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DATS. EA.1E
BOOKS BY ROYAL CORTISSOZ
PERSONALITIES IN ART AMERICAN ARTISTS NINE HOLES OF GOLF LIFE OF WHITELAW REID ART AND COMMON SENSE
CHARLES SCPJBNER'S SONS
Personalities in Art
HEAD OF THE VIRGIN PROM THE DRAWING BY LEONARDO DA VINCI
PersonalMe&in Art
By Royal Cortissoz
Author of "American Artists," "Art and Common Sense,"
"John La Farge : A Memoir and a Study,"
"Augustus Saint-Gaudens," etc.
Charles Scribner's Sons New York - London
MCMXXV
COPYRIGHT, 1924, 1925, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Copyrif ht,'1921, 1922, 1923, bjr THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE, INC. Copyright, 1924, 1925, by THE NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, INC.
Printed in the United States of America
BINDERY APR 41949
'> 9
'23
Contents
CHAPTER
I. THE ART OE ART CRITICISM
II. THE ART CRITIC AS ICONOCLAST .... 15
I. PROFESSOR VAN DYKE ON REMBRANDT . 17
H. PROFESSOR VAN DYKE ON VERMEER . . 37
III. THE THIRTY-NINTH VERMEER ..... 45
IV. LEONARDO'S LEGACY or BEAUTY .... 51 V. RAPHAEL AND THE ART OF PORTRAIT PAINTING 63
VI. RELIGIOUS PAINTING ........ 77
VII. THE CULT OF THE DRAWING ..... 93
VIII. VENICE AS A PAINTING-GROUND .... 107
IX. SILHOUETTES OF OLD MASTERS ..... 123
i. VAN DYCK'S "DAEDALUS AND ICARUS" . 125
H. VELASQUEZ'S "DYING SENECA" . . . 128 in. TWO PORTRAITS BY REYNOLDS AND GAINS
BOROUGH ......... 132
X. RAEBURN V .......... 139
XI. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ...... 149
I. HUBERT ROBERT ........ !$!
II. A PORTRAIT BY DAVID ...... 1 59
in. PRUD'HON ......... 165
XII. GAVARNI ........... 167
XIII. DAUMIER *" ........... 181
XIV. COURBET ........... 193
v
vi Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
XV. Puvis DE CHAVANNES 203
XVI DEGAS 219
I. AS PAINTER AND DRAFTSMAN . . . 221
IL AS A MAN 232
HI. AS A SCULPTOR 245
IV. AS A COLLECTOR ...... 249
XVII MONET 259
XVIII. SEVEN RENOIRS 273
XIX. ODILON REDON 285
XX. CEZANNE . , , 291
XXI. GAUGUIN 303
XXII VAN GOGH / 315
XXIII. EARLY AMERICAN PORTRAITURE . . . 321
XXIV. THE AMERICAN WING AT THE MF.TROPOLI-
TAN MUSEUM . , p\- .\^if . . . 335 1 <*' ^» '' *
v
XXV. THE AMERICAN BUSINESS BUILDING . . 351
XXVI. AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL ART . : ^ . . . 369
XXVIL THE CENTENARY OP GEORGE INNESS . . 383
XXVIII. J. ALDEN WEIR . 397
XXIX. ROBERT BLUM 407
xxx. "291" 417
XXXI FORTUNY ........... 433
XXXII ZORN . . , . . 437
Illustrations
Head of the Virgin Frontispiece
From, the Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci
FACING PAGE
Head of a Young Boy 48
From the Painting by Vermeer
Raphael 66
From the Portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo
Giuliano de Medici, Duke of Nemours ..... 68 From the Portrait by Raphael
The Ascension 88
From the Painting by John La Farge
Paulus Hofhaimer * . „ . . 100
From the Drawing by Albrecht Durer
Venice 118
From the Painting by John Sargent
Daedalus and Icarus 126
From the Painting by Van Dyck
The Dying Seneca * . . . . 130
From the Painting by Velasquez
Mrs. Vere of Stonebyres 144
From the Painting by Raeburn
Lavoisier and His Wife 160
From the Painting by David
Le Cambrioleur 174
From the Drawing by Gavarni
Portrait of a Man in the Studio of an Artist ... 222 From the Painting by Degas
Figure from "The Duo" 232
From the Drawing by Degas
vii
viii Illustrations
TACING PAGE
Dancers 246
From the Bronzes by Degas
Matinee sur la Seine «, , „ 268
From the Painting by Claude Monet
Danseuse 280
From the Painting by Renoir
Mrs. Richard Yates • , . 330
From the Portrait by Gilbert Stuart
Russek's . . 356
From the Building by McKim, Mead & White
The Moorish Knife Grinder 432
From the Painting by Fortuny
Personalities in Art
I
The Art of Art Criticism
I
THE ART OF ART CRITICISM
THE most interesting thing in the world for the art critic in the summer of 1923 was the play of the limelight around — the art critic. Ordinarily he is one of the least conspicuous of mortals. In a prac tical age he is dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of ideas having no practical value. He exercises func tions which have nothing on earth to do with the affairs engaging the majority of mankind. He is to a captain of industry what an astronomer is to a movie star. He could not, if he would, buy an old master; he can only talk about it. But in the year 1923 this talk of his for a little while shared public attention with the occupation of the Ruhr, the diva gations of Signor Mussolini, and all the other high- erected themes of a distracted period. With the tidy sum of half a million dollars involved, it was deemed worth while to call in the art critic, a circumstance almost giving him a "practical" status, almost ally ing him with "big business."
I refer to the cause c&lebre of "La Belle Ferron- niere," the lady otherwise known as Lucrezia Crivelli, whose portrait by Leonardo da Vinci has long been
Personalities in Art
one of the treasures of the Louvre. Mrs. Andr6e Halm, of Kansas City, owns a portrait of the same subject which she attributes to the same master, and which she proposed to sell to the Kansas City Mu seum for $500,000. Sir Joseph Duveen's assertion that the painting 'was not a Leonardo held up the transaction, whereupon Mrs. Hahn brought suit to recover from him the amount named. I have not seen the picture. I have no opinion to express upon it. But I have been fascinated by that other picture presented by the situation developed in preparation for the trial.
Mrs. Hahn's painting was submitted in Paris to the scrutiny of a galaxy of all the critical talents, gathered together by Sir Joseph Duveen. Mr. Ber nard Berenson came over from Italy. Sir Charles Holmes, of the National Gallery, arrived from Lon don. Herr Bode was expected from Berlin, but, I be lieve, could not come. This was, perhaps, as well, since Mrs. Hahn's attorney, who was present at all these proceedings, might have dragged in disconcert ing allusions to another Leonardesque incident, that of the famous wax bust. But it is not my object to enumerate here the entire personnel of the critical clan. The point is simply that the clan was sum moned, and that the world on both sides of the At lantic respectfully listened to what it had to say. And while they waited to see which side should pre vail, many observers were doubtless moved to reflec-
The Art of Art Criticism
tion and inquiry on the whole broad question of the role of the critic. If he is to play his part in court along with the other experts familiar there, with the authorities on chemistry, engineering, lunacy, and so on, how far do his credentials go and what is the story of their establishment?
In the eyes of a multitude of artists the critic is an enemy of mankind, and it is easy to see how this no tion has arisen. Consider the difference between the chemist and the art critic, functioning as experts. It embraces a crucial element. One deals with insensate things; the other with the works of human beings. The chemist hurts no feelings; the art critic some times rasps them horribly. Judge Parry, in a delight ful paper on the celebrated case of Whistler vs. Ruskin, in which his father, Sergeant Parry, appeared for the plaintiff, recalls an apposite story. Ruskin wrote to a friend that he hoped a devastating criticism he had published on that individual's picture would make no difference in their friendship. "Dear Ruskin," re plied the artist, "next time I meet you I shall knock you down, but I hope it will make no difference in our friendship." There is the nubbin of the question as it lies between the artist and the critic. Wounded amour propre has never yet permitted a man to reason impersonally. The validity of criticism as an art passes right out of the consciousness of an artist who has been rubbed the wrong way. This leads to some droll attitudes. An actor, for example, will tell you
Personalities in Art
that the fate of a play, by which we may suppose him to mean judgment on its merits, depends upon the opinions passing in conversation among theatre goers. He will respect the simple statement of " Good " or "Rotten," which may be heard as the audience disperses. The statement, of course, may be made by an auditor who knows nothing about the art of the stage, who knows only what he likes, who knows only whether he has been entertained or bored. On the other hand, the trained critic who not only says that the thing is bad but gives his reasons, gets the actor's goat.
It is in the nature of things. It will always be so. But it sheds no light on our problem. Let us return to Whistler. He won damages of but a farthing out of the trial. Forthwith he set out to get even in his own way. Summing up what he called "the fin mot and spirit of this matter/' he proceeded to belabor Ruskin and, through him, all art critics. He raised some good laughs, laughs to be enjoyed with him to this day by any open-minded reader, whether he be artist or critic; but he failed to contribute a feather's weight to the philosophy of the subject. I may note his principal fallacy: "He [the critic] brands himself as the necessary blister for the health of the painter, and writes that he may do good to his art." The critic does nothing of the sort. The point that Whis tler overlooked is that evaluation is description. To say that a picture is bad in this or that respect is
The Art of Art Criticism
only incidentally to admonish the artist; the real pur pose is to tell the lay reader what it is like.
Whistler is the salient exponent of the argument that the artist alone is the person to tell you what a work of art is like, or worth. " Shall the painter then decide upon painting? Shall he be the critic and sole authority? Aggressive as is this supposition, I fear that, in the length of time, his assertion alone has established what even the gentlemen of the quill accept as the canons of art and recognize as the mas terpieces of work." It is a plausible dictum and only gains in plausibility as you turn to some of the say ings of artists. Read the "Pensees" of Ingres, or Delacroix, or Rodin. Read one of the most beautiful books on art ever printed, "Les Maitres d'Autrefois," written by Fromentin, an artist. Whistler himself, in his "Ten o'Clock," delivered some precious ob servations. In the invaluable " Impressions sur la Peinture" of Alfred Stevens, the Franco-Belgian mas ter, there is a reflection which it is impossible to deny: Un grand artiste est en general un bon critique, parce qu'il p&netre mieux dans les arcanes des choses. The most illuminating talk on art to which I have ever listened was that of John La Farge. I need not labor the subject. From Leonardo down there have been artists who were magnificently eloquent and in structive on their mystery. But that, I maintain, means simply that from time to time — and not very Often — the artist has been doubled with the philos-
8 Personalities in Art
opher and the critic. He has happened to possess, in addition to his artistic gift, the critical faculty, which is a thing by itself. He has been a good critic not merely because he has been an artist but because the gods have given him a dual nature.
There is the familiar hypothesis that the critic is an artist who has failed, but I need not dwell on this. It is refuted by the testimony of uncounted exhibi tions that, along with his betters, the artist who has failed goes right on painting. Nor is the artist who has succeeded necessarily a profitable guide. Stevens has noted the intense preoccupation of the successful painter with the formulas through which he has won his success. It is the foible of most artists, standing forever in the way of their exercising a catholic and sympathetic judgment in matters of art. They see things too much in the light of what they have them selves done. I speak here not from theory but from observation. No, we must seek elsewhere than among artists for criticism. Stevens himself gives us a help ful clew when he says: V opinion d'un connaisseur est plus flatteuse que Us suffrages de la joule ignorante. In connoisseurship resides the key to criticism, in knowl edge, vitalized by natural taste and flair. It corre sponds in art to what Matthew Arnold was driving at in letters when he talked about the critic's know ing the best that had been thought and said in the world.
In knowing. It is the corner-stone of criticism. I
The Art of Art Criticism 9
have at my elbow one of the classical achievements in art criticism, the yellowed pages of a series of articles printed long ago in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. They were written by the French critic Thor6, over the name of "W. Burger/' and they announce his recon- stitution of the works of Vermeer of Delft. Jan Ver- meer was known before him, but his works were largely hidden under other names in the galleries of Europe. Thor6 divined him and restored to him his lost masterpieces. With inexhaustible patience and industry in research, with " conviction, ardor, and passion," as Havard says, with intuition and with knowledge, he plodded through the museums, spotted the previously unknown Vermeers, and gave a great painter to fame. I wonder if any painter, in the r&le assigned to him by Whistler in the passage I have quoted, has ever performed a similar service to the cause of art? How often does the painter have the time, or the temperament, to delve as the critic delves? How much pains does he take to know?
There's great coup dates from 1866. It was in the early seventies that Giovanni Morelli, an Italian writing in German over a Russian name, that of "Ivan Lermolieff/' made his first excursions in the art of art criticism and demonstrated that if it was an art it was also to some extent susceptible of ap proximation to an exact science. In studies of the works of certain masters in German and Italian gal leries he developed a method as painstaking as that
io Personalities in Art
of Thore, with traits of its own placing the whole matter upon a firmer basis than it had ever had be fore. He analyzed the characteristics of a painter with the systematic thoroughness of an anatomist. He turned comparison from an odious thing into a source of illumination. His method has been in use ever since, and largely through its influence art criti cism, in the modern sense, has been as fully profes sionalized as art itself, strong in research and docu mentation, coming into court with emphasis upon facts as well as upon imponderables.
Art criticism is not a matter of casual and capri cious impressionism, but a reasoned activity of the mind. The indisposition of some commentators to regard it in that light is partly explained by the fact that once in so often the critic perpetrates a perfectly gorgeous howler. In 1909 Bode bought in London, for f8,ooo, for the Berlin Museum, a wax bust of "Flora3' which he attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. It presently turned out to be the work of a deceased British sculptor named Lucas. When the inside of it was explored it yielded a fragment of a mid- Vic torian bed quilt. In 1910 Mr. James Grieg, an Eng lish critic, tried to persuade the world that the fa- mous "Rokeby Venus" was painted, not by Velas quez, but by Raphael Mengs. Decidedly your art critic is, like everybody else, a fallible creature, and he is never so near to discrediting himself as when he sets up to be a pope. But that is an error which may
The Art of Art Criticism n
overtake a man in any walk of life. It doesn't touch the essentials of valid art criticism, which are knowl edge, experience, research, scientific system — all endued with a force sprung from that mysterious thing called flair. For art criticism is nothing if not, with all its other resources, clairvoyant. One of Berenson's comments on the Hahn picture, quoted in the cables, provides a useful illustration. "It hasn't," he said, "the severity of a true Leonardo." Severity, no less. How are you to weigh and measure that? Can you touch and handle it? How are you to prove or disprove its presence in a given picture? You can't settle the question by rule of thumb. Either you feel Leonardo's severity or you don't. I remember looking some thirty years ago at the "Ma donna of San Onofrio," on the Janiculum, and won dering why it was called a Leonardo. It seemed to me, as it seemed to others, to have been painted by Boltraffio. But nobody that I know of has ever been able conclusively to demonstrate that attribution, which is nevertheless now generally accepted. Imagine a drawing, falsely given to BotticelK, and submitted to a critic of Italian art. Ask him why he rejects it. If he tells you that the line is rigid, inelastic, where Botticelli's line is supple, flowing, do you expect him to tell you how he knows? How, save through a power of perception residing only partly in his eyes. Knowledge of Botticelli's drawings helps him. So does instinct, flair.
12 Personalities in Art
I thought of the effect of the play of that instinct when the death of Sorolla revived discussion of his art. Everybody remembers the sensation that he made when an immense collection of his works was shown at the Hispanic Museum some years ago. The foule ignorante hailed him tumultuously as the opener of a new heaven and a new earth. He was an accom plished painter. He knew how to depict figures mov ing in the open air and in the water, under blazing sunshine, and he turned his clever trick to some thing like perfection. There never were more joyous pictures. Only they were not the evidences of a great creative art. It was the business of the art critic to enforce that point, to enforce the discrimination which is the central principle in the enjoyment of works of art; and as he reflects upon the altered status of 'Sorolla, abundantly honorable but not by any means what it was at the Hispanic show, he may be forgiven if he smiles at the Whistlers of this world, with their ipse dixits as to who shall and who shall not open his mouth about painting. I see Berenson in my mind's eye as he was described in the despatches, "with immaculately white-gloved hands," pointing out what he saw in the picture before him. I am aware of his learning, of his long study of Leonardo. Speaking of the picture in the Louvre, he said that forty years ago he had been just ignorant enough to doubt its authenticity. Now the doubts were all gone. Greater knowledge had worked the change in
The Art of Art Criticism 13
his opinion. Also the source of his later thought was that instinct which guided him in the matter of Leonardo's "severity," a thing not so much to be seen as felt. This, as I have said, has come to be a factor in tangible affairs, a factor to be reckoned with in courts. Study of facts has come to fortify a spiri tual thing. With the passage of time, a new sanction has been conferred upon the great saying of Keats: "When I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine."
II
The Art Critic as Iconoclast
I. Professor Van Dyke on Rembrandt II. Professor Van Dyke on Vermeer
II
THE ART CRITIC AS ICONOCLAST
I PROFESSOR VAN DYKE ON REMBRANDT
WHEN Professor John C. Van Dyke's "Rembrandt and His School" was published, it achieved notoriety in something quicker than the proverbial leap; it made its sensation even before it was read. On the day of its appearance in the fall of 1923, the salient point it assumed to prove was given out to the world, the point thus succinctly stated on the wrapper: "There are eight hundred pictures given to Rembrandt by experts and authorities, but Professor Van Dyke can give him only a scant fifty." That, by itself, was enough to excite talk. It was as though some one had suddenly announced that Shakespeare could have only six of his plays, Beethoven only three of his symphonies. The outburst of scepticism provoked was perfectly natural. But it included remarks which only served to cloud the issue.
The assertion was made in some quarters that Pro fessor Van Dyke was not a recognized authority on Rembrandt, and consequently did not deserve a hearing. He is not a recognized authority on the
17
1 8 Personalities in Art
subject, it is true. He has not fought in the lists as such. Previously he had published no formal con tributions to it of which I had any knowledge. But he has been known as an intelligent writer on art for many years, during which he has functioned also as a teacher of the history of art in Rutgers College. He tells us in his book that he began to question certain Rembrandt attributions as far back as 1883 and that he has ridden the hobby ever since. Humanly speaking, he ought by this time to have something to say about the Dutch master, and there is no earthly reason why he shouldn't say it or why it shouldn't receive courteous attention. Also, it is ap posite to point out that the reservation of a topic for two or three sacrosanct oracles may be overdone. There is nothing presumptuous, nothing unlawful, in Professor Van Dyke's differing with Bode, Bredius, and De Groot. They know their Rembrandt well, and it is fitting that their judgments should be re ceived with respect. With respect, yes, but not with obsequious awe. A cat may look at a king.
The truth is that behind this thwacking of Pro fessor Van Dyke with names there lies more than the substantial repute of the men who own them. There lies also the overweening confidence of the American in the foreigner. There is a type of collector in the United States whose conduct in the presence of a European expert resembles that of a rabbit in the presence of a hungry boa-constrictor. What impresses
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 19
him about the old master for which he is negotiating is especially the "certification" from some foreign authority that is offered with the picture. It would be interesting to get these experts in a row and ex tort from them a list of the documents with which they have thus fortified the art market for the last thirty or forty years. Their good faith is, of course, unimpeachable, but, as Doctor Johnson said, the au thor of a lapidary inscription is not upon oath, and neither is the author of one of these "certifications." I wonder, anyhow, if all of them have the value of Mosaic revelation. Doctor Bode, for example, is the man who bought a mid-Victorian wax bust of "Flora" under the impression that it was a Leonardo. The Kaiser, with his omniscient wisdom, backed him up in this hypothesis, and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the sculpture figures as a Leonardo in the Berlin Museum to this day. It would be foolish to regard this episode as invalidating Bode's learning where Rembrandt is concerned, but it may fairly be taken as justifying Professor Van Dyke in having opinions of his own, even though they are not in ex act harmony with the opinions of the German director. He has arrived at these opinions by prolonged study in European and American galleries, public and private, and he has organized them for the pur pose of his book by the comparative method. Little by little the whole Rembrandt &uwe took on for him the aspect of "a huge snowball that had gathered
2O Personalities in Art
to itself the work of the school/7 and in attempting to reduce that ball to its original ingredients he would assign each one to the painter whose characteristics seemed to him to proclaim themselves. Say he found a picture given to Rembrandt which struck him as looking like a Bol. He would turn to the admitted works of Bol, make a comparison, and, while using the originals in his study of the subject, he would also employ photographs, placing them side by side. This is what he does in the book. He uses the "deadly parallel." His general discussion occupies only six brief chapters, filling about forty pages. The bulk of the volume is made up of tersely annotated lists, ac companied by plates. Here it is not Rembrandt, but the pupil, who comes, so to say, into the foreground; the master is impoverished that the pupil may be enriched. Take Eeckhout as a specimen. Each one of four admitted pictures by him has beside it a pic ture which Professor Van Dyke also assigns to him, parenthetically noting that it is otherwise "given to Rembrandt."
This method the author evidently regards as being so efficacious as practically to take the burden of proof off his hands. All you have to do is to study his photographs — with others to be obtained by your self, for those cases which he does not illustrate — identify resemblances, and call it a day. "In rearrang ing the pictures," he says, "I have allowed them to fall where they would. I have had no theory to en-
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 21
force and have sought merely that pictures of a kind, aesthetically, mentally, and technically, should go to gether. Names have not prejudiced me, and in the distribution Rembrandt has been allowed to fare the same as Bol or Horst or Eeckhout The result of the rearrangement has been that thirty or more groups of pictures have formed themselves rather than been formed by me." This passage is not altogether per suasive. "I have had no theory to enforce." Not consciously, it would appear. But in effect, I should say, if he has not been ridden by a theory he has been the victim of an obsession, of an idee fixe. It is said that we usually have some difficulty in seeing ourselves as others see us. A red-headed man admits that he is red-headed. A woman equally rufous will call herself auburn-haired and think herself into the conviction. Professor Van Dyke may repudiate the notion that there is any theory in his book, but it is hard to see what else has so steadily lured him into the trick of jamming square pegs into round holes.
Let us turn, however, from his method to his re sults, endeavoring to make a just test of his findings, I have studied the book from beginning to end with the utmost care, not contented to draw alone upon memories of great numbers of the Rembrandts in question, but consulting also a voluminous collection of photographs. I have made endless comparisons in the manner urged by the author, seeking always to give his argument the utmost possible weight. It is
22 Personalities in Art
essential in an examination of this kind to meet the iconoclast half way, to give him every possible ad vantage, and to keep an open mind. At the same time one must realize in this case the peculiar gravity of Professor Van Dyke's assumption. His denudation of Rembrandt is terrific. It entails a proportionate responsibility. If he is to be listened to at all he must advance very solid reasons.
On the principle of allowing Professor Van Dyke to put his best foot forward I touch first upon the most plausible comparison he makes. It is between the portrait of Rembrandt's sister which hangs in the Liechtenstein gallery at Vienna and the ver sion of the same subject which hangs in the Brera at Milan. I may cite part of his analysis:
The Liechtenstein portrait is profound. The face is an epitome of all that is typical, sensitive, noble, refined in Dutch girlhood. It is a wonder and a marvel and becomes more wonderful and marvellous the longer you look at it. Keep on looking at it for five or ten minutes and let it unfold to you its own depth, subtlety, and penetration, No one but a great master could do such a work as that. Now turn to the Brera portrait and do you not instantly feel a great loosening of the mental grasp, a falling down in the mental conception? The personality of the sitter now appears shallow. She is merely an empty-headed girl posing for her portrait. She epitomizes nothing, stands for nothing, reveals nothing but a superficial ex terior, such as any Dutch girl from the burgher quarter might show. The emptiness of the conception, the lack of thought or of reflection in the painter, even the lack
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 23
of comprehensive vision, is too apparent for further argu ment. That alone might be sufficient to convince one that the two portraits were not painted by the same man.
The distinctions he draws in the matter of mental conception he confirms when he discusses the emo tional significance of the two portraits, and he is equally shrewd in the discussion of purely technical differences. His conclusion that the Brera portrait was painted not by Rembrandt but by Jan Lievens is so persuasive that one is inclined to regard the mat ter as settled. Professor Van Dyke is unmistakably confident in this case, so confident that he puts it in the forefront of his study. Impressed by it, we go on to a systematic survey of his lists. Immediately we begin to scent trouble — not for Rembrandt, but for his critic. The scheme is alphabetical, so I will begin with Jacob Backer. The "Young Dutch woman" by Rembrandt, in the Metropolitan Mu seum, is placed side by side with a portrait by Backer in London. The comparison moves Professor Van Dyke to give the Rembrandt to Backer. What promptly strikes me about it is that it discloses a vitality which the Backer conspicuously lacks. An ex actly similar impression is left when the author com pares Mrs. Havemeyer's "Portrait of an Old Lady" with a Backer in Berlin. The New York painting is alive, the other is not. Then Professor Van Dyke takes up the famous "Elizabeth Bas," at "Amsterdam. It has been doubted before. Doctor Bredius advanced
24 Personalities in Art
the hypothesis that it was painted by Bol. Professor Van Dyke gives it to Backer. If Rembrandt must be robbed of this great portrait, then Bol might better have it than Backer. Once in this sheaf of photo graphs Professor Van Dyke bolsters up his case. The "Wife of Alenson," in Paris, is far more credible as the Backer that he calls it than it is as a Rembrandt, But in the other instances I have cited he carries no conviction whatever.
The explanation cuts deep into the authority of the author. In these matters the imponderables are profoundly important. Models, costumes, modes of composition, technical methods, may all be related to the solidarity of a school and period. It is the subtle, indefinable quality of genius that counts, the matter that you cannot stick a pin through but that you feel instinctively. This is what Professor Van Dyke seems to have missed, a circumstance which I note not only in the chapter on Backer but elsewhere. The harshest but, as it seems to me, the truest thing to say about this book is that it is insensitive, that it wants imaginative insight. Professor Van Dyke seems so curiously blind to what jumps to the eye that his evidence turns against himself. I go on tabu lating the luckier hits in his illustrative scheme and I find a few. It is believable that Eeckhout painted the "Ascension" at Munich, as he says, and not Rembrandt. I can sympathetically entertain the idea that the " Portrait of a Man" in the Schwab collection
The Art Critic as Iconoclast
might better be given to Carel Fabritius than to Rem brandt. The Petrograd "Saskia as Flora" is more probably by Flinck than by Rembrandt. I can fol low the argument that gives the "Portrait of an Old Woman/' likewise in Russia, to Koninck. But there are two significant points about these various attribu tions. They make, in the first place, a very slender group, a mere drop in the great sea of Rembrandt- esque painting. And secondly they are intrinsically of no great importance. When Professor Van Dyke settles down to strip Rembrandt the removals that seem reasonable have no great meaning. In the larger sphere of the master's activity he leaves me absolutely sceptical.
Reverting to the introductory matter in this cata logue there are one or two remarks that require to be noticed. In disintegrating his " snowball," in tak ing apart what he designates "the present hodge podge" embodied in the Rembrandt ceuvre, Pro fessor Van Dyke is governed by a strange idea. It is so strange that I must quote the author's exact words:
"The Night Watch," more than any other picture, seems to confirm the tale told by his pictures, that Rem brandt was a portrait painter and little more. He could not do the historical picture in a satisfactory way, and probably after some trials gave it up. I have gone over the figure pictures assigned to him, again and yet again, in the hope that I should find in some one of them the trace of his mind and hand, but I have been almost com-
26 Personalities in Art
pletely disappointed. The dramatic, the pathetic, the spectacular, the grotesque things set down to him are the pictures of pupils in which he had no more than a guiding voice — perhaps not even that. There is doubt about even the few compositions that can be set down to him.
One picture alone offers sufficient commentary on this pronouncement, the sublime " Supper at Em- maus" in the Louvre, a picture which Professor Van Dyke himself admits is a Rembrandt and character izes as "of much emotional feeling and great pathos." If there is one thing more than another which is dis closed in the Shakespearian pell-mell of Rembrandt's works it is that he was a master of great creative imagination, ranging from low comedy to tragic so lemnity. It is Professor Van Dyke's unawareness of this that largely vitiates his thesis. This is, I repeat, an insensitive book. The author's sense is sealed where the inner fires of Rembrandt's genius are con cerned. Teasing his mind with surface matters, he remains untouched by paintings from which great ness emanates with a kind of tangible electric force. Repeatedly as I trace his path through the ceuvre I see how it is just the magic of Rembrandt that is for ever eluding him.
He does not see that the "Tobias and the Angel/' in the Louvre, which he would give to Bol, has in finitely more energy in it than the "Three Marys " of Bol placed beside it. Over and over again I note this Rembrandtesque superiority in the picture which
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 27
the author would take from the master and give to the pupil; there is a perceptible lift in vitality, in quality, in beauty, and it is particularly noticeable in those very paintings which, from their subjects, Professor Van Dyke would give to pupils. The "Blinding of Samson," at Frankfort, is a case in point. It is a work of thrilling furia, one of the most impressively dramatic things Rembrandt ever painted. Professor Van Dyke finds it coarse and brutal in technic, and in giving it to Horst adds that it " represents Horst rather at his worst." Now, that I differ from Professor Van Dyke on the merits of this work is not the point on which I would dwell. What I more especially commend to the reader is a comparison of the " Samson" with the recognized works of Horst. How Professor Van Dyke can re gard it as supporting his argument is simply incom prehensible. The artist of the Frankfort "Samson" is obviously a bold, swinging technician, a master of the brush, a powerful painter. The artist of the "Isaac Blessing Jacob," reproduced beside the "Sam son," which is to say Gerrit Horst, is obviously a mediocrity. He couldn't have painted the "Samson." Neither could he have painted the Petrograd " Danae," which the author would take away from Rembrandt to give to him.
When I say that at times this critic is merely "in comprehensible" I am not speaking lightly, but out of a genuine bewilderment. An instance is supplied
28 Personalities in Art
by his comment on the masterpiece at Dresden, "Manoah's Offering," I remember that painting as I might remember a great strain of organ music. The genius of Rembrandt fairly glows in it. Professor Van Dyke says: "The picture (as regards the two figures) is superb. I tried to fit it in the Rembrandt group again and again, but without success. It is too black in the shadows, too hard in the contours." He prefers to think it by an unidentified pupil. All this, I maintain, is incomprehensible. Suppose we grant, for the sake of argument (though I am not otherwise inclined to do so), that the shadows are too black, the contours too hard, the light uncertain, the angel poorly drawn. What does all that amount to against the overwhelmingly Rembrandtesque beauty and style of the picture? And why assume that he was impeccable and that an imperfection condemned a picture as not his? Professor Van Dyke holds oddly contradictory views on this point. On page 20 we are permitted to believe that Rembrandt was not "always and infallibly right." On page 107 we are told where the real Rembrandts proclaim themselves — "they are absolutely right from start to finish." That is a fearfully dangerous attitude to take toward any master. No master invariably strikes twelve. Rembrandt didn't do so. But, as Professor Van Dyke himself observes, "some touch of his genius will be apparent in his most indifferent performance." Un fortunately, the author's decisions seem to be based
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 29
on the point of view I have cited from page 107. He has a preconceived notion of the typical authentic Rembrandt as a thing "absolutely right from start to finish/' and apparently when a picture fails to meet this touchstone he straightway assigns it to some one else, even if it must be, as in the case of "Manoah's Offering," an unidentified pupil. All the time the Rembrandts go on glowing, if I may so express it, proclaiming their authenticity not by flaw- lessness in detail but by the organic life in them, the accent of power they bear.
I cannot too often reiterate that in this "accent of power" lies the crux of the matter. In the conven tional and I fear rather superficial view of the matter the art expert has some sources of knowledge un available to the vulgar, which enables him to decide absolutely as to the authenticity of a given picture. This is a fallacy. Knowledge of a master's works in detail, extending to nuances of color, habits of com position, character of surface, peculiarities of brush- work, and so on, will carry him far and enable him to dogmatize where the layman is left dumb. But when he has studied all these things, when he has docu mented his picture to the utmost, he must admit, if he is honest, that what finally determines his judg ment is the operation of his instinct. Bode must de pend upon that. That, in the long run, is what Pro fessor Van Dyke must depend upon, and that, I feel more and more as I study his book, is where he
30 Personalities in Art
is unreliable. I have been at pains to tabulate some of his attributions and will give the list here, stating the name of the Rembrandt, the place where it hangs and the painter to whom Professor Van Dyke ascribes it:
"Portrait of Titus." Metropolitan Museum. B. Fa- britius.
"Portrait of Woman." National Gallery, London. B. Fabritius,
"Hendrickje Stoffels," Metropolitan Museum. B. Fabritius.
"Portrait of Man." Frick Collection. B. Fabritius.
"Man With Golden Helmet." Berlin Museum. Aert de Gelder.
"An Oriental." Metropolitan Museum. Solomon Koninck.
"Old Woman Cutting Her Nails." Metropolitan Mu seum. Nicolaes Maes.
"Portrait of Woman." National Gallery, London. Nicolaes Maes.
"An Architect." Cassel Gallery. Nicolaes Maes.
"Portrait of Man." Metropolitan Museum. Nicolaes Maes.
"Portrait of Girl." Art Institute, Chicago. Uniden tified pupil.
The list might be extended, but I select the fore going pictures because they are illustrated in the book, and may therefore easily be referred to by the reader. Let him make the comparisons that Pro fessor Van Dyke makes, and let him be especially careful to remember the "accent of power" to which
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 3 1
I have ventured to call his attention. I should be surprised if he did not invariably find it present in the pictures named, in vivid contrast to the quality of the pupil in each case cited by the author. On two pictures in particular I find it irresistible to pause. One is the exquisite " Portrait of Titus/' at the Metro politan Museum, given by Professor Van Dyke to Bernaert Fabritius. It is one of the loveliest por traits of youth in all European painting. It has ex traordinary psychological interest, and technically there rests upon it what I can only describe as a Rembrandtesque bloom, a fairly magnificent patina. Bernaert Fabritius never in his life painted anything half so flowerlike, so masterly. If there is one other attribution made by Professor Van Dyke which more than this one falls to the ground as emphatically not proved, it is that which he essays in the matter of the "Old Woman Cutting Her Nails."
Professor Van Dyke begins by attacking it — very unjustly, I think — in technical details. The lights, he says, are forced and out of value. The shadows are too dark. The nose "jumps" forward. The handling is hasty, heavy, ineffective. The drawing is not correct. Then the model resembles a model used by Nicolaes Maes many times. Ergo, the "Old Woman Cutting Her Nails" is by Nicolaes Maes. To clinch the matter the author reproduces beside this picture the "Sleeping Woman," by Maes, in the Brussels Museum. Only he doesn't clinch it at all,
Personalities in Art
for, with that fantastic blindness to which I am com pelled to allude again and yet again, this critic misses the perfectly obvious fact that the "Old Woman Cutting Her Nails" has a breadth, a monumental majesty, a cloudy splendor, to which Maes never even remotely approximated, Rembrandt's old woman in this picture has the imposing grandeur of an antique statue. Her dignity superbly triumphs over the technical details which Professor Van Dyke so grossly exaggerates. And the painting has, above all things, that indefinable cachet to which I am always return ing, the cachet of genius, the cachet of Rembrandt. Do not stop at the comparison the author makes be tween this work and the three pictures by Maes he prints on the same page. Consider the ceuvre of Maes in its length and breadth. Include such thor oughly characteristic things of his as "The Listening Girl," at Buckingham Palace. Look to the core of each painter's character. You cannot avoid the con clusion that Maes could no more have painted the "Old Woman Cutting Her Nails" than that he could have pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
There is something deeply interesting about the manner in which Professor Van Dyke's comparisons recoil upon himself. The master is too strong for him.
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still.
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 33
Thus Shakespeare in Arnold's sonnet. Thus Rem brandt as the iconoclast seeks to rob him of some of his noblest achievements.
Traversing the lists of works which Professor Van Dyke would give to the pupils, I come back with heightened curiosity to the list to which he would confine Rembrandt, the restricted list which has oc casioned all the recent uproar. " Fifty are all that I can now definitely place to his name/' he says. But he also says: "The list of Rembrandt pictures which follows does not pretend to completeness. Some of the works attributed to Rembrandt are in private hands, where I have not been able to see them." I rub my eyes. The thing seems almost incredible. Here is a book which undertakes to sift the czuvre of Rembrandt; the author draws up a list of the pic tures which he " can now definitely place to his name " ; he assails what may be called the recognized canon of the master's works, and yet he does not "pretend to completeness"! Completeness, in the circum stances, amounts to a point of honor. Is it fair to attempt to riddle the integrity of the admitted ceuvre and then to leave quantities of the pictures that make it outside the inquest, hanging, so to say, in mid-air? Professor Van Dyke observes that "to gain a right conception of Rembrandt, Bol, Eeckhout or Horst it is not necessary to run down and catalogue every indifferent head or half-finished picture of their doing." He thinks that his list of fifty "will give a
34 Personalities in Art
comprehension of the man almost as well as a hun dred." It is as though a literary historian were to announce a theory that Balzac had been served by a corps of ghosts and give us for touchstones nothing but "Pere Goriot" and "Seraphita." It may not be necessary to run down, as Professor Van Dyke sug gests, " every indifferent head or half-finished pic ture," but what of the great masterpieces? What of "The Shipbuilder and His Wife/' at Buckingham Palace; the Devonshire and Westminster Rembrandts, and divers other pieces in England ? What of certain pictures here, like the marvellous "Scholar With a Bust of Homer/' in the Huntington collection, or Mr. Morgan's great "Nicolaes Ruts," or the "Lucrezia" which the late M. C. D. Borden owned? Professor Van Dyke knows the Frick collection, adding the Ilchester Rembrandt therein to his list, but after a laborious search for anything he might have to say about "The Polish Rider" I have run to earth nothing more than an allusion in a note on another picture — "the £ Polish Rider' which has been attributed to Eeckhout" To give this cavalier treatment to a can vas of the eminence of this one is sheer wanton pre sumption. After all, there is such a thing as "a de- , cent respect for the opinions of mankind." If Pro fessor Van Dyke thinks that that glorious equestrian portrait is not a Rembrandt, at least he should offer his reasons. He may be dubious about the authority of "experts," but he cannot brush them aside in this
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 35
airy fashion — not, at any rate, if he wants his book to be taken seriously.
I do not believe his canon of Rembrandt can be taken seriously. It is too slim and sketchy. Specific subtractions which he would make from the accepted canon in the majority of cases, as I have indicated, remain not proven, and the omissions concerning which he says nothing are too numerous and too im portant. A canon which merely ignores such out standing canvases as I have touched upon in the pre ceding paragraph (and many more could be named) collapses of its own arbitrariness. There is another point which demands comment. There is nothing difficult to believe in the assertion that Rembrandt painted hundreds of pictures. He was that kind of a painter and he lived a fairly long life. What is hard to believe is that that busy career of his produced only about fifty works. The truth is that Rembrandt had the power of a force of nature, pouring forth an immense mass of paintings, drawings, and etchings. There are things in the mass as we know it which doubtless he never saw. Professor Van Dyke, as I have admitted, occasionally bags an error in the accepted canon. But the great bulk of the mass re mains unaffected by his book. If there are discrepan cies between one picture and another as regards abil ity they are to be accounted for by the elemental fact that, as I have said, no master always strikes twelve. But there runs through his art like a ground-
36 Personalities in Art
swell the energy of genius. It leaves upon Ms paint ings that accent of power which not all the expertise in the world can rub out.
It is a mistake to pooh-pooh Professor Van Dyke's book as unworthy of consideration. It is, for the lover of Rembrandt, an intensely interesting production. The ceuvre constitutes a cosmos of never-ending fascination, and it is always stimulating to explore it anew. Professor Van Dyke is shrewd, ingenious, and ardent. I am sorry for the reader who gets only indignation out of its pages. There is genuine inter est to be got out of them. But to be interested is not necessarily to be convinced. The author has written, I imagine, to be discussed. He cannot have the in ordinate vanity to expect that his arguments will be swallowed whole simply because he makes them and supplies some photographs to boot. That would be to adopt the preposterous attitude of the experts with whom he so stoutly disagrees. He cannot speak ex cathedra, and his book embodies no final judgment, only a series of opinions. They are not by any means conclusive opinions, largely because, with all his ex cellent equipment, Professor Van Dyke lacks the " seeing eye."
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 37
II
PROFESSOR VAN DYKE ON VERMEER
In studying "Rembrandt and His School" I came upon a chapter relating to Vermeer of Delft, that is one of the most curious contributions to the litera ture of Dutch art I have ever encountered. There is a foreshadowing of it earlier in the book, in the chap ter on Carel Fabritius, the master of Vermeer. Apro pos of the "Portrait of a Man" at Munich, which the author would take from Rembrandt and give to Fabritius, a reproduction of Vermeer's "Geographer," at Frankfort, is printed. "The same model and some of the pose" were probably used by both painters, Professor Van Dyke thinks, a far-fetched hypothesis and one on which we can build no confidence in the influence which the author here assigns to Fabritius. But I glance at this matter only in passing. What is really interesting is the assertion that "this Fabritius influence is apparent in certain famous portraits put down to Vermeer of Delft hereafter." I turn with zest to the Vermeer chapter, wondering what in the world will develop therein. I find, as has been indi cated, an amazing bedevihnent of the subject.
The Vermeer ceuvre has been in debate for a long time. When Burger rescued him from obscurity in 1866 the catalogue terminating his study in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts ran to more than seventy
38 Personalities in Art
numbers. That has since been cut almost in half. Van Zype, in his authoritative monograph, gives a list of but thirty-eight works of incontestable authen ticity. It may still reasonably be enlarged or dimin ished. If Professor Van Dyke had some persuasive things to say about it he would be listened to with extreme interest. What he actually has to say only puzzles me. Here is part of it:
Vermeer's pictures have been sought for everywhere — except in the Rembrandt osuvre. Perhaps it is not strange that he should appear there, since he was of the Rem brandt school once removed. He was a pupil of Carel Fabritius, who, in turn, was a pupil of Rembrandt. It is by an understanding of Fabritius that we shall possibly arrive at a better understanding of Vermeer. I frankly confess to my inability to follow the Vermeer writers and authorities or agree with the present arrangement of his pictures. I seem to see several painters in the pictures put under Vermeer's name. The small pictures given to him contain things supremely fine and things supremely thin, small, and hard. Such pictures as the " Girl Read ing," in the Dresden Gallery, are beyond criticism. The " Young Woman Reading a Letter" and the "Cook," at Amsterdam; the "Lady With a Pearl Necklace," at Berlin; the "Girl at a Window," of the Marquand Col lection, Metropolitan Museum, New York, are in the same class of excellence. There are, perhaps, ten or a dozen pictures by this hand. I shall call their painter, for con venience herein, Vermeer No. i. There are, however, as many more pictures that superficially look to be in the class, but they are brittle, cardboard affairs with false high lights, airless rooms, and color that has no quality. Two pictures, each showing a "Young Woman at the Vir ginals," in the National Gallery, London; "The Letter,"
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 39
at Amsterdam; the "Allegorical Subject/' at The Hague, are the illustrations of this latter class. I have called their painter, in my "New Guides/7 a pseudo-Vermeer, meaning by that that he may be an imitator — some one like Verkolje or Ochtervelt — or possibly Venneer himself in decline and grown hard in manner. These small pictures form the first group given to Vermeer, and I shall con sider them as done by a Venneer No. i and a pseudo- Vermeer.
Vermeer was undoubtedly a pupil of Carel Fabri- tius, but that is no reason why we should believe that "it is by an understanding of Fabritius that we shall possibly arrive at a better understanding of Ver meer." As well say that, as Whistler was a pupil of Gleyre, who in turn was a pupil of Ingres, it is by an understanding of Gleyre that we shall possibly arrive at a better understanding of Whistler. That would be absurd. Whistler was his own man. Ver meer likewise was his own man, and one of the fas cinating things about his art is its establishment of him as a figure apart, a figure extraordinarily de tached from the whole Dutch school. The passage I have quoted takes on even stranger turnings. In the game of solitaire that Professor Van Dyke plays, shuffling the cards about and about to see which of them match, he makes some staggering combinations. The pictures which he does not feel sure of he thinks may be by an imitator, or they may be by Venneer in a declining phase! It is, perhaps, an amusing speculation, but why print it? It comes rather under
4-O Personalities in Art
the heading of workshop meditations and has no tangible value. Especially because of what follows. Professor Van Dyke goes on to confusion after con fusion.
The "Diana," at The Hague, he says, "does not agree with any Vermeer picture of any group," and forthwith he asserts that "it was not done by Ver meer, but by Jacob Van Loo," with certain of whose works he thinks it does agree. It is difficult to be patient over this question of "agreement." Let us suppose, for example, that some Van Dyke of the future were to be set the task of straightening out the ceuvre of Saint- Gaudens, dislocated by the passage of two or three hundred years. Grant that he has pretty satisfactory evidence about the "Lincoln," the "Farragut," the "Sherman," the "Stevenson," and so on, but has only internal evidence to go on where the Adams monument is concerned. We can imagine what would happen to him if he sought for any obvious "agreement." The Adams monument occupies a place in the sculptor's ceuvre that is unique. So it is with the nude "Diana" that he made for the tower of the Madison Square Garden. But these two works would, nevertheless, be recognized as his by a really penetrating analyst of his style. In the case of Vermeer, as in that of Rembrandt, Professor Van Dyke uses the most cleverly fabricated machinery but fails to enliven it by the right instinctive spark. The painter he cites in this instance gives him simi-
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 41
larities "in subject, type, drawing, grouping." But we have only to put a Van Loo side by side with a Vermeer to see that what the minor man lacks is the master's quality and beauty.
The author proceeds to the great "Procuress," at Dresden. He will give it neither to his Vermeer No. i nor to his "pseudo-Vermeer." In order to account for it he calls into being a painter whom he calls Vermeer No. 2. To the same unknown he would as sign the "Young Girl/' formerly at Brussels, which was in New York for a time, and the "Old Woman" in the Johnson collection, which figures there as a Nicolaes Maes. I know all three of these paintings well and can only feel astonishment at Professor Van Dyke's attitude toward them. The "Procuress" is a glorious picture, glorious in color and in what I can only describe as the Vermeer touch. That is present also, in more jewel-like mood, in the "Young Girl." And why the Johnson picture should be dragged in is a mystery past finding out. Placed beside the "Procuress" it simply crumples up, a mediocre pic ture beside a brilliant one. But the author has more surprises in store.
He passes next to a painter whom he calls Vermeer No. 3, making great play over the "Portrait of a Woman" at Budapest. With this painting, a master piece by Vermeer if ever there was one, he can find no other picture in the Vermeer ceuvre to "agree," except, possibly, the "Head of a Young Girl" at
42- Personalities in Art
The Hague. (So that, also, is to be detached from the real Vermeer!) Hence the "Number 3." He is a distinctly obscure person.' "Whether his name is Vermeer or whether he is some other pupil of Carel Fabritius or Rembrandt I am not now able to say." It is extremely doubtful if he will ever be able to speak with greater certainty. Meanwhile he proposes that to this painter shall be given Rembrandt's "Por trait of a Lady" at Petrograd and the two Rem- brandts in the Widener collection. As for the robbing of Rembrandt to enrich Vermeer, even an hypotheti cal Vermeer, I am not for a moment convinced. The Petrograd and Budapest portraits, placed side by side, reveal not resemblances (of handling, of style), but differences. They are clearly not by the same painter, Professor Van Dyke's "Vermeer Num ber 3 " or any other single man. Vermeer, the Ver meer we know, painted the Budapest portrait, and Rembrandt the other. The new attribution which Professor Van Dyke would make in respect to the Widener portraits remains likewise "not proven." Furthermore, he says something about one of these portraits that utterly complicates, as in a climax, the whole complicated business.
We have seen that in the author's view certain works which he would assign to Vermeer No. i, such as the Marquand Vermeer, are "beyond criticism." They are, it is to be inferred, the authentic Vermeers. But the Widener Rembrandts "are superb portraits,
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 43
perhaps by the same hand that did the ' Portrait of a Woman' at Budapest — that is, Vermeer No. 3, the best and greatest of my so-called three Vermeers." You see where we have arrived ? There is a Vermeer, a Vermeer we have all known, the Vermeer who painted what we mean when we talk about Vermeer, and his works are "beyond criticism." But all the time there is another Vermeer, one of three, and he, as it happens, is "the best and greatest" of all of them. Both of the Widener portraits, we are told, are "more important in art, more valuable in his tory, and even in commerce, as Vermeers than as Rembrandts." But as which Vermeers? The Ver meers that are valuable in art, in history, and even in commerce are the Vermeers the world cherishes as such. How can Professor Van Dyke expect to secure the same status for an unknown painter he has in vented, even though he calls him by the same name ? The Vermeer chapter in this book is, in short, one of the most unfortunate it contains. It does not clarify the subject; it only darkens counsel. In at tempting to revise the Vermeer canon, as in attempt ing to revise the Rembrandt canon, Professor Van Dyke leaves his reader a little more than sceptical.
Ill
The Thirty-ninth Vermeer
Ill
THE THIRTY-NINTH VERMEER
EVER since Burger rehabilitated him in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1866, the ceuwe of Vermeer of Delft has fluctuated in volume under the sifting processes of criticism. Burger's catalogue runs to seventy-three numbers. When Henry Havard pub lished his brochure in 1888, he cut the list down to fifty-six. It has been shortened repeatedly in later years. Van Zype, in the definitive edition of his book, brought out in 1921, accounted for but thirty-eight paintings. One of these, the "Young Girl With a Flute/' was discovered by Doctor Bredius as re cently as 1906. Vermeer is one of those masters about whom you can say almost anything save that their history has been conclusively written. He is an ever- tantalizing mystery. One never knows when some thing new of his is going to be brought to light. Apropos of which I would refer to the thirty-ninth Vermeer.
The first news of it reached the world as a discov ery made by Doctor C. Hofstede de Groot, the well known Dutch connoisseur. He announced his find in the Nieuwe RotterdamscJte Courant, explaining that it belonged to M. Yves Perdoux, in Paris. Then it
47
48 Personalities in Art
passed into the possession of Sir Joseph Duveen. The subject is a curly-haired boy in his teens. The hair is dark brown, and enframes a face in which the flesh tints are of a pearly, almost grayish, pallor. The white collar falls over a doublet of yellowish silver gray. The cloak, whose folds make the base of the composition, is of a reddish brown, which Doctor Hofstede de Groot allies with color in the famous "Christ at the House of Mary and Martha," which has always been reckoned an early work of the master.
The face is drawn and modelled with the fine suavity always characteristic of Vermeer in paint ing the features of his sitters, but elsewhere the por trait is remarkable for its flowing breadth. The col lar is a little miracle of painter-like notation, brushed in with a generous but not too thick impasto and very beautiful in tone. The costume is not otherwise so rich or so resonant in color quality. In this and in the handling it departs from the key which might superficially be assigned to the typical Vermeer. But as a matter of fact he had more than one man ner, corresponding to more than one mood. When he made most of his pictures he labored in the spirit of still life and gave a special significance to painted surface as such. The famous Marquand Vermeer in the Metropolitan Museum is an apposite example. When he fell into the stride of pure portraiture, as in the wonderful half-length at Budapest or the curious
HEAD OF A YOUNG BOY FROM THE PAINTING BY VEEMEER
The Thirty-ninth Fermeer 49
clavecin player in the Beit collection, he got away from his consummate preciosity and thought not only of tone but of a large definition of form. This is the distinguishing point about the Duveen picture.
It hasn't, save in the collar, the jewel-like depth and density of facture which we usually think of when we think of Vermeer. That waits upon the dignity and vitality of the portrait as a whole, upon the broad swing in the workmanship. The master's gift for ensemble comes out nowhere more impres sively than in his dealings with the single figure. His design is sometimes fairly monumental in such con tributions to this category as the Budapest portrait just mentioned or the great "Dentelliere" in the Louvre. If he is not precisely monumental in the "Head of a Young Boy" he at any rate reveals in it a finer sense of scale, a more imposing effect, than is ordinarily associated with the figures in his more familiar interiors. Vermeer didn't paint many por traits. There is a whimsical suggestion in the circum stance that in "Le Peintre," at Vienna, which he may have intended as a memorial of himself, the artist is seated with his back to the spectator. But when he did essay portraiture he had a way of gripping his subject. There is no mistaking the character of the woman at Budapest, or that of the Arenberg " Jeune Fille," or that of the grave gentleman with the mus tache in the museum at Brussels. So in the "Head of a Young Boy" he gives us a personality interest-
50 Personalities in Art
ing even under the simple traits of adolescence. That is one reason why it is so persuasively a Ver- meer; it has so subtle a reality. You feel at once the touch of the master, not only registering a form but evoking a presence.
IV
Leonardo's Legacy of Beauty
IV LEONARDO'S LEGACY OF BEAUTY
IN spite of her precoccupation with the problem of Fiume, Italy found time in 1919 to commemorate the name and fame of Leonardo da Vinci. He died in France on May 2, 1519, and in the four centuries that have elapsed since then there has been only one man of a kindred type of universal genius known to the world, Shakespeare, who died almost a hundred years later. The learned and artistic bodies of Italy hailed him as one of the supreme memories of the nation, and everywhere those who care for the things of the mind shared in their fervor. He is a classic be yond peradventure, and, like all true classics, he em bodies ideas and principles in which the most mod ern of the moderns may renew his artistic vitality.
There are, in a sense, two Leonardos. One is the property of the scholar whose researches are directed more especially into the complex aspects of the sub ject. In Scribner's Magazine at the time of the cele bration there was an interesting and valuable paper by Mr. George Sarton, of the Carnegie Institute, on "The Message of Leonardo." He is engaged on the establishment of a standard text of Leonardo's writ ings, and, accordingly, I was not surprised to find his
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essay an analysis of the master's "relation to the birth of modern science." In our time, and in view of its prevailing drifts of thought and activity, there are bound to be many tributes to the scientific aspects of Leonardo's career. Mr. Sarton well brought out their solid importance. In the anticipation of the flying machine, we have only one of a host of points of contact which may be established between the fifteenth century Florentine and ourselves. But the other Leonardo is he who is more quickly brought to mind by mention of his name among people at large in the twentieth century, and he is the property of the lover of beauty. When we speak of "the Leo- nardesque" we think not of his achievements as scien tist but of the ideal of loveliness which he created. It towers above all that the scholars may seek to force upon our attention. It is true that he left be hind him but a comparatively small number of works of art, and that he himself, as Mr. Sarton reminds us, was no less proud of being an engineer than of being a painter. Nevertheless, for the bulk of man kind, the paintings and drawings will continue to mean Leonardo as the plays continue to mean Shake speare.
The only portrait we have of him is the drawing in the library at Turin, which shows us the head of an old man, and the power of the association of ideas is such that one hardly ever thinks of him save as an aged type of wisdom. He appeals to the imagination
Leonardo9 s Legacy of Beauty 55
not simply as old in knowledge and thought, indeed, but as a kind of ancient seer, a mystic, living aloof from the common world. Yet it is desirable to check such an impression, to keep a firm grasp upon the very human foundations of this colossal genius. His manuscripts yield a helpful passage in the note he writes apropos of one of the apprentices he was wont to take into his 'bottega at five lire the month. "Gia- como came to live with me on the Feast of St. Mary Magdalen, 1490," he says. "He was ten years old. The second day I ordered two shirts, a pair of hose, and a doublet for him. When I put aside the money to pay for these things he took it out of my purse. I was never able to make him confess the robbery, al though I was certain of it. A thieving, lying, pig headed glutton." Remembrance of the every-day side of life which these lines illustrate will keep the student from visualizing Leonardo too much as a rapt Olympian, with his singing robes always about him. He went to and fro among men in homespun, so to say, with an intensely human curiosity about all the things of the visible world. If he painted the "Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper" he drew also the most appalling profiles of hideous, malformed peasants. When Baroncelli was hanged in Florence for his share in the conspiracy of the Pazzi, Leonardo made a drawing of him at the end of the rope, and something of the dispassionately artistic trend of his temperament is shown by the note he added on the
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sheet: " Small tan-colored cap, black satin doublet, lined black jerkin, blue cloak lined with fur of foxes' breasts, and the collar of the cloak covered with velvet speckled black and red; Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli; black hose." A confirmed realist, we say, must have made that sketch and that note. One can see 'him ignoring the emotiona] horror of the spec tacle, looking only to the accurate registration of the facts. Most characteristic of all is the touch about the " black hose/' hastily jotted down after he had thought the portrait complete.
Leonardo was a realist in that he never under valued what he could see and touch, handle and measure. He was peculiarly a master of ponderable things. Here it is interesting to turn for a moment to the scientist in him, the man of practical affairs, a famous letter in which he offered his services to the Duke of Milan supplying just the needed light on what we might call the prosaic turn of his mind. "I have a method of constructing very light and porta ble bridges," he says, "to be used in the pursuit of or retreat from the enemy. I also have most con venient and portable bombs, proper for throwing showers of small missiles, and with the smoke thereof causing great terror to the enemy, to his imminent loss and confusion." In these and in other lines he shows how useful he could be in time of war, and then he goes on as follows: "In time of peace I be lieve that I could equal any other as regards works
Leonardo's Legacy of Beauty 57
In architecture. I can prepare designs for buildings, whether public or private, and also conduct water from one place to another. Furthermore, I can exe cute works in sculpture: marble, bronze or terra-cotta. In painting, also, I can do what may be done as well as any other, be he who he may." How reveal ing, and, again, how human, is that return to the ruling passion, that transition from canal-cutting to the art of the painter ! It is profoundly inevitable. The play of Leonardo's intellect knew no boundaries. He studied acoustics. He was a seasoned anatomist. Botany fascinated him, and so on through an alpha betical list one might follow his imagination, ranging through all the interests of man. But, then, we would veer toward the Leonardo who is, as I have said, the property of the scholar. The Leonardo who is the property of the world is the Leonardo who is the property of the artist, the man who is remembered because of the way in which he drew the ripple of a woman's hair athwart her cheek.
As he drew it the searching observation of the realist magnificently sustained him, but in the same instant all that is materialistic in realism fell from him, and he functioned as a poet. The result was a work of art that is incomparably beautiful and that also is, I believe, the most successful manifestation of Leonardo's genius. There is, after all, a sharp dis tinction to be recognized between his universality and the universality cf Shakespeare. The poet, tak-
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ing the world for his province, bodied forth creations in which his purpose is clearly realized. His energy is concentrated upon a task which he completes. Leonardo, undeniably putting to his credit specific achievements in science, at the same time varies them with an infinite number of inconclusive experiments. His energy is diffused. It is in his curiosity rather than in the actual things he accomplished that the universality of his mind is declared. He survives in his writings as a Goethe rather than as a Shakespeare. But as an artist he knows no diffusion, no incertitude. There it would seem that he most triumphantly ex pressed himself. A significant testimony to the fact that he was, indeed, an artist far more centrally than a scientist lies in the paradox that he needed no great mass of works to affirm his immortality in the sphere of painting. The "Leonardesque" lives in a touch. It is an ideal of beauty communicated through the channel of a style.
Legend clusters around the "Mona Lisa," and famous tributes to that portrait, composed by such skilful writers as Gautier and Pater, have led thou sands to the conviction that in this painting as in no other the quintessence of the Leonardesque is to be found. It is there, of course, but it also is in other works, and some of them offer perhaps a simpler path to his secret. It was the secret of exquisitely subtle expression, of delineating the facts of nature with so spiritualized a grace that the facts take on a
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kind of divinity. Leonardo had it in the time of his pupilage, when he painted the celebrated angel in the foreground of Verrocchio's " Baptism of Christ." He had it all his life long. Through all the multifarious activities of his career he was the clairvoyant drafts man, using his art as though it were a sort of magic in the service of pure beauty. As a painter he em ployed color and tone as subtly as in the drawings he employed line. The "Virgin and Child With Saint Anne," in the Louvre, is even more comprehensible than the "Mona Lisa" as an instance of his powers of expression. It is clothed in beauty as in a vaporous garment. The forms are defined with an almost melt ing suavity. The style would remain merely sensuous in another hand. With Leonardo all that is sensuous in it is raised to a higher power, made spiritual. Be cause he was a complete technician he could do any thing, and among the drawings which are indispen sable to study of his art there are many which reveal in him a tremendous power. Battle scenes, for exam ple, notably inspired him. He could draw their broad movement, and he could draw the faces of individual fighters, distorted by passion. But it is in his finer subjects that he leaves the finest impression. The "Head of Christ" in the Brera is a miracle of beauty because it is a miracle of tenderness. We are thrilled by the swinging strength in the great "Head of a Warrior" in the British Museum, but we are be witched and haunted by those heads of women and
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maidens, scattered through the galleries of Europe, in which Leonardo unites to what he sees in life a beauty of which we feel he must have dreamed.
It is an infinitely delicate beauty, sprung from truth, but refined to a point which leaves it, indeed, well-nigh beyond interpretation in words. Leonardo flings it over the heads of his feminine types; he plays with it unceasingly, as I have indicated, in defining the tendrils of their hair. Over mouth and eyes and other features it hovers like a sacred atmosphere. A hand or an arm, as he draws it, is more than a bodily appurtenance; it is the vehicle for a kind of aesthetic enchantment. Alluding to these studies of details that he made I feel tempted to linger on the force of his technic, the superb knowledge at the bot tom of his treatment of form, of drapery. But every thing is used by this tremendous realist as a means to an end — the evocation of beauty. Never did a tech nician more steadily throw us back upon the subtler elements of his work. It is in these that the modern artist has his lesson. Leonardo sets before him an heroic standard of workmanship. He was, in mas tery of the processes of art, a positive demigod. As a draftsman, for example, Michael Angelo alone is his peer. It is hopeless to try to match him, to bor row his skill. But "the Leonardesque," considered as an inspiration, has had and must always have a marvellously leavening influence. There were Re naissance painters in Lombardy who recaptured
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something of its glow. In the paintings of Boltraffio, of Cesare da Sesto, of Solario and others you can see how his tenderness, his grace, his spiritualization of tangible things were extraordinarily emulated. No one in his senses could imagine their revival to-day in terms modelled closely upon Leonardo's practice. The time for that kind of emulation is gone. But in recalling us to beauty he performs a service by which the modern artist can profit as well as did the artist of the Renaissance. Leonardo, who could delineate with overwhelming eloquence the ugliness of life and the terror of death, has left us, more than anything else, a tradition of the radiant, flower-like loveliness that is to be found in nature and that can be ex pressed in art. In my own sense of him I reckon with nothing as with his unmistakable belief that beauty is the goal of the artist. The proof of its validity lies in his works — for all men to see.
Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting
V
RAPHAEL AND THE ART OF PORTRAIT PAINTING
AMONG the anecdotes relating to Ingres winch have come down to us there is one illustrating the attitude that he held toward his demigod Raphael. He sat at dinner with his friend Thiers, and the latter un dertook to demonstrate that the fame of the Italian master rested chiefly upon his Madonnas. Ingres was furious. "I would give them all/' he exclaimed; "yes, monsieur, all of them, for a fragment of the 'Disputa' or of the 'School of Athens' or of the 'Parnassus.'" The episode is symbolical of a con flict which has long persisted in the modem world of taste. If the "Sistine Madonna" is the most famous painting in the world, it is because it embodies the most universally appealing of all pictorial ideas of the mother of Christ. It seems conclusively to exalt Raphael as an interpreter of sentiment both human and divine. But that very painting points to the equally potent element in his genius which accounts for the enthusiasm of Ingres; the "Sistine Madonna" is nothing if not a masterpiece of design. It reveals the same transcendent power of composition which makes immortal the decorations in the Vatican.
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Nevertheless the conflict aforementioned will still go on. Laymen will think first of the Madonnas. Artists return to the mural paintings. In the mean time, of course, Raphael's art remains all of a piece, and true appreciation of it depends upon our realiza tion of the unity binding together its different aspects. He was one of the most versatile men who have ever lived. The important thing is to follow him sympa thetically into every field, and then to seize upon the central force which animated him in them all.
The American student has had the opportunity to study here one of Raphael's important religious sub jects ever since Pierpont Morgan placed the Colonna "Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints" in the Metropolitan Museum. Now there seems to be every likelihood that we will have in this country a monu ment to a very different phase of the master's ac tivity. In the spring of 1925 there was a tremendous to-do in the press over the purchase by the Duveens of a great portrait by Raphael. It belonged to a col lector in Berlin, Mr. Oscar Huldschinsky. His sale of it grievously excited the Germans, who looked upon it as one of the national treasures, and its exporta tion, if that had been heard of in time, might pos sibly have been prevented. However, it got to Lon don, Once in this country it is almost certain to be acquired by an American collector, and, though it would then pass to a private gallery, precedent justi fies the supposition that sooner or later one of our
RAPHAEL
FROM THE PORTRAIT BY SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO
Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 67
museums will possess it. It would be a little more than welcome, for it would serve to enlighten the student where most he needs enlightenment as re gards Raphael, that is, on his purely human side, on that side which brings him down from the douds and makes the Prince of Painters one of the raciest figures of the Renaissance. The Raphael of legend is a portent, a worker of miracles, who in a brief life of thirty-seven years achieved a mass of work — most of it flawless — large enough to have occupied several giants of art through a period three times as long. But he was a man like other men, save for his genius, and his work is to be apprehended in very human terms. That is where his portraiture helps.
This example of it is a portrait of Giuliano de Medici to which Vasari refers as one hanging in his time in the palace of Ottaviano de Medici at Florence. From that home it disappeared for centuries, nothing being known of it save a copy by Alessandro Allori in the Uffizi. Then, some time in 1866 or 1867, the German critic Liphart went one day with the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia to the house of a Signor Brini in Florence, to look at some paintings that he had to sell. They were struck by this portrait of Giuliano, and after the dust upon it had been sponged off, were only the more impressed. Brini apparently did not regard it as of exceptional importance. He could not have paid very much for it when he had got it from the firm of Baldovinetti, for he sold it to the
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Duchess at what Llphart characterizes as a very modest price. She took it to her villa at Quarto, and she brought in the restorer Tricca, who transferred the canvas, and in the process of cleaning it discov ered the initials of the painter and the fragments of a date. In 1901 the Duchess sent the portrait to Paris, where Eugene Muntz, one of the biographers of Raph ael, pronounced it the lost portrait of Giuliano de Medici, Duke of Nemours. Later Doctor Bode con firmed this opinion. We next hear of it as belonging to the Sedelmeyers in Paris, and then in the gallery of Mr. Huldschinsky.
Giuliano, the younger brother of Leo X, was lucky in his artists. Michael Angelo made his stupendous monument in the sacristy at San Lorenzo, and Raph ael painted this portrait. I must quote most of what Crowe and Cavalcaselle have to say about it, for it revives something of the atmosphere in which it was produced, besides throwing some light upon the subject of the painting:
Giuliano de Medici was the highest personage in the Papal State for whom Raphael could paint a likeness. All the arts of Leo X had been exerted to raise this prince to a station worthy of his birth and pretensions. He was Duke of Nemours in the peerage of France; the Pope had given him a principality, Louis XII a wife of royal lineage. The marriage took place early in February, 1515, and Giuliano returned to Rome to form a court over which his wife presided. .Within less than five months after these events occurred, the French Duke was commanding
GUILIANO DE MEDICI, DUKE OF NEMOURS FROM THE PORTRAIT BY RAPHAEL
Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 69
the papal forces against France. Illness alone prevented him from leading the troops in person, and a fatal decline soon deprived him of his life. But before leaving Rome, Giuliano had apparently had the wish to leave a portrait behind him which should adorn his wife's drawing-room. Raphael, as the Duke's "familiar," was selected to paint it. ...
Giuliano's repute is good among the princes of the Medicean house. He is said to have been weak. Eut he had a quality which other members of his family wanted. He was grateful to those who had favored him in adver sity. His features, handed down to us in several examples, are of the genuine Medicean type, including a long hooked nose, almond-shaped eyes, and a beard and mustache kept short to suit a small chin and upper lip. Great breadth and flatness marked the plane of the cheeks, which, in every extant specimen, are seen at three-quar ters to the left, with an oval black eyeball looking to the right. According to the fashion of the period, a coif of golden net drawn obliquely over the head to the level of the left ear, and a wide toque set aslant over the right ear, leave the whole of the forehead bare. A ticket of lozenge shape and three gold buckles are affixed to the toque. The low dress displays a long neck fringed with the border of a white shirt covered by a red vest, all but hidden by a black doublet over which a fawn-colored watered silk pelisse is thrown, adorned with a collar and facings of brown fur. A black patch conceals the fore finger of the left hand, which lies on a table partly hidden by the right, holding a letter. ... A green hanging half conceals an opening through which the sky appears cut out by the broken outline of the Castle of St. Angelo, to which the secret approach is shown by a covered way.
There is a significant phrase employed in the fore going passage, the one designating Raphael as the
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duke's " familiar." It recalls us to the splendor of the painter's life, his intimacy with popes and all their gorgeous satellites. His biographers glance at the notabilities who were his sitters, not only the princes of the church but statesmen, diplomatists, and poets. He would portray not only such men as Julius and Leo but a lettered courtier like Casti- glione. His net embraced all manner of men. He had but one prejudice as regards a sitter. As Munte re marks, "the artist was unwilling to transmit to pos terity the features of any but those who were worthy of sympathy or admiration." I am strongly tempted to pause upon this matter of Raphael's discrimination, and especially to pursue him as a denizen of the high est circles In Roman society. But it is well to di verge here upon the foundations of his work in por traiture. It is well to go back to his pupilage, to those early years in which he felt the influences of Timoteo Viti and Perugino. He has left portraits of both painters, a superb drawing of Viti in the British Museum, and a similarly moving head and shoulders of Perugino in the Borghese Gallery at Rome. The first is particularly to be admired just for its broad, sweeping draftsmanship, but the thing that still further touches the imagination in both portraits is their intense realism. Raphael's portraits, indeed, from the very beginning, completely expose the fal lacy of regarding him as even tinctured by that un reality which we associate with so-called " academic"
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art. I recall an odd conversation about these por traits with a very capable artist. They were, no doubt, very fine, he said, but it was a great pity that Raphael "didn't know how to paint." Seeing me rather stunned by this cryptic remark, he hastened to add that, of course, what he meant was that Raph ael was neither a Rembrandt nor a Manet, that the Italian didn't know anything about brush-work. I have to smile a little when I remember that and think of the sheer technical maestria in the portraits I have just mentioned, the linear breadth in the "Viti" and the nervous flowing brush-work in the "Perugino." The truth is that Raphael is only super ficially an artist of an academic cast. Essentially he was as keen a realist as any in the history of art.
Look only to that question of school currents, of formative influences, of which the exhaustive his torian is bound to make so much, and you get to thinking of Raphael as dabbling in more or less ab stract principles all his life long. Trace him from his labors in Umbria under Perugino and Pintoricchio, watch him as he is stirred by the magic of Leonardo, observe him shrewdly taking a leaf from the book of Fra Bartolommeo, and study above all the impetus he draws from contact with the manner of Michael Angelo. You forthwith call him an eclectic, which is a freezing enough label to affix to any man, and you wonder how through all those mutations he had anything to do with life. He had everything to do
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with it, as the portraits in particular clearly show. They testify to nothing so much as to the master's grasp upon the deep sources of vitality, the thrilling actuality with which he could endue his every stroke. There is an apposite passage in a letter of Bembo's to Bibbiena. "Raphael," he says, "has painted a portrait of our Tebaldeo, which is so natural that it seems more like him than he is himself." His con temporaries put his realism among the first of his merits. Vasari, paying a tribute akin to that of Bembo, writes these words, in the course of his com ments on the decorations in the Vatican: "And at this time, when he had gained a very great name, he also made a portrait of Pope Julius in a picture in oils, so true and so lifelike that the portrait caused all who saw it to tremble, as if it had been the living man himself." In this matter of embodying a for midable personality in a portrait I know of nothing more impressive, not even the great " Innocent X77 of Velasquez. There must have been something in por traiture which poignantly appealed to Raphael, for even when he was dealing with personages long dead and gone he had a way of lending to his images of them an extraordinary verisimilitude. When he painted the Vatican decorations he had to deal with numerous historical figures, with Sappho and Plato, with Virgil and Pindar, with Ptolemy. The task never gave him a moment's hesitation. He painted them with a vividness that makes them seem almost his
Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 73
contemporaries. Speaking of the "Parnassus," Va- sari says: "There are portraits from nature of all the most famous poets, ancient and modem, and some only just dead or still living in his day; which were taken from statues or medals, and liiany from old pictures, and some who were still alive, portrayed from the life by himself/' It is like Vasari to speak of them all as "portraits from nature," for no matter what he used, whether a document or the living model, Raphael made a living and breathing present ment of his subject. When he had the model before him he was merely incomparable, as witness the por trait of Bramante introduced into the foreground of "The School of Athens." As you may see from the sheet of drawings in the Louvre, when he came to study the lineaments of his architectural friend he got such a grip upon them that they seem fairly to vibrate with character. Over and over again Vasari returns to this motive. He loves to speak of the power that Raphael had "to give such resemblance to portraits that they seem to be alive, and that it is known whom they represent." I confess that I find it hard not to emulate Vasari, lingering repeatedly on the simple truth, the almost artless animation, in Raphael's portraits. One point that is pertinent I cannot neglect. It is the triumph of this truth over the purely decorative motive pursued as an end in itself. It is especially noticeable in his portraits of women, such as the "Maddalena Doni," the "Donna
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Velata," and the "Joanna of Aragon." They have a freedom and a solidity making them strangely pre dominant over the typical Florentine profile, con summately exquisite though that may be.
His genius was too great to wear the shackles of a convention, to be confined within the linear bounds of a pattern. But I indicated at the outset of these remarks that Raphael's genius was all of a piece, that one pervasive inspiration went to the painting of the Madonnas, the decorations, and the portraits. To return to that issue is to enforce the unity of Raphael's art by exposing its corner-stone where the portraits are concerned. He couldn't have sus tained in them that virtue of lifelikeness on which I have dwelt if he had not known how to build for it a perfect scaffolding of design. That is where the painter of three great types of pictorial art affirmed himself a master of one great secret. It is the secret of composition. Raphael had it in its simplest form when he made his early four-square portrait of Peru- gino. Rapidly he developed it and richly exploited it, achieving, as he placed a figure within the rec tangle, the same freshness and felicity which you ob serve in such a decorative gem of his as the "Juris prudence." Look at the "Angelo Doni," look at the "Cardinal Bibbiena," look at the "Baldassare Cas- tiglione" and look finally at the " Giuliano de Medici." If they throb with human life, their beauty springs also from the supreme composition that is in them.
Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 75
Raphael could meet, through his grasp upon that art, the last test of the portrait-painter. He could make of a portrait a really great picture. The point is ap preciated by Vasari when he comes to describe the famous "Leo X with Two Cardinals," now in the Pitti:
In Rome he made a picture of good size, in which he portrayed Pope Leo, Cardinal Giulio de Medici, and Car dinal de Rossi. In this the figures appear to be not painted but in full relief; there is the pile of the velvet, with the damask of the Pope's vestments shining and rustling, the fur of the linings soft and natural, and the gold and silk so counterfeited that they do not seem to be in color, but real gold and silk. There is an illuminated book of parch ment which appears more real than the reality; and a little bell of wrought silver which is more beautiful than words can tell. Among other things, also, is a ball of burnished gold on the Pope's chair, wherein are reflected, as if it were a mirror (such is its brightness), the light from the windows, the shoulders of the Pope, and the walls round the room. And all these things are executed with such diligence that one may believe without any manner of doubt that no master is able, or is ever likely to be able, to do better.
Was any other master ever able to do better? Muntz seems to have been a little in doubt. "Nor can we place before him," he says, "any but the greatest masters of portraiture, such as Jan van Eyck, Holbein, Titian, Velasquez, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt." For my own part, I cannot see why any of these save Rembrandt should be placed "be-
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fore" Raphael in portraiture. The Dutchman, to be sure, is hors concours. No one in the whole range of portraiture can touch him for pathos, for the dra matic, even tragic, presentation of character. But for the rest, Raphael's portraits seem to me to stand among the greatest. They do so by virtue of force in characterization, distinction in design, and, above all, a certain serene beauty.
VI
Religious Painting
VI RELIGIOUS PAINTING
AN exhibition held not long ago in New York set me thinking anew on an old subject. It was one of pictures by Mr. H. Siddons Mowbray, and the sub ject they brought up was that of religious painting. The artist dealt with the life of Christ. He did so in a remarkably persuasive manner. Mr. Mowbray* is a good draftsman and a good designer. His epi sodes were composed with both dignity and vitality, and his justly organized groups were set against a deep blue background realistically enough and at the same time with a decorative felicity recalling the traditions of Pintoricchio and the earlier Florentines. This was a fairly long and well-sustained flight in Biblical illustration. There were fifteen panels given to the main theme, with several others allied to the series. They were beautiful and convincing. They disclosed true devotional emotion. Their technical merits, too, were impressive, but what especially in terested me was that they should have been painted at all, that in the present period, dedicated to the apotheosis of materialism, an artist should arise de voting himself to the delineation of purely spiritual realities. The incident revived the whole problem of
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religious art and the change which has come over its fortunes with the passing of the centuries.
I remember puzzling over this problem years ago in the sacristy of the cathedral at Montauban before that "Vow of Louis XIII " which is one of the most ambitious of the religious paintings of Ingres. I am an Ingres man and ready, I suppose, if anybody is, to meet him half-way. But I confess that despite the elements of grandeur in this composition it would not occur to me to cite it among the great pictures of the Madonna. He returned to Scriptural subjects again and again. Witness the "Christ before the Doctors" at Montauban. Witness the "Virgin and the Sacred Host" in its two versions, one of them in the Louvre, or the "Christ Committing to Peter the Keys of Paradise" in the same museum. But I have never seen those things without amusedly recalling the retort of Ingres, cited earlier in these pages, when Thiers tried to prove to him that the Madonnas of Raphael constituted his chief title to fame. "I would give them all," cried the artist, "for a fragment of the 'Dispute,'" Who would not give all of the re ligious paintings by Ingres for one of his nudes? For my own part I feel that way not only about Ingres but about most of the more devoutly minded men of his generation and later in France, and in England too. Flandrin and Ary Scheffer were ele vated spirits but never triumphant masters. Puvis alone climbed the heights, yet, when all is said, one
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reveres him rather as a great decorator than as an interpreter of Scriptural story; his indubitable in spiration is poetic rather than divine. When you glance cursorily over the rank and file in France you are arrested here and there by interesting things. You note a memorable "Madonna" by Dagnan-Bou- veret. You find Cazin, of all people in the world, paint ing a "Hagar and Ishmael." You discover B6raud portraying a Biblical scene in sensationally modern terms, or you come upon the famous illustrations of Tissot. Bouguereau once painted a "Madonna" in his polished academic way, and it wasn't a bad picture — in its polished academic way. I could go on indefinitely enumerating French excursions into this field. But hardly any of them are fundamentally pertinent to this discussion. I can recall only two modern Frenchmen who have seemed to me to be imbued with authentic religious emotion. One of them was Millet, when he painted "The Angelus." The other is that brilliant satirist of our own time, Forain, who has drawn from the Bible compositions of a Rembrandtesque poignancy.
The failure of England in this matter is curious, for the genius of the race, addicted in literature at least to the play of ideas, would seem to be peculiarly favorable to the development of religious painting. Why did not George Frederick Watts conclusively prove it? To the painter of "Love and Death," to say nothing of divers other imaginative conceptions,
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it would seem as if anything might have been pos sible. And why did not the Pre-Raphaelites put the subject on a firmer basis? Holman Hunt created a certain furore in his own country with "The Light of the World," One of the best of Rossetti's paintings is one of the earliest, his charming "Ecce Ancilla Domini," of 1850. But in England, as across the Channel, the status of religious art is essentially sub ordinate. It is a striking historical circumstance — in the assertion of which I might or might not have foreign support — that the greatest religious painting of our own time was produced by an American, the late John La Farge. His "Ascension" in the church of that name in New York is a veritably sublime work of art. We are a strange people, sometimes very slow to appreciate our own, and I am not at all sure that as many Americans know of this masterpiece as know of, say, Munkicsy's "Christ before Pilate." But I would defy anybody to name any religious painting of its epoch anywhere in the world that is compara ble to it in beauty and grandeur. I can hear some reader murmuring at this point: "Well, if an American was the greatest religious painter of his time, why isn't America the scene of more and better religious painting?" There is an obvious answer. It is only once in so often, anywhere, that a John La Farge is born. Incidentally, that answer excites many re flections on the broad problem to which I have re ferred, the relation of religious painting to a givea period.
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It has often, I think, been grievously misunder stood because of the error made in ascribing to a given period a talismanic potency that it never pos sessed. The unwary student, happily beguiled by the glamour of an innocent world, conceives of medi aeval mysticism as a kind of holy elixir imbibed by generations of painters. It is as easy as it is delight ful to fall into this misconception. Certain types like the Sienese and Florentine Primitives irresistibly in vite it. An age of faith and nothing else is mirrored in the tenderness of a Duccio or a Giotto. There is something pervadingly celestial about early Italian art. The pictures of Fra Angelico are of so much saintliness all compact, and the man is as childlike as the spirit of his immortal work. Seeing the tre mendous force of religious exaltation by which his art and that of a host of his contemporaries were en ergized, it is natural to assume that exaltation as exclusively animating a school. The student comes to think of it as a kind of general, communal posses sion. It was, as a matter of fact, an element depend ing for its perfect exploitation wholly upon the indi vidual, a truism which, as I have said, is sometimes overlooked.
These observations are assuredly not directed at the revival of ancient scandals. I have no disposition to dip the brush in earthquake and eclipse, retelling sad stories of the death of private reputations. But I may be permitted to touch upon the classical in-
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stance of Fra Filippo Lippi and his well-known levity. Vasari has some drastic things to say upon the paint er's more earthy mood and adds the following pas sage: "When he was in this humor he gave little or no attention to the works that he had undertaken; wherefore, on one occasion Cosimo de Medici, hav ing commissioned him to paint a picture, shut Mm up in his own house, in order that he might not go out and waste his time; but, after staying there for two whole days, one night he cut some ropes out of his bed sheets with a pair of scissors and let himself down from a window, and then abandoned himself for many days to his pleasures/' A scurvy wretch, no doubt, as he lives in the pages of Vasari or in Browning's poem. Human; in short, one of the most human creatures that ever lived ! It is for that that I signalize him. It is not Ms peccadilloes that make him representative but his humanness; he was a man before he was a mystic.
It is the story of the whole of Renaissance paint ing. Religious exaltation was a part, but only a part, of religious painting at its zenith, and sometimes it was only vicariously present, so to say. I can imagine the words of John Milton on the lips of Fra Angelico :
— What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That, to the highth of this great argument, I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.
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I cannot for the life of me imagine this cry from the depths on the lips of, for example, Titian, the bosom friend of Aretino. One must lay hold of an other clew to the majesty of great religious painting. You find it, looking to the human aspect of the ques tion, in the conception of the painter as primarily a craftsman and a temperament. The church was there to supply the theme and the occasion. The artist was there to make the most of both according as he was a man of imagination and, transcendently, a man of his hands. There is no such thing, says Swinburne, as an inarticulate poet. There is no such thing as a great painter who cannot paint — and paint superlatively well. He must feel, too, he must have creative power, yet the tale of his exploits is all sound and fury if it is not a tale of his craftsmanship. I know of no more moving illustration than that sup plied by the "Sistine Madonna." By some fantastic slip of the memory Ingres must have forgotten that when he offered to give all of Raphael's "Madonnas" for a fragment of the "Disputa." He was thinking of Raphael as the prodigious designer, draftsman, and master of form, and he forgot for the moment that in the " Sistine Madonna" Raphael is the consummate exemplar of all three elements. The picture survives as a triumph of religious exaltation and an interpre tation of divine motherhood chiefly because, to ex press it bluntly, it is so magnificently and monu mentally put together, because the man who made it was so intensely the artist.
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Religious art is so much the more quickly and re freshingly appreciated if one begins by grasping it from within in these more tangible aspects of its character. Its beauty is the more thrilling as it deepens, and takes on more of spiritual mystery, but that very mystery only grows the more enkindling as you search out the fabric of personal and technical traits on which it rests. It is an article of my belief that the artist as artist is paramount, that he is greater than the school, the movement, the epoch, and I would transpose the familiar phrase "adven tures among masterpieces " into "adventures among artists.3' Inevitably and in a measure justly you read into a painting of a given period the pressure of ex ternal influences. All the time you have to reckon also with the strength of personality and the play of taste. How crushingly this sometimes overrides the sway of convention ! There hangs in the museum at Bile one of the masterpieces of Holbein, his "Dead Christ." It is for me one of the most beautiful things in sixteenth-century painting, a miracle of drafts manship and modelling. It has tragic pathos, too. But it comes straight from the charnel-house, and you trace in it not so much of religious emotion as you do of the canny, clear-eyed Holbein, the man with a passion for form that had about it something of scientific objectivity. To turn about this phe nomenon of personalized artistry, like a many-faceted jewel in one's hand, go from Bale to Milan and hunt
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up Mantegna's "Pieta" in tlie Brera. Again you behold a dead body, but this time the connoisseur of form who has drawn it is one who has not paused in the charnel-house but has spent a lifetime in the company of antique marbles. This painting, too, has pathos, but it is the personal equation of the artist that in the long run validates it; what we are first and last conscious of is just the idiosyncrasy of Man- tegna, wreaked upon a special accent in the treat ment of form. The student will be repaid who wiU pursue this motive as it is exposed in the works of this or that master. Let him pass from Holbein to Mantegna and from Mantegna to that ineffable "Pieta" of Michael Angelo's at St. Peter's. Let him contrast Michael Angelo's handling of form with Signorelli's, or with that characteristic j}f Rubens. Just as one voice in a choir differs from another in color, so you find the style differing as you go from one passage in the great symphony of form to an other. Once in his dosing years La Farge walked through the Louvre with a medical friend, who, from time to time, felt his pulse. Afterward the doctor said that, trusting merely to this indicator, he could tell which picture had most affected the artist. It was, he said, the famous "Dead Christ" from Avi gnon. "And," said La Farge to me, "he was right." The authorship of that painting has been much in debate, but I have no doubt about the source of my friend's emotion. If he owed it to the theme he owed
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it even more to the genius of the French Primitive. Brander Matthews, by the way, once gave me a suggestive anecdote on this matter of the invincible, persistence of personality. He and La Farge were talking at the dinner table about the Morellian hy pothesis and the painter said:
Let us suppose the testing of a picture of my own sometime many years hence. The Morelli of the future might look at it narrowly and after a while conclude that the hands and eyes in the picture showed a Japanese conception of form. He would remember that I had kept a workshop, a bottega, after the old Italian fashion, and he would have heard that I had had Japanese people with me. So he would say that the picture was a studio piece, the work of a Japanese assistant. Then the Berenson of that day would come along and look it all over very carefully and get much interested in the spirituality of the face. He would say that there was something very soft, very feminine about it, and he would wind up by attributing it to Miss So-and-So, another pupil. — But it would be a La Farge, all the same.
It is by reference to La Farge also and to his ex perience in the making of his masterpiece, the paint ing of "The Ascension " I have already mentioned, that I may throw a little further light on the pro foundly personal origin of a work of art. He wrote me a long letter about it, describing his methods, how he studied the matter of proportioning his fig ures to the given space, how he pondered over the naturalistic appearance which he wished to establish in the landscape, and so on. In the effort to make
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some of Ms figures look at their ease floating in the air, "I studied what I could," he wrote me, "of the people who are swung in ropes and other arrange ments across theatres and circuses." He had cer tain geometric conditions in his mind which his com position had to meet if it was to make the right pattern in the space awaiting it. The landscape es pecially troubled him, and on this point there is a passage in his letter which I must quote intact:
At that moment I was asked to go to Japan by my friend, Henry Adams, and I went there in 1886. I had a vague belief that I might find there certain conditions of line in the mountains which might help me. Of course the Judean Mountains were entirely out of question, all the more that they implied a given place. I kept all this in mind and on one given day I saw before me a space of mountain and cloud and flat land which seemed to me to be what was needed. I gave up my other work and made thereupon a rapid but very careful study, so com plete that the big picture is only a part of the amount of work put into the study of that afternoon. There are turns of the tide which allow you at times to do an amount of work incredible in sober moments; as you know, there are very many such cases; I do not understand it myself. When I returned I was still of the same mind. My studies of separate figures were almost ready and all I had to do was to stretch the canvas and begin the work.
Now this artist had one of the richest minds and one of the subtlest souls ever known in art. His "Ascension" is the noblest work of Ms extraordinary imagination. Its appeal is that of religious painting
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in its highest estate. Yet you see from the foregoing out of what human perplexities and expedients it was developed. And if I allude to La Farge's pro cedure it is not of course to deny him a spiritual in spiration and to contrast his methods with those of the Old Masters, but, on the contrary, to emphasize his solidarity with them. A great religious painting grew under his hands precisely as it grew under the hands of a Titian or even a Leonardo. We talk about the man of action as though he had traits decisively separating him from the artist. The artist is a man of action in that at least while a dreamer he is also a doer, a maker. La Farge, slowly fashioning his picture so that it might become an organic part of an architectural ensemble, sends me back with a heightened sympathy to the great company of his august predecessors. I seem only to apprehend a more vital character in the beauty of their works when I trace behind their unquestioned mysticism endless traits of a more mundane and personal ori gin."
I love to watch the natural every-day habit of mind belonging to a Ghirlandajo or a Carpaccio, ad justing itself to a realistic gait and achieving its pleasant, friendly narrative effects without any thought of the emotions indispensable to the Primi tives. I love to observe Fra Angelico's affection for the flowers and Crivelli's artless sumptuosity. It is delightful to savor the wistfulness of Botticelli, the
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paganism of Mantegna, the intellectuality of Raphael, the sheer splendor of Titian, the terriUlita of Michael Angelo, the dramatic fire in Tintoretto, the inex haustible bravura of Tiepolo, and so on through the long list of what I would not call phases of religious painting but just the individualized moods of men. Consider the increased intimacy with religious art which we gain through this mode of approach. It is a mistake to be too metaphysical, too recondite, in the study of religious painting. It is a mistake to assume that at some places in the morning of the modern world, in Italy, in Flanders, or elsewhere, art sat at the feet of the church and profited by a mystical laying on of hands. Even on that hypoth esis it is to be noted that the religious inspiration depends for its fortunes utterly upon the caprice of fate that illumines one man and not the other. Look at Spain. There is something like religious ecstasy in the paintings of Zurburan and again in those of El Greco, whereas the religious compositions of Velas quez are negligible, though he was, as a painter, the master of them all. Look at the Low Countries. They were the scene of the most pronounced realism, yet the tenderness of the Van Eycks is unsurpassed and Rembrandt was one of the most moving religious painters of all time, as witness alone his " Supper at Emmaus," in the Louvre. It all comes back to the generosity of the gods, who may or may not project into the world a man with the genius of religious
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painting in him. A long time ago they dowered the earth with numbers of such masters. They and not their time account for what they did. Let us not forget, either, that most of these men were also great mural painters, great portrait-painters, as much at home with a secular as with a sacred subject — in other words, simply great masters of a craft. This may not be an age of faith, but if a master arose to-morrow, a man of ideas and imagination, emo tional and creative, wielding a compelling brush, he could fill the churches with immortal illustrations of the divine story. The case of La Farge's glorious picture proves that.
VII
The Cult of the Drawing
VII THE CULT OF THE DRAWING
IN the "Souvenirs du Diner Bixio" of the late Julps Claretie there is a passage which rather amus ingly illustrates the attitude occasionally held by one eminent man toward another, and incidentally it gives us a clew to the status in French art of one of its most famous -figures. The passage reports a col loquy between Meissonier and Ger6me, about Leon Bonnat, which ran as follows:
MEISSONIER. — Qm va-t-on nommer comme wee-president aVInstitut?
GE&6ME. — Bonnat.
MEISSOJSHER. — A quel propos? C'est done un peintre?
GER.6ME. — Oui . . . maintenant.
Thus we see that even an Academician may some times be a little acrid toward another Academician. But, as I have indicated, besides what is droll in the anecdote there is a suggestion of Bonnat's character as an artist. He was one of the salient painters of his day, but was he, in the esoteric sense of the term, a painter? He promised to be one when he was a young man in Italy, a pensionnaire of the Villa Me- dicis in the early sixties, the ardent soul painted by
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Degas at that time in one of the most interesting of Ms portraits. Bonnat delineated then the models who hang about the Scala di Spagna in Rome wear ing their most picturesque garments, and he made capital pictures out of them. Even then, however, there was working in him a deleterious influence. Born at Bayonne and spending part of his youth just across the border in Spain, he had conceived a great admiration for Eibera. In one of his Italian pictures he invented a scene in which that master sat on the steps of a Roman church drawing the monks issuing from the edifice; and besides commemorating his hero in this way he emulated him in method when he came to paint the portraits that occupied a large part of his career. He went in for a simple but dra matic play of light and shade and put forth a series of extraordinary images. It is resplendent with great names. He portrayed Pasteur and the Due d'Aumale, Gounod and Pasta, Thiers and Victor Hugo — in short, all the celebrities of an epoch. They live mag nificently upon his canvas. You look, for example, at such a portrait of his as that of Leon Cogniet and for a moment you feel that you are looking at a masterpiece. On second thoughts you revise this judgment, for you observe that the portrait is as hard as nails, as rigidly defined as though it were cut out of iron. What was it, in addition to the vitalizing characterization in them, that nevertheless gave them high rank in modem French portraiture ? They
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were superbly drawn, drawn academically, no doubt, but still with the touch of a master.
Apropos of this matter of Bonnat's draftsmanship I may recite a very curious incident. Gambetta died on December 31, 1882. In its issue for February, 1883, the Gazette des Beaux- Arts published an article about him as a man of taste by Jules Claretie, and accompanied it by a reproduction of an etching from the head of the statesman drawn the day after his death at Ville d'Avray by Bonnat. It was signed and dated. I tucked it away among my prints and years afterward, in 1898, when Bodley published Ms book on France, I reprinted the portrait in a review of that work. This fell under the eye of my friend the late Samuel P. Avery, the old art-dealer, con noisseur, and collector. He wrote to me with aston ishment, saying that Bonnat himself had aided him to complete his collection of his (Bonnat's) etchings, sending him an impression of any new plate he made, and this one had never turned up. Avery said he would send my reproduction to his agent in Paris with instructions to make inquiry. The report came back stating that Bonnat declared he had never etched the plate, and scrawled across the reproduc tion were these words: "Bonnat swore by the point of his knife that he never made etching of this in his life." Now what could have caused that amazing repudiation, made under the most sacred of Basque oaths? I call it a repudiation because the documen-
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tation of the print is conclusive. Its mere publication in the Gazette, one of the sedatest periodicals on earth, would by itself be fairly conclusive, but besides that it bears the familiar signature and Claretie specifically ascribes it to Bonnat in his text. That the artist didn't see it in the magazine at the time is next door to incredible, and that he never protested to the Gazette is shown by the fact that when the "Tables Generates " of the magazine were subsequently com piled by Charles de Bus the etching was attributed therein to Bonnat. It will be interesting if some day, in some passage of social or political reminiscence, a ray of light is thrown on this little mystery.
Bonnat triumphed, we have seen, through drafts manship. The point has a dual significance. He not only drew well himself, but he had a cult for the drawings of others; and if he left one monument to his art in the body of portraiture to which I have re ferred, he left another to his taste in the Mus6e Bon nat at Bayonne. That little town in the extreme south of France was good to the artist in his youth, subsidizing his studies, and he never forgot it. As he rose in the world and prospered he collected paint ings and drawings, and he gave a prodigious collec tion of these to the municipality in 1901. I remember that when I visited Bayonne the drawings in the mu seum made me catch my breath. Nowhere else in the provinces could one encounter quite such riches. It was as though one were in an annex to the Louvre*
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Bonnat made memorable gifts to that great national institution — especially one of a priceless sheaf of Rembrandt drawings — but the Musee Bonnat was very close to his heart and it possesses most of his finest gems. These are now being made accessible to a wider public. There is an admirable co-operative organization in Paris, Les Presses Universitaires de France, which exists to supply its members with books at reasonable prices. It also engages in pub lishing, and it is issuing a series of portfolios under the title of "Les Dessins de la Collection Leon Bon nat." Four times a year subscribers receive a group of from twenty to twenty-five drawings, and publica tion will go on until the best at Bayonne have been reproduced. This means that in the long run we will have in facsimile some of the greatest drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michael Angelo; Rembrandt, Holbein, and Diirer; Claude, Poussin, and Watteau. Nor is the collection confined to the ancient masters. Bonnat had a passion for the draw ings of Ingres, and, with his fine catholicity, he showed the same ardor in assembling souvenirs of that mas ter's romantic rival, Delacroix. Other moderns are present. The German Menzel, for example, is rep resented by six beautiful drawings. The first port folio, which lies before me, well brings out the wide range of the affair. It opens with Guardi and Signo- relH. There follows a brilliant sanguine attributed to Maes, and from this we pass to an exquisite Rem-
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brandt. Then come Diirer and the elder Holbein, followed unexpectedly by a brilliant drawing in colors from the hand of Sir Thomas Lawrence. The eigh teenth-century French School is glitteringly rep resented by Clodion, Fragonard, Lancret, and Gabriel de Saint-Aubin. Barye, Corot, Delacroix, G6ricault, Ingres, and Millet round out the company.
The important thing about these reproductions is that, thanks to the development of modern processes, possession of them is tantamount to possession of the originals, and I note the fact with the more appre ciation because it plays into the hands, if I may so express it, of a hobby which I would urge upon every lover of art. Of course there are, I suppose, people quite interested in pictures for whom drawings as such have no great appeal. Well, frankly, I'm sorry for them, and, indeed, I will go so far as to assert that their equipment is sadly incomplete. The world is divided, for me, into two groups, formed respec tively of those who care for drawings and those who do not. For those who do care there is nothing so thrilling as a good drawing. I have ridden this hobby all my life and I know. Some old Frenchman — it may have been Mariette — once said that in a draw ing you get an artist's idea in its premiere edosion* You get more than that. You get in its most reveal ing autographic expression the very breath and pres sure of his individuality, you come into the most intimate possible contact with the very essence of
PATJLUS HOFHAIMER
FROM THE DRAWING BY ALBRECHT DURER
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Ms genius. Pater and the rest of them have uttered their dithyrambs in celebration of the "Mona Lisa." They seek thereby to draw nearer to the secret of La Gioconda. But if you want to draw nearer to the secret of Leonardo, the secret of that almost un earthly beauty, impalpable and evanescent, which he brought forth from the recesses of his soul, you go to the drawings. There is eloquence enough in his few paintings to carry us far, but in the final inter pretation of Leonardo's magic the drawings are so indispensable that without them criticism would be gravely handicapped.
It is so with all the masters. When the Diirer So ciety issued its first portfolio, in 1898, it specialized necessarily in the prints, but it included a few draw ings and multiplied the number of them as it went on with its ten years of devoted reproduction. More and more have facilities for the study of drawings been made the object of a beneficent activity among artistic associations. Long ago, before he dispersed his renowned eighteenth-century collections, M. Doucet took me through them in his house in the rue Spontini. I lingered especially over his drawings by Watteau and the others of that school. Doucet smiled sympathetically and said: "Wait. You shall have, them." What he meant, as he proceeded to ex plain, was that he was about to found his now famous library of art, and with it the Societe de Reproduc tions des Dessins de Maitres. I joined it, of course,
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when it started, in 1909, and remained a member un til the concluding portfolio appeared, only the other day. Annually I was enriched by a large group of masterpieces, practically, as I have said before, originals. That Societe has done precious things. As a separate venture it reproduced in four large port folios all the drawings by Pisanello and his school in the Codex Vallardi in the Louvre. It also made some six or seven volumes out of the old Salon cata logues annotated with pencil sketches by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin. Anything more adorable — there is no other word — than those pictorial memoranda of the eighteenth-century draftsman it would be impossible to find, and the facsimiles are so exact that you get the very spirit of his page. I must mention also the fine work done by the late M. Demotte in making a series of facsimiles from the drawings of Degas, a series continued by his son. Degas could have no more eloquent memorial.
The French have been the most brilliant miracle- workers in this matter of facsimile reproduction. The English, however, have been close behind them* Their Vasari Society, created in London to do what Doucet did in Paris, has issued and is still issuing beautiful plates. The Germans have not, in my ex perience, been so successful. Everybody knows that their book work and color work are exceptional, but I was disappointed in the drawings I got from a society in Frankfort before the war broke out. I
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have found better plates in two volumes by Detlev von Hadeln on the drawings of Tintoretto and Titian, but these recent books, good as they are, might be better. They certainly don't challenge the supremacy of the French. While I am speaking of that I ought to mention another source of valuable reproductions for the amateur to whom the cost of original draw ings is prohibitive. I mean the sale catalogue as it is issued in Paris. Some remarkable French collec tions of drawings have passed under the hammer, Doucet's, the Muhlbacher collection, and that of the Goncourts. The drawings of the great Heseltine col lection have also been reproduced to a certain extent; and, in fact, more instances crowd upon my memory than I can enumerate here. Some of my best prizes have come fiom the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. It is not at all an unexciting sensation to buy a bundle of back numbers of the Gazette at auction, to buy it "unsight unseen," and then to sift out of it a handful of su perb drawings, perhaps a new Leonardo or a Dtirer of the first water. The browsing among books is almost illimitable since photography came to the aid of illus tration. There are monumental folios like Berenson's classic work on the drawings of the Florentine mas ters and there are popular inexpensive collections like the one which the Scribners imported from England some years ago, each thin volume in which was given to excellent full-page plates from the drawings of a single master. Decidedly the collector who gives his
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mind to it may go on indefinitely adding to his port folios. In one way and another the reproductions of drawings in the last twenty or thirty years have been run up into the thousands.
There is more in this circumstance than its refer ence to the collector's purse. He has one great ad vantage besides that of gathering unto himself trea sures available only to the millionaire before the me chanical processes involved in the matter were per fected. He is absolutely unrestricted in his choice. The luckiest of millionaires is helpless before the fact that a given drawing is lodged forever in the British Museum or in the Louvre, in the Uffizi or in the Albertina. On the -other hand, the collector who could not dream of possessing an original Leonardo, may little by little assemble facsimiles of virtually all the Leonardos. And I cannot too often reiterate the tremendous meaning of that word " facsimile." A photograph of a painting is one thing; a facsimile of a drawing is quite another, often giving you not only the drawing but the color and texture of the paper and even the stains thereon. In other words, the judicious collector having the modest status to which I allude, may make himself the master of the whole cosmos of historic draftsmanship. He will ride his hobby, of course, in accordance with his own taste. He may specialize in this or that school. He may con centrate on Botticelli, say, or on Rubens, and be utterly indifferent to Degas. But on one point, I
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think, all amateurs of this subject will agree. The drawing for which they care will be not only the drawing of a true artist, but it will be a chip from a workshop, a study, a preliminary step toward some thing else, a natural gesture which we surprise look ing over the artist's shoulder. There are exceptions, to be sure. Ingres made some of his finest drawings as finished portraits. I might cite other illustrations from types old and modern, but I need not go into this phase of the subject. The drawing I have par ticularly in mind is just the drawing that I might describe as the informal fragment of personality, the drawing in which the painter or sculptor feels his way toward the creation of a work of art and thinks aloud, as it were, unfettered by those conditions which confront him when he is functioning in full dress.
If this character is important to the drawing there is also much emphasis to be placed upon the distinc tive quality of the artist, his flair for draftsmanship, his way of giving to line a special power and enchant ment. Where the drawings of some painters are full of the subtlest elements, disclosing beauties that fre quently evaporate when they work with the brush, the drawings of others are negligible, even though those others can paint like masters. Sargent, for ex ample, is more of a technical virtuoso on canvas than John La Farge ever dreamed of being, but his drawings, as drawings, haven't a tithe of the felicity
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belonging to those of La Farge. It is strange, by the way, that the drawings of the modern painter seldom have the virtue residing in the drawings of the past. Occasionally draftsmen turn up. In England they have Charles Shannon, Augustus John, and William Orpen. Here we have a consummate draftsman like Arthur B. Davies, who is as unique in black-and- white as in color. But men like these are excessively rare. And the most singular circumstance is that the draftsmen who professionalize the subject, the artists who draw strictly for publication, make scarcely any contribution at all to our subject. A master like Forain is only the exception that proves the rule. Great illustrators like Abbey and Howard Pyle may draw with unqualified authority, but there is a crucial distinction between their draftsmanship and the kind of draftsmanship that I have been talking about. It is the great paradox of this cult for the drawing that the connoisseurs who have followed it from the Re naissance down have almost invariably sought the drawing which was not so much a masterpiece in it self as a stroke on the way to one. The typical draw ing of superlative interest and beauty is a kind of sublime by-product of art.
VIII
Venice as a Painting-Ground
VIII
VENICE AS A PAINTING-GROUND
THE most paintable city on earth rests, as a matter of fact, upon the sea. I refer of course to Venice. There are other places in the world that rival it in what is commonly called picturesqueness, but they haven't won the painter as Venice has won him. Some pedantic statistician might here arise and point out that Holland has been having its portrait painted for centuries. I would grant him his figures but I would still go on stubbornly to assert that for the artist the Venetian glamour has been incomparable. And now the artist must look to the defense of his favorite painting-ground, for it is grievously threat ened by so-called modern progress. Pompeo Mol- menti, the Carpaccio man, who has all his life been a champion of Venetian integrity, has assembled in a book, "I Nemici di Venezia," the papers in which he has repeatedly returned to the castigation of the city's foes. The latter are as varied in the nature of their attacks as they are numerically strong. One in sidious enemy is the man with the purse who, against the law, secretly contrives to detach from Venice some of its most characteristic art treasures. Then
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there are the more candid souls who would erect tasteless new buildings cheek by jowl with the his toric monuments. But, indeed, the schemes of the promoters are endless.
Once she did hold the gorgeous East in fee — and now she is the sport of the speculator ! In The Liv ing Age one day I found some passages quoted from an indignant Italian journal on some of the "sense less projects conceived by Venetians and non- Vene tians." I used to wince when I floated about the lagoons in a gondola or a sandola in the early days of the steamboats and had to take the wash of those impertinent little craft. But they were as nothing compared to the sort of thing proposed by the van dals mentioned in the Revista d' Italia :
A few of them would like to improve part of the lagoon shore so as to enable people to raise cabbages and po tatoes upon it. Others have more varied and also more persistent ideas. They want to join Venice to the main land by means of a grand bridge for pedestrians and vehicles. In a near future it might be possible thus to leave a villa in Venice and go directly by motor-car or tramway to the gardens of Bottenighi. As it is plain enough that the tramways, automobiles, and carriages could not stop short and accumulate at the town limit, a way will be naturally found to give them easy access to the streets of the interior, and that is all that will be needed to change the aspect of the city and the general run of its life. . . .
An invention & la Jules Verne! A street which will reach over and across canals, marshes, and islands is going to unite Venetia with the station of Mestre. It will be
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an iron construction, a huge road of steel beginning at the station of Mestre, crossing the lagoon, flanking Venice along the new Fondamenta; then at the farther extremity of the latter it will divide into two branches, of which the left one, passing close to the celebrated island of San Francesco del deserto (beata solitude!) and over more bridges and embankments, will reach Burano; the right branch will fly over the port of Lido, run along the shore, cross the canal of the port of Malamocco, go all the way along the shore of Pellestino and end at Chioggia.
The worst thing about this campaign to Trill the goose that lays the golden eggs — for surely the tide of money-laden tourists will slacken as the city loses its charm — is that it has been gathering momentum for such a long time, it has been so deadly in its per sistence. I have seen something of the gradual de terioration myself. When I first used to go down to the Lido for my daily dip the whole place was sim plicity itself, and after coining out of the sea it was only a few steps away from the pavilions to stretches of what seemed like isolated serenity. My friend Eugene Benson would be painting a picture only a few hundred yards off. I would lie in the sand at his side among the primroses scattered about, and I would be aware of nothing save sea and sky. In suc cessive summers after that I saw the Lido grow more and more like Coney Island, and the last time I was there it had become so raucous and shoddy a resort that I fled in disgust and never went back. Imagine how a host of Venice-lovers will feel if the city itself
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suffers a kindred transformation ! In two ways the disaster may be thwarted. In the first place, propa ganda may drive it into the heads of the Venetians that their so-called " improvements75 can only di vert from the lagoons that army of travellers which now means so much to their prosperity. Generations still to come will be repelled from visiting the city which their forefathers frequented as a shrine. Sec ondly, if "local pride " is non-existent in Venice, the Italian Government might conceivably do some thinking for the city fathers, and protect them from their own stupid obduracy by declaring Venice a national monument, to be tampered with only under heavy penalties. Signor Mussolini is, they say, a very busy man, occasionally in trouble even with his own Fascisti, but those all over the world who care for Venice will hope that in some happy moment he may come to the rescue of their dream city.
I call it a dream city advisedly, for I firmly believe that there is no other city in the world which to the sensitive traveller is more an affair of poetized visions, of romantic moods. The unimaginative can find no welcome on the lagoons. Have we not all met the man who remembered nothing in particular about Venice save that there were bad smells on some of its canals and that its mosquitoes had a lethal bite? I know all about the smells and I have fought the mosquitoes, but I know, nevertheless, that Venice is Beauty Incarnate. So she has been to a glorious
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company of painters, the immortal spirits for whose f eelings I have suffered whenever I have encountered signs of the encroachment of ugliness and vulgarity upon her domain. One could weep with Veronese, enthroning Venice upon the world itself in the ducal palace. He gave her attributes of imperial grace and strength. He placed the Lion of St. Mark's at her feet between figures of Justice and Peace. He saw her, in a word, reigning in fadeless splendor. Poor Paolo ! How could he anticipate the era of the tin Lizzie ?
The old painters knew well the unique beauty of their town and paid jealous tribute to its genius and its monuments. When Gentile Bellini delineated a great religious procession in the piazza he gave the upper half of his canvas to a magnificent portrait of the Cathedral. The city gave him backgrounds for more than one picture, and repeatedly you find mas ters like Carpaccio and Mansueti drawing for their compositions upon the scenes they saw about them. There is, however, an interesting distinction to be observed where the attitude of the older Venetian masters toward their beloved city is concerned. They did not regard her precisely in the way of the Im pressionists. Their pride in her was rooted in a strong sense of her material pomp and power, of her political ascendancy, and it was strongly tinctured by religious emotion. Hence the personification of Venice as a queenly figure, hence the portrayal of
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even St. Mark's itself as a background rather than for its own sake. Somehow the old Venetian master could not think of Venice as a mere spectacle. He was forever glutting his eyes upon pageants, but be hind the color and the movement he saw the might of state or church, and he commemorated ideas as much as appearances. Jt is a curious circumstance that Venice in its more mundane and social aspect, as an arrangement of form and color appealing sen suously to the eye, practically shorn of all symbolism, did not really come into its own until the eighteenth century.
It is then that one recognizes the stirring of a new impulse, the impulse to paint the Venetian scene out of sheer delight in its corporeal loveliness. In Tiepolo the earlier conception of the city as a mine of back grounds still lingers, and the pillared schemes in his mural decorations revive the sumptuous note of Veronese with a new and flashing accent. But Tiepolo kindled now and then to the pure elegance of the Venetian social picture; and among all the paint ings of this period I know of none more humanly en gaging than his fascinating "Consilium in Arena/7 in the museum at Udine, a spacious interior with figures recalling the very essence of eighteenth-century Vene tian life. Life, customs, and manners, the Venetian as well as his background, may be said to fill the Vene tian art of that time. Longhi painted the fashionable types that he knew, the lady of Venice and her cava-
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Here, and lie did not disdain either to study the apoth ecary or the fortune-teller. Step from his scenes into those of Guardi. Go with the latter to a concert in the house of some noble, to a ball in the theatre of San Benedetto, to a masquerade at the Ridotto, to a festival on the Grand Canal, or to an ordinary gathering in the Piazza of St. Mark's. Wherever you follow Tirm you behold indoor or outdoor Venice, clothed in brocade or in marble and animated by figures which, whether in gleaming satins or dark velvet cloaks, are the very images of Venetian piq uancy and pictorial charm. There are times when Canaletto will strike you as the more solid painter of the two, as, especially, the stronger draftsman. But Guardi is the great triumphant exemplar in his age of that Impressionism which I have mentioned as neglected by his ancestors. His lagoon pictures sparkle with a living light. There are drawings of his which show that he went about sketch-book in hand, and swiftly jotted down fugitive effects. His paint ings clearly profited by this habit. They have ex traordinary freshness and spontaneity.
Chronologically the next arresting figure amongst the painters of Venice is Turner. Sir Walter Arm strong, his definitive biographer, was unable to ferret out the exact date of the artist's first contact with the Venetian scene, but he has traced sketches of the city which seem earlier than 1832, and that is re garded as roughly the significant year. A point be-
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yond cavil is that the English master had a peculiar flair for the subject. What Armstrong says about it is so concisely illuminating that I may cite him here:
His almost unbroken stream of "Vertices" began to flow on to the Academy walls in 1833. Between that year and 1846, he only twice — in 1838 and 1839 — missed having at least one in the exhibition. . . . According to my view of his personality, Turner had been waiting all his life for Venice. It gave him exactly what he wanted. It afforded an opportunity to combine the particular view of the world's envelope which appealed to himself, with a skeleton, a supporting structure, which was at once strange, picturesque, and entirely human. It was therefore not surprising that he fastened upon it as he did, and that between 1833 and his death he sent no fewer than twenty-five pictures of Venice to the annual exhibi tion.
There is a useful dew in this fragment to the whole drift of what I may call Turner's Venetian hypothesis: "The particular view of the world's envelope which appealed to him." It is the artist with such a view who has always made the most of Venice. After all, a "dream city" is hardly the place for a crass realist. More than of any other city in Europe it may be said of Venice that everything that an artist finds there depends upon what he brings there. Turner brought a fine constructive vision, the power to build up upon the Venetian "skeleton" a prodigiously ro mantic fabric of atmosphere and color. It is not ex actly a ghostly city that he paints, but one in which
s Venice as a Painting-Ground, 117
richly decorated facades and the towers and domes lifted above them take on an intangible beauty. They are bathed in a golden luminosity, in a light that never was on sea or land. In the foreground gondolas, sailboats, or ceremonial craft float in a strange immobility. You look on not at life but at a kind of tableau, and though the place is unmistak ably Venice the key might be that of some legendary Babylon. It is all magnificently unreal, of dubious value as a record but inestimable as an interpreta tion.
Turner's worthiest successors have been Americans, two of whom have linked their names with the city with something of his creative magic, equalling him in the originality of their work. When Armstrong said that Turner had been waiting all his life for Venice he expressed an idea that may be applied to Whistler. Our American painter never found himself in any environment more favorable to the exercise of his genius than was the Venetian. There he made many of the most brilliant of his etchings. There were pro duced some of the most exquisite of his Nocturnes. Otto Bacher, in his delightful book, "With Whistler in Venice," tells how his friend once joined him in his gondola where Bacher was at work on a plate of the Ponte del Pistor. Said the older man: "This is a good subject. When you find one like this you should not do it, but come and tell Whistler." There was noth ing of Whistlerian arrogance in that. He was simply
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expressing what every one who knows his work will admit, that Venice was his, that he was born to inter pret her secret with a special inspiration, etching her beauty by day and painting it by night with a touch so personal and so new that his portraits of Venice stand forever apart. The Nocturnes are extraordi narily tender and beautiful. No one ever saw Venice looking just as she looks in these paintings, but that is only another way of saying that no one was ever inspired by a Grecian urn as Keats was inspired by one. If Whistler was sent into the world for any pur pose that no one else could fulfil it was to make a Venetian Nocturne.
The only contemporary of his approaching him in this singularity and exquisiteness of achievement was William Gedney Bunce, whose characteristic design was composed of a long, low horizon line separating a tremulous lagoon from a vibrating sky, with a cam panile or two lifted into the air and a group of sail boats shrewdly placed to right or left in the fore ground. Out of these few materials he fashioned the most amazing opalescent effects. Like Whistler's, they are very new and personal, but Bunce differs from Whistler and from Turner in being a little more realistic than either of them. You can't quite see Bunces for yourself in Venice, unless you have been born with something of his genius, but he is not so mysterious as the other men are. John Sargent, of course, is never mysterious, and you enter a totally
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different world when you enter Ms Venice. But don't imagine for a moment that it is a negligible world. On the contrary, Sargent's Venice is one of the most interesting that I know. I remember a Venetian street scene of his, another picture of an interior with bead-stringers at their work, and a strong study of San Giovanni Evangelista. Then there are the num berless water-colors in which architecture, gondolas, and all manner of motives are drawn with uncanny precision. Sargent did an immense mass of work in Venice and all of it is superbly brilliant, the vivid record of a Venice that every one can see and touch. Every one can see it, but only Sargent could paint it with that supreme virtuosity of his. So he, too, though in so different a way, affirmed like Whistler certain inalienable rights in Venetian territory. He knew the city all his life as an intimate of the Cur- tises, and when, on his election to the Royal Acad emy, he brought forward, as is customary, a picture for the Diploma Gallery there, he made it one of his masterpieces, a study of the Curtis family grouped in one of the great rooms of the Palazzo Barbaro, their Venetian home.
F. Hopkinson Smith did good work in Venice. He did it with a marked economy of means, so that for some time his work looked a little thin. A. B. Frost once caricatured it uproariously, appending to his funny drawing lines at which no one laughed more heartily than Smith himself:
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You can bet your bottom dollar We're onto the Venice caper, A little paint, a little work, And lots of empty paper.
But "Hop" got over that and as the years went on brought back from his summers in Venice more and more substantial and delightful impressions. They were realistic. All the American artists who have painted Venice this side of Whistler and Bunce have been realists, mixing next to no poetic emotion with their colors. The only exception I can think of is the late Robert Blum, who painted Venice with a subtle delicacy. He was always a sterling artist and on the lagoons he, too, dreamed dreams.
What of the men on the spot? When I saw the earlier international exhibitions at Venice, many years ago, it was, paradoxically, the Spaniards rather than the Italians who seemed to be most active on the scene. I used to foregather with them for dinner at a dingy old trattoria, tucked away somewhere not far from the piazza. It was a jolly crew. Martin Rico would be there in a pirate's mustachio, the inky blackness of which I surmised came out of a dye bottle. He was a portentous being, clothed in shep herd's plaid, altogether one of the most noticeable figures I ever encountered. It surprised me when I ran across him, painting away in some corner of Venice, that nobody paid any attention to him. Prob ably they had got used to him as he had been at it
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for a long lifetime. And Villegas dined with us every night, bearded, a little bald, dapper, and with an in describable air about him of solvency and authority. I remember him also in his handsome villa just out side one of the gates of Rome, the place crowded with paintings and antiquities. He was enormously successful. American millionaires visiting Rome bought his pictures. Prosperity got him, perhaps, a little expectant of consideration. One summer he sent to the international a huge "Marriage of a Dogaressa." It contained an abundance of a pecu liarly flagrant red, and I noticed at dinner that one of the subjects nobody talked about was the "Mar riage of a Dogaressa." Then came some inspections by the cognoscenti of the European press and all that red paint was freely damned. Villegas forthwith shook the dust of Venice from his feet — if there is any dust in those watery thoroughfares — and went off to Spain. All Italy came under his displeasure. He abandoned his Roman villa and stuck to his na tive land. For some years before he died he was Director of the Prado at Madrid.
Rico, Villegas, Gallegos, and others of their com pany whose names I have forgotten painted the Venetian glitter and not much else. There used to be a time when an American collection was incom plete without a "Venice" by Martin Rico. His pic tures still figure in the auction-room occasionally, but I wonder where they go. Those clever Spaniards were
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not quite clever enough to carry on the torch lit by Fortuny. He, by the way, would have painted a marvellous Venice if he had ever given his mind to it. But amongst the old sketch-books I have pored over in old days at Madame Fortuny's Venetian palazzo I recollect no souvenirs of the lagoons. Very recently two or three young Italians have arisen who, without doing anything really memorable, are still doing something to restore the tradition of Venice as a place productive of art. Perhaps the most tal ented of them is Favai. Italico Brass is another fairly auspicious type. Emma Ciardi is a Venetian artist of really distinguished capacity, but she paints chiefly the villas on the mainland, peopling them with figures in eighteenth-century costume. It would be interesting to see her at work on the lagoons.
If she did good things there, as I believe she would, it would be because she possessed that quality to which I have alluded as inseparable from the true artist in this field, the personal quality, the singular quality, the something original and, if ever so faintly, creative. That is indispensable to the painter any where, but it is necessary nowhere more conclusively than in Venice. If the city is, as I said at the begin ning, the most paintable on earth, it is also the most exacting.
IX
Silhouettes of Old Masters
I. Van Dyck's "Daedalus and Icarus" II. Velasquez's "Dying Seneca" III. Two Portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough
IX
SILHOUETTES OF OLD MASTERS
I
VAN DYCK'S "D^DALUS AND ICARUS"
SINCE New York has become the world's clearing house for the great works of the old masters that emerge slowly into the market, there is, from time to time, in the galleries an episode to be marked with a white stone. A chef d'ceuwe is placed momentarily on exhibition. Then it is purchased by some collector and passes, forthwith, from the public view. I cannot forbear preserving in this place my memories of one or two such apparitions, brief records of delightful passages in critical experience. One such memory I retain of a picture at the Duveen Gallery, an ex traordinary Van Dyck out of Earl Spencer's collec tion. This "Daedalus and Icarus" is an amazing work, illustrating the painter in a vein unfamiliar in the United States. It is through his portraiture that Van Dyck is chiefly known among our collectors, and there he is held in honor for certain specific traits which the practice of the portrait painter, especially in his period, was exactly calculated to bring out. I
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refer more particularly to the courtly elegance in separable from the world in which he was called to move. Van Dyck's innate refinement made him the predestined commemorator of lordly types. It is in teresting to reflect on his significance as an exemplar of that natural instinct which persists through all the vicissitudes of training and experience and stamps an artist's work as with the inevitability of a thumb- print. Consider the difference between Van Dyck and his master, Rubens. The latter undoubtedly con quered for himself the status of a great gentleman, rose to ambassadorial rank, foregathered with kings and princes, and altogether was so circumstanced as to interpret their characteristics, as it were, from within. But that full-bodied Flemish habit of his which was in his blood would not down, and when he let himself go on some royal theme, as in the brilliant Medici canvases at the Louvre, his brilliance is that of the surface of a pageant. I recall his gorgeous state portrait of the Earl of Arundel. The earl and his wife are very tangibly portrayed, but somehow the ensemble is that of a factitious tableau, packed with £tofage. It was not so with Van Dyck. He was, by gift of the gods, free of the language of courts, and when he painted figures of incomparable polish and grace those elements of charm flowed with easy magic through hi$ brush. It is no wonder that his portraits are cherished or that they have caused his name to be associated with one transcendent virtue,
DAEDALUS AND ICARUS FROM THE PAINTING BY VAN DYCK
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that of high-bred delicacy. But he had other strings to his bow.
That glorious strength in Rubens which so often took the bit between its teeth and ran away with him, landing him in earthiness, was present in Van Dyck in rich measure, but held in check by a finer taste. You have a manifestation of it in the "Daeda lus and Icarus." It is tempting to speculate on the mood in which he painted it. For my own part I can imagine him saying to himself: "I think I'll paint a nude. Just to show them." Being what he was, he was bound to give penetrating thought to the sub ject, and this picture is impressive just as an em bodiment of a legend. The myth is vividly realized. Youthful pride and daring are superbly put before us, and made the more effective through their con trast with admonitory age. What he has to say, too, Van Dyck says with all the power of scholarly design. The poise of the principal figure, the exact relation to it of Daedalus in the background, the placing of the wings and the arrangement of the drapery — all these things are consummately handled. But what makes the glory of this picture is the painting of the body of Icarus. A photographic reproduction shows something of the perfection with which the beautiful young form is drawn, the faultless construction of the torso and the arms, the fine drawing about the face, head, and hair. But the marvel of the flesh painting must be seen at first hand to be appreciated. It is
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nothing short of a miracle of pearly, luminous tone, the skin palpitating over the ribs and muscles in a glow as forceful as it is tender.
It is not direct painting in the sense that Manet, for example, would have given to the term; but, on the other hand, this nude is singularly free from signs of any kneading or fumbling. The impasto is not too thick and the tone has great fineness, great purity. It has, of course, great unity also, yet within that unity there are countless modulations of the ut most exquisiteness, nuances that Velasquez might have envied. Memory goes back to that master's "Rokeby Venus." It is a lovely thing in its dusky brilliance, but in that particular instance the Spanish painter seems not only a little pallid beside Van Dyck, but a little less subtle. Yes, he showed them. In a burst of technical maestria the suave painter of knights and ladies in their satins and laces put forth all his strength upon the problem involved in the treatment of the nude, and produced a glittering masterpiece. It is a great Van Dyck, one of the greatest in the world.
II
VELASQUEZ'S "DYING SENECA"
Two early paintings by Velasquez have recently come to this country. One of them, the "St. John in the Wilderness," was bought by a private collector
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in Chicago and has been lent by him to the Art In stitute in that city. The other, a "Dying Seneca," was not long ago at the Ehrich Gallery. It is one of the most interesting souvenirs of the Spanish master I have ever seen, illustrating his art in its formative period when he was a student under Pacheco, in Seville. That sterling craftsman taught him, above all things, "the true way to imitate nature." Beruete, in his precious monograph, cites from Pacheco 7s "Art of Painting," a passage which richly illuminates the early art of Velasquez. Speaking of the lodegones, with their conscientious realism, the artist says: "It is in this belief that my son-in-law, Diego Velasquez de Silva, was brought up from childhood. He sketched a little peasant child who was a model for him in various poses and attitudes, sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing, without attempting to avoid any of the difficulties. And from this boy and others he made numerous studies on blue paper in charcoal heightened with white, which enabled him to arrive at truthfulness in his portraits." You can trace the splendor of his greatest works to that first devoted discipline.
Realistic truth is the foundation and corner-stone of the bodegones. Perhaps the most characteristic ex pressions of it are those which you find in the two famous pictures at Apsley House, the "Young Men at a Meal" and "The Water-Carrier of Seville." They disclose his habit of taking his material where
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he found it, in the streets and taverns, amongst peasant types. He was never endowed with the crea tive imagination that seeks an outlet in terms of high invention. Even when he tackled religious themes he kept his feet upon the solid earth, as wit ness the fine early "Supper at Emmaus" in the Alt- man collection. This is a dignified interpretation of the theme, but it remains essentially a page from seventeenth-century Sevillan life, the devotional spirit of the painting being subordinate to its frank realism. You get in it the force of a thing seen rather than the mystery of a scene imagined. Its simplicity is purer, a little weightier than that of Tiepolo, say, treating the same subject. He avoids the slightly theatrical turn of the Venetian. Compared with Rembrandt's "Supper at Emmaus," on the other hand, the Spanish picture is as hollow as a drum. Velasquez knew nothing of the tragic pathos which the Dutch master had at his finger-tips. For Velas quez there was nothing on earth so important as just "the true way to imitate nature."
His preoccupation with that standard comes out superbly in the "Dying Seneca." It is a well-nigh flawless "academy," the coolly considered, pains taking work of a student set by Pacheco to study the nude for the good of his artistic soul. Every detail is drawn and modelled with the most searching care. The fact is reproduced as in a mirror. One can imagine Pacheco's sigh of satisfaction as he looked
THE DYING SENECA
FROM THE PAINTING BY VELASQUEZ
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over the shoulder of this miraculously precocious pupil, and the words of discreetly judicious approval lie spoke. No wonder he gave him his daughter for a bride ! He must have felt that here was a young man of genius. For that is the interesting thing about the "Dying Seneca" — its proclamation of a new and phenomenally gifted painter. The theme and the idiom speak of Caravaggio and Ribera. But in the grain of the execution one perceives an individual touch that is unique, and with it that flair for beauty which does so much to give the Spaniard a place apart. Look to the beauty of the drawing, observe the tact with which the drapery is arranged, and note especially the charm of the whites and grays. Re mark also the magical strokes which bring out the character of the model's beard. They play over the canvas with astounding ease and certainty. A born painter, you say, if ever there was one.
A born technician, with an instinct for the por trayal of life. The title of this canvas is, in a sense, irrelevant. Pacheco was doubtless responsible for it. He, as Beruete tells us, was "a great lover of Latin literature/5 and I can hear him talking to Velasquez about Seneca and giving him the inscription to place upon the canvas. But they had only to step out of doors to find the model and we may be sure that when Velasquez got him posed he thought of noth ing save of his painting. It is in its realism, pure and simple, that the "Dying Seneca" foreshadows such
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later pictures as "The Forge of Vulcan/' and, in fact, the whole long story of the master's career. Yet its true lesson lies in the circumstance that realism, pure and simple, is effective only in proportion to the ad mixture with it of certain other qualities. Without the technical rectitude of Velasquez the truth in the " Dying Seneca " would lose half its vitality. And the other half would go if it were not for his unsleeping feeling for beauty.
Ill
TWO PORTRAITS BY REYNOLDS AND GAINSBOROUGH
Besides the Van Dyck I have described in this chapter the Duveens got from Earl Spencer two other masterpieces, constituting an imposing dramatization of an historic moment in eighteenth-century English portraiture. Both are of the same subject — that Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, of whom Wai- pole said that she "effaced all without being a beauty." She was eighteen when Sir Joshua painted her in the full-length brought to this country, he being then in his prime. Eight years later she posed for Gains borough, when he, too, like his great rival, was at the height of his powers. Turning from one of the tall canvases to the other, the mind reverts for a moment to the situation in the artistic London of that day, to the two leaders supporting each in his
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different way the identical tradition. "We are all going to heaven," said Gainsborough on his death bed, "and Van Dyck is of the company/' The sol idarity of the school is one of the outstanding phe nomena of history. "They" were all united in carry ing on the dignity, the elegance, the courtly grace which had come down to them from the famous Fleming. But the first lesson one draws from these portraits is the lesson of individuality. Genius over rides the very formula on which it rests. Reynolds and Gainsborough, both allied to the academic prin ciple, engage in a rivalry determined by the most personal of inspirations, and each transcends the academy,
A remarkable felicity attends upon the portraits, taken together. How fortunate was this duchess, this "irresistible queen/' the friend of Sheridan and Fox, the embodiment of charm ! Reynolds painted her in a moment of animation, a figure of arrested move ment, poised at the head of some steps. When it came Gainsborough's turn he studied her in medita tive repose, a little older, a little more mature and in a graver mood. Merely as human documents the portraits have a deep interest, merely as interpreta tions of a woman who enchanted her contemporaries. If legend is to be believed, her painters flattered her, but it would seem that they did no more than heighten what they found in her features. Perhaps she was not as beautiful as they made her. But the witchery
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they gave her is, by all accounts, authentic. The memoirs teem with tributes to her personality. She had an illuminating mentality. In her girlhood she listened with unaffected interest to the sayings of Doctor Johnson, and from that august company she could pass to spirited combat with the fashionable wits of her world. She must have been a gra cious, lambent being, and so the two masters painted her.
But it is with their technical triumphs that I am first concerned; and here, again, one is tempted to the use of superlatives. Looking at the Reynolds I thought instinctively of "The Tragic Muse" and, frankly, I must confess to finding the "Georgiana" more extraordinary than the "Mrs. Siddons." The latter is undoubtedly Sir Joshua's masterpiece in aus terely monumental portraiture. It comes back to the memory as a portentous achievement in design, the figure, the throne, and all the subordinate details being welded together in superb unity. But, perhaps by virtue of this very perfection of balance, of schol arly ordonnance, the "Mrs. Siddons" remains a little cold. In it Reynolds is utterly the academician, mag nificent, and at the same time a little chillingly formal. In the "Georgiana" he is the consummate brushman, glorying in his mastery over his instruments, moved to enthusiasm by his theme, and producing in a burst of energy a canvas in which we feel that his soul must have rejoiced as he laid down the brush. For
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sheer splendor it is the most thrilling thing of his I have ever seen.
The lady's dress is white save where, at the shoul ders and waist, and in the veil flung across the out stretched arm, there are powerful accents of brown ish gold. Crowning the grayish headdress there are feathers of vivid pink and white. There are autumnal glints in the rich foliage filling part of the background, and notes of strong blue appear in the sky beyond* There is great force in the color scheme, but it is kept wonderfully in hand, a flawless harmony, rich and mellow, save where the feathers lift the key. The tone of the dress is merely miraculous, one of those studies of white in which an ordinarily lifeless hue is made fairly to sing. In sensuous beauty, in the magic of pigment made eloquent, Sir Joshua surely never did anything in his life to beat the pas sages of gold. They are as discreet as they are reso nant, the quintessence of painter's painting. He matches the tour de force of this ornamentation and of those incomparably vivacious feathers with the maestria that you feel in the drapery, with the supple polish that marks the drawing of the arms, the hands, and everything about the face and hair, and with a marvellous play of light over the whole canvas. More often than not Reynolds impresses you by the cool, measured nature of his art, the cerebral origin of his design, and the similarly calculated movement of every phase of his technic. In this portrait he
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seems to paint, rather, with a kind of passion. I have alluded to formula. There is something of it in the "Georgiana." The well-worn eighteenth-cen tury convention is there, the lovely attitude, the parklike background, the adjustment of the whole affair to a definitely fixed social hypo thesis. But the wine of inspiration bursts the vessel that would con tain it. Reynolds gets, as it were, outside of himself, the academician yielding to the painter. The result is a glittering, breath-taking masterpiece, a portrait vibrating with the emotion that is attuned to beauty, It is a case of the grand style made intimate and search ing, of the Olympian Sir Joshua forgetting his wonted calm in the ardor of creative painting.
After the overpowering success of his "Georgiana" one feels a certain drop on turning to Gainsborough's, and the experience is odd, for, as a rule, it is the other way around. Gainsborough's natural habit was far more that of the virtuoso than was Sir Joshua's. Even with this "Georgiana" of his before us we know that Sir Joshua could never have painted "The Blue Boy" or the "Perdita Robinson." Neither, for that matter, could he have done the portrait confront ing his "Georgiana" in this study, yet we have to reckon with that drop. For once Gainsborough seems, at any rate, less powerful. He has not that moving splendor to which I have alluded. But I note it only in passing. Make the transition, forget the difference in question, and think only of that individuality
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which I mentioned at the outset. There Gainsbor ough is potent enough, in all conscience. It tells not so much in design, where he follows convention with marked docility, as in the solid construction of the figure and in the painting of the dress. That, too, is white, ever so faintly flushed. The girdle and the scarf the Duchess holds are of the tint of an aqua marine, hesitating between blue and green. It is an ineffably delicate arrangement of tone, one that would have fascinated Whistler. And every nuance in it is developed with that necromancy of brushwork that has done more than anything else to make Gains borough immortal. " Feathery " is the canonical word for it, and the only one adequately connoting the artist's lightness, his deft translation of insensate pigment into something incredibly exquisite and mo bile. The painting has the tremulous beauty of an opal and, withal, an unmistakable force, even plan- gency. The dress had to be strongly painted, in fact, to withstand the competition of the heavy mass of red drapery above, half revealing the stately gray pillars. The landscape in this portrait is compara tively unimportant, but it includes an effective sky.
There is a curious contrast to be remarked in the study of these two canvases. They were painted by contemporaries, who, as I have said, adhered to the same broad tradition and were in many ways com mitted to the same practices. Doubtless, for exam ple, they patronized the same color man. But their
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methods differed. Sir Joshua painted with a full brush, kept his surfaces fairly solid, and was histori cally careful of his medium. Gainsborough followed a more liquid mode, used a thinner medium, and, by the same token, was apparently less learned in the matter than his rival, though he, too, was solicitous as to what went onto his palette. In the upshot each tells a different story. Reynolds's surface has the purer integrity, has better withstood the passage of time. The essential tones, I gather, preserve their values with equal tenacity. The carnations in both portraits are singularly true and gleaming. But Rey nolds fabricates the solider, more steadfast lacquer. Less subtle by half in the modulation of tone he yet, in this instance, retains a tenderer bloom. It raises an absorbing technical problem.
X
Raeburn
X
RAEBURN
RAEBUBN occupies a place apart in the firmament of British art. In London the leaders carry on a clearly defined tradition. Developing the courtly mode of Van Dyck in the atmosphere of the Georgian period, they give it a decisively academic turn. Even Gainsborough, with that flying "feathery" brash of his, subscribes to much the same theory of ordonnance that is most resplendently illustrated in Reynolds. The school has a certain solidarity, based on respect for discipline. The men of genius in it affirm marked individuality, but all have a kindred accent. Raeburn ploughed his own furrow. There seems to have been some virtue in the very fact that he grew up scarcely touched by the pressure of that sort of corporate in fluence, if I may so designate it, that bore upon his English confreres.
He was the son of a Scots miller who was pros perous enough to see that he had some schooling, but this did not last long, and he was still a lad when he was apprenticed to one Gilliland, a jeweller and gold smith. By him he was by and by introduced to a fashionable portrait painter, David Martin, who
141
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gave him the run of his studio, allowed him to copy some of his studies, and presumably benefited him through some practical instruction, though on this point the various biographers are not very illumi nating. "Bob " Stevenson, one of the best of his com mentators, surmises that at Martin's he must have "picked up enough knowledge to go on with." He "went on" with judgment and rapidity. In 1778, when he was twenty-two, he married a widow with some fortune, and it is noted that "he improved his wife's property by intelligent management." Thence forth he was much at his ease in Edinburgh. Steven son characterizes him, with the painter's portrait of himself to aid him in the vignette, as "a large, bold Scot, full of humor and intelligence, fit to swallow a lot of work and yet keep an appetite for social pleas ure, for golf, for archery, for fishing, for expeditions with friends, and for the somewhat heady after-dinner conversation which pleased the northern man."
Six years of married life found him a happy and sufficiently successful man, visited by compunctions as to his artistic equipment, and he went for two years in Rome where the dilettanti Gavin Hamilton and James Byres gave him guidance and advice. It is recorded that when he returned to Scotland he came straight through, with no obvious thought of Paris or the Low Countries. It may have been from economic motives, but it is possible also that he was merely incurious. By this time he had beaten out a
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mode of his own, and Ms cHef thought seems to have been to get back to his own land and exploit it. Scotland was ripe for his appearance upon the scene. It abounded in types and notabilities. They liked the handsome, self-confident, accomplished painter, and he became, in his turn, one of the salient figures of the Northern Athens. England took note of his prowess, and in due course he was elected to the Royal Academy. He was honored by other artistic bodies, and in 1822, when George IV visited Edin burgh, he knighted the painter and made him "His Majesty's Limner for Scotland." He was a friend of Scott, whose portrait he painted, and was engaged upon an excursion with him, Miss Edgeworth, and others only a few weeks before he died, in 1823.
He exhibited frequently at the Royal Academy, and, as I have said, became a member; but though he was in it, he was never precisely of it. The ex planation is readily enough accessible in the tall canvas dedicated to the Drummond children, one of them mounted upon a pony. It reveals at once, in contrast to similar designs of English origin, a certain naturalistic directness, moving persistently away from the formality characteristic of the more aca demic painters. Byres is somewhere credited with having done Raeburn a crucial service in urging him always to "keep his eye on the object." It constitutes his leading merit. Over the masterpieces of the Eng lish school there is flung a thin veil of a certain mun-
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dane elegance, one of that school's finest qualities. Raeburn had little to do with it. A realistic approach was instinctive with him. He could be ineffably graceful when he chose, as witness the exquisite "Mrs. Vere of Stonebyres," in the collection of the late Sen ator Clark. But this very portrait, in its animation, its spontaneity, shows how much more vigorous than courtly Raeburn was wont to be. No painter of his time was defter than he was in the fixing of a pose. His red-coated sitters, like " Captain David Birrell" and " General Sir William Maxwell/7 are unmistaka bly martial, on parade. But he gets his pictorial point, so to say, essentially from the individual he portrays, not through accessories or background, through that ordonnance to which I have referred as more typical of the English craftsmen.
There are two or three celebrated full-lengths by Raeburn which denote his ability to get the last ounce of picturesqueness out of costume and attitude. They are the portraits of "Dr. Nathaniel Spens," "Sir John Sinclair," and "The Macnab." The na tional dress counts heavily in all of them. But in these, top, he is direct, completely free from that im mobility which dogs the merely academic portrait, and it is the personality of his sitter that dominates the composition. In the bulk of his portraits he is far nearer to Manet than to Reynolds. Stevenson has rescued from the archives some interesting data on his method:
MRS. VERE OF STONEBYRES FROM THE PAINTING BY RAEBURN
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He seldom kept a sitter more than an hour and a half or two hours. He never gave more than four or five sit tings to a head or bust portrait. He did not draw in his subject first with the chalk point, but directly with the brush on the blank canvas. Forehead, chin and mouth were his first touches. He placed the easel behind the sitter and went away to look at the picture and poser to gether. A fold of drapery often cost him more trouble than the build or expression of a head. He never used a mahlstick.
The critic adds that these were the habits of the French painters a premier coup, and points out, justly, that while it does not leave each touch final it means that "the work was searched out and fin ished in one direct painting." To this habit, which more than anything else stamps Raeburn as an essen tially modern artist, the commentator must always return. The enchantment of his pprtraits lies in their fresh, crisp handling, in brushwork that states the fact with a positively exhilarating precision. Does it state that fact with charm? Yes, where the portraits of women are concerned. The lovely "Mrs. Campbell," in the Byers collection at Pittsburgh; the portrait that is almost French in its elegance, of "Margaretta Henrietta, Lady Hepburn"; the dainty "Miss Eleanor Urqiihart," are above all things charm ing. His portraits of men are above all things simple and forceful. Here again you find Raeburn gaining a little by comparison with his English rivals. He escapes the somewhat excessive suavity which occa-
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sionally betrayed them. He bears down on character rather than on worldly demeanor. His handsome Scots are strong as well as handsome men.
Looking to the mint and cummin of technic, on the other hand, Raeburn has what might not unfairly be called the defects of his qualities. His draftsmanship, so swift, so sure, so cannily adroit, is a little thin and hard. His line is not exactly wiry, but sometimes it almost extorts the epithet, and is then undoubtedly wanting in distinction. Then, too, though he models a head with superb aplomb and defines the structure of a face with all the clean-cut simplicity of that ever-present directness of his, you cannot help wish ing — especially when you are in the company of numerous portraits by him — that he would not manipulate the light and shade with quite such in curable sophistication. It brings an incongruous ele ment of something very like theatricalness into his fundamentally sincere art, his sole approach to the pit of formula. In other words, Raeburn did not wholly avoid the dangers of facility. It brings him near to mannerism in some of his heads and it leaves him sometimes, in his handling of textures, a little papery. There are moments in which this powerful Scot falls into the trap that engulfed Lawrence and is merely " slick. "
But they are only moments. When he is in the vein, and he was generally in the vein, he is as whole somely forthright as a Scot could be, as honest as
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he is direct, and, withal, a painter with some notable reaches of tenderness in him, for all his granitelike force and veracity. It would be hard to beat, for the sweetness of adolescence, the Drummond picture to which I have already alluded, and it is beautifully matched, in the matter of feeling, by the famous "John Tait and His Grandson," a study of old age and childhood. That gives, indeed, the final measure of Raeburn's ability as a portrait painter, disclosing not only his sterling technic, but his grasp upon character, his emotional capability and his art in carrying design very far yet well this side of formal convention. If an English master had painted it you would perhaps call it "monumental." The term is a shade too imposing for Raeburn. He is too intimately human for it.
XI
The Eighteenth Century
I. Hubert Robert II. A Portrait by David III. Prud'hon
XI THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
I HUBERT ROBERT
THE French school of the eighteenth century was of sophistication all compact. It was a growth of the studio, brought to perfection for the drawing- room and the boudoir. Never was an art more sym pathetically social than the art of this period. It is at c;ice the mirror of French manners and their monu ment. It reproduces with exactitude the color and movement of a life in which human relations were codified to an extreme degree, and its all-pervasive law was one essentially urban. The wholesome airs of the countryside seem to have been excluded from this fabric as by general consent. But genius domi nates the surroundings from which it draws the breath of life. In the paintings and drawings of Wat- teau you see how his instinct for nature made him superior to mere artifice. Chardin, delineating kitchen- maids and other humble domestic figures, developed a style as robust as his themes and rose masterfully above the insincerity of his time. From the influence illustrated by these men there developed in the eigh-
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teenth century a feeling for nature counterbalancing the hothouse atmosphere that everywhere controlled. Artists who would not have known what to do with a ploughed field, such as Millet was later to make beautiful, were at home in a stately park. They recognized the value of a tree, at least as a decorative value. Hence, they arrived at the formation of some thing like a landscape tradition. They exploited it in a subordinate capacity. Their landscape was never painted for its own sake, but only as a background. Nevertheless, they made it fascinating. It was this tradition that produced Hubert Robert.
He was born in 1733, a light, gay personality, not in the least a man of genius, but indubitably a man of talent. He was altogether in harmony with his pe riod. When he died in 1808 and they buried him in the cemetery at Auteuil, the inscription upon his tomb commemorated him as an Academician formally enreg- istered as such, not only in his native France, but in the then St. Petersburg, where the Russian aristocracy had long followed a cult for his works. Stress has been laid upon his cheerfulness, which persisted even under the imprisonment which he suffered during the Terror. He is described as a bold athlete in his youth. At Rome he risked his life promenading the cornice of the dome of St. Peter's. He did this on a wager of a few sheets of drawing-paper. Vigee-Lebrun, who painted his portrait when he was a young man, rep resents a full-blooded, energetic being, who, with the
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temperament that we know lie possessed, ought to have become something like a romanticist. He be came, instead, an archselogue. He never could throw off, he probably never wanted to throw off, the habit of the Academy. At the same time, there was at the bottom of his academic predilection a certain realistic strain. In the foreground of his " Staircase and Foyer of the Villa Medici," a purely architectural subject, as formal in design as a work by Pannini or Piranesi, a washerwoman has hung up her linen. The incident is characteristic of Robert, of his taste for everyday accents upon his monumental schemes. He did not always draw his figures himself. Boucher, Fragonard, and others drew them for him. But he wanted them there. It is the mark of his archaeological world that nature is always creeping in.
There have been curious fluctuations in the repute of Hubert Robert. He was enormously prosperous while he lived. Allusion has been made to his Russian vogue. Catherine II invited him, in 1782, and again in 1791, to come to St. Petersburg. He no longer had, however, the gusto for travel which had sustained him in his youthful Italian wanderings. He would not go north himself, but was content to paint quan tities of canvases for his admirers there. M. Louis Reau estimated in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, some time ago, that there were easily a hundred examples of Hubert Robert in the public and private collec tions of Russia. At home he always had abundant
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support. In the official world he held high rank. On the tombstone aforementioned he is honored as "Conseillier de TAcademie Royale." In 1778 he was a member of the committee appointed to supervise the alterations in the Louvre required by the estab lishment there of the King's pictures. It was not un til 1895 that M. Gabillot published his monograph on the painter. This was followed in 1910 by M. de Nolhac's admirable volume, and a few years later M. Tristan Leclerc celebrated him and the landscapists of his time in a contribution to a series of popular handbooks. To-day Hubert Robert is once more on the crest of the wave. His works fetch high prices in the auction-room in Paris. Collectors are finding him worth while. Why should there ever have been any interruption to appreciation of his art?
It is partly explained by the nature of that art it self, as it is unconsciously criticised by Vigee Lebrun, who held him in high esteem. She notes in her "Sou venirs" that it was fashionable to have one's salon painted by Hubert Robert. Fashion is a perilous task- mistress, leading particularly to the cultivation of that facile method which is one of the most specious of all crutches. Vigee Lebrun again records the du bious proficiency of her friend, "II peignait un ta bleau" she says, "aussi mte qu'il ecrivait une lettre" Facility like that implies scores of "pot boilers," and Hubert Robert painted them, not simply by the score, but, I might even say, by the hundred.
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It is significant, too, that he has been bracketed for popularity with Greuze, which is tantamount to saying that he had in him a vein of rather too sac charine sentiment. Even now the commentator occa sionally patronizes him. M. Louis Hourticq says that he "trifled with the noble ruins of Rome and Pro vence." Well, perhaps he did. But, like divers other men, he trifled to good purpose. There is a kind of artist in the history of landscape painting notable for a scenic handling of nature and for a treatment of architectural motives that is perhaps to be charac terized as trifling. Claude had the grand style. Pous- sin had it. But Wilson, the Englishman, is a good example of the old classical hypothesis made a little less than majestic. Guardi, too, made the rains in some of his pictures charming rather than impressive. This was the function of Hubert Robert not to im press, but to charm.
The eighteenth-century French painter who made landscapes more than a background in his pictures was Joseph Vernet. He revived the architectural tradition of Claude, but his classicism did not keep him from loving nature for itself; and if he was capa ble of building an academic composition in the heroic manner, he was also capable of painting a recogniza ble portrait of a place. Hubert Robert, who formed himself to some extent upon Vernet, inclined less to portraiture in landscape and more to a theatrical ideal. In an easel picture, therefore, which exists in
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isolation, he has less weight than his master. But when he has a purely decorative aim he more than rivals Vernet; he achieves, if anything, a finer role. There are some delightful easel pictures of his. They are serene, limpid impressions, their picturesqueness carried just so far, their naturalism held in check by a polished elegance. Taken as a group apart, they would be sufficient to justify Hubert Robert as a minor figure of distinction in his school. But the decorative panels almost give him major rank in that school.
His paintings are meant to enter into the integrity of a wall. They do this. As I have said, he was not a man of genius, but his talent was consummate. He "trifled" with his ancient luins in the sense that he relieved them of all unduly weighty and forbidding effects. He painted them with a kind of suavity. They are masses of hoary stone, yet he contrives, without doing violence to their antique dignity, to make pillar and frieze, crumbling staircase or half- wrecked cornice, no more overpowering than the same things are when they are simulated in the opera- house. These are, indeed, bewitchingly operatic scenes, these scenes of Hubert Robert's. A classical ruin of his, a Renaissance palazzo still intact, as in "A F6te at the Villa Medici/' is relieved by trees which hint not of the forest but of the garden. Even when he paints a wilder subject as a pendant to the villa picture just mentioned, he makes it, "The Tor-
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rent/7 an altogether gracious impression of a shattered temple lifted above a rocky gorge. He is never tragic. From the blithe morning or noonday light in which he generaEy bathes the first canvas in a pair he passes to a more subdued key without indulging in any thing graver than a sort of mild, sunset revery. His characteristic mood is cheerful. Long before the im pressionists he was interested in problems of illumina tion. He had no science with which to solve them, but he had what was almost as good, an exquisite taste. He had, too, the instinctive ability of a born craftsman.
His craftsmanship tells primarily in the building up of his compositions. He knows what to leave out and how to bring what is left into a happy unity. See Tn'rn in the two panels dedicated to the baths founded by Count Vigier on the Seine. He puts the prosaic elements of his subject into a most beguiling perspective. The enveloppe is as graceful as the sub stance of the work is not. But look even more atten tively at a couple of decorations, like "The Fountain of the Temple of Vesta" and "The Rest in the Park." There his subjects meet him half way, they are clas sical, but nature has her chance, and the painter can put forth without handicap the peculiar strength that is his.
He can make his ancient ruin a light, romantic fabric. He can make his trees like the accessories in some comedy of the period, all grace and slender
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beauty. Over everything he can throw the glamor of a bright, cool, luminous sky. The sky in a good Hubert Robert comes near to making the painting a masterpiece, it is so deep and airy, so blandly spa cious, so full of clear, fine color. I say a "good" Hubert Robert. The pot-boilers tell a different story. At its best his work is a source of sheer delight, making known, in an ideal way, the best qualities of a deeply interesting type whose traits need to be better understood in the United States. It is full of suggestion for the student of decorative painting. It shows how nature and art may be fused together, how landscape may be introduced into formal schemes without pedantry, withput sacrifice of the beauty be longing to greensward and trees. The net result is, as I am bound to repeat, a shade theatrical, but it is theatricality refined to a point of loveliness. Think of it in close association with the social world of eigh teenth-century France and one cannot help making much of the glittering artifice which was a second nature to Hubert Robert, as it was to all the painters of that epoch save such portents as Chardin and Watteau. Think of it more abstractly, as just a mode of decorating a wall in any period, and you forget the glitter, you recognize only the urbanity of Hubert Robert's tradition, its eternal freshness and fitness, its easy adaptation to the atmosphere of beautiful houses, its kinship to the art of living. To many a modern artist, I dare say, panels like Hubert
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Robert's must appear to belong to a bygone era, frozen within the confines of an outmoded system of design and technic. But I am sorry for the decora tive painter who could not see the advantage of taking a leaf from Hubert Robert's book, who could not learn something about blending landscape and architecture from the Frenchman's brilliant example.
II A PORTRAIT BY DAVID
Just once in so often there comes into view a masterpiece of painting that is absolutely hors con- cours, a work so perfect in all its relations that one looks upon it with a sigh of contentment. Such a work I saw at the Wildenstein Gallery one winter in a great portrait by Jacques Louis David of the eighteenth-century chemist, Lavoisier, and his wife. It is a huge canvas, perhaps eight feet tall. In its superb frame of contemporary origin it brought back all the splendor of the old regime, that period of courtly brilliance in which a serene sense of balance, of order, was tempered by an innate feeling for the sensuous beauty of life. The portrait has a rich sig nificance, from both the historical and the artistic point of view.
In the matter of history it gets its status from La voisier as well as from David. The former was a re markable personality, a born chemist, who in Ms
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hours deviated into finance and thereby invited ulti mate disaster. Bom in Paris in 1743, of humble parents, he nevertheless received a thorough educa tion and developed an extraordinary genius for chem istry. Along that path he might have proceeded in safety through a long career. But an evil fate gave him specious advancement, making him while he was still in his twenties one of those fermiers-generaux upon whom the bitterest hatred of the Revolution was to fall. Though he had been out of that office • for some years when the storm broke, his alliance with governmental error was remembered against him, and in 1794, while he was still in his prime, the Tribunal sent him to the guillotine. His life had been very happy. In Marie- Anne-Perrette Paulze, the daughter of another farmer-general, he had married an ideal wife, with talents for the very laboratory work upon which he was engaged. When David painted them together he painted comrades in chemical research as well as in all the private relations of life.
He painted them in 1788, when he was himself forty, back in Paris from his experience as a winner of the Prix de Rome, a full Academician, classically minded, a portent of everything that ought to spell a reactionary and arid type of art. He was a court painter, and the very soul of tradition. But this por trait, like certain others by David, constitutes a warn ing to the student to beware of the lure that lies in labels. To call a thing "academic" in our own day
LAVOISIER AND His WIFE
FROM THE PAINTING BY DAVID
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is often foolishly to misrepresent it. What of the power of genius? That will utterly destroy the meaning of a mere label. David had a broad streak of genius in him. He painted, beyond question, some of the deadest canvases that exist in French museums, vast tableaux of antique life which are as remote from our comprehension as the myths they com memorate. But he who would get at the truth about David, eschewing conventional disparagement, would do well to consider his portraits, especially those which date from the period just prior to the Revolu tion and from the time of conflict itself.
Despite Ms academic affiliations David was a hu man being if ever there was one. When the Revolu tion came he broke with his past, morally at least. He who had labored with all the good will in the world for Louis XVI threw himself so ardently into the company of royalty's foes that when the critical moment arrived he could cast his vote for the death of the King. He was intimate enough with Robe spierre to suffer imprisonment on the collapse of that leader.- He was to breathe again, in due course, and sympathetically enough, the atmosphere that en velops a throne. If he had had Louis XVI for a mas ter he could adapt himself complaisantly to the ser vice of Napoleon. It isn't, perhaps, a pretty record. But it is, we repeat, very human, and you feel this in his art. On one calamitous day, looking out of the window of his friend Jullien's studio, he saw the
1 62 Personalities in Art
tumbril go by — Marie Antoinette upon the bench within it, her hands corded behind her back, her face disfigured by suffering and tears, all her majesty in ruins. So he drew her, in a few spare lines, and the sketch remains one of the most poignant souvenirs we have of that tragic time. It was characteristic of David. With the same unflinching directness he drew the dead Marat and afterward painted the terrible portrait that is in the Brussels Museum. It was his true genius working in him, the genius for seeing and recording.
There are divers thrilling examples of this realistic eloquence of his. One of the most memorable of them is the powerful profile of Le Pelletier de Saint-Fargeau, a strange, original head, drawn with the swift and almost brutal veracity ' of a Hals. To talk of the Academy in the presence of such vitality is to winnow the wind. It would be as essentially inapposite in the presence of the portrait of Lavoisier and his wife. What, after all, is the test of a work of art, academic or of some other sort ? It is that it should live, that beneath the technic there should throb an immortal animation. That is unmistakable in the portrait of the Lavoisiers. Is the design at all formal? Remem ber that in that particular it registers the very walk and demeanor of the time. Here is eighteenth-century propriety, grace, elegance, mirrored in perfect realism. Then consult the attitudes in detail. They are ar ranged with unfaltering respect to the laws of com-
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position. The four hands, for example, are woven into what I can only describe as a pondered felicity. But the effect of the whole is the effect of life.
There is a curious fusion in this painting of an in timate sentiment with the dignity of the grand style. All that we know of this pair is suggested in their grouping, we feel the charm of their personalities, ac cented by the professional interest they had in com mon, and at the same time what is personal in the portrait is lifted to a higher power by the force of David's art. I have alluded to the symmetrical beauty of the design. I turn next to the magnificent drawing, observable not alone in the hands, for ex ample, where it tells most obviously, but in the dress of Mme. Lavoisier and in the form of her husband. Then I go on to the color, to the beautiful whites in the dress aforesaid, to the black costume of M. La voisier, to the glowing rose of the heavy table-cover ing, and, finally, to the discreet grays in the back ground. The still life gives an emotion apart, it is so exquisitely and yet so unobtrusively handled, and all through the canvas you come upon marvellous little passages of pure painting, in the lace across the lady's bosom, in the quill feathers, in the easel thrust into the shadows* and in other details. It all displays that quality which Ingres so loved, "the rectitude of art," workmanship supremely mastered, distinction, beauty. And with all this there goes convincing truth.
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It is, above all, the proud vitality of the thing that most moves us. This portrait gives an overwhelming answer to those who ignorantly decry tradition. It is the calibre of the individual artist that settles the business. Let him be a master, let him truly know his trade and respect it, and in tradition he uses not a formula but a language, a living language whose potentialities are limitless. Neither Rembrandt nor Velasquez has given us a more veracious evocation than this portrait of the Lavoisiers. In certain ways they are obviously as different from David as it is possible for them to be. His technic is removed as far from theirs as pole is from pole. But in this one matter of truth he is their peer, and by truth I mean not the reproduction of fact as so much still life, but the transference of it upon canvas so that it remains genuinely sentient and sympathetic. And David, in his "academic" way, works another magic which ranks the portrait as indubitably a great work of art. He imparts to his painting the cachet of style. There, as in his design and his draftsmanship, he triumphantly expresses the genius of the old French school. Thinking of that, I do not forget the clap trap of "La Distribution des Aigles," or the dreary theatricality of, say, the "Antiochus et Stratonice" — only I put those pieces in their place. I come away from the portrait of the Lavoisiers thinking simply of David at his best.
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III PRUD'HON
Though PrucThon lived in an era that thought a good deal of the grand style, he was himself not so much for grandeur as for charm. That is Prud'hon's special gift, the envelopment of his themes in a gra cious, subtly endearing air. Touch was everything with him. He was musical, lyrical, the master of an essentially tender and fragile quality. He may be studied in portraiture, in the treatment of the nude, and in the role of draftsman pure and simple. What ever he does is eloquent of the same romantic loveli ness, the same charm. Fully to appreciate Prad'hon you must have some sense of his background. You must see him in that period which marks the tran sition from the eighteenth century to the nine teenth, from the old regime to the Napoleonic. The decorative spirit of the court of Louis XVI has died out. The classical severity of David has come in. The moment is one for the antique virtues. Prud'hon has them, in a measure. He has a positively pagan de light in form. He has the academician's feeling for stately composition. But there is a poetic instinct struggling about in him. He would be a classicist only he happens to have been born a romanticist. So he filters the formulas of David through his tem perament, looks at the nude not as at a marble in a museum, but through rose-colored spectacles, which
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leave it with the animation of life heightened and made somehow more gracious. He adds to the clas sical tradition something akin to "the Correggiosity of Correggio," that melting tenderness which, when it escapes sentimentality, is one of the most entranc ing things in the world.
It invests with a new grace the linear purity and dignity of his portraits. It softens, makes exquisitely sensuous, the forms in a wonderful little grisaille of his, "Venus, FHymen et F Amour." It flings a kind of bloom upon his bewitching drawing, the "Young Woman and Cupids/' Prud'hon's portraits are fine things, but it is in his drawings that we come nearest to his central enchantment. It is the elegance of the earlier eighteenth century come back, poetized, en dued with more of the fresh loveliness of spring, more of the glamour of romance. He knew nothing of that rich breadth which Watte^u took over from Rubens. Where he was allied to the painter of "The Departure for the Island of Love'7 was in his passion for the beauty that is fleeting, diaphanous, fairylike. The drawing I have just cited is one of his masterpieces, one in which his fusion of classical motive with ro mantic fervor and style is consummately achieved. He is a comparatively minor figure in the history of French art, but he is one of the most seductive.
XII
Gavarni
XII GAVARNI
IT happened once in Paris, long ago, that M. Guillaume-Sulpice Chevalier, then a young artist at the outset of his career, sold a design to the publisher Susse. The latter noticed that it was unsigned and re marked that for the benefit of the public this omission should be corrected* The artist pondered for a mo ment and then, taking up the pen, made a decision which was to have far-reaching consequences. Per haps he thought that his name was too long. Perhaps a flood of sentiment rushed through him as there just then rose to his memory the lovely valley of Gavarnie, where he had spent a happy period within the glamour of the Pyrenees. At all events, upon this occasion he signed himself "Gavarnl" and thus gave immortal syllables to the trumpet of Fame.
It is a name around which cluster some of the most beguiling and suggestive associations in the history of French art, one which has engaged the ardent activity of one pen after another. None was ever more elo quent than that of Sainte-Beuve, who as far back as 1863 consecrated three of his luminous "Lundis" to Gavarni, then within only three years of his death.
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Not too long after that event the Goncourts wrote their invaluable book, invaluable for the intimate lore which it contains and for the superb etching which Flameng made as frontispiece from Gavarni's cele brated portrait of himself, "L'Homme a la Cigarette." Beraldi gave a particularly skilful little memoir to Gavarni in his well-known catalogue published in the eighties. Only the other day there appeared in Paris under the imprint of Floury the first volume of a work in which M. Paul-Andre Lemoisne obviously proposes to go most exhaustively into the subject. It is study of his pages that has specifically set me to thinking about Gavarni, but the man and the period have al ways seemed to me to repay reflection.
The period is one of those which, in their very con tradictions, have a particular attraction for the ana lyst. "Victorian," for example, has become a by word, yet if it connotes much that was commonplace, dull, and even ugly, the apotheosis of mediocrity, it also designates a period marked by a positively Eliza bethan expansion of the British genius. So it is in France, during that time of transition which stretches from the break-up of the Ancien Regime to the estab lishment of the Third Republic. Gavarni was born in 1804 and died in 1866. Between those dates French art is constantly in travail, having to reckon with un toward influences. One great classical type survives in Ingres to fertilize one so modern as that which we have in Degas, but in general there blows from the old years
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of David and the Napoleonic interval a dulling wind inimical in the last degree to the rise of the Romanti cists and the naturalistic painters of Barbizon. It was in the sixties and for some time later that the Impres sionists had to fight for whatever ground they won. The Second Empire remains a pinchbeck affair in the eyes of most commentators, and the artist could hardly be expected to come to its defense in view of the fact that its favorite portrait-painter was the sentimental, insipid Winterhalter. Yet even while that saccharine journeyman prevailed, there were great spirits on earth sojourning, and they were not without oppor tunity and stimulus. It is a droll paradox that it was Napoleon III himself who authorized the organization of the Salon des Refuses in the same building that housed the official Salon in 1863. Men like Manet and Whistler, after all, had their chance, and yet I balk a little at the word " chance." Genius has never yet been fortuitously kept down. It will affirm itself, no matter what its surroundings. Sometimes, too, it will ally itself with those surroundings, extracting from them its natural sustenance. Nor is it subdued to the stuff in which it works. On the contrary, it forces the material at its hand to its own purposes. This was the way of Gavarni. You do not think of his era as one precisely favorable in France to the develop ment of art, but it was favorable to him, and he was a great artist. It was favorable to him because he was born to illus-
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trate its most picturesque traits, and then, too, cir cumstances were kind to Mm. He came into the world along with a great company of brilliant men. Think for a moment of the writers of those days, with most of whom he was destined to be thrown. It was the period of Dumas, of Balzac, of Victor Hugo, of Gau- tier. The artists of ability are past counting. It is enough to note here that if you would see him in a group you would recognize Daumier on his right and Constantin Guys on his left. There was "atmos phere" enough and to be spared for the evolution of his talent in the work and companionship of his con temporaries. He was born in Paris, and save for cer tain absences of his youth he breathed for most of his life the airs of the capital. There is nothing more evo cative of the spirit of Gavarni than the introduction to that Journal des Gens du Monde which he started in 1833 with the collaboration of a veritable squadron of celebrities. The essence of this Journal Artiste- Fashionable is untranslatable, and so I must give as they were printed the words proclaiming its debut:
i
Voyez, Messieurs! Voyez, Mesdamesl Void Paris la Capitate t Paris la belle! Paris la mile aux gens d' esprit! Paris la mile aux bonnes manures! Paris la mile ou Von sait marcher, oil Von sait saluer, ou Von sait sourire, ou Von sait faillir, oil Von sait tout faire comme it faut! Void Paris! Voyez! Voyez, gens de la province; voyez, gens d'outremerl Voyez, Allemands; voyez y Russiens; wyez, gens de tons lieux; gens qui voulez apprendre & wus coiffer, & wus parfumer, & wus presenter; gens qui voulez bien dire,
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qui wulez. Uen rire, qui voulez Men voir, qui voulez lien viwe: void Paris!
Les voix de Paris! Les yeux de Paris! Les mots de Paris! Les airs de Paris! Les Ids de Paris! Les chapeaux de Paris! Les rubans de Paris! Les odeurs de Paris! Les adr esses de Paris! Les moqueries de Paris!
Tous les riens de Paris Paris, Paris, voici Paris!
To qualify as the pictorial laureate, so to say, of this Paris he had instinct rather than training. In his youth he oscillated briefly between architecture and science, showing the while a strong mathematical bent. All his life long this last persisted in him, so that he would often work out a problem on the mar gin of a drawing. It is not unreasonable to infer that this taste of his had something to do with his devel opment as a draftsman, partially accounting for his exactitude in matters of form and perspective and for the crisp purity of his line. He was precocious with the pencil and, in fact, was still in his twenties when he was making drawings for publication. I will not pretend to trace all the steps in his career as a pictorial satirist. Beraldi thinks that he made perhaps eight thousand drawings, water-colors, lithographs, and so on. His designs were published in periodicals and al-
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bums. A fairly full catalogue was made by Maherault and Bocher in 1873, but doubtless M. Lemoisne will frame an even more conclusive list by the time he gets through. I am not concerned with its minutiae here. It is rather of the broad cosmos it represents that I am thinking, Gavarni's cosmos of life and movement. It was his cosmos in a very deep spiritual sense. Sainte- Beuve says of him that "he was observation itself/7 but in another passage he expresses his belief that Ga- varni did not need to have a subject actually under his eyes in order justly to entitle it "After Nature." Memory and imagination, and that gift which we call genius, reinforced physical observation. // a son monde en lui. With that seeing eye of his there went a philo sophical habit <\f mind, commenting, differentiating, enriching, and so making it possible for him to give instant form to the visions of revery. The inexhausti ble spectacle which was Paris passed, as it were, like so much ore through his mind to be poured forth in the pure minted gold of his designs. It came forth pure gold because, for one thing — a point which might ordinarily seem irrelevant — Gavarni was very much of a gentleman. Sainte-Beuve, as I have just noted, says that il est V observation meme. Beraldi, adopting a similar locution, says that ilfut la distinc tion meme, adding that he gave distinction to every thing which passed under his crayon or his pen. All his commentators unite in the conclusion that, no mat ter from what slum or backwater he drew his subject,
LE CAHBRIOLEUR FROM THE DRAV.'ING BY GAVARNI
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he did not know how to be common or vulgar. From his early manhood he was interested in clothes. He used to design theatrical costumes for Mile. Georges, Carlotta Grisi, Dejazet, and other great ladies of the stage, he improved upon the fantasies of the carnival in his time, and he gave his attention to the dress of the man of the world, which he wore himself with an air at once gaittard and exquisitely conventional. Hu mana, the tailor whose name is preserved, like the proverbial fly in amber, in the serene prose of Sainte- Beuve, respectfully took off his hat to Gavarni as to a man with an incomparable flair for un "habit now.
We see him, then, contemplating Paris, the Gavarni cosmos, very much from within, living its life as an initiate, understanding the tone and sentiment of its dinners and its dances, swinging with a natural grace into its extraordinarily graceful movement — above all, participating in its movement. There has never been anything to beat the brilliant rhythm of Paris in Gavarni's time. Life swept on to a light, waltzlike measure. The very dress of the period was expressive of its hectic pace. Crinoline has gone down the wind as, among other things, cumbrous and thereby awk ward, but for the artist there was an element as of quicksilver in its flowing lines. How Gavarni could draw the animated elegance, if I may so describe it, of a Parisienne's toilet ! He caught the rustle of frou frou as hardly any other pictorial connoisseur has ever caught it. He has his rivals in this field, I know.
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Eugene Lami was an artist with a singularly delicate touch, and when he painted a courtly pageant, like that enveloping the marriage of the Due d'0r!6ans, or delineated the notables in the foyer de la danse at the opera, he placed upon his picture exactly the right accent of mundane distinction. Guys was another mirror of the social world in which its forms and color flash and gleam with extraordinary charm. Yet Lami always strikes me as uninspired and Guys as a little thin and mannered beside the supreme vitality and beauty of Gavarni. Gavarni has an elan to which neither of the others can quite lay claim; he is infi nitely more various and he has in far greater measure the attribute of style. His secret lies, I suppose, in the fact that he knew so magnificently how to draw.
Any final estimate of his genius must reckon, no doubt, with his substance as much as with his form. The legend beneath the drawing is of equal impor tance with the latter. Sainte-Beuve was profoundly impressed by the cynical wit and wisdom of these legends. He loved to observe the evolution of a Gavarni who was a kind of Fragonard into a Gavarni who was a kind of La Bruyere. A great deal of the entertainment to be got out of the lithographs lies in the concisely eloquent words accompanying them. They are as concise as they are biting. In one of the numerous designs given to his ragged philosopher, Vireloque, Gavarni has him contemplating a fallen drunkard, and the legend says simply: Sa Majeste
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le Roi des Animaux. Under the portrait of a pompous oracle is placed this edifying dialogue:
"L'homme est le chef-d'oeuvre de la creation. Etqui aditqa? Uhomme.
He moralizes life as he goes along and if he does so with something of the cynic's1 mordant tone, with a lucidity that is sometimes a little bleak, he never theless preserves in the main that precious Ban to which I have alluded. Even in his pathos there is grace, and here I come back to his line. I have glanced at his philosophical function, at the moralist, the satirist, because, as I say, this side of him cannot be ignored. It is easy to understand how the legends appealed to a mind like that of Sainte-Beuve. It could not have been otherwise. In a country like France, given to the play of ideas, Gavarni could not have been Gavarni without a deep fund of gnomic intelligence. But neither could he have been Gavarni without his linear power, and I must confess that to that, as an art critic, I turn with immeasurable gusto. I have often been struck, in thinking of this period, by -the characteristic good fortune of France in her two princes of black and white. If you cannot think of the period without Gavarni neither can you think of it without Daumier. They offer you the two sides of the one medal. Each supplies what the other lacks. For Daumier the crushing philippic; for Ga~
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varni the airy, lightly stinging mot. And as it was with their satirical texture so it was with their tech nical equipment. The puissant Daumier is a modern Michael Angelo in his massive treatment of form. The delicately effective Gavarni has beside him a Raphaelesque polish and suavity. He is withal, like Daumier, one of the most original spirits in the his tory of art. No other draftsman in the host of clever illustrators and caricaturists adorning his time had anything like his richness of individuality. That fe cundity at which I have glanced in citing Beraldi's figure of eight thousand designs is significant of the type of creative artist that Gavarni was. He oper ated like a force of nature, spontaneously, abundantly, and with a sort of sublime certainty. His touch has about it a wonderful ease and precision. Consider too how free he is from surplusage, with what perfect balance and economy he puts his compositions to gether. I would not press this matter of his felicity in design too far. He is in no wise Raphaelesque as a weaver of linear patterns. On the other hand, noth ing could be more discreet or more pointedly right than his placing of a figure. There he has that virtue for which Matthew Arnold had such appreciation in his word " inevitability." He realizes a scene, a group, or an isolated figure, always in what seem to be both the terms of life and the terms of pictorial unity. He led a long, successful, and, in the main, unad-
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venturous life. One rather surprising episode arrests Ms biographers. Once he went to London, to spend a few weeks, and remained there for several years. He had introductions to smooth his way into the presence of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, but for some occult reason he scamped his courtly opportunities and devoted himself to observation of the ordinary walks of life. He had his misanthropic moods, and latterly the philosopher in him knew some sad moments. The death of a son bore heavily upon his spirit and he suffered a material vexation which sorely exasperated him. Gavami was an im passioned lover of flowers and trees, and he was happy in cultivating his Auteuil garden. But the Hauss- mannization of Paris spoiled all that, a new railway cutting right into his domain. Still, there was the success of which I have spoken. It was piled up steadily. Gavarni soon became in Paris something like an institution. He did not struggle for his re nown. There is a pretty story of a colloquy between him and M. Cave, Director of Fine Arts, about the cross of the Legion of Honor. The official wondered if he cared to have it and on Gavarni's making an affirmative reply, offered him pen and paper with which to make a request for the honor. If the cross depended on his asking for it, said Gavami, he would never receive it. Later, in 1852, Comte de Nieu- werkerke saw to it that he got the decoration without pleading. He had lacked nothing of appreciation and
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recognition when he closed his eyes in 1866, and he could close them with the resignation of an artist who had enjoyed life and left behind him a body of work calculated, in the nature of things, to keep his name alive. The pictures of a painter are compara tively limited in number, and remain more or less stationary. The prints of a lithographer are pro digiously multiplied and carry his art everywhere. The traits of Gavarni are like those of an author, sus ceptible of the widest circulation. His repute is, I should say, fairly universal now. Is it matched by as extensive an influence? Hardly. Pictorial satire since his day has rarely developed that vein of gaiety which was peculiarly characteristic of him. The other day with this subject in my mind I looked through the "Feu Pierrot'7 of that jocund humorist, Willette, who should have recaptured something of Gavarni's verve if any modern Frenchman could have done so. But the book left a rather dubious taste in my mouth. After the high-bred art of Gavarni the fun of Mont- martre seemed a little coarse, the levities of the Chat Noir a little vulgar. It was breeding, yes, that set Gavarni upon such an eminence; it was his distinc tion and his genius. Also it was something that the modern draftsman strangely neglects, perhaps be cause he thinks that it lies outside his bailiwick. It was the sense of beauty. It was his possession of that, I think, that made Gavarni what he was, not only a great satirist but a great artist.
XIII
Daumier
XIII DAUMIER
WHEN Henri Beraldi came to Daumier in the com pilation of his invaluable catalogue of "Les Graveurs du XIXe Siecle" he was a little amused to find what commentators on the subject had already done in the way of comparison. They had discovered points of contact between Daumier and about thirty differ ent masters, to say nothing of the traditions of the Flemish, the Dutch, the Venetian, and the Florentine schools. Daubigny, visiting Rome and seeing the "Moses/' cries with enthusiasm: C'est un Daumier! Above all things, the draftsman of Charivari was the Michel-Ange de la caricature. One may be, with Be raldi, a little amused — until one sees that there is in all this but the reflection of a very simple truth. It is that Daumier is of the elect, a mighty artist "with the mark of the gods upon him/' to borrow Whistler's phrase. He made his fame primarily as a satirist in black and white, but he triumphed through the possession of a genius transcending his main voca tion. Champfleury, who catalogued his works in 1878, the year before he died, wrote his best epitaph: Dans le moindre croquis de Daumier on sent h gri/e du lion.
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It is none the less fitting because the lion had some of the traits of the bourgeois. Born at Marseilles, in 1808, he had for father an humble glazier who by some extraordinary paradox nourished the ambitions of a poet! It is tempting, of course, to infer from that latter circumstance the germ of a certain roman ticism in Daumier, only the romanticism is not there. When he was brought up to Paris as a child it was to enter upon a rather humdrum existence. In his teens he was inducted into a clerkship in a book-shop. However poetically inclined the elder Daumier may have been, he was slow to give way to his son's ar tistic predilections. These received some encourage ment, however, from the functionary, Alexandre Lenoir, and presently we find him commencing lith ographer under one Zephyrin Belliard. In 1829 he was launched as a caricaturist. He had one charac teristic alone calculated to carry him far; he had courage. It was even in ttus formative period that his "Gargantua," a terrific lampoon upon Louis- Philippe, procured him six months in jail. But he emerged with a career in his hands. Falling under the notice of Charles Philopon, founder of the weekly Caricature and the daily Charivari, he was closely as sociated with those publications for years. Some time in the late forties he began to function as a painter also, and this continued until his death, but he never lost touch with the satirical arena. In 1878 there was a memorable exhibition of his works at the
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Durand-Ruel Gallery which had a qualified success. He died in retirement at Valmondois in the following year, old, sightless, and in poor circumstances. He had been offered the ribbon of the Legion d'Honneur but had quietly refused it, not caring, like his friend Courbet, to make a theatrical fuss about his de clination.
Where do the bourgeois traits come in, in the life thus rapidly surveyed? In a certain almost prosaic steadiness of activity. As a satirist he did his job and that was enough. He had among his friends men whose names are like so many challenging ban ners against a French sky that in his time was noth ing if not turbulent. He knew Delacroix and Corot, Barye and Diaz. He lived at the very heart of revo lution in French painting, peculiarly at the heart of the romantic movement. But he stayed of unroman- tic temperament. It is curious, when you look down the vista of his long life, to reckon with the events that made his background. As a child he was old enough to sense the reverberations of Waterloo. He grew up to witness the brief reign of Charles X, the coming of Louis-Philippe, the rise of the Second Em pire, and the disasters of 1870. An instinctive repub lican, he was on the side of liberalism and fought for it through all these permutations with passion and even with venom, so long as the governing powers let the freedom of the press alone. Yet, when that freedom was curtailed, he turned readily enough from
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the castigation of politicians to the satirizing of man ners, and in the long run you feel that the march of history had comparatively little to do with the devel opment of his genius. The break-up of the old Napo leonic r6gime and the organization of a new France may have involved him in some cerebral activity, but it did not so inflame his imagination as to give a distinctive color to his work. The inference might be that he remained just a ready journalist. But it is more fitting to deduce, I think, that he remained just a great artist.
Criticism has often diverted itself drawing paral lels between Daumier and Gavarni, despite the plausi ble observation of Philippe de Chennevieres that you might as well waste your time drawing a parallel between Poussin and Watteau. The two satirists had this at least in common — they knew how to draw. In spirit, no doubt, they were poles apart. I have before me as I write a design of Daumier's illustrating the "Galop Final" at a masquerade ball. The de licious lightness and gayety that Gavarni would have given it are somehow missing. In none of the draw ings that Daumier dedicated to the feminine levities in the Parisian spectacle is there anything of the ex quisite frou-frou in which Gavarni excelled. On the other hand, there is composition, there is movement, and there is superbly puissant line. At a dinner at Daubigny's a fellow artist once said to Daumier that a lithograph of his, the famous "Ventre Legislatif,"
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made him think of the Sistine Chapel. It sounds like a boutade, but one can understand that the design made him think at least of the grand style. That was Daumier's great resource, that is where you recog nize the claw of the lion. He drew with a certain largeness and sweep, a certain noble force. I say " noble" advisedly, because, while the end of the artist was ridicule, and he would exaggerate the points of a physiognomy sometimes to an almost re pulsive degree, there is something which you can only designate as grandeur about the linear simplicity and power through which he gains his effect. You see this magic of his working supremely in Ms carica tures, and the mere bulk of them, the mere salience they possess in his life, would be sufficient justifica tion for those who prefer to see their Daumier in black-and-white. I can feel with them. There are lithographs of his that rejoice my soul, partly through their great draftsmanship, and partly through their magnificent affirmation of the very genius of lithog raphy. Daumier knew all the secrets of the stone. But, thinking of him as I most like to think of him, thinking of the satirist as artist, I care for him es pecially as a painter.
He was more than the Michael Angelo of carica ture. He was something of a Michael Angelo in paint. He was that inasmuch as he was a great master of form. In 1848 the proclamation of the Re public gave occasion for the opening at the Beaux-
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Arts of a competition for a symbolical decoration. More than five hundred artists entered. Daumier's sketch was marked the eleventh in the group of twenty chosen as indicating the painters to take part in the definitive concours. I will not assert that it is a portentous conception, but there is no denying the monumental force and unity of the design. It invites not unreasonably, I believe, the assumption that if fate had so ordained it Daurnier might have devel oped into a remarkable mural painter. But it is not obvious that fate ever dowered him with the grandi ose imaginative faculties that would have filled out his grandiose mode of tackling composition and the figure. He had no traffic with Olympus. He kept his feet upon the solid earth and found his inspiration in obscure humanity. Banville has pictured him in his big, austere attic on the He St. Louis, watching for hours the scenes below him along the banks of the Seine. He did for the workaday figures of' the city what Millet did for their brethren of the fields. Like Millet, he found a measure of pathos in the lives of the humble, and he would paint a poor washer woman trudging along with her burden and her child, mixing positive tenderness with his sympathy. For the submerged this bitter satirist always had sym pathy. But, again like Millet, he utterly escapes mawkishness in his idyls of the pave. It is his feel ing for form that is essentially his safeguard against sentimentality. He sees the figure simply and grandly,
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gets the elements of structure with a broad, synthetic stroke, and finally, with that composer's felicity of his, places his form consummately within the rec tangle. His range was not very wide, yet it was suffi ciently varied. Besides the life of the riverside he would paint the habitues of the law-courts, the peo ple of the circus, the doctor and his patient, the trav ellers on the railroad, and, occasionally, the amateur turning over his prints. Once or twice he dealt with scenes in the theatre, and there is a considerable series of his pictures given to the celebration of Don Quixote and his adventures. These last represent, of course, imaginative excursions, but, as I have indicated, it is not imagination but observation and human interest that especially denote his genius. He had a strong grip upon character. With his lifelong study of phys iognomy in the political world it was inevitable that when he came to paint his pictures he would paint them with the "seeing eye." The interesting thing is that as a painter he kept that eye so free from jaun dice. The ferocity of the caricatures falls from him like a garment when he takes up the brush. A trace of the old bitterness will creep into the studies of the avocat, but when he paints his Seine folk or the homespun types of the troisieme dasse on the rail road he is only the friendly bourgeois depicting his own kind. Only that, plus the great artist enveloping his people in the glamour of line and mass, flinging over them the mysterious beauty that flows from
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light and shadow, and adding to them that which sums up all the rest — the accent of style.
His style is in the key of all those traits of largeness and nobility which I have endeavored to point out in his draftsmanship and his composition. It is, too, intensely personal. That disposition among his com mentators, which I have noted, to ally him with one master or another, does not leave him, as a matter of fact, in any sense an eclectic type. You may say that there is an Hogarthian amplitude about his humor. You may find a savagery in him akin to Goya. But these and other strains in Daumier are in nowise derivative. He is his own man. His tech- nic, his energy, and pre-eminently his style are new- minted and "of the centre." There is a Daumier cult, and its divagations are sometimes a little over done. Beraldi, as I have remarked, found the rap prochements merely droll. If one were to swallow whole the ideas of the eulogists, one would, as he says, have to retouch Delaroche's famous hemicycle at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and, erasing the heads of aE the masters portrayed, substitute for each one the head of Daumier. The funniest of these oddities in criticism is that of the recent biographer who would see in Daumier a forefather of the Post-Impression ists, as naive a piece of body-snatching as the erec tion of Ingres into a spiritual ancestor of Matisse. The truth is that there is nothing recondite or mys terious about the status of this artist. He was a good
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craftsman. He knew how to draw and How to paint. He looked at the life about him and mirrored it truthfully in his art. He surcharged it with no ro mantic fervors. This comrade of Delacroix had noth ing of his friend's emotion and nothing of his flair for color, but was content with a quiet tonality in which he leaned far more toward the "brown sauce" of Rembrandt than toward the luminous hues which the Impressionists were bringing into view just as he was about to pass from the scene. Exactly as he was unaffected by the splendors of Delacroix, so he did nothing to emulate the silvery vibrations of his be loved Corot. I may remark in passing that he was as sensitive as Corot in the delineation of landscape. His backgrounds of earth, trees, and sky are always just, true, and well designed, and sometimes they are very beautiful. Did he care for beauty in the sense of grace, of charm, of that subtle enrichment which makes a picture one of the poetic things of life? I hardly think so. It may be that his spirit was too much subdued to the sardonic stuff in which he worked for so many years. When he touches the an tique, it leaves him cold. There are some repellent profiles among his "Physionomies Tragico-Clas- siques." The beauty in Daumier is of a grave, even stem, order. Beside the suavity of Ingres his rugged- ness seems that of granite. It is, in its way, as be guiling. Baudelaire noted that a long time ago, when he associated Daumier as a draftsman with Ingres
192 Personalities in Art
and Delacroix. Each was different from the others, but he doffed his hat to all of them. Each, to return to our leading motive, had style, the indefinable ele vation which imbues workmanship with a personal, distinguishing mark and lifts it to a higher power. It is the mark of the creative artist, the original, born artist. That is why nobody can write about Dau- mier without seeking to illuminate his analysis here and there by alluding to one or the other of the mas ters. There is a kind of solidarity among them. They stand for one idiom, one tradition. Daumier is not the tremendous portent that some of the zealous would represent him to be. He had limitations, as I have sought to indicate. None the less he used the idiom of the masters, belonged to their tradition, and he is of their glorious company.
XIV
Courbet
XIV
COURBET
ON June 10, 1819, Gustave Courbet was born at Ornans, in a then almost sequestered corner of east ern France. In manhood he became the friend of Corot. As a landscape painter who was the contem porary of the Barbizon group, it would have been natural enough for Mm to have adopted its romanti cized naturalism. But Courbet followed his own gait, developed a body of independent ideas, and emerged from an extraordinary clash of personalities with a clearly defined celebrity. He remains a singular fig ure in the history of French painting, one to whom artists all over the world have reason for paying cor dial tribute. The fact was happily recognized in 1919 at the Metropolitan Museum, where Mr. Bryson Burroughs, curator of paintings, had the inspiration to invent and organize an exhibition commemorative of Courbet's centenary. From private and public col lections he drew important examples, assembling some two score pictures in one of the stateliest rooms in the museum. Hung in a single line, they made a noble effect. Nowhere else, save in Paris, could so brilliant a memorial have been arranged. And not even in Paris could a collection of this kind meet
196 Personalities in Art
with warmer appreciation than in New York. Cour- bet's qualities are peculiarly sympathetic to us. There are marked points of contact between the genius of Courbet and the genius of American painting.
The character of Courbet as a man — and it is forced upon every commentator who approaches his works — is hardly as lovable as one would like it to be. Thirty-odd years ago an American enthusiast, Mr. Titus Munson Coan, made a pilgrimage to the painter's old haunts in Franche-Comte, and printed in The Century some interesting impressions received from friends and neighbors who had known Courbet well. "He is not very kindly remembered," said one of these former comrades of his. In Paris he had some notable associates. Sainte-Beuve, we are told, was one of his faithful friends. But this son of a farmer never quite adjusted himself to the suaver modes of urban life. He was eccentric to the point of violence. "In 1864," his friend Buchon recalled, "when cold weather came, he bought a bed-quilt from a Jew. He made a hole in the middle of it for his head. That was his winter overcoat." He was prosperous enough to have gone abroad in furs if he had so chosen. But the bed-quilt attracted attention, which he craved. He had, indeed, a passion for reclame, and posed as a wiontagnard because it brought him notoriety. Late in life this histrionic disposition led to the one tragic episode of his career. When the Vendome column was pulled down under the Commune his flamboyant
Courbet
197
radicalism had so far involved Him with the vandals who actually brought it to the dust that in the up shot he was held responsible by the authorities. The reconstruction of the column, under the Republic, was at his cost, and he had a taste of jail into the bargain before flight into Switzerland gave him a few more years of broken life. I allude to his personal traits and adventures chiefly for the sake of contrast. They are antithetical to Courbet's r61e as an artist There he was, paradoxically, nothing if not simple and sincere. There is only one point at which it is necessary to consider the man and the painter together. That is the point at which we have to reckon with his taste.
In the definitive biography of Courbet, by M. Georges Eiat, there is an amusing anecdote of the Empress Euggnie. She went to see Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair" one day, and after admiring its mag nificent Percherons turned to "Les Baigneuses," of Courbet. Looking at the powerful semi-nude woman, whose back is turned to us in this picture, she asked, "Is this also a Percheron?" It was a fair epigram, one directing attention to a strain in Courbet which cannot be ignored. He was no super-refined searcher after beauty, but took nature as he found it, and his instinct, his taste, was to find it rather plain. There is a picture of his which might seem to contradict this observation. It is "The Woman in the Waves," which has the sensuous charm of a Boucher. Con-
198 Personalities in Art
sider also "The Woman with the Mirror," better known as "La Belle Mandaise." When he painted this portrait of Whistler's famous model he responded as sensitively as Whistler could have done to the gracious appeal of his sitter. But pictures like these are the exceptions which prove the rule. Courbet had no abstract ideas of beauty* It was the visible fact, not the dream, that concerned him. A far more significant painting is the sylvan nude, "The Source," which immediately makes one think of the great study of the same subject by Ingres in the Louvre. In the work of Ingres the young model is synthesized into a classically elevated design. In the work of Courbet she is delineated as in a portrait. Convention is utterly excluded from the painter's thought. I might cite other individual pieces which, like "The Source," add to the light needed for a thorough ap preciation of Courbet; but the most useful clew is, perhaps, to be developed by a survey of his work as a whole.
Is not its outstanding virtue the virtue of variety? There are landscapes and nudes, portraits, marines, flower studies and hunting pictures in Courbet's cosmos. And the special merit of this variety is one taking us to the very core of Courbet's art. Every artist accepts the peril of repeating himself. Indeed, it is not necessarily a peril. Who could dis parage Corot, for example, because he spent long years in painting " Corots," which is to say landscapes
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sharing in such a strong family likeness that one could tell them in the dark. Corot was richer in sheer genius than was Courbet. But in this particular matter Courbet was the stronger artist. In all his life he scarcely ever painted a "Courbet/' You know him, it is true, for certain notes of color, and, of course, for certain technical methods, but variety, with him, means the transmutation of each new picture into a new adventure. He had small patience with crystal lized pattern in other painters, and he had no patience with it at all in his own work. M. Riat teHs us that in the artist's student days he was all for the great realists, for Ribera, Zurburan, Velasquez, Von Os- tade, Holbein, and Rembrandt. When he had an ex hibition of his own in the '505 he inscribed the words Le Realisme on the door. It introduced not so much a type of picture as a point of view. That is what made the exhibition at the Museum so interesting. It was composed not of forty " Courbets," but of forty works of art in which you could see reflected a broad attitude, the attitude of an artist whose sole conception of picture-making was the recording of the truth.
Consider how isolated he was in this philosophy. Truth was precious to the men of 1830, but it was all interwoven with romantic emotion. Even a type as austere as Millet tended to heighten the truth with grandiose elements of design and style. Courbet ad hered to the bedrock of realism. Design, for exam-
2OO Personalities in Art
pie, as he cultivated it, was on the whole a rather accidental factor. His pictures are well enough put together, but we feel that this is due to a lucky selec tion of motives. It never comes from the interven tion of a definite principle of composition. In the absence of such a principle, in fact, Courbet's most ambitious schemes are curiously defective. Witness the famous "Enterrement a Ornans," in the Louvre. Balance is left, as it were, to take care of itself. But the truth of life is unmistakable. To note the fact is to pose Courbet's whole case. In the arts of com position, in the refinements of draftsmanship and color, in the magic of style, he may not be one of the demigods; but in the matter of a kind of central vitality he is one of the great men of the nineteenth century. It is the vitality, moreover, of an original painter. There is nothing of the photographer about Courbet's realism. It is too personal for that, too artistic. There was, after all, an element of charm in that rough temperament of his, which seems nomi nally to have held charm at arm's length. He was indifferent to beauty as Ingres saw it, with his pas sion for Raphaelesque form. He cared nothing for the lyrical inspiration of a Corot. But he transmogri fied his facts in spite of himself, made his realism the vehicle for impressions that sometimes, at all events, are merely lovely.
A good example is supplied in the "Spring Flowers," painted in the prison of Sainte-Pelagie in 1871, when
Courbet 201
he was obliged to ruminate in seclusion on Ms ill- fated connection with the destruction of the Vendome Column. Fantin-Latour himself never painted a more exquisite mass of blooms. Notable, too, for its vein of aesthetic delicacy is one of his marines, the picture called simply "The Mediterranean." There are some of the earlier pictures of Whistler of which it may be said that "Courbet might have painted them." By the same token we may say of "The Mediterranean" that "Whistler might have painted it." In color, particularly, this is an almost poetic piece of work. I have spoken of Courbet's variety. The museum exhibition afforded really extraordinary illustrations of the theme. From a marine like "The Mediterranean" you could turn to a full-length por trait like the "Madame Crocq: La Femme au Gant," or to a nude like "The Woman with the Parrot," or to a major hunting scene like the brilliant picture of "The Quarry," lent by the Boston Museum. To this diversity in Courbet we are bound to return, over and over again. But always I would emphasize more especially the significance of his landscapes, for these, more perhaps than any other of his paintings, typify Courbet's influence at large.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to make invidious comparisons here, to speak of what he missed on the subjective side of landscape painting. He missed whole worlds of such enchantment a Corot and Dupre, Diaz and Rousseau, made their
202 Personalities in Art
own. But the "natural magic" wHch he gained in stead is a thing of almost thrilling power. In such a landscape as "The Fringe of the Forest," in which design, as such, is well nigh negligible, the expression of woodland depths, of tree forms and ground tex tures is nothing less than superb. Nature is given her chance. She is interpreted with the least pos sible interposition of a personal habit of painting. It is as though she guided Courbet's brush and, in the process, communicated to him something of her own energy. He never founded a school, in the sense of passing on a technical method. But he has been a tremendous fertilizing force in that he has pointed the way to an honest, clear-eyed mode of attack. Because he dealt in low tones, knowing nothing of the luminosity of the Impressionists, his paintings leave a curious impression of old-masterish sobriety. But it is not in his forest greens, dull blacks, and tawny hues generally that Courbet alone denotes his alliance with the past. It is Ms truth that fixes his rank, that makes him an old master, and places him also among the most progressive of the moderns.
XV Puvis de Chavannes
XV PUVIS DE CHAVANNES
A BRIEF note in Le Gaulois one day reported certain ceremonies which had, as a matter of fact, a high
significance. They were held at Lyons, in the house in wHch Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was born on December 14, 1824. Faithful as always to the mem ory of her illustrious dead, France officially recog nized the centenary of one of her greatest painters. We, too, have reason to remember him. He did some of his finest work for the walls of the Boston Public Library, and many of our artists have profited by study of his genius. To the mural decorator and to every student of art who cares for monumental de sign he is one of the outstanding European figures, an incomparable master. Why, I wonder, has not a more voluminous literature gathered about Ms fame? Marius Vachon published a good book on his work in 1895. A condensed monograph has since appeared from the pen of M. Andre Michel, really a collection of illustrations with sketchy text. The exhaustive work by M. Leonce Benedite has not, that I know of, as yet been published. Marcelle Adam made an amusing brochure out of his numerous caricatures, and of course 'there has been much writing on the
205
206 Personalities in Art
subject in the French periodicals. But very little has been done to bring the man as well as the artist into view, and from all the printed matter available I have gathered less than I have received from M. Joseph Durand-Ruel, who from his boyhood was in timately acquainted with Puvis de Chavannes. I regret my own lost opportunities. He was a painter I greatly desired to meet; I was frequently in Paris prior to his death in 1898, and I knew men like Rodin, who could easily have taken me to his home on the Place Pigalle or out to the studio at Neuilly. Perhaps I was a little hesitant about tackling his Olympian aloofness.
It is a trait which disengages itself decisively enough from the facts that have been made known about him. Puvis de Chavannes seems to have been a man apart, from the beginning. He came from the old Burgundian noblesse, and he was not unconscious of it, reserved, a man of a kind of hauteur, giving of himself freely to those he loved but on the whole keeping himself to himself. The portrait which he painted at twenty-five shows a lean, aristocratic visage, very thoughtful in expression. More expres sive of his legend is the portentous full-length painted by his friend Bonnat It is that of a stately acade mician. There was nothing academic about him, it is true, but the canvas is eloquent of his dignity, his gravity, his mundane weight.
His father was an engineer and he was destined to
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foEow in the paternal footsteps, but illness inter rupted the preliminaries and a journey to Italy gave a new direction to Ms ideas. Initiated into the world of pictures, he came back resolved to be an artist.
He threw himself upon his chosen career not only with artistic ardor, but with the warm, human en ergy of youth, and said, long afterward, that he did not know more about the tedmic of Ms craft at this
time than he knew about the argot of the rapin. He liked to tell the story of Ms encounter with the wife of Lamartine, when he was spending a vacation at Macon. She asked Mm if he painted, and, on Ms re plying in the affirmative, wanted to know if he drew "the figure/' meaning did he draw a portrait. "The face?" he answered. "I draw the entire man." His master then was the now fairly forgotten painter, Henri Scheffer, but later, following a second trip to Italy, in the company of Ms friend Beauderon de Vermeron, he was for a short time in the studio of Delacroix, and after that enjoyed the criticism of Couture. I cannot trace in detail the history of Ms contacts with that remarkable painter and decorator, Theodore Chasseriau, but I know they were dose, on the authority of John La Farge, who told me about them long ago. It used to amuse La Farge, by the way, to recall the time when Puvis de Chavannes came into the studio of Couture, where the young American was working, and picked him out to pose for one of Ms figures. La Farge couldn't remember
208 Personalities in Art
wHch one it was, and would joke about some day getting a lot of photographs together and hunting up his physiognomy. There is another personal sou venir of that distant period which I may cite here. The Princess Cantacuzene belonged to Chasseriau's circle, and one of the most brilliant of his drawings is a portrait of her. Puvis de Chavannes succeeded him ia her friendship and they were married in his old age.
In some cases these questions of master and pupil might assume importance. With Puvis de Chavannes they are of slight moment. He was his own man. That, to be sure, was one of the reasons why he be came a great painter. He took his own line and fought his battle in his own way. He had to fight. They let him into the Salon of 1850, but in 1852 they refused him, and for some years he met the same repulse. There were writers on his side, Theophile Gautier and Paul de Saint-Victor among them, but there were others who could not endure his work and in official dom there were as many malcontents, if not more. It did not matter. He went on making studies and painting, especially making studies. The nature of those compositions on which his renown is based might well beguile the student to inquire into the matter of the master's intellectual equipment. Paint ings like his must necessarily, we say, imply a deep culture. Vachon gives the best commentary upon this idea in a passage he quotes from the painter,
Puvis de Chavannes 209
asked about the genesis of Ms designs, "l am ignor ant," he replied. "I have no philosophy, or history, or science. I am occupied with my profession. " He was sheer artist and, into the bargain, a type of ap palling industry.
When he settled in Paris in 1852, joining with his friends Bida, Eicard, and one or two others in the organization of a happy circle, he fixed upon an apart ment on the Place Pigalle, which was to remain his home for nearly half a century. He was a rich man, with an annual income of some 200,000 francs, and though there was a studio attached to Ms quarters he did none of Ms work there. Painting on a large scale from the outset, he built Mmself a great studio at Neuilly, with all the mechanism required for the manipulation of vast canvases. Between these two places he led with unbroken regularity a life partly Spartan and partly luxurious. Since he wanted a full day for his work, he would see Ms friends only in the morning. You could call as early as six but not later than nine. There were always devotees there. One of them was the famous Marcelin Desboutin, nomi nally the oddest of associates, for he was as untidy a Bohemian as ever lived, and his comrade was nothing if not the pink of all the amenities. But Desboutin, like Puvis de Chavannes, was the great gentleman to his finger-tips. Legend has it, indeed, that he was really the Marquis des Boutins. M. C16ment-Janin, in Ms biography of the artist, scouts
2io Personalities in Art
the idea of a noble origin, but it would seem to have had the sanction of Puvis de Chavannes, at all events. They were companions from adolescence, and Des- boutin was nearly always on hand in the mornings when his friend sat in his white dressing-gown and "held court." I gather that he warmly welcomed all manner of artists to these early soirees, but was rarely intimate with any of them. Besides Desboutin, among those who knew him well, there was Degas (who was entitled to call himself the Comte de Gas), and there were inevitably divers others, but most of the visitors were, so to say, on professional terms alone with him.
While he talked — and it is said that he was a charming, gracious, deeply interesting talker — he would have his breakfast, consisting of a glass of milk, without so much as a bit of toast or a biscuit. Then at nine he would start out for the long walk to Neuiliy, a matter of about two miles and a half. Arrived there, he would work, standing, until the light failed, and without a bite of luncheon. In the dusk he would walk home, dress with the meticulous care of a man of fashion, and dine out in the great world where his personality and his conversational powers made him a constantly desired guest. He was a mighty trencherman. With nothing to keep him going all day but that minute draught of milk he had a heroic appetite for dinner, and his hosts took pains to see that his gigantic hunger was satisfied
Pnvis de Chcwannes 211
by food enough for two. He was otherwise sobriety
itself. A very little watered wine was aE that he wanted to wash down Ms Gargantuan repasts. As an artist he remained detached from groups as such. He knew Degas, as I have observed, and Manet, Monet, Renoir, and the rest. He had friends, too? in the academic camp. Bonnat was one of his in timates. But he made few ties and thereby suffered no losses. A trait to be mentioned appositely here is his admirable discretion. He never disparaged any one he disliked. M. Durand-Ruel tells me that he often saw Mm smile but never knew Mm to laugh.
At Neuilly Ms labors were assisted by a corps of pupils, who served as instruments in the execution of Ms paintings. He chose them with great care, paid them well, and altogether carried himself there, as elsewhere, with marked poise and dignity. The circumstances of his whole life seem so ordered, so measured, so beautifully balanced, and in so many ways so successful that it seems positively incongru ous to find that Ms work was long a drag on the market. He put Mgh prices on Ms paintings, dis daining to cheapen them, and was unperturbed when they did not sell. The elder Durand-Ruel bought the famous "Decollation de Saint Jean-Baptiste" out of the Salon of 1870 for 5,000 francs, and for fifteen years was unable to dispose of it. At the end of that time Puvis de Chavannes, with Ms characteristic gesture of the grand seigneur, insisted upon buying
212 Personalities in Art
it back. He had that majestic way with him. When he painted the first of the great decorations in the Musee de Picardie, at Amiens, he heard that it was to have neighbors from other hands as yet unde cided upon. Promptly he offered to fill all the re maining spaces at his own expense, counting the seri ous cost as nothing in the balance against the pain of seeing his work in juxtaposition with things in a totally different key. The story of the Boston panels shows delightfully how, for once, the tables were turned upon Mm. McKim was resolved that Puvis de Chavannes should do the work, and when the committee waited upon the artist it was prepared to make any concessions. He was busy? They could accept any delay. He had not seen the building in Boston? They could send him a model. Then came up the question of cost, and he thought he had them. He was really overborne with work, he didn't want to do the thing, and by naming a prohibitive price he would scare off these importunate Americans. They blandly met his figure and he surrendered, to find, as it developed, peculiar happiness in working out one of the loveliest decorative schemes in his career.
I have alluded to the modesty with which he spoke of his resources in the production of all those schemes of his. The truth is, of course, that he was a born poet, with a brain teeming with ideas and an imagi nation that instinctively played in the grand manner
Puvis de Chamnnes 213
around grand themes. Apropos of one of Ms easel pictures, "L'Enfant Prodigue," he used to say that
what started him painting it was the sheaf of sketches he had enthusiastically made from a herd of swine once observed in the country. But we may agree with M. Michel not to take this loutade too much au pied de la letire. The composition has too much tenderness for that, too much elevation. Elevation, nobility, are inseparable from the work of Puvis de Chavannes. He had, far more than Chasseriau, whose powers of ordonnance he otherwise recalls, "the large utterance of the early gods." There is something primeval in the sense of space he gives you, of im posing space peopled by heroic figures. And Ms heroic forms are always tinctured by beauty. In "Le Tra vail" and "Le Repos," which date back to the early sixties, his men and women have an antique ampli tude and simplicity. They are rather massy figures, types of almost rude strength. Yet they have grace, too, the grace that comes from rich contours, full flowing lines, and, above all, a kind of innate purity. As time went on his faculty for thus transmogrify ing life only gained in potency. For whatever he did he required a generous scale. Gautier noted this early in the painter's career. He painted many easel pictures, ch&ialet pieces, as the French call them, and some of them are among his most felicitous perform ances, but there can be no question about the essen tial gravitation of his genius to big wall spaces.
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He found them in divers important French cities — in Amiens, in Marseilles, and, when once his long fight with the augurs was over, in Paris. His work beautifies the Pantheon, the Sorbonne, and the H6tel de Ville. Once neglected, he became one of the recognized glories of French art, and with the good will of the government there went also an increase in public appreciation. It dated most decisively from the exhibition that Durand-Ruel organized in 1886. That silenced the scoffers. For the rest of his life Puvis de Chavannes was a classic in his own country, and was so accepted throughout the world. He is a classic, but that is not to say that he is clas sical. On the contrary, he breaks with the term as it is impHed in the works of Ingres, say, and cultivates a spirit far removed from the spirit of that marmoreal master. There is nothing Greek about Puvis de Cha vannes save that humanity which you may discern in the idyls of Theocritus. He lodges his symbolical figures in landscapes that are Virgilian in their sweet ness. His groups are freely arranged. There is no Raphaelesque symmetry to his design. The equilib rium he establishes is almost naturalistic. He is nearer to Giotto than he is to the more sophisticated craftsmen of the high Renaissance. Least of all has he any points of contact with eighteenth-century formalism as it was understood in France, and as it has been carried through more modem phases by certain of his contemporaries.
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THs side of Chasseriau, Flandrin, and Delacroix, French mural decoration has been largely an affair of picture-making on a large scale. The huge machin which is graduated from the Salon to some place in a provincial museum, even when conceived originally for its ultimate position, remains very much the product of a Salon formula. Between Baudry and Besnard there stretches an immeasurable acreage of mural decoration which is picturesque, realistic, effec tive, and in its commemoration of historical episodes undeniably dever — but it is never an integral part of an architectural ensemble. Baudiy offered a hand some solution of this problem in his work for the Opera, and Besnard has functioned to the same good purpose, but neither of them ever had the feeling for a wall that Puvis de Chavannes had. He would build up a broad, serene landscape background, dis tribute his figures against it with the happiest fidelity to that axiom of Whistler's, that the artist is known by what he omits, and, when he laid down the brash, he had somehow given to the wall a new integrity, as just and convincing as it is original His originality consisted in a grandiose simplicity, a very fresh and interesting development of symbolic motives, and an extraordinarily beautiful gamut of color. It was a gamut of light tones, on the whole, though his love of landscape sometimes led him into wonderfully deep and resonant passages, as in the glorious back ground of "L'Et6," in the H6tel de Vflle. But the
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tints by which you know Puvis de Chavannes are delicate tints of pale green, quiet violet and rose, subdued white, and an all-pervading gray. I have touched upon his tenderness. He is never more ten der than in his color. He drew with great force and suppleness. He modeled with the same august au thority. That ravishing fabric of coloration which distinguishes his art is superimposed upon a ground work of superb construction.
He is a type of French industry, of French disci pline, but he had inspiration if ever a painter had it, and the splendor of his work lies in nothing more than in its quality of creative individuality. With the possible exception of Chasseriau — and that only in slight degree — he had no predecessors in his school, and he has left no followers. The accent of Puvis de Chavannes is as personal as that of Gluck, with whose music, for some indefinable reason, I am always inclined to associate his designs. He had, no doubt, the minor traits that do so much to make us all kin. He was very sensitive, almost unduly so. Marcelle Adam tells us what happened after Dalou had one day permitted himself to speak lightly of a painting by the master. Several days later Puvis de Chavannes went to dine at the house of Philippe GiUe and caught sight of his critic at the foot of the gar den. He disappeared as if by magic and presently sent in a note to Madame Gille: "I have seen Dalou. I could not stay. I could not stay," But there was
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nothing really little in either the man or Ms work. "To think that he has lived among us !" cried Rodin. "To think that this genius, worthy of the most radi ant epochs of art, has spoken to us ! That I have seen him, have pressed Ms hand! It seems as if I had pressed the hand of Nicolas Poussin!" The sculptor made a bust of him, wMch the painter did not like. He thought it, in fact, a caricature ! But there are some words of Rodin's, on the other hand, wMch I may fittingly quote: "He carried Ms head high. His skull, solid and round, seemed made to wear a hel met. His arched chest seemed accustomed to carry the breastplate. It was easy to imagine him at Pavia fighting for Ms honor by the side of Francis I." Thus he endures among the Mstoric painters of France, Mgh-bred, gallant, splendid, doing great things nobly.
XVI
Degas
I. As Painter and Draftsman
II. As a Man
III. As a Sculptor
IV. As a Collector
XVI DEGAS
I
AS PAINTER AND DRAFTSMAN
DEGAS was born in Paris in 1834. He died in the same city in 1917, not only full of years, but quite
literally full of honors^ universally acclaimed as one of the great masters of French art. He left a prodig ious body of work behind Mm in his studio. Glancing over the eight catalogues of the sales through which it was dispersed in 1918 and 1919, I find that they run, all told, to nearly three thousand numbers. For the paintings and drawings in this mass of treasure there was the keenest competition among collectors and dealers, competition productive of a fortune — - over which, by the way, the heirs have had a pretty quarrel. Several examples of Degas have passed into the Louvre. In a word, nothing has been lacking to stamp him as an artist of the type the French like to call "illustrious/5 His art and Ms ideas come un der discussion as the art and ideas of a classic.
It is customary to group Degas with the Impres sionists, and this is natural enough. He was friendly with thenij and especially with Manet, for whom he
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had, Indeed, a deep and lasting affection. He was allied for long years, as they were, too, with that great figure among dealers, Paul Durand-Ruel; and where his potent influence went it carried Degas and Monet, say, together, thus fortuitously emphasizing an asso ciation which might not otherwise have appeared to be particularly close. Yet all the time Degas remained really an isolated character. The reserve which he showed in Ms ordinary walk and demeanor indicates also the aloofness of his art. In a superficial view you would say that Degas was a man of the world. He had the right traits for social intercourse, if he chose to exploit them. He had, to begin with, a vitriolic wit, and they say that he used to shine in the famous salon of the Princess Mathilde. As his pictures show, he frequented the races and the coulisses. Once, when he was in his prime, an officer of the government asked him if there was anything he could do for him, expecting that Degas would want a ribbon or some thing of that sort. The artist replied that what he really desired was a free pass for life into the pre cincts of the Op6ra, so that he could study the ballet to Ms heart's content. Yes, decidedly, Degas had plenty of mundane contacts and enjoyed them. But they left his art in essence untouched. There never was, spiritually speaking, a more redoubtable reduse. There are many piquant stories about him, but the most characteristic one I know is the story disclosing the hermit in him. Talking with a friend he said:
PORTRAIT OF A MAN ix THE STUDIO OF AN ARTIST
FROM THE PAINTING BY DEGAS
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"You know Forain? Well, he has a telephone." "Yes," replied the friend, "I suppose he has." "Do you know what they do?" continued Degas, "They ring him up and they ring him up." "Naturally/* said the other. "What of it?" "Sacre nom de Dieu!" exclaimed the master. "But he answers them ! " A telephone is unthinkable in the apartment in which Degas barricaded himself for years, sealing his door to all save a few friends like Rouart, Durand- Ruel, Forain, or Manet. It would be a mistake to infer from all this that he was just a curmudgeon. He could be not only friendly, but helpful. To Mary Cassatt, for example, he was a stimulating comrade, and only the other day, when I met in New York the Parisianized Spaniard, Jose Maria Sert, I was interested to learn that he owed his good drawing in a measure to his having profited by the kindly coun sel of Degas. When he came out of his shell he could be delightful. Only he preferred mostly to stay in it, to stay detached from the ordinary cur rents of contemporary art.
Look to Ms origins and you look to influences which persisted in him all his life long. This in tensely modern artist, a progressive of the progres sives, the very antithesis of all tMngs academic^ was one of the loyalest disciples of the old masters that ever lived* In Ms formative period as a young man he haunted the Louvre and the great Italian galleries. There is a story that Ms copy of Poussln's "Rape of
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the Sabines" cost him a year's labor. He copied Clouet and Holbein and sat reverently at the feet of Ghirlandajo. He adored the Primitives. His mas ter at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts had been Lamothe, who had been the pupil of Ingres and Flandrin. A framer of artistic pedigrees might say that Ingres begat Lamothe and Lamothe begat Degas. He went to Rome in the fifties and foregathered with men like Elie Delaunay, Bonnat; and the sculptors Chapu and Paul Dubois. He knew also in Rome the ro manticist Gustave Moreau and the composer Bizet, but theirs was not the spirit that communicated it self to him. He was altogether on the side of those conservative ideas which prevailed at the Villa Me- dicis. I remember coming upon a striking portrait in the museum at Bayonne that he painted of Bon- nat, the young Bonnat in a monumental top hat. It is the souvenir of a friendship rooted in a mutual respect for certain ideals of art. Nevertheless they did not tread a common path. Bonnat returned from Italy a predestined Salonnier. Degas was ever to disdain the official standard under which his com rade enlisted. But they were united irrevocably in a passion for research into form. The direction Degas took is interestingly suggested by one of the earliest incidents in Ms career. In 1861 he tackled a subject which, as a subject, was well calculated to qualify him for the Salon, "Semirainis Building the Walls of Babylon." The picture is no masterpiece. But that
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is tie only epithet to be applied to one of the studies
lie made for it, the famous study for a virtually head less draped figure seen in profile. That proclaims —
as early as 1861 — the true Degas, the consummate disciple of Ingres.
George Moore has a charming story of a visit of his to the dusty apartment in the Rue Pigalle. His eye went straight to a drawing placed upon the side board, a faint drawing in red chalk, and Ms quids: movement toward it brought an exclamation from Degas. "Ah ! look at it," he said. "I bought it only a few days ago; it is a drawing of a female hand by Ingres; look at those finger-nails, see how they are indicated. That's my idea of genius, a man who finds a hand so lovely, so difficult to render, that he will shut himself up all his life, content to do nothing else but indicate finger-nails." As Moore says, the whole of the artist's life is summed up in this pas sage. And, apropos, there is an important distinction to observe, I have gone down to Montauban to study the vast collection of the drawings by Ingres there preserved. I have seen almost as many of the drawings of Degas. Both masters are equally free from the implication that might, in error, be drawn from the foregoing anecdote. Neither of them, shut ting himself up all his life to indicate finger-nails, worked in the spirit of the Oriental spending years in tie carving of a cherry stone. Both, on the con trary, drew with extraordinary gusto for the vital
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elements in life. They were miraculous craftsmen absorbed in the study of nature.
Degas didn't take over from Ingres a style, a mode of draftsmanship. What the older man stimulated in him, rather, was an inborn instinct for truth and for the rectitude of drawing. It is this that links him with the old masters, explains his youthful devo tion to them. He was a true Frenchman, which is to say a true child of tradition. Nothing is more foolish than to think of tradition as an academic formula. It is simply the tribute which the genuine artist pays to the wisdom of the finer spirits in the art of all ages. Degas, with tradition in his blood, proceeded in perfect freedom to express himself. The mood in which he designed his Semiramis picture went down the wind. The mood in which he drew his incomparable studies for it governed the develop ment of his entire career, and he was never more essentially classical, more essentially the disciple of Ingres, than when he used his great draftsmanship to define the most modern of forms.
What did Degas mate of life in his art? What did he see, by preference, in the great human spectacle, and what were his thoughts about it? Dip into the first of those catalogues to which I have referred, the one given to paintings he possessed from other hands, and you will find Delacroix as well as Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes as well as Manet. But appreciation of the chief of the Romantics had no more effect upon
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the detenninatlon of Ms own gait than had the tran quil Inspiration of the great mural painter. The actu ality of the moment was the object upon which Degas kept his eye. A cool spirit, as of scientific inquiry, presides over practically everything that he ever did, the exceptions to the rule being so few as to be al most negligible. The outstanding exception is, of course, the celebrated "Interieur" in the Pope col lection. The story, if it has one to tell, remains singularly obscure, a characteristic negation of that anecdotic vein so common in the Salon that the mas ter hated. He may have started to paint the picture in the key of Balzac, but he wound up in the key of Degas — undramaticj passionless, prosaic, I have thought sometimes of the naturalistic school of French fiction when I have stood before the painting that passed with the Camondo collection into the Louvre, "L'Absintlie," it is so Zolaesque a transcript from, life, but nothing is done by Degas to underline such tragic ingredients as may belong to the com position. He paints what he sees and leaves the moral to take care of itself, obviously having no emotion whatever to spend on the subject. I recall a third painting lying off his beaten track, an unfin ished canvas which appeared in the Paris sale and was then sold over again in New York, going into the possession of an American artist. It was a racing scene in which a thrown jockey lay with a deadly pallor upon his face while the field thundered over
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him. It was an accident, pure and simple, that the artist portrayed; not drama thought out. It is one of the delightfulest paradoxes that this denizen of the theatre, who was forever looking at the stage, depicting the movement of the ballet, studying sing- ers across the footlights, painting "Miss Lola" as she hung from the ceiling of the circus, clinging to the cord's end by her teeth, never brought into his art the faintest trace of theatricality. In the theatre and out of it he looked at life from a point of view sublimely disinterested.
It is hard to name the first and most lastingly sig nificant landmark in the career of Degas, for the posi tion is disputed by several works of outstanding beauty. He painted, for example, as far back as 1865, that fascinating medley of portraiture and flower-painting which is known as "La Femme aux Chrysanthemes." Two years later came "La Femme aux Mains Jointes," now in the Gardner collection, which is as brilliant as a Velasquez in its handling of blacks. From 1872 dates the wonderful "Ballet de 'Robert le Diable/" with which the English are doubtless well content as an illustration of Degas at his best when they see it in the Victoria and Albert Museum. All three of these paintings show Degas at his best, a young but puissant master. Yet for my own part, if I had to choose one of the earlier paint ings as constituting a kind of canon of Degas, I would choose "Le Bureau de Coton." He painted it at New
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Orleans in 1873, when he spent some long months on an unde's plantation in the vicinity. As an artist he was never more triumphantly on the crest of the wave than in this picture. It is twenty-five years since I saw it, in the Paris Exposition of 1900, but my vision of it has never lost its clear outlines. Some time every day, through the weeks that I spent in the galleries, I would go and? with unchanging joy, fairly memorize the perfectly balanced design^ the limpid tones, and the matchless drawing — the ever lasting truth and beauty of the thing. In it you have, as it seems to me. Degas in excelsis, the master who observes life with absolute fidelity and lifts it to a higher power through the distinction of his technic. M. Henri Riviere, the latest editor of his drawings, calls him un grand styliste. The phrase exactly fits the painter of "Le Bureau de Coton," which makes him the peer of the old masters he so humbly and so steadfastly followed. Yet with this very thought there come intimations of certain differences betwixt him and them.
They turn upon the matter of imagination,, which, for the present purpose, I conceive not as implying invention, not as promoting adventures in design, but as a transforming element,, one enriching the thing seen even beyond the enrichment of technic. To make the point immediately concrete I would compare "Le Pedicure" by Degas, painted in the same year as "Le Bureau de Coton/' with Rem-
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brandt's "Old Woman Cutting Her Nails.7 ' Both subjects are disgusting, but when you look at Rem brandt's picture disgust is swallowed up in the emo tion which only majestic beauty can evoke. With massy form and imposing drapery, with heroic con tours and with grand light and shade, with rich color, but, above all, with the indescribable play of imagi native power, the artist lends to his commonplace figure the interest and the elevation of a Greek mar ble. When Degas painted "Le Pedicure" he took what was commonplace and left it utterly as he found it. The distinction indicated here is felt wher ever you approach his work. He had, I suppose, a certain amount of human sympathy. You feel it especially in those studies he made of laundresses and other obscure toilers whose unlovely bodies are shaped into even greater unloveliness by grinding hardship. Yet it might easily be possible to deduce from these grimy documents a greater degree of sen sibility than Degas actually had. There are some lines in "The Strayed Reveller" which irresistibly come back to me:
"The Gods are happy. They turn on all sides Their shining eyes, And see below them The earth and men.
These things, Ulysses, The wise bards also
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Behold and sing. But oh7 what labour ! 0 prince, what pain !
They too can see Tiresias; — but the Gods, Who give them vision, Added this law:
That they should bear too BBs groping blindness, His dark foreboding, His scorn Jd white hairs; Bear Hera's anger Through a life lengthened To seven ages."
Degas emphatically was not one of athe wise bards/' What of it? Does this make him any the less the master? Hardly , and the reader may be
sure that I have not cited the foregoing fragment with any idea of its sanctioning a disparaging classi fication of his art. I cite it simply as an aid to char acterization. Arnold so beautifully puts Ms finger upon what was left out of the painter's cosmos. For Mm rather the happy spectatorsWp of Olympus. He did not suffer as he watched Ms jockeys, dancers, caf6 singers, milliners, and all the other passers-by in Parisian life. He did not share their hopes and sor rows — or even wonder if they had any. They were to him merely so many problems in form and move ment, and where his happiness came in was in Ms
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development of the solution of those problems through the language of line.
There lies the key to the beauty that is in him. His line is one of the most beautiful and one of the most magical In the whole history of European draftsmanship. It is in his line that he stands be side Leonardo or Diirer, Michael Angelo or Rem brandt; it is in his line that he is worthy of the Ingres whose example he cherished. He drew it on paper as he painted it on canvas — firmly, flowingly, with the truthfulness of a surgeon exercising his scalpel, with tremendous personal force and with that last creative impulse which endues line with beauty and with style. One can imagine the replies of divers great artists, asked at the gates of the Elysian Fields for their passports to immortality. One can hear Raphael: "I designed." Or Tintoretto: "I drama tized." Or Leonardo: "I evoked beauty." Or Velas quez, using the words that Whistler wrote for him: "I dipped my brush in light and air and caused my people to stand upon their legs." And when it came the turn of Degas, he would say, simply and proudly: "I drew."
II
AS A MAN
Degas had always what Ms countrymen call "a good press." He was wont to speak scornfully of others, which is perhaps one reason why others were
FIGURE FROM "THE Duo"
FROM THE DRAWING BY DEGAS
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wont to speak well of him. Nevertheless, there were few commentators who were able to break through the barriers with which he surrounded himself, and, though much has been written about the artist, little has been written about the man. Even such glimpses of him as George Moore, for example? has given us have been colored by the writer's consciousness of the purely artistic elements in his subject. It is not so in the case of the model, Pauline, whose impres sions were communicated to Alice Michel and by her contributed to the Mercure de France. When she posed for Degas in the closing years of his life she knew perfectly well that she was posing for a genius; but she knew also that her employer was a weary, half -blind , pathetic old man^ and it is the merely human side of him that passed into her recollec tions. I am not sure but that they do more to us acquainted with his personality than is done by any of the high erected tributes that have been paid to him by oracles of much greater pretenses,
It was in the old house at 37 Rue Victor-Mass^ that Pauline posed for the master. "Nora de Dieu ! You pose badly to-day!" is the first saying she quotes from him,, but it is evident that she was, on the whole? a satisfactory mode!7 and she had the run of the studio so long that her descriptions are unmis takably exact. She pictures a vast, sombre? and^ indeed, rather unsympathetic room. It held many armoires, tables, easels, tabourets, screens, so
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on, but there was never a bibelot or a hanging to re lieve the monotony of the dull brown walls. A single painting, unfinished, one of his dancing scenes, gave rather grudging indication of the artistic riches piled within reach, but invisible in portfolios or otherwise Hdden. A curious note is supplied by the bathtub lying among the furniture. The toilet subjects with which Degas so often dealt were not always, after all, of the "keyhole" origin which has been assigned to them. Pictures which have seemed like so many invasions of privacy were really painted in the studio, with the aid of the bathtub aforesaid. Pauline was made pretty uncomfortable by the dust lying thick over everything. Zoe, the old housekeeper, had per mission to light the fire and give a touch of the broom to a limited area extending from the small stove. Otherwise she was forbidden to disturb the accumu lated dirt of years. There was no dean, tidy spot on which the model might deposit her clothes, and when her work was ended she was dismissed to a dark, cold, and dirty corner which was all that le weux maniaque allowed his models for a dressing-room. He deplored the use of a dothes-brush, and was irritated if Pauline wished to wash her hands. It was ridic ulous, he thought, to be always dabbling in the water. Zoe is sympathetic but helpless. She has been with the master for twenty years, and yet, she asks Pauline, with tears in her voice, had the model noticed how Degas had behaved toward her that morning when
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the fire had been slow? And he has not wanted to give up the day's allowance of five francs for the larder. That Is all she gets to feed Mm, herself , and her niece. A chicken sent in by one of his friends has seemed to Mm to cover the situation this time* Yet for the purchase of paintings or drawings he can always find the money !
Pauline's first memories are of an Irritable, taciturn old man, shaking Ms wMte hairs in vexation; his large nostrils breatMng fury; the mouth obstinately dosed; the chin, expressive of a hard will. He wears a long gray blouse, in wMch he takes rapid strides. His movements are habitually brusque. Absorbed in the figurine he is modelling — it is altogether as a sculp tor that Pauline knew Mm — he is exasperated with the model when, as one suspects, the clay proves in tractable. " You pose so badly that you will make me die of rage !" But the very next day aH is changed. He is stifl at breakfast when Pauline c0me% in a room almost as bleak as the studio. Zee is reading him an article from La Libre Parole wMle he eats. "Ta-ta-ta-ta!" he suddenly cries, in a passion. "Mon DieUj Zoe, you read badly !" and he bids her stop. But Pauline notices that Ms expression this morning is generally serene, and she detects a cer tain sweetness in Ms eyes. They talk of homely things. Degas explains that Zoe has been shortening the sleeves of a jacket he has bought in the Pkce Clichy for eighteen francs. Was that expensive?
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Pauline reassures Lira. Zoe seizes the moment to re mind Mm that the time has come for Mm to go to the Bon Marche and buy some sMrts and socks. He pretends not to hear and starts for the studio, but presently gives Zoe ten francs. "Five for Pauline/' he says, "and five for food. Still, yesterday there was the cMcken sent in by a friend." In the studio he is querulous about his ill-health, and impatient of Zoe, who is forever urging him to buy linen. Hasn't he just bought that jacket in the Place Clichy? To be told that Zoe is economical and never wants "him to buy useless things is not really consoling. He will wait till the last minute to do Ms shopping, just the same. Then, when he does it, there will be such a mob of women ! Why not send Zoe ? Oh, well, he likes better to go himself. It occupies an afternoon. He marvels at the emotions of women in the shops. Is Pauline like that? No, she has no time for shop ping, though she must soon hunt up a bit of silk for her mother's birthday. Degas pooh-poohs the silk idea. When he seeks gifts for Ms sister and her daugh ters he finds something more useful.
The talk drifts to Ms afternoon promenades. They are an old habit. He takes the tram from the Place Pigalle to the Porte de Vincennes and strolls for a whfle on the fortifications. Then another tram and another walk and he is home. He goes to Montrouge and Auteuil. He is especially fond of Montmartre, for he knows all the streets there and does not need
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to ask his way. But It hardly matters where he goes? with his poor eyes. Pauline warns Mm to be prudent^ reminding him of the taxis and other dangers of the highway. Yes. He knows. Zoe is always warning hinij and is in terror if he is late in returning. But he can't stay eternally at home. He needs the air. She tells him he moves as swiftly as a rabbit. She has seen him near the Moulin Rouge? and he went up the Rue Lepic too quickly for her to overtake him. He laughs. "Yes, I still have good legs." He does not like to go out at night. The streets are too badly lighted. He rarely accepts an invitation to dinner. Besides^ it would keep him up too late. Pauline re minds Mm that he goes to bed at nine. He sighs,, and then breaks out in rebellion against his semi- blindness. It is hideous not to see clearly. For years he has had to renounce drawing and paintingj and has had to content himself with sculpture. If Ms sight goes on failing he will have to abandon even that. Then^ what will he do with Ms days? He will die of ennui and disgust. What has he done that he should be thus tortured? All his life has been con secrated to Ms work. Never has he sought honors or riches. He appeals to Mgh heaven to spare him the torment of going blind. His model tries to comfort him. He is not going blind. He is fatigued, and the day is cold. Finer days will make him better. Does Pauline think so? The thought cheers Mm. She re iterates it. The doctors would tell Mm the same
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thing. He is doing very well for a man of seventy- six. He works every day, even on Sundays and holi days. Younger artists do not work so hard. He has a good appetite and a good digestion; he sleeps well and has no rheumatism like his old friend the col lector, Rouart. He laughs and goes to work.
Precious, inspiring, rejuvenating work! Degas sings a fragment from "Don Giovanni" as his fingers fly; sings in a voice which Pauline finds "sweet and expressive," and he translates the text for his listener. He knows the Italian operas by heart, and some days passes the whole morning singing them over his clay, pausing to cry out: "Is not this delicious?" He wanders off into fantastic monologues and sometimes forgets himself, using words which are enough, Paul ine tells him, to make a trooper blush. He apologizes for offending her "chaste ears." He knows not what he is saying when he is at work. She asks for a rest from the difficult pose and for the air he has just been singing. It is the air of a minuet, and as he sings they face one another in the movement of the dance. He grows happy. The minuet finished he seizes her hand and swings her in a ronde, singing the while an old song. A little giddy at the end of it, he subsides upon a lounge and asks: "What is prettier or more gracious than these old French rondes?" Zoe comes in with a bowl of tisane. He drinks it with laughter and chuckles over the idea of himself as a Don Juan. Aside from his lapses into bad language his conduct
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with Ms models is impeccable, but he gleefully pleads with Pauline to see that when she poses in other studios she gives him a sinister reputation,
To his gayety on one day succeeds gloom on the next. He thinks always of death. Day or night the dread of it is before his eyes. How sad it is to be old, he cries. How lucky for Pauline to be only twenty- five. She protests against his repimngs. She reminds him to look at HarpignieSj who is ninety. Whether the spectacle encourages him or not> he is willing to change the subject. He tells Pauline that he loves her name, and goes on to speak of "Edgard/1 Ms own* "When I was born, in 1834," he says, " the epoch was one for romantic names, and my parents followed the fasMon. My grand-parents were old ^mlgres^ who left Paris under the Revolution for Naples. They be came bankers there. I still have kinsfolk in that re gion." Musing over these relations he recalls how he was often in the south when he was young; speaks of travelling with Gustave Moreau, but now, alas! he does not see well enough for such journeys. He re calls his sojourn in America^ when he spent long months on his uncle*s plantation. Connoisseurs of Ms work know this period as it is commemorated in one of the most brilliant of Ms earlier pictures, the famous "Bureau de Colon." Degas says nothing of this. He brings back? instead^ the joyous moment in wMch he had speech with a French workman on the New Orleans docks. In it he caught the Parisian
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argot} which he was missing, and it brought tears to his eyes. Pauline angles for memories of more im portant people. He smiles at her curiosity, which he easily detects, girding at her "little elephant feet." Degas turns the tables and wants to know about M. Blondin, for whom Pauline also poses. She speaks of that gentleman's indulging in blague, "like all art ists/' and as he scornfully repeats that phrase, he discourses on artists and their models. They both behave better than the world thinks. He speaks well of models and of the ballet dancers who have so often posed for him. Incidentally, he remarks that he has been several times to call for news of one of the dancers, Yvonne, who has been down with typhoid. One senses the kindly, generous feeling in the old man's heart.
If he grumbles at others, he grumbles at himself. Pauline notes his chagrin when he finds that one of his figurines is in bad shape, and realizes that he might have made it securer if he had not been too solicitous of the cost of plasteline. But his bitterest outbursts are against the meretiicious folk in art. How about M. Blondin ? Is he ambitious ? Has he any medals ? On learning that the poor man has indeed been recom pensed in the exhibitions, Degas is furious. "Hein! They are ridiculous with their medals. These men do not speak as we do of such a thing happening in such a year. No, they say, "The year when I had iny medal, or my premier prix, or my violet ribbon,' as
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women say, 'The year when I had my beautiful robe de ueloursJ And to tHnk that even my friends, my best friends, run after honors and distinctions; talk of salons and exhibitions. A true artist does not do these things. If he really has talent he can show his works, no matter where? even in the shop of a shoe- maker; and he will surely find persons to notice and appreciate him." Pauline points out that he also has exhibited. She has read about him in a brochure by Huysmans, This Is the signal for a terrific gust of
contempt. "Huysmans? He is a What has he
to do with painting? He knows nothing. Good heavens! In what an epoch we are living, when models come to you to speak of art, of painting^ of literature^ as if all they had to know was how to read and write. People were happier without all this useless instruction. Zoe has two brothers^ one a butcher and the other a wagoner. They neither read nor write, and this is not bad for them. To-day everything is vulgarized — education, and even art. What a criminal folly to talk of £ popular art'! As if artists themselves had not enough labor to appre hend art. But it all comes from these modem of equality! What infamy to speak of equality! There will always be the rich and the poor. For merly each one stayed in Ms place aad dressed ac cording to Ms condition. To-day the obscurest grocer's boy must read his newspaper and like
a gentleman. What an infamous century!"
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Pauline knew better than to try to answer this tirade. She went on posing, in a glacial silence. The door bell rang and Degas straightened up with his surliest expression. As he opened the door there drifted in to Pauline's attentive ear a dulcet "Bon- jour, dier Mattre" In an instant came the reply 3 "There is no ccker Mattre1 here/' and the door went to with a bang. In a fury Degas goes back to work,
muttering: "It is one of those art critics." The
unfortunate visitor was one who knew not the habit of his cker Matire, which was to work undisturbed in the morning. Even his closest intimates were un welcome then. Only at meals or in the afternoons would he see anybody. Once in Pauline's experience a round, lively, white-haired little gentleman was received in the morning and spent a long time talk ing. He waved his arm at the sole picture exposed, the dancing subject we have cited, and offered to buy it. "You can see that it is not finished," growled Degas. "But it is very well as it is," retorted the other. "Let me have it." The old artist, who had been amiable enough up to this, took on a crusty tone. "You know nothing," he replied, and opened the door wide for his tactless guest to depart.
Where is the searcher after beauty in this atmos phere of dust, work, and ill-temper? Pauline speaks of his always giving her difficult poses. He had an aversion, as it seemed to her, to all gracious move ment. But his cult for what we may call severity
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never blinded Mm to the charm of pure nature. He was enraged If he caught Pauline using rouge. "When one is young and fresh there is no need for such frip peries. Restez done naturelle" She asked Mm why,
then, he loved to draw Ms themes from the theatre, where there is so much that is factitious, but to this
she got no answer. There are no nuances of Ms artis tic ideal emerging from the dialogue. One is made aware cMefly of just Ms passion for art, for work. Artistic activity was essential to him. He worked on Christmas Day. "How could I pass the morning otherwise? God will forgive me for neglecting my Christian devotions for my work." In Ms absorption he was merciless to Ms models. There was one of them, Suzon, who had the hardihood to be a quarter of an hour late for her morning's work. Degas dis missed her the moment she turned up, giving her the five francs due for the sitting, but forbidding her ever to return. His own hours were as adamant, Forain found this out when Degas once came to dine with him- The dinner was for nine o'clock. TMs was too late for Degas, who said so, and sat down to Ms soup alone at eight. He never dined there again. He complained, by the way, that Forain called Mm UM, Degaz."
Sensitive, brusque, irascible, and, perhaps, capri cious, Pfire Degas was chancy company. There came a time when illness interrupted Ms modelling and Pauline did not see him for months. Thent when, she
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sought him out, she found that the house in the Rue Victor-Masse in which he had lived for twenty-five years had been marked for demolition, to make way for a modern building, and she followed Degas to new quarters in the Boulevard de Clichy. Zoe re ceived her with joy and took her at once to the mas ter, who was at table. He lifted his head and asked Pauline briefly what she wished. She had only called to ask after his health, she explained. "Yes," said he. "Zoe, bring me my tea. Bonjour> Pauline." That was his farewell, and in its curtness It would seem to deny to her reminiscences the seal of any thing like friendship. But they can do without it. They serve, nevertheless, as I have said, to initiate us into the presence of the old man, to make us realize a little what he was like — harsh and gay, variable but, somehow, "all of a piece/3 He is exasperating, touching, and, somehow, not unlovable. Through the play of his saturnine humor you catch the natural man and see what it is good to see — how even to Pauline, who took him simply as a human being, he was the great artist. Does she not make plain his passion for his work? Month after month she posed for him, while he wrestled with the clay and fashioned the little statuettes which were alone left to him in art. What were they like? He was not an expert in the manipulation of the sculptor's material The figurines over which he labored with so much devo tion would crumble or go away. But a man of his
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gifts could not winnow the wind. Something was certain to come forth from aU that struggle.
in
AS A SCULPTOR
From the moment that I read Pauline's account of her experiences as a model for some of the figurines sculptured by Degas, I tried to get on their track. Inquiry made of M. Durand-Ruel brought me this letter:
MY DEAR MR. CORTISSOZ: June 7? I919*
It is quite true that Degas has spent a good deal of time, not only in the later years of his life, but for the
past fifty years, in modelling in clay. Thus, as far as I can remember — that is to say, perhaps forty years — whenever I called on Degas I was almost as sure to find
him modelling in clay as painting. He must have made an enormous number of clay or wax figures. But as he never took care of them — he never put them in bronze — they always fell to pieces after a few years, and for that reason it is only the later ones that now exist.
When I made the inventory of Degases possessions I found about one hundred and fifty pieces scattered over his three floors in every possible place. Most of them were in pieces, some almost reduced to dust. We put apart all those that we thought might be seen, -which was about one hundred, and we made an inventory of them. Out of these, thirty are about valueless; thirty badly brokeE up and very sketchy; the remaining thirty are quite fine. They can be cast in bronze. They have ai been intrusted to the care of the sculptor Bartholome, who was an in timate friend of Degas, and in the near future the work
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will be started by the founder Hebrard, who will repro duce them in cire perdue.
It is understood that twenty-five sets of each statuette will be made. The first set will be given to the Louvre. The other sets will be sold. y^ sincerely?
J.
It was possible for me to get some idea of what the figurines were like at the time this letter was written, studying a sheaf of photographs, but I had to wait two years and more for a view of the sculp tures themselves. A set, the first one to reach this country, was placed on exhibition at the Grolier Club. It made a group of seventy-two bronzes, magnificently illustrating the master's work in the round.
In everything that he did he was an insatiable in terrogator of form and movement. Modelling these statuettes, he drew, if anything, closer to the expres sion of his ideas on these subjects than he could with the brush. What were his ideas ? Were they those of a creative artist or those of a craftsman for whom, in Gautier's phrase, the visible world existed? Just after his death, when the novelty of the figurines was in the air, so to say, M. Paul Gsell rose up in "La Renaissance" to pronounce Degas une statuaire de g&nie. The phrase seems just, if its implications are not carried too far. That Degas had genius it would be idle to deny, but thinking of genius in sculpture one assumes an element that would seem to be in-
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separable from it, the element of design. The Degas bronzes, on the other hand, are the fruits not of in vention but of patient observation. When they pos sess the quality of composition, which is not infre quent, it would appear to be accidental rather than intentional. You would say that one of his poised dancers had the charm of a figurine by Clodion until you began to ponder it more closely and saw that the sophisticated balance of the eighteenth century was not there. There is, in its place, the artless vitality of the thing seen, the passage from life ar rested and restated with the touch of the pitiless realist.
Degas carried over into these plastic studies of his something of the dry psychology of Ms pictorial work. He is the inquisitive analyst pursuing some recon dite movement of form and recording it for its own sake, not the inventive devotee of beauty weaving a plastic pattern of loveliness. Because there are both grace and rhythm in many of the bronzes one may be momentarily inclined to see in them the disciple of Ingres. But the impression is superficial and passes. What remains is the point of view of a man for whom a gesture, a contour, was by itself exciting, a truth interesting because it was the truth, rooted in life, not because it had any subjective envelop ment. Looking at the photographs mentioned above, I recalled the figurines of Tanagra, wondering if any thing of their mood had ever visited Degas, Looking
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at the bronzes, I felt that the spirit of Tanagra was beside the point. I was not sorry.
Degas is twice as compelling because there is noth ing of tradition in his sculpture, but just the actuality to which his whole genius was dedicated. And being a genius he reached a beauty of his own. The little torso he modelled is a good illustration. There hangs about it the sensuous glamour of the antique. Only it remains, like all the other pieces, intensely modern, intensely expressive of that analytic passion to which I have referred. It is so, too, with the studies of horses. In them the vivid, tangible note of the race course seems fused with a large dignity that could only have been added to the bronze by an artist with the gift of style. That is the final touch, en riching the whole varied group of nudes, dancers, and animals. You savor the artist's truth, his energy, his skill, but above all you savor his style, his distinc tion of line, his personal touch in the modulation of surface. The new page that is unfolded in the his tory of his art is absolutely "of a piece" with the rest; it raises the stuff of life to a higher power through the play of that magic which lies simply in great, in dividualized technic.
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IV AS A COLLECTOR
I have spoken on another page of the obscurity in
which the solitary life of Degas was plunged. For years his door was sealed to all save a few intimates, and, once within, not even his old friends could fee! that they were made really free of all Ms possessions. In perennial dust and gloom, as Mr. Moore has told us, the vast canvases of his youth were piled up in formidable barricades, and though many works from other hands were visible on the walls no visitor ever came away with a precise and comprehensive knowl edge of just what the old^ secretive apartment contained. All that was generally known was that Degas had accumulated a lot of fine things, among which the productions of Ingres were conspicuous. The rest was legend. For art lovers throughout the world, fascinated by his own works and doubly inter ested in the question of his taste because it had its mysterious aspects, he became a figure not unlike one of Balzac's cottectionneurs — shadowy, reticent, a little bizarre, and, in the matter of furnishing surprises* presumably capable of anything. It is not too much to say that the public exhibition of no collection of our time has been awaited with a tithe of the curi osity excited when the "Collection particuliere E. Degas" was sold in 1918 and 1919. A bundle of pho tographs is not, ordinarily, the most eloquent thing
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in the world, but the one wiiich lifted for me the cur tain hung over a great artist's studio for a lifetime was fairly thrilling. With its aid, reinforced by the scant biographical data available, I could reconstruct something of the artist's inner life and get that much closer to the secret of his genius.
The small number of old masters in the list — an early copy after Cuyp, an eighteenth-century French portrait, a typically elegant Perronneau, a sketch by Tiepolo, and a couple of pictures of saints by El Greco — is in no wise to be misunderstood. For his old masters Degas naturally went to the museums. He prospered exceedingly, but he was never rich enough to make for himself another Louvre. How he haunted that institution and the Italian galleries we know. In his earlier period he was all for the old masters and the world well lost. It is said that he spent a year copying Poussin's " Rape of the Sabines," and according to George Moore the copy is as fine as the original. There are stories, too, of his copying Clouet and Holbein, and, whether he studied Ghir- landajo for the same purpose or not, it is known that he sat reverently at the feet of that Renaissance Florentine. M. Lemoisne cites also a copy from Sir Thomas Lawrence, an odd type to be found in this gallery. What was it that lie sought among the Primitives? The answer is disclosed the more lumin ously as we postpone it to the hour of his edosion as an artist.
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It Is tempting to the students of Degas, familiar with the works characteristic of the greater part of his life, to see him as so essentially allied to the mod ern, impressionistic group as to have, otherwise^ no antecedents. The influence of Ingres is often reck oned with, by commentators on Mm? as though it were a deliberately adopted elixir, something poured out of a bottle. As a matter of fact, the passion for sound drawing was in Ms blood. It was that that drew him to the Primitives. His initiation into the circle of Ingres would appear to have dated from Ms youth. Degas was born in 1834. He was old enough when he frequented the house of Mme. Valpingon, the master's friend , to profit by his few encounters there with the august potentate. Ingres lived on until 1867. Doubtless before the end Degas had pre cept as well as example to make the menage Valpin- gon memorable to him, counsels for the confirmation of wMch he had only to turn to the pictures given to his hostess by her friend, At any rate, it puts no strain upon the imagination to figure Mm as making, almost as though under the eye of Ingres^ the famous "Etude pour Semiramis," which Ingres Mmself would not have disdained. To think of Degas as exclusively the painter of jockeys, ballet girls, and laundresses is to forget the picture on which he labored so devot edly in 1861, Ms "Semiramis Building the Walls of Babylon." That mood of Ms, we say, long ago went down the wind. It stayed with him, to tell the truth.,
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in a sense, down to the day he died. For it was not an archaeological mood. It was the mood for form, for contours finely drawn, for draperies handled as so much sheer linear beauty. It was the mood of Ingres. Here I resume my bundle of photographs and look at the list.
Montauban itself could hardly furnish forth a purer light on the subject. The collection there is more voluminous, of course, but it contains no finer things than the works in the Degas collection. There was, to begin with, a group of the full-dress portraits, a " Monsieur de Norvins," which seemed almost as impressive as the "Bertin" in the Louvre; a "Mar quis de Pastoret," making for it a fit companion, and, to complete the trio, an unmistakably superb portrait of a lady, this one "Madame Leblanc." Evidently in painted portraiture Degas contrived to get a full and authoritative representation of his master; in the matter of subject pictures he was no less fortunate, acquiring a version of the "Roger deKvrant Angelique," as well as half a dozen other mythological or historical studies, and then, having formed a sufficient gallery of the paintings, he pro ceeded fairly to luxuriate in the drawings. The titles fill a couple of pages in the list, pointing to a veri table mine of glorious draftsmanship, and the photo graphs more than confirmed this impression. He missed no aspect of the great artist's genius.
A study for the "Roger" gave his measure in the
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sphere of pictorial invention; there were portraits^ and dozens of the incomparable nudes, including one gem-like study for "The Grand Odalisque." I could dilate upon them aE, one by one. But I turn rather to their broad significancej visualizing Degas through out the years of his maturity, coming home to that quiet studio of Ms to paint a ballet girl — but paint ing under the influence of these drawings^ drinking in their inspiration day by day, living constantly in the spirit of the dassicist he adored. At the bottom of his work you find Ingres^ which is to say not the imitation of a style but the application of a principle. It is an instance of the thinking artist, that always rare type, the man whose hand is fed by Ms brai% who practises Ms own method, but is steadily open to other impressions, allowing them to fertilize Ms genius without governing it. There axe no contra dictions in the life of such an artist. He does not "dislike" one master because he "likes35 another. All is fish that comes to Ms net
But you find a pretty clearly defined catch when you look into the net of an artist like Degas. After Ingres he was enthusiastic for Delacroix, of all men. I say "of all men" because the antithesis between Ingres and Delacroix is so strong. Each fairly hated what the other did. Just why Degas^ loving Ingres, loved also Ms romantic rival iss I confess^ a little difficult to surmise, even with the evidence before me. The evidence, in fact, was so mixed. The early por-
254 Personalities in Art
trait, " Baron de Schwitzer," supplied something in the nature of a due. It was a simple, beautifully drawn thing. Ingres would have praised it — if he could have praised anything by Delacroix. The rest was all pure romanticism — Delacroix the disciple of Rubens, Delacroix the Orientalist, Delacroix the painter of battle scenes, of hunting episodes, of religious sub jects a la Titian. There were drawings, as in the Ingres contingent, but one suspects it was the color- ist in Delacroix that won Degas. At all events, he was in this collection, as in the days when the two men were living, the rival of Ingres. They were the twin pillars bearing the arch, as it were, of that aesthetic fabric which Degas reared in his home, under which he dreamed his dreams and did his work. No other individual loomed quite so large in the list. But just one came very near to doing so. This was Manet. There was a curious leap, if I may so define it, from period to period in the Degas collection. One was aware in the first place, as I have indicated, of the pervasive influences of Ingres and Delacroix. Then a silence befell. It was the Salon and all its works being haughtily ignored.
Was he attracted at that juncture by the Bar- bizon men? Yes, by Corot. There were seven of that master's works in the collection, evidently in more than one of his manners. The photograph gave an enchanting account of an early mountain scene done in the Morvan. There were others, like "Le Pont de
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Limy/* which seemed even In a photograph to be made of the pure gold of Corot. Moore has a note that is appropriate here, a note on Degas at a Bouglval dinner, looking at some large trees massed in shadow. "How beautiful they would be," he said} "if Corot had painted them." There was one Rousseau, and I observed a couple of studies by Millet. There was nothing of Dupre, of Diaz, of Daubigny, as there was nothing, on the purely romantic side, of Decamps or G£ricault. Troyon, obviously 3 was likewise absent. One cannot see Degas ecstatic before a painted cow. Barbizon^ in short, as Barbizon, and "1830" as a battle cry, it is plain, meant nothing to Degas. He was bored by "schools," " movements/" and I know nothing more characteristic of him. Let me revert to that leap to which I have just alluded. Barring his pause upon tie beauty of Corots it took him straight to the camp of the impressionists, to Manet and the rest,
The Manets included a number of works tint were "important," as the jargon of criticism has it, stunning finished pictures like the "Indienne Fu- mant," or the half-humorous u Portrait of M. Bran." masterly stfll-lifes like the " Jambon" and the "Poire" (which in the photograph had the air of a miracle), and so on through a group of paintings^ studies, and pastels, twenty pieces in all. There were in this little collection some items of quite extraordinary interest, a strange , fragmentary version of "The Execution of
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Maximilian," a portrait of Berthe Morisot that was like a sudden flashlight effect thrown upon a screen. We have heard from Moore and others of the deep-rooted affection Degas had for Manet. These pictures seemed echoes of it. Some, possibly all of them, may have been purchased, but from their quality one took them to have been fraternal gifts or exchanges. They had the character of personal souvenirs. As in the case of Corot, I felt in the presence of the essential artist. No one else in the Impressionistic cenade appeared to have had any thing like the same hold upon Degas. Pissarro turned up with four or five landscapes, Sisley with one, and there were traces of Caillebotte and John Lewis Brown. By Berthe Morisot there was a good sketch, and by the American impressionist, Mary Cassatt, there were no fewer than four pictures. Boudin was present in a couple of sky studies and a water- color, and Renoir in a good head of a woman. Of Claude Monet there was no sign at all. Had they some personal cause of disagreement, or did Degas, painting ballet girls over and over again, in infinite variety, rebel against the somewhat monotonous tendency in his contemporary's similar devotion to haystacks and cathedrals? The omission was in dubitably a little odd.
He took with a good will the step from impres sionism to post-impressionism. One of his Gauguins was a curious memento of the point of contact be-
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tween the twos a copy of Manet's "Olympia," which in the photograph would easily pass for an original study. He had at least ten of Gauguin's paintings, most of them relics of the painters sojourn in Tahiti. Cezanne was almost as fully represented, with por traits, figure subjects, and still life, and Van Gogh also had his modest place, being given three numbers in the catalogue. Turning over the photographs and recalling the good old rule that the king can do no wrong, I realized that I ought to be deeply impressed by the inclusion of these things In the collection of Degas. In some pious quarters, I know, it could only be taken as a kind of pontifical ratification, and I am quite sure that the episode served in those quarters to give the post-impressionist hypothesis a new lease of life. For my own part I could only look upon this small section In the mass as an incongruous pendant, difficult to reconcile — even for the "thinking artist" to whom I have referred • — with the atmosphere and principles otherwise disclosed. The "going/1 so to say, was easier in passing to the remaining pieces In the list, the paintings by Daiimier, Puvis, and LegroSj the dozen drawings by Forain — one of the master's peculiar admirations — and a few oddments by Jeannlot, Guilkumin, Ricard? Bartholom€ (the sculptor), and the portrait painter of the Second Em pire, Helm. There was also a single work of German origin, an example of the great draftsman Menzel. These things fitted Into the picture, the picture of a
258 Personalities in Art
gallery and a mind. It is an ancient axiom that a man is known by the company he keeps. An artist is certainly known by his predilections among other artists. That is why I found so lively an interest in a bundle of insensate photographs. In the memories they awoke of Ingres and Delacroix, Manet and Corot, Daumier and Forain, they illuminated and explained Degas. We know him better, and the better understand his own work, in knowing the mas ters with whom he most cared to live.
XVII
Monet
XVII
MONET
WHEN despatches from France brought the news that Claude Monet In his eighty-third year had un dergone an operation for cataract, the natural thing to do was to turn to M. Joseph Durand-Ruel for some light on the subject. Like Ms father before him, he is close to everything that relates to Impression ism, and, as usual, he had received from Paris some interesting communications. "Yesterday," wrote a member of his family, "we went to Giverny to pay a visit to Claude Monet, who interrupted Ms game of backgammon with Clemenceau to greet us most kindly. He was looking wonderful, with Ms plaited frills and Ms vest painted by Mme. Albert Andrfi. His eyes seemed to be all right, but he will undergo his second operation shortly." Later M. Georges Durand-Ruel wrote: "I received yesterday a visit from Michel Monet. Monet underwent Ms second operation last Wednesday at a clinic at NeuSly. The operation itself was not much, and he stood It very well, but for the following three days he was pre scribed complete immobility; he was given no food, but was fed only on liquids. He was rather ex asperated but Is now calm, and Michel Monet told
261
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me I could pay Mm a visit. He will stay a few days longer in the clinic before he returns to Giverny. The cataract of the other eye is very advanced; the surgeon says he could make the operation now, but he prefers to wait until next year, when Monet has entirely recovered from the operation." In still an other note the writer says: "I have just come back from Monet's clinic. I saw him only a short time, having been asked not to stay long. Mme. Jean Monet told me that the night following the opera tion had been bad. He had been asked to be quiet, but was very nervous and exasperated." A few days later he was on his feet again and planning for an early return to his beloved Giverny.
These details, surely of interest to every admirer of the great painter, revived in me a precious mem ory of Claude Monet some twenty-odd years ago. I saw him then at Givemy, and in the mind's eye I see again as though it were yesterday that unique presence, those searching eyes, and a curious im- maculateness. There was about the burly, bearded figure something which I can only describe as the sweetness and freshness of youth. We sat and talked in the studio, looking over a great collection of im pressions that Monet had just painted on the Thames, and, apropos, I shall never forget the serene finality with which he told me that numbers of them were doomed to destruction, because they did not satisfy him. Afterward we joined the family around a table
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under the trees and went on talking about pictures while Madame Monet knitted. He was Interested to hear about impressionism in the United States. But most vividly of all do I recall the Monet who pres ently dropped artistic subjects and took me for a stroll through his incomparable domain. Part of it was a garden full of flowers. Part of it was that little body of water, an arm of the Epte7 thickly framed by trees? where lilies floated and where the Master painted those exquisite pictures known as "Les Pay- sages (TEau," or "Les Nympheas/' Monet's conver sation then revealed him for what he has always been3 a loving interpreter of Nature^ the man happier in her companionship than amid any of the attractions of urban life. I wonder if this had not had something to do with the freshness^ the inunaculateness to which I have referred. 1 know that there was something about Monet, something indescribably wholesome and fine, suggestive of a spiritual alMance between him and the clean earth. This impression is ratified as I turn the pages of the book about him published by his old friend, Gustave Geffrey,
Geffroy begins, characteristically enough in the case of a French artist, with allusions to Monet's re spect for tradition and paints Mm as out of with his own work when he thinks of the achieve ments of the past. "All the which 1 have re ceived," he said one day, "seem out of when I remember the masters of painting, Titian,
264 Personalities in Art
Veronese, Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, whose genius is incontestable. After their works what are ours, what are mine?" Being a man of genius him self, his admirations take a wide range. In the salle of the eighteenth century, at the Louvre, Clemenceau asked him what picture there he would choose. Wat- teau's "Embarkation for Cythera," Monet told him, His reverence for the old masters has been unbounded. At Madrid he has stood before "Las Meninas" of Velasquez with his eyes full of tears. But in his ap preciation of that very picture you have a clue to the secret of his own creative gift. He told Geffroy that what he especially admired in "Las Meninas" was the air bathing the figures. With admirable judgment his biographer makes the most of that clue. Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840 (the same day as Rodin, who was to become Ms lifelong friend), but as a young artist he received his initiation at Havre, There he began as a designer of caricatures, and in the shop to which he took them for sale he fell in with Boudin, whom Courbet called "the Raphael of the skies*3' When we find bun again in Paris, his vocation well settled, it is with a feeling for light and air and truth which had unquestionably been clarified and fixed in him by Boudin.
M. Geffroy draws a charming picture of him as a young man in the capital, making friends among the brilliant Bohemians of the Brasserie des Martyrs, his ardors stimulated by the talk of Champfleury, Dur-
Monet 265
anty, Flrmin Mallard, and a score of others destined for fame. Courbet, superb In a wMte waistcoat, would describe a visit to Ingres. Poets would dedalm their verses. Castagnary would come there, and so would Alphonse Daudet. Decidedly the Brasserie was rich in enkindling personalities. Monet refers to some of them as * mauvais sujets like myself." He looks anything save a sujet in the portrait of Hm
painted at this time by Deodat de Severac. On the contrary he appears an unusually grave youth of eigh teen, with a lofty brow and an altogether serious as pect. In fact, he was nothing if not serious, as is shown by his letters to Boudin, full of Judgmatic com ment on the pictures in the Salon. He is highly appre ciative, by the way, of Delacrok? Rousseau? Millet, and Daubigny. In the early sixties came his military service, but ill health terminated this after two years, and on his return from Africa, artistically the better for what he had seen there, he went once more to Havre, where he painted again with Boudin, and this time came also under the equally favorable influence of Jongkind. Coming back definitively to Paris around 1863, he formally entered the atelier of Gleyre. Whis tler, the reader will recall, made a similar error. Monet found three young fellows of Ms own likewise bewildered by an incongruous master. They drew from the model. Gleyre criticised Monet's work one day. "It is not bad,11 said he, "but the breast is heavy, the shoulder too powerful, and the foot too
266 Personalities in Art
large. " Timidly Monet replied that he had to draw that which he saw. "Praxiteles," Gleyre dryly told him, "took the best elements from a hundred imper fect models before he created a masterpiece. When one would do anything it is well to think of the antique." That night Monet talked it over with the three aforesaid, which is to say with Sisley, Renoir, and Bazille. "This place is unhealthy/7 he said, and after a fortnight more of vain struggle with an im possible philosophy they incontinently fled. It is not surprising that Monet's rebellion against Gleyre landed him forthwith in the arms of Courbet.
Courbet was very kind and encouraging to the young man, who, as he said, "painted something be sides angels/7 giving him good advice and even lending him money when he was in difficulties. Some of Geffroy's pleasantest pages relate to this friendship. I gather that Monet fairly loved the old artist, with whom he spent some of the happiest days of his life painting around Havre. It was there that Courbet made him acquainted with the elder Dumas. Once, when they were to dine together, Courbet failed to appear, and Monet, seeking him out, found him asleep. Dumas was gayly astonished. "I have frequented kings," he cried, "and they have never kept me wait ing!" One is always coming back to Havre with Monet, for that means coming back to the sea, an in fluence constant in the painter's life. He wanted al ways to be near it. "When I die," he once said, "I
Monet 267
would wish to be coffined In a buoy"1 — which would be to be rocked In the cradle of the deep with a vengeance. It is a singular thing; however, that while one of the earliest of his pictures Is a shore painted at Havre In i8667 and wMle divers views in Paris come down from ihe same year, Monet's role at the outset was as much that of the figure painter as that of the landscape or marine artist. His first considerable paintings were undoubtedly "Le D6- jeuner sur L'Herbe" and "La Dame i la Robe Verte," a full-length portrait of the painter's wife. Geffrey fixes between 1880 and 1883 that phase in the evolu tion of Monet which marks him most decisively as the salient master of impressionism. It is that this French critic, for many years the of the master, should use the word "evolution." That is precisely the right one.
He seems to have abandoned figure painting in the seventies, and thenceforth Ms landscapes steadily in atmospheric refinement. Light, always light, that it is which pro\res more and more an element in the painter's palette — a thing as defi nitely controlled as the actual It is a little disappointing at first to observe that the biog rapher of Monet had little, if anything, to say the scientific aspect, so called, of the movement. But on reflection this circumstance only serves happily to indorse the view 1 always maintained that impressionism has really had no
268 Personalities in Art
scientific aspect at all. Claude Monet is an artist — a great artist — and that, I venture to say, means that he has arrived at his delineations of nature through processes of direct observation, instinct, and experi mentation. Somewhere in this book he is encountered declining to assume the functions of a teacher. There is not available anywhere, that I know of, a philos ophy, a body of ideas, attributable to him. Simply, across the years he has beaten out a method, a mode, a style.
One fact, easily accessible, yet, somehow, newly emphasized by Geffroy, is the variety of Monet's ex perience. He has been, as I have said, a figure painter. He has dealt also, and dealt beautifully, with still life. He has painted rivers and the sea, hay stacks and poplars. In Rouen, Venice, and London, as well as in Paris, he has painted architecture with a peculiar flair for its character. He has been a fairly active traveller, and Geffroy follows him to many points of the compass. A full and rich life has been Monet's, unified by a single-hearted devotion to light, atmosphere, and color. How has it all fared with him ? How have the Fates treated his magnificently sus tained effort? In so far as they have been embodied in the French critics of his time it may be said that they took a long time to recognize his abilities. Monet preserves at Giverny an extraordinary collection of press cuttings. Geffroy has had access to it, and a great deal of his space, too much, in fact, is given to
MATiXEi' SVR LA SllXK PROM THE PAINT IX<» IJV t"LAI*i>i
Monet
citations from these peccant judges. The ineptitude of one of themj M. Roger Ballu, uimpecteur da Beaux- ArtS) critique qfficid," may suffice here as a terrible example. Glancing at an exhibition held by lionet and Cezanne in 1877^ this worthy said: "One have seen these lamentable canvases to they are. They promote laughter. They lie
profoundest ignorance of draftsmanship, of compo sition, and of color. When children with paper and a box of colors they do better."
One can sympathize a little with fe ban over
his revolt against Cezanne, but that Monet have thus affected Mm is^ as Geffrey says, stupefying. It does not matter. The Ballus, the ClaretieSj the Albert Wolffs, and al the rest of the malcontents have gone down the wind. And in those long years during which they of influence in the world Monet had Ms backers. He had Ms friends in what has come to be known as the Impressionist group — Manet, Degas, and the rest. He had a tower of in Paul Durand-Rud, and
it is gratifying to meet in quotations from the latter the liveliest testimony to ''Without America/* he "I
lost, minedj after having bought so and
Renoirs. The two I in
saved me. The American public it is true, but to public Monet Renoir
were to live, and after the French public
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followed suit." It is interesting to note also that when, in 1889, Monet launched his campaign for the pur chase of Manet's "Olympia" as a gift to the state, two Americans, Alexander Harrison and John Sargent, were among the subscribers to the fund. While I am touching upon this subject I may express the wish that Monet might know something; if he does not already know it, about the fruits of his influence here. To say that men like Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, and John H. Twachtman were worthy of bfm in their handling of his principles would be to put the matter mildly. If Monet could have seen the room at the San Francisco Exposition filled with the paintings of John Twachtman I feel certain that he would have doffed his hat as to a fellow master.
Recurring to the "Olympia" episode, I must pause upon the strength of character in Monet which it illus trates. When he initiated the plan it was not by any means easy going where the authorities were concerned. A squabble that he got into with Antonio. Proust only needed a spark to explode it into a duel. But with the aid of all the progressive artists in Paris Monet pulled the thing through. He got the picture into the Luxem bourg, at any rate, and in 1907, thanks to the good offices of Clemenceau, then in power, he saw Manet established in the Louvre. In his quiet way he has always been, if not precisely a fighter, at all events the stanch adherent of a cause. And little by little the critics, the public, and the government itself have
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come round. In 1892, when the decoration of the H6tel de Vflle was going forward, Jules Breton with drew, on account of ill health, from participation in the series of landscapes assigned to him, Harplgnies^ Pelouse, and others. The question of a substitute for Breton was brought up before a commission. Rodin and Bracquemond voted for Monet, but there were only two other voices to support them, and the com mission went to Pierre Lagarde. So it happened in 1892. Thirty years later the state accepts from Monet a great series of his "NymphSas" and prepares a special haH for their reception in the old orangery of the Tuileries. Thus the sterling old painter at
the creation of his own monument — - a monument to be one of the glories of France. One muses upon it with thoughts positively tender as3 in imagination, one observes the venerable master sitting over his game of backgammon with Clemenceau there at Givemy. What memories, what dreams, and fulfil ments these two veterans must share !
XVIII Seven Renoirs
XVIII SEVEN RENOIRS
A YEAR or two ago, I saw assembled in New York, at the Dturand-Ruel Gallery, a group of seven Renoirs which through their qualities and through their dates, which assigned them to a particular period in the life of the artist, took on something of the nature of an his torical memorial. They brought back the Renoir who made an individual entry into French art about fifty years ago, affirming a new point of view with a new power. Also, for a student of the movement they represented, they recalled not Renoir alone but a man whose alliance with Mm and with lie other leaders of Impressionism, left, in its turn, an ineffaceable mark. I cannot think of these pictures without tMnking of my old friend Paul Durand-Ruel, who preserved them for many years in Ms home in the Rue de Rome, rich testimonies to Ms feeling for beauty,
The annals of Impressionism are annals of con flict, of ideas making slow headway reaction, of courage maintaining itself neglect, of faith ultimately triumphant over and scorn. Renoir^ painting works in the
seventies and early eighties, carried on in the
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fight which had had its first notable skirmish when Manet, Whistler and the rest appeared in the Salon des Refuses of 1863. Paul Durand-Ruel was a partici pant, a factor, in that battle. He had ranged himself with the proud malcontents from the beginning and soon figured before the world as their propa gandist. He was the far-seeing merchant who spurred others on to collect the Impressionists. He was like wise the disinterested connoisseur, delighting in fine things because they were delightful. To talk with him across his table in the Rue de Rome, amid the paintings of Monet and his companions, always gave me the sensation, in a very vivid way, of touching hands with the members of that glorious company. The rooms had a cachet for me unique. They seemed to enshrine the spirit of an act of belief, to deserve a place in the memory akin to that occupied by the famous Salon to which I have alluded. These Renoirs were souvenirs of a habitation as well as of the man who made them, and in approaching them one could not forbear saluting the discernment and the enthusi asm of the man who brought them together.
It is one of the happiest circumstances associated with Impressionism that in its struggle for freedom it remained consistently free, that in establishing a new gospel it escaped the blighting influence of dogma. Every commentator on the school has presently to explain that it was not, strictly speak ing, a school at aH; that Manet and Monet went
Seven Renoirs 277
their different gaits; that Degas Is of the group only on Ms own terms; that, in short, lie solidarity of Impressionism is a totally different thing from the solidarity of, say3 the men of 1830. I need not labor the point here, but I must pause upon it long enough to characterize the entirely personal attitude of Renoir toward the Impressionistic hypothesis of open air light. In Monet the effect of light upon nature rapidly became an intense preoccupation. I don't believe, as I have said elsewhere, he had the specifically scientific bias that has sometimes been at tributed to him; but in the evidence which we may be content to draw from Ms works his curiosity as to purely atmospheric phenomena is unmistakable. With Renoir the point of attack is different. You do not feel that he tackled a problem with an overmastering con cern as to what light would do to it. He does not want to prove anything. You fed, rather, that he took light as but an element in his design^ an indispens able element^ an element previously overlooked and now to be exploited with militant ardor, but an element just the same — playing a part in a con structive whole. His attitude included the handling of light without Ms being dominated by it. It was the attitude of a painter, a painter who was primarily a colorist.
There is no one in the Impressionist group! with the possible exception of Manet, who has anything like Renoir's magical^ clairvoyant touch
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In the manipulation of mere pigment, in the enrich ment of mere surface. Oil paint has a witchery of its own. The notes in the gamut of tempera can be made, as the early Florentines so often proved, extraordinarily pure and beautiful. I would not dis parage them in order to exalt those of the later medium. But I would emphasize the difference be tween the two, and I would cite Renoir as a true examplar of the tradition of Velasquez and Vermeer. Manet has his kinship with the Spanish master in the broad strong masses of his blacks and yellows, and sometimes in the pearly loveliness of his flesh tints and the singing quality of his blues. But to Renoir was left the felicity — one of his most personal con tributions to Impressionism — of bringing out the beauty of oil paint in an incomparably precious, jewel-like way.
Light interpenetrates his color and makes it lustrous, sensuous, as enchanting to the eye as the red of a pomegranate. He can paint white with a lusciousness that — observing all due respect for the Whistlerians — makes a picture like "The Little White Girl" look almost cold and hard. If you doubt this, examine the whites in "La Loge." I know no others, anywhere, more subtly vitalized. I have wondered momentarily if his experience in porcelain painting at Sevres had anything to do with the brilliance of his color; but this question arises only to subside. Preternatural insight into
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the genius of oil paint offers a much more satisfying explanation, that and a correspondingly exquisite dexterity. Renoir has this grasp upon a medium as Rubens had it, though here again the inevitable qualification, evocative of his originality, forthwith presents itself. Pigment for Rubens is a means to an end, the vehicle for headlong statement* There is something prodigiously virile and even violent about Ms brushwork; he paints at topmost speed; he knows his medium, he uses it with gusto — but does he love it for its own sake ? There is power in his touch, but no tenderness. He flings his color on the canvas with a masterful gesture; he does not caress it. Renoir does this peculiarly painter-like thing. He can be as "fat" as Rubens, as weighty, as sumptuous, but some delicacy of taste in him that Rubens knew nothing about keeps Mm very re fined. There are passages in "La Loge," as, for example, in the painting of the gloved hands and wrists of the woman, which in technical fineness and grace fairly make your mouth water. And you will find the same marvellous beauty of facture developed in certain others of these pictures in a great fulness and harmony. The "Danseuse" is a little mirade in pure painting. "Sur la Terrasse" is another. The reds and the greens in the latter have the transparent radiance of precious stones. The tangle of leafage and flowers against which the figures are placed is a web of jewelled color, its threads
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and its interstices alike lifted to a higher power by the intervention of light.
All this betokens, as I have said, the painter, the technician, the virtuoso exercising his brush with a kind of passion of craftsmanship and exulting in its precision, its finesse, its searching eloquence. Who else in the great cirde has wielded so supple an in strument, one so sure, or one so perfectly adjusted to the very grain and essence of oil paint? But there are still other grounds on which this group of pic tures ascribes to Renoir a position of singularity. He alone of them all is the hierophant of beauty existing in and for itself. Manet is enamored of the truth of life; he is the recorder, not the interpreter. Monet, in his so different domain, has similar func tions. Only in the celebrated "Nympheas" of his later years has he seemed to divine in nature a grace lying like a benediction on tangible fact. Degas, if he looked for beauty everywhere, even in ugliness, fused with the draftmanship that links him to his beloved Ingres the mordant philosophy of a cynic. He dreamed dreams of antiquity in his youth, but as time went on he saw the world as an essentially prosaic spectacle. Renoir saw it with the fervid glance of a Giorgione.
In Impressionism, I may say in the whole range of the French art of his time, he is preeminently the painter of the jow de mwe^ the sole inspired singer of proud "hosannas of the flesh" that, by the
DANSEUSE PROM T3EIE PAINTING BY RENOIR
Seven Renoir s 281
same token, are never fleshly. A pell-meE of Ms nudes comes to mind with this reflection, glowing blond figures reviving the Venetian key of Palma, but the truth is that they are not needed to enforce the point as we traverse the glorious seven of which I write. Consider the mundane luxury of "La Loge," the warmth and well-being of "Sur la Terrasse," the blithe youth in the "Danseuse," and, above all, the ebullience, the bodily glow, the happy animation, of "Le Dejeuner des Canotiers." He takes the glory of the senses and makes it the guiding principle of his art, mirrors the splendor of life in the beauty of light and air and color, records the truth and invests it with aesthetic charm. It is the truth, the life, of a sophisticated monde. Once in this series, in the "P£cheuses de Modes," humanity receives its commentary in very simple human terms. Hie fisherf oik are portrayed with all the sincerity in the world; the accent is altogether one of homely realism. We are not far from the same sentiment in the "Femme au Chat." But in the other paintings Me is an urban affair, rich with the beauty of fair faces, fine stuffs, the exhilaration of health and pleasure. The little figurine of the "Danseuse/5 character istically, is no starveling sparrow of the o?nfeses, as Degas might have made her. We think not of her hard-worked young musdes but of her sweetness. She is doubtless in the ballet but not wholly of it; she is Renoir's vision of the footlights,
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an image of beauty he has reft from their garishness. With what melting nuances of tone does he paint the half-graceful, half-awkward form, and the filmy dress ! His brush seems to hover over the problem, it is so suave, so infinitely delicate in its pressure. And behind it all lies the strength of a master. That is the final impression received from the imposing seven. They are the works of a great painter, an authoritative man of his hands. They come down to us from his golden years, when he was in the f uH flush of his powers. "La Loge" and the "Danseuse" were painted in 1874, when he was but thirty-three. Five years later he painted the "Pecheuses" and then in 1880 "Au Concert" and the "Femme au Chat." "Sur la Terrasse" came a year later and at about the same time "Le Dejeuner des Canotiers." The seven date from a period of seven years. They were years, I repeat, of unremitting strife. Impressionism was not by any means in the saddle when these canvases were thrown into the fray. But the man who painted them was in the saddle, in complete command of his high abilities.
He interrogates life with a truly seeing eye. He grasps the truth with the whole plein air apparatus, as it were, at his finger-tips. What he sees he defines with equal force, ease, propriety, and, most interest ingly of all, with characteristic racial fidelity to the rectitude of art. A revolutionist, there are never theless no revolutionary eccentricities or excesses
Seven Renoirs 283
dinging about Ms artistic character. That, for ail his independence of academic precedent is abso lutely in harmony with the immemorial tradition of French painting? the tradition that is the servant of beauty. Apropos of this significance of the seven paintings, I come back to the special nature of the group they make. When there was talk of a monu ment to Cezanne, and Renoir was appealed to in its interests, he wrote to Claude Monet expressing his disgust at the idea of a nude figure for the thing. He could put up with a bustj a bust would go very well into the museum at Aix, if it were accompanied by an example of the artist. But the latter was im perative. "I feel that a painter ought to be repre sented by his painting/' said he. His conception is exactly realized in the present instance. The seven Renoirs make an ideal monument.
XIX Odilon Redon
XIX ODILON REDON
ODILON REDON was bom at Bordeaux in 1840, He
was an impressionable child, and the sentiments pro moted in Ms nature by early contact with the Pyrenees and the melancholy region of the Landes appear to have been fostered by an indulgent father. He loved art and music when he was a boy. At that time, too — and the point is significant — he had a proper sense of " mon originaliti." When the time came he went to Paris and studied under G6r6me, but straggled in vain to "render form" with anything like academic authority. It was not that he was unwilling to learn how to draw. It was simply that he had an incurable fondness for doing things in Ms own way, in accordance with what he believed to be a kind of spiritual independence. It is a fine gospel^ not without its perils* The war of 1870 led him away from Ms studies and Ms dreams, but it did him good. In the dash of arms he found himself, and on settling down in the studio again he felt Ms resources stirring within him in a new way? Ms ideas being clarified. In Ms essay OE Redon, prefixed to the catalogue of the latter's etchings and lithographs issued by the Soci6t6 pour PEtude de la Gravure Fran^aise, M. Andr6 Mellerio has much to
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say about the influences accepted by the artist. He was devoted to Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Diirer. Among the moderns he preferred Delacroix. In music he was all for the noblest masters, for Beethoven and Bach. One thinks, with all these heroical landmarks in sight, of another Puvis de Chavannes. But there are some surprises in store.
After the ideals in painting and music to which I have referred, there came, for Redon, in literature, the writings of Poe, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Stephane Mallarme; which is to say that, after his instinct for grandeur in art, came a passion for the macabre. The fall was too far. A great artist was lost in a decadent. His paintings expose a kind of dual character. They show us his best side, to begin with, in the beauty of their color. There are no half measures about the "inspiration Redonesque" to use M. Mellerio's rather overwrought phrase. When he uses a vivid color he gives it its fullest possible value. But he keeps it very pure, and he sees to it that his reds and yellows and blues are intrinsically fine. Merely for their sensuous brilliance Ms paintings would command a little more than respectful consideration. There is genuine fire in them. In the next moment, however, we are on shifting ground, and respect is tinged with dubiety. We begin to reflect on the ideas embodied in the pictures, and the problem takes a decidedly different twist. It is the lovely poetic intention that we note first, the exquisiteness of the impulse driving
Odilon Redon 280
the artist to paint high-erected themes, "Orpheus/' "Phaeton/' "Apollo," even " Saint John." Almost,
but not quite, does he succeed with them. The largef wild romantic gesture is there, the hint of mystery, the vague echo of "mm origimlM.™ But something is missing, something that would turn these f ascinatlng but amorphous sketches into pictures. It is the power of construction, of sustained imagination, which is the power of the normal creative master,
Redon has visions, but they are formless and un wholesome. He invokes the aid of imaginationf but he cannot rise to its rarefied plane. It is instructive to turn over the scores of plates in M. Meilerio's admir able catalogue. Redon has been an ardent^ prolific lithographer^ and his work on the stone the
full range of his ideas. From beginning to end they make it pathetically obvious that he has never soared to the intellectual companionship of Ms beloved Leonardo and Rembrandt and Diirer? but has re mained on the merely bizarre, decadent of Felicien Rops, that Belgian type of Parisian diabolism^ or of Goya in the worst of his charnel-house moods. Symbolism runs riot in Ms designs and always in a nightmarish direction. And, while linear of an extraordinary delicacy not infrequently in these more than fantastic works of his, the impression one receives is of the student in vain, under Gerdme, to "'render form." Is it, then, by a failure of technic that we are to account for
290 Personalities in Art
his failure convincingly to affirm the "inspiration Redonesque"? Only in part. The true explanation lies deeper, in the artist's habit of mind, its sickliness and its want of veritable imaginative force. Redon is a type of the modern hunger for release from ordinary, prosaic thought and conditions. He is another exem plar of the wistful school, sympathetic, suggestive, genuinely interesting, but somehow ineffectual.
XX
Cezanne
XX
CEZANNE
A PORTRAIT by Cezanne was once shown to Whistler. Said he: "If a child of ten were to draw like that upon
his slate, his mother, if she were a good mother, would spank him for it." But M. Ambroise Voilard, the Parisian dealer, who tells us the anecdote, is of quite another mind, and he, in similar circumstances, would probably frame the slate. He knew the painter weU, bought as many of Ms works as he could get hold of , and made them the leading attraction of Ms gallery in the Rue Laffitte. Then, as a testimony to the faith that was in him and as a monument to Ms friend, he himself published "Paul Cezanne/* a truly sumptuous folio, written with affectionate care and illustrated with the richest possible array of paintings and drawings, many of the former reproduced in photogravures or in color plates. Nor is M. VoUard by any means alone in his appreciation of this artist. Theodore Duret, who in Ms book on "Manet and the Impressionists" wrote the first full biograpMcal sketch of Cezanne, upon wMch Vollard and all other com mentators have since freely drawn, speaks of "the distinctive and isolated nature of Ms art/1 and credits him with at least one peculiarity "of a very Mgfa order of merit." Since then the commentators have
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been legion. Where, precisely, does the truth reside?
For a hero-worshipper, M. Vollard is delightfully discreet. His idolatry appears between the lines rather than in the actual text of his narrative. The latter makes, indeed, a really charming introduction to the life of Cezanne, more particularly in its earlier stages. From M. Duret's book we have long known how fortunate were the circumstances of the artist, how the rich banker at Aix who was his father first frowned upon his ambitions, but soon encouraged them, sending him to Paris with an allowance, and how all his life Cezanne was in a position to please himself. But M. Vollard tells us more and incidentally paints a pretty picture of the boy Cezanne getting his first lessons in drawing from an old Spanish monk, flinging himself with ardor upon his classical studies at the lycee, and, above all, giving himself up to the romantic dreams of youth.
Zola was his comrade in those golden days. Another was one Baptistin Bailie, who appears to have been of a philosophical turn of mind. He looked after the profundities while the future author of "Nana" de- daimed the poems of Musset, Hugo, and Lamartine, and C6zanne advanced tremendous theories of art, based on the masterpieces of Veronese, Rubens, and Rembrandt. The canny Cezanne pere, much bewil dered and not a little scandalized by all this, was hardly reconciled to it when his son brought home a prize for drawing from the local academy. "Enfant,
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enfant" he would go on murmuring, "songe a Vavcnir! On meurt avec du genie, el Von mange avec de far gent"
But, as has been said, he relented after a despairing effort to force the lad into the law, and by the time he was twenty-two Cezanne's wish was realized. He joined Zola in Paris, entered himself as a student at the Academie Suisse, on the Quai des Orfevres (in 1861), and thenceforth to the day of Ms death, in 1906, was the happy painter, practising his profession with but trifling opposition of a parental nature.
He was of bourgeois origin and remained of a bourgeois temperament. His strong likes and were generally expressed with a decisively Bohemian accent. An old painter, recalling him in Ms young manhood, describes him as wearing a red waistcoat — d la Gautier — and always putting his hand in his pocket to pay for a chum's dinner. He was kindly and, I surmise, a little coarse^ a point to be inferred, by the way, as well from certain of Ms works as from Ms quoted speech. Rejecting the discipline of the schools in favor of Ms own hypothesis of the art of painting, he nevertheless frequented the Louvre sat with a kind of haughty reverence at the feet of the old masters. Rubens Is echoed^ faintly, in his earlier works. In the course of his formative years he fell in with Courbet and emulated him. As the Impressionists came into view he attached himself to the group at the Cafe Guerbois and afterward at the Nouvelle Athenes, but seems to have rebelled against
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the dominating influence of Manet. I may note in passing Ms observation of Forain, "who knew even then how to indicate the fold in a garment/' and whom he once discovered in the Louvre copying Chardin, a fragment of biography precious to the connoisseur of the great French draftsman. Delacroix also touched his sympathies and encouraged in him, momentarily, a romantic impulse. He had all the tjme some of the traits of the average artist. He would have exhibited at the Salon if he could have obtained admission, but had to wait many a long year before he was let in. On the other hand, he was faithful to his inner convictions. He went on painting in his own way so long as he remained in Paris and was only confirmed in it when finally he withdrew to his native town and settled down as more or less of a recluse. The career described by M. Vollard is honorable and not without a certain touching dignity. But that it should appear touching is an indication of the element of weakness even then threatening the ultimate fame of Cezanne. When, on his arrival in Paris, he un successfully sought admission to the Ecole des Beaux- Arts, one of the examiners explained his failure by saying that he had the temperament of a colorist, but painted "with excess." He always painted with excess. M. Vollard cites the current opinion of the sixties on Cezanne's method. It was that he tackled a piece of white canvas with a pistol charged to the muzzle with all sorts of colors. Later he simplified his chromatic
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scheme. It is the claim of Ms partisans that he triumphs by virtue of his color. They say he is a master of values; that with a few tones of green, gray, and red he achieves immortal things. But those things, I fear, lie altogether in the eye of the fond beholder. That individuality of which Cezanne thought so much possibly struggled along some definitely thought out lines toward the expression of a high ideal Unfortunately the last successful phase of the straggle did not come off, Cezanne stayed what he was at the beginning, a painter wandering about in worlds un realized, too imperfectly equipped to say what he had to say, if, indeed, that was worth saying.
There is a point bearing upon this question of intrinsic values which I must discuss briefly. The veteran John Sartain aptly remarked once that the status of a work of art is determined by the choice spirits of the world, not by the Philistines. It is an unanswerable saying. No doubt it savors of a phari- saical superiority to those who stand by the good old democratic axiom that one man*s opinion is as good as another's — but it happens to be true. Also, it is a truth equally applicable among artists themselves. They produce great art exactly in proportion to their inborn alliance with the choice spirits of the world. Was C6zanne thus allied to them? Neither M. Vollard nor Cezanne in his works can so persuade me for the fraction of a second. He was sincere^ yes, and I know with what gusto that trait is
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elevated into an artistic virtue by the backers of a type like Cezanne. It may be, indeed, a virtue, but not in tie sense that it is also an asset, a quality automatically productive of beauty. It is compatible, of course, with the production of stupid ugliness. If sincerity by itself were to make a work of art, then it would enable some inventor of perpetual motion to pull through. It is important, therefore, to recognize the fact that Cezanne's sincerity is beside the point. It does not keep him from being commonplace, mediocre, a third rate painter. If the reader finds these terms harsh, let him examine closely into the works by Cezanne, let him look at them with an open mind and see what they have to offer to the eye and the imagination.
The best of them offer, to begin with, a fair enough approximation to the forms of things seen. I recall a "Portrait of a Man" as an acceptable bit of ordinary realism. So is a landscape called "L'Estaque,37 in which the huddle of red roofs seen between trees against a gray background provided by the sea is handled with a mildly engaging sympathy. But what nonsense to pretend to discover in this picture the distinction, the beauty, which alone lifts a piece of painting out of the ruck ! And this is wiiat we have to reckon, in the mass of Cezanne's work, as really nothing more than a deviation into something like success. As a rule he flounders. Far more character istic is a picture like "The Francois Zola Dam," Ob-
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sessed by some vague theory — of no earthly interest to the spectator until It is justified by results — he gropes among his ground forms and strives painfully to bring them into some sort of pictorial unity. The effort fails. The canvas is crude, unlovely. It is the same with his sketchy water-colors. The Mnts at form which they contain have no artistic charm. They are but the shreds and patches of an uncertain purpose. In those fumblings of his around the secrets of nature Cezanne may have had glimpses which did make him less forlorn, but he transmits to us nothing of the joy he may have derived from them. Partly this is due to his limitations as a workman^ to the harsh, uninspired technic which excludes aH hope of style, of linear felicity. But even more it is due to the humdrum nature of his vision. Witness his more or less celebrated picture of "The Two Sisters/9 That absolutely representative example follows in design the routine of the Salon. The leaden folds in the dress of the foremost figure (why didn't he take a leaf from Foranr s book !) seem calculated to get the ut most possible dtdness out of a banal motive. The drawing is as heavy-handed in detail as it is in the larger contours of the scheme. In the color, where Cezanne is supposed to be "magisterial/5 this painting is ineffably dreary, ineffably lacking in quality. It is, in short, a dolorous performance. Which brings me to the Cult. Celebrities like Cezanne are the products of mis-
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taken enthusiasm. Their vogue in Paris is explicable on the ground of an amiable weakness. Art is the completely absorbing interest of thousands there, and participation in a historic moment, nay, even a casual relation to the affairs of some memorable period, will secure for quite unimportant individuals a certain niche. Then the literary man is always grateful for a topic. In London and in New York a Cezanne is a doubly welcome theme. He is new and strange. There are romantic implications in the annals. He was one of the generation that knew Manet, and so on and so on. His whole atmosphere is favorable to the envelop ment of his art in an esoteric mystery. Born, reared and long neglected in, say, Philadelphia, there would be no special excitement about discovering him. But if you can call a man "the great Aixois," you've got something to go on with. So we have dithyrambs on Cezanne by rhetoricians who know that he is wonder ful and feel that he is sublime, and even so clairvoy ant a critic as Huneker would sententiously remark: "Think of Bouguereau and you have his antithesis in Cezanne." Why drag in Bouguereau? To suggest that, in the antithesis, there is something to be put to Cezanne's credit? Why not Claude, or Corot, or Degas, or Ingres, or any master, comparison with whom exposes the inferiority of C6zanne without uncovering any nakedness of his own? Well, Mr. Huneker, who wrote shrewdly if not altogether con vincingly on Cezanne, had to have his witty gay-
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eties. But there is really more occasion for sorrow than for mirth in the facility with which these specious reputations are drummed up in modern art. The
mission of the painter is to create beautiful pictures. It is a function which Cezanne pathetically missed.
XXI
Gauguin
XXI GAUGUIN
IN the book about Paul Gauguin published by Ms friend Charles Morice in 1919, the best literary me morial to the artist which exists, there is a section entitled "Le Maltre de Taiti." To-day there are many to whom Gauguin is "the master." On the other hand, Mr, Sargent once had occasion to say of certain of the pictures painted by this Franco- Peruvian that they struck him as "admirable in color ; and in color only." If the matter is still in debate it is for a rather factitious reason. Would Gauguin remain "the master" if he had stayed at home? I doubt it* Half the furore raised about him is traceable to Ms sequestration in the South Seas, His death there made Mm the hero of a legend. A contribution was made to this in the shape of "The Letters of Paul Gauguin/7 published with a foreword by Frederick O'Brien, a leading figure in the Tahitian cult. Here are gathered together the missives of the artist to Ms friend Daniel Monfreid, who did what he could to keep him going in Ms self-sought exfle. They give us further revelations of the life and character of the man. Incidentally, they help a little to clarify the
subject of his art.
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Gauguin was born at Paris In 1848, was, taken to Peru and brought back to France while still a child, received some education in a Jesuit seminary, served briefly in the navy as a common sailor, and in 1871 left the sea to turn stock broker ! He was successful in finance. Miss Ruth Pielkovo, the translator of his correspondence and the author, presumably, of the commentary that accompanies it, remarks that during his activities in the Rue Laffitte he made something like thirty or forty thousand francs a year. Then, with a suddenness of which Mr. Somerset Maugham made the most when he wrote "The Moon and Sixpence," he began to paint, shook off his wife and children, and dedicated himself entirely to the brush. There was a tune, in the eighties, when he settled in Brittany and produced, with some talent, fairly unconventional pictures. Later came a flying trip to Martinique. On his return to his native land he had some associations with Van Gogh. In 1891 he went to Tahiti and thenceforth, save for a visit home, continued in his remote fastness until he died in the Marquesas in 1903.
In the South Seas, his disciples would have us believe, he found the secret of a new heaven and a new earth. What was it? He himself, as was natural enough, never formulated it. "You know/' he once wrote to a friend, "that though others have honored me by attributing a system to me I have never had one, and could not condemn myself to it if I had. To
Gauguin 307
paint as I please, bright to-day, dark to-morrow. The artist must be free or tie is not an artist. *But you have a technic/ they say. No; I have not, or rather I have one, but it is a vagabond sort of thing, and very elastic. It is a technic that changes constantly, according to the mood I am in, and I use it to express my thought, without bothering as to whether it truthfully expresses exterior nature." It is permissible — for the acolytes — to read into this the magnificent independence of a great creative artist. I would read it there myself, probably* if the works authorized me to do so. But in the light of what they have to say I am inclined to infer from the pronouncement aforesaid nothing more nor less than the wayward egotism of an artist who never quite mastered his medium or his instruments. As I pointed out at the time of the celebrated Armory Show, when Gauguin was one of the "new" men brought to the fore, the only pertinent question to be asked regarding him is, "Does he know how to paint?"
What he didn't like is easily seen. In one of Ms letters he alludes to "Baudry and his crowd." There is a fleer in another at Bouguereau. He is blighting oa the subject of "the Seminary of Meissonier and his like." Study of Baudry, I may note in passing^ would have done Mm good, but one can sympathize with his repulsion from Bouguereau and Meissonier. He had, no doubt, the root of the matter in Mm. In a letter of his Parisian visit in 1893 there is a
308 Personalities in Art
eloquent of an artist sensitive to the true distinctions of the schools, "I'm just back from a six days' trip in Belgium," he says. "It was fine. I saw some Memlings at Bruges — what marvels ! my dear fellow, and afterward, on seeing Rubens (entering into naturalism), it's a comedown." Only a man with authentic taste would have registered "that dis criminating touch. But, again, Rubens might have aided him through showing him the value of discipline and construction. The truth is that there was little if anything reflected in Gauguin's cosmos. It is pretty to visualize him as a man of ideas withdrawn to an exotic solitude and there spinning masterpieces out of his entrails, but, though it is pretty, it is not exact. He was a haphazard type. His characteristic mood is thus hit off to Monfreid:
I am going to let you into my secret a bit. There is a great deal of logic in it and I act methodically. From the outset I knew that it would be a day-to-day existence; so, naturally, I've had to accustom my temperament to that. Instead of wasting my strength working and worry ing about to-morrow I put everything into the present, like a fighter who does not move until the moment of struggle. When I go to bed at night I say to myself — " One more day gained, to-morrow I may be dead."
In my work of painting it is the same thing. I only think of the present. But the methodical way is to ar range matters so that things follow smoothly, and not do on the $th what should be done on the 2oth. The madre pores do the same — and at the end quite a lot of ground is covered. If only people did not spend so much time in
Gauguin 309
useless and unrelated work ! One stitch a day — that's the great point.
Is it the programme of a philosopher or of a beach comber? Does it spell heroic concentration or, at bottom, an incurable irresponsibility? The answer lies in the broad drift of Ms letters. uSee what I did with my household !" he exclaims, UI cut loose from it without warning. My family will get out of its scrapes by itself, so far as I am concerned ! I want to finish my life here, in this house, in perfect quiet. Ah, yes, I am a great criminal ! What does it matter? So was Michael Angelo; and I am not Michael Angelo." I ignore the question of ainnnality and look solely to the question of art. The diff erence between him and Michael Angelo was not a matter of morals, but one of aesthetic principle. I see in Mm the beachcomber rather than the philosopher, because I see not a maa of ideas, but a creature of impulse. " So far/1 he writes in 1899, "I have put nothing on canvas but Intention and promises." He was not precisely ashamed of the avowal. It was better, he thought, than "this great fault of treating all canvases as pictures.11
He had no patience with the men who "try to excuse their lack of imagination, of creative power, by the finesse and perfection of their craftsmansMp.11 It is a good saying, but, I repeat, Gauguin would have been the better for more of the very and
perfection of CTaffemansMp to which lie alludes*
The explanation of Ms failure lies in a fact which, by
3 ID Personalities in Art
implication, is made sufficiently clear in this book. Through an inevitable association of ideas we assume that a man who buries himself among savages in the South Sea Islands must have something primitive about him. Gauguin wasn't even in a rudimentary sense a primitive. He was as worldly-wise and sophis ticated a being as ever trod the pavements of Paris. There is much talk about his preferring the natives to the whites in Tahiti, about his adopting native dress and habits. Almost any hard-bitten habitue of Mont- martre might have done the same thing if he had had the same self-indulgent impulses. If Gauguin made a mess of his life in Tahiti it was because he hadn't the courage, hadn't the nature, to "go the whole hog." He never became whole-heartedly a native. He was from beginning to end a Parisian type, seeking to live cH fresco what time he drew an income from picture-selling at home. His tragedy consisted simply in the fact that the income was unspeakably hard to get. The letters to Monfreid make one long plaint over the difficulties of practical existence and the necessity for remittances from purchasers. Dip into the correspondence at random, and you come upon nothing so frequently as upon the discussion of ways and means. Marooned (of his own volition) in far-away Tahiti, Gauguin is forever keeping an eye upon his status at home. "It seems that my success is growing in the North." "My Tahitian work has had a moral success among the artists, but the result, so far as the vulgar public went, was — not one centime." In one of the longest
Gauguin 311
of Ms letters he frames a scheme for the creation of an income of 2,400 francs a year. He Is to send over annually a collection of fifteen pictures and as many subscribers are to put In 160 francs each, drawing lots
for the painting that in each case is to be the reward, It is pathetic, obviously. But the "primitive" by the board.
Lightly to disparage Gauguin's efforts to acquire a decent return for his labor would be not only cruel but stupid. It would be to flout the instinct of self- preservation. But the passages, I have cited are legiti mate touchstones whereby to test the grain of this painter's mind. One may deplore his sufferings still decline to regard them as those of an inspired artist retiring to the wilderness from exalted motives and, for the sake of Ms art, holding the world well lost. For the life of me, I cannot discover that kind of primitive in the letters to Monfreid. I behold, rather, a painter of modest talent, who from egotism and wMm strayed into a strange land, got into a pickle there^ and paid a grievous penalty. He was a Montmartrois out of place. He took no spark of esoteric genius with him to Tahiti, and he found there nothing of the sort, "To be hard as a stone/* he says, "means to be as strong as a stone." It did not mean this for Gauguin. He painted a number of pictures from inherently pic turesque subjects, painted some of them middling well and a few with an approach to felicity. The rest, as I have hinted, is pure legend.
Monfreid told Mm so when, near the end, Gauguin
312 Personalities in Art
proposed to come back to France. This best of friends then candidly wrote him:
It is to be feared that your return would only derange the growing and slowly conceived ideas with which public opinion has surrounded you. Now you are that legendary artist who, from out of the depths of "Polynesia,, sends forth Ms disconcerting and inimitable work — the defini tive work of a man who has disappeared from the world. Your enemies (and you have many, as have all who trouble the mediocre) are now silent, do not dare to combat you, do not even think of it; for you are so far away ! You must not return. Now you are as are the great dead. You have passed into the history of art.
1 His friend was right. It is doubtful if Gauguin's celebrity would have survived his reappearance upon the Parisian scene. I take leave to doubt if it will ultimately survive in any serious measure, leaving him more than an interesting minor type. Sooner or later, when the present vogue of modernistic tendencies has passed, it will be recognized that an artist "who has disappeared from the world " is no more dowered by that fact with exceptional gifts than an artist who is good to his wife and mother is made a master in the process. In the long run the letters will be useful in bringing about a proper appraisal of "the master of Tahiti" in that they will help to develop a clearer con ception of just what his sojourn in the Pacific meant. They are compiled, of course, to advance the man's re pute. Among readers unbitten by the Gauguin mania they will not altogether do this. To be hard as a stone
Gauguin
is not to be really admirable. The letters expose only
too vividly a gross and selfish nature. Yet here and there a likable trait peeps out. "I want to ask some thing of you," he writes to Monfreid. "If you have a bit of good luck with the sales, I wish you would send me a few bulbs and seeds of flowers. Simple dahlias, nasturtiums, and sunflowers of various sorts, flowers that can stand the hot climate — whatever you can think of. I want to decorate my little plantation; and, as you know, I adore flowers. What they have here are mostly shrubs, very few annuals — a few roses, but they do not do very well." There was a love of beauty struggling somewhere in his complex make up. An artless sincerity peeps forth from behind a brutally cynical and self-centred temperament.
There are a few suggestive passages, too, relating to the purely artistic side of Gauguin. Writing to Monfreid about his biggest, most ambitious canvas, he says:
I look at it by the hour and (Fli admit it to you) I ad
mire it. The more I look at it the more I realize its enor
mous mathematical faults, but I would not retouch It for anything. It must remain as It is — oiJy a sketch if you like. Yet this question comes up and perplexes me: Where does the execution of a painting commence and where does it end? At that moment when the most in tense emotions axe in fusion in the depths of one's being, when they burst forth and when thought comes up like lava from a volcano, Is there not then something lite an explosion? The work is created suddenly, brutally if you like, and is not its appearance great, almost superhuman?
3 14 Personalities in Art
The cold calculations of reason have not presided at this birth, for who knows when in the depths of early being the work was commenced? Have you ever noticed that when recopying a sketch, done in a moment of emo tion and with which you are content, only an inferior copy results, especially if you correct the proportions, the mistakes your reason tells you are there?
This fragment represents the best that was in Gauguin, the artist, freed for a moment from material preoccupations, musing imaginatively on the things that count. It Is interesting to speculate on what he might have made of his art if he had longer maintained such a mood. He thought, no doubt, that he was pla cating his daemon when lie said: "I have come to an unalterable decision — to go and live forever in Poly nesia." Perhaps he was right. But I wonder if the Polynesian adventure did not do him more harm than good, in leaving him what it found him, an artist in adequately equipped.
XXII
Van Gogh
XXII VAN GOGH
is a famous sonnet in which that brilliant parodist J. K. Stephen once paid his compliments to Wordsworth. A line from it will serve my purpose here : " Two voices are there — one is of the deep * * • — and the other talked rubbish. The criticism is apposite in approaching the work of Vincent van Gogh.
The first light that is thrown upon the subject by the evidence I have observed, illuminates what may fairly be called the conventional bases of Van Gogh's art. He had at bottom the capacities of an ordinary realistic contributor to the Salon. There is a picture by Mm of a large Bible laid open upon a table beside a candlestick. It might have been painted by almost any clever young fellow in Paris who had dabbled in the "brown sauce" of the old Dutch school. In its quiet way it is almost handsome. It has weight. It is a bit of
painting. It is not, on the other hand, noticeably beautiful. A certain measure of truth, boldly stated, would appear to have been the artist's aim. There are a few other canvases of kindred character which invite much the same comment, leaving one the impression that if Van Gogh had on in this
vein we would never have heard much about Mm.
317
3 1 8 Personalities in Art
What would have happened if, instead, he had per sisted in cultivating the influence of Millet as it is reflected in several of his paintings and drawings? He was moved not only to emulate but to copy the master, A discipleship so pronounced might easily have carried him, far. There is one of his drawings, "Woman Digging Potatoes/' which shows that as a draftsman he could be not unworthy of Millet. For a moment imagination pauses upon the idea that at one time Van Gogh must have had in him potentialities as a delineator of form. Over and over again in his black-and-whites we come upon testimonies to the fact that he could draw, not brilliantly, not with the accent of style, but with the ability of a sound workman. But then the influence of Millet fades and that of the Impressionists takes its place.
It is neither from Manet nor from Monet that his impressionism derives. When we look at the " Moulin de la Galette" or at the "Restaurant Cristal" or at the "Garden of Daubigny" we think of Sisley and Pissarro. He has something of their light touch — something of their springlike gamut of color. In one of these paintings, the " Garden of Daubigny," Van Gogh possesses what Pissarro and Sisley possess. He has charm, and this peeps out again in the lovely color and delicate surface of his " Still Life — Jug and Lemons." But these flashes are few in number compared with the broad drift of Van Gogh's work and with the develop ment of what may be classified as his Post-Impression-
Van Gogh 319
ist productions — the productions over which the
zealots uplift their voices — they disappear altogether, This painter was under forty when he died, and he was mentally unbalanced before he committed suicide.
It would not be unfair, therefore, to assume that with years and health he would have beaten out better conceptions of landscapes and of form than he left
behind him as the fruits of his later period. But hypothetical guesses, one way or the other, are beside the point. All that we are justified in considering is the intrinsic quality of what he actually did. THs is not impressive. His portraits have the vitality of a kind of rough truth. They are crude in handling, commonplace in design, and quite without distinction of style. A "Self Portrait," which I recall as one of the best of them all, had a vividness of characteriza tion not to be denied, and there was some dever painting in it into the bargain, but it was not a work of more than ordinary merit.
Taking his later paintings in a group they not
gains, but losses. The old sense of form which Millet had stirred in him, is gone. So is the resonance of luminous color, which is characteristic of I describe as Ms uaadventurous impressionism* He seems now to be moving about in a world to be feeling his way toward a solution of Ms wMch he may have visualized in Ms eye, but
wMch he has failed to place convincingly on the canvas. He uses a tMck impasto and
32G Personalities in Art
his surface great ridges of claylike pigment. Above all, he appears to have thrown overboard any feeling that he may have possessed for pictorial invention and for beauty. There is pathos in the story of his career, yet it is only a weak sentimentality which will allow his personal misfortunes to obscure the truth about his art. -It- was •Bet-'a-gieat-azrt. Let the open-minded observer look closely at any of his pictures, ask him self if they convey anything like the sensation that he feels when a work of authentic beauty swims into his ken. When some of the paintings of Van Gogh appeared in the famous Armory exhibition, I said that all they had to tell us was that he was " a moder ately competent impressionist, who was heavy-handed, had little, if any, sense of beauty, and spoiled a lot of canvas with crude, quite unimportant pictures." Later exhibitions give no reason for revising this judgment. They have shown that he had his lucky moments, but they have made his fundamental limitations equally plain.
XXIII
Early American Portraiture
XXIII EARLY AMERICAN PORTRAITURE
THE origins and earlier developments of American art have of late been receiving renewed attention. Ar dent research is bringing highly interesting facts to light, and the whole subject promises to be seen in a
better and more impressive perspective when its history comes to be written conclusively. A fresh
impetus was given to this movement in connoisseur- ship by the American wing of the exhibition which was organized at the Metropolitan Museum for the Hud son-Fulton celebration in 1909. That date will always
be remembered as significant of much. The Museum! I
may observe in passing^ has steadily been of service in
what I might call the aggrandizement of the Ameri can school. I might cite evidences of a growing ap preciation of our artistic patrimony in the activities discernible in museums throughout the country, in the galleries of the dealers^ in the ardor
of private collectors, and in the pubEcation of helpful books. But I write now with ref
erence to a remarkable contribution to the sub
ject at the Union League Club in Xew York. It de serves to be recorded as adding uniquely to the resources of the students giving him an opportunity to
324 Personalities in Art
make a really exhaustive survey of our pioneer portrai ture.
For many years it has been customary at this club to hold during the winter monthly exhibitions of works of art. The committee of members having these in charge at various times has included men with often deeply interesting enthusiasms. I remember an occa sion, long ago, when John Hay was momentarily drafted into service. He was keen upon Spanish painting and talked to me in the most zealous fashion about Goya and Fortuny. He had the intensest con viction about the debt which the modern man owed to his predecessor in respect to technic. Another stimulating figure in former years was Thomas B. Clarke, long known as a leading collector of American art. In that r61e he was first concerned with his contemporaries, but later he turned to the earlier phases of the school, and more recently his ownership of one of the greatest of Gilbert Stuart's portraits of Washington has set a kind of capstone upon his career as an advocate of the American genius in painting. To him the Union League Club turned in the autumn of 1921, and he proceeded to assemble about a score of American portraits for the exhibition of November in that year. He made a good group; but it was obvious that he had only scratched the surface of the subject. Interested already in the painters involved, he realized, too, how these portraits brought back upon the scene personalities frequently
Early American Portraiture 325
conspicuous in the social and intellectual life of our forefathers, and he saw that he was dealing with one of the most humanly appealing aspects of American history. He put twenty-three more portraits on the walls in the following month and thrice repeated Ms effort in the winter of 1922. In January, i923? he contrived another exhibition, and he made two early in 1924. By the time he had hung his last group he had shown a total of one hundred and sixty-seven portraits by sixty-six artists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Nothing like this series has ever been seen elsewhere in this country. It has made perfectly plain the characteristics of practically all the founders. It has illuminated dark places, bringing to the surface men who have hitherto been only even to the most persistent investigators; and it has been of immeasurable service in affirming with a new force the merits of an old tradition. I folowed the exhibitions with the minutest care, and I can testify whole-heartedly to their constructive value.
Samuel Isham, in the indispensable book on Ameri can painting that he published in 1905, opens with an assertion about the method of our Primitives that the fundamental and mastering fact concerning it is it is no way native to America, but was to these shores from Europe. It is a true judgment, but it is a mistake to take it as altogether final. Primi tive American art is, no doubt, a derivative art; but the interesting thing about it is that if it Inculcated
326 Personalities in Art
foreign ideas of style, it also inculcated a habit of good painting as such. That was one of the outstand ing lessons of the Union League Club shows. They brought forward some astonishing illustrations of sound technic, a technic which in some instances quite transcended the matter of an alien origin. Gilbert Stuart, for example, did more than pay back the British school in its own coin. I remember one portrait of his at the Union League which was comparable to Velasquez rather than to Reynolds. But I anticipate in making that allusion. Consideration ought to be given beforehand to what I might call some of Mr. Clarke's early surprises. He made us acquainted, for one thing, with Jacobus Gerritsen Strycker, who came to the New Netherlands in 1651 and died here nearly thirty-five years later. He was a man of substance and energy. They made him first a burgher and afterward an alderman, and he held office as attorney-general and sheriff. In the intervals of his career as farmer, trader, magistrate, and office-holder generally he seems to have functioned as a "limner/' and, by great good luck, Mr. Clarke was able to run down two of Ms three known portraits. The first to turn up at the dub was one of Adrian Van der Donck, the founder of Yonkers. It is a solid, polished affair, a capable, full-bodied bit of painting, clearly reminiscent of the school of the artist's native Holland. It is piquant to know that this, the earliest portrait painted in America, allies our be ginnings with the great tradition of Rembrandt. There
Early American Portraiture 327
is even a faint trace of a distant personal tie. Strycker's wife had the same surname as the lady whose daughter married the master's son Titus. The other example of his work was a portrait of his brother Jan, painted more freely and broadly. Both portraits made fasci nating foot-notes to the opening pages in the story of our school.
It is curious to remark the supremacy of portraiture in those pages. The founders appreciated many of the friendlier appurtenances of life. They dressed and lived well. They liked good furniture and silver. Never was there a people more soigne. But their fas tidious taste demanded next to no pictorial sustenance, and the little they had was probably brought with other household impedimenta from abroad. The typi cal man of property in our Dutch and English periods might have all the refinement in the world, but he was not precisely aesthetic. The work of art he chiefly sought was the portrait, and he sat for this more with the idea of obtaining a record than because he wanted to add beauty to his belongings. It is primarily for their value as records that the earlier portraits are to be noticed — for that and for a certain simple sincer ity. Pieter Vanderlyn's "Johannes Van Vechten," dating from 1719, which cropped out about two hun dred years later in Mr. Clarke's first show, displayed there the bald rigidity of a map. But the old fellows were not always so stiff. Another of Mr. Clarke's rarities was Henri Couturier, who was born as far back
328 Personalities in Art
as 1626. His portrait of Frederick Philipse, the original owner of Philipse Manor, left a decidedly good impression. The figure in its courtly dress and with its dignified gesture, the rocky background, and the full-rigged ship in the distance, were all painted with a certain easy sophistication. Couturier, like Strycker, was not by any means unworthy of the Dutch tradition. You think from time to time of that tradition, especially as it was filtered through Kneller, when you are traversing early American portraiture, though how direct its influence may have been is another question. But it was, of course, from the British school that our more characteristic Primitives sprang, men like James Claypole, the first native artist of Pennsylvania, Charles Bridges, Henry Ben- bridge, Robert Feke, John Wollaston, and John Smibert. I group these individuals not in exact chron ological order, but as linked in a broad way by the traits of our formative period. The group as a group is, perhaps, nothing to make a song about; but there linger in my memory the charming passages of color and brushwork disclosed by Claypole, the faint Hogar- thian note in Wollaston, and the dignity, the rectitude, characterizing them all. In the honesty of their work manship if in nothing else they prefigured the more creative development of their school. The minor men are sometimes not so very far from their major con temporaries or followers. Blackburn is occasionally on a level with the more formal work of Copley.
Early American Portraiture 329
Copley was one of those rare types in whom is manifested the principle of growth. He painted por traits in which he seems merely dry and inert, the cultivator of an uninspired precision. But even in his more restrained mood he has elegance and distinction. His portraits of women have great aristocratic charm, and occasionally in the portrait of a man he could rise to heights. His celebrated "Epes Sargent" is a mon umental design painted with power; it is almost a masterpiece. That epithet is unreservedly to be applied to the great "Mrs. Fort" in the Wadsworth Athenaeum at Hartford. An American must always feel a thrill of pride in the presence of that canvas. Almost any of the great Englishmen might have bettered its color, but none of them could have beaten its swinging brushwork, its flashing bravura, or the fine ordonnance which sets the great lady before us in absolutely final terms. Copley was one of the out standing painters in Mr. Clarke's array, and if the fates had allowed him to be represented there by the "Mrs. Fort" he would have fairly shared the honors with Gilbert Stuart. Still, even then, it would have been necessary to admit that he had only his moments of spectacular triumph. Stuart was not unnaturally the hero of the whole enterprise, for he came forth repeatedly as an exemplar of sustained authority. Superb Stuarts recur to me again and again as I look back over the Union League exhibitions, a great "Robert Thew," an even greater "Joseph Anthony,"
33O Personalities in Art
and I cannot resist the temptation to cite another portrait seen at the Knoedler Gallery, a "William Constable/' which for gemlike perfection and beauty might have caused Sir Joshua, or even Gainsborough, to look to threatened laurels. But the one shining Stuart episode came in February, 1922, when six teen of his portraits were hung, among them the "Mrs. Richard Yates."
This is the portrait I had in mind when I was moved, just now, to "drag in Velasquez." No one who cared for pure painting could help thinking of the Spanish master on seeing this portrait. It combines, as a portrait by him combines, firm and weighty statement of fact with a touch equally sure but so light and flowing that the artist seems to be in abso lutely effortless command of his instruments. The brushwork is without a flaw. Not a stroke fails to fulfil itself in the exact notation of some nuance of form and tone. And the tone ! It is one consummate harmony in silvery grays. Add to that some wonder fully distinguished drawing, a felicitous composition, and the most sympathetic interpretation of an interest ing sitter, and you have some idea of the greatness of this lifelike and beautiful portrait. In the preceding month's exhibition a Stuart portrait shown was that of Sir Joshua Reynolds. It looked a little as if it might have been painted by the great man himself. But you thought of nothing derivative when you stood before the "Mrs. Richard Yates "; and if, as I have said, you
MRS. RICHARD YATES PROM THE PORTRAIT BY GILBERT STUART
Early American Portraiture 331
thought of Velasquez it was only because Stuart and he were obviously at one in seeking to make painted surface exquisite.
Apropos of this question of our indebtedness to for eign influences, the Union League exhibitions demon strated that in one respect at least we remained generally indifferent to what the London studios had to teach. Although we took over from the British portrait-painters a certain style in the placing of a figure upon the canvas, we rejected that style when we painted groups. Different conditions in social life probably had something to do with it. We had nothing here, either before or after the Revolution, quite corresponding to the court pageantry of England. New York or Philadelphia might have its grande dame, but she had no occasion for carrying herself like a duchess, and it never occurred to an American painter to put her on canvas as though she were one. There is nothing more pathetic about the magnificent career of Benjamin West, magnificent in worldly success, but artistically negligible, than his effort to paint great English ladies in the great English style. He only fell upon bathos. Stuart alone caught the trick. He painted his famous full-length of Washington (the one known as the Lansdowne type) with all the academic aplomb of a Reynolds. But that was a tour-de-force. The average of our response to the demands of the statelier, more splendid formula in English portraiture was illustrated at the Union League by Copley in his
332 Personalities in Art
"Henry Laurens." That was all furniture and back ground, in which a stilted figure was ill at ease if not quite lost. In the group portraits that Mr. Clarke secured, "The Washington Family/' by Edward Sav age, was tolerably well composed, but other examples, by John Lewis Krimmel, Joseph Wright, and Washing ton Alston, revealed more especially a kind of naive naturalism. The point is not without its larger bear ing. Not only in the group portrait but in the study of a single sitter, the early American artist was dis posed to infuse a measure of naturalism into the very artifice which he brought from British sources to his aid. That is why, as you follow American portraiture from its earliest period down into the nineteenth century, you are struck by its evolution into forms persistently traditional, yet no longer predominantly foreign.
I recognized this truth when I saw, for example, the "Timothy Matlack" of Charles WiUson Peale. This strong portrait of a homespun type gave forth no echo of the English school It was racy in its simplicity, American in its essence. The fact is that that historic company of Americans over whom Stuart and Copley preside bequeathed to their successors not so much a formula as the life-blood of a formula, not so much a tradition as the wholesome elements residing in that tradition. The Union League exhibitions proved it. They showed that what went on after our direct contacts with England decreased in number was just
Early American Portraiture 333
a Mgh-minded cultivation of the good things in paint ing: good modelling, drawing and brushwork, good composition; in short, good artistic manners. To put it bluntly, the founders had breeding and they passed it on. The recipients of that precious gift varied in force and individuality. Some of them have gone down the wind. But it is impossible to forget Thomas Sully, say, or John Neagle, or Samuel F. B. Morse, or Charles Loring Elliott, or John Wesley Jarvis, or Chester Harding. You can't forget them, because what they did they did well, because they were not only conscientious but really adequate craftsmen, and because ingrained in their portraits is the characteristic spirit of America. I have glanced at the interest which the portraits gathered by Mr. Clarke possessed as relics of bygone generations. Through their interven tion there seemed to go trooping through the gallery at the club a memorable procession of statesmen, orators, soldiers, authors, actors, and men of affairs. They lived upon the canvas. You knew them in their walk and demeanor. Sometimes their painted present ments were not only animated but beautiful. The spectacle could not but move the observer, giving him a sense of something fine and vital. Certainly it could not but impress him with a conviction of the authentic power of the early American school of portraiture.
XXIV
The American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum
XXIV
THE AMERICAN WING AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
ON NOVEMBER 10, 1924, there occurred in New York an event always to be underlined in the his tory of American art. On that day the Metropoli tan Museum opened the doors of its new American Wing, the building given to the city by Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. De Forest. Behind the south fa- gade, formerly that of the old Assay Office in Wall Street, are rooms preserved bodily from the past or constructed in such wise as to revive the environ ment of the Forefathers. Within them are assembled furniture and other objects illustrating our aesthetic beginnings. Paintings and prints complete the en semble. To explore the American Wing is to appre hend in singular vividness the spirit in which those men who made the Colonies and those who founded the Republic lived their lives at home and superim posed urbanity upon the site of the primeval wilder ness. Many museums in the United States are giving earnest attention to our earlier arts and crafts. But the Metropolitan was the pioneer in this matter, tak ing a crucial step when it organized the American section of its exhibition for the Hudson-Fulton Cele bration in 1909; it has ever since been unremittingly
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active in support of the subject, and now, thanks to the gift of this building, it makes a demonstration that is unique not only in this country but in the world.-
Europe has of course shown us the way where the honoring of native art is concerned. She has an older ancestry and in consequence greater riches. Paris, for example, has so much that it must be divided among different treasure-houses. She has the Louvre and the Luxembourg, the Cluny and the Mus6e des Arts Decoratifs. We gather under one roof the collec tions in which we emulate all four. The circumstance gives a delightful opportunity to the student. Here he may, with extraordinary ease, literally "survey man kind from China to Peru" and observe the art of his own country in a perspective embracing all the nations and all the centuries. For my own part I find the American Wing more interesting as I see it groping about for a place of its own in the cosmos that em braces Egypt and all the rest. It does not hurt but, rather, aids the imagination to come from antiquity into this modern world of ours, and the trustees have done a clever thing in so framing the plan of the new wing that it is entered from the old main building. The only fly in the ointment consists in the fact that the visitor is thus kept from seeing first the Assay Office facade. This was designed by Thompson about a hundred years ago. In its classical dignity it proclaims the severe mood which belonged to our formative
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periods, and there would be a certain fitness in bringing the spectator into contact with it at the very outset. However, the scheme is too admirable as it stands for this point to be stressed, and in the arrangement of the wing the transition from European to American senti ment is felicitously marked. In the little gallery through which the approach is made, there hangs the big portrait of "The Washington Family" which Edward Savage painted in 1796. When I first saw this in an exhibition at the Union League Club I longed to see it again in the Metropolitan Museum. It is inspiriting to find it actually there and in an ideal position.
The American Wing does much the same sort of thing as was done in the Swiss National Museum at Zurich a quarter of a century ago. It reconstructs characteristic interiors, endeavoring to minimize the conventional museum effect and to renew, instead, that of a veritable habitation. Space must naturally be reserved for circulation, but so far as is consistent with this the furniture, pictures, and so on are so dis posed as to re-create the atmosphere in which the original owners of these things had their being. The only marked concession to the scientific side of mu seum administration lies in the careful fixing of a chronological sequence. Thus the entrance (on the top floor of a three-story building) takes you into the seventeenth century. Off the central beamed hall, whose trusses have been modelled after those of
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the Old Ship Meeting-House at Hingham, Mass., are small rooms in which you may trace our earliest modes of interior design. The type commemorated is, of course, the house and not the hovel, the dwelling which is the mirror, so to say, of the upper middle class, the merchant class, the prosperous class, which, if it went in for plain living, was at all events wont to do its high thinking in simple comfort. It is with a double purpose that I pause here to pay tribute to Mr. R. T. H. Halsey, the distinguished collector of Americana, who has labored heroically over a long period in supervision of the American Wing. With his own scholarship and with that of the many ex perts whom he has whole-heartedly called to his aid, he has established the wing not only with great charm, but in what would appear to be remarkable historical accuracy. We owe him much for that, and we owe him thanks, too, for those numerous articles in the Museum Bulletin into which he has packed the lore of his subject. I shall turn to him for more than one illuminating passage. He has seen his sub ject steadily and seen it whole. On the top floor the seventeenth century is luminously unfolded. The eighteenth century is also illustrated there, and on the floor below we are initiated more fully into its characteristics. On the floor below that there lie per fectly exposed before us the traits of the early Re public. To what do all this reconstruction and elucidation
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lead? To what reflections and conclusions do they carry us? The visitor to the American Wing will miss the service it is there to render who fails to grasp it as the embodiment of an idea. It is based upon ar chaeological research, but it is concerned essentially with warm human things. It answers first and last the question of countless inquirers, the question as to how the instinct for art was implanted and nourished in the genius of the American people.
There is pleasant testimony to the frame of mind with which we started in one of those fragments which Mr. Halsey has ferreted out. It occurs in Edward Johnson's "Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England" of 1642. " Further the Lord hath been pleased/' he says, "to turn all the wigwams, huts, and hovels the English dwelt in at their first coming, into orderly, fair, and well-built houses, well- furnished, many of them." You may see the proof of this in the American Wing, going first into the room based on the kitchen of the Capen house, which was built in the seventeenth century at Tops- field, Mass. It is an affair of the baldest simplicity, but that simplicity is not rude; it is seemly and dignified. In the neighboring room, reproducing the parlor of the Hart house at Ipswich, the level of taste is slightly lifted. The "summer beam" is chamfered, taking on thereby a little more interest than attaches to its prototype, and above the fireplace there is a moulding on which a pattern of red and black hints at
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an unexpected craving for color. When you get into the Hampton room, in which the walls are covered with the original New Hampshire panelling, you note an extraordinary progress in taste. Primitive as it is in epoch, this room nevertheless shows in its investiture, especially in a corner cupboard and in the panelled ceiling, a strong desire to overlay luxury upon comfort. The evolution goes on into the eighteenth century through a room from Portsmouth, Rhode Island, on this floor, and is continued through the remaining chambers on the lower floors until we reach a high pitch of sophistication. In all these developments, which I make no pretense of following step by step, for minute details would hopelessly exhaust my few pages, the derivation of Colonial craftsmanship from English sources is obvious. You feel it unmistakably in the furniture. It is the distinction of the American Wing that it is dedicated absolutely to work of native origin, but it forcibly brings out our early dependence in these matters upon the land from which we sprang. We were English in blood and in habit. We brought over the old Jacobean and Elizabethan chest or cabi net, and, when we lacked it, our carpenters and wood- carvers did their best to copy the old designs and the old style. I may cite here an apposite passage from Dunlap:
The artists who visited the Colonies found friends and employers; they did not need protectors. They exchanged the products of their skill and labor for the money of the
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rich., and received kindness and hospitality "in the bar gain." Our first visitors were probably all from Great Britain; and none stayed long. The Pilgrims who sought refuge from oppression, and the other pioneers of coloniza tion, had their thoughts sufficiently employed on the arts of necessity and the means of subsistence or defence. Their followers brought wealth and pictures and imported from home the articles of luxury and the materials for ornamental architecture. As wealth increased, art and artists followed; and as the effects of that freedom which the colonists enjoyed was felt native artists sprang up and excelled the visitors from the fatherland.
The interesting thing to get at here is the question of the Colonial point of view, whether it was consciously artistic or whether it regarded art as wholly related to that instinct for comfort and luxury to which I have alluded. Did that liking for what the English liked, and that disposition to cultivate the same style, flower in a definite appreciation of art as art? Mr. Halsey quoted in The Bulletin an advertisement published by John Smibert, who was a dealer as well as a painter in Boston, which points to the existence of the amateur. It runs:
To be sold at Mr. Smiberts in Queen Street on Monday the 26th instant. A Collection of valuable Prints, en graved by the best Hands after the finest Pictures in Italy, France, Holland, and England. Some by Raphael, Michael Angelo, Poussin, Rubens, and others the greatest masters, containing a great variety of Subjects as History &c. Most of the Prints very rare and not to be met with except in private collections; being what Mr. Smibert collected in the above mentioned countries, for his own private use and improvement.
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Mr. Halsey tells me, too, that buyers of prints in the old days were more than lavish, sometimes fairly spotting a wall with engravings. The American Wing happily refrains from reproducing this foible. Both its paintings and its prints are restrained in number. Its testimony is, notwithstanding, in confirmation of the significance of Smibert's advertisement. It is clear that the Forefathers liked to embellish their walls. You may see that also in the several rooms in the wing which are adorned with Chinese painted paper or with pictorial papers printed in France. Still, the picture for its own sake was long in coming into its own. The portrait, painted or engraved, is the charac teristic thing, and that functioned primarily as a record, not as a source of sensuous pleasure.
Apropos of the sensuous note it is suggestive to observe the matter of color in the early American social fabric. I have glanced at the modest gleam of decoration in red and black over the mantelpiece in the reproduction of the Hart parlor. The rudimentary color-sense there manifested was bound to develop. It crops out more bravely in imported textiles, in hangings of painted cotton, and in velvet cushions. On the rush or wooden seats of some of the old chairs in the American Wing there are flung cushions of ruby or emerald velvet. The color sets off the furniture delectably to the modern eye, and I can imagine the pleasure it gave to the Colonial housewife, how it brought something jocund into an otherwise sober
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Interior. But musing in these rooms I have been greatly impressed by their sobriety. We are apt to think of the typical Colonial interior as an affair of brilliant white contrasted with glistening dark mahogany. That is a misinterpretation. In the seven teenth century panelling was left the natural color of the wood, without oiling or polishing, and when it was painted it was more often gray or blue or green. I don't think, by the way, that their tints, then or later, were particularly happy. On the contrary, some of those in the American Wing are interesting only for their fidelity to precedent. Intrinsically they are of a deadly bleakness, some of the coldest, most inartistic tints I ever saw. The panelling in the room from Woodbury, Long Island, for example, may have pleased the farmer for whom it was made, but if the color he saw was what we see — and there is no reason to doubt it — we may be sure that he stayed a farmer unillumined by any of the subtleties of art.
I don't think they were very subtle folk, these ancestors of ours. I don't think there was anything recondite about their aesthetic outlook at all. Indeed, it is an open question as to whether the word "aes thetic" had any great status in their vocabulary. As I have indicated, I do not see them as collectors in the strict sense, even though they had their occasional collections of prints and ceramics. I see them, rather, just as people of good breeding and consequent good taste. Art as the American Wing puts it before us,
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art as it was brought over from England, and some what artlessly nurtured here, was wreaked upon noth ing more nor less than social amenity. And in its very detachment from the milieu of the collector, the con noisseur, it kept itself free to strengthen the one quality which was to prove, aesthetically, our salva tion. The seasoned collector pays a certain penalty for his r61e. It makes him a complex being and makes his taste eclectic. We began with a strong tincture of fairly classical simplicity, and the outstanding lesson of the American Wing is that it stayed with us for full two hundred years. We wax in sophistication as time goes on. We are susceptible to rococo influences now and then. (There is a piquant instance in the room with painted decorations on the second floor, brought from Marmion in Virginia.) But chiefly our sophis tication finds its efflorescence in grace and elegance. Our good taste stands firm. Our restraint is unshaken. You can see our evolution in perhaps its most eloquent phases if you observe the big ballroom taken out of Gadsby's Tavern at Alexandria, Virginia, and the room from the Powel house in Philadelphia. To the former, I may note in passing, Washington came for his last birthnight ball, in 1798, riding over from Mount Vernon, only eight miles away. The Powel room is richer than the ballroom, serving to show how wealth asserted itself, but both have the same austere stateliness. It is beautiful to see how the purity and reserve
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in matters of style, which we have now to gain through education, were then practised by our crafts men and their patrons quite naturally and as a matter of course. The visitor to the American Wing will see clearly enough, if he gives his mind to it, the idea, and the ideal there enshrined. He will see that the Forefathers liked as part of their measured, well-mannered mode of carrying them selves in the world a cool, serene, and handsome environment. They liked gracious lines, telling par ticularly in the delicately wrought mouldings of wain scot, panelling, and cornice. They liked a brilliant chandelier, a shining lustre. With high appreciation and always without extravagance, they welcomed Chippendale and Sheraton, and took to their hearts the architectural motives of Robert and James Adam. They were always without extravagance, I have said, and I repeat the words because they affirm a fastidious ness at the core of the subject. There was luxury in that old America beyond a doubt. When John Adams made a note of the dinner that he had at "Mr. Nick Boylston's" one winter night in 1766, he added these words: "Went over the house to view the furniture, which alone cost a thousand pounds sterling. A seat ft is for a nobleman, a prince. The Turkey carpets, the painted hangings, the marble tables, the rich beds with their crimson damask curtains and counterpanes, the beautiful chimney-clock, the spacious garden, are the most magnificent of anything I have ever seen."
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Gorgeous it must have been to leave Adams so breath less, but it is certain that it had a fundamental sim plicity infinitely removed from one of those ex otic interiors in which your modern Maecenas is lodged.
It is the key to the American Wing, this simplicity, and with it there goes a kind of beauty. Both elements pervade the whole broad scheme, the rooms as rooms and the pictures that they make of our earlier civili zation. Moreover, the spirit of the place is exemplified again in those smaller objects which diversify and fill out the general design. Consider the pottery, the glass, and the silver, especially the silver. Our craftsmen were never more judicious or more suave than when they worked in silver. It is of the craftsmen, to tell the truth, more than of the artist in the ordinary acceptation of the term, that you think in the Ameri can Wing. American painting has its place here, but the portraits by Stuart, Peale, Trumbull, Morse, and so on are displayed less for themselves than as details. Though I am tempted to speak of some of these canvases, which represent some highly important painters, beginning with Strycker, and include some notable pieces in the Charles A. Munn bequest, it is the grand design which I am more concerned to emphasize. It has been carried out in the grand style. In a thousand ways the Metropolitan Museum has made itself indispensable to the nation, but never hitherto has it rendered a service so intensely national
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in character. Americans need to know the soil in which the evolution of their art is rooted. Here, as in a laboratory, it is made plain to them. The wing has an educational value beyond measurement.
XXV
The American Business Building
XXV THE AMERICAN BUSINESS BUILDING
SOME man of imagination, half philologist and half poet, should give his mind to the renaming of the categories of architecture. These are, no doubt, ac curately enough designated as they stand. When you talk of domestic or ecclesiastical architecture you know pretty well where you are, though it must be admitted, as regards the first, that there is a certain organic difference between a suburban bungalow and a house like Chatsworth. But what are you to do about that particular kind of architecture which has been de veloped by the business conditions in American life? It is called "commercial," and against that possibly convenient but nevertheless pinched and inadequate essay in nomenclature I disgustedly rebel. It takes no account of the particular and peculiarly artistic charac teristics of the kind of building to which I wish in this survey to refer. Within a period of a scant thirty-five or forty years American architects have been tackling so-called "commercial" problems in a spirit of their own and with results unique in the world. They have taken one of the raciest aspects of the American genius and interpreted it in terms of beauty, producing a • body of architecture meet for honorable description.
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I want some word which will ally it not only to the things of the market-place but to the things of the soul, a word worthy of the new creative art which it represents, a word as spiritually indicative as "romantic" or "classical." This architecture is rooted in the most practical phase of our civilization, but you cannot call it a prosaic thing, for it has brought out a fairly inspired audacity in designers and it constitutes an achievement not only in ingenuity but in taste. Was there anything partaking of the ordi nary nature of prose in the imagination of Cass Gilbert when he conceived the Woolworth Building? He had there, rather, the poetic inspiration of his life. Yet I dare say the questions that pressed upon him as he sat down to his plan began with the hard issues of engineering and embraced all manner of demands for those things that are summed up in the phrase "rent- ing-space." Your "commercial" architecture misses its destiny if it does not "pay." The triumph of the American architect has consisted in his extorting from that obligation a type of architectural beauty.
It has all happened within the memory of living men. As recently as the eighties, in fact, they were still putting up terrible facades of cast iron, facades all the more terrible because they played ducks and drakes with the classical orders. But it was in that period, too, that the change began. It was a swift affair, part and parcel of that instinct for speed and mutability which is the very life-blood of the American people. We are
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nothing if not rapid in our movements, and I recall with some chagrin an instance of this in the very chapter of evolution with which I am dealing here. It was in the eighties that McKim, Mead & White erected the Columbia Bank on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. The facade on the avenue was narrow, that on the street was long. The first stages were rusticated stone. Brick and terra-cotta carried up to the cornice. The design was that of a Florentine palazzo with loggias at the top, and it was a little gem, one of the gracefulest monu ments the city ever possessed. Where is that building now ? It was razed to make way for a broader structure about double its height. But if the reader wants to see how our renaissance in this field was begun he may happily still do so by looking at the building of the De Vinne Press, in Lafayette Street, which dates from 1881. The late Theodore L. De Vinne was himself a man of high ideals, a printer who took typography for what it is, one of the greatest of the arts; and when he set out to house his business he went to architects of distinction, to Babb, Cook & Willard. They made him a design which to this day proudly maintains a standard of beauty amid its commonplace surround ings. The building is beautiful in its true proportions, in its distribution of the apertures, in its fine lines, and in its expression of the strength and the sim plicity befitting the purpose for which it was con structed. Consider the dignity and the positive charm
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of this building and then ask if there is not something lacking in the designation of it as merely "commer cial" architecture. Of course I'll admit that the designation is reasonable, but I repeat that I hanker after a phrase which would somehow transcend the signification of the term to which we are at present confined.
Work like that done in the De Vinne Building has been going on in the United States ever since; and I make not the smallest pretense of touching in these brief remarks upon anything like the generous propor tion of the landmarks in our architectural progress which industry and business have developed all over the country. I can, instead, glance at only a few repre sentative monuments. But those few have tremen dous meaning. I don't think it would be possible to exaggerate the import of Russek's, formerly the Gor- ham Building, which Stanford White completed in 1906 — its intrinsic beauty and its influence upon American architecture. White built their marble Ve netian palazzo for the Tiffanys at about the same time, and for artistic quality it is hard to choose between the two; but as the years have gone on and I have gazed with delight upon them both thousands of times, I have found myself more and more coming back to the gray stone walls of the old Gorham Building as making a masterpiece apart. Here, to begin with, was an inspiring problem: the housing of a business dedicated to one of the precious metals.
RUSSEK'S
FROM THE BUILDING BY McKIM, MEAD & WHITE
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The building had to possess both weight and delica cy. A certain elegance was to preside over its bulk. White saw to that with unerring taste and felicity in the columns and arches with which he started, in the cornice surmounting them, and in the sculptured dec oration he introduced. Then he struck the nicest balance in the four stories above them, using just the right restrained touch in his shallow pilasters at the corners, in his balconies, in the sills for the windows, and in the heraldic ornamentation crowning this part of the facade; and for his final stage he set his tall grilled windows between columns that support a deep and gloriously decorative cornice. The thing is su perb and it has two especially outstanding merits. In the first place, it is original, a work of great personal style, a building unlike anything that had come before and unsurpassed since. Secondly, it is a consummate affirmation of the American genius, practical, contem poraneous, a perfect fulfilment of every-day utilitarian needs, a work of usefulness which is a work of beauty. Imagination boggles at the idea of our ever having to give up this building for a taller one.
The merely tall building will always -be with us, but it is interesting to note that tallness by itself no longer has anything talismanic about it, is no longer an obsessing preoccupation — and this I say in spite of the fact that rumors about the vast building which is to take the place of the old Madison Square Garden promise a higher altitude than that of the Woolworth
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Building. From the beginning, American architects have been feeling their way toward a mitigation of pure vertical dimensions. Years ago I heard a story of what John W. Root dreamed of when he and his partner, Dan Burnham, pioneering in the erection of skyscrapers, built one of their first compositions, I think it was the Monadnock Building in Chicago. He wanted to do something about the coloration of the simple facade which would simulate the upward rush of flame. Root would have made some interesting experiments, I imagine, if he had lived; he would have done something to romanticize the subject. As it happened, when Burnham went on alone he was some times grandiose, but only through sheer bulk; and if there is anything romantic about the Flatiron Build ing in New York it is an accidental imposition due to the eccentric nature of the site rather than to the expression of any emotion in the architect. Burnham did a great deal of distinguished work, but he did it, like most of his colleagues, within the rather rigid confines of an accepted formula. The difference be tween his regime and the new is defined very effectively by the Hanna Building in Cleveland, designed by Charles A. Platt It is not so tall as the Flatiron, but it is tall enough. Like the Flatiron, it stands at a corner coming almost to a point; and though the two fagades extend to a much greater breadth, the idea of the prow of a ship asserts itself as you stand on Euclid Avenue and study the great gray mass. This is one
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of the major buildings in the country, subtly Renais sance in style but, like the old Gorham Building, possessing an essentially personal quality. As a mass it has great power, great force, and this is tinctured by a singular beauty in all the linear elements that lend relief to bulk and add charm to strength. It is an illustration of " commercial" architecture studied in the finest spirit, with warmth, delicacy, and flexibility.
The zoning laws came to lend aid to the architect in New York when they determined that a facade should be recessed above a certain height, and the city is already rich in examples of the taste and skill which which the new opportunity has been exploited. Our sky-line has entered upon a period of transfor mation during which almost any picturesqueness may be expected. I can cite no better design in illustration of this latest advance than that which Benjamin Wistar Morris gave us when he erected the Cunard Building at that point at which Broadway emerges from contact with Bowling Green. There is a noble landmark if ever there was one. He had in the firm and its great fleet an historic institution to commemorate, and he went about it matching heroic scale with a fairly majestic inspiration. The immense f ajade rests upon a rusticated base, with arches, columns, and cornice modifying its grimness; and it soars dizzily until it reaches the prescribed height, then recedes thrice until it reaches the roof. Twenty-five years
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ago this problem would have bewildered an architect, and he would have been practically defeated by the task. Morris grappled with it out of a fund of origin ality, and — the all-important point — he saw his gigantic facade as a whole, refused to be baffled by his necessarily serried windows, and developed an or ganic unit of architectural interest and beauty. I don't wonder that our sublime British brethren, so patronizing in their reception of things like "the great American novel/' forget to condescend when they are confronted by such an achievement as the Cunard Building. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world, and I cannot too often point out that what makes such architecture impressive is not by any means its scale alone but the superimposition of beauty upon scale and the exact correspondence be tween these things and the needs of our time. Could anything be racier, more modern, more true? It is the American soul in architecture. We are a busy, hard-working people, dear-eyed and energetic, wor shipping efficiency, tending instinctively to bigness in enterprise, and widely occupied not only in the piling up of money but in the spending of it with a well-nigh imperial gesture. You read it all in the might and splendor of a Cunard Building. There is momentary amusement in the reflection that here a British organi zation is subdued to the stuff in which it works. With its business as American as it is English, the Cunard Line adjusts its tradition to the New York environ-
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ment, falls into step with our whole movement, and finds itself expressed in the terms of an intensely American architecture.
I do not mean that there are no gorgeous business buildings in England. The Cunard offices in Liver pool are not by any means negligible from an archi tectural point of view. But they are a flea-bite compared to the offices in New York. The observer will smile again if, as he enters the latter, he will let his mind revert to those canonical quarters with which, according to generations of English writers, the English business man has always been content. If, when you are writing a romance of life in London, you want to be impeccable as to your "local color" you know well enough what to do. Pursue your famous solicitor up a flight of creaking steps in a dingy little building, follow him down a dark passage, and, when you have placated a snuffy clerk in a poverty-stricken anteroom, come to speech with the great man among japanned boxes looking even more antique than they are in the light that filters dimly through unwashed windows. You are in the presence of the oracle of dukes. That, at all events, is what we have been led to believe, along with the circumstance that if an English millionaire sometimes functions in an office of the American style, he is as likely to be discovered in a den that would be repu diated by a small retail merchant in South Bend, Ind. Well, cherishing these memories, as I say, let the
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reader visit the great hall in the Cunard Building. I verily believe that if a certain type of British business man were to do so he would fall in a fit. Almost you might be in the Vatican. The deep-domed chamber goes clear through to the back of the building. The walls are of mellow travertine. The domes rest on piers which are themselves pierced by arches, so that repeated swelling curves lighten the austerity of a hall well over 150 feet deep. On the walls there are huge maps of the Cunard routes, painted by Barry Faulk ner, and on ceiling and pendentives Ezra Winter has brilliantly painted decorations reviving in an enchant ing harmony the traditions of Raphael and Pintu- ricchio. This more than spacious room is Medicean in its stateHness and sumptuous character.
It will be remarked that in this apotheosis of " com mercial" architecture the enhancement of the interior has kept pace with the creative development of the faf ade, and in this the banking business has played a distinctive part. Every one, I am sure, has noticed it, and I might cite evidence from almost any direction. What first impressed it upon me was not, to tell the truth, a design of spectacular dimensions, but a bijou of a bank designed by Cross & Cross for a branch of the Guaranty Trust Company at Madison Avenue and Sixtieth Street. It is much used by women, and though it is an absolutely businesslike place, it has the delicate, even exquisite, traits which would be sympa thetic to its clientele. The depositor here might come
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from her Adam drawing-room or from some such surroundings to the bank and not feel that she had stepped out of her atmosphere. The black-and-white scheme is as cool and serene as flawless taste could make it, and there is no detail anywhere that does not fit into the picture. The place has the finish of the proverbial Swiss watch. One would think that such a finish was only attainable in a building of limited dimensions, but, as I have indicated, the note of grandeur recurs again and again in the architectural development we are considering, and it strongly marks the work of the architects who have in some sort brought the subject to a culmination.
Thirty-odd years ago Philip Sawyer was a young architect in the office of McKim, Mead & White. So was Edward P. York. They did together some jobs of their own and sometime in the late nineties launched forth definitely as the firm of York & Sawyer. Later the partnership included Louis Ayres and L. M. Franklin, both likewise McKim men, and in still another partner, F. S. Benedict, they have a graduate from the office of Babb, Cook & Willard. It is perhaps worth noting that among the five there is a voice which occasionally remembers the accents of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but the important point is denoted in my allusions to McKim and Babb. This younger force, in short, has been trained in the American tradition, its use of Italian Renaissance motives having been determined chiefly by experience at home. The style
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which York & Sawyer have formed for themselves is a style pure and scholarly, spiritually classical but never academic or muscle-bound. It is embodied in buildings of many kinds and uses, all of them distin guished; but on this occasion I would pay tribute to these architects chiefly as designers of banks. Two of them in New York without question give to York & Sawyer a status incomparable here or abroad. One is the Bowery Savings Bank, on Forty-second Street just east of Park Avenue. The other is the Greenwich Savings Bank, the site of which stretches from Broad way to Sixth Avenue on Thirty-sixth Street. The facades in both cases are beautifully designed. The three of the Greenwich, of reasonable height, are purely classical, using the Corinthian order, with a simple attic rising above the columns. The Bowery is of Romanesque origin, and for all its historic deriva tion presents a very fresh and unconventional effect. You could not pass either building without an im pulse of admiration. Enter either of them and you behold banking architecture in excelsis.
I have figured the surprise of the British business man seeing the Cunard Building for the first time. Downright stupefaction would overtake old Meyer Rothschild if the founder of that famous fortune could revisit the glimpses of the moon and pass into the building of the Bowery Savings Bank, memories clustering thick about him of his ancient and obscure Frankfort lair. "This isn't a banking-room," he
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would exclaim in his bewilderment. " It is a hall be longing to a Roman Emperor/' Only it is a banking- room, one brought to the highest point of everything that spells efficiency in banking processes. The room is 200 feet long and nearly 80 feet in width, but there isn't an inch of waste space in it. The network of compartments for the staff is islanded on the great marble floor, and around it the area for the circulation of the public is exactly proportioned to the scale of the whole. The ceiling, 65 feet high, looks down on a scene in which there is nothing haphazard but in which each detail has a function and completes a balance. The ceiling is itself richly decorated. It is borne by walls in which engaged columns of varied marbles support massive arches. All along on either side the walls are panelled in mosaic as discreet in tone as so much ivory. There is no undue emphasis anywhere. The columns, as I have said, are of different marbles, and with the same substance the floor is as richly be- dight as that of many an Italian church. Gold gleams from the sculptured counter screen. The architects have had a perfect Sardanapalian debauch of marble and bronze, and in the walls themselves they have sought richness of surface, mixing Ohio sandstone with Indiana variegated limestone. It sounds of Byzantium. But it is sanely and magnificently of New York in 1925. These gifted men have always known when and how to restrain themselves, and they have painted their glowing picture so harmoniously that as the light
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comes through wide expanses of amber glass at either end and falls through the lofty roof panes, one is first aware of it as adequate illumination and then delight ed with the mellowness of its revelation. The room falls into one reposeful tone, like a chord of organ music.
Lovers of art make pilgrimages to see renowned pictures and cathedrals. I urge them to make a pil grimage to this work of American architecture, and when they conclude, as I know they will, that they never saw a handsomer room, the thing for them to do is to go down to the Greenwich Savings Bank and to observe that there York & Sawyer have, if anything, surpassed themselves. Here again we have a room of noble dimensions, this time 120 feet long by 86 feet wide, with a coffered ceiling 72 feet high. Here again the staff works behind a counter screen islanded as in the bank further up-town. But this time the room is elliptical and the result is one of the most beautiful in the world. It gave me one of the most thrilling moments I have ever known in architecture. I had a fleeting impression as of a tour-de-force,I wondered if I had come upon just a daring "stunt." But the longer I pondered the design the more I realized how deeply studied it was. There are, of course, no columns here, save at the ends. The great curving walls rise in unfretted simplicity, unbroken save by a few shrewdly placed false windows, filled with pierced stone. Look at the individual things that go to make up this lovely
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ensemble. Look at the floor, look at the mouldings, look at the very benches placed here and there against the walls and at the lighting fixtures, which reproduce the lines of some ornate Renaissance marvel in metal. Once more, as at the Bowery, the part plays into the hands of the unit, and in this case it goes to vitalize a conception at once massy and graceful, a thing of exultant strength and of beguiling charm. It is in the grand style and yet it makes a fairly intimate appeal. While you are impressed by those antique wall sur faces you are joyously uplifted by the flowing line of the ellipse.
How buoyantly and masterfully American it is! What a stir of creative energy these eloquent walls proclaim ! Those who care for American architecture must rejoice when they see a room like this, a room genuinely worthy of the school to which McKim gave such impetus when he built the Pennsylvania Ter minal. And it springs straight from the core of our national life, straight from the fundamental sources of the American genius. That is the exciting thing about our "commercial" architecture. It expresses what we do and what we are in one of our most characteristic fields of endeavor. It is full of our spirit, of our imagination. Does the reader wonder at my wanting a word, a phrase, which would do new honor to this new growth in our art?
XXVI
American Industrial Art
XXVI AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL ART
FURNITURE — if I may risk a figure that through the association of ideas might seem a little absurd — furniture is in the air. So is wall-paper. So is silver ware and so are window hangings. In fact, all the appointments of a well-regulated American home are being discussed as they never were before. The Ameri can home is being made over, and the interesting thing about the transformation is that it is proceeding not on an artistic impetus alone, in the strict sense, but from the adjustment of the practical and mechani cal genius of the country to ends both artistic and commercial. How irrelevant that last word must sound in the ear of the dilettante and how whole somely apposite it really is ! Undoubtedly, when Benvenuto Cellini fashioned the great saltcellar at Vienna he made it beautiful because he loved his craft, but he did the best he could with it, too, be cause he was "filling a job."
It is possible to be too romantic, too sentimental, about the ideals of the craftsmen of the past. Good art in industry has always been a matter of good business, and disciplinary pressure from without has been pretty nearly as important as inspiration surging from within. I do not doubt that when Oeben and
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Eiesener labored across the years on the prodigious desk in the Louvre they had a salutary consciousness of the fact that they were carrying out a commission for the King. In short, artists though they were, they had a sense of trade responsibility. It is an ancient faith. Observe, in M. Saglio's concise summary, the rule of law followed by the mediaeval French huchiers, or cabinetmakers :
No one could aspire to the title of a master cabinet maker who had not served an apprenticeship of six years, at the end of which he would have to submit to an exam ination before a selected jury, and be called upon to exe cute in the house of one of them, without any assistance, a masterpiece on some prescribed theme that should test to the uttermost his power of dealing successfully with the difficulties of his profession. The manufacture of any furniture in wood except in the licensed ateliers was strictly forbidden, as was also the buying or selling of anything produced elsewhere. To set against these restrictions, master cabinetmakers were bound to send forth none but work of the highest quality, alike of material and execu tion; it must all be in Ion bois loyal et marchand, under penalty of having anything inferior publicly burned before their doors, and having to pay a fine of ten crowns.
Now it would of course be appropriate to dilate upon the artistic conscience of the cabinetmaker here suggested; appropriate and just. But do not let us forget his solicitude for his bill. He knew perfectly well that if that was to be cheerfully and promptly paid it would be becaipe he had satisfied a customer, met an obligation in the open market.
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I keep the economic aspect of the subject in mind because it has made so deep an impression upon me when I have seen at the Metropolitan Museum in New York the remarkable exhibitions of American industrial art organized there. They are exhibitions of beautiful things, and what makes them significant is their representation of that intensely American factor in modern life, quantity production. They form a series of shows having a certain historical status. The American craftsman is no new type. We have had our famous pioneers in carpentry and cabinetmaking, in glass and pewter, and so on. Paul Revere is remem bered not only for his historic ride but for his silver ware. There are collectors who specialize with some thing like religious passion in the furniture of Duncan Phyfe. In 1909, when the Metropolitan Museum held its great exhibition commemorative of the tercen tenary of the discovery of our river by Henry Hudson and the centenary of Fulton's first use of steam in its navigation, a goodly proportion of the space was given to early American furniture and utensils. These things could not promote the revival, out of hand, of Colonial ideas and types of craftsmanship, but they did have a constructive influence. They had some effect upon style in current manufacture and they had more in setting people thinking. They have been thinking ever since, and this is where the Museum again comes in.
Recognizing in the most liberal spirit the force of
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that clause in its charter which dedicates it3 among other things, to "the application of art to manufac ture," it has for many years steadily developed its collections of industrial art. More recently it has actively pursued the subject in those administrative ways which can do so much to make an institution of tangible service in the community. It has done every thing possible to encourage the practical student. It has lent all the facilities in the world to the designer and manufacturer. An extraordinarily rich library has been placed at their disposal, to reinforce the aid embodied in the collections. An efficient staff has always been on the spot to lend willing co-operation, and in 1918 one of its members, Mr. Richard F. Bach, was appointed Associate in Industrial Arts to preside over the department and in every way to further its usefulness. He frequents shops, factories, and design ing-rooms, knows machinery as well as men, and in the presence of a brocade or a cretonne or a wall-paper, to cite only one or two examples, can tell you how the thing was made and exactly what progress it stands for in the history of its particular craft. The Museum not only has an amazing number of trade papers in its files but keeps in touch with their editors. It welcomes the manufacturer, and the manufacturer, it is good to know, responds with growing enthusiasm, though it would be, perhaps, too much to say that the trade in toto is as yet aware of what art can do to bring culture and commercialism together. The modern
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manufacturers have not by any means renewed the solidarity of those mediaeval huchiers to whom I have alluded. Some of them harbor jealousies of their rivals. Some of them are fearful of exhibiting outside their own warerooms an object of their making; they shiver at the thought of the possible snooping of one of their ideas. The middleman, that portentous phenomenon, is occasionally an obstructionist. There are, indeed, divers reactionary elements with which the Museum has to reckon. But the good work has gone on in spite of them.
Seven or eight years ago the Museum opened in a small way an exhibition of manufactures based on study of the collections. Annually this demonstration has been repeated, always increasing in scope, until, in 1922, the largest single gallery in the building, the familiar one reserved for special exhibitions, was as signed to the purpose. There were twenty-six exhibi tors in the first year, thirty-seven in the second, seventy-eight in the third, and so on through a scale always rising. Hundreds of pieces are now shown. Hitherto the policy of the Museum has adhered to the point that all of the work shown should be work influ enced by study of its collections. This was a reasonable and desirable attitude. It was important for the Metropolitan to affirm the nature and value of its re sources — as Mr. Bach has expressed it in The Bulletin, to broadcast Museum usefulness to the manufacturer, "on the wings of commerce and along the crowded
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channels of sale and purchase." Nothing could do this better than an annual collection of objects giving the most tangible possible of evidences of contact with the collections. I have followed the shows from the beginning and have seen the remarkable growth they have registered.
It has been a mixed growth, and I cannot forbear deviation here into a curious phase in the development of American taste. That taste, after all, must have a lot to do with the proceedings of the manufacturer; and he has been seriously affected by our cult for Europe. It is a cult that under the right hands may promote exquisite emulation of a Renaissance Italian interior, French or English precedent, or under the wrong hands it may bring about nothing more than the accumulation of exotic and expensive junk. There is the classical anecdote of the lady who was showing her new house to a friend and opened a door, saying: "This is our Louis Quinze room." Quoth the visitor: "What makes you think so?" I remember an eigh teenth-century French room "somewhere in the United States," a little affair in Reckitt's blue and chalk-white. It added a new shudder to life. One sees an "Italian" drawing-room sometimes that looks like nothing on earth so much as a hotel lobby. I have detected some reverberations from that meretricious world in the exhibitions at the Museum. At any rate, they have indicated a marked dependence upon the historic model, not so much emulation as imitation.
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But a change has been going on all the time, and the exhibition of 1924 took memorable account of it. It released the manufacturer from any obvious alliance with the Museum collections, permitting him to sub mit objects simply of American design and manufac ture, with emphasis on the point that they illustrated quantity production. This last term was interpreted to mean either the production of many identical pieces at one time from a single design or the production of identical pieces from time to time according to the same original model or pattern. Finally, I must note that the exhibition was restricted absolutely to work falling within the year 1923. The subject was thus brought up to date in the fullest possible sense. The public was shown on a large scale what I may call the high lights in American industrial art.
It is the broad illumination they cast rather than their character in detail that concerns me here, but I confess it is tempting to pause upon a few specific items. I simply can't resist the temptation to pay a passing tribute to one man whose memory the show brought back to me, the late Edward F. Caldwell, one of the most charming artists I ever knew* I used to know him in the old days when he designed fixtures in the firm known, I think, as the Archer-Pancoast Company. He used to do things for Stanford White, White had a wonderful way of attracting the best workers. If he designed a panelled room, it was executed for him by the old Austrian Joseph Cabus,
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one of the finest cabinetmakers we ever had. His houses were painted by John Sarre, who came from the Isle of Guernsey, and brought a marvellous French touch to his work. When White was looking for fix tures he went to Caldwell, and there was simply nothing that Caldwell could not do. He knew aU the historical styles, and he had invention of his own. Thirty years ago he made chandeliers that are beauti ful works of art to this day. He started a business of his own, and this firm, Edward F. Caldwell & Com pany, splendidly carries on the tradition it owes to him. In one of the exhibitions I have in mind, it illustrated his principle of doing many things well. It sent andirons and a fire-screen, and offered, be sides, the appointments for a desk, boxes, and so on, done daintily in "Battersea" enamel. In the one instance you had strength, in the other delicacy, and in both you had good design. That was Caldwell all over. It would have tickled him if he could have lived to see the idea which he followed in rather lonely fashion now being recognized by an ever-growing company. There were other things recalling his tradition at the Museum. One of them was a chan delier of hammered pewter and brass, designed by Walter W. Kantack, and made by his firm, Kantack, Heath & Warman. It was a shining example of what has come over American manufacture, the vitalizing of old European idioms of style in work so sound and so beautiful that you had no thought of mere imitation
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but were simply conscious of the American designer and craftsman falling naturally into step with their predecessors and taking beauty in their stride.
There is surely no reason why they should be original at the expense of immemorial convention. That way there often lies nothing but strained fantas ticality. I remember the splash that was made in the Salon by the French craftsman Carabin. No wonder he got himself noticed ! He would carve a goblin atop a chair-back or reveal him climbing up over the edge of a table. Then the craze for Vart nouveau set in and furniture abroad looked more or less like the notorious "Nude Descending a Staircase." In the earlier exhibi tions at the Museum there were repetitions, as I have said, of established motives, but, thank heaven, there were no freaks. There wasn't even the ghost of one in the eighth show, the show of 1924. It was sane, conservative, a model of good taste. Did it disclose any thing like genius? Hardly that. A William Morris turns up only once in a generation. There are some wall-papers of his that have never been rivalled. In design and in color he made them fairly superb. Yet there were some fascinating wall-papers at the Metro politan, shown by fully a dozen firms. And in the textile field our American manufacturers need hardly fear comparison with Morris. The makers of rugs and velvets, tapestries and damasks, cretonnes and silks came magnificently into the foreground in a group so large and imposing that I do not pretend to enumerate
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its members. All I can do is to render homage to the beauty of their fabrics, the sound design in them, and the high character of their manufacture.
The matter of design inevitably first attracts at tention, and this is a matter which is being taken more and more seriously. A recent incident makes this manifest. Not long ago Mr. Michael Friedsam, of the Altaian firm, offered to the Architectural League an Art and Industry Medal to be awarded annually to the man doing most to apply artistic ideals to commer cial production in America. This golden tribute, which Mr. Friedsam proposes to maintain in perpe tuity, was bestowed for the first time upon Mr. Henri Creange, who as Art Director of Cheney Brothers has had an immense influence upon the creation of beauty in their fabrics. I saw the result of his activity at the Museum show and I have observed it elsewhere. The Cheneys have done enchanting things, and it is patent that they could not have done them to the same extent without Mr. Creange. In industrial art, as in painting or sculpture, you are always coming back to the indi vidual, and there the subject involves a grave problem, In his invaluable report on "Art in Industry," a volume indispensable to the investigator, Mr. Charles R. Richards has among his " Conclusions " a significant passage. "We must have better designers," he says; "not that we have not good designers in the art industries to-day., but we have not enough of the highest training or capacity to meet the advancing
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demand. Our manufacturers in certain industries go to France and other countries for their best designs, not because they can thus obtain them more cheaply, not even because of the prestige of Paris, but because they can find there better designs.57 Mr. Richards places the emphasis upon the need for more training. He says that only a minority of the designers in our art industries have received this aid to development. It is in the hands of the art schools to a large extent, but episodes like the exhibitions at the Museum have a strong contributory influence, and the pioneer work done at the Metropolitan has been more extended throughout museums elsewhere in the country than can be indicated within the limits of this brief essay. American industrial art has still much to achieve, but it has already fixed itself on the map.
It must be constrained, no doubt, to recognize the fact that it has more to learn than to teach in respect to design. But where manufacture is concerned it may safely take a bolder stand. I have touched on the sub ject of " quantity production." It not only means the taste of industrial art in America but means also our national traits of energy and ingenuity. The enthusi ast for taste, for purely aesthetic issues, may wince a bit when you tell him that the lovely things at the Mu seum, the films of lace, the exquisite silver and glass, the handsome furniture, the bewitching cretonnes, rep resented the triumph of America's mechanical genius. But that, in cold blood, is precisely what it did; and in
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that, to my mind, lies the hope of American industrial art. You cannot expect a race that applied the steel- cage principle to the building of the skyscraper to func tion in the mood and manner of a mediaeval craftsman. Now and then some individual may arise in whose bosom there glows the old fire. Invariably, when I go to an exhibition of the Architectural League, one of the first things I do is to see what has been done by Sam uel Yellin. That masterly worker in wrought metal is a Renaissance artisan born out of his time. I can conceive of Yellin as the leader of a group, the founder of a school, and I would be grateful for such an eventuality. But he would make a great mistake who, in appreciation of the maker of a single beautiful object, would sniff at beautiful objects perfectly pro duced by machinery in large quantities. Make no mistake about it, they spell delightfully one of the finest, most genuine impulses of the American soul. To undervalue them would be like undervaluing the railroad, the reaper, the Hoe press, the telephone, and the flying machine. When I think of American indus trial art as I have seen it at the Museum and remember that, thanks to the machinery behind it, it was meant not for the connoisseur alone but for the multitude, I feel that I have been in the presence of a truly vital expression of American life.
XXVII
The Centenary of George Inness
XXVII
THE CENTENARY OF GEORGE INNESS
THE story of American landscape-painting has a peculiar interest because it constitutes the most de cisively national achievement of our school. I have a particular reason for returning to it. George Inness was born at Newburgh on May i, 1825. In commemoration of his centenary the Macbeth Gal lery in New York City arranged in the spring of 1925 a loan exhibition of about thirty of his works, ranging from the sixties to his last period. It was a well-chosen, fairly representative collection, a good illustration of the art of Inness. I rejoiced in it for its own sake, and it set me to thinking about the whole development of American landscape art. It is a sub ject for which I have a special predilection, for it is one affirming the American genius in extraordinary fulness and brilliance. In our earlier history, when we were learning how to paint, we got our first impetus from the British tradition of the eighteenth century, and adjusted that tradition specifically to problems of portraiture. Our first efforts to deal with the subject- picture remain, critically speaking, almost negligible. I have sometimes wondered if our nearness at that
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time to the ideas of Puritanism did not have something to do with it. Such ideas, still lingering in the air, may possibly have slowed up the attack upon that study of the nude which bears so heavily upon the treatment of the figure. The thought persists despite the essays in the nude which can be discerned here and there in our formative period. In any case, the fact remains that the significant disciples of nature in the pioneering phase of American art are those who sought their inspiration in field and forest.
They were not, to tell the truth, the most exciting types in the world! Thomas Doughty, born in 1793, Aster B. Durand, born in 1796, were distinctly want ing in the creative fire so indispensable to the found ers of an authentic school. It seems sometimes as if their names had been conclusively submerged, and with them the names of men like Kensett and Mc- Entee, Whittredge and Bierstadt, S. R. Gifford and F. E. Church. But I wish the people who hold this view would now and then, just out of old loyalty, go to the Metropolitan Museum and renew the impres sions which the Hudson River men are there to convey. No doubt they are impressions of a dry, pinched, and altogether too literal reproduction of the given sub ject. But these pictures are also exemplars of honest workmanship, of judicious composition, of sound and sometimes graceful drawing. They are allied to our earlier and more successful portraiture by a certain rectitude which was in itself well calculated to give a
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measure of stimulus to the evolution of a better movement. It is customary and reasonable to ascribe their failure to assert themselves more effectively to the insufficient store of ideas behind them. It is con venient and not unfair to say that we needed ac quaintance with the new outlook and the new meth ods hr ought into play around 1830 by the painters of France. Of course Barbizon set a new beacon by which we were in due course bound to profit. But the crux of the matter resided, as it always does, in the question of personality. Everything in art depends upon the calibre of the artist. Consider, for example, the case of Homer Martin, born in 1836. He was a pupil of William M. Hart, and when he began was not only conversant with the Hudson River methods but whole-heartedly employed them. Yet Martin, having intensely that gift which we call temperament, presently emerged from under the handicaps of his pupilage and painted some of the things most ex quisite and most modern in American landscape. Genius does the trick. It did it for George Inness. Everything about his career points to the power of originality in him. In the biography written by his son occurs this statement of the precocity of his aspira tions toward art:
In speaking of his aims and ambitions, my father once told me that his desires first began to crystallize when, as a very little chap, he saw a man painting a picture out in a field. Immediately a responsive chord was struck,
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and his own nebulous groping for self-expression became at once a concrete idea. Then and there he made up his mind that when he grew up he would be a painter. He told me that he thought it the most wonderful thing in the world to make with paint the things that he saw around him, clouds, trees, sunsets, and storms, the very things that brought him fame in later years. He told me with what awe he viewed the difficulty of getting a piece of paper big enough, for he thought that to paint a land scape one had to have a paper as large as the scene itself — a thought as naively conceived as it was expressed.
With these emotions seething in his bosom he had to reckon with a father who was kind and generous, but whose belief in the virtues of a mercantile career led him to set the lad up, at the age of fourteen, as proprietor of a little grocery-store in Newark ! But almost immediately he escaped from that and was placed under the instruction of an artist in the town, named Barker, who in a few months had taught him about drawing and painting all that he had to teach. His son says that a little later he did some work in an engraver's office, but was not interested, and shortly entered the studio of Regis Gignoux in New York. There is also mention of his susceptibility to certain old masters in engravings casually encountered in a print-shop. In after years he could not remember just what the pictures were, but he could not forget their broad lesson. "There was a power of motive, a bigness of grasp in them," he said. "They were nature, ren dered grand instead of being belittled by trifling detail and puny execution. I began to take them out with me
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to compare them with nature as she really appeared, and the light began to dawn." That light stayed by him all his Kfe long, and with it there was fused a re markable inner illumination. "The true use of art/' he was wont to say, "is, first, to cultivate the artist's own spiritual nature. . . . The true artistic impulse is divine."
This is an appropriate point at which to pause upon the nature of the man. He thought much and could talk well, but I should say that he was an emotional and mystical type rather than an intellectual. That naivete to which his son alludes in the anecdote of his boyhood was never quite lost. He seems, indeed, naivete itself when you compare him with a contem porary of his like the lettered, philosophical, sophis ticated La Farge. I can find no traces in his biography of what is surely untraceable in his works — anything like exhaustive examination of historic schools or aca demic organization of ideas. Something like the latter might perhaps be identified in some of his letters or sayings, and, of course, as a technician he knew what he was about, following a reasoned method. But his thought as thought, in such specimens of it as have come my way, has always seemed to me to be im pulsive and a little confused by his mysticism. An instance of his intellectual crudity is supplied in a letter of his on one of the most momentous develop ments in modern painting, a letter from which I take the following passages:
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I am sorry that ... I have come to be classed as a fol lower of the new fad, "impressionism." . . . Every fad immediately becomes so involved in its application of its want of understanding of its mental origin, and that the great desire of people to label men and things, that one extreme is made to meet with the other in a muddle of unseen life application. And as no one is long what he labels himself, we see realists whose power is in a strong poetic sense, as with Courbet. And impressionists who from a desire to give a little objective interest to their pancake of color, seek aid from the weakness of pre- Raphaelism, as with Monet — Monet, made by the power of life through another kind of humbug. For when people tell me that the painter sees nature in the way the Im pressionists painted, I say "Humbug!" from the lie of intent to the lie of ignorance.
On another occasion, alluding to this same bugbear of impressionism, he declares that he is down on all that sort of thing, characterizing such "fads" as shams. I could quote further specimens of what seems like nothing more nor less than a hopeless obscuran tism, but it is unnecessary to do so or to linger over the subject. I touch upon it only to point the fact that Inness was not precisely a thinker. He was, instead, all imagination and emotion, all eye and hand. His essential attitude he thus illuminatingly expressed, referring to a practice begun at the outset of his career: "I would sit down before nature, and under the impulse of a sympathetic feeling, put something on canvas more or less like what I was aiming at. It would not be a correct portrait of a scene, perhaps, but it would have a charm. . . . When I tried to do
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my duty and paint faithfully I didn't get much; when I didn't care so much for duty I got something more or less admirable." Add to this his passion for nature, his insight into her moods, and you have some idea of the equipment that he took with him when his friend Ogden Haggerty, an auctioneer in New York, enabled him to go abroad not long after his marriage in 1850, when he was stiU in his twenties. He painted and studied the old masters in Italy for two years. He remained here as long on his return from abroad, but in 1854 was on his travels again, this time working much in France. There followed a long American period, but once more in the seventies he was under foreign skies. The remainder of his career down to his death, in 1894, was spent in this country. The biog raphy contains one interesting fragment on his con tact with the Barbizon school, so interesting that I must quote it intact:
As landscape-painters I consider Rousseau, Daubigny, and Corot among the very best. Daubigny particularly and Corot have mastered the relation of things in nature one to another, and have obtained the greatest works, representations more or less nearly perfect, though in their day the science underlying impression was not fully known. The advance already made is that science, united to the knowledge of the principles underlying the attempt made by those artists, will, we may hope, soon bring the art of landscape-painting to perfection. Rousseau was perhaps the greatest French landscape-painter, but I have seen in this country some of the smaller things of Corot which appeared to me to be truly and thoroughly spon-
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taneous representations of nature, although weak in their key of color, as Corot always is. But his idea was a pure one and he had long been a hard student. Daubigny also had a pure idea, and so had Rousseau. There was no af fectation in these men, there were no tricks of color. But the trouble with Rousseau was that he has too much detail. He's little, he's twopenny. He's little with de tail, and that takes away from his artistic worth.
From that fantastically inept "twopenny" allusion it is clear enough that he was no docile pupil sitting at the feet of the great Frenchmen, and I do not think it could be said that he was at any time definitely subject to their influence. But it is undeniable that the whole European experience was beneficial. It broadened him and it steadied him, and I think especially his broodings on French and Italian soil strengthened him in the art of mere picture-making. His earliest paintings show a minutely close analysis of detail. It is obvious from landscapes like his "Juniata River," or his "Berkshire Hills," or his "Nook Near Our Village," that he could not throw off the pressure of the Hudson River tradition all at once. But in Europe finally he did completely reject it, gain ing at great strides in largeness and freedom. The big monumental "Barberini Pines," in the Metropolitan Museum, shows perhaps most conspicuously what he drew from the classical environment that he found in Italy, but I remember a little "Albano" of his that is even more eloquent of his growth. The composition is perfect — a foreground with no great incident, a
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bridge in the middle distance, and then beyond that the gleaming town on its hill. And I recall it, too, as a superb piece of painting, the brushwork vigorous and explicit, the handling a blend of force and delicacy that could have been matched only by Corot. It is the maestria of this "Albano" that henceforth char acterizes Inness, only waxing stronger as time goes on, until at his full maturity he worked like the au thoritative conductor of a magnificent orchestra.
He was a great colorist. A blazing sky appealed to him as a stirring theme appeals to a virtuoso. But even while it wrought him up to a high pitch of enthu siasm he held his hand and kept his picture on the safe side of merely sensuous improvisation. Creative frenzy was thus governed by him in whatever key he painted. His impulsiveness, it is true, sometimes led him into strange ways with a canvas. Dissatisfied with a perfectly good design, he would proceed to "tickle it up," and not infrequently this meant the complete transmogrification of it. He was capable of turning a landscape into a marine overnight, and the client who wanted to be sure of the picture he bought did well to carry it off on the spot, before the artist had a chance to "improve" it. But the important thing to remember is that the truth of nature never suffered from any of the changes which he was so often tempted to make. His memory was a veritable anthology of the things of the visible world. He was largely, I gather, a studio painter, but no resolute
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open-air man ever beat him in fundamental veracity. I do not think that any modern landscape-painter, either of the Barbizon school or any other, has sur passed him in truth, in beauty, and in that stamp of individual genius which gives artistic immortality to both.
It is a large saying, but I do not hesitate to make it, for I have a deep sense of the splendor in his work, its note of organic creative strength. From the thirty pictures at the Macbeth Gallery my memory travelled over thrice that number more, and I had a vivid sense of the might and scope of this great painter. There was a wonderful amplitude about his genius, a wonderful energy. He poured forth his designs in glorious profusion, and they have rich substance, an abounding vitality. It was in America, too, that he brought his art to a climax, during the eighties and the early nineties. He is our own man, his roots going down deep into our own soil. His landscapes are among the raciest, most characteristic things American art has given us. They most faithfully depict the American scene, and they enrich it with the beauty that only art could give to it. They do this, curiously, in spite of the fact that he was not one of the sublimest technicians that ever lived. The "twopenny" Rous seau could easily have taught him something about the drawing of trees, and from the Barbizon men generally he might have learned something about the definition of textures. Yet against his limitations in
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technic there must be set the circumstance that he had an uncanny way of getting the effect that he wanted. I remember some water-colors of his done on the Italian border beneath the shadow of the Alps. Grandiose ground-forms were sketched in them, with a feeling for structure reminding one of the drawings of Turner. I go back to that saying of his: "The true artistic impulse is divine.'5 He had it and had it so supremely that the niceties of manual dexterity never, after all, troubled him very much. With his vision he could afford to be a little careless of technic.
I have spoken of the exhibition of his works as reviving the question of American landscape art at large. It does not do so in the sense of drawing attention to a master and a school. Inness did not rear up a large company of pupils. But he did leave an ineffaceable mark because he left American land scape better than he found it, fixed it in a new status, and inculcated by example a new point of view. It would be false and unjust to say that he did this single-handed. Wyant counted in ushering in a new regime. Homer Martin counted. So did Winslow Homer. But for George Inness it was reserved to illustrate the modern hypothesis of landscape-painting with an energy, a brilliance, an individuality, and, I repeat, a splendor, giving him unique salience. His influence might seem to have been curtailed by the rise in this country of that very impressionistic move ment which he so mistakenly contemned. Many of
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his juniors, including some of our best painters, gladly and profitably derived from Claude Monet the aid which he disdained. But their interest in problems of light constituted, in a sense, a detail. Broadly speak ing, it was from George Inness that they took over the point of view, the habit of mind, typical of Ameri can landscape art in the last thirty years and more. If the old methods of the Hudson River school are no longer valid, if the " natural magic" that now holds sway is one concerned in utter freedom with the everlasting truths of light and air and color, if our painters and their public explore the intimacies of nature in a spirit of sympathy and understanding, it is largely because Inness found the key to a more beautiful world. He accustomed us to a different kind of landscape, and he established it as the right one. He liberated us from an inadequate tradition and gave us a new standard to live by. Only a man of genius could have done it.
XXVIII J. Alden Weir
XXVIII J. ALDEN WEIR
IT is a testimony to the vital qualities which go to the making of American art that whenever a memorial exhibition is held at the Metropolitan Museum it brings forward work of an intensely personal signif icance. Consider what similar affairs might mean, say, in Paris. Man after man, no matter how distin guished, would affirm his solidarity with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, with the Salon. Here it is different. A Winslow Homer stands absolutely by himself. So does an Abbott Thayer. So does a George Fuller. They are among the pillars of our school, yet they are in no wise school types. The same reflection was evoked by the exhibition opened at the museum in honor of the late Julian Alden Weir in 1924. Like so many of our artists, he received his early training in France, and for a time his work gave the dearest possible evidence of that circumstance. But in the long run, when he had got into his own stride, he became utterly American, Looking back over these memorial episodes at the museum, noting their differences and yet the essential unity for which they have stood, I realize anew what it is that especially marks our art. It is the quality of genuineness, of a thing fresh and unspoiled by excess of sophistication. The school is held together as a
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school not by a formula, but by the strength of its various individualities.
If we have ever had a born artist it was Alden Weir. When he went to Paris in the early seventies, a young man of twenty-one, it was inevitable that he should have formed himself more or less upon his master, G6rome. But it is important to observe that he did so in a spirit so little imitative that he stated his loyalty to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in matters of principle, not through the narrower implications which you identify in a style deliberately fashioned. He didn't copy G6rome. He learned from him the virtues of good drawing, good composition, good workmanship generally. With this equipment he was prepared to go on, in readiness for the moment when he 'would say what he had to say in his own way. Meanwhile he found an inspiring comrade in Bastien-Lepage. "We loved Bastien for his honesty, his truth, and his sin cerity," he said long afterward. The words he chose to designate the power in his friend are the words to apply to Weir Mmself .
Bastien's liberalism doubtless hastened his aliena tion from what was rigidly scholastic in Ger6me, but, despite the dangers of speculation as to what might have been, I am confident that Weir would in any case have moved on from an academic to a personal point of view. It couldn't have been otherwise, con sidering the progressive, inquiring mind he had. He was from the beginning that rare type, the thinking
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artist, the painter whose exercise of the brush is energized by aesthetic culture. Though he had a lot of manual dexterity, he was far from resting his art upon dexterity alone. It is important to remember that he didn't slavishly emulate Bastien-Lepage any more than Ger6me. He was simply stimulated by the one as he had been stimulated by the other, and in the period of his pupilage the old masters also contributed to his growth. He sat at the feet of Velasquez in Spain, he studied Rembrandt and Hals in Holland, and when the French Impressionists came into his view, revolutionists with the novelty of their crusade still upon them, he found in them too something to his own profit. And always he stayed Weir, the born artist bent upon his own evolution.
It would be foolish to assert that this singularity of his immediately declared itself in triumphant terms. The most golden of talents has, of course, to mature. To look at the "Idle Hour," which has been in the Metropolitan ever since Weir painted it, in 1888, is to look at a good but not in any way masterly picture of the old Salon type. But even so, it has a curious vitality; you would know it anywhere for the work of a man of great promise. There is an earlier painting of his in the same rather conventional vein which per haps more vividly exposes his ingrained ability. It is the beautiful "Muse of Music/' which dates from 1884. It may have been thanks to Gerome that the simple pose was so well handled, with such an ad-
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mirable feeling for design, and that such good drafts manship went to the definition of the form and the draperies. But the subtle atmosphere of distinction enveloping the thing is pure Weir. It is, again, his thoughtful mood operating upon the purely technical elements in his task. It is, especially, his emotion, his quick tendency to see a subject finely, beautifully. None of the men who made the early history of the Society of American Artists had a broader conception of the painter's function, and, in fact, there were few of them with whom it was so broad. "Art for art's sake" was the slogan in those days. The revolt against the Academy was all in favor of better paint ing. Weir added to technical ambition the impulse of the poet that was somewhere concealed in his cosmos. It was at that time that he painted some of his exquisite essays in still life, studies of flowers grouped with objects in porcelain or metal. He could paint a rose with a magical touch that no one else has had save John La Farge and Maria Oakey Dewing. He could express the very last essence of fragility and evanescent loveliness in the form and texture of a petal. Weir's flowers, indeed, occupy a place apart in the body of his work. They are the outstanding souvenirs of his tenderness, his delicacy, his interpre tation of beauty as a factor in art half ponderable and half spiritual. There was, it may be repeated, a poet in him. Not, however, in the inventive sense that the term sometimes connotes. His emotions, his imagina-
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tion, could not but be stirred by beauty, and ulti mately in his dealings with landscape he would drift now and then into a markedly subjective frame of mind. But if he had any dreams of a dramatic nature he kept them to himself. The "Muse of Music" prefigured no further symbolism in his work. Run over the titles of his works. A few of them point to the human interest, the sentiment, which infre quently engaged him — " Children Burying a Bird/' for example — and once he painted a mythological subject, "Pan and the Wolf." In the main he was content with the observant role of that familiar type in modern art, the man for whom the visible world exists.
He was always that, always a faithful recorder of the fact, yet with his individuality he could not for the life of him have remained a prosaic realist. His numerous portraits of women, young women set in some decorative arrangement, steadily confirm the point. He pretended to no psychological interest in them. He painted not Miss X, but "The Gray Bodice/7 "The Black Hat," "A Lady with a Vene tian Vase," "Peacock Feathers," and so on. It did not matter. From every one of these canvases there exhales a fragrance, a charm, which denotes a vision as well as a tangible truth. While he kept his eye on the object that sensitive mind of his was at work, recognizing impalpable beauty and translating it into form and color. For years, I have watched these
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apparitions in the exhibitions of the Ten and elsewhere. They varied in their approach to the painter's ideal For some obscure reason pigment appears to have turned more or less intractable under Weir's fingers when he was otherwise on the crest of the wave. The rich and suave tonality which he had formerly obtained as a matter of course would now and then, in the most capricious manner, give place to a surface distinctly cold and harsh. With a heavier impasto something of his more transparent beauty, the beauty that was in his roses, would strangely elude him. But even at his coldest his portraits of women had dis tinction.
In landscape he had a far more uniform success, after he had once conquered the problems to which the impressionistic hypothesis directed him. It is vain to regret that an artist of Weir's achievements did not restrict them to a certain field, but it is legitimate to surmise that if he had dedicated himself to land scape alone he would have won a rank akin to that of George Inness. As it was, he approached his great senior in the quality of his work, and even outdis tanced him in one respect, in the treatment of diffused light. With an extended range of color, almost any thing in landscape art might have been possible in his experience. His development in this domain was at the outset rather slow. The first exhibition that he made of impressionistic studies from nature was not precisely impressive, and it took time for him to
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emerge from a tentative stage. He felt his way instead of launching himself masterfully upon it. He wanted to get away from the close analysis of forms which had contented him in the eighties, and the transition was difficult. He had, at any rate, to start with, that "honesty, truth, and sincerity" which he so commended in Bastien-Lepage, and for a certain fidelity to nature his earlier landscapes and his latest are "all of a piece.'' I have alluded to the subjective strain in some of them. It is obvious in a landscape like "The Return of the Fishing Party/7 in which there is a fairly romantic beauty saturating the sylvan tangle beneath which the figures are assembled. But Weir's status in this region of painting is, above all, that of a veracious observer — doubled with the lover of beauty.
Inness himself never interpreted more convincingly the charm of the American countryside. Though Weir was born at West Point, he settled down in Connecticut early in his career, and, whether from that fact or from the mysterious sources which feed an artist's temperament, he became a clairvoyant New Englander in the delineation of New England scenes. Mr. William A. Coffin has related what happened years ago at the Society of American Artists when "The Factory Village" was placed on the easel. "The jury acclaimed it with shouts of delight and much hand-clapping." One can understand that enthusiasm. I have never seen that picture without a thrill of
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pleasure. In lesser hands the motive might easily have fallen upon disaster, the tall chimney on the left lifting a challenge of ugliness against the majesty of the great oak in the foreground. Weir brought the two things into perfect harmony and expressed the indubitable unity of the scene. He expressed, too, its indescribable Americanism, the homely charm which belongs to our own land.
There wasn't a trace of mere rhetoric in him, yet he could be positively eloquent in his depiction of a stony pasture, a meadow bounded by straggling fences, a barn" yard, an orchard, any of the places that have for the native an unforgettable and endearing raciness. Weir registered these truths because he profoundly respected their character as such and because he was an honest workman. He placed them in enduring form upon his canvas also because he felt the beauty in them and painted with a kind of imaginative, poetic ardor. I end as I began, reflecting on the power ful personality in him, the original creative force.
XXIX
Robert Blum
XXIX ROBERT BLUM
THE art of Robert Blum offers some amusingly disconcerting food for thought to those who make much of the influence of heredity. Both his parents came from Germany. He was born in Cincinnati when that city was peculiarly a centre of Germanism. When he first came in contact with the migratory impulse of American art, on visiting the Philadelphia exposition of 1876, the stimulus to travel in search of a new standard which was stirring many of his young countrymen should have led him straight to Munich. Yet in the midst of the influences making for Teutonic ideals, with Teutonic blood in his veins, he gravitated irresistibly toward a Latin point of view. He had seen in his youth photographs from Fortuny and his followers, and at the Centennial he beheld original works by the Spaniard which profoundly touched him. He never lost traces of the inspiration then received.
He received elementary instruction in Philadelphia for a short time in the seventies, but no other city appears to have offered him any schooling of an artistic sort. He went to school in Europe instead, painting in Venice, in Holland, in Spain, but most of all in Venice. Blum was an ardent traveller. In his earlier years he did much work as an illustrator. For
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Scribner's Magazine, he made a memorable series of drawings in Japan. From The Century I recall some consummate pen drawings of his, a portrait of Irving as Vanderdecken and one of Joe Jefferson as Bob Acres. What a draftsman he was! But he could handle any medium — oils, water-color, pastel. Also he etched some superb plates. In short, Blum had a flair for pure craftsmanship. We have never had any artist more imbued than he was with enthusiasm for technic, technic animated by a blithe and fascinat ing vivacity.
The vivacity of Blum is what fixes him firmly in American art. It would not make him distinguished were it not tempered by feeling. He was dazzled by the witchery of Fortuny's school, and he paralleled it, importing into his work a certain dainty movement, a certain glitter, half of surface and half of alert, delicate movement, which makes him always elegant, always entertaining, always an ideal of grace and re fined piquancy. But you have to add emotion to this enchantment and subtract the last hint of artificiality before you have quite apprehended the secret of Blum's art. He began with some reliance upon chic, a quality toward which it is almost inevitable for a beginner to drift when he has had his fancy excited by the audacious brio of the modern Spaniards. But with Blum the reaction was swift, and his work shows none of the signs of mere surface cleverness. This was due to his penetrating appreciation of Fortuny. He saw
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that the Spaniard was a type of veracity, as well as of brilliancy, and he carried on Ms own work in a simi larly serious vein. He was always serious. That is why I attach a serious value to his vivacity. It is not shallow vivacity of manner, of color. It is vivacity of spirit, of feeling, a very different matter, and a very precious thing in modern art. To see nature in a sunny, wholesome light, to interpret her with gladness and natural ease, to leave an impression that the world is full of loveliness and flowers, pleasant to live in and even pleasanter to see, this is a scheme of artistic development for which we can never be too strenuously grateful, and it is the scheme to which Blum unfailingly adhered. It made him a charming painter. It made him also something of a poet. Certainly, the first pictures of Venice and Spain which he produced had much more in them than the sparkle due to contact with the Roman school of painters; they were generally exquisite, and he progressed higher and higher in the difficult art of making nature light and dainty without sacrificing an iota of her dignity and freshness. No painter of Venice has surpassed Blum in the fragility of his impressions, in their delicacy of fibre, in their ravishing precision, but no painter either has employed so decorative a style with such complete absence of sophistication. I say decorative, because Blum had many of the qualities which are expressed in that epithet. He had picturesqueness of design, brilliancy of light and shade; he had, above all, the
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vivid color and the executive fluency which often make an easel picture a decorative unit. But no love of a brilliantly sensuous effect, no predilection for a note of color, of merely picturesque beauty ever won Blum from his veracity; he was never more realistic than when he was lavishing upon a composition all the attributes of color and pure pictorial design which assured him a decorative climax. It is on that merit, on the solidity which goes with his most flashing and debonair studies that it is perhaps most significant to dwell.
Blum can be praised, and praised lavishly, for the sunshine which belongs to his art, for his blue skies and the vividness they bring into his canvases. His picturesqueness is in itself bewitching. The turn of an arm, the fling of a drapery, the poise of a head, nay, the accent of a shadow, these things have been handled in numberless instances by him with the rapid sureness of touch, the deftness, the animation, of an extraordinary brush man, and his work is full of passages over which it is tempting to pause, with no thought of anything but their charm as matters of form, of color. Side by side with his facility and accomplishment, however, there goes, as I have indi cated in more than one relation, the substantial motive, the sincere aim by virtue of which he is lifted up to the first rank. His Venice is a dreamy pageant, a place of such scenes as only an observer of imagination as well as of skill could have arrested upon the canvas.
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To his Holland lie gave a reality which is none the less real because it is streaked with vague suggestions of a colorist's enthusiasm, a draftsman's passion for what is quaint and effective in a strictly pictorial sense. Lastly, and most important of all in some respects, his Japan brings to the eyes of the West one of the most convincing and beautiful interpretations of the East which American art can show, and it is to America, to La Farge, for example, that we are in debted for the most remarkable of artistic impressions of the Orient. Blum's impression is intensely artistic and intensely real* It is true, and it is beautiful. It is full of color, full of movement, full of Japanese feel ing, always picturesque and yet never so in any bald melodramatic sense. He seems to have resolved that he would get all the color possible out of his strangely lovely models, that he would make Japanese land scape yield him the most original of tones, yet he never departed from the facts before Mm; he captured the visage of Japanese life while he added the un- capturable essences which an imagination takes to Japan.
When Blum died, in 1903, his sister, Mrs. Haller, generously decided that the works left in his studio should be given to various public institutions. "The Vintage Festival/' a panel ten feet long, went to Cooper Institute, with nearly a hundred figure and drapery studies. The Academy of Design received about four-score studies made for the "Moods of
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Music/' one of the mural decorations to which I will presently return. There were other gifts to museums in New York and Cincinnati- All of Blum's etched plates and his bust, modelled by Niehaus, went to the city of his birth. He is thus well represented in divers public galleries. Through force of circum stance, however, his most important paintings have for some time been witheld from view. These are the designs which he painted for the concert hall of the Mendelssohn Glee Club, a building demolished since he adorned it in the nineties.
I used to watch him at work upon this frieze when he was painting it in his Grove Street studio under heart breaking difficulties. The room was only the merest tithe of the size of that hall in which the decorations were to be placed. His fifty foot canvas was stretched on rollers and only a third of it could be exposed to view at one time. But I never saw a happier man. Think of what it meant to an artist who at one time had been confined to the dimensions of a magazine page to be painting for a great wall ! Blum was over joyed and he went at it with all that ardor for tech nical virtuosity which I have indicated as part of his artistic make-up. He produced an enchanting piece of work.
The first panel is dedicated to the elusive side of music, a company of advancing swaying figures, while falling into something like the rhythm of a dance, nevertheless typifying quite as much musical elements
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meditative, poetic, and even metaphysical. The eyes are ravished by the sensuous charm of the color, the mind grasps the strength and artistic beauty of the composition, the first impulse of one's brain is to rec ognize the joyous maidens for dancers pure and simple, but almost instantly the subtle inspiration which animates the whole takes a firm hold of the imagina tion and launches one upon the broad tide of musical delight which is too broad and too complex to be crystallized in a single emotion. In painting his second panel the artist sought to substitute the tangible for the evanescent, to be more plastic and explicit. It might be said of the first panel that it is imbued with the spirit of a Mozart andante. The second I would be disposed to liken to a piece of Wagnerian programme music — if the note were not a little more delicate, a little purer, a little more classic, than the characteristic note of Wagner. Perhaps the contrast may be more effectively elucidated by noting that the earlier decoration has a background of trees, while the later one contains an abundance of archi tectural details. Against these details, against massive marble pillars, which rise white and gleaming into an Italian sky, a procession of priests and bacchic revellers marches across the mosaic pavement toward what we may assume to be the entrance to a temple. An altar is in the centre of the composition, and the instruments of sacrifice are observed near the end of the colonnade, but the moment is without any sanguinary signif-
41 6 Personalities in Art
icance. Mere delight in life seems to animate the entire body of laughing worshippers. Some of the women are dancing to the sound of their own timbrels. A youth clad in a leopard's skin leaps from the ground in sheer exuberance of feeling, and the people who watch the pageant from either side reveal subtly the tension of excitement which holds the whole scene in its grip. Here are the sights upon which one might look in the midst of operatic music and never feel the slightest jar between the two. It stands for the passion and glow and sensual worldly pomp of music, while its companion celebrates the tenderness and mystery of the divinest of all the arts. Surely the principle of growth was in the painter who could rise to these heights from the level of picturesque illustration on which he began his career.
XXX " 291 "
XXX
«29l"
THERE was an exhibition in New York not long ago which was amusing for more than one reason. It was fathered by Mr. Alfred Stieglitz, who "presented" as the work of seven Americans " 159 paintings, photo graphs and things." It was one of those affairs which involve a certain amount of explanation, and no fewer than four signatures were attached to as many pref atory flourishes in the catalogue. But the most significant words appeared at the back of that pam phlet, words proclaiming that the show marked the twentieth anniversary of the opening of "291," the little gallery in Fifth Avenue where Mr. Stieglitz made his beautiful photographs and found an outlet for his generous enthusiasm by organizing displays of things ignored elsewhere. I do not recall ever having missed one of those exhibitions, beginning with the collection of Rodin's drawings that was put on the walls in 1908. There I saw similarly pioneering exhibitions of Matisse, John Marin, Marius de Zayas, Max Weber, Picabia, Brancusi, Picasso, Gino Severini, and so on. Looking at the exhibition inviting these remarks I found myself thinking of it partly for its own sake and partly for its commemorative meaning.
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And I fell to meditating on the principle, as it were, of "291."
It was, in the first place, the admirable principle of open-mindedness. Alfred Stieglitz, who clings to his own ideas with the stanchest tenacity, has never pre tended to impose them upon anybody else. All he has desired to do has been to make known the ideas in which he believes and, for the rest, to watch their fortunes. The atmosphere of "291" was thus always one of the right kind of liberalism. The place was a laboratory for the exposition of this or that experi ment in contemporary art. It was valuable because it was the only source of information on subjects it was necessary to know. I have always maintained that it was wrong merely to scorn modernism, deserving though it be of scorn. The indispensable thing is to look it in the face, analyze it, grasp it for what it is. It waxes fat on ignorance. Condemnation of its vagaries must be based on the most patient of studies. For this Stieglitz supplied precious documents and thereby performed a memorable service to art. The only pang involved in frequentation of his museum, if I may so describe it, was that of disagreeing with so high-minded and devoted an advocate. But disagree with him I generally did, and, looking over the long list of exhibitions appended to his latest catalogue, I was in no wise moved to alter old impressions.
That some of the names enumerated are to-day held in greater honor — in some quarters — than they
"291
were when Stieglitz first made them known here, has no great evidential weight. Twenty years make a very short period. It remains to be seen how these names will be wearing when still another twenty years have passed, and in the meantime I doubt if the tendency is in the direction given by the men represented in the list. In fact, the movement is rather the other way, rather toward a return to conservative modes. I cannot dogmatize from the list. It is too heterogeneous. But there is one thought emerging from revery on its variegated types on which I venture to pause. Is not Stieglitz himself, as photographer, the one figure of them all inspiring a certain confidence? And why? Because he has known absolutely what he was about. He has known the camera with the thoroughness of a master, has exercised his instrument with complete understanding and authority. In a word, he has been a sound workman. Is it not one of the secrets, on the other hand, of good art?
Revisiting "291" in memory with this catalogue before me and realizing that so many of its ghosts have been indeed ghosts, frail, insubstantial apparitions blown by the wind, I surmise that the explanation of their futility has resided in their refusal to make good workmen of themselves, their failure to play the game. Yes, I know all about their "purpose." It has been to express themselves. But they have babbled in strange, outlandish idioms, missing the language of art. That language is, among other things, a language
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of craftsmanship. Painting is a craft, like any other. Flout it and you land in uncouth obscurity.
Stieglite is a courageous, resourceful man. I wish he would undertake the organization of an exhibition such as has never been held by any modernist. Let him supply each one of his friends with canvases divided in the middle by a straight line. Let them paint to the left of the line pictures after their own hearts, expressing themselves in their own way. And to the right let them paint the same subjects according to Hoyle, which is to say, with all the elements of perspective, texture, light and shade, line, form, color, handled with competence. This might show whether the modernist really knows how to paint or if the fearful and wonderful expedients he adopts make the refuge of inadequacy. If he needed inspiration he could easily get it from Stieglitz. Look at the latter's photographs of cloud forms and trees. How beautiful they are ! Because, for one thing, they are well done.
XXXI
Fortuny
XXXI FORTUNY
ON THE death of Senator W. A. Clark, it developed that he had bequeathed his collections to the Metro politan Museum, subject to the condition that they be preserved by themselves somewhere within the vast building in Central Park. The condition was in con flict with the policy of the museum, and the gift was declined, wisely, I think, both in view of the policy aforesaid and because the collections, while containing many treasures, do not form precisely a unit. It was natural while the subject was in the air to think over the collections and to find this or that reason for form ing one's own opinion as to their disposition. As I went over them in memory I could see how certain pieces would practically duplicate others in the Metro politan; how one old picture or another modern one might really enrich the museum or leave it not appre ciably strengthened. The reader may be a little puzzled by my own choice of the one picture which I hated to have the Metropolitan miss. It was Fortuny 's " Choice of the Model." I could perfectly understand anybody's being surprised by this selection, for if there is one tradition in painting that is nominally played out it is the tradition of Fortuny. Our modern ideas date peculiarly from the rediscovery of Velasquez
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and Hals, and the demigods of our own time have been such followers of theirs as Manet and Sargent. But latter-day enthusiasm for technic has, if I may so express it, the defect of its quality; it is a little narrow, though it is all for breadth and the world well lost. When Kipling wrote his ballad, "In the Neolithic Age/' he inserted in it two oft-quoted lines whose axiomatic wisdom may well commend itself to the student of painting:
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And — every — single — one — of — them — is — right.
One of the " right" ways of painting is the way of Mariano Jose-Maria Bernardo Fortuny. I like to give him Ms full Spanish style, if only for old sake's sake, in memory of the day long ago when I was all set to write his biography. In Paris I fell in with Philip Gilbert Hamerton, and he asked me to write one of those "Portfolio Monographs" which he was editing in place of the old miscellaneous "Portfolio." We dis cussed subjects and had about decided on Canaletto when I said: "Why not do a modern man who has not been done in English? Why not do For tuny?" Hamerton was delighted with the idea, and when, soon after, I went to Venice, I found that it met with the cordialest approval of the artist's widow. Neither of the publications by Yriarte and the Baron Davillier had exhaustively covered the ground, and repeatedly among her innumerable sketches, studies, and other
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souvenirs, Madame Fortuny and I talked over the book which, was to be the final record of a brilliant life. We were to go over the letters together. Mari- anito, the painter's son, was himself practising a very different sort of art; he had studied at Munich, and rumor had it that he was painting huge Wagnerian compositions. But he, too, was in the liveliest sym pathy with my plan and would himself gladly photo graph a lot of the unpublished paintings that adorned the beautiful old palazzo on the Grand Canal. As can be imagined, I was well content. At Rome, I hunted up Fortuny's only pupil, Simonetti, and learned that he also had a sheaf of letters. In private collections in Spain I looked at Fortunys that had never before been reproduced, and in Paris the late William H. Stewart readily gave me access to that incomparable collection of Fortuny's works which was afterward dispersed at auction in New York. When I talked it all over with Hamerton again we were both more than pleased with the outlook; but when, in the following summer, I had renewed my explorations and we returned to the project, we were suddenly aware of another color in our dream. It was a stern, practical issue that put it there. It used to amuse me to count up, as I went along, the sums required for the purchase of documents, copyright fees, and the manufacture of copperplates. By the time I had gone over the balance sheet with Hamerton and with the publisher in London, we calculated that it would cost a good
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deal more to produce the book than would be returned by the complete sale of a generous edition. Wherefore the classical biography of Fortuny, as I had fondly imagined it would be, incontinently went aglimmering. But, as the reader may surmise, the episode left me with a certain weakness for Fortuny.
It isn't a matter of sentiment alone, either. I wouldn't have launched upon that task if I hadn't had a deep feeling for Fortuny as a painter, nor would I revert to his art now if I did not still preserve a vivid sense of his extraordinary ability. He was one of those painters who are born, not made, even though it must be admitted that as a lad he did not show the precocity usual in a master. He was born at Reus, in the northeastern part of Spain, the child of obscure parents, who died when he was still very young. The grandfather who brought him up used to travel about as the owner of a little puppet show. He would take Fortuny with him when he gave a performance in the market-place at Tarragona, and at home they used to work together over the wax figures employed in the tiny theatre. They made votive figurines for the churches, too, and Fortuny must have shown some talent in them, for presently the grand father sent him to the academy presided over by Domingo Soberano, and there he made such progress that while still in his teens he was fitted for the much more pretentious academy at Barcelona. At twenty he won the Grand Prix, which sent him to Rome for
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two years, with an allowance of about five hundred dollars a year. It was not very much, yet it must be said that Barcelona was, on the whole, Hnd to him. The municipal authorities recalled him from Rome for the highly honorable purpose of sending him to make a big military picture in Morocco, where the Spaniards were at war. He saw the decisive battle of Tetouan, or Wad-Ras, and made from it ultimately a remarkable canvas. Incidentally, his contact with the Moorish scene brought his art to a swift efflores cence. I shall not wickedly resume, in this place, the details accumulating in the course of those researches to which I have referred. It is enough to state that thenceforth Fortuny's prosperity advanced with phenomenal rapidity. He worked variously in Morocco and at Rome, in Madrid, Grenada, and Paris. I say "worked" advisedly, for he did very little else. Possessed of a delightful personality, he had the world at his feet, especially when he married the daughter of Federigo Madrazo, when the Goupils took him up, and Mr. Stewart became not only his patron but his friend. He was intimate with some of the leading French artists of his time. Gerome, upon one occasion, lent him his studio. But he had few social tastes, finding his chief relaxation in the collect ing of beautiful objects of art and craftsmanship, and his life was one long labor until he died of Roman fever in 1874. What is the story of his labor, what were its origins,
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and what are the special characteristics of its fruits? I once went all the way to Barcelona to see what his early work was like, and found that it was nothing if not academic. The bacchantes which figure in the rather conventional designs of his pupilage might have been drawn by any of the carefully trained young types of the Paris Salon. Form, as he depicts it, is form as it is understood in disciplinary studios. But the Moroccan experience, as I have indicated, changed all that. It confirmed in him an instinct for going straight to nature for the truth, and in Morocco, too, the effects of dazzling sunlight brought a vivifying element into his work. What I feel was the specially invigorating and illuminating force in Fortuny's art was what I can only describe as the genius of sheer painting, the innate disposition of a man to express himself through consummate draftsmanship and a fairly magical manipulation of pigment. Both in oils and in water-colors, once he had got into his stride, he became like a conjurer taking a rabbit out of a hat. Connoisseurship to-day is a little impatient of such triumphs as his, counting rabbits as but small game, and I haven't the least intention of placing this artist in a false perspective for purposes of eulogy. On the other hand, I think that those who would dis parage Fortuny on account of his glitter overlook the firm foundation on which the glitter rests. They con fuse spiritual with technical values. He himself had misgivings as to the precise depth of his art. In a
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letter to Davillier, written at the zenith of Ms career, he says: "I continue to work, but truly I begin to tire (morally) of the kind of art and of the pictures which success has imposed upon me, and which (be tween ourselves) are not the true expression of my. taste." Very well, let us agree as regards the matter of taste. I am not at all sure that I could live happily sitting opposite "The Choice of the Model/' day after day, and year after year. But if it were hanging in the Metropolitan Museum I know that I would pause before it just once in so often, not only with admiration and respect, but with a particular zest for the kind of technical virtuosity that Fortuny exhibits in the picture.
And the kind of virtuosity that is there is, I repeat, the kind that has its roots deep in true painter's painting. He was no mere meretricious juggler with the brush, but a serious technician, who looked to the graver side of his art. There is nothing about him more significant than a certain passage in one of Ms early letters, written when as a student of twenty he was settled in Rome, From this it appears that Raphael's decorations in the Vatican bowled him over, and when it came to the tableau Uen peint, he pre ferred above all others the great portrait of Innocent X, by Velasquez. He had always a passion for the old masters. At the Prado, in Madrid, he made copies of Titian, Tintoretto, El Greco, Velasquez, and Goya, What Velasquez meant to him you may see from the
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"Spanish Lady," in the Metropolitan Museum, which he painted at Rome in 1865. There is no glitter in that. On the contrary, it is a broadly painted, really noble thing, an altogether worthy pendant to the tradition of Velasquez, of Goya. However, do not let us strain the point. It was not by work of this sort that Fortuny lived. His metier was for a lighter, more sparkling type of painting. What it is important to remember is that the knowledge and authority affirmed in the " Spanish Lady" are carried over into the field in which it was his destiny to shine. They tell there primarily in his strong, swift, flashing draftsmanship, and then in his diabolically sure han dling of pigment. There is no one like him for a kind of blazing fluency, for the plastic evocation of a figure or a bit of still-life, for the perfect denotement of a lacy or shimmering stuff. And over all his ma terial, whether he be dealing with the sunlit pictur- esqueness of Morocco or Spain, or with romantic costumes in a stylized French interior, he causes the light to play in a staccato manner that is merely ravishing. The commentator who cannot get away from Manet, says "Bric-a-brac ! " For my part, when I am confronted by Fortuny I can momentarily forget my Manet and my Velasquez and my Rembrandt, and say simply "What painting!"
When they tell me it has lost its hold upon connois- seurship I permit myself a chuckle. As a matter of fact, I do not believe the world will ever willingly let
THE MOORISH KNIFE GRINDER FROM THE PAINTING BY FORTCJNY
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the work of Fortuny die. Its intrinsic brilliance is too much for that. It is too superbly eloquent of a man who exhaustively knew his craft. It has too much verve ; it is too finished and gaittard in style. There is a measure of confirmation for its validity, too, in the cir cumstance that it left a deep mark upon its time. For tuny founded something like a school, though I can re member little recognition of this among his followers. I have foregathered with flocks of them, and it always made me laugh a little inwardly to see how indis posed they were to admit any debt at all to the dead master. It was one thing to join in praise of his qualities; it was another to grant that without their influence the speakers would have taken a different line. I could understand the attitude of those Span iards and Italians; they hadn't studied under Fortuny , but under other men, and doubtless they had gone their own gaits. Nevertheless he had put something in the air which they had not been able to resist. It was the glamour of romantic picturesqueness and with it the lure of sleight-of-hand, of miraculous dexterity. Villegas was one of the pillars of the school. He travelled far enough from Fortuny when he painted the more celebrated canvases of his ma turity, "The Death of the Bull-Fighter" and "The Marriage of the Dogaressa." But if you want to get the pure flavor of Villegas you will get it in some such bits of piquant genre as he painted when he, in his turn, sojourned in Morocco. It was so
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again with Pradilla. He made his fame through big compositions like "The Surrender of Boabdil at Grenada/' which were far more elaborate than any thing in Fortuny's monde, but there are many smaller things of his in which you come obviously upon the trail of Fortuny. There have been any number of them, Gallegos, Viniegra, Domingo, Barbudo, Casa nova, Garcia y Ramos, Pelayo, and more others than it is perhaps worth citing, for if some of them are good, some of them are very brittle and bad.
The man who more than all the rest rivalled Fortuny on his own ground was the Italian Boldini in his earlier period. He also had an incredible facility, incredible sleight-of-hand. I can see him painting my own portrait in two or three sittings. He did it like a man dashing off a note. But Boldini, like Fortuny, is both draftsman and brushman, an authentic master of paint, and in older days, before he had got com mitted to the portraiture that we know, he was wont to tackle the same sort of theme that had attracted his Spanish contemporary. He would paint the women at a Moorish bath, or the buildings around the Place Clichy, or a long road gleaming beneath a hard blue sky, or a coquette lying on a sofa in the studio, all grace and frou-frou. They date from the seventies, these dazzling tours-de-force, a long time ago, and Boldini, I have gathered, has no great opinion of them himself* Just the same, they are among the very best things he has ever done. Though they date from
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the seventies, they are still, praise be, very much alive. The whole Fortuny tradition, I maintain, still possesses this unmistakable vitality. Every now and then I find that I have to break a lance for it. I can recall one that I bore in the fray, against Elihu Ved- der. At a dinner-table in Rome he nearly suffocated at the idea of my asserting that Fortuny knew how to paint. It was all a trick, he said. There was no glamour about Fortuny, for him, though he had known the artist in the days of his triumph. But the glamour is there for me, and precisely for the reason that, in spite of Vedder, he knew ineffably how to paint. That is why I remain incorrigible and wish that, by hook or by crook, the Metropolitan had been able to salvage "The Choice of the Model."
XXXII Zora
XXXII ZORN
ZORN'S etchings are far more familiar in the United States than works of his done with the brush. They have been enormously popular, too, but this without really establishing him as a permanent figure. The vogue of the prints, indeed, has always seemed to me to illustrate nothing more nor less than a curious aberration of taste. He knew nothing about the genius of etching. His line is that of a pen draftsman, clever, no doubt, but in no wise qualified to rank with the line of the masters of the needle. Is he, on the other hand, a master of painting? The answer is of a mixed nature.
Scandinavia has never produced a major school of art in the strict European sense of the term. It has had Its successful figures, of course. Denmark has had .what we may call an international representative in Kroyer. Norway has given good painters to the world in Thaulow and Edelfelt. From Sweden have come Zorn, Carl Larsson, and Bruno Liljefors. But I well remember how at the Chicago fair in 1893 the efforts of these men, and of a few others, failed to lift their countries to a plane of strong racial affirmation, and in 1900, at Paris, the three groups made no better effect. In fact, I found then that the three had
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settled down to the level of one and that the whole company had forthwith stood still. Nothing was changed, in essentials, when the American-Scandi navian Society brought over about one hundred and fifty paintings a few years ago and showed them in New York. The feeling persisted that no truly national force had developed in Danish, Norwegian or Swedish art, that each country continued to depend for its aesthetic distinction upon some lucky individual. And the odd thing is that the individual would not turn out to be a precisely great artist. He would have talent rather than genius. That is the case as regards Zorn.
Born at Mora in 1860, the son of a Bavarian brewer, he gave every evidence of artistic precocity. He began as a boy to carve wooden figures, coloring them with the juice of berries. It was as a sculptor that he made his first studies in the Academy at Stockholm, to which he was admitted while still in his teens, but he soon turned to the brush and is said to have attracted considerable attention by his deftness as a water-colorist. He was a young man when he set out upon his travels, painting in Spain and Italy, in Constantinople and Morocco. He settled for a time in London and was much in Paris. At the time of our exposition in Chicago he visited the United States, where he painted a number of good portraits, including those of Grover Cleveland and Andrew Carnegie. He died in 1920 after a life of triumph.
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Fortune had smiled upon him almost from the begin ning, and it never left him. Of all the Scandinavian artists he had the widest European fame. His por trait painted by himself is that of a powerful, squarely built man, resolute, aggressive. He wears clothes of brick red, and the audacity seems characteristic of him. He was a type to carry off a flourish of that kind. Yet — and this is the crucial point — as you look about among his paintings you do not find quite the personality you expect after that stalwart figure and those romantic garments.
The Scandinavians are, as artists, a race of simple, straightforward, and even commonplace observers. They are not men of dreams, or, in the main, men of theories, academic or of any other sort. The material of Scandinavian art is found in the every-day walks of Scandinavian life, and it is handled with a sincere effort for a truthful expression of every-day .appear ances. Zorn represents this art in its most normal aspect. He paints what he can see and touch and handle. He illustrates Swedish life and its types, the process of breadmaking as it is made picturesque by environment and costume, the traits of an old clock- maker in his portrait of "Djos Mats/' the peasants in their distinctive dress. His "Rowing to Church" is like a page from the familiar movement of things Swedish; as a characterization, in color and in atmos phere, it carries absolute conviction. Very rarely does he seem merely photographic, either, as he does in
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his banal "Butcher Shop/' The veracity of the painting has always its artistic accent, its hint of the craftsman who has his own way of expressing himself. It is a prodigiously swift, sure, and vivacious way. That is what has given Zorn his high status.
He was, a long way behind Sargent, the kind of virtuoso that Sargent was, the man of exact vision and an accomplished, even brilliant, hand. He had the technic of an adroit Salonnier, raised to a higher power. There is a French precision about his work manship, enriched by a greater flexibility, a lighter touch, than is always characteristic of the Parisian school with which he is somehow affiliated. But he remains the Salonnier, the clever, inordinately clever, type, rather than the master of a style. That is where you recognize the superiority of Sargent. The technic of the American has in it an extraor dinary originality and elevation; it has the stamp of genius upon it. Zorn's impresses you without any enchantment; it is effective enough to be called brilliant, but it is not fine enough to be called dis tinguished. All the time you are aware of certain limitations that clog his footsteps and keep him upon a very mundane level.
They were limitations of taste. We do not look in him for the beauty that implies imagination. With the latter quality he simply had nothing whatever to do, and to regret its absence would be beside the point, to ask Zorn to be somebody else. But it is fairly
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puzzling to see an artist with such a passion for the joy in life as he had remaining insensitive to the grace, the subtle charm, that go with it. His color, on which some commentators grow oddly fervid, seems to me to be singularly wanting in quality. It is vivid and it is pure, but it has no original grain or glow, and it is totally devoid of those transparencies and those ex quisite nuances of tone which proclaim the authentic colorist. In water-color he sometimes draws nearer to the delicacy which I have in mind, but even in that medium his really beguiling passages are only epi sodical, and in oils the most that can be said is that he is not, like so many Scandinavians, merely crude. A defect of taste stood between him and sheer loveliness of color, just as it dogged his labors in the matter of pure painted surface. He had technical force and authority, he had positive exhilaration in attack. He did not know how to caress a canvas, to give it sen suous beauty, a rare patina.
If such taste as he possessed is anywhere discon certing it is in his treatment of the nude. I have occasionally observed in him a happy fusion of the picture-making faculty with a response to the supple grace of form. I recall in his "Summer Evening" a composition in which an unwonted elegance presided over the painter's customary realism. But in most of his nudes you get the full measure of his inherent coarseness. The advocate of truth at any price may retort that the coarseness does not matter, that what
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actually counts is Zorn's superbly accurate, full-bodied recording of the visible fact. I am quite conscious of its value. But I cannot ignore the gross materialism in work of this kind or its broad significance. It points, after all, to the central character of the artist, which is what we are bound to pursue; it points to the essential Zorn. He belongs to that band of artists who conquer by virtue of the eye and the hand alone, who are technicians and nothing more. Look at his por traits. The tangible, obviously perceptible facts are unmistakably there, but nothing is added to them, no suggestion of special insight, no stylistic glamour, no distinction. Taking Zorn's art in its length and breadth we are interested but not deeply impressed. It has enormous vitality, yet, by some strange paradox, there seems nothing creative about it, nothing in spiring. Where great art seems to transcend the idiom of the country in which it was produced, this art remains, for all its workmanlike merits, rather narrowly Scandinavian,
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