CHAPTER XXVIII

REALISM IN ENGLAND

The year 1849 was made famous by a momentous interruption in the quiet course of English art brought about by the pre-Raphaelites. A movement, recalling the Renaissance, laid hold of the spirit of painters. In all studios artists spoke a language which had never been heard there before; all great reputations were overthrown; the most celebrated Cinquecentisti, whose names had hitherto been mentioned with respectful awe, were referred to with a shrug as bunglers. A miracle seemed to have taken place in the world, for the muse of painting was removed from the pedestal on which she had stood for three centuries and set up in triumph upon another.

To understand fully the aims of pre-Raphaelitism it is necessary to recall the character of the age which gave it birth.

After English art had had its beginning with the great national masters and enjoyed a prime of real splendour, it became, about the middle of the nineteenth century, the prey to a tedious disease. A series of crude historical painters endeavoured to fathom the noble style of the Italian Cinquecento, without rising above the level of intelligent plagiarism. As brilliant decorative artists possessed of pomp and majesty, and sensuously affected by plastic beauty, as worshippers of the nude human form, and as modern Greeks, the Italian classic painters were the worst conceivable guides for a people who in every artistic achievement have pursued spiritual expression in preference to plastic beauty. But in spite of the experiences gained since the time of Hogarth, they all went on the pilgrimage to Rome, as to a sacred spring, drank their fill in long draughts, and came back poisoned. Even Wilkie, that charming “little master,” who did the work of a pioneer so long as he followed the congenial Flemish painters and the Dutch, even Wilkie lost every trace of individuality after seeing Spain and Italy. As this imitation of the high Renaissance period led to forced and affected sentiment, it also developed an empty academical technique. In accordance with the precepts of the Cinquecento, artists proceeded with an affected ease to make brief work of everything, contenting themselves with a superficial faÇade effect. A painting based on dexterity of hand took the place of the religious study of nature, and a banal arrangement after celebrated models took the place of inward absorption.

It was to no purpose that certain painters, such as F. C. Horsley, J. R. Herbert, J. Tenniel, Edwin Long, E. M. Ward, and Eastlake, the English Piloty, by imitation of the Flemish and Venetian masters, made more of a return from idealism of form to colour, and that Edwin Armitage, who had studied in Paris and Munich, introduced Continental influences. They are the Delaroche, Gallait, and BiÈfve of England. Their art was an imposing scene painting, their programme always that of the school of Bologna—the mother of all academies, great and small—borrowing drawing from Michael Angelo and colour from Titian; taking the best from every one, putting it all into a pot, and shaking it together. Thus English art lost the peculiar national stamp which it had had under Reynolds and Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. It became an insignificant tributary of the false art which then held sway over the Continent, insincere towards nature, full of empty rhetorical passion, and bound to the most vacant routine. And as the grand painting became hollow and mannered, genre painting grew Philistine and decrepit. Its innocent childishness and conventional optimism had led to a tedious anecdotic painting. It repeated, like a talkative old man, the most insipid tales, and did so with a complacency that never wavered and with an unpleasant motley of colour. The English school still existed in landscape, but for everything else it was dead.

A need for reform became urgent all the sooner because literature too had diverged into new lines. In poetry there was the influence of the Lake poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, who had simplicity, direct feeling for nature, and a Rousseau-like pantheism inscribed as a device upon their banner, and it came as a reaction against the dazzling imaginative fervour of those great and forceful men of genius Byron and Shelley. Keats had again uttered the phrase which had before been Shaftesbury’s gospel: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” In the year 1843 John Ruskin published the first volume of his Modern Painters, the Æsthetic creed of which culminated in the tenet that nature alone could be the source of all true art.

This transitional spirit, which strove for liberty from the academical yoke, though diffidently at first, is represented in painting by the Scotch artist William Dyce. In England he pursued, though undoubtedly with greater ability, a course parallel to that of the German Nazarenes, whose faith he championed. Born in 1806, he had in Italy, in the year 1826, made the acquaintance of Overbeck, who won him over to Perugino and Raphael. Protesting against the histrionic emptiness of English historical painting, he took refuge with the Quattrocentisti and the young Raphael. His masterpiece, the Westminster frescoes, with the Arthurian legends as their subject, goes to some extent on parallel lines with Schnorr’s frescoes on the Nibelungen myths. The representation of vigorous manhood and tempestuous heroism has been here attempted without sentimentality or theatrical heroics. In his oil pictures—Madonnas, “Bacchus nursed by the Nymphs,” “The Woman of Samaria,” “Christ in Gethsemane,” “St. John leading Home the Virgin,” etc.—he makes a surprising effect by the graceful, sensuous charm of his women, by his exquisite landscapes and his tender idyllic characters. The charming work “Jacob and Rachel,” which represents him in the Hamburg Kunsthalle, might be ascribed to FÜhrich, except that the developed feeling for colour bears witness to its English origin. With yearning the youth hastens to the maiden, who stands, leaning against the edge of the well, with her eyes cast down, half repulsing him in her austere chastity.

Where the Nazarenes obtain a pallid, corpse-like effect, a deep and luminous quality of colour delights one in his pictures. He is essentially graceful, and with this grace he combines the pure and quiet simplicity of the Umbrian masters. There is something touching in certain of his Madonnas, who, in long, clinging raiment, appeal to the Godhead with arms half lifted, devout lips parted in prayer, and mild glances lost in infinity. A dreamy loveliness brings the heavenly figures nearer to us. Dyce expresses the magic of downcast lids with long, dark lashes. Like the Umbrians, he delights in the elasticity of slender limbs and the chaste grace of blossoming maiden beauty. Many German fresco painters have become celebrated who never achieved anything equal in artistic merit to the Westminster pictures of Dyce. Yet he is to be reckoned with the Flandrin-Overbeck family, since he gives a repetition of the young Raphael, though he certainly does it well; but he only imitates and has not improved upon him.

The pictures of another Scotchman, Sir Joseph NoËl Paton, born in 1821, appear at a rather later date. Most of them—“The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania,” “The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania” in the Edinburgh Gallery, and his masterpiece, “The Fairy Queen”—have, from the Æsthetic standpoint, little enjoyment to offer. The drawing is hard, the composition overladen, the colour scattered and motley. As in Ary Scheffer, all the figures have vapid, widely opened eyes. Elves, gnomes, women, knights, and fantastic rocks are crowded so tightly together that the frame scarcely holds them. But the loving study of nature in the separate parts is extraordinary. It is possible to give a botanical definition of each plant and each flower in the foreground, with so much character and such care has Paton executed every leaf and every blossom, even the tiny creeping things amid the meadow grass. Here and there a fresh ray of morning sun breaks through the light green and leaps from blade to blade. The landscapes of Albrecht Altdorfer are recalled to mind. Emancipation from empty, heroically impassioned emphasis, pantheistic adoration of nature, even a certain effort—unsuccessful indeed—after an independent sentiment for colour, are what his pictures seem to preach in their naÏve angularity, their loving execution of detail, and their bright green motley.

This was the mood of the young artists who united to form the pre-Raphaelite group of 1848. They were students at the Royal Academy of from twenty to four-and-twenty years of age. The first of the group, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had already written some of his poems. The second, Holman Hunt, had still a difficulty in overcoming the opposition of his father, who was not pleased to see him giving up a commercial career. John Everett Millais, the youngest, had made most progress as a painter, and was one of the best pupils at the Academy. But they were contented neither by the artistic achievement of their teachers nor by the method of instruction. Etty, the most valued of them all, according to the account of Holman Hunt, painted mythological pictures, full of empty affectation; Mulready drew in a diluted fashion, and sacrificed everything to elegance; Maclise had fallen into patriotic banalities; Dyce had stopped short in his course and begun again when it was too late. Thus they had of necessity to provide their own training for themselves. All three worked in the same studio; and it so happened that one day—in 1847 or 1848—chance threw into their hands some engravings of Benozzo Gozzoli’s Campo-Santo frescoes in Pisa. Nature and truth—everything which they had dimly surmised, and had missed in the productions of English art—here they were. Overcome with admiration for the sparkling life, the intensity of feeling, and the vigorous form of these works, which did not even shrink from the consequences of ugliness, they were agreed in recognising that art had always stood on the basis of nature until the end of the fifteenth century, or, more exactly, until the year 1508, when Raphael left Florence to paint in the Vatican in Rome. Since then everything had gone wrong; art had stripped off the simple garment of natural truthfulness and fallen into conventional phrases, which in the course of centuries had become more and more empty and repellent by vapid repetition. Was it necessary that the persons in pictures should, to the end of the world, stand and move just as they had done a thousand times in the works of the Cinquecentisti? Was it necessary that human emotions—love, boldness, remorse, and renunciation—should always be expressed by the same turn of the head, the same lift of the eyebrows, the same gesture of the arms, and the same folded hands, which came into vogue through the Cinquecentisti? Where in nature are the rounded forms which Raphael, the first Classicist, borrowed from the antique? And in the critical moments of life do people really form themselves into such carefully balanced groups, with the one who chances to have on the finest clothes in the centre?

From this reaction against the Cinquecentisti and against the shallow imitation of them, the title pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the secret, masonic sign P.R.B., which they added to their signatures upon their pictures, are rendered comprehensible. But whilst Dyce, to avoid the Cinquecentisti, imitated the Quattrocentisti, the title here is only meant to signify that these artists, like the Quattrocentisti, had determined to go back to the original source of real life. The Academy pupils Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, together with the young sculptor Thomas Woolner, who had just left school, were at first the only members of the Brotherhood. Later the genre painter James Collinson, the painter and critic F. G. Stephens, and Rossetti’s brother, William Michael Rossetti, were admitted to the alliance.

Boldly they declared war against all conventional rules, described themselves as beginners and their pictures as attempts, and announced themselves to be, at any rate, sincere. The programme of their school was truth; not imitation of the old masters, but strict and keen study of nature such as the old masters had practised themselves. They were in reaction against the superficial dexterity of technique and the beauty of form and intellectual emptiness to which the English historical picture had fallen victim; they were in reaction against the trivial banality which disfigured English genre painting. In the representation of passion the true gestures of nature were to be rendered, without regard to grace and elegance, and without the stock properties of pantomime. The end for which they strove was to be true and not to create what was essentially untrue by a borrowed idealism which had an appearance of being sublime. In opposition to the negligent painting of the artists of their age, they demanded slavishly faithful imitation of the model by detail, carried out with microscopic exactness. Nothing was to be done without reverence for nature; every part of a picture down to the smallest blade or leaf was to be directly painted from the original. Even at the expense of total effect every picture was to be carried out in minutest detail. It was better to stammer than to make empty phrases. A young and vigorous art, such as had been in the fifteenth century, could win its way, as they believed, from this conception alone.

In all these points, in the revolt against the emptiness of the beautÉ suprÊme and the flowing lines of the accepted routine of composition, they were at one with Courbet and Millet. It was only in further developments that the French and English parted company; English realism received a specifically English tinge. Since every form of Classicism—for to this point they were led by the train of their ideas—declares the ideal completion of form, of physical presentment, to be its highest aim, the standard-bearers of realism were obliged to seek the highest aim of their art, founded exclusively on the study of nature, in the representation of moral and intellectual life, in a thoughtful form of spiritual creation. The blending of realism with profundity of ideas, of uncompromising truth to nature in form with philosophic and poetic substance, is of the very essence of the pre-Raphaelites. They are transcendental naturalists, equally widely removed from Classicism, which deals only with beautiful bodies, as from realism proper, which only proposes to represent a fragment of nature. From opposition to abstract beauty of form they insist upon what is characteristic, energetic, angular; but their figures painted faithfully from nature are the vehicles of a metaphysical idea. From the first they saturated themselves with poetry. Holman Hunt has an enthusiasm for Keats and the Bible, Rossetti for Dante, Millais for the mediÆval poems of chivalry.

All three appeared before the public for the first time in the year 1849. John Millais and Holman Hunt exhibited in the Royal Academy, the one being represented by his “Lorenzo and Isabella,” a subject drawn from Keats, the other by his “Rienzi.” Rossetti had his picture, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” exhibited at the Free Exhibition, afterwards known as the Portland Gallery. All three works excited attention and also derision, and much shaking of heads. The three next works of 1850—“A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary,” by Holman Hunt; “The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter,” by Millais; and “The Annunciation” by Rossetti—were received with the same amused contempt. When they exhibited for the third time—Holman Hunt, a scene from The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Millais, “The Return of the Dove to the Ark” and “The Woodman’s Daughter”—such a storm of excitement broke forth that the pictures had to be removed from the exhibition. A furious article appeared in The Art Journal; the exhibitors, it was said, were certainly young, but they were too old to commit such sins of youth. Even Dickens turned against them in Household Words. The painters who had been assailed made their answer. William Michael Rossetti laid down the principles of the Brotherhood by an article in a periodical called The Critic, and smuggled a second article into The Spectator. In 1850 they founded a monthly magazine for the defence of their theories, The Germ, which on the third number took the title Art and Poetry, and was most charmingly embellished with drawings by Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, and others. Stephens published an essay in it, on the ways and aims of the early Italians, which gave him occasion to discuss the works recently produced in the spirit of simplicity known to these old masters. Madox Brown wrote a paper on historical painting, in which he asserted that the true basis of historical painting must be strict fidelity to the model, to the exclusion of all generalisation and beautifying, and exact antiquarian study of costumes and furniture in contradistinction to the fancy history of the elder painters. But all these articles were written to no purpose. After the fourth number the magazine was stopped, and in these days it has become a curiosity for bibliomaniacs. But support came from another side. Holman Hunt’s picture dealing with a scene from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona received the most trenchant condemnation in The Times. John Ruskin came forward as his champion and replied on 13th May 1851. The Times contained yet a second letter from him on 30th May. And soon afterwards both were issued as a pamphlet, with the title Pre-Raphaelitism, its Principles, and Turner. These works, he said, did not imitate old pictures, but nature; what alienated the public in them was their truth and rightness, which had broken abruptly and successfully with the conventional sweep of lines.

Holman Hunt is the painter who has been most consistent in clinging throughout his life to these original principles of the Brotherhood. He is distinguished by a depth of thought which at last tends to become entirely elusive, and often a depth of spirit more profound than diver ever plumbed; but at the same time by an angular, gnarled realism which has scarcely its equal in all the European art of the century.

“The Flight of Madeleine and Porphyro,” from Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes, was the first picture, the subject being borrowed in 1848 from his favourite poet. In the work through which he first acknowledged himself a member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood he has given a plain and simple rendering of the scene in the introductory chapter of Bulwer Lytton’s Rienzi. He has chosen the moment when Rienzi, kneeling beside the corpse of his brother, takes a vow of vengeance against the murderer who is riding away. The composition avoids any kind of conventional pyramidal structure. In the foreground every flower is painted and every colour is frankly set beside its neighbour without the traditional gradation. His third picture, “A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary,” is not to be reckoned amongst his best performances. It is forced naÏvetÉ, suggesting the old masters, to unite two entirely different scenes upon the same canvas: in the background there are fugitives and pursuers, and a Druid, merely visible by his outstretched arms, inciting the populace to the murder of a missionary; in the foreground a hut open on all sides, which could really offer no protection at all. Yet in this hut a priest is hiding, tended by converted Britons. However, the drawing of the nude bodies is an admirable piece of realism; admirable, also, is the way in which he has expressed the fear of the inmates, and the fanatical bloodthirsty rage of the pursuers, and this without any false heroics, without any rhetoric based upon the traditional language of gesture. The picture from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, with the motto, “Death is a fearful thing, and shamed life a hateful,” is perhaps theatrical in its arrangement, though it is likewise earnest and convincing in psychological expression.

Microscopic fidelity to nature, which formed the first principle in the programme of the Brotherhood, has been carried in Holman Hunt to the highest possible point. Every flower and every ear of corn, every feather and every blade of grass, every fragment of bark on the trees and every muscle, is painted with scrupulous accuracy. The joke made about the pre-Raphaelites has reference to Holman Hunt: it was said that when they had to paint a landscape they used to bring to their studio a blade of grass, a leaf, and a piece of bark, and they multiplied them microscopically so many thousand times until the landscape was finished. His works are a triumph of industry, and for that very reason they are not a pleasure to the eye. A petty, pedantic fidelity to nature injures the total effect, and the hard colours—pungent green, vivid yellow, glaring blue, and glowing red—which Holman Hunt places immediately beside each other, give his pictures something brusque, barbaric, and jarring. But as a reaction against a system of painting by routine, which had become mannered, such truth without all compromise, such painstaking effort at the utmost possible fidelity to nature, was, in its very harshness, of epoch-making significance.

With regard, also, to the transcendental purport of his pictures Holman Hunt is perhaps the most genuine of the group. In the whole history of art there are no religious pictures in which uncompromising naturalism has made so remarkable an alliance with a pietistic depth of ideas. The first, which he sent to the exhibition of 1854, “The Light of the World,” represents Christ wandering through the night in a gold-embroidered mantle, with a lantern in His hand, like a Divine Diogenes seeking men. Taine, who studied the picture impartially without the catalogue, describes it, without further addition, as “Christ by night with a lantern.” But for Holman Hunt the meaning is Christianity illuminating the universe with the mystic light of Faith and seeking admission at the long-closed door of unbelief. It was because of this implicit suggestion that the work made an indescribable sensation in England; it had to go on pilgrimage from town to town, and hundreds of thousands of copies of the engraving were sold. The pietistic feeling of this ascetic preacher was so strong that he was able to venture on pictures like “The Scapegoat” of 1856 without becoming comical.

A striving to attain the greatest possible local truth had led Holman Hunt to the East when he began these biblical pictures. He spent several years in Palestine studying the topographical character of the land, its buildings and its people, and endeavoured with the help of these actual men and women and these landscape scenes to reconstruct the events of biblical history with antiquarian fidelity. To paint “The Shadow of Death” he searched in the East until he discovered a Jew who corresponded to his idea of Christ, and painted him, a strong, powerful man, the genuine son of a carpenter, with that astounding truth to nature with which Hubert van Eyck painted his Adam. Even the hairs of the breast and legs are as faithfully rendered as if one saw the model in a glass. Near this naked carpenter—for He is clothed only with a leather apron—there kneels a modern Eastern woman, bowed over a chest, in which various Oriental vessels are lying. The ground is covered with shavings of wood. Up to this point, therefore, it is a naturalistic picture from the modern East. But here Holman Hunt’s pietistic sentiment is seen: it is the eve of a festival; the sun casts its last dying rays into the room; the journeyman carpenter wearily stretches out His arms, and the shadow of His body describes upon the wall the prophetic form of the Cross.

Another picture represented the discovery of our Lord in the Temple, a third the flock which has been astray following the Good Shepherd into His Father’s fold. On his picture of the flight into Egypt, or, as he has himself called it, “The Triumph of the Innocents,” he published a pamphlet of twelve pages, in which he goes into all the historical events connected with the picture with the loyalty of an historian; he discusses everything—in what month the flight took place, and by what route, how old Christ was, to what race the ass belonged, and what clothes were worn by Saint Joseph and Mary. One might be forgiven for thinking such a production the absurd effusion of a whimsical pedant were it not that Hunt is so grimly in earnest in everything he does. In spite of all his peculiarities it must be admitted that he gave a deep and earnest religious character to English art, which before his time had been so paltry; and this explains the powerful impression which he made upon his contemporaries.

The artist most closely allied to him in technique is Ford Madox Brown, who did not reckon himself officially with the pre-Raphaelites, though he followed the same principles in what concerned the treatment of detail. Only a little senior to the founders of the Brotherhood—he was nine-and-twenty at the time—he is to be regarded as their more mature ally and forerunner. Rossetti was under no illusion when, in the beginning of his studies, he turned to him directly. In those years Madox Brown was the only English painter who was not addicted to the trivialities of paltry genre painting or the theatrical heroics of traditional history. He is a bold artist, with a gift of dramatic force and a very rare capacity of concentration, and these qualities hindered him from following the doctrine of the pre-Raphaelites in all its consequences. If he had, in accordance with their programme, exclusively confined himself to work from the living model, several of his most striking and powerful pictures would never have been painted.

Madox Brown passed his youth on the Continent—in Antwerp with Wappers, in Paris, and in Rome. The pictures which he painted there in the beginning of the forties were produced, as regards technique, under the influence of Wappers. The subjects were taken from Byron: “The Sleep of Parisina” and “Manfred on the Jungfrau.” It is only in the latter that an independent initiative is perceptible. In contradistinction from the generalities of the school of Wappers he aimed at greater depth of psychology and accuracy of costume, while at the same time he endeavoured, though without success, to replace the conventional studio light by the carefully observed effect of free light. These three things—truth of colour, of spiritual expression, and of historical character—were from this time forth his principal care. And when his cartoon of “Harold,” painted in Paris in the year 1844, was exhibited in Westminster Hall, it was chiefly this scrupulous effort at truth which made such a vivid impression upon the younger generation. In the first masterpiece which he painted after his return to London in 1848 he stands out already in all his rugged individuality. “Lear and Cordelia,” founded on a most tragic passage in the most tragic of the great dramas of Shakespeare, is here treated with impressive cogency. It stood in such abrupt opposition to the traditional historical painting that perhaps nothing was ever so sharply opposed to anything so universally accepted. The figures stand out stiff and parti-coloured like card kings, without fluency of line or rounded and generalised beauty. And the colouring is just as incoherent. The brown sauce, which every one had hitherto respected like a binding social law, had given way to a bright joy of colour, the half-barbaric motley which one finds in old miniatures. It is only when one studies the brilliant details, used merely in the service of a great psychological effect, that this outwardly repellent picture takes shape as a powerful work of art, a work of profound human truth. Nothing is sacrificed to pose, graceful show, or histrionic affectation. Like the German masters of the fifteenth century, Madox Brown makes no attempt to dilute what is ugly, nor did Holbein either when he painted the leprous beggars in his “Altar to St. Sebastian.” Every figure, whether fair or foul, is, in bearing, expression, and gesture, a character of robust and rigorous hardihood, and has that intense fulness of life which is compressed in those carved wooden figures of mediÆval altars: the aged Lear with his weather-beaten face and his waving beard; the envious Regan; the cold, cruel, ambitious Goneril; Albany, with his fair, inexpressive head; the gross, brutal Cornwall; Burgundy, biting his nails in indecision; and Cordelia, in her touching, bashful grace. And to this angular frankness of the primitive masters he unites the profound learning of the modern historian. All the archÆological details, the old British costumes, jewels, modes of wearing the hair, weapons, furniture, and hangings, have been studied with the accuracy of Menzel. He knows nothing of the academic rules of composition, and his robes fall naturally without the petty appendage of fair folds and graceful motives.

The picture in which he treated the balcony scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is outwardly repellent, like “Lear and Cordelia,” but what a hollow effect is made by Makart’s theatrical heroics beside this aboriginal sensuousness, this intensity of expression! Juliet’s dress has fallen from her shoulders, and, devoid of will and thought, with closed lids, half-naked, and thrilling in every fibre with the lingering joy of the hours that have passed, she abandons herself to the last fiery embraces of Romeo, who in stormy haste is feeling with one foot for the ladder of ropes.

He has solved a yet more difficult problem in the picture “Elijah and the Widow.”

“See, thy son liveth,” are the words in the Bible with which the hoary Elijah brings the boy, raised from death and still enveloped in his shroud, to the agonised mother kneeling at the foot of the sepulchre. The woman makes answer: “Now by this I know that thou art a man of God.” In the embodiment of this scene likewise Madox Brown has aimed in costume and accessories at a complete harmony between the figures and the character of the epoch, and has set out with an entirely accurate study of Assyrian and Egyptian monuments. Even the inscription on the wall and the Egyptian antiquities correspond to ancient originals. At the same time the figures have been given the breath of new life. Elijah looks more like a wild aboriginal man than a saint of the Cinquecento. The ecstasy of the mother, the astonishment of the child whose great eyes, still unaccustomed to the light, gaze into the world again with a dreamy effort, after having beheld the mysteries of death—these are things depicted with an astonishing power. The downright but convincing method in which Hogarth paints the soul has dislodged the hollow, heroical ideal of beauty of the older historical painting. Madox Brown’s confession of faith, which he formulated as an author, culminates in the tenet that truth is the means of art, its end being the quickening of the soul. This he expresses in two words: “emotional truth.”

While Holman Hunt and Madox Brown held fast throughout their lives to the pre-Raphaelite principles, pre-Raphaelitism was for John Everett Millais, the youngest of the three, merely a transitory phase, a stage in his artistic development.

Sir John Millais was born 8th June 1829, in Southampton, where his family had come from Jersey. Thus he is half a Frenchman by descent. His childhood was passed in Dinant in Brittany, but when he was nine years old he went to a London school of drawing. He was then the little fair-haired boy in a holland blouse, a broad sash, and a large sailor’s collar, whom John Phillip painted in those days. When eleven he entered the Royal Academy, probably being the youngest pupil there; at thirteen he won a prize medal for the best drawing from the antique; at fifteen he was already painting; and at seventeen he exhibited an historical picture, “Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru,” which was praised by the critics as the best in the exhibition of 1846. With “Elgiva,” a work exhibited in 1847, this first period, in which he followed the lines of the now forgotten painter Hilton, was brought to an end. His next work, “Lorenzo and Isabella,” now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, bore the letters P.R.B., as a sign of his new confession of faith. Microscopically exact work in detail has taken the place of the large bravura and the empty imitation of the Cinquecentisti. The theme was borrowed from one of Boccaccio’s tales, The Pot of Basil—the tale on which Keats founded Isabella. A company of Florentines in the costume of the thirteenth century are assembled at dinner. Lorenzo, pale and in suppressed excitement, sits beside the lovely Isabella, looking at her with a glance of deep, consuming passion. Isabella’s brother, angered at it, gives a kick to her dog. All the persons at the table are likenesses. The critic F. G. Stephens sat for the beloved of Isabella, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the toper holding his glass to his lips at the far right of the table. Even the ornaments upon the damask cloth, the screen, and the tapestry in the background are painted, stroke after stroke, with the conscientious devotion of a primitive painter. Jan van Eyck’s brilliancy of colour is united to Perugino’s suavity of feeling, and the chivalrous spirit of the Decameron seized with the sureness of a subtle literary scholar.

The work of 1850, “The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter,” illustrated a verse in the Bible (Zechariah xiii. 6): “And one shall say unto Him, What are these wounds in Thine hands? Then He shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of My friends.” The Child Jesus, who is standing before the joiner’s bench, has hurt Himself in the hand. St. Joseph is leaning over to look at the wound, and Mary is kneeling beside the Child, trying to console Him with her caresses, whilst the little St. John is bringing water in a wooden vessel. Upon the other side of the bench stands the aged Anna, in the act of drawing out of the wood the nail which has caused the injury. A workman is labouring busily at the joiner’s bench. The floor of the workshop is littered with shavings, and tools hang round upon the walls. The Quattrocentisti were likewise the determining influence in the treatment of this subject. Ascetic austerity has taken the place of ideal draperies, and angularity that of the noble flow of line. The figure of Mary, who, with her yellow kerchief, resembled the wife of a London citizen, was the cause of special offence.

Up to the seventies Millais continued to paint such pictures out of the Bible, or from English and mediÆval poets, with varying success. One of them, which in its brilliant colouring looked like an old picture upon glass, represented the return of the dove to Noah’s ark. The central point was formed by two slender young women in mediÆval costume, who received the exhausted bird in their delicate hands. The picture, “The Woodman’s Daughter,” was an illustration to a poem by Coventry Patmore, on the love of a young noble for a poor child of the wood. In a semicircular picture of 1852 he painted Ophelia as she floats singing in the green pool where the white water-lilies cover her like mortuary wreaths—floats with her parted lips flickering with a gentle smile of distraction. The other picture of this year, “The Huguenot,” represented two lovers taking leave of each other in an old park upon the eve of St. Bartholomew. She is winding a white scarf round his arm to save him from death by this badge of the Catholics, whilst he is gently resisting. The mood of the man standing before the dark gate of death, the moral strength which vanquishes his fear, and all the solemnity of his farewell to life are expressed in his glance. A world of love rests in the eyes of the woman. Millais has often treated this problem of the loving woman with earnest and almost sombre realism, that knows no touch of swooning sentimentality. “The Order of Release” of 1853 shows a jailor in the scarlet uniform of the eighteenth century opening a heavy prison door to set at liberty a Highlander, whose release has been obtained by his wife. A scene from the seventeenth century is treated in “The Proscribed Royalist”: a noble cavalier, hidden in a hollow tree, is kissing the hand of a graceful, trembling woman, who has been daily bringing him food at the risk of her life. “The Black Brunswicker” of 1856 closed this series of silent and motionless dramas. In the picture of 1857, “Sir Isumbras at the Ford,” an old knight is riding home through the twilight of a sultry day in June. The dust of the journey lies upon his golden armour. At a ford he has fallen in with two children, and has lifted them up to carry them over the water. And “The Vale of Rest,” a picture deep and intense in its scheme of colour, earnest and melancholy as a requiem, revealed—with a sentiment a little like that of Lessing—a cloister garden where two nuns are silently preparing a grave in the evening light; while “The Eve of Saint Agnes” in 1863 illustrated the same poem of Keats to which ten years previously Holman Hunt had devoted his work of early years. Madeleine has heard the old legend, telling how girls receive the tender homage of their future husbands if they go through their evening prayer supperless at midnight. With her heart filled with the thoughts of love she quits the hall where the guests are seated at a merry feast, and mounts to her room so hastily that her thin taper is extinguished on the way. She enters her little chamber, kneels down, repeats the prayer, and rises to her feet, taking off her finery and loosening her hair. The clear moonlight streams through the window, throwing a ghostly illumination over the little images of saints in the room, falling like a caress upon the tender young breast of the girl, playing upon her folded hands, and touching her long, fair hair with a radiance like a vaporous glory. In the shadow of the bed she sees him whom she loves. Motionless, as in a dream, she stands, nor ventures to turn lest the fair vision should vanish. “The Deliverance of a Heretic condemned to the Stake,” “Joan of Arc,” “Cinderella,” “The Last Rose,” that dreamy picture of romantic grace, “The Childhood of Sir Walter Raleigh,” and the picture of the hoary Moses, supported by Hur and Aaron, watching from the mountain-top the victory of Joshua, were the principal works achieved in the later years of the master. But when these pictures were executed England had become accustomed to honour Millais, not as a pre-Raphaelite, but as her greatest portrait painter.

His portrait of himself explains this transformation. With his white linen jacket and his fresh sunburnt face Sir John Millais does not look in the least like a “Romanticist,” scarcely like a painter; he has rather the air of being a wealthy landowner. He was a man of a sound and straightforward nature, a great and energetic master, conscious of his aim, but a poet in Ruskin’s sense of the word is what he has never been. His pre-Raphaelitism was only a flirtation. His methods of thought were too concrete, his hand too powerful, for him to have lingered always in the world of the English poets, or endured the precise style of the pre-Raphaelites. “Millais will ‘go far’ if he will only change his boots,” About had written on the occasion of the World Exhibition of 1855; when that of 1867 was opened Millais appeared in absolutely new shoes. The great exhibition of 1857 in Manchester, which made known for the first time how many of the works of Velasquez were hidden in English private collections, had helped Millais to the knowledge of himself. From the naturalism of the Quattrocentisti he made a transition to the naturalism of Velasquez.

Millais was a born portrait painter. His cool and yet finely sensitive nature, his simple, manly temperament, directed him to this department, which rather gravitates to the observant and imitative than to the creative pole of art. In his pictures he has the secret of enchanting and of repelling; he has arrived at really definite issues in portrait painting. His likenesses are all of them as convincing as they are actual. Together with the Venetians and with Velasquez, Millais belongs to the master spirits of the grand style, which relies upon the large movement of lines, in figure and in face, upon the broad foundation of surfaces, and the strict subordination of individual details. His figures are characteristic and recognisable even in outline. He makes no effort to render them interesting by picturesque attitudes, or to vivify them by placing them in any situation. There they stand calm, and sometimes stiff and cold; they make no attempt at conversation with the spectator, nor come out of themselves, as it were, but fix their eyes upon him with an air of well-bred composure and indifference. Even the hands are not made use of for characterisation.

The extraordinary intensity of life which sparkles in his great figures, so simply displayed, is almost exclusively concentrated in the heads. Millais is perhaps the first master of characterisation amongst the moderns. To bold and powerful exposition there is united a noble and psychical gaze. The eyes which he paints are like windows through which the soul is visible.

Amongst his portraits of men, those of Gladstone and Hook stand in the first rank: as paintings perhaps they are not specially eminent; both have an opaque, sooty tone, from which Millais’ works not unfrequently suffer, but as a definition of complex personalities they are comparable only with the best pictures of Lenbach. How firmly does the statesman hold himself, despite his age, the old tree-feller, the stern idealist, a genuine English figure chiselled out of hard wood. The play of light centres all the interest on the fine, earnest, and puckered features, the lofty forehead, the energetic chin, and the liquid, thoughtful eyes. All the biography of Gladstone lies in this picture, which is simpler and greater in intuition than that which Lenbach painted of him. Hook, with his broad face, furrowed with wrinkles, looks like an apostle or a fisher. Millais has looked into the heart of this man, who has in him something rugged and faithful, massive and tender; the painter of vigorous fishermen and vaporous sunbeams. Hook’s landscapes have a forceful, earnest, and well-nigh religious effect, and something patriarchal and biblical lies in his gentle, reflective, and contemplative glance.

In his portrait of the Duke of Westminster, painted in 1878, Millais depicts him in hunting dress, red coat, white corduroys, and high, flexible boots, as he stands and buttons on his glove. The same year “The Yeoman of the Guard” was exhibited in Paris—the old type of discipline and loyalty, who sits there in his deep red uniform, with features cast in bronze, like a Velasquez of 1878. Disraeli, Cardinal Newman, John Bright, Lord Salisbury, Charles Waring, Sir Henry Irving, the Marquis of Lorne, and Simon Fraser are all worthy descendants of the eminent men whom Reynolds painted a century before. The plastic effect of the figures is increased by the vacant, neutral ground of the picture. Like Velasquez, Millais has made use of every possible background, from the simplest, from the nullity of an almost black or bright surface, to richly furnished rooms and views of landscape. Sometimes it is only indicated by a plain chair or table that the figure is standing in a room, or a heavy crimson curtain falls to serve as a repoussoir for the head. With a noble abstention he avoids prettiness of line and insipid motives, and remains true to this virile taste even in his portraits of women. His women have curiously little of the Æsthetical trait which runs elsewhere through English portraits of ladies. Millais renders them—as in the picture “Dummy Whist”—neither sweet nor tender, gives them nothing arch, sprightly, nor triumphant. Severe and sculptural in their mien, and full of character rather than beauty, proud in bearing and upright in pose, their serious, energetic features betray decision of character; and the glance of their brown eyes—eyes like Juno’s—is indifferent and almost hard. A straight and liberal forehead, a beautifully formed and very determined mouth, and a full, round chin complete this impression of earnest dignity, august majesty, and chilling pride. To this regular avoidance of every trace of available charm there is joined a strict taste in toilette. He prefers to work with dark or subdued contrasts of colour, and he is also fond of large-flowered silks—black with citron-yellow and black with dark red.

And this same stringent painter of character commands, as few others, the soft light brush of a painter of children. No one since Reynolds and Gainsborough has painted with so much character as Millais the dazzling freshness of English youth; the energetic pose of a boy’s head or the beauty of an English girl—a thing which stands in the world alone: the soft, glancing, silken locks, rippling to a blonde cendrÉe, pale, delicate little faces, pouting little mouths, and great, shining blue, dreamy, childish eyes. Sometimes they stand in rose-coloured dresses embroidered with silver in front of a deep green curtain, or sit reading upon a dark red carpet flowered with black. At other times they are arrayed like the little Infantas of Velasquez, and play with a spaniel like the Doge’s children of Titian, or hold out with both hands an apron full of flowers, which Millais paints with a high degree of finish. A spray of pale red roses, chrysanthemums, or lilies stands near. One must be a great master of characterisation to paint conscious, dignified, and earnest feminine beauty like that of Mrs. Bischoffsheim, and at the same time that fragrant perfume of the fresh and dewy spring of youth which breathes from Millais’ pictures of children.

Millais is one of those men in the history of nineteenth-century painting who are as forcible and healthy as they are many-sided. I do not know one who could have developed so swiftly from a style of the most minute exactness to one of the most powerful breadth; not one who could have united such poetry of conception with such an enormous knowledge of human beings; not one who could have been so like Proteus in variety—at one moment charming, at another dreamy, at another entirely positive. In their firm structure and largeness of manner his landscapes sometimes recall ThÉodore Rousseau. And now the pre-Raphaelite is just a little evident in an excess of detail. He paints every blade of grass and every small plant, though there is at the same time a largeness in the midst of this scrupulous exactitude. He does not merely see the isolated fact through a magnifying lens, but has eyes that are sensitive to the poetry of the whole, and in spite of all study of detail he sometimes reaches a total effect which is altogether impressionist. His picture “Chill October” has an airy life, a grey, vibrating atmosphere, such as only John Constable painted elsewhere.

Such a concrete study of nature as was made by the pre-Raphaelites of necessity led at last to entirely realistic pictures from modern life. In their biblical and poetic pictures they had started from the conviction that new life-blood could only be poured into the old conventional types, which had gradually become meaningless by tactfully drawing the models for them from popular life. They believed, as the masters of Florence and Bruges had done before them, that there could be no good painting without strict dependence on the model; that it was of the utmost importance to give a poetic or legendary figure the stamp of nature, the strong savour of individuality. All their creations are based upon the elements of portrait painting, even when they illustrate remote scenes from the New Testament or from mediÆval poetry. And these elements at last led them altogether to give up transposing such figures into an alien milieu, and simply to paint what was offered by their own surroundings. In this way they reached the goal which was arrived at in French painting through Courbet and Ribot. It is due in the first place to the pre-Raphaelites that the well-meant and moderately painted genre picture of the old style, which, with its wealth of pathetic stories, was once a prime source of supposed artistic pleasure, was finally vanquished in England, and made way for earnest and vigorous painting,—painting which sought to make its effect by purely artistic means, and proudly declined attempt to conceal intrinsic weakness in “interesting” subject drawn from external sources. As early as 1855 Millais exhibited a picture in the Royal Academy which Ruskin called a truly great work containing the elements of immortality—“The Rescue.” It represented a fireman who has carried three children from a burning house and laid them in the arms of their parents. Narrative purport was entirely renounced. The fireman was treated without sentimentality, and in a way that suggested the cool fulfilment of a duty, and the agitation of the parents was also rendered without any dash of melodrama. Then there followed that masterpiece of exquisite and soft colouring, tender and moving expression, and infinite grace, “The Gambler’s Wife,” sadly taking up the cards which have brought her misery upon her. In 1874 was painted “The North-West Passage,” a sort of modern symbol of the forceful, enterprising English people who have populated and subdued half the world from their little island kingdom. “There is a passage to the Pole, and England will find it—must find it.” These are more or less the words spoken by Trelawney, the old friend and comrade of Byron in Greece. With a chart before him he is brooding over the plan of the North-West Passage, and upon his own outstretched hand, which would fain hold the future in its grasp, the hand of a youthful woman is soothingly laid, as she sits at his feet reading to him the narrative of the last voyage of discovery. The figure of the seaman with his white beard has a strong, sinewy life, and the broad daylight streams through the room, filled with charts and atlases. The sea and clear, bright sky gleam through the open window. It is a powerful and moving picture, one of those modern creations in which the ideas of the nineteenth century are concentrated with simplicity and a renunciation of all hollow emphasis.

A few pictures of modern life which have nothing in common with the older genre painting may even be found among the works of the devotionalist Holman Hunt. “Awakened Conscience,” according to the explanation of the painter, tells the story of a young woman seduced by a cruel and light-minded man, and kept in a luxurious little country-house. They are together. Seated at the piano he is playing the old melody “Oft in the Stilly Night,” and the strains of the song recall to the frail maiden her youth, and the years of purity and innocence. Thus even Hunt has not overcome the moralising tendencies of Hogarth, though his taste is more discreet and delicate. He has struck deeper chords of thought than the English public had heard before. And in particular the painting is not a mere substratum for the story; it has become the principal thing, and the story subsidiary. In another picture, “May Morning on Magdalen Tower,” he renounced all deeper purpose altogether, and merely painted a number of Oxford dons and students, who, in accordance with the old custom, usher in the May with a hymn from the college tower.

But the most remarkable work of this description has been executed by Madox Brown, the English Menzel, who has not merely reconstructed the environment of past ages with the accuracy of an eye-witness, but has looked upon the drama of modern life as an attentive observer. His first picture, “The Last of England,” was executed in the June of 1852, at a time when emigration to America began to take serious proportions. A married couple, humble, middle-class people, are sitting on the deck of a ship. The man, in his thick cloth overcoat, with a soft felt hat on his head, a pale face, and sunken eyes with dark rings underneath, casts one more look upon his native-land, which vanishes in the hazy distance, as he thinks bitterly of lost hopes and vain struggles. But the young wife, in a light-coloured cloak and a pretty round bonnet with wide strings, gazes before her with gentle resignation, from underneath a great umbrella protecting her from the boisterous sea-wind.

In “Work,” begun at the same period, and finished, after various interruptions, in 1865, he has produced the first modern picture of artisans after Courbet’s “Stone-breakers.” The painter, who was then living in Hampstead, where extensive cuttings were being made for the laying down of gas-pipes, daily saw the English artisan at labour in all his thick-set strength. This gave him the theme for his picture. In bright daylight on a glaring summer afternoon artisans are digging a trench for gas-pipes in a busy street. Women and poor children are standing near. Even the older genre artists had painted men in their working blouses, but only joking and making merry, never at work. Like stage-managers who are sure of their public, they always set the same troop of puppets dancing. Madox Brown’s artisans are robust and raw-boned figures; where the older artists affected to be witty with their genre painting, Madox Brown painted straightforwardly, without humour and without making his figures beautiful. The composition of his pictures is just as plain. No one poses, no one makes impassioned gestures, no one thinks of grouping himself with his neighbour in fine flowing lines. It is pleasant to think that this powerful symbol of work has passed by presentation into the possession of one of the greatest manufacturing towns in England, into the gallery of Manchester.

A Scotchman, born in Aberdeen, John Phillip was the vigorous abettor of the pre-Raphaelites in these realistic endeavours. He, too, was a painter in the full meaning of the word, and he has therefore left works with which the future will have to reckon. Velasquez had opened his eyes as he had opened those of Millais. When Phillip went to Spain in 1851, he was not the first who had trod the Museo del Prado. Wilkie had painted in Spain before him, and Ansdell had been busy there at the same time. But no one had been able to grasp in any degree the impressive majesty of the old Spanish painters. John Phillip alone gained something of the verve of Velasquez, a broad, virile technique which distinguishes him from all his English contemporaries. The impression received from his pictures is one of opulence, depth, and weight; they unite something of the strength of Velasquez to a more Venetian splendour of colour. The streets of Seville, the Spanish port on the Guadalquivir, the town where Velasquez and Murillo were born, were his chief field of study. Here he saw those market-women, black as mulattoes and sturdy as grenadiers, who sit in front of their fruit-baskets under a great umbrella, and those water-carriers with sunburnt visages, strongly built chests, and athletic arms.

After he had returned to Scotland he occasionally painted pictures of ceremonies, “The House of Commons,” “The Wedding of the Princess Royal,” and so forth, but he soon returned to subjects from Spanish life. Gipsy-looking, cigarette-smoking women, with sparkling eyes and jet-black hair, young folks dancing to the castanets, bull-fighters with glittering silver-grey costume and flashing glances, dark-brown peasants in citron-yellow petticoats, hollow-eyed manufactory girls, potters, and glass-blowers.—such are the materials of Phillip’s pictures. They give no scope to anecdote; but they always reveal a fragment of reality which emits a world of impressions and an opulence of artistic ability. As painter par excellence, John Phillip stands in opposition to older English genre painters. Whilst they were, in the first place, at pains to tell a story intelligibly, Phillip was a colourist, a maÎtre peintre, whose figures were developed from the colours, and whose creations are so full of character that they will always assert their place with the best that has ever been painted. Even in England, the country of literary and narrative painting, art was no longer an instrument for expressing ideas; it had become an end in itself, and had discovered colour as its prime and most essential medium of expression.

CHAPTER XXIX

REALISM IN GERMANY

In Germany the realistic movement was carried out in much the same way as in France, though it came into action two decades after its French original. Here also it was recognised that the well-meant but badly painted anecdote must give way to the well-painted picture: and if we inquire who it was that gave to Germany the first serious paintings inspired by the modern spirit the reply, without hesitation, must be Adolf Menzel. The pioneering work of this great little man, who for fifty years had embodied in their typical perfection all phases of German art, is something fabulous: the greatest and, one might almost say, the only historical painter of bygone epochs, the only one who knew a previous period so intimately that he could venture on painting it, was also the leader of the great movement which, in the seventies, aimed at the representation of our own life. His first appearance was in the time when the proud Titan Cornelius sought to take heaven by storm. Little Menzel was no Titan in those days; he seems in that generation like one bound to the earth, yet he belonged to the Cyclopean race. He was a mighty architect with the powers of a giant; and this uncouth Cyclops rough-hewed and chiselled the blocks, and, fitting each in its place, raised an edifice to as lofty a height as the Romanticists had reached on the perilous wings of Icarus. Having been first the draughtsman and then the painter of Frederick the Great, he gave up history after finishing the picture of the Battle of Hochkirch: his talent was too modern, too much set upon what was concrete, to admit of its being given full scope to the end by constructive work from a milieu that was not his own. Until his fortieth year he had celebrated the glorious past of his country. When, with the death of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, a great and decisive turn was given to the politics of the Prussian state—one which put an end to the stagnation of civil life in Prussia and Germany, and ushered in a new and brilliant period for the realm and the heirs of Friedrich—the painter of Friedrich the Great became the painter of the new realm. After he had already, in the first half of the century, placed reality on the throne of art in the place of rhetoric and a vague ideal, he went one step further in the direction of keen and direct observation, and now painted what he saw around him—the stream of palpitating life.

“The Coronation of King Wilhelm at KÖnigsberg” is the great and triumphant title-page to this section of his art. The effects of light, the red tones of the uniforms, the shimmering white silk dresses, the surging of the mass of people, the perfect ease with which all the personages are individualised, the princes, the ministers, the ambassadors, the men of learning, the instantaneousness in the movement of the figures, the absolutely unforced and yet subtle and pictorial composition, render this painting no picture of ceremonies, in the traditional sense of the phrase, but a work of art at once intimate and august in the impression which it makes. In the picture “King Wilhelm setting out to join the Army”—the representation of the thrilling moment, on the afternoon of 31st July 1870, when the King drove along the linden avenue to the railway station—this phase, which he began with the Coronation picture, was brought to a close. Everything surges and moves, speaks and breathes, and glows with the palpitating life which vibrates through all in this moment of patriotic excitement. But the painter’s course led him further.

He first became entirely Menzel when he made the discovery of toiling humanity. In 1867, in the year of the World Exhibition, he came to Paris and became acquainted with Meissonier and Stevens. With Meissonier in particular—whose portrait he painted—he entered into a close friendship, and it was curious afterwards to see the two together at exhibitions—the little figure of Menzel with his gigantic bald forehead and the little figure of Meissonier with his gigantic beard, a Cyclops and a Gnome, two kings in the realm of Liliput, of whom one was unable to speak a word of German and the other unable to speak a word of French, although they had need merely of a look, a shrug, or a movement of the hand to understand each other entirely. He also came into the society of Courbet, who had just made the famous separate exhibition of his works, at the CafÉ Lamartine, in the company of Heilbuth, Meyerheim, Knaus, and others. Here in Paris he produced his first pictures of popular contemporary life, and if as an historical painter he had already been a leader in the struggle against theatrical art, he became a pioneer in these works also. Everywhere he let in air and made free movement possible for those who pressed forward in his steps. In the course of years he painted and drew everything which excited in him artistic impulse upon any ground whatever, and not one of these endeavours was work thrown away. A universal genius amongst the painters of real life, he combined all the qualities of which other men of excellent talent merely possessed fragments separately apportioned amongst them: the sharpest eye for every detail of form, the most penetrative discrimination for the life of the spirit, and at times a glistening play of colour possessed by none of his German predecessors.

Catholic churches seem always to have had a great attraction for him, as well as the people moving in them, and in this an echo of his rococo enthusiasm is still perceptible. The quaint, rococo churches in the ornate style favoured by the Jesuits, which are still preserved intact in Munich and the Tyrol, were those for which he had a peculiar preference. He lost himself voluptuously in the thousand details of sculpture, framework, organs, balustrades, and carved pulpits, dimly outlined in the subdued light from stained-glass windows. In the gloom it was all transformed into a forest of ornaments, expanding their traceries like trees in a wood. Sick and infirm people, women in prayer burying their faces in their hands, and lame men with crutches, kneel or move amid the luxuriant efflorescence of stone and wood and gold, of angels’ heads and shrines, garlands of flowers, consoles, and fonts of holy water. Twisted marble pillars, church banners, lamps and lustres mount in a confusion of capricious outlines at once tasteful and piquant to the vaulted dome, where the painted skies, blackened by the ascending mist of incense, seem waywardly fantastic.

After the churches the salons appealed to him. There came his pictures of modern society: ladies and cavaliers of the Court upon ballroom balconies, the conversation of Privy Councillors in the salon, the marvellous ball supper, where a mass of beautiful shoulders, splendid uniforms, and rustling silken trains move amid mirrors, lustres, colonnades, and gilded frames. “The Ball Supper” of 1870 is a vivid picture, bathed in glistening light. The music has stopped. And from a door of the brilliantly lighted ballroom the company is streaming into the neighbouring apartment, where the supper-table has been laid, and groups of ladies and men in animated conversation are beginning to occupy the chairs and sofas. In 1879 there followed the famous “Levee”: the Emperor Wilhelm in the red Court uniform of the Gardes du Corps is talking with a lady, surrounded by a sea of heads, uniforms, and naked bowing shoulders. Though it was always necessary in earlier representations of the kind to have a genre episode to compensate the insufficient artistic interest of the work, in Menzel’s pictures the pictorial situation is grasped as a whole. They have the value of a book; they neither falsify nor beautify anything, and they will hand down to the future an encyclopÆdia of types of the nineteenth century.

From the salon he went to the street, from exclusive aristocratic circles into the midst of the eddying crowd. For many years in succession Menzel was a constant visitor at the small watering-places in the Austrian and Bavarian Alps. The multitude of people at the concerts, in the garden of the restaurant, on the promenade, at the open-air services, were precisely the things to occupy his brush. The light rippled through the leaves of the trees; women, children, and well-bred men of the world listened to the music or the words of the preacher. One person leaves a seat and another takes it; everything lives and moves. Huge and lofty trees stretch out their arms, protecting the company from the sun. Unusually striking was “The Procession in Gastein”: in the centre was the priest bearing the Host, then the choristers in their red robes, in front the visitors and tourists who had hastened to see the spectacle, and in the background the mountain heights. The bustle of people gives Menzel the opportunity for a triumph. In Kissingen he painted the promenade at the waters; in Paris the Sunday gaiety in the garden of the Tuileries, the street life upon the boulevard, the famous scene in the Jardin des Plantes, with the great elephants and the vivid group of Zouaves and ladies; in Verona the Piazza d’Erbe, with the swarm of people crowding in between the open booths and shouting at the top of their voices. Many after him have represented such scenes, although few have had the secret of giving their figures such seething life, or painting them, like Menzel, as parts of one great, surging, and many-headed multitude.

People travelling have always been for him a source of much amusement: men sitting in the corner of a railway carriage with their legs crossed and their hats over their eyes, yawning or asleep; women looking out of the windows or counting their ready money. Alternating with such themes are those monotonous yet simple and therefore genial landscapes from the suburbs of the great city, poor, neglected regions with machines and men at their labour. Children bathing in a dirty stream bordered by little, stunted willows; small craft gliding over a river, sailors leaping from one vessel to another, men landing sacks or barrels, and great, heavy cart-horses dragging huge waggons loaded with beer-barrels along the dusty country road. Or the scaffolding of a house is being raised. Six masons are at work upon it, and they are working in earnest. A green bush waves (German fashion) above the scaffolding, and further off long rows of houses stretch away, and the aqueducts and gas-works which supply the huge crater of Berlin, and day-labourers are seen wheeling up barrow-loads of stones. For the first time a German painter sings the canticle of labour.

From the streets he enters the work-places, and interprets the wild poetry of roaring machines in smoky manufactories. The masterpiece of this group is that bold and powerful picture, his “Iron Mill” of 1876. The workshop of the great rail-forge of KÖnigshÜtte in Upper Silesia is full of heat and steam. The muscular, brawny figures of men with glowing faces stand at the furnace holding the tongs in their swollen hands. Their vigorous gestures recall Daumier. Upon the upper part of their bodies, which is naked, the light casts white, blue, and dark red reflections, and over the lower part it flickers in reddish, greenish, and violet tinges, on the creases in their clothing. The smoke rising in spirals is of a whitish-red, and the beams supporting the roof are lit up with a sombre glow. Heat, sweat, movement, and the glare of fire are everywhere. Dust and dirt, strong, raw-boned iron-workers washing themselves, or exhausted with hard toil, snatching a hasty meal, a confusion of belting and machinery, no pretty anecdote but sober earnest, no story but pure painting—these were the great and decisive achievements of this picture. Courbet’s “Stone-breakers” of 1851, Madox Brown’s “Work” of 1852, and Menzel’s “Iron Mill” are the standard works in the art of the nineteenth century.

Within German art Menzel has won an enclave for himself, a rock amid the sea. In France during the sixties he represented German art in general. France offered him celebrity, and after this recognition he had the fortune to be honoured in his native-land before he was overtaken by old age. His realism was permitted to him at a time when realistic aims were elsewhere reckoned altogether as Æsthetic errors. This explains the remarkable fact that Menzel’s toil of fifty years had scarcely any influence on the development of German painting; it would scarcely be different from what it is now if he had never existed. When he might have been an exemplar there was no one who dared to follow him. And later, when German art as a whole had entered upon naturalistic lines, the differences between him and the younger generation were more numerous than their points of sympathy, so that it was impossible for him to have a formative influence. He stood out in the new period merely as a power commanding respect, like a hero of ancient times. Even the isolated realistic onsets made in Berlin in the seventies are in no way to be connected with him.

If realism consisted in the dry and sober illustration of selected fragments of reality, if upright feeling, loyalty, and honest patriotism were serviceable qualities in art, a lengthier consideration should certainly be accorded to Anton von Werner. In his genre pictures of campaign life everything is spick and span, everything is in its right place and in soldierly order: it is all typically Prussian art. His portraits are casino pictures, and as such it is impossible to imagine how they could better serve their purpose. From the spurs to the cuirassier helmet everything is correct and in accordance with military regulation; even the likeness has something officially prescribed which would make any recruit form front if suddenly brought face to face with such a person. In his pictures of ceremonies his ability was just sufficient to chronicle the function in question with the conscientiousness of a clerk in a law court. The intellectual capacity for seeing more of a great man than his immaculately polished boots and the immaculately burnished buttons of his uniform was denied him, as was the artistic capacity of exalting a picture-sheet to the level of a picture.

Equipped with a healthy though trivial feeling for reality, Carl GÜssow ventured to approach nature in a sturdy and robust fashion in some of his works, and exhibited in Berlin a few life-sized figures, “Pussy,” “A Lover of Flowers,” “Lost Happiness,” “Welcome,” “The Oyster Girl,” and so forth. Through these he opened for a brief period in Berlin the era of yellow kerchiefs and black finger-nails, and on the strength of them was exalted by the critics as a pioneer of realism or else anathematised, according to their Æsthetic creed. He had a robust method of painting muscles and flesh and clothes of many colours, and of setting green beside red and red beside yellow, yet even in these first works—his only works of artistic merit—he never got beyond the banal and barbaric transcript of a reality which was entirely without interest.

Max Michael seems to be somewhat influenced by Bonvin. Like the latter, he was attracted by the silent motions of nuns, juicy vegetables, dark-brown wainscoting, and the subdued light of interiors. He was, like Ribot in France, although with less artistic power, a good representative of that “school of cellar skylights” which imitated in a sound manner the tone of the old Spanish masters. One of his finest pictures, which hangs in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, represents a girls’ school in Italy. A nun is presiding over the sewing-lesson; the background is brown; the light comes through the yellow glass of a high and small window (like that of an attic), and throws a brown dusky tone over the room, in which the gay costumes of the little Italian girls, with their white kerchiefs, make exceedingly pretty and harmonious spots of colour. No adventure is hinted at, no episode related, but the picturesque appearance of the little girls, and their tones in the space, are all the more delicately rendered. A refined scheme of colour recalling the old masters compensates for the want of incident.

In Vienna August von Pettenkofen made a transition from the ossified, antediluvian genre painting to painting which was artistically delicate. While the successors of Gauermann and Danhauser indulged in heart-breaking scenes or humorous episodes, Pettenkofen was the first to observe the world from a purely pictorial point of view. Alfred Stevens had opened his eyes in Paris in 1851. Troyon’s pictures and Millet’s confirmed him in his efforts. He was brought up on a property belonging to his father in Galicia, and had been a cavalry officer before he turned to painting: horses, peasants, and oxen are the simple figures of his pictures. In the place of episodic, ill-painted stories he set the meagre plains of lonely Pusta, sooty forges, gloomy cobblers’ work shops, dirty courtyards with middens and rubbish-heaps, gipsy encampments, and desolate garrets. There is no pandering to sentimentality or the curiosity excited by genre painting. There are delicate chords of colour, and that is enough. The artist was in the habit of spending the summer months in the little town of Spolnok on the Theiss, to the east of Pesth. Here he wandered about amongst the little whitewashed houses, the booths of general dealers, and the fruit-sellers’ stalls. A lazily moving yoke of oxen with a lad asleep, dark-eyed girls fetching water, poor children playing on the ground, old men dreaming in the sun in a courtyard, are generally the only breathing beings in his pictures. Here is a sandy village-square with low, white-washed houses; there is a wain with oxen standing in the street, or a postilion trotting away on his tired nag. Like Menzel, Pettenkofen paints busy humanity absorbed in their toil, simple beings who do not dream of leaving off work for the sake of those who frequent picture galleries. What differentiates him from the Berlin painter is a more lyrical impulse, something tender, thoughtful, and contemplative. Menzel gives dramatic point to everything he touches; he sets masses in movement, depicts a busy, noisy crowd, pressing together and elbowing one another, forcing their way at the doors of theatres or the windows of cafÉs in a multifarious throng. Pettenkofen lingers with the petty artisan and the solitary sempstress. In Menzel’s “Iron Mill” the sparks are flying and the machines whirring, but everything is peaceful and quiet in the cobblers’ workshops and the sunny attics visited by Pettenkofen. Menzel delights in momentary impressions and quivering life; Pettenkofen in rest and solitude. In the former every one is thinking and talking and on the alert; in the latter every one is yawning or asleep. If Menzel paints a waggon, the driver cracks his whip and one hears the team rattling over the uneven pavement; in Pettenkofen the waggon stands quietly in a narrow lane, the driver enjoys a midday rest, and an enervating, sultry heat broods overhead. Menzel has a love for men and women with excitement written on their faces; Pettenkofen avoids painting character, contenting himself with the reproduction of simple actions at picturesque moments. The Berlin artist is epigrammatically sharp; the Viennese is elegiac and melancholy. Menzel’s pictures have the changing glitter of rockets; those of Pettenkofen are harmonised in the tone of a refined amateur. They have only one thing in common: neither has found disciples; they are not culminating peaks in Berlin or Vienna art so much as boulders wedged into another system.

Whilst the realistic movement in both towns was confined to particular masters, Munich had once again the mission of becoming a guiding influence. Here all the tendencies of modern art have left the most distinct traces, all movements were consummated with most consistency. The heroes of Piloty followed the divinities of Cornelius, and these were in turn succeeded by the Tyrolese peasants of Defregger, and amid all this difference of theme one bond connected these works: for interesting subject was the matter of chief importance in them, and the purely pictorial element was something subordinate. The efforts of the seventies had for their object the victory of this pictorial element. It was recognised that the talent for making humorous points and telling stories, which came in question as the determining quality in the pictures of monks and peasants of the school of Defregger and GrÜtzner, was the expression of no real faculty for formative art—that it was merely technical incompleteness complacently supported by the lack of artistic sensibility in the public which had produced this narrative painting. It was felt that the task of formative art did not consist in narrative, but in representation, and in representation through the most sensuous and convincing means which stood at its disposal. A renewed study of the old masters made this recognition possible.

Up to this time the most miserable desolation had also reigned over the province of the artistic crafts. But, borne up by the rekindled sentiment of nationality, and favoured by the high tide of the milliards paid by France, since 1870, that eventful movement bearing the words “Old German” and “Fine Style” on its programme had become an accomplished fact. The German Renaissance, which research had been hitherto neglected, was discovered afresh. LÜbke explored it thoroughly and systematically; Woltmann wrote on Hans Holbein, Thausing on DÜrer; Eitelberger founded the Austrian Industrial Museum; Georg Hirth brought out his Deutsches Zimmer, and began the publication of the Formenschatz. The national form of art of the German Renaissance was taken up everywhere with a proud consciousness of patriotism: here, it was thought, was a panacea. Those who followed the artistic crafts declared open war against everything pedestrian and tedious. Lorenz Gedon in particular—in union with Franz and Rudolf Seitz—was the soul of the movement. With his black, curly hair, his little, fiery, dark eyes, his short beard, his negligent dress, and his two great hands expert in the exercise of every description of art, he had himself something of the character of an old German stone-cutter. His manner of expressing himself corresponded to this appearance. In every thing it was original, saturated with his own personal conception of the world. As the son of a dealer in old pictures and curiosities, he was familiar with the old masters from his childhood, and followed them in the method of his study. He was far from confining himself to one branch. The faÇades of houses, the architecture of interiors, tavern rooms and festal decorations, furniture and state carriages, statues and embellishments in stone, bronze, wood, and iron, portrait busts in wax, clay, and marble, models for ornaments, for iron lattices, for the adornment of ships and the fittings of cabins, all objects that were wayward, fantastic, quaint, and curious lay in his province; and for the execution of each in turn this remarkable man felt that he had in him an equal capacity. And, at the same time, the temperament of a collector was united in him with that of an artist in an entirely special way. In the bushy wilderness of a garden before his house in the Nymphenburger Strasse countless stone fragments of mediÆval sculpture were strewn about, up to the very hedge dividing it from the street. Rusty old trellises of wrought iron slanted in front of the windows, and in the house itself the most precious objects, which artists ten years before had passed without heed, stood in masses together. As Gedon was taken from his work when he was forty his artistic endeavour never got beyond efforts of improvisation, but the impulse which he gave was very powerful. Through his initiative the whole province of the artistic crafts was brought under observation from a pictorial point of view. The bald Philistine style of decoration gave way and a blithe revel of colour was begun. The great carnival feasts arranged by him on the model of the Renaissance period are an important episode in the history of culture in Munich, and have contributed in no unessential manner to the refinement of taste in the toilette of women. The Munich Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts in 1876 (before the entrance of which he had erected that great portal made of old fragments of architecture, wood-carving, and splendid stuffs, and bearing the inscription “The Works of our Fathers”) indicated the zenith of that movement in the handicrafts which was flooding all Germany in those days.

The course which was run by this movement in the following years is well known, and it is well known how the imitation of the German Renaissance soon became as wearisome as in the beginning it had been attractive. After it had been a little overdone another step was taken, and from the Renaissance people went to the baroque period, and soon afterwards the rococo period followed. In these days sobriety has taken the place of this fever for ornamentation, and the mania for style has resulted in a surfeit, a weariness and a desire for simplicity and quietude. Nevertheless the beneficial influence of the movement on the general elevation of taste is undeniable, and indirectly it was of service to painting.

In rooms where the owner was the only article of the inventory repugnant to the conception of style, only those pictures were admitted which had been executed in the exact manner of the old masters. Works of art were regarded as tasteful furniture, and were obliged to harmonise correctly with the other appointments of the room; they had, moreover, to be themselves legitimate “imitations of the Works of our Fathers.” And, in this way, the movement in the handicrafts gave an impulse to a renewed study of the old masters, carried out with far more refinement than had hitherto been the case. Amongst the costume painters spread over all Germany, the experts in costume, working in Munich during the seventies, form a really artistic race of able painters who were peculiarly sensitive to colour. They were the historians of art, the connoisseurs of colour in the ranks of the painters. Piloty did not satisfy them; they buried themselves in the study of old masters with a delicately sensitive appreciation of them; they began to mix soft, luxuriant, and melting colours upon their palettes, and to feel the peculiar joy of painting. Whilst they imitated the exquisite “little masters” of former ages, in dimly lighted studios hung with Gobelins, imitating at the same time the beautifying rust of centuries, they gradually abandoned all their own tricks of art; and whilst they devoted themselves to detail they brought about the Renaissance of oil-painting. Compared with earlier works, their pictures are like rare dainties. They no longer recognised the end of their calling, as the genre painters had done, in a one-sided talent for characterisation, but tried once more to lay chief weight upon the pictorial and artistic appearance of their pictures. They were conscious of a presentiment that there were higher spheres of art than the commonplace humour of genre painting, and this recognition had a very wide bearing. Pictorial point took the place of narrative humour. If artists had previously painted thoughts they now began to paint things, and even if the things were bundles of straw, mediÆval hose, and the old robes of cardinals, they were no longer “invented,” but something which had been seen as a whole. It was a transition towards ultimately painting what had actually taken place before the artist’s eyes.

That sumptuous, healthy artist of such pictorial ability, Diez, the Victor Scheffel of painting, stands at the head of the group. From his youth upwards his chief place of resort had been the cabinet of engravings where he studied Schongauer, DÜrer, and Rembrandt, and all the boon-companions and vagabonds etched or cut in copper or wood, and on the model of these he painted his own marauders, robber-barons, peasants in revolt, old German weddings and fairs. His picture “To the Church Consecration” recalls Beham, his “Merry Riding” Schongauer, and his “Ambuscade” DÜrer, whilst Teniers served as model for his fairs. Diez knows the period from DÜrer and Holbein to Rubens, Rembrandt, Wouwerman, and Brouwer as thoroughly as an historian of art, and sometimes—for instance in his “Picnic in the Forest”—he has even drawn the eighteenth century into the circle of his studies. His pictures had an unrivalled delicacy of tone, and could certainly hang beside their Dutch models in the Pinakothek without losing anything by such proximity.

Something of Brouwer or Ostade revived once more in Harburger, the talented draughtsman of Fliegende BlÄtter, the undisputed monarch of the kingdom of slouching hats, old mugs, and Delft pipes. Pictures like “The Peasants’ Doctor,” “The Card-players,” “The Grandmother,” “By the Quiet Fireside,” “In the Armchair,” and “Easy-going Folk” were masterpieces of delicate Dutch painting: the tone of his pictures shows distinction and temperament; they have deep and fine chiaroscuro, and are soft and fluent in execution. Loefftz with his picture “Love and Avarice” appeared as Quentin Matsys redivivus, and then attached himself in turn to Holbein and Van Dyck; and exercised, like Diez, a great influence on the younger generation by his activity as a teacher.

Claus Meyer, who became one of the best known amongst the young Munich painters by his “Sewing School in the Nunnery” of 1883, is worthy of remark inasmuch as he acquired a method of painting which was full of nuances, through modelling himself upon Pieter de Hoogh and Van der Meer of Delft. Through the windows hung with thin curtains the warm, quiet daylight falls into the room, glancing on the clean boards of the floor, on the polished tops of the tables, the white pages of the books, and the blond and brown hair of the children, playing round it like a golden nimbus. Another sunbeam streams through the door, which is not entirely closed, and quivers over the floor in a bright and narrow strip of light. The intimate representation of peaceful scenes of modest life, the entirely pictorial representation of peaceful and congenial events, has taken the place of the adventures dear to genre painting. Old gentlemen with a glass of beer and a clay pipe, servant-girls peeling potatoes in the kitchen, pupils at the cloister sitting over their books in the library, drinkers, smokers, and dicers—such were the quiet, passive, and silent figures of his later pictures. The mild sunshine breaks in and plays over them. Light clouds of tobacco smoke float in the air. Everything is homely and pleasant, touched with a breath of pictorial charm, comfortable warmth, and poetic fragrance. A hundred years hence his works will be sold as flawlessly delicate and genuine old Dutch pictures. Holmberg became the historian of cardinals. A window, consisting of rounded, clumpy panes, with little glass pictures let in, forms the background of the room, and in the subdued oil-light which beams over splendid vessels and ornaments, chests and Gobelins, the white satin dresses of ladies in the mode of 1640, or the lilac and purple robes of cardinals from the artist’s rich wardrobe, are displayed, together with the appropriate models.

In Fritz August Kaulbach, the most versatile of the group in his adoption of various manners, the essence of this whole tendency is to be found. He did not belong to the specialists who restricted themselves, in a one-sided fashion, to the imitation of the Flemish or the Dutch masters, but appeared like old Diterici, Proteus-like, now in one and now in another mask; and, whether he assumed the features of Holbein, Carlo Dolci, Van Dyck, or Watteau, he had the secret of being invariably graceful and chic.

When the German Renaissance was at its zenith he painted in the Renaissance style: harmless genre pictures À la Beyschlag—the joys of love and of the family circle—but not being so banal as the latter he painted them with more delicate colouring and finer poetic charm. Certain single figures were found specially acceptable—for instance, the daughters of Nuremberg patricians, and noble ladies in the old German caps, dark velvet gowns, and long plaits like Gretchen’s, with their eyes sometimes uplifted and sometimes lowered, and their hands at one moment folded and at another carrying a shining covered goblet. Occasionally these single figures were portraits, but none the less were they transformed into “ladies in old German costume”; and Kaulbach understood how to paint, to the utmost satisfaction of his patrons, the black caps, no less well than the little veil and the net of pearls, and the greenish-yellow silk of the puffed sleeves, no less well than the plush border of the dark gown and the antique red Gretchen pocket. Many of them held a lute and stood amid a spring landscape, before a streamlet, or a silver-birch, such as Stevens delighted in painting ten years previously. At that time Fritz August Kaulbach, with greater softness in his treatment, occupied in Germany the place which Florent Willems had occupied in Belgium. Since then he has brought nearer to the public the most various old and modern masters, and he has done so with fine artistic feeling: in his “May Day” he has revived the pastoral scenes of Watteau with a felicitous cleverness; in his “St. Cecilia” he created a total effect of great grace by going arm in arm with Carlo Dolci and Gabriel Max; his “PietÀ” he composed with “the best figures of Michael Angelo, Fra Bartolommeo, and Titian,” just as Gerard de Lairesse had once recommended to painters. Intermediately he painted frail flower-like girls À la Gabriel Max, charming little angels À la Thoma, children in Pierrot costume À la Vollon, and little landscapes À la Gainsborough. He did not find in himself the plan for a new edifice in erecting his palace of art, but built according to any plans that came in his way; he simply chose from all existing forms the most graceful, the most elegant, the most precious, culled from their beauties only the flowers, and bound them into a tasteful bouquet. In his modern portraits of women, which in recent years have been his chief successes, he placed himself between Van Dyck and the English. Of course, a really chic painter of women, like Sargent, is not to be thought of in this connection; but for Germany these portraits were in exceedingly fine taste, had an interesting Kaulbachian trace of indifferent health, and breathed an odeur de femme which found very wide approval. In his “Lieschen, the Waitress of the Shooting Festival” he risked a fresh attempt at treating popular life, and made of it such a graceful picture that it might almost have been painted by Piglhein; while in a series of spirited caricatures he even succeeded in being—Kaulbach. The history of art is wide, and since Fritz August Kaulbach knows it extremely well, he will certainly find much to paint that is pleasing and attractive, “s’il continue À laisser errer son imagination À travers les formes diverses crÉÉes par l’art de tous les temps,” as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts said of him on the occasion of the Vienna World Exhibition of 1878.

After all, these pictures will have little that is novel for an historian of the next century. “Être maÎtre,” says W. BÜrger, “c’est ne ressembler À personne.” But these were the works of painters who merely announced the dogma of the infallibility of universal eclecticism, as the Caracci had done in their familiar sonnets: they were spirited imitators, whose connection with the nineteenth century will be known in after years only by the dates of their pictures. As old masters called back to life, they have enriched the history of art, as such, by nothing novel. Yet, in replacing superficial imitations by imitations which were excellent and congenial, they have nevertheless advanced the history of art in the nineteenth century in another way.

By the labour of his life each one of them helped to make a place in Germany for the art of oil-painting, which had been forgotten under the influence of Winckelmann and Carstens, and in this sense their works were very important stations, as one might say, on the great thoroughfare of art. Through systematic imitation of the finest old masters, the Munich school had in a comparatively short time regained the appreciation of colour and treatment which had so long been lost. At a hazy distance lay those times when the distinctive peculiarity of German painting lay in its wealth of ideas, its want of any sense for colour, and its clumsy technique, whilst the Æsthetic spokesmen praised these qualities as though they were national virtues. These views had been altogether renounced, and a decade of strenuous work had been devoted to the extirpation of all such defects. Such an achievement was sufficiently great, and sufficiently important and gratifying. This last resuscitation of the old masters was capable of being turned into a bridge leading to new regions.

A feeling arose that the limit had been reached, and it arose in those very men who had advanced furthest in pictorial accomplishment, adapting and making their own all the ability of the old masters. Painters believed that they had learnt enough of technique to be able to treat subjects from modern life in the spirit of these old masters, not handling them any longer as laboriously composed genre pictures, but as real works of art. And a group of realists came forward as they had done in France, and began to seek truth with scientific rigour and an avoidance of any kind of anecdotic by-play.

The greatest pupil of the old masters, Franz Lenbach, stands in a close and most important relationship with these endeavours of modern art, through some of his youthful works.

The public has accustomed itself to think of him only as a portrait painter, and he is justly honoured as the greatest German portraitist of the century. But posterity may one day regard it as a special favour of the gods that Lenbach should have been born at the right time, and that his progress to maturity fell in the greatest epoch of the century. His gallery of portraits has been called an epic in paint upon the heroes of our age. The greatest historical figures of the century have sat to him, the greatest conquerors and masters in the kingdom of science and art. Nevertheless this gallery would be worthless to posterity if Lenbach had not had at his disposal one quality possessed by none of his immediate predecessors, a sacred respect for nature. At a time when rosy tints, suave smiles, and idealised drawing were the requirements necessary in every likeness, at a time when Winterhalter painted great men, not as they were, but as, in his opinion, they ought to have been—without reflecting that God Almighty knows best what heads are appropriate for great men—Lenbach appeared with his brusque veracity of portraiture. That alone was an achievement in which only a man of original temperament could have succeeded. If a portrait painter is to prevail with society a peculiar combination of faculties is necessary, apart from his individual capacity for art. Lenbach had not only an eye and a hand, but likewise elbows and a tongue which placed him hors concours. He could be as rude as he was amiable, and as deferential as he was proud; half boor and half courtier, at once a great artist and an accomplished faiseur, he succeeded in doing a thing which has brought thousands to ruin—he succeeded in forcing upon society his own taste, and setting genuine human beings of strong character in the place of the smiling automatons of fashionable painters. In comparison with the works of earlier portrait painters it might be said that a touch of pantheism and nature-worship goes through Lenbach’s pictures.

And what makes this so invaluable is that his greatness depends really less upon artistic qualities than upon his being a highly gifted man who understands the spirit of others. It is not merely artistic technique that is essential in a portrait, but before everything a psychical grasp of the subject. No artist, says Lessing, is able to interpret a power more highly spiritual than that which he possesses himself. And this is precisely the weak side in so many portrait painters, since a man’s art is by no means always in any direct relationship with the development of his spiritual powers. In this respect a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach stands to one by Anton von Werner, as an interpretation of Goethe by Hehn stands to one by DÜntzer. To speak of the congenial conception in Lenbach’s pictures of Bismarck is a safe phrase. There will always remain something wanting, but since Lenbach’s works are in existence one knows, at any rate, that this something can be reduced to a far lower measure than it has been by the other Bismarck portraits. “Bien comprendre son homme,” says BÜrger-ThorÉ, “est la premiÈre qualitÉ du portraitiste,” and this faculty of the gifted psychologist has made Lenbach the historian elect of a great period, the active recorder of a mighty era. It even makes him seem greater than most foreign portrait painters. How solid, but at the same time how matter-of-fact, does Bonnat seem by Lenbach’s side! One should not look at a dozen Bonnats together; a single one arrests attention by the plastic treatment of the person, but if you see several at the same time all the figures have this same plastic character, all of them have the same pose, and they all seem to have employed the same tailor. Lenbach has no need of all that characterisation by means of accessories in which Bonnat delights. He only paints the eyes with thoroughness, and possibly the head; but these he renders with a psychological absorption which is only to be found amongst modern artists, perhaps in Watts. In a head by Lenbach there glows a pair of eyes which burn themselves into you. The countenance, which is the first zone around them, is more or less—generally less—amplified; the second zone, the dress and hands, is either still less amplified, or scarcely amplified at all. The portrait is then harmonised in a neutral tone which renders the lack of finish less obvious. In this sketchy treatment and in his striking subjectivity Lenbach is the very opposite of the old masters. Holbein, and even Rubens—who otherwise sets upon everything the stamp of his own personality—characterised their figures by a reverent imitation of every trait given in nature. They produced, as it were, real documents, and left it to the spectator to interpret them in his own way.

Lenbach, less objective, and surrendering himself less absolutely to his subject, emphasises one point, disregards another, and in this way conjures up the spirit by his faces, just as he sees it. It may be open to dispute which kind of portraiture is the more desirable; but Lenbach, at any rate, has now forced the world to behold its great men through his eyes. He has given them the form in which they will survive. No one has the same secret of seizing a fleeting moment; no one turned more decisively away from every attempt at idealising glorification or at watering down an individual to a type. He takes counsel of photography, but only as MoliÈre took counsel of his housekeeper: he uses it merely as a medium for arriving at the startling directness, the instantaneous impression of life, in his pictures. Works like the portraits of King Ludwig I, Gladstone, Minghetti, Bishop Strossmayer, Prince Lichtenstein, Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Paul Heyse, Wilhelm Busch, Schwind, Semper, Liphart, Morelli, and many others have no parallel as analyses of the character of complex personalities. Some of his Bismarck portraits, as well as his last pictures of the old Emperor Wilhelm, will always stand amongst the greatest achievements of the century in portraiture. In the one portrait is indestructible power, as it were the shrine built for itself by the mightiest spirit of the century; in the other the majesty of the old man, already half alienated from the earth, and glorified by a trace of still melancholy, as by the last radiance of the evening sun. In these works Lenbach appears as a wizard calling up spirits, an Évocateur d’Âmes, as a French critic has named him.

But what the history of art has forgotten in estimating the fame of the portrait painter Lenbach is, that in the beginning of his career this very man paved the way for the “Realistic” movement in German painting which later he confronted so haughtily and with so much reserve. The first of these works of his, which have for Germany much the same significance as the early works of Courbet have for France, is the well-known “Shepherd Boy” in the Schack Gallery. Stretched on his back, he lies in the high grass where flowers grow thickly, and looks up while butterflies and dragon-flies flutter through the dusty air of a Roman summer day. Such a frank, an audacious, naked realism, breaking away from everything traditional in its representation of fact, was something entirely novel and surprising in Germany in the year 1856. Up to this time no one had seen a fragment of nature depicted with such unqualified veracity. The tanned shepherd lad, with his naked sunburnt feet, covered by a dark crust of mire from the damp earth, seemed to be lying there in the flesh, plastically thrown into relief by the glowing midday sun. The next of these pictures, “Peasants taking Refuge from the Weather,” which appeared in the exhibition of 1858, called down a storm of indignation on account of its “trivial realism.” Every figure was painted after nature with blunt and rigorous sincerity, and no anecdotic incident was devised in it.

After the sixties the influence of Courbet began to be directly felt. In the days when he worked in Couture’s studio Victor MÜller had taken up some of the ideas of the master of Ornans, and when he settled in 1863 in Munich, MÜller communicated to the painters there the first knowledge of the works of the great Frenchman. He did not follow Courbet, however, in his subjects. “The Man in the Heart of the Night lulled to Sleep by the Music of a Violin,” “Venus and Adonis,” “Hero and Leander,” “Hamlet in the Churchyard,” “Venus and TannhÄuser,” “Faust on the Promenade,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Ophelia by the Stream”—such are the titles of his principal works. But how far they are removed from the anÆmic, empty painting of beauty which reigned in the school of Couture! Though a Romanticist of the purest water in his subjects, MÜller appears, in the manner in which he handles them, as a Realist on whom there is no speck of the academical dust of the schools. The dominant features of Victor MÜller’s pictures are the thirst for life and colour, full-blooded strength, haughty contempt for every species of hollow exaggeration and all outward pose, genuine human countenances and living human forms inspired with tameless passion, an audacious rejection of all the traditional rules of composition, and, even in colour, a veracity which in that age, given up to an ostentatious painting of material, must have had an effect that was absolutely novel. In 1863 the blooming flesh of his “Wood Nymph” excited the Munich public to indignation, just as the nude female figures of Courbet had roused indignation about the same time in Paris. Pictures painted with singular sureness of hand were executed by him during the few years that he yet had to live—portraits of dogs, landscapes of a flaming glow of colour, single figures of red-haired Bacchantes and laughing flower-girls, old men dying, and charming fairy pictures. The nearer he came to his death the more his powers of work seemed to increase. The most remarkable ideas came into his head. He drew, and painted without intermission designs which had occupied him for years. “I feel,” he said, “like an architect who has been commissioned to carry out a great building, and I cannot do it: I must die.”

But the impulse which he had given in more than one direction had further issues. As Hans Thoma in later years continued the work of the great Frankfort master in the province of fairy-tale, Wilhelm Leibl realised MÜller’s realistic programme.

Wilhelm Leibl, son of the conductor of music in the cathedral, was born at Cologne on 23rd October 1844. At Munich he entered the studio of Arthur van Ramberg, that unjustly forgotten master who, both by his own work and by his activity as a teacher, exercised upon the younger Munich school a far healthier influence than Piloty. Ramberg was a modern man, was always eager to come into immediate contact with life and break the fetters of tradition which hung everywhere upon that generation. He was an aristocrat and a dandy, and, having occupied himself in the beginning with romantic fairy subjects, he painted, soon after his migration to Munich, a series of pictures from modern life—“Dachau Girls on Sunday,” “The Return from the Masked Ball,” “A Walk with the Tutor,” “The Meeting on the Lake,” “The Invitation to Boat,” and others, which rose above the mass of contemporary productions by their great distinction, fragrance, and grace. At a time when others held nothing but the smock-frock fit for representation, Ramberg painted the fashionable modern costume of women. And when others devoted themselves to clumsy genre episodes, he created songs without words that were full of fine reserve, nobility, and delicate feeling.

Rudolf Hirth, who made a stir with his “Hop Harvest”; Albert Keller, the tasteful painter of fashionable life; Karl Haider, the sincere and conscientious miniature painter whose energy of manner had a suggestion of the old masters, together with Wilhelm Leibl, all issued from Ramberg’s school, not from Piloty’s.

The young student from Cologne was thus saved, in the beginning, from occupying himself with history, and he had no need to addict himself to narrative genre painting, since his entire organisation preordained him to painting pure and simple. Wilhelm Leibl was in those days a handsome fellow, with powerful limbs and shining brown eyes. He was realism incarnate—rather short, but strongly made, and with a frame almost suggesting a beast of burden, broad in the chest, high-shouldered, and bull-necked. His arms were thick and his feet large. His gait was slow, heavy, and energetic, and he made with his arms liberal gestures which took up a good deal of room. He had not the fiery spirit of Courbet, being more prosaic, sober, and deliberate, but he resembled him both in appearance and in the artistic faculty of eye and hand. “He had,” as a French critic wrote of him, “one of those organisations which are predestined for painting, as Courbet had amongst us Frenchmen. Such men extract the most remarkable things from painting.”

Even his first picture, exhibited in 1869, and representing his two fellow-pupils Rudolf Hirth and Haider looking at an engraving, had a soft, full golden harmony, which left all the products of conventional genre painting far behind it, and came into direct competition with the refined works of the Dutch painter Michael Swert. His second picture, a portrait of Frau Gedon, made an impression even in Paris by its Rembrandtesque beauty of tone, and was awarded there in 1870 the gold medal which the judges had not ventured to give him the year before at Munich, because he was still an Academy pupil. Yet 1869 was the decisive year in Leibl’s life. The Munich Exhibition gave at that time an opportunity for learning the importance of French art upon a scale previously unknown. Over four hundred and fifty pictures were accessible, and the works of the smooth, conventional historical painters were the minority. Troyon was to be seen there, and Millet and Corot. But Courbet, to whose works the committee had devoted an entire room, was chiefly the hero, and one over whom there was much conflict. Opinions were violently at odds about him in the painters’ club. The official circle greeted the master of Ornans with the same hoot of indignation which had been accorded him in France. But for Leibl he became an adored and marvellous ideal. His eyes sparkled when he sat opposite him at the Deutsches Haus, and in default of any other means of making himself understood he assured Courbet of his veneration by sturdily drinking to him: “Prosit Courbet—Prosit Leibl.” He stretched his powerful limbs, and threw himself into vigorous attitudes to evince in sanguinary quarrels, when necessary, his enthusiasm for the great Frenchman. How false and paltry seemed the whole school of Piloty, with its rose-coloured insipidity and its conventional bloom of the palette, when set against the downright veracity and the masterly painting of these works!

In the same year he went to Paris, special occasion for the journey being given by a commission for a portrait which he received from the Duc Tascher de la Pagerie. There he painted “La Cocotte,” the portrait of a fat Frenchwoman seated upon a sofa and watching the clouds of smoke from her clay pipe. In its massive realism, and in the exuberant power of its broad, liquid painting, it might have been signed “Courbet,” and Leibl told afterwards with pride how Courbet slapped him on the shoulder when he was at his work, saying: “Il faut que vous restez À Paris.” The breaking out of the war brought his residence in Paris to an end more quickly than he had foreseen, but though he was there only nine months that was long enough to give for ever a firm direction to the efforts of the painter. Leibl became the apostle of Courbet in Germany, and in his outward life the German Millet. Back once more in Bavaria, he migrated in 1872 to Grasolfingen, then to Schondorf on the Ammersee, then to Berbling near Aibling, and in 1884 to Aibling itself; he became a peasant, and, like Millet, he painted pictures of peasants.

The poetic and biblical, the august and epical bias which characterises the works of Millet, is not to be expected in Leibl. A spirit bent upon what is great and heroic speaks out of Millet’s pictures. A Rembrandtesque feeling for space, the great line, the simplification, the intellectual restraint from anecdotic triviality of form, are the things which constitute his style. Leibl is at his best when he buries himself with delight in the hundred little touches of nature. He triumphs when he has to paint the faces of old peasant women, full of wrinkles, and furrowed with care; the ruddy cheeks of girls, sparkling in all their natural rustic freshness; figured dresses, the material and texture of which are clearly recognisable; flowered silk kerchiefs worn round the neck, coarse woollen bodices, and heavy hobnail shoes. He is to Millet what Holbein is to Michael Angelo.

Nor can he be called an artist of intimate feeling in the sense in which the Scandinavians are amongst the moderns. In Viggo Johansen the painter disappears; what he paints has not the effect of a picture, but of a moment of existence, a memory of something clear and familiar—something which has been lived and seen, but not fashioned with deliberate intention. His figures are like the sudden appearance of actual persons, spied upon, as if one were looking through the window into a strange room under cover of night. One feels that there is no occasion to pay the artist a compliment; but one would like to sit in such a warm, cosy room, impregnated with tobacco smoke, to inhale the fine cloud of steam issuing from the tea-kettle, to hear the water bubbling and humming upon the glimmering fire. But the painter is always seen in Leibl’s pictures. A communicative spirit, something which touches the heart and sets one dreaming, is precisely what is not expressed in them. The spectator invariably thinks, in the first place, of the astonishing ability, the incredible patience, which went to the making of them. And with all their photographic fidelity he is, moreover, conscious that the painter himself was less concerned in seizing the poetry of a scene, the instantaneous charm of an impression of nature, than in forcing into the foreground particular evidences of his technical powers which he has reserved for display. For instance, newspapers in which, if it is possible, a fragment of the leading article may be deciphered, earthen vessels, bottles, and brandy glasses, play in his pictures a rÔle similar to that assumed by the little caskets with brass covers that catch the flashing lights, the overturned settles, the tapestry, and the globe in works of the school of Piloty.

Wilhelm Leibl is a good workman, like Courbet, a man of fresh, vigorous, and energetic nature and robust health, very material, and at times matter-of-fact and prosaic. Painting is as natural to him as breathing and walking are to the rest of us. He goes his way like an ox in the plough, steadily and without tiring, without vibration of the nerves, and without the touch of poetry. He goes where his instinct leads him and paints with a muscular flexibility of hand whatever appeals to his eye or suits his brush. Opposed to the neurotic and hurrying moderns, he has something of a mediÆval monk who sits quietly in his cell, without counting the hours, the days, and the years, and embellishes the pages of his service-book with artistic miniatures, to depart in peace when he has set “Amen, Finis” at the bottom of the last page. But he has, too, all the capacity and all the boundless veneration for nature of these old artists. He is the greatest maÎtre peintre that Germany has had in the course of the century, and in this sense his advent was of epoch-making importance.

Even Defregger had observed peasant life altogether from a narrative and anecdotic point of view. In Leibl this narrative genre has been overcome. He had ability enough to give artistic attractions even to an “empty subject.” To avoid exaggerated characterisation, to avoid the expression of anything divided into rÔles, he consistently painted people employed in the least exciting occupations—peasants reading a newspaper, sitting in church, or examining a gun. Pains are taken to avoid the slightest movement of the figures. Whilst all his predecessors were romance writers, Leibl is a painter. His themes—simple scenes of daily life—are a matter of indifference; the beauty of his pictures lies in their technique. They are works of which it may be said that every attempt to give an impression of them in words is useless, for they have not proceeded from delight in anecdotic theme, but, as in the good periods of art, from the discipline of the sense for colour and from an eminent capacity for drawing: they are pictures in which mere interest in subject is lost in the consideration of their artistic value, while the matter of what is represented is entirely thrown into the background by the manner in which it is carried out. The chief aim of the historical as of the genre painters had been to draw a fluent cartoon based upon single studies, to mix the colours nicely upon the palette, lay them upon the canvas according to the rules, blend them and let them dry, so as then to attain the proper harmony of colour by painting over again and finally glazing. Leibl’s mastery, which of itself resulted in an astonishing truth to nature, lay in seizing an impression as quickly as possible, taking hold of the reality rightly at the first glance, and transferring the colours to his canvas with decision and sureness, in clear accord with the hues of the original. Lessing’s maxim, “From the eyes straight to the arm and the brush,” has been realised here for the first time in Germany.

As yet no German had, in the same measure, what the painter calls qualities, and even in France two apparently heterogeneous faculties have seldom been united in one master in the same measure as they were in Leibl: a broad and large technique, a bold alla prima painting, and, on the other hand, a joy in work of detail with a fine brush, such as was known by Quentin Matsys, the smith of Antwerp. “The Village Politicians” of 1879 was the chief work that he painted in Schondorf. What would Knaus, the king of illustration and the ruler over the province of vignettes, have made out of this theme! By a literary evasion he would have subordinated the interest of the picture to his ideas. One would have learnt what it is that peasants read, and received instruction as to their political allegiance to party and their offices and honours in the village: that would be the magistrate, that the smith, and that the tailor. In Leibl there are true and simple peasants, who, by way of relaxation from the toil of the week, listen stupidly and indifferently to the reading of a Sunday paper, in which one of them is endeavouring to discover the village news and the price of crops. They are harsh-featured and common, but they have been spared theatrical embellishment and impertinent satire; they are not artistically grouped, though they sit there in all the rusticity of their physiognomies, and all the angularity of their attitudes, without polish or Sunday state. Leibl renders the reality without altering it, but he renders it fully and entirely. The fidelity to nature held fast on the canvas surpassed everything that had hitherto been seen, and it was gained, moreover, by the soundest and the simplest means. Whereas Lenbach, in his effort to reproduce the colour-effects of the old masters, destroyed the durability of his pictures even while he worked upon them, Leibl seemed to have chosen as his motto the phrase which DÜrer once used in writing to Jacob Heller: “I know that, if you preserve the picture well, it will be fresh and clean at the end of five hundred years, for it has not been painted as pictures usually are in these days.”

He took a further step in the direction of truth when he made a transition from the Dutch towards the old German masters. After he had, in his earlier productions, worked very delicately at the tone of his pictures, and, for a time, had particularly sought to attain specific effects of chiaroscuro, attaching himself to Rembrandt, he took up an independent position in his conception of colour, painting everything not as one of the old masters might have seen it, but as he had seen it himself. All the tricks of painting and sleights of virtuosity were despised, special emphasis being scarcely laid upon pictorial unity of effect. Everything was simple and true to nature, and had a sincerity which is not to be surpassed.

The picture of the three peasant women, “In Church,” is the masterpiece in this “second manner” of his, and when it appeared in the Munich International Exhibition of 1883 it was an event. From that date Leibl was established—at any rate in the artistic circles of Munich—as the greatest German painter of his time. That Leibl painted the picture without sketching for himself an outline, that he began with the eye of the peasant girl and painted bit by bit, like fragments of a mosaic, was a feat of technique in which there were few to imitate him. The young generation in Munich studied the pages of the service-book and the squares of the gingham dress, the girl’s jug and the carvings of the pew, with astonishment, as though they were the work of magic. They were beside themselves with delight over such unheard-of strength, power, and delicacy of modelling, the fusion of colour suggesting Holbein, and the intimate study of nature. They perpetually discovered new points that came upon them as a surprise, and many felt as Wilkie did when he sat in Madrid before the drinkers of Velasquez, and at last rose wearily with a sigh.

Leibl did for Germany what the pre-Raphaelites did for England. Men and women were represented with astonishing pains just as they sat and suffered themselves to be painted. He was determined to give the whole, pure truth, and he gave it; that, and nothing more and nothing less. He reproduced nature in her minutest traits and in her finest movements, bringing the imitative side of art to the highest perfection conceivable. In virtue of these qualities he was a born portrait painter; and although he never had “conception,” as Lenbach had, his portraits belong, with those of Lenbach, to the best German performances of the century. Only Holbein when he painted his “Gysze” had this remorseless manner of analysing the human countenance in every wrinkle. Leibl once more taught the German painters to go into detail, and led them constantly to hold nature as the only source of art; and that has been the beginning of every renaissance.

His works were pictorially the most complete expression of the aims of the Munich school in colour. As a representative of the efforts of the decade from 1870 he is as typical as Cornelius for the art of the thirties, Piloty for that of the fifties, and as Liebermann became later as a representative of the efforts of the eighties.

CHAPTER XXX

THE INFLUENCE OF THE JAPANESE

Courbet and Ribot for France, Holman Hunt and Madox Brown for England, Stevens for Belgium, Menzel, Lenbach, and Leibl for Germany, are the great names of modern Realism, the names of the men who subjected modern life to art, and subjected art to the nineteenth century.

One point, however, the question of colour, still remained unsolved: as the preceding generation took their form, so these painters took their colour, not from nature, but from the treasury of old art.

Courbet announced it as his programme to express the manners, ideas, and aspect of his age—in a word, to create living art. He described himself as the sincere lover of la vÉritÉ vraie: “la vÉritable peinture doit appeler son spectateur par la force et par la grande vÉritÉ de son imitation.” But one may question how far his figures, and the environment of them, are true in colour? Where there is a delightful subtlety of fleeting nuances in nature, an oppressive opaque heaviness is found in this modern Caravaggio of Franche-ComtÉ. He certainly painted modern stone-breakers, but it was in the tone of saints of the Spanish school of the seventeenth century. His pictures of artisans have the odour of the museum. The home of his men and women is not the open field of Ornans, but that room in the Louvre where hang the pictures of Caravaggio.

Alfred Stevens made a great stride by painting modern Parisiennes. Whereas the costume picture had up to his time sought the truth of the old masters only in the matter of the skirts which the fashion of their age prescribed, Stevens was the first to dress his women in the garb of 1860, just as Terborg painted his in the costume of 1660 and not of 1460. But the very atmosphere in which the Parisienne of the nineteenth century lived is no longer that in which the women of de Hoogh moved. The whole of life is brighter. The studios in which pictures are painted are brighter, and the rooms in which they are destined to hang. Van der Meer of Delft, the greatest painter of light amongst the Dutch, still worked behind little casements; and in dusky patrician dwellings, “where the very light of heaven breaks sad through painted window,” his pictures were ultimately hung. The old masters paid special attention to these conditions of illumination. The golden harmony of the Italian Renaissance came into being from the character of the old cathedrals furnished with glass windows of divers colours; the half-light of the Dutch corresponded to the dusky studios in which painters laboured, and the gloomy, brown-wainscoted rooms for which their pictures were destined. The nineteenth century committed the mistake even here of regarding what was done to meet a special case as something absolute. Rooms had long become bright when studios were artificially darkened, and artists still sought, by means of coloured windows and heavy curtains, to subdue the light, so as to be able to paint in tones dictated by the old masters. Stevens shed over a modern woman, a Parisienne, sitting in a drawing-room in the Avenue de Jena, the light of Gerard Dow, without reflecting that this illumination, filtered through little lattice-windows, was quite correct in Holland during the seventeenth century, but no longer proper in the Paris of 1860, in a salon where the windows had great cross-bars and clear white panes which were not leaded. It is chiefly this that makes his pictures untrue, lending them an old Flemish heaviness, something earthy, savouring of the clay, and not in keeping with the fresh fragrance of the modern Parisienne. Her modernity is seen through the yellowish glass which the old Flemish masters seemed to hold between Stevens and his model.

Considered as a separate personality Ribot, too, is a great artist; his works are masterpieces. Yet when young men spoke of him as the last representative of the school of cellar-windows there was an atom of truth in what they said. Like Courbet, he continued the art of galleries. The master of a style and yet the servant of a manner, he marks the summit of a tendency in which the great traditions of Frans Hals and Ribera were once more embodied. When he paints subjects resembling the themes of these old masters he is as great as they are, as genuine and as much a master of style; but as soon as he turns to other subjects the imitative mannerist is revealed. Even things as tender and unsubstantial as the flowers of the field seem as if they were made of wax. His disdain for what is light, fluent, and fickle, like air and water, is evident in his sea-pieces. His steamers plough their way through a greyish-black sea beneath a thick black stormy sky, as though through grey deserts. Nature quivering in the air and bathed in light is not so heavy and compact, nor has it such plasticity of appearance. His women reading are the ne plus ultra of painting; only it is astonishing that any human being can read in such a dark room.

Ribot’s parallel in Germany is Lenbach, who had less pictorial and greater intellectual power. As a painter of copies, particularly copies of the artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he formed and perfected a school for the understanding of the old masters, as none of his contemporaries had done. The copies which he made as a young man for Count Schack in Italy and Spain are probably the best translations by the brush that have ever been executed. He has reproduced Titian and Rubens, Velasquez and Giorgione, with equal magic; no other painter has entered into all the subtleties of their technique with such intelligence and keenness; and by the aid of these sleights of art, which he learnt as a copyist from classic masterpieces, he communicated to his own works that impress which qualifies them for the gallery and suggests the old masters with such refinement. His pictures mark the summit of ability reached in Germany in the pictorial style of the old artists.

But, at the same time, his weakness lies in this very eminence. The man who had passed through the high-school of the old masters with the greatest success was entered as a student for life, and never took the professorial chair himself. Helferich has called him the impersonated spirit of the galleries, the spirit which is centuries old.

This indicates the direction which must be taken by the further development of painting. A really new and independent art must finally emancipate itself from the Renaissance colouring, the tone of Church painting, and the chiaroscuro of pictures painted behind the variegated panes of lattice-windows. It must be evident that the methods of the old Spanish and old Dutch schools, excellent in themselves, were fully in keeping with strange scenes of martyrdom or quiet interiors with peasants and fat matrons, but that they could not possibly be employed in pictures of artisans beneath the free sky, nor in those of elegant interiors of our own days, nor of pale and delicate Parisiennes attired in silks, beings of a new epoch. A different period necessitates different methods. It is not merely that the subjects of art change, but the way in which they are handled must bear the marks of the period. Nature should no longer be studied through the prism of old pictures, and the phrase beau par la vÉritÉ must be exalted to a principle applying to colour also.

The pre-Raphaelites and Menzel were the first to become alive to the problem. They were never taken captive by the tones of the early masters, but placed themselves always in conscious opposition to the artists of older ages. The battle against “brown sauce” even formed an essential point in the programme of the Brotherhood. They protested against conventional colouring as violently as against the sweeping line taught by traditional rules of beauty.

But, as so often happens in the nineteenth century, though the English found the jewel, they did not understand how to cut it. The pre-Raphaelites had a quickening influence, in exciting a feeling for hue and tint, and rendering it keener by their own insistence on the elementary effects of colour. They sought to free themselves from brown sauce and to be just to local tones, through straightforward, independent observation. They painted the trees green, the earth grey, the sky blue, the sunbeams yellow, in sharply accentuated colours, as little blended as possible. But in most cases the result was not particularly pleasant; there was almost always a hard, motley colouring which produced a most unpleasant, glaring effect. Their audacity was somewhat barbaric. There was a want of warmth and softness, the atmosphere did not combine the whole by its mitigating and harmonising power. Even Madox Brown’s “Work” is an offensive chaos of crying colours. The bright clothes, the blue blouses, the red uniforms have a gaudy and unquiet effect. The problem was attacked, but the solution was harsh and crude.

Of Menzel’s pictures the same is true, though not perhaps in the same degree. In pictorial conception he also has not quite reached the summit. His method of painting is sometimes sparkling and full of spirit, holding the mean, more or less, between the quiet and plain painting of Meissonier and the crisp, glittering style of Fortuny; he lets off a flickering, dazzling, rocket-like firework, but at bottom he has been cut from the block from which draughtsmen are made. Sometimes it is astonishing how his brush sweeps over costumes, ornaments, and buildings, but he does not think in colour; it is supplementary to the drawing, and not of earlier origin, nor even of equal birth. Much as he tried to paint smoke and steam in his “Iron Mill,” he had no understanding for atmospheric life; for this reason harsh and glaring tones almost invariably make a disturbing effect in his works. His “Piazza d’Erbe” as well as his “King Wilhelm setting out to join the Army” have a motley and restless effect in the picture, and only in photography or black and white do they acquire something of the simplicity which is to be desired in the originals. The best of his drawings may stand beside the sketches of DÜrer without detriment; to place his pictures on the same level is impossible, because quietude and pure harmony are wanting in them.

So extremes meet. Courbet, Ribot, and Lenbach are greater connoisseurs of colour than Europe had seen previous to their appearance, but this they are at the expense of truth; they have identified themselves with the old masters, and not arrived at any personal conception of colour. Menzel and the pre-Raphaelites despised the old masters, but their conception of colour had something primitive, jarring, and undisciplined.

The note of truth was still missing in the mighty orchestra. By what possible means could it be supplied? How bring to perfection that great harmony which is ever the end and aim of all true artistic effort. It was not until the art of the Far East was unfolded before the eyes of Western painters that this disquieting problem reached its solution.

In the year in which Millet exhibited his “Winnower” and Courbet painted his “Stone-breakers” a man died in the Far East whose name was Hokusai. He was the last great representative of an art of painting more than a thousand years old—one which had no Raphael, Correggio, or Titian, though it was, nevertheless, art in the loftiest meaning of the word. Marco Polo, the great traveller of the Middle Ages, had told of a remarkable land “towards the sunrise,” the soil of which it was not permitted to him to tread. And the artistic views of the eighteenth century were revolutionised when the first Japanese porcelain and lacquer-work arrived at the Courts of Dresden and Paris. The aged Louis XIV himself began to find pleasure in idols, pagodas, and “stuffs printed with flowers.” In a short time these works formed an important part of superior collections, and led to the movement against the inflexible despotism of the pompous Lebrun style. For the Japanese gave Europe the unfettered principles of a freer intuition of beauty; they excited a preference for things which were unsymmetrical, capricious, full of movement, for everything by which the charming Louis XV style is to be distinguished from the tiresome academic art of Louis XIV. In the sixties of the nineteenth century Japan exerted, for the second time, a revolutionary influence on the development of European painting. If Japanese productions were in earlier days regarded as curiosities, for which place was to be found in cabinets of rarities, as trifles the artistic value of which was less prized than the dexterity of their construction, it was reserved for the present age to do justice to Japanese art as such.

As is well known, oil-painting exists neither in China nor Japan. Just as the Japanese choose the slightest material for building, so everything in their painting bears a trace of extreme lightness. Japanese pictures, kakemonos, are painted in water colour or Chinese ink upon framed silk or paper; but this paper has an advantage over the European article in its unsurpassed toughness, its remarkable softness and pliability, its surface which has either a dull, silky lustre, or may only be compared with the finest parchment. And the pictures themselves are kept rolled up, and only hung, as occasion offers, in the Tokonama, the little closet near the reception-room, and according to very refined rules. Only a few are hung at a time, and only such as harmonise. When a visit is expected the taste of the guest determines the selection. Fresh and variously coloured flowers and branches, placed near them in vases, are obliged to harmonise in colour with the pictures.

As an instrument for painting use is only made of the pliant brush of hair, which executes everything with a free and fluent effect. Pen, crayon, or chalk, and all hard mediums which offer resistance, are consistently excluded. The subject-matter of these pictures is surprisingly rich, and assumes for their proper understanding some acquaintance with Japanese literature. An opulent folk-lore, in which cannibals and heroes like Tom Thumb live and move and have their being, just as in European fairy stories, stands at the disposal of the artist. Historical representations from the life of fabulous national heroes, ghosts, and apparitions half man and half bird, alternate with simple landscapes and scenes from daily life. And in all pictures, whether they are fanciful or plain renderings of fact, attention is riveted by the same keenness of observation, the same refinement of taste, in the highest sense of the word by pictorial charm. After the Japanese have been long recognised as the first decorative artists in the world, after the highest praise has been accorded to them in the industrial crafts taken jointly—in lacquer-work and bronze work, weaving, embroidery, and pottery—they are now likewise celebrated as the most spirited draughtsmen in existence.

The Japanese artist lives with nature and in her as no artist of any other country has ever done. Life in the open air creates a relation to nature suggestive of the doctrines of Rousseau; it makes earth, sky, and water as familiar to man as are the beings that move in them. Every house, even in the centre of towns, has a garden laid out with fine taste, and combining beautiful flowers, trees, and cascades, everything incidental to the soil. The form of trees, the shape and colour of flowers, the ripple of leaves, and the gleaming mail of insects are so imprinted in the memory of the painter that his fancy can summon them at pleasure without the need of fresh study. The most fleeting moment of the life of nature is held as firmly in his mind as the everlasting form of rocks and gigantic trees shadowing the temple groves of Nippon. Every one of these artists works with the unfettered falcon glance of the child of nature. His keen eye sees in the flight of birds turns and movements first revealed to us by instantaneous photography. This quickness of eye and this astonishing exercise of memory enable him to obtain the most striking effects with the slightest means. If a Japanese executes figures, race, station, age, business, personality are all seized with the keenest vision, and pregnantly rendered in their essential features. Robes and unclad forms, heads and limbs, animated and still nature, are all reproduced with the same reality. Yet little as the doctrine ever gained ground that to create works of art nature should be mastered upon a system, trivial realism was just as little at any time the vogue.

The love of nature is born in the Japanese, but the photographic imitation, the servile reproduction of reality, is never his ultimate aim. Geoffroy has noted with much subtlety the resemblance which exists between Japanese poets and painters in this respect. Their poets never describe, but only endeavour to express a spiritual feeling, to hold a memory fast—the blitheness of smiling pleasure, the mournfulness of vanished joy. They sing of the mist passing over the mountain summits, the fishing boats, the reeds by the seashore, the plash of waves, the flying streaks of cloud, the sunset streaming purple over the weary world. The same economy of means, the same sureness in the choice of characteristic features, and a similar rapidity in striking the keynote are peculiar to the painters. They, too, express themselves by the scantiest means, shrink from saying too much, and aim only at a rapid and right expression of total effect, leaving to the imagination the task of supplementing and amplifying what is given. The heaviness of matter is overcome, the absurd pretence of reality not attempted. Like the French of the eighteenth century, the Japanese possess the sportive grace, the esprit of the brush hovering over objects, extracting merely their bloom and essence, and using them as the basis for free and independent caprices of beauty. They have the remarkable faculty of being synthetic and discarding every ponderous and disturbing element, without losing the local accent in a landscape or a figure. They fasten upon the most vivid impression of things, but in great, comprehensive lines, subordinating every peculiarity to the light which shines upon them and the shadow in which they are muffled. Their handwriting is at once broad and precise, graceful and bizarre. What a nonchalant, fragile, piquant, or coquettish effect have their feminine figures! And but a few firm strokes sufficed to create the impression. A dexterous sweep of the brush was all that was necessary for the modelling, all that was wanted to summon the idea of the velvet softness of the flesh and the firmness of the bosom. Or surging waves have been painted, or foaming cataracts. But with what consummate mastery, with what peculiar knowledge, the swirl and eddying of the waters have been represented. And how slight are the means which have been employed! Everything has the freshness of life, and the sheer, intangible movement of objects has been caught by a simple and decisive line. A few dashes of Chinese ink are made, and the forcible strokes unite without effort in forming a mountain path or a hillside stream foaming over rocks and trees. Or the prow of a vessel is represented. Nothing is to be seen of the water, and yet it is as if the waves were rocking the ship. The billow swells, rises, and sinks, suggesting the wide sea, the rhythm in the universe. The lines in which the motives are executed render only what is essential. But combined with this striving after simplified form there is a sense of space which of itself, as it were, controls everything, producing the poetic illusion of distance.

The Japanese are masters of the art of enlarging a narrow picture frame to a great expanse, and indicating by a few strokes the distance between foreground and horizon. There is often nothing, or next to nothing, in the wide space, but proximity and distance are so correctly related that all the geological structure is clear, whilst light air is pervasive, giving the eye a vision of boundless perspective. The spur of a headland, the bank of a river, or a cleft between two mountains enables the eye to measure far landscapes. In the presence of their works one dreams, one has the presentiment of infinite distances. They divest objects of their earthiness by bold simplifications, and transform reality into dreamland. It is the spirit of things, their smile, and their intangible perfume which live in these veiled masterpieces which are yet so precise.

The bold irregularity of Japanese works, which know nothing of the stiffness of symmetrical composition, contributes much to this impression. Their pictures are never “composed” in our sense of the word, but rather resemble the instantaneous pictures of photographers. A bird is seen to dart past, only half visible, a cluster of trees is a chance slice from the forest, as it is seen out of the window of a railway train whizzing past. Or it is merely the bough of a tree with a bird upon it that stretches into the picture, which is otherwise filled with a fragment of blue sky. Without appearing to concern themselves about it, they compose little poems of grace and freshness, with a frog, a butterfly, and a blossoming apple-branch sprouting out of a vase. They play with beetles, grasshoppers, tortoises, crabs, and fish as did the artists of the Renaissance with Cupids and angels.

And in everything, as regards colour too, the Japanese have a strain of refinement peculiar to themselves. It is as though they were controlled by the finest tact, as by a force majeure, even in their intuition of colour. That great harmony of which ThÉodore Rousseau spoke, and to which it was the aim of his life to attain, is reached by the Japanese artist almost instinctively. The most vivid effects of red and green trees, yellow roads, and blue sky are represented; the most refined effects of light are rendered—illuminated bridges, dark firmaments, the white sickle of the moon, glittering stars, the bright and rosy blossoms of spring, the dazzling snow as it falls upon trim gardens; and there are discords nowhere. How heavy and motley our colouring is compared with these delicious chords, set beside each other so boldly, and invariably so harmonious. Is it that our eyes are by nature less delicate? or is everything in the Japanese only the result of a more rational training? We have not the same intense force of perception, this instinctive and sensuous gift of colour. Their colouring is a delight to the eyes, a magic potion. Offence is nowhere given by a glaring or an entirely crude tone; everything is finely calculated, delicately indicated, and has that melting softness so enchanting in Japanese enamel. The simplest chords of colour are often the most effective; nothing can be more charming than the delicate duet of grey and gold. And the cheapest wood-cut has often all these refinements in common with the most costly kakemono. Even here, where they turn to lowly things, their art is never vulgar, but maintains itself at such an aristocratic height that we barbarians of the West, blessed with oleographs and Academies of Art, can only look up with envy to this nation of connoisseurs.

The oldest of these Japanese artists working in wood-cut engraving was Matahei, who lived in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and executed scenes from the theatres and Japanese family and street life. Icho and Moronobu followed at the close of the seventeenth century, the one being a spirited caricaturist, the other a genuine baroque artist of noble and classic reserve. Through the masters of the eighteenth century, as through Eisen, Fragonard, and Boucher, this reproductive art took fresh development. The soft girls of SoukÉnobu with their delicate round faces, the graceful beauties of Harunobu arrayed in costly toilettes, the tall feminine forms of the marvellous Outamaro in all their provocative charm, the vivid scenes from popular life of the great colourist Shunsho, are works pervaded with a delicate perfume of which Edmond de Goncourt alone could render any impression in words.

Outamaro, the poet of women, was, in a special sense, the Watteau of aristocratic life in Japan. He knew the life of the Japanese woman as no other has ever done—her domestic occupations, her walks and her charming graces, her vanities and her love affairs. He knew also the scenes of nature which she contemplated, the streets through which she passed, and the banks along which she sauntered with an undulating step. His women are slender beings, isolated like idols, and standing motionless in poses hieratically august; Æsthetic souls, who swoon and grow pale under the sway of disquieting visions; fading flowers, forms roaming wearily by the verge of a lonely sea or a sluggish stream, or flitting timidly, like bats, through the soft brilliancy of lights amid a festival by night. And in killing what is fleshly and physical he renders the faces visionary and dreamy, renders the hands and the gestures finer, and at the same time subdues and mitigates the colours and the splendour of the clothes, taking pleasure in dying chords, in deep black and tender white, in fine, pallid nuances of rose-colour and lilac. Every one of his pupils became a fresh chronicler of aristocratic life. Toyohami painted night festivals; Toyoshiru, animated crowds; Toyokumi, scenes of the theatre; Kunisada, women upon their walks; Kunioshi, melodramatic representations full of pomp, with marvellous fantastic landscapes.

The nineteenth century brought the widest popularisation of art, corresponding more or less to the “resort to popular national life,” as the beginning of modern genre painting and of the modern art of illustration was called in Germany. The refined son of Nippon shrugs his shoulders over these last creations of Japanese reproduction in colours; he prefers those earlier charming masters of grace, and misses the aristocratic cachet in the new men, with as much justification as the refined European collector has when he does not care to place the plates of Granville or DorÉ in a portfolio with those of Eisen or Fragonard. Nevertheless amongst the draughtsmen who followed the popular tendency there was at any rate one great genius, one of the most important artists of his country, who became more familiar to Europe than any of his other compatriots: this was Hokusai.

All the qualities of Japanese art are united in him as in a focus. His work is the encyclopÆdia of a whole nation, and in his technical qualities he stands by the side of the greatest men in Europe. He is the most attentive observer, a painter of manners as no other has ever been; he takes strict measure of everything, analysing the slightest movements. He draws the solid things of earth, the immovable rocks, the everlasting primÆval mountains, and yet follows the changing phenomena of light and shade upon its surface. He has, in the highest degree, that peculiarly Japanese quality of giving tangible expression to the movements of things and living creatures. His men and women gesticulate, his animals run, his birds fly, his reptiles crawl, his fish swim; the leaves on the trees, the water of the rivers, and the sea and the clouds of the sky move gently. He is a magnificent landscape painter, celebrating all the seasons, from blossoming spring to ice-bound winter. In his designs he maps out orchards, fields, and woods, follows the winding course of rivers, summons a fine mist from the sea, sends the waves surging forward, and the billows racing up against the rocks and losing themselves as murmuring rivulets in the sand. But he is also a philosopher and a poet of wide flight, who makes the boldest journeys into the land of dreams. His imagination rises above the work-a-day world, rides upon the chimera, bodies forth a new life, creates monsters, and tells visions of terrible poetry. The deep feeling of the primitive masters revives in him, and he appears as a strange mystic, when he paints his blithe ethereal goddesses, or that old Buddhist who, when banished, came every day across the sea, as the legend tells, to behold once more Fuji, the sacred mountain.

Hokusai was born in 1760, amid flowery gardens in a quiet corner of Yeddo, fourteen years after Goya and twelve years after David. His father was purveyor of metallic mirrors to the Court. Hokusai took lessons from an illustrator, but does not seem to have been much known until his fortieth or fiftieth year. In 1810 he first founded an industrial school of art, which attracted numbers of young people. To provide them with a compendium of instruction in drawing he published in 1810 the first volume of his Mangwa. From that time he was recognised as the head of a school. When his fame began to spread he changed his residence almost every month to protect himself from troublesome visitors. And just as often did he alter his name. Even that under which he became famous in Europe is only a pseudonym, like “Gavarni”: amongst various noms de guerre it was that which he bore the longest and by which he was definitely recognised.

As a painter he was only active in his youth. The achievement of his life is not his pictures, but a magnificent series of illustrated books, a life’s work richer than that of any of his compatriots. Like Titian and Corot, fate had predestined him to reach a very great age without ever growing old.

“From my sixth year,” he writes in the preface to one of his books, “I had a perfect mania for drawing every object that I saw. When I had reached my fiftieth year I published a vast quantity of drawings; but I am unsatisfied with all that I have produced before my seventieth year. At seventy-three I had some understanding of the form and real nature of birds, fish, and plants. At eighty I hope to have made further progress, and at ninety to have discovered the ultimate foundation of things. In my hundredth year I shall rise to yet higher spheres unknown, and in my hundred and tenth, every stroke, every point, and in short everything that comes from my hand will be alive.” Hokusai certainly did not reach so great an age as that. He died at eighty-nine, on 13th April 1849, and is buried in the temple at Yeddo. During the period between 1815 and 1845 he published about eighty great works, altogether over five hundred volumes.

“I rose from my seat at the window, where I had idled the whole day long ... softly, softly.... Then I was up and away.... I saw the countless green leaves tremble in the densely embowered tops of the trees; I watched the flaky clouds in the blue sky, collecting fantastically into shapes torn and multiform.... I sauntered here and there carelessly, without aim or volition.... Now I crossed the Bridge of Apes and listened as the echo repeated the cry of the wild cranes.... Now I was in the cherry-grove of Owari.... Through the mists shifting along the coast of Miho I descried the famous pines of Suminoye.... Now I stood trembling upon the Bridge of Kameji and looked down in astonishment at the gigantic Fuki plants.... Then the roar of the dizzy waterfall of Ono resounded in my ear. A shudder ran through me.... It was only a dream which I dreamed, lying in bed near my window with this book of pictures by the master as a cushion beneath my head.”

In these words a learned Japanese has indicated the great range of subject, the unspeakably rich material of the works of the master. By preference he leads us to the work-places of artisans, to woodcarvers, smiths, workers in metal, dyers, weavers, and embroiderers. Then come the pleasures of the nobility, who are displayed in their refinement, reserve, and dignity; the country-folk at their daily avocations, or making merry upon holidays; the fantastic shapes of fabulous animals and demons, who figure in the life of Japanese national heroes, mighty with the sword; apparitions, drunken men, wrestlers, street figures of every conceivable description, mythical reptiles, snow-clad mountain tops, waving rice-fields lashed by the wind, woodland glens, strange gateways of rock, far views over waters with cliffs clothed with pine.

The most celebrated of those works which contain landscapes exclusively are the views, published in three volumes in 1834-36, of the mountain of Fuji, the great volcano rising close by Yeddo, and from old time playing a part in the works of Japanese landscape painters. In Hokusai’s book the cone of the mountain is sometimes seen rising clear in a cloudless sky, whilst it is sometimes shrouded by clouds of various shapes. Its beautiful outline glimmers through the meshes of a net, through the spindrift of snow falling in great flakes, or through a curtain of rain splashing vertically down. It rises from misty valleys coloured by the rays of the evening sun, or is reflected—itself out of sight—in the smooth surface of a lake, upon the reedy shores of which the wild geese cackle, or it stands in ghostly outlines against the night sky flooded with silver moonlight. Summer breezes and winter storms drive over it, rattling showers of hail, lashed by the wind, or light falls of snow descend round it. In spring the blossoms of peach and plum-trees flutter to the earth, like swarms of white and rosy butterflies. Only famished wolves or dragons, which popular superstition has located in the mountain of Fuji, occasionally animate the grandiose solitude of the landscape.

“Never,” says Gonse, “has a more dexterous hand rested upon paper. It is impossible to study his plates without an excited feeling of pleasure, for they are absolute perfection, the highest that Japanese art has produced in freshness, brilliancy, life, and originality. Hokusai’s capacity of giving the impression of relief and colour with a stroke of the brush has nothing like it except in Rembrandt, Callot, and Goya. Men, animals, landscapes, and everything in his drawings are reduced to their simplest expression. Groups are seen in motion, priests in procession, soldiers on the march, and often a single stroke is sufficient to render an individual or create the impression of life and movement. Every plate is a masterpiece of coloured woodcut engraving, of singular flavour in colour, delightful in its gravely harmonised chord of golden yellow, faded green, and fiery red, to which are sometimes added golden, silvern, and other metallic tones.”

After the beginning of the sixties Paris came under the captivating influence of Japan. And there is no doubt that as the English influenced the landscape painters of Fontainebleau, the Venetians Delacroix, and the Neapolitan masters Courbet and Ribot, the newest phase of French art, which took its departure from Manet, was inaugurated by the enthusiasm for things Japanese. From the moment when the peculiar isolation of Japan was ended by the breaking up of the Japanese feudal state, Paris was flooded by splendid works of Japanese art. A painter discovered amongst the mass of articles newly arrived albums, colour prints, and pictures. Their drawing, colouring, and composition deviated from everything hitherto accounted as art, and yet the Æsthetic character of these works was too artistic to permit of any one smiling over them as curiosities. Whether the discoverer was Alfred Stevens or Diaz, Fortuny, James Tissot, or Alphonse Legros, the enthusiasm for the Japanese swept over the studios like a storm. The artistic world never wearied of admiring the capricious ability of these compositions, the astonishing power of drawing, the fineness in tone, the originality of pictorial effect, nor of wondering at the refined simplicity of the means by which these results were achieved. Japanese art made itself felt by its fresh and tender charm, its creative opulence, its lightness and delicacy of observation; it arrested attention because directness, unfailing tact, and inherent distinction were of the essence of its conception; and it was recognised as the production of a nation of artists combining the subtilised taste of an originally refined civilisation with the freshness of feeling peculiar to primitive people. Colour prints, now to be had for a few francs at every bazaar, were bought at the highest figures. Every new consignment was awaited with feverish impatience. Old ivory, enamel, porcelain and embellished pottery, bronzes and wood and lacquer-work, ornamented stuffs, embroidered silks, albums, books of wood-cuts, and knick-knacks were scarcely unpacked in the shop before they found their way into the studios of artists and the libraries of scholars. In a short time great collections of the artistic productions of Japan passed into the hands of the painters Manet, James Tissot, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Degas, Carolus Duran, and Monet; of the engravers Bracquemond and Jules Jacquemart; of the authors Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Champfleury, Philippe Burty, and Zola; and of the manufacturers Barbedienne and Christofle.

The International Exhibition of 1867 brought Japan still more into fashion, and from this year must be dated the peculiar influence of the West upon the East and the East upon the West. The Japanese came over to study at the European polytechnic institutes, universities, and military academies. On the other hand, we became the pupils of the Japanese in art. Even during the course of the Exhibition a group of artists and critics founded a Japanese society of the “Jinglar,” which met every week in SÈvres at the house of Solon, the director of the manufactory. They used a Japanese dinner-service, designed by Bracquemond, and everything except the napkins, cigars, and ash-trays was Japanese. One of the members, Dr. Zacharias Astruc, published in L’Étendard a series of articles upon “The Empire of the Rising Sun,” which made a great sensation. Soon afterwards the Parisian theatres brought out Japanese ballets and fairy plays. Ernest d’Hervilly wrote his Japanese piece La Belle SaÏnara, which LemÈre printed for him in Japanese fashion and paged from right to left, giving it a yellow cover designed by Bracquemond. A Japanese ballet was performed at the opera, and a Japanese turn was given to the toilettes of women.

For painters Japanese art was a revelation. Here was uttered the word that hovered on so many lips, and that no one had dared to pronounce. With what a fleeting touch, and yet with what precision, with what incomparable sureness, lightness, and grace, was everything carried out. How intuitive and spontaneous, how imaginative and how full of suggestion, how effortless and how rich in surprises, was this strange art. How happily was industry united with caprice, and nonchalance with endeavour at the highest finish. How suggestive was this disregard for symmetry, this piquant method of introducing a flower, an insect, a frog, or a bird here and there, merely as a pictorial spot in the picture. How the Japanese understood the art of expressing much with few means, where the Europeans toiled with a great expenditure of means to express little.

It would certainly have been an exceedingly false move if a direct imitation of the Japanese had been thought of. Japanese art is the product of a sensuous people, and European art that of intellectual nations. The latter is greater and more serious; it is nobler, and it reaches heights of expression not attained by the grotesque and terrible distortions and the morbidly droll or melancholy outbursts of sentiment known to the Japanese. Our imagination is alien to that of these children of the sensuous world, who quake and tremble for joy, horrify themselves with their masks, and pass from convulsive laughter to sheer terror, and from the shudder of hallucination to ecstatic bliss. Had Japanese art been coarsely transposed by imitators it would have led to caricature.

But if its poetics were little suitable for Europe in the specialised case, they nevertheless contained general laws better fitted for modern art than those which had been hitherto borrowed from Greece. All arts, music as well as poetry, were then striving for the dissolution of simple, tyrannical rhythms. The recurrence of unyielding measures beaten out with unwavering repetition no longer corresponded with the complicated, neurotic emotions of the new age. In painting, likewise, exertions were being made to burst the old shell, and a style was sought after for the treatment of modern life which had been violently handled in the effort to force it to fit the Procrustean bed of traditional rules. Then came the Japanese with their astonishing, rapid, and pictorial sketches, and revealed a new method for the interpretation of nature. At a time when the symmetrical balance of lines, borrowed from the works of the Renaissance masters, became wearisome in its monotony, they taught a much freer architecture of form, and one which was broken by charming caprices. Where there had been rhythm, tension, clarity, largeness, and quietude in the old European painting, there was in them a nervous freedom, an artful carelessness, and life and charm. Art was concealed beneath the fancy shown in their facile construction, which seemed to have been improvised by nature herself. An artistic method of deviating from geometrical arrangement, freedom of distribution, unforced and unsymmetrical structure, in the place of balance and construction according to rules, were learnt from the Japanese in the matter of composition.

At the same time, they threw light upon what had been flat and trivial in Courbet’s realism. These spirited narrators never told a story for the sake of telling it; they never painted to give a prosaic copy of some particle of reality. They liberated European painting from the heaviness of matter, and rendered it tender and delicate. They taught that art of not saying everything, which says so much, the method of compendious drawing, the secret of expanding distance by a special treatment of lines, the touch thrown rapidly in, the unforeseen, the surprise, the fleeting hint, the way of increasing effect by the incompletion of motive, the suggestion of the whole by a part. Artists learnt from them another manner of drawing and modelling, a manner of giving the impression of the object without the need for the whole of it being executed, so that one knows that it is there only through one’s knowledge. They brought in the taste for pithy sketches dealing only with essentials, the consciousness of the endless catalogue of what may be contained—in life, reality, and fancy—by one fluent outline. They introduced the preference for perspective bird’s-eye views, the disposition to throw groups, dense masses, and crowds more into the distance, and render them more animated and vivid by a relief of the foreground, which (though confirmed by photography) is apparently improbable.

The influence of Japan on colouring is just as visible as upon composition and drawing. It had been clearly shown in Courbet’s pictures of artisans that the rules of the Bolognese school, with their brown sauce and their red shadows, could not possibly be applied to objects in the open air. It was therefore necessary to discover a new principle of colour for modern subjects, a principle by which oil-painting would be divested of its oil, and light and air would come to their rights. It was seen from the works of the painters of Nippon that it was not absolutely necessary to paint brown to be a painter. They taught a new method of seeing things, opened the eyes to the changing play of the phenomena of light, the fugitive nature and constant mutability of which had up to this time seemed to mock at every rendering. The softness of their bright harmonies was studied and artistically transposed.

These are the points in which Japanese art has had a revolutionary effect upon the development of European. Each one of those who at that time belonged to the Society of the Jinglar has had more or less experience of its influence. Alfred Stevens owes to it certain delicacies of colouring; Whistler, his exquisite refinement of tone and his capriciously artistic method in the treatment of landscape; Degas, his fantastic and free grouping, his unrivalled audacities of composition. Manet especially became now the artist to whom history does honour, and Louis Gonse tells a story with a very characteristic touch of the first exhibition of the MaÎtres impressionistes. He went there, coming from the official Salon in the company of a Japanese, and, while the French public declared the fresh brightness of the pictures to be untrue and barbaric, the son of sacred Nippon, accustomed from youth to see nature in light, airy tones without a yellow coating of varnish, said: “Over there I was in an exhibition of oil-pictures, here I feel as if I were entering a flowery garden. What strikes me is the animation of these figures, and the feeling is one I have never had elsewhere in your picture exhibitions.”

CHAPTER XXXI

THE IMPRESSIONISTS

The name Impressionists dates from an exhibition in Paris which was got up at Nadar’s in 1871. The catalogue contained a great deal about impressions—for instance, “Impression de mon pot au feu,” “Impression d’un chat qui se promÈne.” In his criticism Claretie summed up the impressions and spoke of the Salon des Impressionistes.

The beginning of the movement, however, came about the middle of the sixties, and Zola was the first to champion the new artists with his trenchant pen. Assuming the name of his later hero Claude, he contributed in 1866 to L’ÉvÉnement, under the title Mon Salon, that article which swamped the office with such a flood of indignant letters and occasioned such a secession of subscribers that the proprietor of the paper, the sage and admirable M. de Villemessant, felt himself obliged to give the naturalist critic an anti-naturalistic colleague in the person of M. ThÉodore Pelloquet. In these reviews of the Salon, collected in 1879 in the volume Mes Haines, and in the essay upon Courbet, the Painter of Realism—Courbet, the already recognised “master of Ornans “—those theories are laid down which Lantier and his friends announced at a later date in L’Œuvre. Then the architect Dubiche, one of the members of the young BohÈme, dreamed in a spirit of presage of a new architecture. “With passionate gestures he demanded and insisted upon the formula for the architecture of this democracy, that work in stone which should give expression to it, a building in which it should feel itself at home, something strong and forcible, simple and great, something already proclaimed in our railway stations and our markets in the grace and power of their iron girders, but purified and made beautiful, declaring the largeness of our conquests.” A few years went by, and then the Paris Centenary Exhibition provided that something, though it was not in monumental stone. The great edifices were fashioned of glass and iron, and the mighty railway buildings were their forerunners. The enormous engine-rooms which gave space for thousands and the Eiffel Tower announced this new architecture. And as Dubiche prophesied a new architecture, so did Claude prophesy a new painting. “Sun and open air and bright and youthful painting are what we need. Let the sun come in and render objects as they appear under the illumination of broad daylight.” In Zola Claude Lantier is the martyr of this new style. He is scorned, derided, avoided, and cast out. His best picture is smuggled, through grace and mercy, into the Exhibition by a friend upon the hanging committee as a charitÉ. But, ten years after, these new doctrines had penetrated all the studios of Paris and of Europe like germs borne in the air.

The artistic ideas of Claude Lantier were given to Zola by his friend Édouard Manet, the father of Impressionism, and in that way the creator of the newest form of art. Manet appeared for the first time in 1862. In 1865, when the Committee of the Salon gave up a few secondary rooms to the rejected, the first of his pictures which made any sensation were to be seen—a “Scourging of Christ” and a picture of a girl with a cat resting—both invariably surrounded by a dense circle of the scornful. Forty years before, the first works of the Romanticists, whose doctrine was likewise scoffed at in the formula Le laid c’est le beau, had called forth a similar outcry against the want of taste common to them all. A generation later people laughed at “The Funeral in Ornans,” and now the same derision was directed against Manet, who completed Courbet’s work. His pictures were held to be a practical joke which the painter was playing upon the public, the most unheard of farce that had ever been painted. If any one had declared that these works would give the impulse to a revolution in art, people would have turned their backs upon him or thought that he was jesting. “Criticism treated Manet,” wrote Zola, “as a kind of buffoon who put out his tongue for the amusement of street boys.” The rage against “The Scourging of Christ” went so far that the picture had to be protected by special precautions from the assaults of sticks and umbrellas.

But the matter took a somewhat different aspect when, five years afterwards, from twenty to thirty more recent pictures were exhibited together in Manet’s studio. Whether it was because the aims of the painter had become clearer in the meanwhile, or because his works suffered less from the proximity of others, they made an impression, and that although they represented nothing in the least adventurous and sensational. Life-size figures, light and almost without shadow, rowed over blue water, hung out white linen, watered green flower-pots, and leant against grey walls. The light colours placed immediately beside each other had a bizarre effect on the eye accustomed to chiaroscuro. The eye, which, like the human spirit, has its habitudes, and believes that it always sees nature as she is painted, was irritated by these delicately chosen tone-values which seemed to it arbitrary, by these novel harmonies which it took for discords. Nevertheless the clarity of the pictures made a striking effect, and something of “Manet’s sun” lingered in the memory. People still laughed, only not so loud, and they gave Manet credit for having the courage of his convictions. “A remarkable circumstance has to be recorded. A young painter has followed his personal impressions quite ingenuously, and has painted a few things which are not altogether in accord with the principles taught in the schools. In this way he has executed pictures which have been a source of offence to eyes accustomed to other paintings. But now, instead of abusing the young artist through thick and thin, we must be first clear as to why our eyes have been offended, and whether they ought to have been.” With these words criticism began to take Manet seriously. Charles Ephrussi and Duranty, besides Zola, came forward as his first literary champions in the press. “Manet is bold” was now the phrase used about him in public. The Impressionists took the salon by storm. And Manet’s bright and radiant sun was seen to be a better thing than the brown sauce of the Bolognese. It was as if a strong power had suddenly deranged the focus of opinion in all the studios, and Manet’s victory brought the same salvation to French art as that of Delacroix had done forty years before and that of Courbet ten years before. Manet et manebit. Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet are the three great names of modern French painting, the names of the men who gave it the most decisive impulses.

Édouard Manet, le maÎtre impressioniste, was born in 1832, in the Rue Bonaparte, exactly opposite the École des Beaux-Arts, and his life was quietly and simply spent, without passion and excitement, unusual events, or sanguinary battles. At sixteen, having passed through the CollÈge Rollin, he entered the navy with the permission of his parents, and made a voyage to Rio de Janeiro, which was accomplished without any incident of interest, without shipwreck or any one being drowned. With his cheerful, even temperament he looked on the boundless sea and satiated his eyes with the marvellous spectacle of waves and horizon, never to forget it. The luminous sky was spread before him, the great ocean rocked and sported around, revealing colours other than he had seen in the Salon. On his return he gave himself up entirely to painting. He is said to have been a slight, pale, delicate, and refined young man when he became a pupil of Couture in 1851, almost at the same time as Feuerbach. Nearly six years he remained with the master of “The Decadent Romans,” without a suspicion of how he was to find his way, and even after he had left the studio he was still pursued by the shade of Couture; he worked without knowing very well what he really wanted. Then he travelled, visiting Germany, Cassel, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and Munich, where he copied the portrait of Rembrandt in the Pinakothek; and then he saw Florence, Rome, and Venice. Under the influence of the Neapolitan and Flemish artists, to whom Ribot, Courbet, and Stevens pointed at the time, he gradually became a painter. His first picture, “The Child with Cherries,” painted in 1859, reveals the influence of Brouwer. In 1861 he exhibited, for the first time, the “double portrait” of his parents, for which he received honourable mention, although—or because—the picture was entirely painted in the old Bolognese style. These works are only of interest because they make it possible to see the rapidity with which Manet learnt to understand his craft with the aid of the old masters, and the sureness and energy with which he followed, from the very beginning, the realistic tendency initiated by Courbet. “The Nymph Surprised,” in 1862, was a medley of reminiscences from Jordaens, Tintoretto, and Delacroix. His “Old Musician,” executed with diligence but trivial in its realism, had the appearance of being a tolerable Courbet. Then he made—not at first in Madrid, which he only knew later, but in the Louvre—the eventful discovery of another old master, not yet known in all his individuality to the master of Ornans.

At the great Manchester Exhibition of 1857 Velasquez had been revealed to the English; in the beginning of the sixties he was discovered by the French. William Stirling’s biography of Velasquez was translated into French by G. Brunet, and provided with a Catalogue raisonnÉ by W. BÜrger. The works of Charles Blanc, ThÉophile Gautier, and Paul Lefort appeared, and in a short time Velasquez, of whom the world outside Madrid had hitherto known little, was in artistic circles in Paris a familiar and frequently cited personality, who began not only to occupy the attention of the historians of art, but of artists also. Couture was in the habit of saying to his pupils that Velasquez had not understood the orchestration of tones, that he had an inclination to monochrome, and that he had never comprehended the nature of colour. From the beginning of the sixties France came under the sway of that serious feeling for colour known to the great Spaniard, and Manet was his first enthusiastic pupil. Certain of his single figures against a pearl-grey background—“The Fifer,” “The Guitarero,” “The Bull-fighter wounded to Death”—were the decisive works in which, with astonishing talent, he declared himself as the pupil of Velasquez. W. BÜrger praised Velasquez as le peintre le plus peintre qui fÛt jamais. As regards the nineteenth century, the same may be said of Manet. Only Frans Hals and Velasquez had these eminent pictorial qualities. In the way in which the black velvet dress, the white silk band, and the red flag were painted in the toreador picture, there was a feeling for beauty which bore witness to the finest understanding of the great Spaniard. In his “Angels at the Tomb of Christ” he has sought, as little as did Velasquez in his picture of the Epiphany, to introduce any trace of heavenly expression into the faces, but as a piece of painting it takes its place amongst the best religious pictures of the century. His “Bon Bock”—a portrait of the engraver Belot, a stout jovial man smoking a pipe as he sits over a glass of beer—is one of those likenesses which stamp themselves upon the memory like the “Hille Bobbe” of Frans Hals. “Faure as Hamlet” stands out from the vacant light grey background like the “Truhan Pablillos” of Velasquez. The doublet and mantle are of black velvet, the mantle lined with rose-coloured silk; and the toilette is completed by a broad black hat with a large black feather. He seems as though he had just stepped to the footlights, and stands there with his legs apart, the mantle thrown over the left arm, and his right hand closing upon his sword. The cool harmony of black, white, grey, and rose-colour makes an uncommonly refined effect. Manet has the rich artistic methods of Velasquez in a measure elsewhere only attained by Raeburn, and as the last of these studies he has created in his “Enfant À l’ÉpÉe” a work which—speaking without profanity—might have been signed by the great Spaniard himself. In the beginning of the sixties, when he gave a separate exhibition of his works, Courbet is said to have exclaimed upon entering, “Nothing but Spaniards!”

But even this following of the Spaniards indicated an advance upon Courbet; it meant the triumph over brown sauce and a closer approximation to truth. For, amongst all the old masters, Velasquez and Frans Hals—who greatly resemble each other in this respect—are the simplest and most natural in their colouring; they are not idealists in colour like Titian, Paul Veronese, and Rubens, nor do they labour upon the tone of their pictures like the Dutch “little masters” and Chardin. They paint their pictures in the broad and common light of day. Their flesh-tint is truer than the juicy tint of the Venetians, and the fiery red of Rubens, with his shining reflections. Beside Velasquez, as Justi says, the colouring of Titian seems conventional, that of Rembrandt fantastic, and that of Rubens is tinged with something which is not natural. Or, as a contemporary of Velasquez expressed himself: “Everything else, old and new, is painting; Velasquez alone is truth.”

Thus the difference between the youthful works of Manet and those of his predecessor Courbet is the difference between Velasquez and Caravaggio. Of course, in Manet’s earliest pictures there were found the broad, dull red-brown surfaces which characterise the works of the Bolognese and the Neapolitans. A cool silver tone, a shadowless treatment gleaming in silver, has now taken the place of this warm brown sauce. He has the white of Velasquez, his cool subdued rose-colour, his delicate grey which has been so much admired and against which every touch of colour stands out clear and determined, and that celebrated black of the Spaniard which is never heavy and dull, but makes such a light and transparent effect. What is bright is contrasted with what is bright, and light colours are placed upon a silvery grey background. The most perfect modelling and plastic effect is attained without the aid of strong contrasts of shadow. Thus he closed his apprenticeship to the old masters by being able to see with the eyes of that old master whose vision was the truest.

This was the point of departure for Manet’s further development. The study of Velasquez did not merely set him free from sauce; it also started the problem of painting light. He went through a course of development similar to that of the old Spaniard himself. When Velasquez painted his first picture with a popular turn, the “Bacchus,” he still stood upon the ground of the tenebrous painters; he represented an open-air scene with the illumination of a closed room. Although the ceremony is taking place in broad daylight, the people seem to be sitting in a dingy tavern, receiving light from a studio window to the left. Ten years afterwards, when he painted “The Smithy of Vulcan,” he had emancipated himself from this Bolognese tradition, which he spoke of henceforward as “a gloomy and horrible style.” The deep and sharply contrasted shadows have vanished, and daylight has conquered the light of the cellar. The great equestrian portraits which followed gave Mengs occasion to remark, even a hundred years ago, that Velasquez was the first who understood how to paint what is “ambiant,” the air filling the vacuum between objects. And at the end of his life he solved the final problem in “The Women Spinning.” In the “Bacchus” might be found the treatment of an open-air scene in the key of sauce, but here was the glistening of light in an interior. The sun quivers over silken stuffs, falls upon the dazzling necks of women, plays through coal-black Castilian locks, renders one thing plastically distinct and another pictorially vague, dissolves corporeality, and lends surface the rounding of life. Contours touched with the brightness of light surround the heads of the girls at work. The shadows are not warm brown but cool grey, and the tints of reflected light play from one object to another.

Two remarkable pictures of 1863 and 1865 show that Manet had grasped the problem and was endeavouring in a tentative way to give expression to his ideas.

In one of these, “The Picnic,” painted in 1863, there was a stretch of sward, a few trees, and in the background a river in which a woman was merrily splashing in her chemise; in the foreground were seated two young men in frock-coats opposite another woman, who has just come out of the water and been drying herself. Needless to say, this picture was rejected as something unprecedented, by the committee, which included Ingres, LÉon Cogniet, Robert Fleury, and Hippolyte Flandrin. EugÈne Delacroix was the only one in its favour. So Manet was relegated to the Salon des RefusÉs, where Bracquemond, Legros, Whistler, and Harpignies were hung beside him. This Exhibition was held in the Industrial Hall, and the public went through a narrow little door from one gallery to the other. Half Paris was bewildered and discomposed by these works of the rejected; even Napoleon III and the Empress EugÉnie ostentatiously turned their backs upon Manet’s picture when they visited the Salon. This naked woman made a scandal. How shocking! A woman without the slightest stitch of clothes between two gentlemen in their frock-coats! In the Louvre, indeed, there were about fifty Venetian paintings with much the same purport. Every manual of art refers to “The Family,” as it is called, and the “Ages of Life” of Giorgione, in which nude and clothed figures are moving in a landscape and placed ingenuously beside each other. But that a painter should claim for a modern artist the right of painting for the joy of what is purely pictorial was a phenomenon that had never been encountered before. The public searched for something obscene, and they found it; but for Manet the whole picture was only a technical experiment: the nude woman in front was only there because the painter wanted to observe the play of the sun and the reflections of the foliage upon naked flesh; the woman in her chemise merely owed her existence to the circumstance of her charming outline making such a delightful patch of white amid the green meadows. Manet for the first time touched the problem which Madox Brown had thrown out in his “Work” ten years before in England, though for the present he did so with no greater success: the sunbeams glanced no doubt, but they were heavy and opaque; the sky was bright, but without atmosphere. As yet there is nothing of the Manet who belongs to history.

The celebrated “Olympia” of 1865, now to be found in the Luxembourg, was painted during this stage in his development: it represents a neurotic, anÆmic creature, who stretches out, pale and sickly, her meagre nudity upon white linen, with a purring cat at her feet; whilst a negress in a red dress draws back the curtain, offering her a bouquet. With this picture—no one can tell why—the definite battles over Impressionism began. The critics who talked about obscenity were not consistent, because Titian’s pictures of Venus with her female attendant, the little dog, and the youth sitting upon the edge of the bed, are not usually held to be obscene. But it is nevertheless difficult to find in this flatly modelled body, with its hard black outlines, those artistic qualities which Zola discovered in it. The picture has nothing whatever of Titian in it, but it may almost be said to have something of Cranach. “The Picnic” and “Olympia” have both only an historical interest as the first works in which the artist trusted his own eyes, refusing to look through any one’s spectacles. Feeling that he would come to nothing if he continued to study nature through the medium of an old master, he had to render some real thing just as it appeared to him when he was not looking into the mirror of old pictures. He tried to forget what he had studied in galleries, the tricks of art which he had learnt with Couture, and the famous pictures he had seen. In his earlier works there had been a far-fetched refinement and a delicacy taken from the old masters, but “The Picnic” and “Olympia” are simpler and more independent. In both he was already an “Impressionist,” true to his personal vision, though he could not entirely express the new language that hovered upon his lips. He had tried both to rid himself of Courbet’s brown sauce and of the ivory tone of Bouguereau, and to be just to local tones through simple and independent observation; in his “Picnic” he had painted the trees green, the earth yellow, and the sky grey, and in “Olympia” the bed white and the body of the woman flesh-colour. But he was as little successful as the pre-Raphaelites in bringing the local tones into full harmony. This is the step which Manet made in advance of the pre-Raphaelites: after he had emancipated himself from the conventional brown and ivory scheme of tone, and had been for a time, like the pre-Raphaelites, true although hard, he attained that harmony which hitherto had been either not reached by artistic means or not reached at all, by strict observation of the medium by which nature produces her harmonies—light. As the air, the pervasive atmosphere, renders nature everywhere harmonious and refined in colour, so it forthwith became for the artist the means of reaching that great harmony which is the object of all pictorial endeavour, and which had never previously been reached except through some mannerism.

This movement, so historically memorable, when Manet discovered the sun and the fine fluid of the atmosphere, was shortly before 1870. Not long before the declaration of war he was in the country, in the neighbourhood of Paris, staying with his friend de Nittis; but he continued to work as though he were at home, only his studio was here the pleasure-ground. Here one day he sat in full sunlight, placed his model amid the flowers of the turf, and began to paint. The result was “The Garden,” now in the possession of Madame de Nittis. The young wife of the Italian painter is reclining in an easy-chair, between her husband, who is lying on the grass, and her child asleep in its cradle. Every flower is fresh and bright upon the fragrant sward. The green of the stretch of grass is luminous, and everything is bathed in soft, bright atmosphere; the leaves cast their blue shadows upon the yellow gravel path. “Plein-air” made its entry into painting.

In 1870 his activity had to be interrupted. He entered a company of Volunteers consisting chiefly of artists and men of letters, and in December he became a lieutenant in the Garde Nationale, where he had Meissonier as his colonel. The pictures, therefore, in which he was entirely Manet belong exclusively to the period following 1870.

From this time his great problem was the sun, the glow of daylight, the tremor of the air upon the earth basking in light. He became a natural philosopher who could never satisfy himself, studying the effect of light and determining with the observation of a man of science how the atmosphere alters the phenomena of colour.

In tender, virginal, light grey tones, never seen before, he depicted, in fourteen pictures exhibited at a dealer’s, the luxury and grace of Paris, the bright days of summer and soirÉes flooded with gaslight, the faded features of the fallen maiden and the refined chic of the woman of the world. There was to be seen “Nana,” that marvel of audacious grace. Laced in a blue silk corset, and otherwise clad merely in a muslin smock with her feet in pearl-grey stockings, the blond woman stands at the mirror painting her lips, and carelessly replying to the words of a man who is watching her upon the sofa behind. Near it hung balcony scenes, fleeting sketches from the skating rink, the cafÉ concert, the Bal de l’OpÉra, the dÉjeuner scene at PÈre Lathuille’s, and the “Bar at the Folies-BergÈres.” In one case he has made daylight the subject of searching study, in another the artificial illumination of the footlights. “Music in the Tuileries” reveals a crowd of people swarming in an open, sunny place. Every figure was introduced as a patch of colour, but these patches were alive and this multitude spoke. One of the best pictures was “Boating”—a craft boldly cut away in its frame, after the manner of the Japanese, and seated in it a young lady in light blue and a young man in white, their figures contrasting finely with the delicate grey of the water and the atmosphere impregnated with moisture. And scattered amongst these pictures there were to be found powerful sea-pieces and charming, piquant portraits.

Manet had a passion for the world. He was a man with a slight and graceful figure, a beard of the colour known as blond cendrÉ, deep blue eyes filled with the fire of youth, a refined, clever face, aristocratic hands, and a manner of great urbanity. With his wife, the highly cultured daughter of a Dutch musician, he went into the best circles of Parisian society, and was popular everywhere for his trenchant judgment and his sparkling intellect. His conversation was vivid and sarcastic. He was famous for his wit À la Gavarni. He delighted in the delicate perfume of drawing-rooms, the shining candle-light at receptions; he worshipped modernity and the piquant frou-frou of toilettes; he was the first who stood with both feet in the world which seemed so inartistic to others. Thus the progress made in the acquisition of subject and material may be seen even in the outward appearance of the three pioneers of modern art. Millet in his portrait stands in wooden shoes, Courbet in his shirt-sleeves; Manet wears a tall hat and a frock-coat. Millet, the peasant, painted peasants. Courbet, the democrat from the provinces, gave the rights of citizenship to the artisan, but without himself deserting the provinces and the bourgeoisie. He was repelled by everything either distinguished or refined. In such matters he could not find the force and vehemence which were all he sought. Manet, the Parisian and the man of refinement, gave art the elegance of modern life.

In the year 1879 he made the Parisian magistracy the offer of painting in the session-room of the Town Hall the entire Ventre de Paris, the markets, railway stations, lading-places, and public gardens, and beneath the ceiling a gallery of the celebrated men of the present time. His letter was unanswered, and yet it gave the impulse to all those great pictures of contemporary life painted afterwards in Paris and the provinces for the walls of public buildings. In 1880 he received, through the exertions of his friend Antonin Proust, a medal of the second class, the only one ever awarded to him. And the dealer Duret began to buy pictures from him; Durand-Ruel followed suit, and so did M. Faure, the singer of the Grand Opera, who himself is the owner of five-and-thirty Manets. The poor artist did not long enjoy this recognition. On 30th April 1883, the varnishing day at the Salon, he died from blood-poisoning and the consequences of the amputation of a leg.

But the seed which he had scattered had already thrown out roots. It had taken him years to force open the doors of the Salon, but to-day his name shines in letters of gold upon the faÇade of the École des Beaux-Arts as that of the man who has spoken the most decisive final utterance on behalf of the liberation of modern art. His achievement, which seems to have been an unimportant alteration in the method of painting, was in reality a renovation in the method of looking at the world and a renovation in the method of thinking.

Up to this time it was only the landscape painters who had emancipated themselves from imitation of the gallery tone, and what was done by Corot in landscape had, logically enough, to be carried out in figure-painting likewise; for men and women are encompassed by the air as much as trees. After the landscape painters of Barbizon had made evident the vast difference between the light of day and that of a closed room in their pictures painted in the open air, the figure-painters, if they made any claim to truth of effect, could no longer venture to content themselves with the illumination falling upon their models in the studio, when they were painting incidents taking place out of doors. Yet even the boldest of the new artists did not set themselves free from tradition. Even after they had become independent in subject and composition they had remained the slaves of the old masters in their intuition of colour. Some imitated the Spaniards, without reflecting that Ribera painted his pictures in a small, dark studio, and that the cellar-light with which they were illuminated was therefore correct, whereas applied, in the present age, to the bright interiors of the nineteenth century it was utterly false. Others treated open-air scenes as if they were taking place in a ground-floor parlour, and endeavoured by curtains and shutters to create a light similar to that which may be found in old masters and pictures dimmed with age. Or the artist painted according to a general recipe and in complete defiance of what he saw with his eyes. For instance, an exceedingly characteristic episode is told of the student days of Puvis de Chavannes. Upon a grey, misty day the young artist had painted a nude figure. The model appeared enveloped in tender light as by a bright, silvery halo. “That’s the way you see your model?” grumbled Couture indignantly when he came to correct the picture. Then he mixed together white, cobalt blue, Naples yellow, and vermilion, and turned Puvis de Chavannes’ nude grey figure by a universal recipe into one that was highly coloured and warmly luminous—such a figure as an old master might perhaps have painted under different conditions of light. With his “Fiat Lux” Manet uttered a word of redemption that had hovered upon many lips. The jurisdiction of galleries was broken now also in regard to colour; the last remnant of servile dependence upon the mighty dead was cast aside; the aims attained by the landscape painters thirty years before were reached in figure-painting likewise.

Perhaps a later age may even come to recognise that Manet made an advance upon the old masters in his delicacy and scrupulous analysis of light; in that case it will esteem the discovery of tone-values as the chief acquisition of the nineteenth century, as a conquest such as has never been made in painting since the Eycks and Masaccio, since the establishment of the theory of perspective. In a treatise commanding all respect Hugo Magnus has written of how the sense of colour increased in the various periods of the world’s history; since the appearance of the Impressionists, verification may be made of yet another advance in this direction. The study of tone-values has never been carried on with such conscientious exactitude, and in regard to truth of atmosphere one is disposed to believe that our eyes to-day see and feel things which our ancestors had not yet noticed. The old masters have also touched the problem of “truth in painting.” It is not merely that the character of their colours often led the Italian tempera and fresco painters to the most natural method of treating light. They even occupied themselves in a theoretical way with the question. An old Italian precept declares that the painter ought to work in a closed yard beneath an awning, but should place his model beneath the open sky. In the frescoes which he painted in Arezzo in 1480, Piero della Francesca, in particular, pursued the problem of plein-air painting with a fine instinct. But love of the beautiful and luminous tints, such as the technique of oil-painting enabled artists to attain at a later date, quickly seduced them from carrying out the natural treatment of light in the gradation of colour. Under the influence of oil-painting the Italians of the great period, from Leonardo onwards, turned more and more to strong contrasts. And in spite of Albert Cuyp, even the Dutch landscape painters of the seventeenth century have seen objects rather in line and form, plastically, than pictorially in their environment of light and air. The nineteenth century was the first seriously to attack a problem which—except by Velasquez—had been merely touched upon by the old schools, but never solved.

What the masters of Barbizon had done through instinctive genius was made the object of scientific study by the Impressionists. The new school set up the principle that atmosphere changes the colour of objects; for instance, that the colour and outline of a tree painted in a room are completely different from those of the same tree painted upon the spot in the open air. As an unqualified rule they claimed that every incident was to be harmonised with time, place, and light; thus a scene taking place out of doors had of necessity to be painted, not within four walls, but under the actual illumination of morning, or noon, or evening, or night. In making this problem the object of detailed and careful inquiry the artist came to analyse life, throbbing beneath its veil of air and light, with more refinement and thoroughness than the old masters had done. The latter painted light deadened in its fall, not shining. Oils were treated as an opaque material, colour appeared to be a substance, and the radiance of tinted light was lost through this material heaviness. Courbet still represented merely the object apart from its environment; he saw things in a plastic way, and not as they were, bathed in the atmosphere; his men and women lived in oil, in brown sauce, and not where it was only possible for them to live—in the air. Everything he painted he isolated without a thought of atmospheric surroundings. Now a complete change of parts was effected: bodies and colours were no longer painted, but the shifting power of light under which everything changes form and colour at every moment of the day. The elder painters in essentials confined light to the surface of objects; the new painters believed in its universality, beholding in it the father of all life and of the manifold nature of the visible world, and therefore of colour also. They no longer painted colours and forms with lights and cast-shadows, but pellucid light, pouring over forms and colours and absorbed and refracted by them. They no longer looked merely to the particular, but to the whole, no longer saw nothing except deadened light and cast-shadows, but the harmony and pictorial charm of a moment of nature considered as such. With a zeal which at times seemed almost paradoxical, they proceeded to establish the importance of the phenomena of light. They discovered that, so far from being gilded, objects are silvered by sunlight, and they made every effort to analyse the multiplicity of these fine gradations down to their most delicate nuances. They learnt to paint the quiver of tremulous sunbeams radiating far and wide; they were the lyrical poets of light, which they often glorified at the expense of what it envelops and causes to live. At the service of art they placed a renovated treasury of refined, purified, and pictorial phases of expression, in which the history of art records an increase in the human eye of the sense of colour and the power of perception.

That light is movement is here made obvious, and that all life is movement is just what their art reveals. Courbet was an admirable painter of plain surfaces. If he had to paint a wall he took it upon his strong shoulders and transferred it to his canvas in such a way that a stonemason might have been deceived. If it was a question of rocks, the body of a woman, or the waves of the sea, he began to mix his pigments thick, laid a firm mass of colour on the canvas, and spread it with a knife. This spade-work gave him unrivalled truth to nature in reproducing the surface of hard substances. Rocks, banks, and walls look as they do in nature, but in the case of moving, indeterminate things his power deserts him. His landscapes are painted in a rich, broad, and juicy style, but his earth has no pulsation. Courbet has forgotten the birds in his landscape. His seas have been seen with extraordinary largeness of feeling, and they are masterpieces of drawing; the only drawback is that they seem uninhabitable for fish. Under the steady hand of the master the sea came to a standstill and was changed into rock. If he has to paint human beings they stand as motionless as blocks of wood. The expression of their faces seems galvanised into life, like their bodies. Placing absolute directness in the rendering of impressions in their programme, as the chief aim of their artistic endeavours, the Impressionists were the first to discover the secret of seizing with the utmost freshness the nuances of expression and movement, which remained petrified in the hands of their predecessors. Only the flash of the spokes is painted in the wheel of a carriage in motion, and never the appearance of the wheel when it is at rest; in the same way they allow the outlines of human figures to relax and become indistinct, to call up the impression of movement, the real vividness of the appearance. Colour has been established as the sole, unqualified medium of expression for the painter, and has so absorbed the drawing that the line receives, as it were, a pulsating life, and cannot be felt except in a pictorial way. In the painting of nude human figures the waxen look—which in the traditional painting from the nude had a pretence of being natural—has vanished from the skin, and thousands of delicately distinguished gradations give animation to the flesh. Moreover, a finer and deeper observation of temperament was made possible by lighter and more sensitive technique. In the works of the earlier genre painters people never are what they are supposed to represent. The hired model, picked from the lower strata of life, and used by the painter in bringing his picture slowly to completion, was obvious even in the most elegant toilette; but now real human beings are represented, men and women whose carriage, gestures, and countenances tell at once what they are. Even in portrait painting people whom the painter has surprised before they have had time to put themselves in order, at the moment when they are still entirely natural, have taken the place of lay-figures fixed in position. The effort to seize the most unconstrained air and the most natural position, and to arrest the most transitory shade of expression, produces, in this field of art also, a directness and vivacity divided by a great gulf from the pose and the grand airs of the earlier drawing-room picture.

From his very first appearance there gathered round Manet a number of young men who met twice a week at a cafÉ in Batignolles, formerly a suburb at the entrance of the Avenue de Clichy. After this trysting-place the society called itself L’École des Batignolles. Burty, Antonin Proust, Henner, and Stevens put in an occasional appearance, but Legros, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Duranty, and Zola were constant visitors. Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Monet, Gauguin, and Zandomeneghi were the leading spirits of the impressionistic staff, and, being excluded from the official Salon, they generally set up their tent at Nadar’s, Reichshofen’s, or some other dealer’s. These are the names of the men who, following Manet, were the earliest to make the new problem the object of their studies.

Degas, the subtle colourist and miraculous draughtsman, who celebrates dancers, gauze skirts, and the foyers of the Opera, is the boldest and the most original of those who banded together from the very outset of the movement—the worst enemy of everything pretty and banal, the greatest dandy of modern France, the man whose works are caviare to the general and so refreshing to the gourmet, the painter who can find a joy in the sublime beauty of ugliness.

Degas was older than Manet. He had run through all phases of French art since Ingres. His first pictures, “Spartan Youths” and “Semiramis building the Walls of Babylon,” might indeed have been painted by Ingres, to whom he looks up even now as to the first star in the firmament of French art. Then for a time he was influenced by the suggestive and tender intimacy in feeling and the soft, quiet harmony of Chardin. He had also an enthusiasm for Delacroix: less for his exaggerated colouring than for the lofty mark of style in the gestures and movements painted by this great Romanticist, which Degas endeavoured to transfer to the pantomime of the ballet. From Manet he learnt softness and fluency of modelling. And finally the Japanese communicated to him the principle of their dispersed composition, the choice of standpoint, allowing the artist to look up from beneath or down from above, the taste for fantastic decoration, the suggestive method of emphasising this and suppressing that, the surprise of detail introduced here and there in a perfectly arbitrary fashion. From the original and bizarre union of all these elements he formed his exquisite, marvellously expressive, and entirely personal style, which is hard to describe with the pen, and would be defectively indicated by reference to Besnard, who is allied to him in the treatment of light. It is only in literature that Degas has a parallel. If a comparison between them be at all possible, it might be said that his style in many ways recalls that of the brothers de Goncourt. As these have enriched their language with a new vocabulary for the expression of new emotions, Degas has made for himself a new technique. Utterly despising everything pretty and anecdotic, he has the secret of gaining the effect intended by refinements of drawing and tone-values, just as the de Goncourts by the association of words; he has borrowed phrases from all the lexicons of painting; he has mixed oils, pastel, and water-colour together, and, such as he is to-day, he must, like the de Goncourts, be reckoned amongst the most delicate and refined artists of the century.

His range of subjects finds its limit in one point: he has the greatest contempt for banality, for the repetition of others and of himself. Every subject has to give opportunity for the introduction of special models, not hitherto employed, of pictorial experiments and novel problems of light. He made his starting-point, the grace and charming movements of women. Trim Parisian laundresses in their spotless aprons, little shop-girls in their boutiques, the spare grace of racehorses with their elastic jockeys, marvellous portraits, like that of Duranty, women getting out of the bath, the movements of the workwoman, and the toilette and nÉgligÉ of the woman of the world, boudoir scenes, scenes in court, and scenes in boxes at the theatre—he has painted them all. And with what truth and life! How admirably his figures stand! how completely they are what they give themselves out to be! The Circus and the Opera soon became his favourite field of study. In his ballet-girls he found fresher artistic material than in the goddesses and nymphs of the antique.

At the same time the highest conceivable demands were here made on the capacities of the painter and the draughtsman, and on his powers of characterisation. Of all modern artists Degas is the man who creates the greatest illusion as an interpreter of artificial light, of the glare of the footlights before which these dÉcolletÉ singers move in their gauze skirts. And these dancers are real dancers, vivid every one of them, every one of them individual. The nervous force of the born ballerina is sharply differentiated from the apathy of the others who merely earn their bread by their legs. How fine are his novices with tired, faded, pretty faces, when they have to sweep a curtsey, and pose so awkwardly in their delightful shyness. How marvellously he has grasped the fleeting charm of this moment. With what spirited nonchalance he groups his girls enveloped in white muslin and coloured sashes. Like the Japanese, he claims the right of rendering only what interests him and appears to make a striking effect—“the vivid points,” in Hokusai’s phrase—and does not hold himself bound to add a lifeless piece of canvas for the sake of “rounded composition.” In pictures, where it is his purpose to show the varied forms of the legs and feet of his dancers, he only paints the upper part of the orchestra and the lower part of the stage—that is to say, heads, hands, and instruments below, and dancing legs above. He is equally uncompromising in his street and racing scenes, so that often it is merely the hindquarters of the horses and the back of the jockey that are visible. His pictures, however, owe not a little of their life and piquancy to this brilliant method of cutting through the middle, and to these triumphant evasions of all the vulgar rules of composition. But, for the matter of that, surely DÜrer knew what he was about when, in his pictures of apocalyptic riders, instead of completing the composition, he left it fragmentary, to create an impression of the wild gallop.

A special group amongst the artist’s ballet pictures is that in which he represents the training of novices, the severe course through which the grub must pass before taking wing as a butterfly. Here is displayed a strange fantastic anatomy, only comparable to the acrobatic distortions to which the Japanese are so much addicted in their art. But it is precisely these pictures which were of determining importance for the development of Degas. In the quest of unstable lines and expressions, instead of feeling reality in all its charming grace, he came to behold it only in its degeneration. He was impelled to render the large outline of the modern woman—the female figure which has grown to be a product of art beneath the array of toilette—even in the most ungraceful moments. He painted the woman who does not suspect that she is being observed; he painted her seen, as it were, through the key-hole or the slit of a curtain, and making, to some extent, the most atrociously ugly movements. He was the merciless observer of creatures whom society turns into machines for its pleasure—dancing, racing, and erotic machines. He has depicted cruelly the sort of woman Zola has drawn in Nana—the woman who has no expression, no play in her eyes, the woman who is merely animal, motionless as a Hindu idol. His pictures of this class are a natural history of prostitution of terrible veracity, a great poem on the flesh, like the works of Titian and Rubens, except that in the latter blooming beauty is the substance of the brilliant strophes, while in Degas it is wrinkled skin, decaying youth, and the artificial brightness of enamelled faces. “A vous autres il faut la vie naturelle, À moi la vie factice.”

This sense of having lived too much expressed itself also in the haughty contempt with which he withdrew himself from exhibitions, the public, and criticism. Any one who is not a constant visitor at Durand-Ruel’s has little opportunity of seeing the pictures of Degas. The conception of fame is something which he does not seem to possess. Being a man of cool self-reliance, he paints to please himself, without caring how his pictures may suit the notions of the world or the usages of the schools. For years he has kept aloof from the Salon, and some people say that he has never exhibited at all. And he keeps at as great a distance from Parisian society. In earlier days, when Manet, Pissarro, and Duranty met at the CafÉ Nouvelle AthÈnes, he sometimes appeared after ten o’clock—a little man with round shoulders and a shuffling walk, who only took part in the conversation by now and then breaking in with brief, sarcastic observations. After Manet’s death he made the CafÉ de la Rochefoucauld his place of resort. And young painters went on his account also to the CafÉ de la Rochefoucauld and pointed him out to each other, saying, “That is Degas.” When artists assemble together the conversation usually turns upon him, and he is accorded the highest honours by the younger generation. He is revered as the haughty Independant who stands unapproachably above the profanum vulgus, the great unknown who never passed through the ordeal of a hanging committee, but whose spirit hovers invisibly over every exhibition.

A refined charmeur, Auguste Renoir, has made important discoveries, in portrait painting especially. He is peculiarly the painter of women, whose elegance, delicate skin, and velvet flesh he interprets with extraordinary deftness. LÉon Bonnat’s portraits were great pieces of still-life. The persons sit as if they were nailed to their seats. Their flesh looks like zinc and their clothes like steel. In Carolus Duran’s hands portrait painting degenerated into a painting of draperies. Most of his portraits merely betray the amount which the toilettes have cost; they are inspired by their rich array of silk and heavy curtains; often they are crude symphonies in velvet and satin. The rustle of robes, the dazzling—or loud—fulness of colour in glistening materials, gave him greater pleasure than the lustre of flesh-tints and any glance of inquiry into the moral temperament of his models. Renoir endeavours to arrest the scarcely perceptible and transitory movements of the features and the figure. Placing his persons boldly in the real light of day which streams around, he paints atmospheric influences in all their results, like a landscapist. Light is the sole and absolute thing. The fallen trunk of a tree upon which the broken sunlight plays in yellow and light green reflections, and the body or head of a girl, are subject to the same laws. Stippled with yellowish-green spots of light, the latter loses its contours and becomes a part of nature. With this study of the effects of light and reflection there is united an astonishing sureness in the analysis of sudden phases of expression. The way in which laughter begins and ends, the moment between laughter and weeping, the passing flash of an eye, a fleeting motion of the lips, all that comes like lightning and vanishes as swiftly, shades of expression which had hitherto seemed indefinable, are seized by Renoir in all their suddenness. In the portraits of Bonnat and Duran there are people who have “sat,” but here are people from whom the painter has had the power of stealing and holding fast the secret of their being at a moment when they were not “sitting.” Here are dreamy blond girls gazing out of their great blue eyes, ethereal fragrant flowers, like lilies leaning against a rose-bush through which the rays of the setting sun are shining. Here are coquettish young girls, now laughing, now pouting, now blithe and gay, now angry once more, and now betwixt both moods in a charming passion. And there are women of the world of consummate elegance, slender and slight-built figures, with small hands and feet, an even pallor, almond-shaped eyes catching every light, moist shining lips of a tender grace, bearing witness to a love of pleasure refined by artifice. And children especially there are, children of the sensitive and flexuous type: some as yet unconscious, dreamy, and free from thought; others already animated, correct in pose, graceful, and wise. The three girls, in his “Portrait of Mesdemoiselles M——,” grouped around the piano, the eldest playing, the second accompanying upon the violin, and the youngest quietly attentive, with both hands resting upon the piano, are exquisite, painted with an entirely naÏve and novel truth. All the poses are natural, all the colours bright and subtle—the furniture, the yellow bunches of flowers, the fresh spring dresses, the silk stockings. But such tender poems of childhood and blossoming girlhood form merely a part of Renoir’s work. In his “Dinner at Chaton” a company of ladies and gentlemen are seated at table, laughing, talking, and listening; the champagne sparkles in the glasses, and the cheerful, easy mood which comes with dessert is in the ascendant. In his “Moulin de la Galette” he painted the excitement of the dance—whirling pairs, animated faces, languid poses, and everything enveloped in sunlight and dust. Renoir’s peculiar field is the study of the various delicate emotions which colour the human countenance.

The merit of Camille Pissarro is to have once more set the painting of peasants, weakened by Breton, upon the virile lines of Millet, and to have supplemented them in those places where Millet was technically inadequate. When the Impressionist movement began Camille Pissarro had already a past: he was the recognised landscape painter of the Norman plains; the straightforward observer of peasants, the plain and simple painter of the vegetable gardens stretching round peasant dwellings. Since Millet, no artist had placed himself in closer relationship to the life of the earth and of cultivated nature. Though a delicate analyst, Pissarro had not the epic feeling nor the religious mysticism of Millet; but like Millet he was a rustic in spirit, like him a Norman, from the land of vineyards, of large farmyards, green meadows, soft avenues of poplars, and wide horizons reddened by the sun. He was healthy, tender, and intimate in feeling, rejoiced in the richness of the land and the voluptuous undulation of fields, and he could give a striking impression of a region in its work-a-day character. Celebrated in the press as the legitimate descendant of Millet, he might have contented himself with his regular successes. He had, indeed, arrived at an age when men usually leave off making experiments, and reap what they have sown in their youth, at an age when many conquerors occupy themselves with the mechanical reproduction of their own works. Nevertheless the Impressionistic movement became for Pissarro the starting-point of a new way.

He aimed at fresher, intenser, and more transparent light, at a more cogent observation of phenomena, at a more exact analysis of the encompassing atmosphere. He celebrated the eternal, immutable light in which the world is bathed. He loved it specially during clear afternoons, when it plays over bright green meadows fringed by soft trees, or at the foot of low hills. He has sought it on the slopes across which it ripples deliciously, on the plains from which it rises like a light veil of gauze. He studied the play of light upon the bronzed skin of labourers, on the coats of animals, on the foliage and fruit of trees. He characterised the seasons, the hour of day, the moment, with the conscientiousness of a peasant intent upon noting the direction of the wind and the position of the sun. The cold, chilly humour of autumn afternoons, the vivid clarity of sparkling wintry skies, the bloom and lightness of spring mornings, the oppressive brooding of summer, the luxuriance or the aridity of the earth, the young vigour of foliage or the fading of nature robbed of her adornment,—all these Pissarro has painted with largeness, plainness, and simplicity. He strays over the fields, watching the shepherd driving out his flock, the wains rumbling along the uneven roads, the quiet, rhythmical movement of the gleaners, the graceful gait of the women who have been reaping and now return home in the evening with a rake across their shoulders; he stations himself at the entrance of villages where the apple-pickers are at work, and the women minding geese stand by their drove; he notes the whole life of peasants, and gives truer and more direct intelligence of it than Millet did in his broad, synthetic manner. Where there is a classic quietude and an oily heaviness in Millet, there is in Pissarro palpitating life, transparence, and freshness. He sees the country in bright, laughing tones; and the pure white of the kerchiefs, the pale rose-colour or tender blue bodices of his peasant women, lend his pictures a blithe delicacy of colour. His girls are like fresh flowers of the field which the sun of June brings forth upon the meadows. There is something intense and yet soft, strong and delicate, true and rhythmical in Pissarro’s tender poems of country life.

So long as any advance beyond Rousseau and Corot seemed impossible, pictures of talent but only moderate importance had increased in number in the province of landscape. The landscape painters who immediately followed the great pioneers loved nature on account of her comparative coolness in summer; upon sites where the classic artists of Fontainebleau dreamed and painted they built comfortable villas and settled down with the sentiments of a householder. The country was parcelled out, and each one undertook his part, and painted it conscientiously without arousing any novel sensations. Impressionism gave landscape painting, which showed signs of being split into specialties, once more a firm basis, a charming field of study. To communicate impressions without any of the studio combinations, just as they strike us suddenly, to preserve the vividness and cogency of the first imprint of nature upon the mind, was the great problem which Impressionism placed before the landscape painters. The artists of Fontainebleau painted neither the rawness and rigidity of winter nor the sultry atmosphere and scorching heat of summer; they painted artistic and dignified and exquisite works. The Impressionists did not approach their themes as poets, but as naturalists. In their hands landscape, which in Corot, Millet, Diaz, Rousseau, Daubigny, and Jongkind is an occasional poem, becomes a likeness of a region under special influences of light. With more delicate nerves, and a sensibility almost greater, they allowed nature to work upon them, and perceived in the symphonies of every hour strains never heard before, transparent shadows, the vibration of atoms of light. decomposing the lines of contour, that tremor of the atmosphere which is the breath of landscape. Here also England was not without influence. As Corot and Rousseau received an impulse from Constable and Bonington in 1830, Monet and Sisley returned from London with their eyes dazzled by the light of the great Turner. Laid hold upon, like Turner, by the miracles of the universe, by the golden haze which trembles in a sunbeam, they succeeded in painting light in spite of the defectiveness of our chemical mediums.

Alfred Sisley might be compared with Daubigny. He settled in the neighbourhood of Moret, upon the banks of the Loing, and is the most soft and tender amongst the Impressionists. Like Daubigny, he loves the germinating energy, the blossoming, and the growth of young and luminous spring; the moist banks of quiet streamlets, budding beeches, and the rye-fields growing green, the variegated flowering of the meadows, clear skies, ladies walking in bright spring dresses, and the play of light upon the vernal foliage. He has painted tender mornings breathed upon with rosy bloom, reeds with a bluish gleam, and moist duck-weed, grey clouds mirrored in lonely pools, alleys of poplar, peasants’ houses, and hills and banks, melting softly in the warm atmosphere. His pictures, like those of the master of Oise, leave the impression of youth and freshness, of quiet happiness, or of smiling melancholy.

On many of his pictures, saturated as they are with light, Claude Monet could inscribe the name of Turner without inciting unbelief. In exceedingly unequal works, which are nevertheless full of audacity and genius, he has grasped what would seem to be intangible. Except Turner there is no one who has carried so far the study of the effects of light, of the gradations and reflections of sunbeams, of momentary phases of illumination, no one who has embodied more subtle and forcible impressions. For Monet man has no existence, but only the earth and the light. He delights in the rugged rocks of Belle-Isle, and the wild banks of the Creuse, when the oppressive sun of summer is brooding over them. He paints phenomena as transitory as the shades of expression in Renoir. The world appears in a glory of light, such as it only has in fleeting moments, and such as would be blinding were it always to be seen. Nature, in his version, is an inhospitable dwelling where it is impossible to dream and live. One hopes sometimes to hear a word of intimate association from Monet—but in vain; Claude Monet is only an eye. Carouses of sunshine and orgies in the open air are the exclusive materials of his pictures. Thus he has little to say for those who seek the soul of a human being in every landscape. Like Degas, he is par excellence the master in technique whose highest endeavour is to enrich the art of painting with novel sensations and unedited effects, even if it has to be done by violence. There are sea-pieces filled with the spirit of evening, when the sea, red as a mirror of copper, merges into the glory of the sky, in a great radiant ocean of infinity; moods of evening storm, when gloomy clouds over the restless tree-tops race across the smoky red sky, losing tiny shreds in their flight, little thin strips of loosened cloud, saturated through and through with a wine-red glow by the splendour of the sun. Or there are spring meadows fragrant with bloom, and hills parched by the sun; rushing trains with their white smoke gleaming in the light; yellow sails scudding over glittering waters; waves shining blue, red, and golden; and burning ships, with shooting tongues of flame leaping upon the masts; and, behind, a jagged rim of the evening glow. Claude Monet has followed light everywhere—in Holland, Normandy, the South of France, Belle-Isle-en-Mer, the villages of the Seine, London, Algiers, Brittany. He became an enthusiast for nature as she is in Norway and Sweden, for French cathedrals rising into the sky, tall and fair, like the peaks of great promontories. He interpreted the surge of towns, the movement of the sea, the majestic solitude of the sky. But he knows too that the artist could pass his life in the same corner of the earth and work for years upon the same objects without the drama of nature played before him ever becoming exhausted. For the light which streams between things is for ever different. So he stood one evening two paces in front of his little house, in the garden, amid a flaming sea of flowers scarlet like poppies. White summer clouds shifted in the sky, and the beams of the setting sun fell upon two stacks, standing solitary in a solitary field. Claude Monet began to paint, and came again the next day, and the day after that, and every day throughout the autumn, and winter, and spring. In a series of fifteen pictures, “The Hay-ricks,” he painted—as Hokusai did in his hundred views of the Fuji mountain—the endless variations produced by season, day, and hour upon the eternal countenance of nature. The lonely field is like a glass, catching the effects of atmosphere, the breeze, and the most fleeting light. The stacks gleam softly in the brightness of the beautiful afternoons, stand out sharp and clear against the cold sky of the forenoon, loom like phantoms in the mist of a November evening, or sparkle like glittering jewels beneath the caress of the rising sun. They shine like glowing ovens, absorbed by the light of the autumnal sunset; they are surrounded as by a rosy halo, when the early sun pierces like a wedge through the dense morning mist. They rise distinctly, covered with sparkling, rose-tinged snow, into the cloudless heaven, and cast their pure, blue shadows upon the silent, white, wintry landscape, or stand out in ghostly outlines against the night firmament, mantled with silver by the moonlight. Without moving his easel, Monet has interpreted the silence of winter, and autumn with her sad and splendid feasts of colour—dusk and rain, snow and frost and sun. He heard the voices of evening and the jubilation of morning; he painted the eternal undulation of light upon the same objects, the altered impression which the same particle of nature yields according to the changing light of the hour. He chanted the poetry of the universe in a single fragment of nature, and would be a pantheistic artist of world-wide compass had he merely painted these stacks of hay for the rest of his natural existence.

And here ends the battle for the liberation of modern art. Libertas artibus restituta. The painters of the nineteenth century are no longer imitators, but have become makers of a new thing, “enlargers of the empire.” The prophetic words written in the beginning of the nineteenth century by the Hamburger, Philipp Otto Runge, “light, colour, and moving life,” were to form the great problem, the great conquest of modern art; they were fulfilled after two generations. Through the Impressionists art was enriched by an opulence of new beauties. A new and independent style had been discovered for the representation of new things, and a new province—a province peculiar to herself—was won for painting.