that the intelligence of his death woke a painful echo. In Paris it met with no word of sympathy. Courbetism was extinguished; as impressionists and independents his adherents had gathered round new flags. Zola has done him honour in L’Œuvre in the person of old Bongrand, that half-perished veteran who is only mentioned now and then with veneration.

And the course of development has indeed been so rapid since Courbet’s appearance that in these days one almost fails to understand, apart from historical reasons, the grounds which in 1855 made his separate exhibition of his works an event of epoch-making importance. It was not Cham alone who at that time devoted a large cartoon to Courbet, as he did in “The Opening of Courbet’s Studio and Concentrated Realism.” All the comic journals of Paris were as much occupied with him as with the crinoline, the noiseless pavement, the new tramways, or the balloon. Haussard, the principal representative of criticism, in discussing “The Funeral at Ornans,” spoke of “these burlesque masks with their fuddled red noses, this village priest who seems to be a tippler, and the harlequin of a veteran who is putting on a hat which is too big for him.” All this, he continued, suggested a masquerade funeral, six metres long, in which there was more to laugh at than to weep over. Even Paul Mantz declared that the most extravagant fancy could not descend to such a degree of jejune triviality and repulsive hideousness. In a revue d’annÉe produced at the OdÉon, the authors, PhiloxÈne Hoyer and ThÉodore de Banville, make “a realist” say—

“Faire vrai ce n’est rien pour Être rÉaliste, C’est faire laid qu’il faut! Or, monsieur, s’il vous plait, Tout ce que je dessine est horriblement laid! Ma peinture est affreuse, et, pour qu’elle soit vraie, J’en arrache le beau comme on fait de l’ivraie. J’aime les teints terreux et les nez de carton, Les fillettes avec de la barbe au menton, Les trognes de Varasque et de coquecigrues, Les dorillons, les cors aux pieds et les verrues! VoilÀ le vrai!”

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
COURBET.	THE HIND ON THE SNOW.

So it went on through the sixties also. When the Empress EugÉnie passed through the exhibition on the opening day of the Salon of 1866, with an elegant walking-stick in her hand, she was so indignant at Courbet’s “Naked Women” that the picture had to be immediately removed. In the beginning of the seventies, when he exhibited in Germany, a few young Munich painters recognised in his pictures something like the cry of a conscience. But otherwise “artists and laymen shook their heads, not knowing what to make of them. Some smiled and went indifferently on, while others were indignant in their condemnation of this degradation of art.” For “Courbet went to the lowest depths of society, and took his themes from a class where man really ceases to be man, and the image of God prolongs a miserable existence as a moving mass of flesh. Living bodies with dead souls, which exist only for the sake of their animal needs; in one place sunk in misery and wretchedness, and in another having never risen from their brutal savagery—that is the society from which Courbet chooses his motives, to gloss over the debility of his imagination and his want of any kind of training. Had he possessed the talent for composition, then perhaps his lifeless technique would have become interesting; as it is he offers a merely arbitrary succession of figures in which coherence is entirely wanting.” In “The Stone-breakers” it was an offence that he should have treated such “an excessively commonplace subject” at all as mere artisans in ragged and dirty clothes. And by “The Funeral at Ornans” it was said that he meant to sneer at the religious ceremony, since the picture had a defiant and directly brutal vulgarity. The painter was alleged to have taken pains to expose the repulsive, ludicrous, and grotesque elements in the members of the funeral party, and to have softened no feature which could excite an unseasonable merriment. In the “Demoiselles de Village” the design had been to contrast the stilted, provincial nature of these village misses with the healthy simplicity of a peasant child. In the picture, painted in 1857, of the two grisettes lying in the grass on the bank of the Seine he had “intentionally placed the girls in the most unrefined attitudes, that they might appear as trivial as possible.” And umbrage was taken at his two naked wrestlers because he “had not painted wrestlers more or less like those of classic times, but the persons who exhibit the strength of their herculean frames at the Hippodrome,” and therefore given “the most vulgar rendering of nudity that was at all possible.” And in his naked women it was said that this love of ugly and brutal forms became actually base.

All these judgments are characteristic symptoms of the same sort of taste which rose in the seventeenth century against Caravaggio. Even his principal work, the altar-piece to St. Matthew, which now hangs in the Berlin Museum, excited so much indignation that it had to be removed from the Church of St. Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. Annibale Carracci has a scornful caricature in which the Neapolitan master appears as a hairy savage, with a dwarf at his side and two apes upon his knees, and, in this fashion, intended to brand the hideousness of his rival’s art and his ape-like imitation of misshapen nature. Francesco Albani called him the “Antichrist of Painting,” and “a ruination to art.” And Baglione adds: “Now a number of young men sit down to copy a head after nature; they study neither the foundations of drawing, nor concern themselves about the more profound conditions of art, merely contenting themselves with a crude reproduction of nature, and therefore they do not even know how to group two figures appropriately, nor to bring any theme into an artistic composition. No one any longer visits the temples of art, but every one finds his masters and his models for a servile imitation of nature in the streets and open places.” The nineteenth century formed a different estimate of Caravaggio. In opposing his fortune-telling gipsies, his tipplers, gamblers, musicians, and dicing mercenaries to the noble figures of the academical artists, with their generalised and carefully balanced forms, their trivial, nugatory countenances, and their jejune colouring, he accomplished the legitimate and necessary reaction against a shallow and empty idealistic mannerism. No one is grateful to the eclectic artists for the learned efforts which it cost them to paint so tediously: in Caravaggio there is the fascination of a strong personality and a virile emphasis in form, colour, and light. The Carracci and Albani were the issue of their predecessors; Caravaggio is honoured as a fearless pioneer who opened a new chapter in the history of art.

COURBET.	MY STUDIO AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF ARTISTIC LIFE.

 

Courbet met with a similar fate.

If one approaches him after reading the criticisms of his pictures already cited, a great disillusionment is inevitable. Having imagined a grotesque monster, one finds to one’s astonishment that there is not the slightest occasion either for indignation or laughter in the presence of these powerful, sincere, and energetic pictures. One has expected caricatures and a repulsive hideousness, and one finds a broad and masterly style of painting. The heads are real without being vulgar, and the flesh firm and soft and throbbing with powerful life. Courbet is a personality. He began by imitating the Flemish painters and the Neapolitans. But far more did he feel himself attracted by the actual world, by massive women and strong men, and wide fertile fields smelling of rich, rank earth. As a healthy and sensuously vigorous man he felt a voluptuous satisfaction in clasping actual nature in his herculean arms. Of course, by the side of his admirable pictures there are others which are heavy and uncouth. But if one is honest one paints according to one’s inherent nature, as old Navez, the pupil of David, was in the habit of saying. Courbet was honest, and he was also a somewhat unwieldy being, and therefore his painting too has something bluff and cumbrous. But where in all French art is there such a sound painter, so sure of his effects and with such a large bravura, a maÎtre peintre who was so many-sided, extending his dominion as much over figure-painting as landscape, over the nude as over nature morte? There is no artist so many of whose pictures may be seen together without surfeit, for he is novel in almost every work. He has painted not a few pictures of which it may be said that each one is sui generis, and on the variations of which elsewhere entire reputations might have been founded. With the exception of Millet, no one had observed man and nature with such sincere and open eyes. With the great realists of the past Courbet shares the characteristic of being everywhere and exclusively a portrait painter. A pair of stone-breakers, kneeling as they do in his picture, with their faces protected by wire-masks, were figures which every one saw working at the street corner, and Courbet represented the scene as faithfully as he could, as sincerely and positively as was at all possible. “Afternoon in Ornans” is a pleasant picture, in which he took up again the good tradition of Lenain. And in “The Funeral at Ornans” he has painted exactly the manner in which such ceremonies take place in the country. The peasants and dignitaries of a little country town—portrait figures such as the masters of the fifteenth century brought into their religious pictures—have followed the funeral train, and behave themselves at the grave just as peasants would. They make no impassioned gesticulations, and form themselves into no fine groups, but stand there like true rustics, sturdy and indifferent. They are men of flesh and blood, they are like the people of real life, and they have been subjected to no alteration: on the one side are the women tearfully affected by the words of the preacher, on the other are the men bored by the ceremony or discussing their own affairs. In the “Demoiselles de Village” he gives a portrait of his own sisters, as they went to a dance of a Sunday afternoon. The “Girls lying on the Bank of the Seine” are grisettes of 1850, such as Gavarni often drew; they are both dressed in doubtful taste, one asleep, the other lost in a vacant reverie. His naked women make a very tame effect compared with the colossal masses of human flesh in that cascade of nude women of the plumpest description who in Rubens’ “Last Judgment” plunge in confusion into hell, like fish poured out from a bucket. But they are amongst the best nude female figures which have been created in the nineteenth century. Courbet was a painter of the family of Rubens and Jordaens. He had the preference shown by the old Flemish artists for healthy, plump, soft flesh, for fair, fat, and forty, the three F’s of feminine beauty, and in his works he gave the academicians a lesson well worth taking to heart; he showed them that it was possible to attain a powerful effect, and even grace itself, by strict fidelity to the forms of reality.

Neuerdein, photo.
COURBET.	THE WAVE.

His portraits—and he had the advantage of painting Berlioz and Baudelaire, Champfleury and Proudhon—are possibly not of conspicuous eminence as likenesses. As Caravaggio, according to Bellori, “had only spirit, eyes and diligence for flesh-tints, skin, blood, and the natural surface of objects,” a head was merely a morceau like anything else for Courbet too, and not the central point of a thinking and sensitive being. The physical man, Taine’s human animal, was more important in his eyes than the psychical. He painted the epidermis without giving much suggestion of what was beneath. But he painted this surface in such a broad and impressive manner that the pictures are interesting as pictorial masterpieces if not as analyses of character.

L’Art.		L’Art.
STEVENS.	THE LADY IN PINK.	STEVENS.	LA BÊTE À BON DIEU.

L’Art.

STEVENS.   THE JAPANESE MASK.

To these his landscapes and animal pieces must be added as the works on which his talent displayed itself in the greatest purity and most inherent vigour: “The Battle of the Stags,” that most admirable picture “The Hind on the Snow,” “Deer in Covert,” views of the moss-grown rocks and sunlit woods of Ornans and the green valleys of the Franche-ComtÉ. He had the special secret of painting with a beautiful tone and a broad, sure stroke dead plumage and hunting-gear, the bristling hide of wild-boars, and the more delicate coat of deer and of dogs. As a landscape painter he does not belong to the family of Corot and DuprÉ. His landscapes are green no doubt, but they have limitations; the leaves hang motionless on the branches, undisturbed by a breath of wind. Courbet has forgotten the most important thing, the air. Whatever the time of the year or the day may be, winter or summer, evening or morning, he sees nothing but the form of things, regarding the sun as a machine which has no other purpose than to mark the relief of objects by light and shade. Moreover, the lyricism of the Fontainebleau painters was not in him. He paints without reverie, and knows nothing of that tender faltering of the landscape painter in which the poet awakes, but has merely the equanimity of a good and sure worker. In regard to nature, he has the sentiments of a peasant who tills his land, is never elegiac or bucolic, and would be most indignant if a nymph were to tread on the furrows of his fields. He paints with a pipe in his mouth and a spade in his hand, the plain and the hills, potatoes and cabbages, rich turf and slimy rushes, oxen with steaming nostrils heavily ploughing the clods, cows lying down and breathing at ease the damp air of the meadows drenched with rain. He delights in fertile patches of country, and in the healthy odour of the cow-house. A material heaviness and a prosaic sincerity are stamped upon all. But his painting has a solidity delightful to the eye. It is inspiriting to meet a man who has such a resolute and simple love of nature, and can interpret her afresh in powerful and sound colour without racking his brains. His attachment to the spot of earth where he was born is a leading characteristic of his art. He borrowed from Ornans the motives of his most successful creations, and was always glad to return to his parents’ house. The patriotism of the church-spire, provincialism, and a touching and vivid sense of home are peculiar to all his landscapes. But in his sea-pieces, to which he was incited by a residence in Trouville in the summer of 1865, he has opened an altogether new province to French art. EugÈne Le Poittevin, who exhibited a good deal in Berlin in the forties, and therefore became very well known in Germany, cannot count as a painter. ThÉodore Gudin, whose signature is likewise highly valued in the market, was a frigid and rough-and-ready scenical painter. His little sea-pieces have a professional manner, and the large naval battles and fires at sea which he executed by the commission of Louis Philippe for the Museum of Versailles are frigid, pompous, and spectacular sea-pieces parallel with Vernet’s battle-pieces. Ziem, who gave up his time to Venice and the Adriatic, is the progenitor of Eduard Hildebrandt. His water and sky take all the colours of the prism, and the objects grouped between these luminous elements, houses, ships, and men, equally receive a share of these flattering and iridescent tones. This gives something seductive and dazzling to his sketches, until it is at last perceived that he has only painted one picture, repeating it mechanically in all dimensions. Courbet was the first French painter of sea-pieces who had a feeling for the sombre majesty of the sea. The ocean of Gudin and Ziem inspires neither wonder nor veneration; that of Courbet does both. His very quietude is expressive of majesty; his peace is imposing, his smile grave; and his caress is not without a menace.

Courbet has positively realised the programme which he issued in that pamphlet of 1855. When he began his activity, eclectic idealism had overgrown the tree of art. But Courbet stripped off the parasitic vegetation to reach the firm and serviceable timber. And having once grasped it he showed the muscles of an athlete in making its power felt. Something of the old Flemish sturdiness lived once more in his bold creations. If he and Delacroix were united, the result would be Rubens. Delacroix had the fervour and passionate tamelessness, while Courbet contributed the Flemish weight. Each made use of blood, purple, thrones, and Golgothas in composing the dramas they had imagined. The latter pictured creation with the absolutism of complete objectivity. Delacroix rose on the horizon like a brilliant meteor catching flame from the light of vanished suns; he reflected their radiance, had almost their magnitude, and followed the same course amid the same coruscation and blaze of light. Courbet stands firm and steady upon the earth. The former had the second sight known to visionaries, the latter opened his eyes to the world that can be felt and handled. Neurotic and distempered, Delacroix worked feverishly. As a sound, full-blooded being Courbet painted, as a man drinks, digests, and talks, with an activity that knows no exertion, a force that knows no weariness. Delacroix was a small, weakly man, and his whole power rested in his huge head. That of Courbet, as in animals of beauty and power, was dispersed through his whole frame; his big arms and athletic hands render the same service to his art as his eyes and his brain. And as, like all sincere artists, he rendered himself, he was the creator of an art which has an irrepressible health and overflows with an exuberant opulence. His pictures brought a savour of the butcher’s shop into French painting, which had become anÆmic. He delighted in plump shoulders and sinewy necks, broad breasts heaving over the corset, the glow of the skin dripping with warm drops of water in the bath, the hide of deer and the coat of hares, the iridescent shining of carp and cod-fish. Delacroix, all brain, caught fire from his inward visions; Courbet, all eye and maw, with the sensuousness of an epicure and the satisfaction of a gourmet, gloats over the shining vision of things which can be devoured—a Gargantua with a monstrous appetite, he buried himself in the navel of the generous earth. Plants, fruit, and vegetables take voluptuous life beneath his brush. He triumphs when he has to paint a dÉjeuner with oysters, lemons, turkeys, fish, and pheasants. His mouth waters when he heaps into a picture of still-life all manner of delicious eatables. The only drama that he has painted is “The Battle of the Stags,” and this will end in brown sauce amid a cheerful clatter of knives and forks.

L’Art.		Baschet.
STEVENS.	THE VISITORS.	RICARD.	MADAME DE CALONNE.
(By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture.)

Even as a landscape painter he is luxurious and phlegmatic. In his pictures the earth is a corpulent nurse, the trees fine and well-fed children, and all nature healthy and contented. His art is like a powerful body fed with rich nourishment. In such organisms the capacity for enthusiasm and delicacy of sentiment are too easily sacrificed to their physical satisfaction, but their robust health ensures them the longer life. Here is neither the routine and external technique and the correct, academic articulation of form belonging to mannerists, nor the strained, neurotic, sickly refinement of the decadents, but the powerful utterance of inborn, instinctive talent, and the strong cries of nature which rise out of it will be understood at all times, even the most distant. It is hardly necessary to add that the appearance of a genius of this kind was fraught with untold consequences to the further development of French painting.

What is held beautiful in nature must likewise be beautiful in pictorial art when it is faithfully represented, and nature is beautiful everywhere. In announcing this and demonstrating it in pictures of life-size, Courbet won for art all the wide dominion of modern life which had hitherto been so studiously avoided—the dominion in which it had to revel if it was to learn to see with its own eyes. One fragment of reality after another would then be drawn into the sphere of representation, and no longer in the form of laboriously composed genre pictures, but after the fashion of really pictorial works of art.

What Millet had done for the peasant, and Courbet for the artisan, Alfred Stevens did for “society”: he discovered the Parisienne. Until 1850 the graceful life of the refined classes, which Gavarni, Marcellin, and Cham had so admirably drawn, found no adequate representation in the province of painting. The Parisienne, who is so chic and piquant, and can hate and kiss with such fervour, fascinated every one, but Grecian profile was a matter of prescription. Auguste Toulmouche painted little women in fashionable toilette, but less from any taste he had for the graceful vision than from delight in genre painting. They were forced to find forbidden books in the library, to resist worldly marriages, or behave in some such interesting fashion, to enter into the kingdom of art. It was reserved for a foreigner to reveal this world of beauty, chic, and grace.

Alfred Stevens was a child of Brussels. He was born in the land of Flemish matrons on 11th May 1828, and was the second of three children. Joseph, the elder brother, became afterwards the celebrated painter of animals; Arthur, the youngest, became an art-critic and a picture-dealer; he was one of the first who brought home to the public comprehension the noble art of Rousseau, Corot, and Millet. Stevens’ father fought as an officer in the great army at the battle of Waterloo, and is said to have been an accomplished critic. Some of the ablest sketches of Delacroix, DevÉria, Charlet, and Roqueplan found their way into his charming home. Roqueplan, who often came to Brussels, took the younger Stevens with him to his Parisian studio. He was a tall, graceful young man, who, with his vigorous upright carriage, his finely chiselled features, and his dandified moustache, looked like an officer of dragoons or cuirassiers. He was a pleasure-loving man of the world, and was soon the lion of Parisian drawing-rooms. The grace of modern life in great cities became the domain of his art. The Parisienne, whom his French fellow-artists passed by without heed, was a strange, interesting phenomenon to him, who was a foreigner—an exotic and exquisitely artistic bibelot, which he looked upon with eyes as enraptured as those with which Decamps had looked upon the East.

L’Art.		Baschet.
CHAPLIN.	THE GOLDEN AGE.	CHAPLIN.	PORTRAIT OF COUNTESS AIMERY DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
(By permission of Messrs. Goupil & Co., the owners of the copyright.)

His very first picture, exhibited in 1855, was called “At Home.” A charming little woman is warming her feet at the fire; she has returned from visiting a friend, and it has been raining or snowing outside. Her delicate hands are frozen in spite of her muff, her cheeks have been reddened by the wind, and she has a pleasant sense of comfort as her rosy lips breathe the warm air of the room. From the time of this picture women took possession of Stevens’ easel. His way was prescribed for him, and he never left it. Robert Fleury, the president of the judging committee in the Salon, said to him: “You are a good painter, but alter your subjects; you are stifling in a sphere which is too small; how wide and grand is that of the past!” Whereon Stevens is said to have showed him a volume of photographs from Velasquez. “Look here at Velasquez,” he said. “This man never represented anything but what he had before his eyes—people in the Spanish dress of the seventeenth century. And as the justification of my genre may be found in this Spanish painter, it may be found also in Rubens, Raphael, Van Dyck, and all the great artists. All these masters of the past derived their strength and the secret of their endurance from the faithful reproduction of what they had themselves seen: it gives their pictures a real historical as well as an artistic value. One can only render successfully what one has felt sincerely and seen vividly before one’s eyes in flesh and blood.” In these sentences he is at one with Courbet, and by not allowing himself to be led astray into doing sacrifice to the idols of historical painting he continues to live as the historical painter of the Parisienne.

In his whole work he sounds a pÆan to the delicate and all-powerful mistress of the world, and it is significant that it was through woman that art joined issue with the interests of the present. Millet, the first who conquered a province of modern life, was at the same time the first great painter of women in the century. Stevens shows the other side of the medal. In Millet woman was a product of nature; in Stevens she is the product of modern civilisation. The woman of Millet lives a large animal life, in the sweat of her brow, bowed to the earth. She is the primÆval mother who works, bears children, and gives them nourishment. She stands in the field like a caryatid, like a symbol of fertile nature. In Stevens woman does not toil and is seldom a mother. He paints the woman who loves, enjoys, and knows nothing of the great pangs of child-birth and hunger. The one woman lives beneath the wide, open sky, dans le grand air; the other is only enveloped in an atmosphere of perfume. She is ancient Cybele in the pictures of Millet; in those of Stevens the holy Magdalene of the nineteenth century, to whom much will be forgiven, because she has loved much. The pictures of Stevens represent, for the first time, the potent relations of woman to the century. Whilst most works of this time are silent concerning ourselves, his art will speak of our weaknesses and our passions. In a period of archaic painting he upheld the banner of modernity. On this account posterity will honour him as one of the first historians of the nineteenth century, and will learn from his pictures all that Greuze has revealed to the present generation about the civilisation of the eighteenth century.

Baschet.		Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
GAILLARD.	PORTRAIT.	DUBOIS.	PORTRAIT OF MY SONS.
		(By permission of the Artist.)

And perhaps more, for Stevens never moralised—he merely painted. Painter to his finger tips, like Delacroix, Roqueplan, and Isabey, he stood in need of no anecdotic substratum as an adjunct. The key of his pictures was suggested by no theme of one sort or another, but by his treatment of colour. The picture was evolved from the first tone he placed upon the canvas, which was the ground-note of the entire scale. He delighted in a thick pasty handling, in beautiful hues, and in finely chased detail. And he was as little inclined to sentimentality as to pictorial novels. Everything is discreet, piquant, and full of charm. He was a delicate spirit, avoiding tears and laughter. Subdued joy, melancholy, and everything delicate and reserved are what he loves; he will have nothing to do with stereotyped arrangement nor supernumerary figures, but although a single person dominates the stage he never repeats himself. He has followed woman through all her metamorphoses—as mother or in love, weary or excited, proud or humbled, fallen or at the height of success, in her morning-gown or dressed for visiting or a promenade, now on the sea-shore, now in the costume of a Japanese, or dallying with her trinkets as she stands vacantly before the glass. The surroundings invariably form an accompaniment to the melody. A world of exquisite things is the environment of the figures. Rich stuffs, charming petit-riens from China and Japan, the most delicate ivory and lacquer-work, the finest bronzes, Japanese fire-screens, and great vases with blossoming sprays, fill the boudoir and drawing-room of the Parisienne. In the pictures of Stevens she is the fairy of a paradise made up of all the most capricious products of art. A new world was discovered, a painting which was in touch with life; the symphony of the salon was developed in a delicate style. A tender feminine perfume, something at once melancholy and sensuous, was exhaled from the pictures of Stevens, and by this shade of demi-monde haut-goÛt he won the great public. They could not rise to Millet and Courbet, and Stevens was the first who gave general pleasure without paying toll to the vicious taste for melodramatic, narrative, and humorous genre painting. Even in the sixties he was appreciated in England, France, Germany, Russia, and Belgium, and represented in all public and private collections; and through the wide reception offered to his pictures he contributed much to create in the public a comprehension for good painting.

In the same way James Tissot achieved the representation of the modern woman. Stevens, a Belgian, painted the Parisienne; Tissot, a Frenchman, the Englishwoman. It was not till they went into foreign countries that these artists perceived the grace of what was not deemed suitable to art at home. In Paris from the year 1859 Tissot had painted scenes from the fifteenth century, to which he was moved by Leys, and he studied with archÆological accuracy the costume and furniture of the late Gothic period. When he migrated to England in 1871 he gave up the romantic proclivities of his youth, and devoted himself to the representation of fashionable society. His oil paintings fascinate us by their delicate feeling for cool transparent tone values, whilst his water-colours—restaurant, theatre, and ball scenes—assure him a place among the pioneers of modernity.

At first Stevens found no successors amongst Parisian painters. A few, indeed, painted interiors in graceful Paris, but they were only frigid compositions of dresses and furniture, without a breath of that delicate aroma which exhales from the works of the Belgian. The portrait painters alone approached that modern grace which still awaited its historian and poet.

An exceedingly delicate artist, Gustave Ricard, in whose portraits the art of galleries had a congenial revival, was called the modern Van Dyck in the sixties. Living nature did not content him; he wished to learn how it was interpreted by the old masters, and therefore frequented galleries, where he sought counsel sometimes from the English portrait-painters, sometimes from Leonardo, Rubens, and Van Dyck. In this way Ricard became a gourmet of colour, who knew the technique of the old masters as few others have done, and his works have an attractive golden gallery-tone of great distinction.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.		L’Art.
CAROLUS DURAN.		BONNAT.	ADOLPHE THIERS.
		(By permission of the Artist.)

In Charles Chaplin Fragonard was revived. He was the specialist of languishing flesh and poudre de riz, the refined interpreter of aristocratic beauty, one on whose palette there might still be found a delicate reflection of the fÊtes galantes of the eighteenth century. In Germany he was principally known by those dreamy, frail, and sensual maidens, well characterised by the phrase of the Empress EugÉnie. “M. Chaplin,” she said, “I admire you. Your pictures are not merely indecorous, they are more.” But Chaplin had likewise the other qualities of the rococo painter. He was a decorative artist of the first rank, and, like Fragonard, he carelessly scattered round him on all sides grace and beauty, charm and fascination. In 1857 he decorated the Salon des Fleurs in the Tuileries, in 1861-65 the bathroom of the Empress in the Palais de l’ElysÉe, and from 1865 a number of private houses in Paris, Brussels, and New York; and there is in all these works a refined haut-goÛt of modern Parisian elegance and fragrant rococo grace. He revived no nymphs, and made no pilgrimage to the island of Cythera; he was more of an epicurean. But Fragonard’s fine tones and Fragonard’s sensuousness were peculiar to him. He had a method of treating the hair, of introducing little patches, of setting a dimple in the chin, and painting the arms and bosom, which had vanished since the rococo period from the power of French artists. Rosebuds and full-blown roses blossom like girls À la Greuze, and fading beauties, who are all the more irresistible, are the elements out of which his refined, indecorous, and yet fragrant art is constituted.

The great engraver Gaillard brought Hans Holbein once more into honour. He was the heir of that method of painting, the eternal matrix of which Jan van Eyck left to the world in unapproachable perfection. His energetic but conscientiously minute brush noted every wrinkle of the face, without doing injury to the total impression by this labour of detail. Indeed, his pictures are as great in conception and as powerful in characterisation as they are small in size. Gaillard is a profound physiognomist who attained the most vivid analysis of character by means of the utmost precision.

Paul Dubois takes us across the Alps; in his portraits he is the same great quattrocentist that he was from the beginning in his plastic works. His ground is that of the excellent and subtle period when Leonardo, who had been in the beginning somewhat arid, grew delicate and allowed a mysterious sphinx-like smile to play round the lips of his women. Manifestly he has studied Prudhon and had much intercourse with Henner in those years when the latter, after his return from Italy, directed attention once more to the old Lombards. From the time when he made his dÉbut in 1879, with the portrait of his sons, he received great encouragement, and stands out in these days as the most mature painter of women that the present age has to show. Only the great English portrait painters Watts and Millais, who are inferior to him in technique, have excelled him in the embodiment of personalities.

As the most skilful painter of drapery, the most brilliant decorator of feminine beauty, Carolus Duran was long celebrated. The studies which he had made in Italy had not caused him to forget that he took his origin from across the Flemish border; and when he appeared with his first portraits, in the beginning of the seventies, it was believed that an eminent colourist had been born to French painting. At that time he had a fine feeling for the eternal feminine and its transitory phases of expression, and he was as dexterous in seizing a fleeting gesture or a turn of the head as he was in the management of drapery and the play of its hues. Then, again, he made a gradual transition from delicate and discreetly coquettish works to the crude arts of upholstery. Yet even in his last period he has painted some masculine portraits—those of Pasteur, and of the painters FranÇais, Fritz Thaulow, and RenÉ Billotte—which are striking in their vigorous simplicity and unforced characterisation after the glaring virtuosity of his pictures of women.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.		L’Art.
BONNAT.	VICTOR HUGO.	ANTOINE VOLLON.
		(By permission of the Artist.)

LÉon Bonnat, the pupil of Madrazos, brought about the fruitful connection between French painting and that of the old Spaniards. By this a large quantity of the fresh blood of naturalism was poured into it once more. Born in the South of France and educated in Spain, he had conceived there a special enthusiasm for Ribera, and these youthful impressions were so powerful that he remained faithful to them in Paris. As early as his residence in Italy, which included the three years from 1858 to 1860, his individuality had been fortified in a degree which prevented him from wasting himself on large academical compositions like the holders of the Prix de Rome; on the contrary, he painted scenes from the varied life of the Roman people. Several religious pictures, such as “The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew” (1863), “Saint Vincent de Paul” (1866), and the “Job” of the Luxembourg, showed that he was steadily progressing on the road paved by Spagnoletto. He had a virtuosity in conjuring on to the canvas visages furrowed by the injustices of life—grey hair, waving grey beards, and the starting sinews and muscles of old weather-beaten frames. In the beginning of the seventies, when he had to paint a Crucifixion for the jury-chamber in the Paris Palais de Justice, he executed a virile figure, the muscles and anatomy of which were as clearly marked as the buttresses in a Gothic cathedral. As in the paintings of Caravaggio, a sharp, glaring light fell upon certain parts of the body, whilst others remained dark and colourless in the gloomy background. He applied the same principles to his portraits. A French Lenbach, he painted in France a gallery of celebrated men. With an almost tangible reality he painted Hugo, Madame Pasta, Dumas, Gounod, Thiers, GrÉvy, Pasteur, Puvis de Chavannes, Jules Ferry, Carnot, Cardinal Lavigerie, and others. Over two hundred persons, famous or not, have sat to him, and he has painted them with an exceedingly intelligent power, masculine taste, and a learning which never loses itself in unnecessary detail.

The delicate physiognomy of women, the frou-frou of exquisite toilettes, the dreaminess, the fragrance, the coquetry of the modern Sphinx, were no concern of his. On the other hand, his masculine portraits will always keep their interest, if only on historical grounds. In all of them he laid great stress on characteristic accessories, and could indicate in the simplest way the thinker, the musician, the scholar, and the statesman. One remembers his pictures as though they were phrases uttered with conviction, though a German does not hesitate to place Lenbach far above Bonnat as a psychologist. The latter has not the power of seizing the momentary effect, the intimacy, the personal note, the palpitating life peculiar to Lenbach. With the intention of saying all things he often forgets the most important—the spirit of the man and the grace of the woman. His pictures are great pieces of still-life—exceedingly conscientious, but having something of the conscientiousness of an actuary copying a tedious protocol. The portrait of LÉon Cogniet, the teacher of the master, with his aged face, his spectacled eyes, and his puckered hands (MusÉe Luxembourg), is perhaps the only likeness in which Bonnat rivals Lenbach in depth of characterisation. His pictorial strength is always worthy of respect; but, for the sake of variety, the esprit is for once on the side of the German.

Ruled by a passion for the Spanish masters, such as Bonnat possessed, Roybet painted cavaliers of the seventeenth century, and other historical pictures of manners, which are distinguished, to their advantage, from older pictures of their type, because it is not the historical anecdote but the pictorial idea which is their basis. All the earlier painters were rather bent upon archÆological accuracy than on pictorial charm in the treatment of such themes. Roybet revelled in the rich hues of old costumes, and sometimes attained, before he strained his talent in the Procrustean bed of pictures of great size, a bloom and a strong, glowing tone which rival the old masters.

L’Art.		L’Art.
VOLLON.	A CARNIVAL SCENE.	BONVIN.	THE COOK.

In all periods which have learnt to see the world through a pictorial medium, still-life has held an important place in the practice of art. A technical instinct, which is in itself art, delights in investing musical instruments, golden and silver vessels, fruit and other eatables, glasses and goblets, coverings of precious work, gauntlets and armour, all imaginable petit-riens, with an artistic magic, in recognising and executing pictorial problems everywhere. After the transition from historical and genre painting had been made to painting proper there once more appeared great painters of still-life in France as there did in Chardin’s days.

Yet Blaise Desgoffe, who painted piecemeal and with laborious patience goldsmith’s work, crystal vases, Venetian glass, and such things, is certainly rather petty. In France he was the chief representative of that precise and detailed painting which understands by art a deceptive imitation of objects, and sees its end attained when the holiday public gathers round the pictures as the birds gathered round the grapes of Zeuxis.

It is as if an old master had revived in Philippe Rousseau. He had the same earnest qualities as the Dutch and Flemish Classic masters—a broad, liquid, pasty method of execution, a fine harmony of clear and powerful tones—and with all this a marvellous address in so composing objects that no trace of “composition” is discernible. His work arose from the animal picture. His painting of dogs and cats is to be ranked with the best of the century. He makes a fourth with Gillot, Chardin, and Decamps, the great painters of monkeys. As a decorator of genius, like Hondekoeter, he embellished a whole series of dining-halls with splendidly coloured representations of poultry, and, like Snyders, he heaped together game, dead and living fowl, fruit, lobsters, and oysters into huge life-size masses of still-life. Behind them the cook may be seen, and thievish cats steal around. But, like Kalf, he has also painted, with an exquisite feeling for colour, Japanese porcelain bowls with bunches of grapes, quinces, and apricots, metal and ivory work, helmets and fiddles, against that delicate grey-brown-green tone of background which Chardin loved.

Antoine Vollon became the greatest painter of still-life in the century. Indeed, Vollon is as broad and nervous as Desgoffe is precise and pedantic. Flowers, fruit, and fish—they are all painted in with a firm hand, and shine out of the dark background with a full liquid freshness of colour. He paints dead salt-water fish like Abraham van Beyeren, grapes and crystal goblets like Davids de Heem, dead game like Frans Snyders, skinned pigs like Rembrandt and Maes. He is a master in the representation of freshly gathered flowers, delicate vegetables, copper kettles, weapons, and suits of armour. Since Chardin no painter depicted the qualities of the skin of fresh fruit, its life and its play of colour, and the moist bloom that rests upon it, with such fidelity to nature. His fish in particular will always remain the wonder of all painters and connoisseurs. But landscapes, Dutch canal views, and figure-pictures are also to be found amongst his works. He has painted everything that is picturesque, and the history of art must do him honour as, in a specifically pictorial sense, one of the greatest in the century. A soft grey-brown wainscoting, a black and white Pierrot costume, and a white table-cloth and dark green vegetables—such is the harmony of colour which he chiefly loved in his figure-pictures.

On the same purely pictorial grounds nuns became very popular in painting, as their white hoods and collars standing out against a black dress gave the opportunity for such a fine effect of tone. This was the province in which poor FranÇois Bonvin laboured. Deriving from the Dutch, he conceived an enthusiasm for work, silence, the subdued shining of light in interiors, cold days, the slow movements and peaceful faces of nuns, and painted kitchen scenes with a strong personal accent. Before he took up painting he was for a long time a policeman, and was employed in taking charge of the markets. Here he acquired an eye for the picturesqueness of juicy vegetables, white collars, and white hoods, and when he had a day free he studied Lenain and Chardin in the Louvre. Bonvin’s pictures have no anecdotic purport. Drinkers, cooks, orphan children in the schoolroom, sempstresses, choristers, sisters of mercy, boys reading, women in church, nuns conducting a sewing-class—Bonvin’s still, picturesque, congenial world is made up of elements such as these. What his people may think or do is no matter: they are only meant to create an effect as pictorial tones in space. During his journey to Holland he had examined Metsu, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hoogh, Terborg, and Van der Meer with an understanding for their merits, but it was Chardin in both his phases—as painter of still-life and of familiar events—who was in a special sense revived in Bonvin. All his pictures are simple and quiet; his figures are peaceful in their expression, and have an easy geniality of pose; his hues have a beauty and fulness of tone recalling the old masters.

L’Art.
BONVIN.	THE WORK-ROOM.	RIBOT.	THE STUDIO.

Even ThÉodule Ribot, the most eminent of the group, one of the most dexterous executants of the French school, a master who for power of expression is worthy of being placed between Frans Hals and Ribera, made a beginning with still-life. He was born in 1823, in a little town of the department of Eure. Early married and poor, he supported himself at first by painting frames for a firm of mirror manufacturers, and only reserved the hours of the evening for his artistic labours. In particular he is said to have accustomed himself to work whole nights through by lamplight, while he nursed his wife during a long illness, watching at her bedside. The lamplight intensified the contrasts of light and shadow. Thus Ribot’s preference for concentrated light and strong shadows is partially due, in all probability, to what he had gone through in his life, and in later days Ribera merely bestowed upon him a benediction as his predecessor in the history of art.

His first pictures from the years 1861 to 1865 were, for the most part, scenes from household and kitchen life: cooks, as large as life, plucking poultry, setting meat before the fire, scouring vessels, or tasting sauces; sometimes, also, figures in the streets; but even here there was a strong accentuation of the element of still-life. There were men with cooking utensils, food, dead birds, and fish. Then after 1865 there followed a number of religious pictures which, in their hard, peasant-like veracity and their impressive, concentrated life, stood in the most abrupt contrast with the conventionally idealised figures of the academicians. His “Jesus in the Temple,” no less than “Saint Sebastian” and “The Good Samaritan”—all three in the MusÉe Luxembourg—are works of simple and forceful grandeur, and have a thrilling effect which almost excites dismay. Sebastian is no smiling saint gracefully embellished with wounds, but a suffering man, with the blood streaming from his veins, stretched upon the earth; yet half-raising himself, a cry of agony upon his lips, and his whole body contorted by spasms of pain. In his “Jesus in the Temple,” going on parallel lines with Menzel, he proclaims the doctrine that it is only possible to pour new life-blood into traditional figures by a tactful choice of models from popular life around. And in “The Good Samaritan,” also, he was only concerned to paint, with naturalistic force, the body of a wounded man lying in the street, a thick-set French peasant robbed of his clothes. From the seventies his specialty was heads—separate figures of weather-beaten old folk, old women knitting or writing, old men reading or lost in thought; and these will always be ranked with the greatest masterpieces of the century. Ribot attains a remarkable effect when he paints those expressive faces of his, which seem to follow you with their looks, and are thrown out from the darkness of his canvas. A black background, in which the dark dresses of his figures are insensibly lost, a luminous head with such eyes as no one of the century has ever painted, wrinkled skin and puckered old hands rising from somewhere—one knows not whence—these are things which all lend his figures something phantasmal, superhuman, and ghostly. Ribot is the great king of the under-world, to which a sunbeam only penetrates by stealth. Before his pictures one has the sense of wandering in a deep, deep shaft of some mine, where all is dark and only now and then a lantern glimmers. No artist, not even Ribera, has been a better painter of old people, and only Velasquez has painted children who have such sparkling life. Ribot worked in Colombes, near Paris, to which place he had early withdrawn, in a barn where only tiny dormer-windows let in two sharp rays of light.

L’Art.
RIBOT.	AT A NORMAN INN.

By placing his canvas beneath one window and his model beneath the other, in a dim light which allowed only one golden ray to fall upon the face, he isolated it completely from its surroundings, and in this way painted the parts illuminated with the more astonishing effect. No one had the same power in modelling a forehead, indicating the bones beneath the flesh, and rendering all the subtleties of skin. A terrible and intense life is in his figures. His old beggars and sailors especially have something kingly in the grand style of their noble and quiet faces. An old master with a powerful technique, a painter of the force and health of Jordaens, has manifested himself once more in Ribot.

L’Art.

RIBOT.   KEEPING ACCOUNTS.

Courbet’s principles, accordingly, had won all down the line, in the course of a few years. “It is only Ribera, Zurbaran, and Velasquez that I admire; Ostade and Craesbeeck also allure me; and for Holbein I feel veneration. As for M. Raphael, there is no doubt that he has painted some interesting portraits, but I cannot find any ideas in him.” In these words he had prophesied as early as 1855 the course which French art would take in the next decade. When Courbet appeared the grand painting stood in thraldom to the beautÉ suprÊme, and the Æsthetic conceptions of the time affected the treatment of contemporary subjects. Artists had not realism enough to give truth and animation to these themes. When Cabanel, Hamon, and Bouguereau occasionally painted beggars and orphans, they were bloodless phantoms, because by beautifying the figures they deprived them of character in the effort to give them, approximately, the forms of historical painting. Because painters did not regard their own epoch, because they had been accustomed to consider living beings merely as elements of the second and third rank, they never discovered the distinctiveness of their essential life. Like a traveller possessed by one fixed mania, they made a voyage round the world, thinking only how they might adapt living forms to those which their traditional training recommended as peculiarly right and alone worthy of art. Even portrait painting was dominated by this false method, of rendering figures as types, of improving the features and the contour of bodies, and giving men the external appearance of fair, ideal figures.

But now the sway of the Cinquecento has been finally broken. A fresh breeze of realism from across the Pyrenees has taken the place of the sultry Italian sirocco. From the pictures of the Neapolitans, the Spaniards, and the Dutch it has been learnt that the joys and sorrows of the people are just as capable of representation as the actions of gods and heroes, and under the influence of these views a complete change in the cast has taken place.

L’Art.
RIBOT.	ST. SEBASTIAN, MARTYR.

The figures which in 1855 filled Courbet’s picture “The Studio”—beggar-women, agricultural labourers, artisans, sailors, tippling soldiers, buxom girls, porters, rough members of the proletariat of uncouth stature—now crowd the stage of French art, and impart even to the heroes of history, bred through centuries from degenerated gods, something of their full-blooded, rough, hearty, and plebeian force of life. The artists of Italian taste only gave the rights of citizenship to “universal forms”; every reminiscence of national customs or of local character was counted vulgar; they did not discover the gold of beauty in the rich mines of popular life, but in the classic masters of foreign race. But now even what is unearthly is translated into the terms of earth. If religious pictures are to be painted, artists take men from the people for their model, as Caravaggio did before them—poor old peasants with bones of iron, and bronzed, weather-beaten faces, porters with figures bowed and scarred by labour, men of rough, common nature, though of gnarled and sinewy muscles. The pictures of martyrs, once artificial compositions of beautiful gesture and vacant, generalised countenances, receive a tone local to the scaffold, a trait of merciless veracity—the heads the energy of a relief, the gestures force and impressiveness, the bodies a science in their modelling which would have rejoiced Ribera. As Caravaggio said that the more wrinkles his model had the more he liked him, so no one is any longer repelled by horny hands, tattered rags, and dirty feet. In the good periods of art it is well known that the beauty or uncomeliness of a work has nothing to do with the beauty or uncomeliness of the model, and that the most hideous cripple can afford an opportunity for making the most beautiful work. The old doctrine of Leonardo, that every kind of painting is portrait painting, and that the best artists are those who can imitate nature in the most convincing way, comes once more into operation. The apotheosis of the model has taken the place of idealism. And during these same years England reached a similar goal by another route.

 

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII