On Art and Artists

XII Physiognomies in Painting

John W. Alexander, an American, possesses an enviable skill and certainty. He is master of the means of expression belonging to his art, and has a trustworthy feeling for the harmony of those light, subdued colours called in Fiance “Liberty” shades, after the name of an American tradesman in the Avenue de l’Opéra who first brought into vogue clothing, furniture, and wall stuffs in such peculiarly anæmic and almost chlorotic colours. With his dexterous draughtsmanship and charming harmony of cool, diluted blue, soft green, faint pale yellow and delicate rose, he might possibly have pleased connoisseurs, but could hardly have attained world-wide fame. He, therefore, hit upon painting women’s portraits in amazing positions. He was the inventor of acrobatics in portraiture. His women lie about, in orgiastic contortions, on the ground or on sofas, with their legs up and heads hanging over the edge, or with forms twisted twice round, like a screw, or curled round like a sleeping dog, astonishing the inoffensive spectator, and suggesting to him of corrupt imagination certain lustful ideas. The means were effectual. Alexander became a first-class firm, and the crétins of criticism did not fail to praise his special knowledge of, and feeling for, the “modern women of high-strung nerves and Satanic caprices.” Now Alexander seems to find that he has acquired sufficient fame, and is abandoning his follies. Among his later pictures there very rarely occurs one of which the model betrays his earlier leaning to gymnastics. The ladies he now paints are quite decent in their attitudes, and only, perhaps, a serpentine movement in their long, flowing garments reminds us still of the old gutta-percha or snakelike contortions of his bodies. Alexander has slipped through the fingers of his modernistic critics. Whilst they still keep on raving about his “modern women with high-strung nerves and Satanic caprices,” he is painting prosperously, peacefully, and intelligently, and can now be recommended to the most respectable bourgeois families to immortalise their matrons.

Aman-Jean is a melancholy painter, whose palette has been tuned in a minor key. He is the guitarist of the falling leaf, twilight, tapestry-hung ancestral halls, sombre Gobelins. His pictures result from the mood in which a man catches himself humming the King of Thule. I do not say that this tone of colour does not possess its charm. He who does not live his life like a thoughtless, devouring, and digesting animal has, I suppose, on every blessed day of his existence, an hour in which he finds his own soul in the subdued and faded palette of Aman-Jean. It is, however, morbid to see the phenomena of the universe merely as old Gobelins in the hue of twilight hours. And morbid, too, is the way in which Aman-Jean transforms his impressions of poems into a painter’s view. I know, for instance, a “Beatrice” of his which affords the maximum of involuntary comicality. Before an artificial-looking orange-tree, which she overtowers in height, Dante’s beloved, with the upper part of her body thrown back, and her stomach pushed forward, performs a sort of danse du ventre. To her girdle she has a golden laurel garland hanging, which, as a note of illumination in the dull night-hues, has an excellent effect as valeur (as the French say), but as an object or requisite is very comic. Aman-Jean himself, with that misappreciation of subordination in his pictures, which is so common among artists, lays far greater value on such ridiculous whims than on his portraits. And yet it is only in these that he shows with what sureness and intensity he is able to seize and lay bare the most inaccessible and most mysteriously elusive thing that reality has to exhibit, viz., living man. His “Jules Caze” and his “Dampt the Sculptor” belong to the most delicate portrayals of men, just as his “Paul Verlaine” and “Madame Henri Martin” must also remain unforgettable by every one who has beheld them.

His portraits, to be sure, are not by any means of the same value. There is, for instance, a portrait by him of a “Cossack Colonel” that must fully mislead in regard to him. Materiality is entirely lacking in the full-length figure he has painted of the Russian officer; it is clapped flat on the canvas like a pancake. A laurel bush climbs from the bottom to the top of the picture—one cannot say in the background, as the picture has no depth, but, apparently, behind the man. The shrub seems painted on the wall to the height of the head. It suddenly grows plastic before our eyes, and shoots its leaves in front of the colonel’s nose and forehead. By this symbolism which scoffs at all the laws of perspective, the painter evidently wants to suggest relations between the warrior and fame. One can only shrug one’s shoulders at such puerility.

He is more and more breaking himself of the habit of regarding living models, and allows himself to be hypnotised by the Præ-Raphaelite magic lantern. We might wish for an Orpheus to take this noble artist by the hand and lead him back to the light from the shades in which he has lost himself. Perhaps the adventure would be more successful than in the case of Eurydice.

Albert Besnard.—Contemporary painting knows no more harsh contrasts than Puvis de Chavannes and Albert Besnard. The former saw nothing in the world except spectres; the latter sees only fireworks. Puvis’s eyes perceived no living colour; Besnard’s eye is in a state as if it had received a violent blow from a fist, in consequence of which it saw the proverbial ten thousand candles. There is nothing objectionable about his delight in colour; on the contrary, any one who is not suffering from Daltonism would be delighted to be invited to his debauch of colours. If only Besnard only satisfied his taste in a somewhat nobler way! It pleases him to introduce his dazzling rockets into women’s faces, and there no man of healthy taste will care to follow him. Besnard has marvellously beautiful yellow, orange, green, blue, and red on his palette. He can attune them, too, to a beautifully sounding harmony; but why must he put yellow on the cheeks, green on the hair, and blue and orange on the shoulders in his portraits? Why must he so portray his model as if it were streaked with luminous paint or bathed in a stream of light that has flowed through a coloured glass window? His mastery of drawing and modelling certainly makes his colouring-run-mad somewhat more endurable, but it does not justify his not searching for the tumult of colour which he loves in actual life (where, after all, he might with some effort find them), but chasing them into actual life without any regard or thought.

In the salons of late years, Albert Besnard pursues a curious policy. Near one or more aggressively stupid works, he exhibits a portrait or painting which is amazingly rational. In this there is method, unmistakably. It is a sort of self-defence. Besnard seems, from his canvasses, to address the visitors to the “Salon” in these words: “You see that I am in private life quite a sane individual and correct painter, who is as much the master of his art as anybody in the world. The other rubbish is for the fools of modernism. For those I am bound at times to play the Jack Pudding, but you need not, however, worry yourself about that.” Once, for instance, this painted plea was the life-sized portrait of Denys Cochin, the nationalist deputy for Paris—an excellent work, laborious, powerfully drawn, and irreproachable in colour, which reminds one of Herkomer’s best style. His clownery, on the other hand, was a huge picture which Besnard calls “The Isle of the Blessed.” A bushy shore in the foreground, then a wide expanse of water which looks partly like sand, partly like wine-soup, and only in the remotest degree like natural water. Finally, in the background, a flat shore with the outlines of a white town that stick, as if cut out of paper, on the blue horizon. Across the level sea where it is reddest, glides a skiff in which stands, in the attitude of the Saviour calming the tempest, an enigmatical figure in red, flowing garments, and with the countenance of an Indian chief, surrounded by a grass-green and wine-dreg-coloured woman and a monkey-like rower of sulphur-yellow hue. On the bank young maidens tarry for the new arrivals, their light raiment, blown bell-shaped by the breeze, reproducing a motif of Botticelli. Between the trees groups of bright-coloured figures are camped, and on the steps of a hill sit or lounge flute-playing fauns, one of whom has the typical head of a retired French colonel. The women in the skiff are distinguished by distorted, acrobatic attitudes, which no model could sustain for ten minutes without supports and props. On principle, no two figures are placed side by side without being clad in the most opposite colours in the spectrum. This arrangement of colours suggests the thought that none of the figures must move away from the side of the others, and none could step into another group, as otherwise the harmonies intended by Besnard would be destroyed. That seems boldly and freely fanciful, but is soberly and painfully subtilised. It is a mechanical game with contrasts of colours, devoid of purpose and even of the charm of any sense of colour. Albert Besnard has, in his later days, evidently discovered Böcklin, or even has only heard him extolled and wants now to make his own Böcklin. The fauns—up to their heads—the maidens on the shore, the blue sea, the white town in the distance, are descended in the direct line from the pictures of the Bâle master. But Besnard has imitated the details as any one may copy a writing which he cannot read. “The link of the spirit is all that it lacks.”

Jean Boldini is one of the most remarkable painters of female portraits in our time. In these he makes himself most solicitous to unite together the screw lines of Alexander’s demoniacs twisting in hysterical convulsions, and Zorn’s bold, sunbeam dances. The faculty of tumult hardly any one among contemporaries possesses like this uncommonly skilful Italian. His pictures seem to fly up as from a bursting bomb. Every fibre in his women palpitates and throbs. One of his women sits half naked, just as if she had torn, in a rage, the clothes off her body, on a lion’s skin, and he has made the head and skin of this common floor-rug bristle with such an expression of cruel savageness, that you jump back in terror from the expected spring of the bloodthirsty monster. Another woman wears on her arm and shoulders a feather boa with wonderful convolutions, which seems to rustle from her in excitement like an eagle. A third lady stands in a door frame—she seems to be about to spring forward with the leap of a tiger. She wears one of those very modern, low-cut evening dresses, which are fastened over the shoulders only by a tiny chain; her bust looks as if it were laid bare because her dress was torn from her body in a brutal struggle with a satyr. There is an atmosphere about this woman of all hysterical convulsions, St Vitus’s dance, or defence with teeth and claws against lawless attempts. There is a story about sorcerers and witches who through a touch give another shape to men. This changing of skin is not practised only in fairy tales. Certain portrait painters also have it in their power. Old Cabanel transformed the rich, fat wives of wholesale merchants and owners of house property, whom he painted for 30,000 francs, into goddesses of the old Greek mythology. Boldini by a spell transforms the ladies who trust themselves to him into mænads, mad women, evil witches that ride of a night on broomsticks to their Sabbath. I do not believe that people pay him 30,000 francs for that; but if a lady even disburses a centime to be represented by Boldini as a Bacchante or a Vampire, she must be as much a victim to neurosity as Boldini makes her out to be.

William Bouguereau.—The contempt of Bouguereau is the beginning of wisdom in art. That everybody knows who has occupied himself with contemporary painting otherwise than as a picture-dealer. Among the long-haired ones who dwell on the mountain land of Montmartre, no name conveys a worse insult. He who wants to make an impression on the Botticelli ladies when visiting the “Salon,” must make a grimace of sudden, severe nausea when he comes across a painting by this “manufacturer of perfumery labels.” On the other hand, Bouguereau has managed to collect in his head in a coronet of all sorts all the honours that blossom for an artist in France. He is Commander of the Legion of Honour and Member of the Institute; he gained the Prix de Rome, and has pocketed all the medals that the Salons and Universal Exhibitions had to bestow. His works fetch the highest prices in the market, and if no Parisian artist finds purchasers, the big pork butcher of Chicago, that painters’ Providence, to whom in their prayers they turn their countenances, always has gold for Bouguereau. The deplorable Philistine, who would also very much like to have a little share in the æsthetic enjoyments of this world, tears his hair and groans: “Where is truth?” The Chat Noir treats Bouguereau as a buffoon, but the Academy erects altars to him. Criticism scoffs, but America pays. And, however readily the Philistine yields to the appearance of daring modernity, if he listens to the voice of his own heart, he notices to his embarrassment that Bouguereau, as a matter of fact, pleases him. He gazes with secret delight at his “Cupid and Psyche,” his “Pearl,” and “Innocence,” his “Oblation to Cupid,” his “Wasps’ Nest,” his “Cupid mouillé,” his “Holy Women at the Tomb.” It is always the same: a sweet maiden, or even several, a well-built youth of rosy body and slender limbs, laughing little mouths with pearly teeth, blooming cheeks, snowy bosoms and rosy fingers—all lovely, all a delight to the eye. The Philistine wriggles under the decree of fashion, which forces him to find these charming things horrible, and his troubled look frames the question that his mouth dares not utter: “Why? Why?”

I think we are doing a good work when we answer him calmly and in a friendly manner, without exaggeration or cheap witticisms which neither explain nor prove anything, not even necessarily the sincerity of the witling. Bouguereau pleases the insufficiently trained eye, because he paints prettily; but in art prettiness is the direct opposite of the beautiful, for it is untruth, since a conscience originally delicate or happily trained only feels truth to be beautiful.

Prettiness is necessarily untruth, for it is that which is conceived without trouble, which excites no opposition, which compels no strain on the attention and no adaptation on the part of the spectator to the peculiarity of the artist. Its effect is merely the effect of what meets the spectator’s pre-existent thoughts or feelings completely. This pre-existing element is not, however, the result of collective observation and strong feeling, but the dissipated precipitate of the most fugitive, indifferent perception, which is totally unfitted to obtrude into the world of phenomena.

The artist whose goal is prettiness, does not glance at reality, but at the soul of the crowd which he wishes to please. He does not portray what he sees, and what makes an impression on him, but what suits the feeble, inexact concepts which the average man forms of things. He is a courtier of the crowd; he flatters their shallowness and incapacity. He wants them to say, with a self-satisfied smile: “This man is a great artist, for he has the same way of looking at things as ourselves.” Prettiness is, in lyric poetry, rhyming “love” with “dove,” “heart” and “part”; in drama, it is rewarding the good characters with advantageous marriages and lucrative posts, and making the wicked fall into the pit they have dug for others. For this is just what the public expects; such is the world-picture which the world has arranged for itself, and it is grateful to the poet that he does not force it to rectify its comfortable way of thinking.

In the plastic arts prettiness is the average or typical. Bouguereau paints a pattern, not a person. He has a canon to which he holds; and if he would only go so far as to look at real human beings, and had to admit that nature does not act according to his canon, he would certainly say: “So much the worse for nature.”

Superficiality always confuses prettiness with the ideal. One cannot fail to see that prettiness lacks exactness. This inexactness is, however, praised as an improvement on reality: the master of prettiness understands nature better than she understands herself. He guesses what she would, but cannot always, do, and comes with his superior creative power to help the poor incapable. The truth is that prettiness is the exact reverse of the ideal; for the ideal is the presentiment of future developments: prettiness the pompous repetition of what is commonplace. The idealist is impelled by a restless longing after novelty to represent; he seeks in invisible germs which the average soul does not perceive to detect the later glory of blossom. The painter of prettiness shows scant satisfaction in attainment, and his creation is nothing but a sleepy reminiscence of impressions he is accustomed to.

The chief harm done by prettiness in art is that it confirms the multitude in their dulness instead of arousing them from it. What the “man in the street” feels in presence of a work of Bouguereau’s is self-complacent pleasure at the artist agreeing with him. He will expect the same feeling also from real works of art, and be disappointed if he fails to find it. Pretty paintings deaden the mind of the average man for powerful works, which teach men to see, educate eyes, operate for cataract, and heal colour-blindness, are keys to the hidden sense of lines of movement, interpret the symbolism of form, and point the way to unknown beauty. The bloodthirsty backwoodsman of Montmartre is, therefore, right to think little or nothing of Bouguereau, and to scalp him; and the Philistine who expects to elevate and enrich his mind by art must make the sacrifice of renouncing the cheap pleasure which the engaging banality of prettiness procures him.

If Bouguereau has anything personal to say, he can say it no worse than many another. His “Portrait of Himself” in the velvet painting-jacket is sincere, and at any rate strives to be honest. It is true that here, too, he has not been quite able to overcome his habit of embellishing, and his cheeks are distressingly rosy. One could not expect from him the almost terrifying inexorableness with which a David has confessed the dreadful grimace of his face paralysed on one side, and a Rembrandt, in his old age, the puffiness of his features and the wateriness of his eyes. These men had such a pride in truthfulness that, in their anxiety not to be partial, they felt almost hostile to themselves, and tried, and judged themselves accordingly. Bouguereau does not understand why he should treat himself more ill-temperedly than his Cupids and nymphs, and smiles good-humouredly at himself.

Frank Brangwyn.—This young Englishman, born in Belgium, is a painter of the great class from which the kings of art spring. In his delight in colour, he reminds us of Delacroix in his Sturm und Drang period; in the dauntlessness with which he wields the brush, of Franz Hals himself, the boldest fighter with this weapon that ever lived up to now. His two first works exhibited in the Paris Salon, “A Sailor’s Funeral” and “All Hands Aloft,” instantly called attention to him. His “Buccaneers” was a veritable revelation. In a boat, floating on the blue-black tide of the Carribean Sea, row some life-sized fellows clad in variegated material, their heads bound with bright red cloths. In the glowing, tropical sun that swelters down on them, everything is a blinding, bright flame: the foam, wet oars, the ship’s planks, the clothing and headgear of the people. The brown cut-throats get in this noonday glory an almost superhuman relief, and in their savage countenances a calm consciousness of their formidableness is revealed, which even in the picture has the effect of a challenge to mortal combat. A year later he exhibited “Goatherds,” likewise life-sized, and likewise plunged in the noonday glow of a southern sky, and, in addition, a reposefully coloured and marvellously deep night-piece, “The Three Holy Kings offering the Infant Jesus Gold, Incense, and Myrrh.” His ability was further enhanced by a “Market on the Shore” and a “Miraculous Draught of Fishes.”

The “Market on the Shore” is held in a Barbary harbour. Little bright-coloured carpets are spread on the yellow loamy sand, where negroes in brown and green-lined haiks and burnooses lie squatting. They are surrounded by poorer people in fantastic rags, with red tarboosh on long, clean-shaven Hamitic skulls. Beyond, three ships extend their prows over the flat beach, and in the background, on the further side of a strip of water, we get a glance, through a gateway with three pointed arches, at the dim throng of a mysterious Mohammedan town.

The “Miraculous Draught of Fishes” takes place in the evening. The fishing-boat rocks softly on the almost oil-smooth, dark blue mirror of the Lake of Genesareth, on the shallow valleys and crests of whose waves the setting sun’s nearly horizontal beams strew leaves and strips of thin gold. Four fishermen are busy hauling in with powerful movements the net heavy with their catch. Behind their vessel, a green, flat-bottomed boat with sails, steered by a disciple, carries the Saviour, veiled in the gloaming, across the water.

Religious subjects have an especial attraction for Brangwyn. In his great picture, “The Scoffers,” he shows a man with the bearded curly head of an enthusiast, fastened to a pillory. The scene, as is usual with Brangwyn, is an Eastern town. A crowd, which is amusing by its negro and Moorish types and their charming garments and rags, presses on the prisoner, who is wearing the strange garb of a Western artisan, and reviles him with the words from their mouths opened in sneering laughter; with the glances of their stupid, malicious eyes; with the gesture of their forked and pointed fingers. Pity is mingled with curiosity only in the case of a handsome, brown, young maiden in the foreground, who, with a noble water-pot on her head, evidently returning home from the spring, remains standing in order to gaze at the scene. You may understand the story as you please. Perhaps it is a foreign socialist or anarchist, who tried to preach his doctrines there, and to whom the authorities are giving short shrift, and whose only reward now is the mockery of the stupid crowd to whom he intended to bring a message of salvation. Perhaps the incident has a deeper and more solemn sense, and is the subjective, half-touched-up, half-modernised representation of the mocking of Christ when He was bound to the pillar in order to undergo flagellation. Whether the drama is conceived from a sociological or theological standpoint, it is of supreme power. The great pain of the altruist who sacrifices himself for mankind, and sees his sacrifice despised; the great sin of the populace that is thoughtlessly guilty of the most horrible ingratitude, are strikingly expressed. And in what form is this rich spiritual and moral purport clothed? Such repose and nobility in varied colour; such witchery in the flat triad of dark yellow, reddish purple, and deep blue; such amazing sureness in modelling by means of mere patches of colour without outlines, it has not been my lot to meet with twice in contemporary painting.

Neither must I leave his “St Simon Stylites” unnoticed. The saint is sitting, with his back resting against a pole, on the platform of his lofty pillar. On the other edge of the platform, ascending by a ladder, appears a priest in mass vestments, accompanied by a deacon, in order to administer Holy Communion to the Stylite, who is apparently dying. The story, however, is a matter of indifference. It is the wonderful harmony of colours that makes this picture so expressive. It is late in the day; twilight is approaching; the last ray of sunlight is finely sprinkled through the air around the figures above the roofs of the Syrian town, from which arises a transparent cloud, so thin that it is rather a breath, an exhalation, than a vapour, and is more surmised than seen. A flight of swallows glides past the saint, and the birds, with their arrow-swift and pleasing motions, observed in the precise Japanese way, greatly help to produce an impression of height and airiness, which Brangwyn attains chiefly by his art of distributing light, and his eerie perspective.

Brangwyn fixes in his pictures all the magic of noon and midnight. He shows his figures either flushed by the quivering heat of the full burning sun, or covered with a veil of half-transparent darkness. Both illuminations have the peculiarity of suppressing all subsidiary work and letting only what is essential remain. The face or body of a man steeped in sun rays becomes almost transparent. Behind the skin and the connecting tissues which we perceive only as a covering, the muscles and bones come forth. The intense brightness prepares a body almost as the dissecting knife of anatomy. Darkness has a similar effect; it blots out the connections and transitions, and only accentuates the strong lines of construction. Only diffused light gives an equal value to all the parts of a surface; it shows all and explains nothing. Direct light, on the other hand, just like darkness, graduates phenomena, makes us recognise at the first glance what is external ornamentation and what are the supports and timber.

Brangwyn is an impressionist in the best sense of the word, a perfect representative of what Impressionism contains that is justifiable. He does not stop over trivialities and accessories. He sees only the essential in phenomena, but this he sees with infallible certainty and intensity. A feature which marks exhaustively the direction, purpose, and force of a movement; a spot of colour that challenges and fixes the eye, as a sudden stroke of a bell does the ear—these are the optical elements which he grasps, and with delightful simplicity, weight, and carelessness, and, as it were, in student fashion, throws on the canvas “straight from the wrist.” The spectator finds once more in the picture exactly the component parts of the phenomenon which in the actual thing would alone excite and fix his attention, and, corresponding to his psychological habit, he supplements the indications of the painting by pictures from his own memory, till it becomes a perfect copy of the real thing, which then includes also all the subsidiary matters either merely hinted at, or quite passed over by the painter.

Brangwyn is one of those rare gifted virtuosi who does not need to draw. The line does not subsist for him, just as it does not subsist in nature. He models with light and colour. He puts spots irregularly near one another, little and big, long and short, angular and round, bright and dark, white and coloured; and from these spots, from this mosaic of correctly-felt effects of light, he builds up the phenomenon in space with incomparably genuine and intense corporeality. Our judgment adds the lines which the painter has never drawn, as it does when looking at the actual thing. We have here the optical elements themselves, which are perceived by the retina of the eye as mere gradations of light, but are apprehended and interpreted by the higher centres as coloured and plastic phenomena. Such a way of painting demands infallible certainty of sight and trustworthy obedience of the hand, else it leads to bankruptcy in art.

Paul Cézanne.—He was one of the protagonists and pioneers of Naturalism. He was with Claude Monet, Caillebotte, and the other Impressionists an interesting subverter; with Zola he was for a moment a victor, and is now vanquished, although, probably, he will not admit it. A barefooted Masaniello, whom a successful revolution of the rabble carries to the top and lodges in the king’s palace, but who has very soon to exchange his purple mantle for his hereditary rags. Fortunately, the lot of overthrown art-revolutionaries is not so horrible as Masaniello’s; they do not end under the executioner’s hand.

Cézanne has one thing in his favour which prepossesses us for him, i.e., his uprightness. It is his nature that ugliness has for him an attraction. He sees only what is abnormal, unpleasant, and repulsive in actual life. If he paints a house, it must be warped, and threaten to tumble down soon. If he portrays a human being, the latter has a distorted face, apparently paralysed on one side, and a deeply depressed or stupid expression. Every model that submits himself to him is put in some sort of convict’s dress. Here is a female portrait. A withered, dried-up face, mud-bedaubed clothes that look as if they had been trailed through the gutter. Doubtless a “professional” who at a raid was accommodated in “Black Maria,” and, after a night in the cells of the police station, discharged? Nothing of the sort. She is a respectable lady of the upper middle-class. This man with the trouble-distorted countenance and the greasy felt hat and overcoat is perhaps a starveling from Bohemia, a broken-down creature, ruined artist or writer? Most certainly not. He is a well-to-do person of independent means. It is curious to me how any one can allow himself of his own accord to be painted by Cézanne, unless it were done in a contrite, penitential mood as a penance. To be sure, one cannot be angry with him, for he does not treat himself any better than his other victims. He has painted portraits of himself which would be grossly libellous if another had painted them. In truth he is not vain, for he sees himself as he represents himself in these pictures. And his morose eye disfigures not only faces, heads, and raiment, but also the rest. Heine assures us that “A woman’s body is a poem.” He would not dare to sustain this statement if he were to see Cézanne’s “Three Naked Women before the Bath.” Such nudities are really immoral, and shriek, not for a discreet fig-leaf, but for a nine-fold covering of cloth and fur.

Blaise Desgoffes.—This painter, who died in 1902, was an incomparable copier of still life; for indeed there exists a still and secret life in the productions of the artist’s hand, as an eye lovingly steeped in form and beauty of colour sees them. Desgoffes was great in little pictures, which rendered splendid things of gold and enamel, of rock crystal, jasper and chalcedony, trinkets and precious stones, lace and embroidery on velvet and silk, carved and polished ebony in insurpassable perfection. There is a school which very contemptuously calls these pictures bodegones. That is the disdainful Spanish expression both for a cookshop and for daubed representations of vulgar eatables such as sausages, smoked herrings, and cheese made from whey. Copying the productions of human hands should be unworthy of an artist. Only what is living, nay, only human life, should be justifiable. But that is too narrow a conception. Certainly the highest mission of all human art is the portrayal of men and women; and what is not itself human becomes artistic in proportion as it gains relation to humanity by means of secret anthropomorphic animation and spiritualisation. But he who demands harshly and dogmatically that the human figure should be treated to the exclusion of everything else, relegates a Hondekoeter, a Landseer, a Rosa Bonheur to the second class, and denies a Desgoffes the title of artist, which is sheer nonsense. I do not know if there is a precedence in art, or any other precedence than that of the ability to express and transmit the life of emotion. Anyhow, a man stands very high who understood how to translate into painting the optical peculiarities of choice woods, metals, stones, and textures better than any painter before him.

Léon Frédéric amazes like an anachronism; in him lives the soul of a primitive. Thus the Van Eycks, Roger van der Weydens, and Hans Memlings regarded the world and man. That is, however, not a sort of affected, antique skill, as in the English Præ-Raphaelites, and their Continental imitators, but genuine, unconscious atavism, the purity of which is evident from the fact that Frédéric paints no masquerades, but only nude, human limbs, or contemporary types of the people in the miserable working garb of our days. If they appear like figures out of mediæval ballads or folk-stories, it is because Frédéric feels them so. He is an out and out Fleming: mystical like his countrymen Ruysbroek, Suyskens, etc.; and, besides, delighting in form, like the builders of the Belgian cathedrals and guildhalls; in love with life, like the feasters and dancers of the Flemish kermesses; honest and conscientious in his work, like an old guild-master of the time of the Spanish Netherlands; brooding and earnest, like a Beguine or a Lollard.

Frédéric does not actually copy, but he is curiously vivid in his recollection of what he has seen. The old Low-German and Flemish masters, whose outlook on the world he shares, hover before him. From the Low-German artists he has his naïve, brick-red flesh tone and the painfully conscientious kind of workmanship, which neglects no wrinkle in the skin or curl in the hair; from Memling, his loving accuracy in treating all accessory work—flowers, ground, clothes, and utensils. Sprinkling the whole canvas with equally finished details, chiefly luxuriant plants, is common to Frédéric and all the Præ-Raphaelites. The pictures of this school, even if they take their subjects chiefly from the fourth dimension, are optically of two dimensions. They are only surfaces. They do not understand perspective, and, therefore, cannot shade off a middle distance or background. Everything lies in one and the same plane and is treated with the same clearness and precision. In the accuracy with which they render every little stone, every texture, and plant, the Præ-Raphaelites have no equals. If, in addition to this, they could paint human beings also, they would deserve unstinted praise, at any rate, as draughtsmen, if not as colourists.

Frédéric feels the sacredness of his art profoundly, as do few other painters of the present day. He seems to himself a priest. It is an external, but a characteristic one: he paints hardly anything but triptychs, which he regards, to a certain extent, as altar-pieces of a philosophical religion; and what he portrays is always a sort of pathetic symbol, from which there comes a sound like verses from the Bible or Vedic hymns. His symbols are not always clear, but it is not his fault that painting is not a fit expression of brief syntheses of long trains of thought, or ethical and philosophical abstractions. At most it is his fault that he does not feel this. His triptych, the “Golden Age,” is, for instance, a view such as Ovid might have described if he had lived in a Belgian district among Flemish people. Frédéric relates the history of one day of his happy race: how human creatures of all gradations of age sleep peacefully in the gleaming night, clinging to one another; how they are awakened by rosy dawn and refresh themselves in a crystal brook; how, beneath a noonday sun, they play and dance and shout for joy, pluck blossoms and fruits, and sit before dainty dishes. It is a profusion of magnificently modelled nude women who are all very red of skin; a laughing exuberance of life such as an old-time worshipper of the obscene god of fruitfulness might have dreamt of amidst the reek of sacrifice. It is also a funnily cannibalistic debauch of delicious children’s flesh and blooming, well-nourished bodies. In other pictures Frédéric has occasionally tortured us by quite as perfectly painted, but, on account of their inexorable truth, fearfully painful representations of radiant nudities torn by thorns, and whole heaps of children’s corpses. Here, however, he is all joy and peace, and his picture is a delight to the eye.

In another of Frédéric’s triptychs, “The Ages of the Workman,” we can measure the whole emptiness of such concepts as “Realism” and “Idealism.” Compare Frédéric with the Bastien Lepage of the Luxembourg. Bastien Lepage passes for the most perfect didactic type of realistic painting. His brutalised, ape-like, feeble-minded, staring Reaper is supposed to be genuine, unrouged nature. Possibly the painter has, on some occasion, seen a disgusting idiot of this sort. I do not know, but I will believe it, for I should like to assume that he had not discovered in his own imagination so perversely distorted an image of the human form. But as such repulsively bestial young women are, in any case, rare exceptions among the white races, Bastien Lepage has unmistakably taken the trouble to choose out of thousands the most hideous model he could hunt up, out of a base, corrupt delight in ugliness, with the malicious intention of defaming nature. Frédéric tells a story in his triptych, “The Ages of the Workman.” Who can deny that he, too, has held with absolute accuracy to reality? On the right, early childhood: workmen’s wives, young and fair mothers are suckling their babies, sweet, fat little creatures with firm little limbs and skins like rose leaves; little maidens, who can hardly stand on their feet, take in tow and act the mother to still smaller brothers and sisters; old grandmothers, who can no longer take part in the labours of the household, keep an eye on the children crawling and swarming about. In the middle, youth: neglected yet happy scapegraces are playing cards in the street, sitting or squatting on the curb-stone; undisciplined lads are venturing the experiment of their first cigarette; grown-up youths go out with young girls of their class on their arm; what they whisper in the ears of their blushing sweethearts would scarcely delight severe guardians of morals; but, at that period of life, in that human environment, their feelings are so natural and healthy that, in spite of all crabbed affectation, they are felt to be pleasant and touching. Finally, on the left, men in their prime are at work: they are erecting toilsomely, with heavy pieces, a scaffold, and a little youngster looks at them; what he has before his eyes is his own future lot, but in his careless, boyish curiosity he notices only the amusing side of the growth of a skilful and intricate work of man, not the hard seriousness of the ill-paid, dangerous, and severe exertion. Thus the life of the poor artisan lies exposed to our gaze. Frédéric does not conceal from us either its hardships or the scantiness of its material condition. He shows us how poorly the people are clad, how ugly their streets and houses are, how narrow is the circle that includes their petty joys and sorrows, and how serious, now and then, is their pastime. But he makes us see also the sunshine resting golden over their years of childhood and youth, and feel the satisfactions with which their families also animate and delight their monotonous existence. He brings these poor, humble people humanly near us, and gives us a great lesson in brotherhood. Every feature in his picture is true; but from this truth a noble and consoling thought proceeds, revealing to us its full extent of beauty and moral motives. Frédéric is a Realist quite as much as Bastien Lepage, so far as he deals with the painfully exact reproduction of sights he has actually observed. But in Frédéric’s presentment the commonplace appears ennobled, and that a superficial æstheticism dubs Idealism. The fact of the matter is that the words Realism and Idealism mean simply nothing. There is no art, there is no artistic tendency, which could be so designated. There are only artists’ temperaments, which are themselves bilious, and, for that reason, dwell with malicious joy on the unpleasant sides of reality, and others which delight in all that is bright, and have a presentiment of a deeper redeeming meaning even behind the unpleasing external. The Realism of a Bastien Lepage is calumny; that of a Frédéric, a speech for the defence.

Jean Paul Laurens has reached all the heights of artistic success. He is a professor, an Academician, and he receives the most honourable commissions from the State and great cities. He has been graciously permitted to satisfy his ambition as a monumental painter with enormous wall- and ceiling-paintings, like those of the Capitol of Toulouse. He was often more happy, often less happy, always powerful, always pathetic, now and then, I will admit, declamatory. But he has also once forsaken his visions of history and turned a glance at the present; and what he saw there, he fixed in a great painting which he calls “Mining Folk,” which stands above all his far-famed frescoes.

It is evening. Between a high, steep-sloping heap of coal and slack and a low line of distant hills closing the horizon, a big town is painted in a wide trough of country. Over the crowded roofs of this town numerous chimneys rise up. No church towers or palace gables, only chimneys which belch aggressively, one might say, white vapour or dense black smoke in the face of the twilight sky. From the middle distance a procession of weary, toil-worn men, whose legs drag and heads hang down, is moving forward along a causeway. From the depths on both sides of the causeway ascend clouds of sulphurous yellow and blue smoke.

Any one engrossed in the details may see how the workmen wandering homewards are clad in the garb of the modern proletariat, and how a manufacturing town of the present day with typical factory buildings lies stretched before us. But the first rapid, comprehensive glance conveys quite a different impression. The town looks like a Sodom and Gomorrha in rebellion against God, and is on the point of being chastised by fire from heaven. The procession of men appears to be a band of the damned which a hidden, mysterious abyss of hell, behind the bend in the road, has vomited. Near the causeway, uncanny depths seem to yawn, from which tongues of hell-flames leap up. It is a prophet’s vision, and the atmosphere of a saga. You fancy you have an illustration of the Inferno before you, but also a note from the formula according to which the painters and sculptors of the Middle Ages were wont to depict the Last Judgment.

And the most remarkable thing is that this epic extension and enhancement of so banal an incident as the exodus of a shift of pitmen knocking off their work is by no means intended. The painter nowhere consciously works with a view to melodrama. He keeps, in all details, strictly to facts. It is only his perception that has made a canto of Dante out of a true copy of an everyday incident. At the sight of the flaming forges, smoking chimneys, and exhausted slaves working for hire, there came to him an inkling of the mighty forces of nature and society which are at work in the man- and horse-powers of a modern wholesale business, which fixed the choice and arrangement of elements in his picture, imprinted on it the demoniac feature, and rendered it a profound symbol of the history of a part of humanity.

Jef Leempoels is one of the most interesting of contemporary Flemings in whom the exquisite artistic qualities of their mediæval forefathers and masters live again. Leempoels has the sturdy, homely truthfulness of these ancestors, their profound feeling, and speculative mind, which easily goes astray into the fantastic. He has their masterly draughtsmanship, and he only lacks their delight in colour and their gift of free, clear composition to rise entirely to their greatness.

He does not rely on his capability or right to distinguish between the essential and the non-essential. He does not dominate his subject with sovereignly subjective perception, but makes himself the humble slave of the phenomena and all their most capricious and lowest details. He does not span the world with the eye of a creative artist, but glances at it as though he were a photographic apparatus for taking authentic negatives. To this intellectual dependence is joined an insufficient development of the sense of what is picturesque. Leempoels is dry in his accuracy and sober in his colouring. He does not seem to think it is his vocation to harmonise tones and to please the eye by a well-arranged palette. And in spite of all this I can never forget his chief pictures. He revealed his nature in naïve little features. For instance, on the wall of the room where the father and mother, old and worn out by life, are sitting together, hang faded photographs representing them, as a young married couple, in a strikingly comic dress according to the latest fashion of five-and-twenty years ago, yet young and full of joyous hope. This discreet contrast, which must be sought for to be noticed, contains the whole melancholy poetry of their life from blooming youth to withered age. And the pictures of his sisters. The good girls are not particularly favoured by nature; they are true daughters of the homely Flemish race, in whom beauty is rare. When Leempoels painted them, there was a struggle in him between the conscientiousness of a sworn witness to reality and brotherly love; but the former gained the victory, and the latter was allowed to reveal itself only in the delicate, almost caressing, perfection of their hands, necks, hair, and clothes.

His picture “Friendship”—an old and somewhat younger man are sitting boldly before us, hand in hand, with their honest, ugly faces turned full towards us. They are figures from the people, the one wearing a green, the other a dark red knitted waistcoat. They are evidently neither rich nor educated, and no particularly developed intellectual life speaks from their clear, reposeful eyes, or their heavy, vulgar features. And yet they are noble creatures. It is their feeling which ennobles them. Only lofty souls are capable of such loyalty and attachment as these two workmen, who so affectionately clasp each other’s hands and lean shoulder to shoulder—let come what come may!—and he who comprehends character without declamation says to himself involuntarily before this picture: “It is well for him who in his path through life meets with such friendship.” Here Leempoels has performed the highest mission of the artist—he has recognised and indicated convincingly what is grand and beautiful in the insignificant and commonplace. That is healthy idealism, for which it is my pride to fight—a consoling and uplifting moral purport in an exact and true form.

I am less agreed in respect of another picture. Leempoels calls it “Fate and Humanity,” and in this he has gone beyond his natural vocal register. From the lower rim of the picture there grows a marvellous flora of hands stretched forth on high, either folded in supplication or clenched in threatening fists, embracing many symbols of faith of various kinds, such as crosses, communion chalices, fetishes and offerings; over them appears, in violet light and filling two-thirds of the picture, a huge, bearded face that, indifferent and unmoved, gazes forward without noticing the hands of supplication and blasphemy raised towards it. It is plain enough what Leempoels wants to express; but it is not apparent what the effect will be of this violet face as inexorable destiny. Its feeble, vacant gaze and stiff nimbus infuse no particular horror, and nothing else which might be imposing is discernible in it. On the other hand, Leempoels imparts to the hands the full measure of his amazing capacity. These hundreds of hands, which are painted with a patience that is almost painful, have all their individual physiognomy. They are all individual hands of men and women, young and old, industrious and idle, Caucasian, Nubian, and Indian. The hands of all races, callings, ages and temperaments are so perfect in their characterisation that error is impossible. If among the hands were to be found those of a friend, I should certainly recognise them at the first glance. As a study of human hands, the piece is a museum-picture which has not its peer in all the collections with which I am acquainted. As a work of art it saddens through want of taste. Leempoels would sin against himself if he strayed into unlimited symbolism. His talent points him in the direction of the clearly circumscribed. He need not trouble himself about being implicated with Philistinism through his devotion to actuality. His sincerity of feeling, too, in the treatment of Philistine subjects, will always raise him above Philistinism.

Henri Martin has always aimed at lofty ends, but the paths he has followed to gain them were crooked and wrong. He was, when he began, and still is, in moments of relapse, a dabbing stumper, i.e., he laid on a thick dab of colour the size of a hazel-nut and extended it somewhat. With this method, his famous “Vibrations” was, indeed, successful, especially at a certain distance; but he broke up all form, and this allowed him to draw quite superficially. If any one reproached him with not rendering a single outline with exactness and certainty, he could use the excuse: “One cannot at the same time flood a picture with flickering light and model precisely.” Stumping was with Martin as with his imitators the cloak to cover up artistically dishonest forms. His idealism—the main feature in his physiognomy as an artist—was revealed, in his first period chiefly, by his feeble figures being dressed in the garb peculiar to no time or country, the garb in which the Primitives were wont to make their angels appear, and by their moving in an artificial stage, which one can call neither earth, nor air, nor heaven; for, as a rule, it was painted a single iridescent, mixed colour, mostly a sort of pale lilac, into which some darker, smooth tree trunks, placed regularly like a lattice, were introduced.

Typical of his first period are his symbolical pictures “Towards the Abyss,” and “Every One has his own Chimæra.” We are almost ashamed to linger over describing this confused rubbish.

“Towards the Abyss.”—A hussy unclad after the fashion in vogue at a Paris artists’ pot-house—her cunning nudity is emphasised by ball-shoes, long black gloves, and by a black veil, thrown back at the right place, but transparent throughout—is hurrying down the gentle slope of a hill. Bats’ wings wide outspread sprout from her shoulders. A crowd of people, in which men and women of all ages and ranks are mixed up, rush after her with the attitudes and gestures of epidemic madness. Some run, others drag themselves along on their knees, others, again, on all fours, after her, and scuffle for flowers which she strews in her wake. Every meaning can be imported into this picture, but nothing can be gleaned from it, or, at most, that the frenzied attitudes of the slaves and victims of this creature, wallowing in the dust, kissing and licking the hussy’s footsteps, betray an unconscious masochistic trait in Henri Martin’s soul.

“Every One has his own Chimæra” is even more futile than this perverse illustration of the pious admonition: “Keep from sin, for the lust of the flesh leads to destruction.” A number of daubed, shadowy figures crawl painfully along in a clay-coloured mass; each is bent under a burden which represents in bodily form his ruling passion. Thus the sensualist carries a naked strumpet; the miser a sack full of gold; the ambitious man laurels and the spoils of war, etc.—a lamentable attempt to represent a literary commonplace in an artist’s vision, in a living and concrete form.

Luckily, Henri Martin showed development. After his first period of crudely affected stippling and streaking, of bold neglect of drawing, amidst the shapeless daubing of coloured confetti, serpentines, and pomposities, with a would-be profound yet absolutely vacant symbolism, he returned to nature and life, treated warmly human subjects from an ideal standpoint, and toned down the crudeness of his execution without, I admit, giving it up altogether.

Commissioned by a rich banker, he painted for the Marseilles Savings Bank a monumental triptych which he called “Labour.” He assigns views of Marseilles—certainly treated with great freedom—to the three backgrounds. The manifest meaning of the three panels is morning, noon, and evening. In the first panel, the children are on their way to school, reading their books; the women are going to market, the labourers to their place of work. In the second, dockers, under the glowing sun of Provence, are unloading a ship’s cargo, which consists of baskets full of golden oranges. In the third, the waterside is almost deserted; an old couple, with a child carrying a doll in its arm walking in front of them, stroll in the cool of the day; some artisan families are also enjoying some fresh air after leaving off work, and Jam majores cadunt altis a montibus umbrae.

But the times of day are, as I have said, only the plain meaning of the picture. Beside or behind it, it has also a deeper, veiled meaning. It would illustrate also an actual state of things in the future. Valiantly take full advantage of school in the morning of life, learn and prepare yourself by that means for working and daring later on. Labour in your prime until your ribs crack: you can do so, and it is lucrative. In return, in the evening of life you will be at ease, and, as a comfortable man of means, enjoy refreshing leisure.

We must be allowed to laugh at this optimistic aspect of industrial life. If Henri Martin has known a docker—of Marseilles or any other place—who was able to end his life as a man of independent means, I should like to ask him for that man’s photograph. Nevertheless, a painter need not be a political economist, and the picture is, you know, intended for a Savings Bank, and the people who will see it there may actually find themselves on the way to the independency that makes blessed, though hardly after noonday unloading of orange boats. We might be able to pass lightly over the poverty of thought in the work, if its artistic qualities were satisfactory. But there’s the rub. It was indeed a questionable thought to put in juxtaposition three pictures separated only by slender pillars, which had to exhibit three absolutely different lights; for either the lights of morning, noon, and evening were properly kept apart, and we had a discord in three notes, or the tones were pitched in one key in order not to shriek at each other, in which case they were untrue. Such is indeed the case. There is a somewhat more silvery breath about “Morning,” a somewhat redder one about “Noon,” a paler violet about “Evening”; but the lights and shadows are about equally powerful, whatever be the position of the sun. The forest of masts in the middle panel is of such exaggerated density that the eye is confused in the maze of shrouds and yards. And the entire picture is executed in the crudest stippling, with dabs of colour thickly plastered on, so that it looks almost scaly. If Henri Martin could give up his vagaries and lack of good taste, he would be a monumental artist of lofty vocation; for, though the fairies have refused him sundry things, they have given him one precious gift when he was in his cradle, viz., that of light. There is sun in his pictures, and they brighten up the space they occupy.

His best work up to now is a huge wall-painting for the Capitol of Toulouse.

A landscape of big, restful lines with a background of dark-shadowed mountain forests, against which all I have to object is that they wall in the whole horizon. From this range of darkening blue heights the country sinks in undulating tiers of hills to the plain of the foreground. Here the idyll of the seasons and men’s lives is developed in three pictures. First, amidst the laughing spring, a strapping maiden, intoxicated with love, on the breast of the young lad who is embracing her. Next, a number of stalwart country folk in the summer work of haymaking, on whom, beyond the cut grass, their wives and children at play are gazing. Lastly, under melancholy autumn trees, a lonely old woman preoccupied with recollections. The people are homely, of course, without crude realism, poetic without the shepherd-insipidity of Gessner. The parallelism between the aging of the men and women and the progress of the year is unforced; the symbolism clear and free from morbid, perverse mysticism. Turf, trees, and bushes are decorative in form, delicate, and at the same time sufficient in colour, and the whole is flooded by a wonderfully joyous sunshine, which is more reminiscent of the glories of May in Provence than even Montenard’s symphonies of light. Henri Martin has, I admit, here, too, indulged in stippling, but he has given his people and trees strong, free outlines, and scarred only the outer skin very lightly with pock-marks. He has not abandoned that ill habit, but he seems to practise it with remorse. Perhaps he thinks gradual transition is due to his conversion to better insight. In any case, this picture was conceived and executed in a happy moment.

Henri Martin’s career teaches a moral. Let him who would honour an artist continually bear in mind an appropriately modified reading of Solon’s warning to Crœsus: “Do not pronounce on any artist before his death.”

Jean Raffaelli.—Like Henri Martin, Sisley, and the other stipplers who painted with little dots, Jean François Raffaelli at first painted with thin, slightly serpentine strokes. And we have had to get accustomed to this manner. Raffaelli has been able to succeed, because he long favoured subjects for which his ripple lines were the suitable style. He painted poor people in poor landscapes, emaciated bodies in slatternly clothes under trees as dry as brooms. Like a raindrop on a window-pane, and like a tear on a furrowed cheek, the slender traces of colour flowed down these pitiable figures, arousing twilight imaginations of weeping, plaintive trickling, and dissolving. Later on he caught cheerful, coloured views of Paris streets—The Invalides, Notre Dame, and the Place St Michel. In these his streaky way of painting was somewhat inadequate; but his amazing feeling for a crowd in the hurried, nervous movement which is peculiar to the Parisian lower orders, saved him. I know no painter who feels as Raffaelli the bustle of the world’s metropolis. I think that any one who suffers from dread of the market-place, must get a feeling of fear at seeing his pictures.

In a third period of his production, Raffaelli gave a rare example of complete change in his maturity. He who had grown famous as a painter of the poor and miserable, of vices and sicknesses, turned, at the zenith of his success, from the aspects that he had hitherto cherished, and opened his heart to the joys of existence. In his mind a process occurred, such as the ninth symphony describes in eternal strains. In his despair a voice suddenly cries out: “Brothers, let us sing other strains,” and roars out exultingly: “Joy, fair brightness of the gods.” Formerly, he knew only abandoned tramps, tattered beggars and thieves, broken-down hospital brothers. His plant-world consisted of the leprous turf in front of the Paris forts, decayed flowers, the half-withered, suburban street trees, broomlike and leafless as in autumn. And he painted this misery in miserable colours and in his own peculiar, streaky manner, especially appropriate to the subject. Now he caresses with a broad, full brush bloomingly beautiful maidens in white raiment, sunny, ornamental gardens with rich parterres, fresh nosegays or living flowers. He has also changed his style with his subject. It is all renovated—palette, execution, and story. I have a feeling of a secret happiness having blossomed in this artist’s soul, and I rejoice in the cheerful unconcern with which, by his altered work, he makes all men privy to his Vita Nuova.

Odilon Redon is a completed artist. His development is ended. It came from Gustave Moreau, and it never deviated from him. He is a delightful harmonist of colours, who handles the sharp and flat notes with equal mastery, and if he condescends to paint flowers, fruits, unpretentious still life, and landscapes every one can understand, he displays naturalness, taste, and winning homeliness. But when he strives for higher expression he gets beyond his master’s range of vision, and becomes purely hallucinatory. Fabulous creatures, at once Pegasus and Centaur, stagger about amongst rare flowers, which gape like bleeding wounds or grin like vampires’ mouths. Monsters without recognisable organic shape, bastard combinations of parts of dragons, beetles, birds and Ashes hover or swim in an uncertain medium, which may be water, air, or ether. Dreadful human heads, bound in clusters, grow bushlike out of the ground. All this is in colour pleasing; in form, enigmatical. Gustave Moreau is always intelligible; we know the myths he clothes in forms of extrahuman and superhuman splendour. No one can make head or tail of Odilon Redon. He himself does not think at all in his unearthly representations, and they awaken no definite thoughts either, but affect us like wild faces in a fever.

Pierre Auguste Renoir is also counted among the Impressionists and Naturalists. When we see that the same designation is applied to him as, for example, to Cézanne, we can, as it were, clutch with our hand the misuse of the words, and convince ourselves how senseless classification in art is. Renoir is certainly no painter of prettiness. He does not paint nature white and rosy, or stick beauty-patches on her face. He does not go out of his way even for pronounced ugliness. You have only to look at his two Megæras on the garden bench to be convinced of this; but beside these witches he has so much refreshing, individualised beauty, that one fails to understand how he could have been classed with Cézanne and, what is more, the routine Naturalists. His naked young woman with the mother-of-pearl flesh; his lady in a cashmere dressing-gown on the tapestry sofa; his girl in blue with the red cap, and the little sister in white; his two ladies with the roses, are simply charming. And love speaks no less from his chrysanthemums and his sunny meadows than from his men and women. He who has the same feeling as Renoir for roses and children, is not only a great painter, but also a good and noble man.

Alfred Roll is one of the most amiable figures in the art world of to-day. No one has such feeling as he for the exquisitely delicate silvery vapour of a May morning atmosphere, quivering with sunlight and saturated with dew. No one knows how to model out with such creative genius as he a human body from the daylight that flows around it in gushing torrents. In his free-light painting one breathes free from all oppression. Besides qualities which, in all ages, make a great artist, he has the little trace of corruption which makes him a legitimate son of our age. One of his masterpieces—the naked young woman who clings caressingly to the bull—awakes Pasiphaistic ideas of old classic aberration. To procure pardon for this picture, he had to do no less than paint the splendidly healthy peasant girl with the brimming milk-pail and the cow—certainly a worthy penance.

Roll is, to be sure, not always the charming, luminous painter of the milk-maid and the girl with the bull. He very often strikes other notes. Thus, for instance, in his picture inspired by socialism, which he calls “The Martyr’s Road,” he shows an old tramp who, with his back leaning against a tree, has collapsed by the wayside, has let his wallet fall beside him, and appears to be about to give up the ghost. The misery of his worn countenance already overshadowed by death, of his emaciated figure and tattered clothes are convincing. On the other hand, it is open to question whether it was good taste to paint the dying man in front view, with bold foreshortening of the outstretched legs, and with boot-soles of a terrific size, that rear up before us, in the extreme foreground, like two præ-historic menhirs. Roll intended to pay his homage to Maxim Gorki also. Was it from sincere feeling, or to show that he is dans le mouvement, and is keeping step with the most advanced of his time?

He has insisted on trying his hand at monumental decoration also. The fruit of his effort is a gigantic picture which he entitles “Life’s Joys.” He has evidently thought of Watteau, probably of the latter’s “Embarcation to Cythera.” It is the same blissful landscape with roses, trees, and water that seems, in the haze of the distance, to continue interminably until it reaches Paradise. It is the same air which the rain of blossom renders coloured and almost opaque. It is the same spring sky which we might hail with shouts of joy. The men and women, however, who give life to this Eden, are different to Watteau’s. In Roll, everything is marvellously austere and hard. His women in the foreground are naked, and partly lie in Michael Angelesque attitudes on the grass, partly sit there overpoweringly monumental. Loving couples, walking and dancing, behave as if they were possessed by wild, brutal lust. Something like a tragic current is traceable amidst this idyll. We exclaim in alarm: “Here, this very day, there will yet be murder or manslaughter?” And with the object of destroying still more the ideal note of May, Roll puts, in the midst of this fairy-tale splendour, three realistic musicians, whose clothes were bought at la Belle Jardinière, who will certainly, after every dance, go round with a plate and collect from their audience. Where will the nude ladies take money from to throw to them? How much more charmingly and wittily does Watteau begin his theme! Only a marble statue of a woman renounces the advantages of elegant toilettes. Winged Cupids flit about the young couples, and translate, as it were, into lyrical, rhymed verses the naturalistic prose of the gallantry exhibited. The men do not rage in brutal eagerness, but pay delicate and discreet court to their ladies. And above all things, Watteau’s infallible taste warns him against telling his stories at excessive length. As brevity is the soul of wit, so moderate compass is a great advantage in an Anacreontic scene. This should be elegant and pleasant; but the monstrous excludes elegance and pleasantness. Roll’s Titans and Cyclopses are not suitable for masquerading as Arcadian shepherds.

Lucien Simon, a painter who has been an imitator of Cottet, puts himself forward now, by an impetuous movement, into rank with him. “The Evening Gossip” unites the family round the table lamp, which lights up a number of richly animated faces with curious lights that play and flicker. “Nuns Collecting”—one old and one young nun try by gentle yet tenacious and irrefusable pressure to overcome the resistance of a well-to-do and apparently somewhat niggardly country lady, and to determine her to open her well-guarded purse. In a “Ball-room in Brittany” peasant couples, in the dress of the Celtic province, under smoking lamps emitting a yellow light, spin round, with heavy stampings, to a bagpipe tune which drives the blood into the simple dancers’ browned cheeks, and kindles sparks in their eyes. All this is stumped in broadly and luxuriously without petty dwelling on the less essential, yet with a sure feeling for what is characteristic in appearance and movement, and in a harmony of dark colours, which is as far remote from the bright tone of the style of painting in vogue the day before yesterday as a Guido Reni is from a Franz Hals, but affirms its own justification as self-consciously as the particular note struck by a Hennar and Gustave Moreau among the moderns, of a Velasquez and Rembrandt among the greatest ancients.

Up to now, his most important creation is his “Mass in Brittany,” a work of an exquisite nature. The young and old peasants and seamen who hear High Mass standing in the bare village church, are truly and lovingly individualised head by head. Proudly renouncing pleasing externals, L. Simon has made up his mind to produce his effects only by the noblest means, viz., by characterising with accuracy these manifold types, and by the depth and fulness of the spiritual life of these pious folk here gathered together. Offence has been taken at the broadness of his execution, which already bordered on superficiality, and on the coarseness of his colour, which put one now and then in mind of the bill-poster’s newer art. He has laboured conscientiously on himself, and diminished the defects of his qualities without weakening the latter. He still continues to paint with large strokes in fresco style, but he pays attention to the solid building of his figures. He is still pronounced and unaffected in his colouring, but he avoids letting power degenerate into coarseness, and expressiveness into shrillness. Thus Lucien Simon rises slowly and steadily, though unerringly, to the lofty peaks of pre-eminence.

Jean Veber is quite a peculiar phenomenon which has not yet been deservedly appreciated. On one characteristic ground: because he never understood how to be solemn; because he seems not to take himself or his art seriously. He began as a caricature draughtsman for Boulevard papers, and only when his vocation for this peculiar province was well established, did he exhibit oil-paintings. But he was already labelled, and people continue to regard him merely as a comic draughtsman. The public refuses to allow a double renown to a single talent. Its admiration, you know, costs nothing, but it is, nevertheless, scanty with it, as if it were bringing a sacrifice obtainable only with difficulty. That is a royal trait in the sovereign mob. It is niggardly with its distinctions in order to enhance their value. The splendid Daumier also had to suffer from this coyness on the part of the public. For a long time nothing was thought of his easel pictures, and it was really the Universal Exhibition of 1900 that first revealed to posterity the fact that Daumier of the “Charivari” was one of the most important French painters of the nineteenth century. The caricaturist of our days is, as it were, the journalist among plastic artists, and we know that it is very hard for journalists to succeed with poetical creations, however brilliant. The older humorists among the painters fared better. The Dutch painters could make rough fun of the life of the populace without injuring their reputation as artists by so doing. Hogarth attained high recognition, although his clumsy, Philistine, moralising painting ranks below the works of many caricaturists of to-day. Cruikshank, however, whom I rank, without hesitation, above Hogarth, occupies, in popular estimation, a lower rank, because he put his pencil at the service of the Press.

Jean Veber is the descendant in the direct line of the younger David Teniers, the Adriaen Brouwers, and the Höllen-Breughels. From them he derives his full style of painting, his deep, rich colours, his great sureness and luxuriance of execution, his clear composition and florid imagination. He differs, however, from them in the quality of his fancy which delights in symbols replete with philosophical references; frequently in Saadic spectacles of cruelty and lust, and very often in lubricities of the Félicien Rops kind. This is the effect of the hundred and fifty to three hundred years which separate him from his more innocent spiritual ancestors.

Of the pictures he has exhibited, some are unforgettable, when one has seen them. The “Triumphal Procession” of a gigantic crowned goose through the streets of a mighty city, amid the loud applause of a populace raving mad with loyalty. The “Struggle for Gold” of a number of awful cripples tearing each other to pieces in their mad struggles for a few gold pieces that have fallen in the street; the “Sight of Terror” of a man reeling home at night, apparently after a long drinking-bout, in whose eyes the houses and monuments take weird, living physiognomies, are most impressive utterances of the misanthropic pessimism, the satiric bitterness, and the humour of Veber, also, to be sure, of his predilection for the weird, the ghostly, and the horrible.

These qualities are repeated in almost all his works up to now. The greatest and most pretentious, “The Machine,” offends through the daring symbolism by which he illustrates the murderous power of woman over the sensual man. On the other hand, “Sunday Morning” is a bit of life observed with exquisite humour: a barber’s shop in the village, with a soaped victim under the nimble but not too considerate hands of the beard-shaver’s wife, whilst some other customers, of unspeakable comicality in looks, bearing, and dress, smoking, dreaming, staring, or chattering, wait their turn on the bench by the wall. “The Hermit and the Female Faun” is a scarcely orthodox, but keenly witty modernisation of the old theme, the temptation of a saint, which these square-toes of painters for the past five hundred years have cherished with predilection, since it permits them to present quite heathen sights with a hypocritically contrite air. “The Three Good Friends” are of refreshing cheeriness. The ugliness of these contented louts is touching. The painter, by way of exception, exhibits them without malice, rather sympathetically, with a plea for extenuating circumstances. But generally, his wit belongs, in the main, to the species of evil-speaking. We laugh over the malice with which a sharp-tongued observer characterises our fellow-creatures, but we feel quite well that it is not the better man in us that laughs. Jean Veber loves to mock at mankind in goblin fashion. He sees men perpendicularly pushed together like a telescope, horizontally drawn out as short, square gnomes with pumpkin faces, who, pleased with themselves and unconscious of their grotesque ugliness, strut about as if they were so many Apollos and Dianas. Thus Jaurès appears with mouth agape and flourishing gestures on the rostrum of the Chamber, at the foot of which breaks a flood of blustering deputies in stormy session. So in a parody of Rubens’ “Kermes”—itself of the nature of a parody—villagers resembling sacks amuse themselves with feasting and drinking and amorous tendernesses which are calculated to disgust us with love itself. A grandly rigged-out, inexpressibly laughing lady in a low-cut dress between two greybeards paying their dreadful court at an exquisitely appointed supper-table; a physician at the foot of the bed gazing with devotion at the tongue, put out quite a yard, of a rich, fat lady-patient; a short, stout woman in a fashionable tailor’s salon, whom the slenderest of the show-room girls is trying, with “cake-walk” movements, to fit with a dress like an umbrella-cover, are amusing in their stupidity and ugliness. On the other hand, I cannot follow Jean Veber further when, in “Family Joys,” he tries to make the newborn child ridiculous—a shapeless bit of sprawling flesh, red as a crab, which the midwife has brought from the bed of the exhausted mother at the back of the room, and is exhibiting in triumph to the gaping family. He should keep his sacrilegious hand off the sanctity of this event.

The happy combination of a faultless dexterity with an arrogant, creative humour, in which I would only like to see a trifle less admixture of gall, renders Jean Veber’s an artistic physiognomy that is far more interesting than many an idol to whom altars are raised.

Emile Wéry, a young and fortunate man of talent, began his career with a great success. His view of an Amsterdam canal made a sensation, and gained the great prize at the “Salon.” Perhaps a little stupefied by this triumph, he kept for a while to the style of his prize picture, so that there was reason to fear he would early stiffen into a manner. He painted, for instance, an attractive triptych, which presents Venice to us in her three characteristic decorations: the narrow Calle, the slender Rio, and the splendid Canal. But what we cannot anyhow fancy absent from a view of Venice—the southern sky, the gleaming sun, and the warm tints of her old stones and tiles: these are here altogether lacking. It is all grey, northern grey. It is the same tone as in the prize picture of Amsterdam. As Faust found Helen in every woman, so Wéry then found apparently Dutch water-towns in every town, and Amsterdam herself in Venice. People think they are flattering the city on the Amstel, when they call it the Venice of the North. Wéry reversed the compliment: to him Venice was the Amsterdam of the South. How true it is that we see not with the eyes but with the soul!

The South, combined with his youthful impulses to development, was to save him from the danger of mannerism. Though he had seen Venice with his Amsterdam eyes, and found in the azure and gold of the city of lagunes the leaden waters and mist of the north, further south, in the light, he bathed his eyes clean from the muddiness of higher latitudes. In “Sicily” a girl’s brown head, with red cloth in the midst of a cluster of dark green-leaved branches with ripe oranges, flashes and glows the whole noon of the magic island, which this vigorous woman—a golden fruit among golden fruits—is to personify. But even after his return home he still remained drunk with the light of Italy. In a new picture, “The Little Ones,” we are once more in a harbour on the North Sea, at a place where Wéry’s talent takes its root. Flaxen-haired youngsters are playing round a boat; one of these, a little chap in wide, flapping trousers, is droll enough to eat. Water, sky, and river-bank are wedded in silver sheen, and over the whole reposes a happy sense of comfort, in which the artist’s cheerful heart is disclosed. He has happily got over his first crisis. Now his artistic career lies smooth and sunny before him.

Anders Zorn.—This Swede is a virtuoso of amazing skill. He delights in marvellous effects of light, in surprises, in fixing fugitive views. His pictures are snap-shots pitched on the canvas with an almost mechanically smart brush. He is a concert painter possessing talent. He is one of the great corruptors of young artists nowadays. It is so fascinating, by a few wild, staggering, nimble strokes of the brush, to conjure up a human figure or a scene. But this method leads to the worst superficiality, and attracts most the lazy fellows who wish to save themselves the trouble of learning properly the principles of drawing and painting. Zorn did not make the thing easy for himself. He honestly and industriously acquired a thorough mastery of technique before turning to execute his dazzling little pieces. He may allow himself to storm and rage over the canvas, for accuracy has become automatic in him. In spite of this haste, every line is on the right spot, and though people often regret that he only hints instead of stopping and deepening, nevertheless it is continually said: “The man knows how to build up a figure or a group.” His imitators, however, have caught only his daubing, and with them superficiality is but a bold excuse for ignorance of drawing.

Ignacio Zuloaga.—Spain can at the present time boast of a number of painters who might call out to their greatest predecessors among their countrymen the proud anch’io. What characterises them is a peculiar, almost mad energy in drawing, which appears in all details, in the living and the dead, not only in the mien and attitudes of men, but in the sharp profile of every leaf and blade of grass, in the bold relief of every stone, in the aggressive self-consciousness of every being as of every thing. This energy is not to be learnt. One has it or one has it not. There are foreign painters in plenty, whom Spain has bewitched, and who their whole life long recount nothing but bull-fights and processions, shepherds and gipsies, cigarreras and manolas; but no one who knows the genuine Spaniards will confuse these with the foreign imitators. There is, for instance, the excellent Jules Worms. He has been exhibiting Spanish scenes uninterruptedly for forty years. They are always nicely painted, prettily conceived, and pleasantly executed. As contributions to knowledge of the nation they are not without value. They have gained him all official honours, and he passes for an undisputed master of his particular province. And yet how un-Spanish is this life-long Spanishness of Worms and all his rivals and imitators! It is as smooth, licked, tricked up, entertaining, and banal as the railway novel of an inquisitive but superficial globe-trotter. It is a conventional comic-opera Spanishness, a theatre decoration for scenery, with groups of costumes for living figures. It lacks the power, the stern virility which distinguishes the Spanish painters, even those of the second rank, and gives them a family likeness to their great ancestors, Valdes, Velasquez, and Ribera.

The most typical of these modern Spaniards is Ignacio Zuloaga, and the most typical, perhaps, of his pictures are the three sketches from Spanish folk-life, which were exhibited a few years ago in the “Salon.” An Andalusian, young, thin, and delicate, with a little crumpled face of apish ugliness, with a supple body that seems to whirl, stands in front of a poor mirror, and powders her face with coarse rice-powder, as though she were sticking on a comic Pierrot-mask, whilst her sparkling eyes testify that she wants to make herself thoroughly beautiful for the bull-fight. Then we see her in loud, bright ribbons, with the inimitably draped mantilla over her head and shoulders, passing quickly through the street, greeted by two old connoisseurs with highly-spiced endearment. On the third occasion she or her sister goes with a diabolically piquant young gipsy girl, whose insolent laugh discovers gleaming wolf’s teeth and turns up the sharply-curved nose, rapidly over the ground, probably to keep a Sabbath, from the expression of both grimaces. This is warm life such as not often glows on painted canvas. Zuloaga has felt his Andalusian wild creatures to his finger-tips, and renders them with all their garbo and salero—the German Schneid and Mumm, and the French montant and mousseux are weak translations of this expression. The pictures seem to be painted, not with mineral colours and oil, but with sulphuric acid and lunar-caustic. These ladies are young witches, of whom you would imagine that by touch they must give an electric shock like a torpedo-fish, that, if they open their mouths, red mice will jump out, and that it must be more natural for them to ride through the air on a broomstick than to make use of their legs in the usual way. In the piquant ugliness of their faces, made up with a thick layer of rice-powder, in the gorgeous Sunday array, in their attitudes and movements, in the gipsy-girl’s bestially insolent grinning and winking, in the lustful glances and laughter of the men, there is a fulness of hot life, an insolent sensuality such as is only met with in Brangwyn’s youthful works. One often heard the name of Goya pronounced before these pictures. It is indeed the same temperament, but another outlook on life, another art. Zuloaga has much of the cutting virtuosity of his great countryman; but he is no embittered critic of the world, rather a laughing Sunday’s child who enjoys life with all his senses.

And, above all, his pictures are patterns of a domestic art which, through its unreserved sincerity, is at the same time an universal art. For it reaches so deeply that it penetrates beyond the special type to humanity in general.