Full text of "Modern art : a contribution to a new system of aesthetics"

See other formats

MODERN ART

AUTHORISED BY MR. WHISTLER

THE LIFE OF JAMES McNEILL

WHISTLER
By E. R. & J. PENNELL

In Two Volumes, with over 120 Plates In Half

Tone and Photogravure. Crown 4to. Price 365.

net. Also an Edition de Luxe of 150 Numbered

Copies on Japanese paper. Price £5 55. net

This book is the Life authorised and planned by Whistler
himself, and it is based on material furnished by himself and
by his family. Whistler was certainly fortunate in his choice,
for Mrs. PennelVs admirable Life of Charles Godfrey Leland
has proved her to be a very able biographer, and the
master's long friendship with her and her husband gave
them that opportunity of personal knowledge which no bio
grapher who had only documents to work from could possibly
possess. Many of the pictures were photographed before they
left Whistler's studio, and it is certain that rarely, if ever, was
so much material brought together to illustrate the life-work
of a great artist. That his personality was as interesting as
his work, all those experienced who came into contact with
him. His wit, his brilliant conversation, the fun with which
he baited his enemies, the determination with which he
cherished and upheld his friends, the philosophy of his art
and the clearness of his vision, all these delighted his circle
day by day.

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

.AVEUSE)

M313

CONTENTS
BOOK I

THE STRUGGLE FOR PAINTING

THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT I

TRADITIONS 12

THE RISE OF PAINTING 15

MOSAICS 1 5

FROM THE GOTHIC PERIOD TO THE RENAISSANCE 21

THE FIRST FLORESCENCE OF PAINTING 27

THE EMPIRE 33

INGRES 36

GERMAN ART 40

ENGLAND'S CONTRIBUTION 45

HOGARTH 45

THE PORTRAIT MANUFACTURERS 64

WILSON AND GAINSBOROUGH 74

TURNER 82

CONSTABLE 99

FROM DELACROIX TO COURBET 144

EUGENE DELACROIX 144

HONOR£ DAUMIER i55

COROT i 60

JEAN FRAN9ois MILLET 195

SEGANTINI 200

VINCENT VAN GOGH 202

CONSTANTIN MfiUNIER 213

vi CONTENTS

BOOK II

THE PILLARS OF MODERN PAINTING

PAGE

GUSTAVE COURBET 219

THE GENERATION OF 1870 252

MANET AND HIS CIRCLE 257

CEZANNE AND HIS CIRCLE 266

PAUL CEZANNE 266

VUILLARD, BONNARD, RoUSSEL 271

DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE 277

EDGAR DEGAS 277

THE SUCCESSORS , 282

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC 283

RENOIR AND HIS CIRCLE 287

BOOK III

COLOUR AND COMPOSITION

I. COLOUR

CLAUDE MONET 301

SEURAT AND HIS CIRCLE 309

THE APOSTLE AND THE CONGREGATION 309

PAUL SIGNAC 315

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM AS AN ART-FORM 318

NEO-!MPRESSIONISM IN BRUSSELS 323

ILLUSTRATIONS

To/aet

DAUMIER. The Washerwoman. 'Bureau Collection, Pant Fro^ti^itct

FANTIN-LATOUR. Drawing for the Portrait in the Fan Culsen Collection, Brussels vi

Mosaic in Murano Cathedral g

BENOZZO Gozzou. Fresco. Noah's Vintage. Camfo Santo, Pisa 12

GIOTTO. Detail of a Fresco in the Chapel of the Madonna dell' Arena in Padua 20

VAN EYCK. Jan Arnolfini and his Wife. National Gallery 24

TINTORETTO. Martyrdom of St. Mark. Brussels Museum 26

RUBENS. The Lion Hunt. Hermitage, St. Petersburg 28

REMBRANDT. Dr. Deyman's Anatomy Lesson. Rijfa Museum, Amsterdam 30

REMBRANDT. The Unmerciful Servant. Wallace Collection, London 32

J. L. DAVID. Paris and Helen. Group from the picture in the Louvre, Paris 34

J. L. DAVID. The Three Ladies of Ghent. Louvre, Paris 36

INGRES. Drawing of a Lady 38

INGRES. Madame Riviere. Louvre, Paris 40

INGRES. La Grande Odalisque. Louvre, Paris 42

HOGARTH. Peg Woffington. Sir Edward Tennanfs Collection 46

HOGARTH. Unused Sketch for " Industry and Idleness." British Museum 50

HOGARTH. Marriage \ la Mode. National Gallery 54

HOGARTH. The Shrimp Girl. National Gallery 60

REYNOLDS. Lavinia, Countess Spencer. Earl Spencer's Collection 64

REYNOLDS. White the Paviour. Earl of Crewe s Collection 68

ROMNEY. Portrait of Miss Ramus. Hon. W. F. D. Smith's Collection 70

RAEBURN. Portrait of Mrs. James Campbell. Mr. L. Muirhead"s Collection 72

WILSON. Italian Lake. The White Pilgrim 74

GAINSBOROUGH. Cornard Wood. National Gallery 76

GAINSBOROUGH. The Mall. Sir A. Neela"s Collection 78

GAINSBOROUGH. Portrait Study. Heseltine Collection 80

CLAUDE LORRAIN. The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca. National Gallery 86

TURNIR. The Fighting Temeraire. National Gallery 90

TURNER. The Great Western Railway. National Gallery 90

CUYP. After the Thunder-storm. The Hague Museum no

VAN GOYEN. View of Dordrecht. The Hague Museum 114

CONSTABLE. The Cornfield. National Gallery 118

RUBENS. Mercury and Argus. Brussels Museum 120

RUBENS. Autumn. National Gallery 122

CONSTABLE. Coast Scene. Cheramy Collection, Paris 128

CONSTABLE. Jubilee at East Bergholt after Waterloo. Cheramy Collection, Paris 132

DELACROIX. Portrait of the Artist. Louvre, Paris 140

DELACROIX. Fragment from the Massacre of Scio, 1838. Ckeramy Collection, Paris 144.

GERICAULT. Silenus (Drawing). Marcille Collection, Paris 146

viii ILLUSTRATIONS

To/act

P*e*

G£RICAULT. The Mad Woman. Cheramy Collection, Paris 148

DELACROIX. Horse and Tiger (Lithograph). Cheramy and A, Rouart Collections, Paris 150

GOYA. Vision de la Romeria de San Isidro. Prado, Madrid 154

DAUMIER Drinking Song (Water-colour). Tavernier Collection, Paris 154

DAUMIER. Portrait of Berlioz. Versailles Museum 156

DAUMIER. The Two Lawyers (Water-colour). Bureau Collection, Paris 158

DAUMIER. The Fugitives. From a Cast of the Bronze Relief. Marx Collection, Pans 160

DAUMIER. Ratapoil (Bronze). A. Rouart Collection, Paris 164

COROT. St. Sebastian. Cheramy Collection, Pant 168

COROT. The Toilette. Desfosses Collection, Paris 170

VERMEER. View of Delft. The Hague Museum 174

COROT. Genzano. Cheramy Collection, Paris 178

VERMEER. The Soldier and the Laughing Girl. From an Etching by Jacquemart 182

COROT. The Studio. Esnault-Pelterie Collection, Paris 1 84

VERMEER. Head of a Girl. The Hague Museum 188

COROT. The Lady in Blue. H. Rouart Collection, Paris 192

MILLET. The Soup. Marseilles Museum 194

MILLET. Drawing 198

SEGANTINI. The Mothers (Drawing) 200

SEGANTIXI. La Vacca Bagnata. Flersheim Collection, Frankfort 200

VINCENT VAN GOGH. Landscape. Kessler Collection, Weimar 202

VINCENT VAN GOGH. The Good Samaritan. Painted from a lithograph after the picture by

Delacroix 206

VINCENT VAN GOGH. Public Gardens at Aries. Gustave Fayet Collection, 'Betters 210

CONSTANTIN MtuNiER. Harvest (a relief from the "Labour" monument) 214

MANET. At Pere Lathuile's, 1879. Van Cutsen Collection, Brussels 216

MANET. Boating, 1874. Havemeyer Collection, New York 216

RENOIR. Lise. Folkwang Museum, Hagen 218

COURBET. The Woman and the Wave. Photograph Durand Ruel 220

F. HALS. Portrait of Willem Croes. The Hague Museum 222

GOYA. El Famoso Americano, Mariano Ceballos (Lithograph) 224

GOYA. The Dance. Design for Tapestry. Torrecilla Collection, Madrid 226

GOYA. Charlotte Corday. Photograph Durand Ruel 228

COURBET. The Ladies of the Village, 185 I. Durand Ruel 232

VELAZQUEZ. Pope Innocent X. Hermitage, S/. Petersburg 236

COURBET. The Grotto of the Loire. Photograph Durand Ruet 244

COURBET. The Grotto. Photograph Durand 'Ruel 244

CONSTANTIN GUYS. At Mabille (Water-colour) 246

EUGENE LAMI. Races at Maisons Lafitte. A. Rouart Collection, Paris 248

JONGKIND. View of Honfleur, 1865. Photograph Durand Ruel 250

SISLEY. The Flood, 1875. Camondo Collection, Paris 250

MANET. The Nymph Surprised, 1861. Manzi Collection, Paris. Photograph Camentron 252

MANET. Fishing, 1 86 1. Durand Ruel 254

MANET. The Al-Fresco Luncheon. Moreau-Ne'laton Collection, Paris 254

MANET. Lola de Valence, 1852. Camondo Collection, Paris 256

SARGENT. Portrait of Madame Gautreau 258

MANET. Toilers of the Sea, 1874. Faure Collection, Paris. Photograph Camentron 260

MANET. Before the Mirror, 1876. Photograph Durand Ruei 262

CEZANNE. A Sunday in Summer (Woodcut). Hessel Collection, Paris 264

ILLUSTRATIONS ix

T0/mCf

'.I f

CEZANNE. The Rape. Photograph Durand Ruel 266

CEZANNE. The Al-Fresco Luncheon. Vollard Gallery, Parh 266

CE"ZANNE. Still Life. Bcrnheim Collection, Paris 268

BONNARD. The Boulevard. Photograph Druet 2jo

BONNARD. Une Apresmidi Bourgeoise. Property of the Artist 272

ROUSSEL. Hylas. Fe'neon Collection, Paris 27

ROUSSEL. Nymphs and Faun. Fe'neon Collection, Paris 274.

D£GAS. The Dancers (Les Pointes) (Pastel) 276

DE"GAS. Harlequin and Columbine (Pastel) 278

D£CAS. The Bath (Pastel). Luxembourg, Paris 28o

D£CAS. A Cafe on the Boulevard Montmartre (Pastel). Luxembourg, Paris 280

TOULOUSE-LAUTREC. A la Mie. Bernhelm Collection, Paris 282

TOULOUSE-LAUTREC. The Model Resting. 'Bernheim Collection, Paris 284

RENOIR. Idyll. Kessler Collection, Weimar 286

RENOIR. Lady on Horseback. H. Rouart Collection, Pans 288

FRAGONARD. Women Bathing. Louvre, Paris 290

RENOIR. Women Bathing. Bernhelm Collection, Paris 290

RENOIR. Women Bathing, 1885. Blanche Collection, Paris 292

RENOIR. A Woman Bathing. Durand Ruel Collection, Paris 294

RENOIR. Nude Figure on the Beach. Durand Ruel Collection, Pans 296

CLAUDE MONET. The Bridge at Argenteuil. Faure Collection, Paris 298

CLAUDE MONET. Saardam. Tavernier Collection, Paris. Photograph Druet 298

CLAUDK MONET. The Seine at Rueil. Photograph Durand Ruel 300

CLAUDE MONET. Cliffs and Beach at Pourvillc. Photograph Durand Ruel 302

CLAUDE MONET. Still Life. Photograph 'Durand Ruel 304

CAMILLE PISSARRO. The Edge of the Lake (Water-colour). Cheramy Collection, Paris 306

CAMILLE PISSARRO. The Fountain of the Tuileries. Bernheim Collection, Paris 306

SBURAT. Bathing (fragment, 1884). Fe'neon Collection, Paris 308

SEURAT. Sketch for " La Grande Jatte," 1884, Fe'neon Collection, Paris 310

SEURAT. Le Chahut, 1890. Photograph Druet 3I2

PAUL SIGNAC. The Coast at Port-en-Bassin. Fe'neon Collection, Paris 31 .

CLAUDE MONET. The Field of Poppies, 1883. Stern Collection, Berlin 314

PAUL SIGNAC. Morning at Samois. Kessler Collection, Weimar 316

HENRI EDMCND CROSS. Fishermen (Var), 1901 318

D£GAS. Portrait of Mdlle. Malot, the Dancer. Blanche Collection, Paris 320

D£CAS. Coming from the Bath (Pastel). Tavernier Collection, Paris 322

DEGAS. The Dancing Lesson. "Blanche Collection, Paris 324

BONNARD. Nude Study. Photograph Druet 326

ERRATA

Page 41, line 25, jor " Kraus " read "Knaus."

70, for " W. J. D." read " W. F. D." on Plate.
153, line 43, for " I shall deal " read " I have dealt."
194, for "Marseille," read "Marseilles" on Plate.

236, for "Doria Pamfili Gallery" read " Hermitage, St. Petersburg" on Plate.
256 for " G. Manet " read " Edouard Manet."
Pages 276, 286 read " From a Drawing by Fdlix Vallotton."

VOL. I.

ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

Fragment of the large Mosaic at Torcello

Wooden Crucifix in Brunswick Cathedral

From an Engraving by DURER

TURNER. Sol way Moss (after the etching)

Auvergnate Peasant Woman spinning (from a Woodcut by Paris after J. F. Millet)

Drawing by J. F. MILLET (after a Woodcut by A. Lavieille)

EDOUARD MANET. Portrait of Courbet

EDOUARD MANET. Olympia (from a Woodcut by the Painter)

EDOUARD MANET. Portrait of Guys (from a Woodcut by TSeltrand)

From a Drawing by FKLIX VALLOTTON

From a Drawing by FELIX VALLOTTON

From a Drawing by FKLIX VALLOTTON

From a Japanese Woodcut

From a Drawing by GEORGE LEMMEN

From an Etching by HENRI DE BRAEKELEER

PAGE
X

197

199

265
276
286

297
298
308

325

326

FRAGMENT OF THE LARGE MOSAIC AT TORCELLO

BOOK I

THE STRUGGLE FOR PAINTING

THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT

OUR collective artistic culture was bound to suffer, when the collective forces of
art were concentrated in a special domain, that of pictures and statues. The fact is
not minimised by the consideration, that this development was the work of a
glorious history, originating in the most brilliant phases of modern culture. Nor can
it be denied that the most splendid epochs of humanity achieved their great results
without the omnipotence of pictures. It will hardly be contended that the Greeks
lacked the instinct for artistic expression. The only modern nations that may aptly
be compared with the Greeks in artistic importance, the Chinese and Japanese,
certainly had pictures, but they had them as the Greeks had their sculptures and
their wall-decorations ; to such gifted nations as these, abstract art was not the
final goal of artistic ambition, but merely one of the many emanations of their
rich culture. These works are, no doubt, the most important evidences of their
art that we now possess, but they are far from being the only ones ; they crown a
whole that is homogeneous throughout. They are, therefore, infinitely less
significant of the degree of culture of their age than are works of equal
importance in our own times. To the brilliant researches of German savants,
more especially Furtwangler, we owe the beginnings of a personal estimate of
Phidias. Yet who does not feel that even this greatest of artists was not the
arbiter of his epoch, but a product of its glory ?

The ideal interdependence of all artistic activities made art the possession of
the whole people, and enabled them to understand it and to love it.

We moderns repeatedly see instances of great artists who live and work and die
among us, and find recognition only after death, while the public acclaims the pigmy
who is no sooner dead than he is forgotten. It was not so in the past. Among
the pictures of the great masters in our galleries we find portraits of their wealthy
and powerful contemporaries. How came the rich patrons of Florence, Flanders,
and the Netherlands, of France and Germany, to choose the greatest masters of
their time as their portraitists, whereas the wealthy and distinguished of our own
age so often content themselves with the most miserably equipped ? Obviously,
they were better able to appreciate good painting. Yet then as now, princes busied
themselves with affairs of state, and their artistic sense was not relatively higher
above that of the general public than it is to-day. But the general standard was
higher. The public was no more concerned with painting than it is now ; then
as now, it had other things to occupy it ; but it was familiar with art. People
found in painting the same excellence as in other things, chairs, tables, and clothing;
they would have been astonished to find anything else. Painting was not much
more highly esteemed than any other craft. It owed its privileged position solely

VOL. i A

2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

to the fact that from its nature, it existed mainly as the handmaid of religion ; it
adorned the church, the sanctuary. The origin of this adornment was practical ;
it filled the bare surfaces left by the architect, the real artist in the eyes of the
masses throughout the Gothic period. Painting dealt only with predetermined
themes ; it had to translate religious conceptions ; hence there is a certain essential
difference between it and the art of our own day ; subject was in no sense charac
teristic, for it was the same for all. This necessarily led to a purely artistic
development, which the multitude followed. If it did not quite exclude critical
errors, it reduced them to a minimum. The strict convention no artist could cast
aside, did not prevent artists from becoming great; it served them as a shield
against the public, who recognised something familiar even in their originality ; the
convention was a protection, not an impediment. But at the same time a close
relation between artist and layman was not of such practical necessity then as
now. The Church or the State was, broadly speaking, the sole patron. The
artist troubled himself little about the public, for he had no immediate or
practical dealings therewith. This circumstance had not only a material side ;
it contributed to the ideal relations subsisting between the two. The layman
of the Gothic period looked at a work of art with other eyes as compared
with ourselves. To a certain extent he was colder in his attitude ; but he
was also juster.

In these days, the pure work of art has been brought into immediate contact
with every-day life ; an attempt has been made to transform it utterly, to make it
the medium of the aesthetic aspirations of the house, whereas this function belongs
properly to the house itself and the utilitarian objects in it. We have tried to
popularise the highest expression of art, something only significant when applied to
the loftiest purposes, something, the enjoyment of which without a certain solemnity
is inconceivable, or, at least, only to be attained in moments of peculiar detach
ment. We have succeeded merely in vulgarising it.

This is the source of the great error that retards our artistic culture. We
revolve in vicious circles round the abstract work of art.

The painted or carved image is in its nature immovable. Not only because it
was originally composed for a given space, but because the world of emotion to
which it belongs lies wholly apart. This may be so powerful, that its association
with the things of daily life cannot be effected without serious damage either to
the one or the other.

The association of works of art with religious worship was therefore the most
natural association possible. A heavenly illumination, itself possessed of all the
attributes of divinity, art gave impetus to the soul in its aspirations towards the
mystic, its flight from the sufferings of daily life, and offered the best medium
possible for that materialisation of the divine idea, which the primitive man
demands in religion. The ancient Greek worship, with its natural, purely sensuous
conceptions, was the happiest basis for the artist, for in Greece religion and art
were one thing : beauty. The god was the ideal of beauty.

When the temple became a church, art lost its original purity, and became the
handmaid of the hierarchy. But religion was so deeply implanted in the souls
of the faithful, that both to executant and recipient the service never lost the
mystic atmosphere, the common bond, and all hostile antagonism was avoided. It
was the Reformation that first drove the image from the temple, and gave to
worship a form, the austerity of which excluded any sensuous enjoyment.

THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT 3

This was one of the many contributory impulses that brought about the con
fusion of aesthetics. Art was so closely bound up with religion, that it almost
seemed as if the enlightenment that shattered the one, must be dangerous to the
other. The mysticism of art and that of religion had formerly mingled their
currents. As a fact, the former was no less obscure than the latter — who can say
even now, what the essence of art is ? But the pious and sometimes beautiful
fable of religion had to perish, to make way, not for Luther's compromise, but for
something radically opposite, science, by which the raison d'etre of art remained
unaffected. Indeed, as science could not satisfy the mystic yearnings of the soul,
the sphere of art was, if possible, extended, though it could no longer be restricted
to conventional forms.

The emancipation of man from the dogmas of the church was an advance. In
the domain of art, where it destroyed the fixed convention as to subject, it might
have become beneficent. But as a fact, it entailed retrogression. Painting was not
yet strong enough to stand alone, or perhaps it was already enervated ; instead, now
that it was free from all objective constraint, of rising to the heights of pure art,
sustained by its own convention alone, it gradually became vulgarised, and finally
fell into perplexities from which it had been preserved in the early ages of culture.

A three-fold watchword inspired the political and social contests of the new
age : Freedom, Truth, Equality. We think we have the first two ; and our
generation is warring for a verdict as to the third.

Art thought herself bound to take part in the contest. As on other battlefields,
the three sections of the ideal were upheld simultaneously, and as in these again,
the fight was sharpest and most decisive over the first two, Freedom and Truth.

Broadly speaking, the trilogy, taken absolutely, is Utopian, and even nonsen
sical ; but in social matters, the ideal regulates itself in a rational manner. In
art, where such was not the case, where the extravagance of the postulate was far
in excess of its good sense, it worked most mischievously.

Art was to be free — but free from what ? The innovators forgot, that freedom
implies isolation. In her impulsive vehemence, art cast away the elements that
made her indispensable to man. The vaster the wide ocean of unbounded aims
before her, the more distant was the terra firma which had been her home. She
lost her native land.

The goal was of the vaguest, and therefore, it was dubbed truth. For the
most part it was a negation of the very essence of art, which is neither truer nor
falser than an earthworm, or a star, or any imaginable thing to which conceptions
such as that of truth have no possible relation. But the formula persisted, and the
materialisation of the abstract was carried so far, that Art was humiliated by a
crude comparison with Nature. Because conceptions of certain aspects of Nature
figure among the technical equipment of great artists, because they faithfully re
produced things the eye is supposed to have seen in woods and meadows, they were
pronounced " truer " than others who did not use these means, or who used them
differently. Men began to forget that to the artist, woods and meadows can be no
more than a purely mechanical medium such as his brushes or his palette, or a
thousand other things he supposes, rightly or wrongly, to be necessary to him, but
which are as foreign to the enjoyment of others as those rotten apples which a
certain German poet needed for his inspiration!

It must be understood that the artist did not think thus. It was the layman.
He took to reflection where he had formerly given himself up to sensation, and

4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

his attempt to arrive at a rational understanding of art resulted in schism, as
formerly in the case of religion. It was impossible for him to see the thing as it
was, and not knowing how justifiable was his repulsion to an incomprehensible
abstraction, he caught at the first tendencies his caprice presented to him, and
directed art in accordance therewith. The immediate result was that adroit persons
at once sprang up, who exploited these tendencies. They were greeted with
acclamations.

This alone is a sufficient explanation of the ever-increasing disproportion
between artists and those who impertinently call themselves such. And at the
same time, it accounts for the antagonism of the layman to art. In earlier times
the mysticism of the church drove the believer into the mysticism of art. He
offered no resistance. One awe completed the other. But later he had made up
his mind to a personal interest in the matter, and when this was not satisfied, he
was repelled.

The conception of equality in the secularisation of art tended to positive
aberration. It did not attain to the authority of a shibboleth, like the two
others, but it danced like an ignis fatuus before the eyes of both artists and
laymen. Art was to lay aside its majesty. Even here tyranny was supposed to
have entrenched itself. It was to present itself humbly, soberly, plainly, realisti
cally. But when it came, men knew not what to make of it, and in lofty
scorn of the equality that had been won, it turned to serve the few, the elect.

Art could only have remained equal and universal on universally accessible
ground. This it had lost when it was severed from the church. An attempt
was indeed made to replace the religious ideal by the patriotic passion. But
setting aside the fact that there was no appropriate stage for the display of the
results, this ideal, though perhaps a more possible substitute than any other,
lacked all the elements necessary to a tradition. It was, above all, too mobile, too
closely related to contemporary passions and personalities. It gave us the historical
picture, in which the public saw only the history ; the enthusiasm or pain that it
evoked could not be laid to the account of art.

That works of art should be easy of acquisition by purchase was one of the
principles of the theory of equality. Every one was henceforth to be able to buy
art. All that was needed was money. This, again, led to a direct negation
of the shibboleth.

It was only in those earlier days, when proprietary rights were not associated
with art, that the relation of the layman thereto approached the socialistic ideal.
Art was for all, for it belonged to no one. It stood above individual greed, a
highly communistic symbol in an age that in all else was far indeed from the
socialism of our day. Now it has become the expression of our terrible class
distinctions. It is only accessible to an aristocracy, whose domination is the more
sinister, in that it is not based solely on rank and wealth, that is to say, on things
by the division of which the ardent socialist hopes to re-establish the social
equilibrium. There is nothing so unattainable, for the enjoyment of it pre
supposes an abnormal refinement of aesthetic perception, which has become as rare
as genius itself. Nowadays, one must not only have a great deal of money to buy
art, but one must be an exceptional creature, of peculiar gifts, to enjoy it. It
exists only for the few, and these are far from being the most admirable or
beneficent of mankind ; they seem, indeed, to show all the characteristics of the
degenerate. Loftiness of character, or of intelligence, are not essential to the com-

THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT 5

prehension of art. The greatest men of our age have notoriously known nothing
about it, and what is more remarkable, artists themselves often understand it
least of all. Artists have talked more nonsense about art than any other class of
men. Modern artistic culture can scarcely be accounted an indispensable element
of general culture any longer, for the simple reason that art has ceased to play
a part in the general organism.

Art has not so much as a decisive influence on our taste, even among those
who have penetrated most deeply into the secrets of artistic enjoyment. We have
the clearest evidence of this in the indifference with which people, who surround
themselves with the most costly works, regard the general decadence of industry.
They, the elect, who possess their masterpieces, not only materially, but psycholo
gically, tolerate the most glaring breaches of taste in the rooms where their
treasures hang. They, who have shown themselves competent to choose the best
among the best, amaze us by their utter insensibility in such matters as their
clothing, and their daily surroundings. The one thing swallows up all the rest ;
their worship has become mania.

This attenuation of aesthetic exigence tends further to reduce their demands on
the work of art itself to a minimum. They tolerate the most glaring defects,
nay, even to a certain extent absolute incapacity, if some single quality is preserved,
which approves itself as unique.

In the course of our appreciations, we shall make due allowance for the
relative justification of such estimates in individual instances ; we may even fall
under the spell of the particular so far, as to be unable to keep the general always
before our eyes. I register my protest here at the outset the more emphatically,
in the hope that it may be strong enough to curb my own obsessions. It is the
vow of the " infirm of purpose," his hand already on the door of the tea-house,
whose inmates beckon to him from behind the reeds.

The incomprehensibility of painting and sculpture to the general public has
been shrouded in a veil of pretentious exposition. The amount of talking and
writing about art in our day exceeds that in all other epochs put together. The
increase of sociability rising from increase of wealth made it necessary to invent
suitable occupations for unproductive energies. Chatter about art became a highly
popular form of such amusement ; it requires no special preparation, no exertion,
is independent of weather and seasons, and can be practised in drawing-rooms !
Art has become like caviare — every one wants to have it, whether they like
it or not. The immaterial elements of the former give a certain intellectual
tone to the sport, which is lacking in a feast of caviare ; it is therefore
complacently opposed to such material enjoyments. The discussion of art
in Germany (the home, par excellence, of such discussion) originated in the
dark days of the nation during the first quarter of the nineteenth century,
when men were dreaming romantically of the great things they lacked.
Nevertheless, it was more fruitful than it is now ; it was the sphere of great
personalities, and the origin of an idealism, which, though impotent, was sincere.
Nothing of all this has survived but a subsidiary function. It is the form of

6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

entertainment affected by families who do not give expensive dinner-parties. It
has become the feudal cognisance of the aspiring bourgeoisie, as necessary to the
well-educated as some indispensable garment.

Love of art, however, especially the kind of love that goes beyond platonic
limits, becomes rarer as those who meddle with it multiply in every land.
Purchase has become the touchstone of such affection ; like marriage, it is a
practical token of sentiment, and even to the artist, this evidence is generally
more important than the impulse that inspired it.

It can hardly be otherwise now. If art is to be anything, it must not arouse
merely that languid attention which people manifest when they politely approve
something as "very interesting." It is not enough that it should inspire the pens
of scribblers, and develop itself alone, and not others. In the form to which it is
confined to-day — that of picture or statue, a marketable commodity — it could only
exercise an influence by fulfilling the purpose of other marketable things : that of
being purchased. But the popularisation of art is rendered impossible by the
extravagant prices commanded by recognised works of art and demanded for
those that are not so recognised, by a frantic, absurd, and unhappily, thoroughly
dishonest traffic. I can conceive of rich people who would refrain from the
purchase of pictures out of sheer disgust at the trade, a desire to keep their
hands clean. The purchasing amateur is a personality made up of the most
obscure springs of action. The absolutely incalculable fluctuations in prices, the
influence of fashion, nowhere so demented as in this connection, the desire to go
on improving his collection, /.<?., to bring it up to the fashionable standard of the
moment, forces the collector to be always selling, to become the shamefaced
dealer, who is, of course, the most shameless, and who introduces additional
elements of disorder into a commerce already chaotic. The result is that there
are, as a fact, no buyers, but only dealers, people who pile their pictures one
above the other, deal exclusively, or almost exclusively, with each other, and have
no connection with the real public. Statistics, showing how few are the hands to
which the immense artistic wealth of the world is confined, would make a
sensation. A great London dealer once told me that he had only three customers !
Durand-Ruel, of Paris, has several times had certain famous Impressionist pictures
in his possession at progressive prices, rising some 1000 per cent, each time, and
the purchasers have often been the same persons on several occasions.

Such conditions reduce the aesthetic usefulness of a work to a minimum.
Pictures become securities, which can be kept locked up like papers. Even the
individual, the owner, ceases to enjoy his possession. Nine-tenths of the most
precious French pictures are kept for nine-tenths of the year in magnificent cases,
to protect them from dust. Sales are effected as on the Bourse, and speculation
plays an important part in the operations. The goods are scarcely seen, even
at the sale. A typical, but by no means unique, example is afforded by the
late Forbes collection. It consisted of I forget how many hundreds or thousands
of pictures. To house them, the owner rented the upper storey of one of the
largest London railway stations, vast storehouses, but all too circumscribed to
allow of the hanging of the pictures. They stood in huge stacks against the
walls, one behind the other : the Israels, Mauves, and Marises were to be counted
by hundreds, the French masters of 1830 by dozens; there where exquisite
examples of Millet, Corot, Daubigny, Courbet, &c., and Whistler. Although the
stacks of pictures were held up by muscular servants, the enjoyment of these

THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT 7

treasures was a tremendously exhausting physical process. One walked between
pictures; one felt capable of walking calmly over them ! After five minutes in
the musty atmosphere, goaded by the idiotic impulse to see as much as possible,
and the irritating consciousness that it was impossible to grasp anything, every
better instinct was stifled by an indifference that quenched all power of ap
preciation. The deathly calm one broke in upon, as one toiled sweating through
these bare gigantic rooms where there was no space to turn, the whistling of the
engines, the trembling of the floor as the trains ran in and out below, seemed
to inspire a kind of strange fury, a silent longing to destroy the whole lot.

Who would be the loser if this were actually done ? If anything could justify
anarchism, it is the knowledge that the greatest artists toil in poverty, to enable a
few dealers to grow rich after their deaths, and a few fanatics to hoard their works
in warehouses. The most notorious vices are not so grotesquely irrational as this
mania for hoarding, which, owing to its apparent innocuousness, has not yet been
recognised as a malady. All the famous collectors of Paris, London, and America
are more or less tainted with this disease. We enter their houses full of eager
anticipation, and quit them with a sigh of relief, half suffocated by the pictures
that cover every inch of wall-space, and wholly depressed, not by a feeling of
envy, but by the thought that there are people who have voluntarily accepted the
torture of spending their lives among all these things.

Even if a wiser economy should improve the conditions we have described, it
will never be possible to induce a better appreciation of art by commercial means.
Hence all the fine ideas of " popular art" are doomed to remain mere dreams. It
is materially impossible to produce pure -.vorks of art at prices that will bring them
within the means of the masses. The Fitzroy Society in England, and the
publishers of the prints for the Riviere School in Paris made the attempt, and
in Germany Thoma was inspired by the same ideal in the production of his
lithographs. All these attempts have only served to stimulate the collecting
mania. Every speculation that panders to this instinct is successful, whether it
deals with postage stamps or pictures. There is no question of aesthetic principle
in the matter. I believe that the plebeian would really prove accessible to a
revival of artistic influences, if he could possess a picture of his own, to hang
up. But a work of art could never be cheap enough for this, for if it cost
but tenpence, the poor man will always prefer to save his tenpence, towards
the purchase of something necesssary to his physical well-being. An artistic
propaganda that relies on purchasable and abstract works of art must always fail.
It can only succeed by means of industry, by producing things which combine
artistic and utilitarian qualities. As long as we neglect these, we need not wonder
to find the artistic sense of the lower orders more depraved than at any other period
of the world's history.

The social struggle is breaking down class distinctions ; the intelligent outcast
of to-day is the millionaire of to-morrow. Nothing opposes the rise of the pro
letarian in the modern state, and he brings his lack of culture with him into
his higher sphere. The man who has had no aesthetic stimulus in his period of
development will, as a rule, have no lofty requirements when chance has made him
an influential member of the community, though he may simulate these, and
so add a new source of error to those already present.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

III

So much for the material side of the question. This is in itself decisive —
discussion on any other basis can only deal with the conditional, and with com
promises. Let us suppose for a moment that we could realise a state of things in
which every citizen should not only have a fowl in the pot, as the good king wished,
but a picture in his room. What can the man who is blessed with taste and wealth
buy in these days ?

Every sensible person who buys things will be governed by his requirements.
When he purchases a picture, he will ask : can I make use of it ? and this will lead
him to the further inquiry : can I hang it up in my house ?

And here the tragedy of contemporary art forces itself upon us, the lack of all
steady connection between art and purpose, the impossibility of establishing
an intimate relation between producer and consumer. The artist cannot attempt
this, for in general he does not know for whom or for what his work is destined.
Experience has taught him that he will do well to make it as adaptable as
possible, easily moved, and suitable for a great variety of interiors; in other words,
not intrinsically valuable to its possessor, but valuable as an object of barter.
These conditions are disastrous to the ideals of the artist, who feels it to be incom
patible with his freedom to be fettered by such limitations, and to allow his
creations to be governed by anything but his artistic conception.

Directly the layman is brought into established relations with art, the absolute
value of art gives way to the relative value. The appreciations that determine
this are very complex.

The question of locality, the axiom that a work of art can only be perfectly
executed for a given place, is by no means decisive. This idea rests on a
misconception which is practically refuted every day, though this refutation is far
from favourable to modern methods of creation. The axiom is not even sound
as applied to the works of the old masters, although these were always more or
less architectonic in structure. A beautiful figure of a saint in the porch of an
early Gothic church remains beautiful, even when it is removed ; it even retains
a considerable part of its charm in surroundings that have no sort of relation to
it. A work of art in which the architectonic relation to the original place is less
intimate, as is the case with most easel-pictures, may change its home still more
readily ; it may even gain by the change.

The past decade has given us excellent museums, which have settled this
question satisfactorily. The majority of " Old Masters " which adorn tnese
galleries, show to greater advantage here than in the places for which they were
painted, places where the light was often defective, or where it was impossible to
get at a right distance from the picture. We have taken up the rational position,
that the essential in these matters is a condition realised in the great museums :
the picture should be seen in the most favourable manner possible. We have not
the same eyes as those for whom these things were originally made, and we have
every right to use all the means at our disposal to enhance our enjoyment of them.
Our enjoyments differ from those of the original spectators. We have
invented new pleasures. We may instance the grouping together of works by the
same artist or different artists, and of different periods, on the same wall, and the
effect of one wall so arranged on another ; such and many other combinations

MOSAIC IN MURANO CATHEDRAL

THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT 9

possible in our museums have, in spite of all antiquarian logic, an artistic charm
which was lacking to these works in former times.

The museum is perhaps — or might be — an ideal substitute for earlier vehicles
of art. It is the purely neutral spot, that serves beauty alone — or might serve
it — and knows no other end, or need know none. It has already all the elements
of an institution of which we may justly be proud.

All the more irrational, therefore, is it to confound the house, the dwelling,
with these constitutionally holy places, and to interchange functions so radically
opposite. Everything, or almost everything, that is necessary in the one is out of
place in the other. Why then should the layman buy pictures at all ? If we go
to the root of the matter, it seems as if he bought them primarily to get rid of
them. The disinterestedness of certain rich people who buy works of art to
present them to museums, does not modify the grotesqueness of this state of things.

We may ask if our dwellings are better adapted for the display of pictures
than those of earlier periods, which contained few, if any, abstract works of art,
in our sense of the term.

The dwelling-house of to-day has lost its formal relation to the age. Save for
non-social, practical considerations, which express themselves in a certain comfort
and in the employment of space to the best advantage, it shows a lack of cohesion
with our lives. Contrary to the usage of former times, our sphere of action is
now generally outside our houses. This action itself has changed, no less than
its field ; mental effort tends more and more to take the place of physical
exertion. The men whose activity is most prolific in these days, that is, whose
wills have the strongest influence upon production, use their limbs and muscles the
least. The intellectual apparatus accordingly requires care and protection in its
leisure.

The dwelling has become a place of recuperation, and this determines the
character of the busy man's domicile.

As places of recuperation, our dwellings have, as a fact, become better
adapted for artistic elements, and even for abstract works of art. We may
for the moment set aside the dismal fact that the pure work of art is generally
the only artistic thing in the house, and quite without relation to all the rest.
Such conditions only make it the more essential, if man is not to renounce
every loftier stimulus from without. But if the work in the house is to have
any influence, in conditions so far removed from those of the earlier vehicles of
art, it must be subordinated to these new conditions. It is not the chief object
that draws us to the place containing it, as in the case of a museum ; we do not
approach it with the devoutness of the soul athirst for mystic rapture, as formerly
in a church. Comfort is the essential in this modern shrine, and a picture that
disturbs our sense of well-being is clearly out of place in a house.

This sense of comfort is certainly not to be satisfied merely by artistic qualities.
The very works that make the deepest impression upon us, are least adapted to
domestic combination, because the sensuous value that might promote satisfaction,
is present in them in forms unsuitable to our four walls or our hundred pre
possessions. There are things one admires, and others one wishes to possess.
That which decides between them is a whole world, and not a kind of hygiene,
which teaches us to live with certain sensations, because they demand intellectual
effort and sacrifice.

Art under such conditions ceases to be divine ; she is no longer the enchantress
VOL. i B

io THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

who brings men to their knees before her, but rather a gentle little housewife, who
surrounds us with tender attentions, and eagerly produces the sort of things that
will distract tired people after a day's work.

Such a function is beneath the dignity of art. She could not accept it, if she
was to remain what she had been in the past. It did not embrace her whole
domain ; it belongs by right to utilitarian art.

We have come back to the same point on our circle : If the uses of art change,
art itself must change. If it cannot have the place it requires, it becomes meaning
less. If it stands alone, it perishes. To restrict our artistic requirements to
abstract painting and sculpture is a folly of the same order as that of the madman
in the fable, who wished that everything he touched might turn to gold. Abstract
art is a holiday delight. We are not a race of pleasure-seekers, and we are proud
to say so. Our most rational idea is to divide, not wealth, but work, to see an
era when there will be no drones, when every one will exert himself for the common
good. In such a state the amateur will cease to exist.

For what then do artists create, pending what is generally the posthumous
consummation — that accumulation of their works described above ?

Some for an unattainable object, every step towards which is marked by tears
and blood, an ideal that can only be described in somewhat metaphysical rhetoric :
the satisfaction of a conscience that has no relation to extrinsic things, of a supernal
ambition, grandiose and dazzling in its conscious determination, in its consistent
effort towards the elusive goal, amazing in the unconsciousness with which it
achieves results that would seem only possible to the most strenuous toil. Creation
for the sake of creation.

A far-seeing idealism sustains them, the hope that they will succeed in
giving a new form of beauty. A blind optimism leads them, even when most
neglected, to believe that they will be appreciated by some, that some will share
the new joys they have discovered. And when the futility of such hopes is
demonstrated, when they see their works passed over, or, worse still, bought by
purchasers who have none of that intimate delight in their creations on which they
had counted, they withdraw into themselves and do their greatest work.

Sometimes that which appears to them in their confident self-knowledge their
greatest work, is recognised by the enlightened at last, and becomes an eternal
possession, a lasting element in after generations of artists, in whose works it lives
in another form, completed by new achievement. It passes into the artistic heritage
of the nation, and finally plays its part in national culture. Others fail ; not that
their self-knowledge is at fault, but that their talent or their intelligence falls short.
Their numeric preponderance is so great, that they completely crowd out the few,
and the limited demand of the public for pictures is supplied almost exclusively
by them. I suppose that to every thousand painters of the one class, there is not
more than one of the other. Imagine such a proportion in any other calling !
The artist can mislead the public more easily than can a man of any other
profession, for setting aside the affinity of the herd for all that is superficial, a sort
of halo surrounds the painter ; he profits by a number of institutions very favour

THE MEDIUMS OF ART, PAST AND PRESENT n

able to mediocrity, which give a certain importance to the metier as such, and
are readily turned to account by the adroit.

Foremost among these is the art-exhibition, an institution of a thoroughly
bourgeois nature, due to the senseless immensity of the artistic output, and
the consequent urgency of showing regularly what has been accomplished in
the year. This institution may be considered the most important artistic medium
of our age.

It would have a certain appositeness as a shop in the grand style, arranged with
a luxury befitting the wares. But this purpose, which seems to be included in the
general scheme, is quite subsidiary, as may be seen from a glance at the sale
statistics.

Artists acquiesce in the system, because if they held aloof, their last means of
expression would be denied them. They want, at least, to let their work be seen,
and see it themselves, even among that of a thousand others, even for a few
months, even under barbaric conditions. What becomes of it after the exhibition
is indifferent to them. It is enough if the picture fulfils its purpose at the
exhibition, attracts attention, is discussed by the critics, and, perhaps, even — this is
the culminating distinction ! — receives a medal.

To secure these results in competition with the thousands who are bent on the
same ends, it is above all things necessary that a picture should have certain
qualities that distinguish it from the rest. If the artist is bold enough, he makes
it very large, or at all events very insistent, that it may strike the eye, even if badly
hung.

It is obvious that under such conditions the purpose achieved by competition
in rother domains — that of promoting the selection of the best — can never be
fulfilled. A variety of those base impulses, which always urge on the compact
majority against the loftier individuality, play their part in the result. Rarely,
indeed, has a genius been brought to light through these channels. The greater
artists avoid these exchanges, and even the amateur does not frequent them, since
quantity is not the only thing he craves.

The remnant of artistic sensibility that lingers in our age bids fair to be
systematically crushed out by these exhibitions. If perchance any of the palatial
barracks that house them should survive for posterity, they will be more damaging
to us than any other relic. There will be persons who will go through these
galleries in the spirit in which we visit ruined castles, and the rusty picture-hooks
will be to them like gruesome instruments of torture.

Pictures once hung on these hooks . . .

This is the end of the history of pictures. We have, at least, the comfort of
knowing that we can sink no lower. Once the symbol of the holiest, diffusing
reverence in the church, and standing above mankind like the Divinity itself, the
picture has become the diversion of an idle moment ; the church is now a booth
in a fair ; the worshippers of old are frivolous chatterers.

TRADITIONS

PAINTING is the art of charming the eye by colour and line ; sculpture charms
the eye by means of form in space.

As the eye, in common with every other organ of sense, has a tendency to
reflect its perceptions on the understanding, i.e., that accumulation of experience
which checks new perceptions by those already accepted, and as it resists every
illusion that might jeopardise its earlier acquisitions, the charm of art cannot be
summarily explained as illusion. Were this otherwise, susceptibility to its influence
would presuppose defective powers of understanding, and this is contradicted by
actual facts. Though persons of high attainments have lived all their lives
ignorant of the charm of art, it is not, on the other hand, to be denied that the
keenest thinkers have been very susceptible to artistic influences. To explain this,
we must assume the existence of certain brain-parts having peculiar functions ; these,
in some individuals, act simultaneously with the parts on which the concentration
of the understanding devolves. When a beautiful new flower meets the eye, the
senses announce it to the understanding as a botanical specimen ; in certain
spectators, the other portion of the brain will be simultaneously occupied solely
with the form and colour of this new thing, regardless of the question whether
these qualities belong to a flower, *>., to a familiar species, which, as such, may
suggest all sorts of extra-aesthetic — for instance, utilitarian — considerations. It
may be presumed that all men are provided with this brain-power more or less,
that it may be cultivated or allowed to dwindle, and that not only individuals but
whole races are more richly endowed with it than others. Like the other brain,
it has its store of experiences, and the conscious sum of such experiences known as
logic in the one, is called aesthetics in the other. This, like logic, is enlarged
by every new experience, by every new enjoyment, and thus enriches not only
itself, but every individual enjoyment

So far, all is simple enough. The difficulty arises from the undeniable
relations between the two brains. The great question nowadays is, whether the
one can work without the other. It is at least certain that perfect results will not
be achieved, either in logic or aesthetics, if the two are divorced. Artistic enjoy
ment may be promoted or hindered by these relations ; there may be works, that
set both in motion, that act as a strong stimulus not only to the aesthetic, but also
to the intellectual apparatus, and call all the powers of the mind into play. There
are works that do not merely impress as beautiful ; — they may even do this to a
comparatively slight degree — but with their beauty, they combine a depth of
experience that goes beyond all experience achieved by intellectual processes, and
gives the soul an instantaneous sense of enlargement and enrichment. Such
works were not vouchsafed to the classic age of art, superior as it was to ours in
beauty of form. They first became possible, when traditions relaxed somewhat,
and permitted an isolated genesis of artistic genius, under circumstances that were
even opposed to the spirit of the age : Michelangelo — Rembrandt.

TRADITIONS 13

Michelangelo reveals to the beholder a beauty that emerges from form,
whereas the ancients, of whose forms he reminds us, contained beauty in complete
solution. The antique stands still and allows us to approach it. Michelangelo
hurls beauty into us. A power which seems compounded of the power to create
forms inherent in thousands of artists, gives the subject he handles an expression
that turns the strongest peculiarities outwards, and makes them credible and
acceptable. Faith grows strong, because it accomplishes a work of its own in every
spectator, and anchors itself in the soul of each with reflections peculiar to each.
It reaches its consummation in a manner directly opposed both to the unreflecting
antique worship of beauty and to the mysticism of our early hieratic art. It may
become so powerful as to go far beyond all the logical means that approach the
same subject, and when, as with Michelangelo, it treats of divinity, it may give
mortals a foothold, that will enable them to approach the Godhead by new paths.
Rembrandt achieves the same result by means that have no sort of apparent
relation to the antique.

This effect is happiest, where it appears utterly unconscious. If art is to have
its true value, it must give its first rapture in the sphere that is peculiarly its own,
re-acting from this on the intellect, not vice versa. A work may express the
deepest truths, and yet fail utterly to satisfy artistic requirements ; a conscious
insistence on ideas will always injure the artistic side. Michelangelo did not
always hold fast this truth. Wherever he appears as the analyst, his art foregoes
something of that legitimate effect he never fails to produce in synthesis. His
famous Creation of Man, which is often pronounced his greatest work, is an
extraordinary example of intellectual invention. In spite of the mastery with
which the composition utilises the idea, the immensity of the giant is not so
impressively suggested here as in certain studies of the nude, which are by no
means definite reproductions of actual facts, but mere fragments. But this does
not prevent them from inspiring thought in those who behold them. The man
of a special capacity will be more easily swayed thereby than another ; the
direction in which his thoughts will move will be determined by a hundred
things — his degree of culture, his temperament, &c., and not least, by his
momentary mood. No two persons will follow out the same train of thought
before such works, but both will perceive the same force, urging their thoughts
onward!

In the new art we can trace two main currents ; in one synthesis predominates,
in the other analysis ; the latter preponderates enormously. Indeed, this is the
direction in which abstract art has tended to develop ever since the Renaissance.
The tendency became more and more pronounced, in proportion as the Germanic
nations, with their infinitely younger culture and their introspective genius,
turned to the practice of art, while the Latins remained more faithful to the purely
sensuous ideal. The results were two traditions : the one relatively artistic, the
other relatively literary. The former is, of course, the only essential one from our
standpoint. We shall therefore have to concern ourselves especially with this, in
order to find points of contact with other aesthetic interests.

Its capital, its principal dwelling, we may say, is at present Paris.

This fact is not to be gainsaid by patriotic feeling. It seems to us a regrettable
one, not only because it gives an advantage to our hereditary foe, but because we
should deplore such a concentration anywhere, as showing that even art has
succumbed to the modern mania for centralisation.

i4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

It will be well to circumscribe our meaning here.

Of course, it is not suggested that Paris is the only centre of painting or
sculpture. It is simply a question of manner. I believe that German painting,
as manifested in Thoma, Bdcklin, Lenbach, &c., or English painting, as practised,
for instance, by the Pre-Raphaelites, is less capable of expansion, of a wide,
universal artistic development than that of Paris ; when I say " of Paris," I include
in the term many distinguished aliens, who, after studying in Paris, have carried
the tendencies of French art back with them to their native lands, extending and
nationalising them.

For directly we consider German, or English, or Scandinavian painting purely
from the pictorial standpoint, we do it injustice. We would fain determine what
is modern, i.e.t serviceable to the age. How can we do this with painting speci
fically German, English, Danish, &c.?

It is not only that the material analysed by many artists of these nationalities
is remote and has no affinity with the era of railways and of countless other things
that give it an aspect so different to that of its predecessors; the manner of
analysis might harmonise this or at least avoid glaring discords. But it is just their
manner of analysing that is so foreign to us. There is much originality in the
process, it is true ; but it is the same manner, modified by individuals, with which
the ancestors of these artists achieved identical results with the greatest success
several hundred years ago. We know that such and such a picture was not painted
centuries ago, solely by reason of certain externals familiar to all students of art
history ; no intrinsic tokens make it certain that it could only have been painted
in our own day. This art is not the necessary consequence of weighty con
temporary elements, something self-evident and belonging to the age, but rather
something opposed to it. We might almost say that it was not created by the
age, but in spite of it.

We know, of course, that there are affinities between modern artists and their
remotest ancestors — that there are moderns who have succeeded in avoiding these
incongruities, though painting the same things as the old masters. It is just
the greatest art of all ages that shows these affinities, nay more, that lives by them.
There is nothing more economic than the power that augments the artistic wealth
of the world. Like the organic forces of Nature, it works by fertilisation. If the
stages of development are more obscure here than in Nature, the aim, the strenuous
impulse towards purposeful efficiency, is identical in both.

We shall try in the sequel to discover certain fundamental aesthetic elements
of ancient art, in order to see where we have gained, where lost, and how it has all
happened. We do not propose to do this by the process of art-history ; this would
be to repeat an oft-told tale. We shall only linger at one or the other of the
stages of this development, notably, at one of the earliest, because it offers the
strongest possible contrast to our latest, and because, in spite of this, there are
bold dreamers who would bind the two ends together. Whether this is possible
is still an open question. At any rate, we will consider them both with this
possibility in view.

THE RISE OF PAINTING

THE Christian Church undoubtedly rendered immortal service to art. Her artistic
influence began at the moment when the Roman Empire lay in its last throes.
Her radical principle, to make everything as unlike as possible to the creations of
Rome, enabled her from the first to dictate the course of art to some extent.
The aesthetic standpoint was naturally somewhat overlooked in the programme.
In the beginning the church was as barbarous as Protestantism. Art was idolatry,
and for the Christian, this idolatry was embodied in sculpture, the presentment of
heathen divinity, which was accordingly forbidden once for all. Not until Christian
Radicalism had been softened by the lapse of a thousand years, did men begin to
think more indulgently. But sculpture never quite recovered from the effects of
this neglect, and its development as an abstract art was therefore tardier than
that of painting. It remained architectonic to the time of our grandfathers.

All that had pertained to it in pre-Christian times among all nations, became
the property of painting. The aims of the two arts were by no means identical.
Painting was writing, a medium of communication for the primitive purposes of
the church. It did not become art, till thought found leisure to express itself in
images, and growing wealth led to the decoration of the churches.

Hence it was originally stroke, line, linear signs. Its development was the
development of line.

And at the same time its history may be carried back to a history of the
supersession of line by plane. All that was taken from the one was added to
the other. The relation between the two is the physiological point of the
whole history.

Line was the handwriting of style. It rises from the coarsest ornament to
the highest expressive power, and becomes the vehicle of the mightiest and most
comprehensive of traditions, the Gothic. As it declines, tradition declines with it,
and individuality gains the ascendency. Then it takes refuge in planes, which
become of supreme importance in our modern, purely abstract art

MOSAICS

The first stage included mosaics. Planes as yet had no existence for the artist,
they were the affair of the craftsman. Contour alone was the vehicle of the
formula, and the formula was anonymous, not the work of individuals, but a legacy.

It is difficult, to a certain extent, to imagine the creative act that produced
these early mosaics. There was no art, but there was certainly an instinct for
interior-effects, the vastness, loftiness, and grace of which fill us with amaze
ment. Who will find words in our copious art-dictionaries to describe the
absolutely divine emotion that thrills the quiet tourist in a mosaic interior like that

1 6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

of the Baptistery of the Orthodox Church at Ravenna ? Who could suggest the
splendour of the gem-like purples, the rhythmic harmony of the simple, earnest
faces of the Apostles ? Where may we dream more sweetly of the lovely legends
of our faith, than in the chapel of Galla Placidia, before the artless poetry of the
representation of the Good Shepherd ? What can be more magnificent than San
Vitale ? We are dazzled at the mere thought of what this building must once have
been. Wherever, wandering in search of the highest enjoyments, we light on old
mosaics, be it in Rome, Sicily, or Constantinople, there comes a moment when we
feel more or less definitely as if in comparison to these first written characters of our
art, all that has followed had been mere confusion. Is there not something of the
same feeling in our attitude to the architectonic form, which bears so many of these
characters ? The Romanesque style has never been surpassed in grandeur ; to our
generation it seems the sole basis for a modern architecture.

The Byzantines were the first to bring mosaic decoration to perfection.
Modern research, blind to all but the analytical development of art, is inclined to
neglect their work altogether, insisting much on the beauty and nobility of Early
Christian examples, and treating the Byzantine more or less as barbaric aberrations.
This attitude is a remnant of that famous classic tendency, which while it pre
served painting and sculpture, perverted the development of architecture, and
was not so far overcome as to allow us to look for beauty outside Greece and Rome
till our own times. The greatest and most rational achievement in modern
aesthetics, the rehabilitation of Gothic and Romanesque art, cannot ignore the
Byzantine form ; least of all can it do so in favour of that last and somewhat
puerile remnant of the Roman tradition, which the early Christians of necessity
carried into our era.

In one point only were these earlier mosaic-workers superior to the Byzantines :
in colour. Even here the superiority is not quite indisputable ; for the reticent
colour of the Byzantines undoubtedly served the architectonic ideal to perfection.
On the other hand, the Byzantines excelled in drawing, if we judge their work
rationally, and not with the unnatural determination to divorce it from architecture
and consider it as a thing apart. It is absolutely appropriate to the technique.
Wherever the Early Christian mosaics, influenced by the antique, or the later
mosaics, betray that feeling for nature afterwards developed in painting, the
decorative effect is sensibly diminished. The problem of equilibrium as between
the requirements of nature and style, which antiquity alone has been able to solve
to the satisfaction of both, began here. Directly realism appeared in the mosaics,
the magical effect of the technique disappeared.

Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in S. Mark's at Venice, to
whose vast series of mosaics every century has contributed., from the tenth to our
own ; in other words, the whole of that Christian era with which we are dealing.
To the Byzantine conception, persons and things, and all that was represented,
were merely vehicles for decorative line, hardly more than those exquisite letters
that accompany the pictures, and are more essential for the comprehension of the
picture than the subject-matter itself. The modern mosaics take a middle course,
and aim chiefly at attracting as strongly as possible. The compositions on the
facade are gaudy pictures, in which the space they occupy means only the
measure of their extent, and is otherwise a matter of no importance. They serve
merely to make the extraordinarily animated facade more restless still, and they
attempt to compete with the architecture, instead of to harmonise with it. They

THE RISE OF PAINTING 17

do, perhaps, succeed in putting their rival into the shade, but only by destroying
the artistic harmony of the whole. We note a difference at once as we pass
into the atrium. Here the Byzantine ideal predominates. We get some
prescience of the splendour within, but, in accordance with the old methods, it is
only a prescience. It is architecture covered with signs. These signs are un
meaning, if we examine them in detail as we should examine a picture ; their con
ventionality of composition, the very primitive ideas they symbolise, make them
incomprehensible to the modern. The architecture alone gives them aesthetic
value. One of the arches depicts the story of Noah. The various episodes of
the legend are set forth in sections at certain intervals ; each is a decoration in
itself. We see figures, animals, waves, but what impresses us above all, is the
extraordinary correlation of these lines and the planes they surround ; the lines
are placed with such unerring judgment, that we never for a moment ask our
selves what they mean. The subject-matter is so subordinated to them, that we
do not even think of protesting against this subordination. Captivated by the
purely decorative charm of these signs, we finally come to accept the complex
emotions they demand from the understanding. The psychology of religious
suggestion finds rich material here.

The six-winged angels between the arches of the right-hand cupola in the
atrium are magnificent pieces of decoration. Their wings stream out in the three
directions of the pendentives assigned to them ; it is scarcely possible to imagine
anything more architectonic, more absolutely appropriate to a given space. They are
a perfect translation into planes of the grandiose sculptures of the capitals, with their
lions and peacocks, that uphold the arches. The modern mosaic of the sixteenth
century in the central cupola seems timid indeed in comparison. The Evangelists
are seated on clouds on either side of the enclosing triumphal arch. They reveal
all the mediocrity of the epigoni. If the naturalism with which they are treated
were carried very much further, the theme would seem none the less unnatural to
the spectator. As it is impossible to sit upon clouds, the more realistically such a
suggestion is made, the Jess credible it appears. The representation of the
Apostles as life-size figures, lacking all architectonic proportion to the magnificent
arch, is positively murderous in its unskilfulness. Early Christian buildings of
some 1000 years earlier show what can be done with such arches in mosaic
without any ornament. I may cite the triumphal arch of Sant' Apollinare in
Classe, near Ravenna, the mosaics of which date from the sixth century.

In the interior of St. Mark's criticism is dumb; so, too, is what we call artistic
perception. We no longer deliberate ; the hand that holds the guide-book closes
convulsively, and the brain abjures its deadly waste of time and thinks no
more. We can form no idea of such splendour till we see it, and then we seem
to be in the presence of something abnormal, impossible, gigantic, terrible. We
do not see this golden magnificence — we hear it, feel it, and breathe it. In an
instant, a new sense is created — a sense of space. We cease to be individuals, and
become atoms, silent particles among other such.

What do we moderns with our aesthetic trivialities know of such grandeur! If
we could fill a room with the finest pictures of our century, if we could collect all
that is greatest in Italian and in Northern art in a single gallery, it would remain
a gallery, a space devoted to art, something isolated and remote that could never
intoxicate the soul as do this barbaric gold and these barbaric symbols of the
discredited Byzantines. It may be objected that it is the depth, and not the
VOL. i c

i8 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

extent, of the emotion produced that is of moment. ... I can imagine heretics
who would call this depth weakness, who are brutal enough to prefer the blind
impact of such barbarism as this to the solvent knowledge of culture. ... It
may certainly make some among us forget our analysis for a moment, and lose
our critical bearings, so to speak. But what would we not give, if such emotion
sometimes overcame us in the presence of modern decoration !

Here the art of mosaic shows its strength ; it was created for these galleries,
for these arches and cupolas. It works miracles here with the dusky gleam
of its gold in the quiet chapels, in this inimitable interior, with the magic
glimpses between and above the pillars. There is not a single picture in the
church, yet none seems richer in pictures. I am not thinking now of those
created by the mosaic-workers, but of those produced as one catches sight of
the mosaics through the architecture, pictures that change with every step, with
every gleam of light, and are absolutely inexhaustible. Whereas in the atrium
the Byzantine decoration appears as the discreet handmaid of architecture, here it
is the privileged companion, or indeed the crown of the whole, the speech,
the vivifying element of the divine body.

The wealth of this language is extraordinary. It ranges from the loftiest
majesty to the most child-like simplicity, from awe-inspiring gloom to smiling
sweetness. Below the large modern, ineffective compositions in the two side-aisles,
there are on each side five isolated figures, among them, on the left, a youthful
Christ, and on the same place, on the right, a youthful Virgin. It is impossible
to imagine anything more delicious than these two faces. The fair-haired,
aristocratic Christ has a sweetness of expression only to be found in Vivarini's
most delicate works, and the Mary with the dark hair and eyes, and the tender
lines, might also be by the hand of the great master of Murano. With this
graceful loveliness we may contrast the tremendous vigour and dignity of the
mosaics over the high altar : the symbols of the Evangelists in the pendentives that
divide the cupola of the apse from that of the high altar, and especially that
terrific lion, in the creation of which convention has only been used to emphasise
the grimness of the beast, who appears as the concentrated expression of all the
gloomy majesty that slumbers in the architecture. The bold suppliant who dared
to raise his eyes from the ground must have started, as if a glare of lightning had
met his gaze, when he saw this monster high above him, and have bowed his neck
again meekly, to carry the burden of inarticulate prayer.

In the exquisite chapel of St. Clemente close by we enter into another
atmosphere, one of gentle mysticism. A brooding twilight fills the space. The
marble rises in gray majesty from the ground. At the spring of the vault the
mosaic begins, and shows the solitary figure of the saint in the lunette. Can one
ever forget the twilight behind the pillars, through which the bronze lamps gleam,
the solemn altar with its shimmer of marble reliefs, the calm saint above ? Over
this again the eye is carried through vast arches to the upper storey, to the
recurrent glimmer of gold and holy sign, and finally rests high above in the vault,
on the swaying ship with the Apostles and the fantastic white sail.

It is curious that the most " modern " of spectators feels no inclination to
smile at the naive audacity of certain of these conceptions. And as he has learnt
to dissociate religion from art, and prides himself on having lost his reverence for
an outworn creed, it can only be aesthetic appreciation that makes him accept the
extreme manifestations of this much maligned style. These are plentiful enough.

THE RISE OF PAINTING 19

A favourite motive in various places, which recurs in St. Mark's, is Christ leading
the faithful to bliss over the prostrate Satan. This group so teems with grotesque
defects of drawing, that in any other connection it would suggest caricature, but
here our critical judgment is suspended. Each detail carries on the eye to the
next, and bids us grasp the whole. And this gives life to the creation. It is, of
course, a very different life from that of the modern picture. Measured by this, it
may seem a dead letter, but, on the other hand, the modern work would be dead
if applied as it is applied. It is a part of the place that stirs such strange
exaltation in the spectator ; these symbols were made for this place, and for it
alone. A time came, when men looked upon those mathematical laws which the
Byzantines consciously or unconsciously observed as sheer barbarism, and judged
it unworthy of the soul to be guided by logic. As if there could be anything
more venerable than these eternal mathematical truths ! As a fact, the eye still
finds harmonies in these half geometrical pictures, unique creations that evoke
unique emotions. In the very group I have just mentioned, there is such a mighty
sense of movement, the action of the advancing Saviour, his mournful face turned
to the suppliants, the cross held high in his hand, is so convincing, that one is
carried away and accepts the grotesque as a matter of course. Consider similar
subjects as treated later by the primitive painters : Fra Angelico's Last Judgment,
where the angels pace the gardens of Paradise on the right, while sinners are
larded, boiled, and roasted on the left. These inevitably strike us as comical,
because here mathematics have given place to spiritual sentimentality. Of course,
Fra Angelico's conception, a symptom of that milder ideal of Christianity that
followed the phase of rigid asceticism, indicates a general advance in culture. But
this synchronised with a diminution of suggestive power, an enfeeblement of the
forces at the disposal of the Church. The difference is very apparent, even in
St. Mark's itself. Wherever we find the work of later centuries, more especially
of those when painting was at its apogee, the technical effect is lost. It is
lamentable indeed that the most important feature of all, the enthroned Christ
of the apsidal cupola, should not be in the pure style. In domed spaces such as
this, Byzantine mosaic developed a grandeur truly stupendous. I know nothing
more beautiful of the kind than the fragments preserved in the churches of
Murano and Torcello, the venerable dependencies of the city of the lagoons.

The ancient mosaic pavement of San Donato at Murano is in itself worth a visit
to the melancholy spot. The design is exquisite, geometrical yet arbitrary. Time,
working like a mole under the slabs, has made it more arbitrary still. One feels
inclined to lie down on the ground, on this strange, Oriental carpet of stone.

Then suddenly, almost casually, one sees far beyond, the gigantic golden apse,
and alone therein, a single slender figure, in flowing blue draperies : Our Lady as
Intercessor. It does not seem to be a dome in which she is hovering, but a world,
and the pale creature floats in the terrible world-solitude, holding her hands
up before her face, as if rigid with the burden of her enigmatic prayers. In
all our religion there is no grander, deeper mystery, and nowhere has it been
more grandly and deeply treated than here. The mosaics in the apse at Torcello
have the same vigorous intensity. Here the Virgin supports the Infant Christ, as
in the chapel* of San Zeno at St. Mark's. Below, and separated from her
by a banderole, the exquisite lettering of which has the effect of the finest
ornament, the twelve Apostles stand in a flowery meadow, and beneath them
the splendid gray marble with its almost geometrical zigzag veinings, descends to the

20 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

choir-stalls, which rise in tiers, and fill the hemicycle of the choir as in an antique
theatre. The artistic effect is indescribable. Everything is so arranged as to bring
the principal figure into relief. Proportions and colours are gradually strengthened
to this end. The Apostles are treated in subdued tones ; white predominates in
their draperies, while the slender figure of the Virgin, clad in the traditional deep
blue robe, stands out from the golden background, her hands and face being the
only passages of light colour. The most beautiful ornament would not be so
effective as this simple contrast, the sharp contour against the grandiose gold
background, to which an automatic play of light and shade gives a gentle
animation. The Apostles all stand facing the spectator on a straight strip of
meadow, studded with exquisitely treated conventional flowers. Their draperies
are caught back in such a manner that each overhanging hem forms almost
identical angles, and this gives throughout the row a scarcely perceptible, yet
indispensable undulation to the outline, which contrasts pleasantly with the per
pendicular figures. The meadow with the Apostles is enframed in a beautifully
designed border, simpler and more tasteful than the similar border in the apse of
St. Mark's.

If we picture to ourselves the cathedral of Torcello, decorated with the same
mosaic as the magnificent facade, with its pavement, and its internal architecture,
of which certain marvellous fragments still remain, notably on the rood-screen,
we shall not lightly judge an art that was lost for ever, yet never replaced. What is
it to us that it was practised by slaves, and that its radiant structures rose upon necks
bowed beneath the yoke ? The Church, the element that generated this art, has
fallen from her high estate, and as we linger in the palaces of her departed glory,
we venerate, not her, but the art she called into being. The greatness she created
she herself caused to decay. The association of art with religion was as propitious
to this great decorative art in its beginning as it was disastrous towards its close.
The more the Church drifted from her supernatural sense of supreme aloofness,
the more languid became that great decorative impetus which made the house of
God a new world, expressing, not only the genius of one man, however great, but
the fervour of nations and peoples.

Art has become free ; it has thrown off, not only the bondage of the Church,
but that of all subsequent elements which have attempted more or less successfully
to take the place of the religious impulse. To-day art is as essentially the work
of the individual, as it was formerly that of thousands. It has altered so radically,
that the name it once bore is scarcely applicable now. Between the new and the
old lies the gulf that separates the individual and the mass. These are distinct
conceptions, that no art history can weld together.

GIOTTO: DETAIL OF A FRESCO

IN THE CHAPEL OF THE MADONNA DELL1 ARENA IN PADUA

THE RISE OF PAINTING 21

FROM THE GOTHIC PERIOD TO THE RENAISSANCE

The first step was the transition from mosaic to fresco. It was decisive.
The artist himself became the decorator, and undertook the expression of his
thoughts ; in his hands thought necessarily underwent a corresponding change.

The rapidity with which the decorative ideals of the mosaicists disappeared is
remarkable. In his mosaics, as in his gigantic Madonna-pictures, Cimabue still
shows the decorative grandeur of an art directed to the ornamentation of vast
interiors. In Giotto's hands, painting is already pictorial.

The example that will best illustrate our present thesis is perhaps Giotto's
beautiful and harmonious fresco-series in the Chapel of the Arena at Padua.
This work contains the germ of all that later art has laboriously achieved. In
such details as that of the traitor's kiss, with its antithesis of the brutal plebeian
head of the renegade and the divine face whose eyes seem to pierce the sinner's
soul, we are startled by a manifestation of personal conceptions, a deeply dramatic
power, worlds apart from Byzantine ideals. But all such effects are isolated. Let
us examine the general effect produced by this little interior, which might have been
decoratively treated by the simplest methods, and let us remember our first sight of
it on entering, before we had found out the pearls among all these timid lines and
tints. Did we not feel a desire to turn back at once into the blooming garden
about the little house ? Did we not conquer a certain involuntary repulsion by a
more or less archaeological interest before we could venture nearer? Then, indeed,
after getting at the root of the matter, we possibly went to another uncritical
extreme, and looked upon the desire for strong impressions which was disappointed
at our entrance, as the impulse of a barbarian. In unsophisticated minds, memory
will always retain the twin impressions : the delight in personal elements, which
we find here in such imperishable traits, in spite of all ravages, and the yearning
for architectonic effects, which was so painfully repulsed.

The Chapel of the Arena was the first picture-gallery : it is the starting-
point of what I may call the gallery-characteristics of all our art. The
picture has already become something we must look at alone, divorced from its
surroundings and governed by its own laws. Art no longer bases itself on the
cosmos, but the individual becomes his own cosmos, a world within the other.
The very first step of this art was momentous for the decorative ideal. Note the
Last Judgment on the facade of the chapel. The composition — not, of course, by
Giotto himself — is as weak as the conception that inspired it, and led on to
Fra Angelico's versions of the same subject.

Meanwhile, as the land, struggling against disaster, allowed art to become
painting, incapable of creating anything but pictures, a marvellous structure was
growing up in the barbaric north, the home of the new church. It could not have
arisen in Italy, where, in spite of all intellectual reactions, the mighty works of
antiquity held the senses spell-bound. The ancient Roman civilisation was not
merely a pagan civilisation ; it was above all things Italian, a part of the national
being, and the greatest, most idealistic artistic expression of that being. The fact
that certain ideas had changed under alien influences, could not suddenly drive the
blood of the nation into different channels, any more than it could alter their faces
and racial peculiarities. The growths of the Italian soil could not be anything
but Roman.

22 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

On the other hand, there was nothing in the north that was calculated to check
an artistic development of ecclesiastical form. The part assumed by Christianity
here was different from that played by the obsolete pagan culture of Italy. It took
the form of a revelation, throwing light into the minds of the barbarians, stiii
shrouded in the mists of dawn. A robust people, which had lived hitherto by its
own rough strength, encountered Christianity just when its power had manifested
itself sufficiently in externals to allow of further development on spiritual
lines. The material function of Christianity was at once favourably regarded by
the leading spirits, who valued material enlightenment. To them the intellectual
advantages offered by Christianity sufficed to make the whole scheme acceptable.
And the new doctrine carried out this mission with unexampled circumspection,
disseminating practical knowledge, and sciences, with no premonition that the very
culture whose foundations it was laying would finally outgrow it, as the last
consequence of its work. Thus art, which served it, grew in its hands to some
thing intellectual, not merely suggestive of thought, but itself a fruit of thought.
Popular decorative elements blended with what religion had brought, but the
distinctive element was a new one, resting on a basis of keen reflection, and thus
sharply differentiated from all Roman art. It found its fullest expression in the
French architecture of the thirteenth century, known as Gothic architecture.
Consciously, and with a science whose healthy influence has worked beneficently
even in our own day upon our decadent architecture, a system of construction
was evolved that was logical before it became beautiful. The consequences were
stupendous ; the system found its way into Italy and there accomplished the
unimaginable, the subjection of the Italians to the barbarians, and their docile
acceptance of that Gothic style, which was antagonistic to all the inherited
instincts of the nation.

The audacities of this architecture reduced the solid wall-surfaces to a minimum.
There was no room for mosaic. Its place was taken by painted glass, the Hosanna
of Gothic art, which found its counterpart in the noble music that swelled
upwards to the lofty windows.

Let us compare the Paduan picture-gallery with the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris,
that little miracle of glass-painting, where the coloured windows (which are far
from being the most beautiful specimens of this Gothic art) constitute the sole
decoration and complete the seductive harmony of the place. It seems incom
prehensible that we should have given up the one thing — this splendid unity — to
nurture the other — the art that Giotto inaugurated.

It was, nevertheless, inevitable. The tremendous forces of Gothic art were
bound to prove self-destructive in the end. The same power that soared heaven
ward in its magnificent buildings, forced every activity upwards, into a sphere
where at last there was no possibility of co-operation. In Italy, under Giotto, the
pupil of the mosaicist Cimabue, the style became type, a similarity of faces and
movements, within the limits of which the individuality of Giotto's pupils could
only find expression in delicate inflections. But simultaneously, painting became
independent of the wall. The wooden panel grew out of the fresco, and this
evolution was the external preparation for the complete isolation of painting. A
circumstance that contributed greatly to this result, was that the execution of
these pictures was entrusted to the same artists who illuminated the books used
in the services of the church. The didactic purpose of the books usurped
predominance in the pictures. The ornamentation of the missals, admirably and

THE RISE OF PAINTING 23

intelligently applied as such, with a perfect comprehension of the surfaces to be
decorated, and of the relation between pictures and text, was stripped of its
original function in a picture, and found no new, clearly defined vocation to
replace it. The artist arranged and enlarged what he had painted in little on the
vellum ; the superficial relation to architecture which passed into the picture in
the process, came circuitously through the book ; this, of course, had certain
decorative elements in common with the structural style. The literary experi
ments of painting are of great antiquity.

Thus was evolved the picture, a composition governed, not by the law of the
place that contained it, but by that of a more or less arbitrary frame. This frame
still stands in the appointed Holy of Holies, but it is already an independent thing,
a church within the church, a place in which is worth the effort of the noblest.

And now the North begins to invade this place too. A school of painting
sprang up in Cologne, which expressed the very essence of Gothic art in its
altar-pieces. These have none of the minuteness of the illuminators ; their
unknown authors were rather stone-masons, penetrated by the ideas of form that
governed Northern carving, and seeking to express these anew in pictures. They
could not arrest the tragedy of the problem ; their dawning glory heralded the
downfall of the building, but they rescued what was most precious therein, pre
serving it to inspire after-generations to renewed creative effort.

From these germs the first genius of the new art, Jan van Eyck, arose a
century after Giotto. He gave to painting something universal and all-embracing,
elements of such grandeur and nobility that we acquiesce in the ruin of all else, to
ensure the survival of this one thing.

With him the material functions of pictorial art changed once more. The
planes become more and more significant ; an amazing minuteness of detail
reinforces the particular interest of the theme. Such miniature-painting as Van
Eyck accomplished in his Virgin in the Temple of the Basle Museum, or his Vierge
an Donateur in the Louvre, especially in the exquisitely elaborate background,
differed entirely from the work of the mediaeval illuminators, and was hardly ever
achieved by the specialists of a later date. Simultaneously Fra Angelico painted
the little altar-tabernacles now shown in the monastery of St. Mark's, the minute
golden lattice-work with the Virgin behind, works of art full of the pathetic
patience only possible in a monk. Compare Fouquet's miniatures at Chantilly
with Fra Angelico's. There is nothing minute in the work of the Northern
miniaturist, and certainly no sweetness. The eye is delighted by the detail here
also, but this disappears in the general effect. Van Eyck's art is the sagest appli
cation of architectonic laws. In his hands, a brush and pigments accomplish
what only structural art had hitherto achieved.

Technically also, Van Eyck's methods were new. He invented painting with
oils, the medium that caused a revolution, the only medium in which the mighty
achievements of the future art were possible, the medium which ensured them an
immortality they could not have enjoyed in the form of frescoes.

With the rise of this art, the organic nature of general artistic development
ceased. The grouping of artists into Schools was the last remnant of the superficial
homogeneity of individuals. It disappeared gradually under the growing worship
of personality. The subsequent development necessarily takes on a spasmodic
character, the accidental, experimental nature of isolated effort. Italy produced
no parallel to the art of Van Eyck, wealthy though it had become again, and

24 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

fascinating as was the bloom of Fra Angelico's colour. In the North the
monk had become a schoolmaster ; here in Italy he remained an artist, until
Donatello's generation. His work was both pious and charming, and an
admirable decoration for vellum or parchment. But when he made use of large
panels, it overflowed with a sugary sweetness that trickled into the art of his
successors. Van Eyck is a man beside a doll in comparison ; we need hardly
invoke the Adam and Eve of the Ghent altar-piece to illustrate this.

The union of the Italian and Northern Primitives was the happiest of artistic
marriages, but the North was the man. There was no danger of loss for the North,
but it was different for the other partner. Once more a mighty song swelled
across the Alps, the paean of the Van Eycks, of Van der Goes and Roger van der
Weyden ; once more a barbarian conquest was imminent, and this time a final
decision was involved.

But meanwhile Italy had recovered her senses, and had become a rich and power
ful country. Her artistic energy had certainly not spent itself in the devout
litanies of the monk of San Marco. One day artists who wore no cowls discovered
remains of classic sculptures beneath their native soil. In a flash they recognised
how they might shake off the foreign domination, and cleanse the house from all
traces of the barbarians. The tremendous prestige of classic art unfurled its
phoenix wings. No one troubled himself now about the moral import of this art.
The Church had become omnipotent, and could venture upon anything. She
stood exalted above the petty party-rage of her infancy : a gracious woman, fair
and crowned, who loved courtly splendour, and understood the aesthetic value of
those relics of her long-since-perished heathen predecessor which she had once
looked upon with such abhorrence.

As the final act of her artistic career, Italy essayed the happy experiment of the
Renaissance, with stupendous results ; after a struggle of a century she conquered
Gothic, and brought the barbarians to her feet. The Renaissance became the
style of all Europe.

The spectacle is a familiar one. But we have perhaps rather overlooked its
tragic side, and in the fulness of delights showered upon us by the Renaissance,
have forgotten what it took from us. The battle of its great leaders is bound up
with such important deeds and is So rich in wondrous elements that we forget that
what they gave us at last was a many-headed hydra. Our artistic appreciation is
coloured by our recognition of the immense advance in culture, the real struggle
for real ends, which heralded our new era, and was so richly adorned by art. But
in the domain of art the course of victory was not pursued in the normal direction
of general culture, as the result of battles already won. On the contrary, it gave
up positions already taken, and lost them irretrievably. It was natural that radical
changes in social and economic conditions should seek expression in art. As no
fitting expression was to be found through the medium of Gothic art, there was a
sudden retrogression to a world of forms which lacked the sound basis of this art —
a determination to meet natural requirements — and admitted of artistic but not of
logical application. Art became more natural, by using the freer forms of the
ancients, but at the same time, it verged on the unreal, for the age had no
inevitable necessity for these forms. It would be futile to attempt a critical com
parison between Gothic and Renaissance ; the Renaissance manner was not, strictly
speaking, a style at all ; there has, in fact, been no style since the Gothic.

From this standpoint, the significance of which is more and more apparent

VAN EYCK: JAN ARN<

NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

-F1NI AND HIS WIFE

THE RISE OF PAINTING 25

to us, the heirs of that epoch, the Renaissance in architecture was no revival,
but a brilliant decline. Its essential element is of a negative and dissolvent
kind, an experiment that necessarily brought about decentralisation, the primary
essential for the development of painting. At one ideal moment we find all the
artistic forces assembled. It is the prologue, the freshest, most enthralling act of
the whole drama. Masaccio's gravity becomes the boldest poetry in his eager,
gifted pupils. This poetry, to which Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and Ghirlandajo
contributed their loveliest rhythms, disclosed the sweetest blossom of Italian art ;
its virgin charm is eternal. The vernal freshness that characterised it, its hopefulness,
its thirst for action so enchant us, that we feel a certain disappointment at the
consummation offered us by its more mature successor.

The prologue is like a meeting of the hunt : the sportsmen are all together, but
they are waiting eagerly for the signal that will scatter them to the four winds. They
are held together only by influences, and these influences unite the arts. Donatello
inspires the painters, and the painters are further architects, goldsmiths, and many
other things, but they are so individually, accidentally, as a result of their passionate
desire for action, their lofty wish to make everything share their enthusiasm.
They take part in industry. But their influence is of no permanent benefit to
industry. What do they, in their exuberant energy, know of that use and purpose,
without which industry pines away ? And while they carry their art unto these
mainfold activities, they over-refine in detail, and give an active impulse to that
decadence in general art, which their forefathers passively promoted.

Jt is characteristic of our age, that contemporary artists are mainly concerned
with the resuscitation of the Renaissance ideal, and that so many of the artists who
have the renewal of general art at heart, are haunted by that epoch, on which, by
a pious fraud, they foist the tendency they desire to promote to-day. We cannot
demand of the last heirs of that development, which made individuality the
highest good, that they should go back to a period when the individual was non
existent. They take the moment when the ideal of a general style was still alive,
though various powerful personalities were at work. But they overlook the logical
weakness of the moment, the fact that the qualities which distinguished these persons
necessarily brought about the disintegration, the evils of which we are now enduring.

An Italian, the latest and greatest, made a final effort to combine the two ideals,
to offer the highest that individual art could give, and to unite all the arts to
beautify an interior. This was the dream of Michelangelo !

But this giant's life-work served only to bring the tragedy of modern art to a
climax. He, the purest, most abstract artist that ever lived, attempted to accom
plish what can never be combined with the abstract. The fact that his noble
frescoes in the Sistine Chapel can only be seen by a dislocation of our limbs, and that
we have to examine them in photographs in order to enjoy them, suffices to condemn
them from the architectonic point of view. There is unquestionably more genius in
the finger of God, calling Adam to life, than in the whole work of any of
Michelangelo's forerunners ; but the secondary purpose he, the master of all arts,
bound up with his art, he never accomplished, because it was impossible for him to
avoid the natural consequences of his brilliant gifts. And therefore the decorative
effect of his magnificent ceiling is monstrous, just as, in spite of the beauty of the
marble figures on the Medici tombs at Florence, the ensemble of limbs and the
stones on which they rest, i.e., the sarcophagi as such, are monstrous. The
objection, that powers far inferior to his would have sufficed to achieve harmony,
VOL. i D

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

is unmeaning, and quite beside the question. If, in our quest for a certain good,
we light on another far greater, the fact that we have not found what we set out
to look for remains unchanged. Michelangelo was conscious of the tragedy. The
number of unfinished works he left prove how greatly he feared to forget the
result in the process. He became the bane of the epigoni, who took what could
not satisfy him, and made it a definite formula, from which they evolved the
sinister beauty of the Baroque Style — the beginning of the end of European
architecture.

WOODfcN CRUCIFIX IN BRUNSWICK CATHEDRA!.

TINTORETTO: MARTYRDOM OF ST. MARK

BRUSSELS MUSEUM

THE FIRST FLORESCENCE OF PAINTING

THE victorious struggle of planes against line continued with results more and
more decisive in the new painting. The Venetians, Rubens, Rembrandt and
Velazquez were its heroes. In the nineteenth century this tendency was carried to
its extreme consequence. The result is undoubtedly the most important acqui
sition made by our art. If it were the only one, and if the influence on all aesthetic
production had been limited to it alone, its apogee would coincide with the nadir
of our power to form style.

This conclusion, a consequence of the Renaissance idea, is happily an error.
We shall see later, on which factors the formation of style devolves in our times,
at least, in our abstract art. To deduce the style of our day from our pictures
would be as absurd as to deduce Gothic art from Gothic pictures. Painting
did not create Gothic. The reverse was rather the case. Painting needed the
impetus it received from contemporary style, to free itself from that style. Its
destinies can therefore at the most only be accounted symptoms of this liberation,
this " degothicisation," if I may coin such a word.

On the other hand, the period undoubtedly plays a part in another form in the
development of painting, however spasmodic this may seem. Its course may, to a
certain extent, be recognised as a phenomenon parallel with the development of
the human organ of vision and certain faculties of perception, not in its entirety,
but certainly in its most important tendency. The great painters, to whom we owe
landscape, from the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century to our own contempo
raries, were undoubtedly right, when they showed that there are other things to see
in Nature besides the stylistic line which classicism selected. Our own century played
such an important part in the development of landscape, that we may almost consider
the creation of the genre as an achievement of our era alone. The importance of light,
of air, of all the imponderabilia we require to give probability to a study of nature,
developed gradually, almost step by step. Much that the earlier masters saw in
Nature, seems, if we place the most trivial modern landscape beside it, an illusion of
primitive senses, and it seems legitimate to demand that the increased complexity
of our perceptions should find expression in art as well as elsewhere. This
necessary scientific accretion, which nevertheless may leave to art all its sources of
beauty or even create new ones for it, modifies its technical equipment. The
significance of the artistic is unaffected by this modification ; painting governed by
scientific considerations alone would lose its artistic value. Science must remain a
means, and can never become an end in this connection.

The quasi-material development of painting naturally caused a reaction on the
other side. While interest in Nature became more and more intimate, composition
entered upon a new phase. Its field of operation altered, became smaller both in
a superficial and a literary sense. The Dutchmen of Rembrandt's time had
already demonstrated that, to render the quality of a fine piece of stuff, it is
not necessary to drape it on an elegantly posed figure, nay more, that arrangement

28 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

of the drapery is just as unnecessary as the elegant pose ; a Vermeer showed the
perfection of art that may lie in the picturesque reproduction of the stuff alone,
and how things so unpretentious from the literary point of view may afford far
more enjoyment than the huge compositions manufactured in Rubens' workshop.

There was composition, too, of course, in the Vermeer ; without it the artist's
gift would not have produced its full effect. But it was not of the lofty classic
kind. It concealed itself behind an apparent simplicity of form that suggested
mere fidelity to the thing seen. It did not make the arrangement of the
picture dependent on the literary argument, but treated it to all appearance
quite arbitrarily, though in reality with the most delicate sense of the division
of space, which made the illusion of accident an artistic means no less powerful
than grandiose composition.

What I call grandiose composition here, in order to make myself easily under
stood, is deliberately constructive painting, which still retains a certain connection
with the conventions of antique style, and finds the stately character it desires
more especially in reliance upon classical forms.

The definite linear outline was originally the logical organ of this art. The
great typical pictures of the Venetians made the first step towards that use
of colour which destroys line, and in a still greater degree is this true of
Rubens, who practically abolished line. It is remarkable that among the immense
series of his gigantic pictures the two that deserve the place of honour are the
magnificent unfinished works in the Uffizi, the "Battle of Ivry, and Henry IV ?s Entry
into Paris, works consisting mainly of splashes of colour, in which we divine more
than we see, and in which not drawing, but a vigorously wielded brush triumphs.
They are far more valuable than the long array of finished flesh-constructions
that cover the walls at Vienna, Dresden, Munich and Paris, because they contain
to a marvellous degree what Rubens could do, and because his faculty is closely
akin to that of the best among our own masters.

The shadow of this personality hangs over the whole of modern art. Rubens
stands in his small Flanders like a colossal tree, so firmly rooted and so great that
in the three hundred years of his still unchecked growth his boughs have spread
over all the little land.

Two strong branches dominate among the rest. One, the larger of the
two, stretches out to France. On it, not far from the parent-stem, are perched
a couple of lovers in Watteau costume ; farther on is Delacroix. Then the
stem makes a mighty knot, and divides into many twigs, on which the buds
are only just beginning to burst; they gleam with the colours of modern French
art. The other branch rises, slim and tender, with but little side-growth,
northwards to England ; this was grafted by Van Dyck. It was not so
vigorous and natural as the other, with whose foliage its own often mingled ; it did
not develop in the open air to which the other aspired, but flourished in the lofty
sphere of English Court life. It first overshadowed the pale aristocrats that Rubens'
pupil painted at the Court of Charles I., and then the more natural and not less
stately splendour of Gainsborough and Reynolds.

The law which governs the historical development of powers such as that
represented by Rubens is a secret one, mysterious as Nature and comparable to
Nature in its noiseless workings. If we go further back, we shall recognise in
Rubens the fusion of northern and southern elements, which, before him, first
met at the time of Van Eyck. When the pictorial impulse of Italy was in its

RUBENS: THE LION HUNT

HERMITAGE, ST. PETERSBURG

THE FIRST FLORESCENCE OF PAINTING 29

first phase, the North approached her. Venice, in particular, was the scene of
the encounter ; here Van Eyck's pupil, Antonello, taught the new creed, and
gave the new school so much of his own strenuous individuality that all Italy-
subsisted on it for generations, and the first great painter of the Venetian school,
Bellini, is like a Northern Gothic artist. Later, during the second prime of
Flemish painting, when the tradition began to fade in the North, Italy gave back
the borrowed fruit. It drew the painters of Antwerp to Venice, and here they
took from the offspring of Bellini, from Titian and Veronese, that which the
North had denied them : colour. Rubens was the child of this wondrous
marriage between North and South, and from him we may date the rise of modern
painting. Like every genius, he had a disastrous influence on his immediate
followers : Van Dyck was but a feeble epigone, as long as he followed in his
master's footsteps. Italianism, which even in Rubens' northern fist was sometimes
held in check with difficulty, degenerated into the grossest mannerism among his
disciples. Van Dyck first came to his own when he had escaped from Rubens'
jurisdiction, and at a first glance he seems to triumph most completely by qualities
he did not share with Rubens. The influence of Rubens seemed to have died
out, even in Flanders itself.

But it declined in a small domain, only to wax more vigorous in a wider field.
The Frenchmen of the eighteenth century drew the sweetest melodies therefrom.
They transformed the wanton love-song into dainty and polished verse. Among
these airy folks, Rubens looks like a giant with a legion of dwarfs swarming over
his thumb. They are careful to take no more from him than they can carry, but
even this little is as much as they can manage. Watteau, the greatest of them,
was the one most capable of resistance. He went back to the sources of Rubens'
art, as if to strengthen himself at these, when the impression of what lay nearer to
him became overpowering, and the Venetian element in him appears almost as the
masculine antithesis to the soft seductive charm of the Flemish. Fragonard was
the first to give himself up wholly to the spell, Fragonard, the most French of all
the Frenchmen of his age, in whom everything was pure, picturesque harmony,
even his melodious name. But even in his hands the exquisite fruit began
to wither. France never tasted it again in such perfection. The art of a much
later date which derived from Rubens required another and sedater element.

This, too, was a product of the great period. It gave birth to Velazquez.
The whole sum of modern art is manufactured out of Rubens and Velazquez.
They are both extremes, protagonists of stupendous powers, almost in excess of
their actual accomplishment. We always feel as if we should some day light
upon pictures by Velazquez more brilliant than the famous examples, as if
everything in the Prado and in London were merely a collection of sketches for
some great work surpassing them all. The same may be said of Rubens.

The obvious incompleteness of their accomplishment gives them a remarkable
power that, centuries after their deaths, stirs the energy of all creative artists, and
that even in their life-time moved their confreres to emulation. Nothing is more
natural, than that we should recognise many different hands in the works of
Rubens, and that there are so many contemporary variations on the Spaniard's
originals. Velazquez himself repeatedly executed variations on the same canvas,
and who can say whether the last was the best ?

A third, the greatest of the age and of all ages, came to associate himself with
these two, darker, deeper, more complex than the others, incomprehensibly unique

3o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

and yet more human in the highest sense. No school bears his name ; there was
a Rembrandt. This very fact makes him suspect to the present generation.
Because he defies technical analysis, because he was a genius, because his results
alone are valuable to us, and not his methods, which only lead the modern painter
astray, we are accustomed, among modern artists, where methods are all-important,
to see him looked upon with ill-concealed repulsion mingled with veneration, in
striking contrast to the boundless admiration expressed for him by the laity.

A thousand things may be urged against Rembrandt, but as a fact they have
nothing to do with him. We shall always be beside the mark if we judge him by
standards that apply to others. He is but little concerned with painting as we
understand it. By its means he created things that are more than the art due to
human hands. A Rembrandt makes the air around it vibrate ; it is like some
splendidly sonorous voice, the very sound of which is pregnant with wisdom,
before we grasp the words it utters.

He painted dignity, of the only kind we can thoroughly understand : the
dignity of human beings. It is, of course, the dignity of man. He has but one
rival here, Leonardo, whose pictures in the Louvre show the same penetration in
approaching woman, the same lofty, purely intellectual — perhaps, here, over-
intellectual — conception ; in him we see a profound result of the Latin race, just
as Rembrandt was the summing up of the Germanic. Such men as these may
boldly accept responsibility for making art purely abstract, and we understand that
cathedrals and palaces had to fall, that they might gaze out freely into eternity.

Rembrandt is a direct contradiction to the art which concerns itself with pure
beauty of form. He is a strenuous prosaist, who, by the significance of his
language, succeeds in lifting us to the heights only attainable to the ancients by
the melody of poetic form. To the ideal of beauty of the Greeks he opposed an
expression in which everything formal seems to be replaced by a consciousness of
knowledge rendered intelligible in some mysterious fashion. It scarcely deals with
beauty, it is too intimate for that ; but it is as deeply rooted in our world of
emotions and as natural to us as was the worship that rejoiced in the marble to
the Greeks. By its means Rembrandt gave the most accurate expression imaginable
to the deep moral difference that divides the two cultures, and further a testimony
that we need not blush before the ancients, and that it is possible for us to make
up for inferior fortune, inferior beauty, inferior power by superior intellectual
gifts. From this representative standpoint it matters little that he was a Dutch
man, and how he formed himself or was formed by others. All this was much
more important in the case of Rubens, and most of all, in the case of Velazquez,
who for this very reason may perhaps be accounted the least among the three.

There is a place in London where pictures by Velazquez and Rubens and
Rembrandt hang together. The Wallace Collection is to Northern art what
the Uffizi is to that of Florence. Here we may approach our men ; they live and
converse together like ordinary mortals. Here is Rembrandt's Parable of the
Unmerciful Servant: the old man with the turban speaking to the three, the
debtor and the two who have brought him before his master.

He speaks, indeed, to many more.

Rembrandt has been praised for his truth of observation, the vigour of his
gestures and facial expression. Even the Anatomy Lesson has been lauded as
masterly in this connection. I think that Frans Hals surpassed him in all these
qualities, and that Rembrandt showed his greatness by his abandonment of these

REMBRANDT: DR. DEYMAN'S ANATOMY LESSON

RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

THE FIRST FLORESCENCE OF PAINTING 31

cheap ambitions in his maturcr years. Certain of his qualities arc to be found in
a higher degree in other Dutchmen, but he is the architect, the rest are only
decorators. They seem mere painters of detail beside him. On one side of the
picture I have mentioned hangs Hals' Laughing Cavalier — it seems mere boisterous
chatter ; on the other Velazquez' famous Lady with a Fan ; she looks at us,
cold and lifeless ; the most exquisite Gainsborough sparkles on the opposite wall ;
it has the effect of a costume-picture. These were all painted to please ; they have a
touch of make-believe about them; a rich, a varied and a wondrous make-believe,
of course. But they are not so necessary in the final sense as the Rembrandt.

The importance of every man lies in the importance he recognises in others.
His value is of the same quality as the value he draws from life ; that which
seems momentous to him, is momentous in him. No conscious philosophic
profundity is required in the process. Vermeer's little Lace-Maker is a stronger
and deeper effort of concentration than acres of symbolic pictures. Instinct
guides the hand of the master, but not the ego-instinct , rather that greater,
indefinable instinct that illumines a sincere and healthy mind at times, when it can
forget the little ego, who wants to paint fine pictures. Rembrandt had such
moments, and only one artist since, a painter who has a close spiritual relation to
him : Millet. The Wallace picture is like some colossal revelation. We ask
ourselves whence these men have come, who are talking together. The famous
chiaroscuro probably never played a more important part than here; it gives
spirituality to the episode, and provides the cloud on which the Eternal Father
was wont to sit in the days of Michelangelo. From out this magic circle the eyes
gleam with strange intensity. And not only do the eyes of the four persons look
at each other, but their very bodies ; each line of the three servants is eloquent of
some relation to the speaker, still more every light, every bit of colour. The
play of planes is positively overpowering in its richness. How poor the use of
linear effects by means of contour seems in comparison ! Before this we think of
the Primitives as truly primitive ; the slender single threads on which they
depended seems to have been transformed into a wondrous web, into which all
emotions are drawn as into a rich, warm, many-coloured life. This richness gives
increased depth to the theme. We discover not only the relations of the three
listeners to the speaker, but those of the three to each other. They appear before
us as so many generations, classes, species, aspects of the universe. Superficially,
this variety is not much insisted upon. The servant and the man-at-arms are of
the same age, and are, further, well-known models; one of them is the Joseph of
the Berlin Potiphars Wife^ the other, unless my memory deceives me, reappears in
several portraits. The older man of the three is Rembrandt's brother, whom he
so often painted. Delacroix called Nature a dictionary. We might compare
Rembrandt's models to the elements of style in classic buildings, elements that
resemble each other, yet are perpetually combined to give different results. And,
indeed, such pictorial art is only comparable to the noblest works of architecture,
that stand outside the domain of trivial significance. Who asks what these men
in the picture are talking about, who wishes to know what is happening here ?
What the old man is saying may be of the profoundest wisdom ; it could only be
dull, trivial stuff if we translated it into words ; just as, on the other hand, an
attempt to render Goethe's Faust in colour could only result in feeble painting.
But we would fain repeat the experience, and have such solemn moments with
our fellow creatures as these four men are having ; if we are artists, we would fain

32 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

be heard with the same eloquently expressed comprehension as this old man, who
with his left hand seems to be casting down the barrier that divides — my soul
from thine !

Rembrandt had no artistic progeny. He completed himself. Bode rightly
assigns the Unmerciful Servant to his last period. It seems the work of one
who had lived many times the years of the master. Any further application of
the methods of this unique artist could only lead to failure : thus has Nature
decreed concerning the giants of art. The sensual, rather than the intellectual,
faculty is necessary for propagation, and this is true in art as in Nature. Rubens
had a rich store thereof. His successors really did little but cast a veil over
the unseemliness of his sensuality, and that of Frans Hals. The talents of the
eighteenth-century Frenchmen were admirably suited to the task. This Rubens-
esque influence continued into the nineteenth century, and became a more serious
but not a less beautiful thing, for which lovers of our modern painting are more
than ever thankful. It was the banner upheld by Delacroix to which the revolu
tionary elements rallied against Classicism. It was not the gorgeous representative
pictures of the Fleming that determined this reaction ; the vivifying influence was
the life that seethed in his frenzied brushing, the riot of his vigorous senses,
insisting as with a shout of joyous vitality on the present, the while the Empire
determined to turn back once more in pilgrimage to the past.

REMBRANDT: THE UNMERCIFUL SERVANT

WALLACE COLLECTION, LONDON

THE EMPIRE

THE classical reaction that took place in France at the close of the eighteenth
century, when David suddenly gave up painting in the manner of Fragonard,
strikes us as inconsistent at a first glance, because it was an outcome of the Revolu
tion. It seems a contradiction that the antique should have become a revolu
tionary symptom, that an obvious retrogression should have been welcomed as the
artistic expression of progress. The phenomenon is not to be explained by
literary influences alone, nor by the gradual growth of the tendency in the years
preceding the Revolution. That at a certain epoch, certain characters in Roman
history excited peculiar sympathy and admiration, is not in itself enough to
explain the substitution of the toga for modern dress, with a fine contempt for all
material differences. What men were seeking in that dramatic moment — the
most tremendous, perhaps, in the history of any nation — was a definite form of
expression, a speech that could convey something of the dignity to which the
people had risen in the Revolution, an art which could fix in plastic form the
extraordinary elements of this great period. They were seeking, in fact, the
simple ideal of popular art, a sign of the times that all might see from afar.

The art of the great Watteau's successors was altogether alien to such a
conception. It found itself suddenly in irreconcilable opposition to its contem
poraries. It is surprising that at a time when the guillotine was so busy its
exponents should not have fared worse. For they were the faithful represen
tatives of all anti-revolutionary instincts; not merely because they were an
embodiment of the seductive period of the Monarchy, the most delicate deposit of
the gay rococo style that had delighted the Court of Louis, but because their
whole mode of thought and form of expression breathed hostility to the revolu
tionaries. In one of the many coarse illustrations of the scenes of horror of
the closing century, a dainty cavalier is shown looking delightedly at a print in a
bric-a-brac shop, while a Jacobin in a toga, the Phrygian cap on his dishevelled
hair, laughingly drives a Roman sword into his ribs from behind. No more
striking antithesis could be imagined than the delicate dilettante art of Frago
nard, the decadent sense of enjoyment that found delight in St. Aubin's
marvellous prints, and the Roman ideals of the youthful Republic. It almost
seems as if the ancient parts of North and South had been reversed, as if
culture had evolved the barbarian, and barbarism the man of culture.

The historical criticism that seems so obvious to us now, that sees salvation in
the Rubens- Watteau tradition, and looks upon Classicism as an untoward interrup
tion in the development of modern painting, was totally outside the ken of these
Republicans. They had all the ingenuousness of youth ; for the social upheaval
had made them almost a new people. There was more affinity between a French
man and a native of the United States, than between the Parisian of the Monarchy
and the Parisian of the Directory. That this youthfulness was a mere rejuvenes
cence, that the nation was the same in blood and was at the end of its powers, was

VOL. i £

34 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

shown by the fact that it turned back to the past instead of creating something
new, and that this renascence finally spent itself in a kind of Indian summer. But
from their own standpoint the French were right ; not merely because they suddenly
bethought them of the few drops of Roman blood in their veins, or because
they, perhaps, recognised an alien strain in the Flemish element of the Watteau
tradition — what was it to them that history declared this strain to have been
present in Gothic art ? — but because they desired at least to feel themselves Latins,
if they could not be French, and above all, because they wanted something more
in art than luxury, than work belonging only to the rich.

In the case of Napoleon, again, it was not mere prudence that made him take
these aspirations of his people into account. A Nero with intelligence, a lusus
naturae made up of the most violent inconsistencies, a materialist, but so immense
in his materialism that there was not space for him in modernity, a man possessed
by a megalomania that the Roman period alone could have tolerated, laid hands
on the helm, and conquered the world. The baroque daintiness of his periwigged
predecessors could not suffice him for the setting of his drama ; he could not
accept artistic consecration from the conquered present that lay writhing at his feet,
but compelled the shadows of the gray past to form the nimbus round his throne.
When a martial caprice drew him to Italy, it is natural to suppose that he did
not pass unheeding through the ruins of an age in which he would fain have lived.
To him it was not a foreign, hostile land ; he understood its loftiest art better than
the Italians themselves, who looked on with scornful smiles, when he carried off
their least prized pictures, the almost unknown early masters of their art. But the
traces of Napoleon's passage through Italy are not solely those of the spoiler.
His well-considered architectural renovations have something of the tender
solicitude of the native prince, adorning his territory.

He took more away with him than Fra Angelico's pictures. Things irre
movable, the mighty relics of antiquity and greatness, stamped themselves deeply
on his soul, and he determined to build them anew at home, after his own fashion,
in the Napoleonic vein.

And this same man, who carried off the horses from the portal of St. Mark's,
gave a code to the moderns, and weakened the lands he could not conquer by
falsifying their coinage — was, in short, modern in all his methods.

This modernity masquerading in a toga was inconsequent and prevented the
working out of a systematic style. Napoleon had, in fact, no time to achieve style
in monumental things ; it did not extend to the complicated buildings of his
Roman prototypes, to say nothing of the Egyptians, certain samples of whose art
he sent to Paris. What he achieved belongs mainly to the interior of the house —
rooms, furniture, classic pictures, portable things . . .

Relatively speaking, architecture fell into the background. Michelangelo's
Renaissance had given the world an architecture rather artistic than utilitarian.
The Empire concerned itself exclusively with details, and though our recent
appreciation of the cold distinction of Napoleonic furniture and ornament was
not ill-founded, the artistic essence proper to it seems to slip between our fingers
— perhaps this is the very reason of such appreciation.

The Empire style was a convulsive attempt to give a different direction to
art-development by those who lacked the power to create it afresh. It is
folly to see in this effort a mere classicistic tendency ; it was a presentiment of
that which moves us to-day, and begins to take tangible shape before us,

J. L. DAVID: PARIS AND HELEN

GROUP FROM THE PICTURE IN THE LOUVRE, PARIS

THE EMPIRE 35

though as yet we have no formula for it : the socialisation of art ; style, not only
in pictures hut in everything. The time was not yet ripe. Art was as yet
untouched by those factors which the nineteenth century brought into play, those
factors which gave material importance to the class that had won political power
by the Revolution. The right to a civic style had been acquired, without the
means to make use of that right. The idea of the citizen existed primarily only
in the form of address adopted by the Republicans. It was not until he had
created his social independence that he could find a form.

And it was because the Empire ideal, in France and Germany at least, failed
to capture this fruitful sphere for which it was adapted, in which classicism might
have become a means to an end, giving the impetus to a general modern artistic
culture, after the manner of other archaistic tendencies of our day ; because it
selected the classic form, the worst it could have adopted, since it was the most
complete and therefore the least capable of development — for all these reasons
it degenerated, expressing itself in details, instead of creating a style.

In painting it revived the definite contour, " la probite de Tart," as Ingres
called it, that structural element, which affords an immediate practical connec
tion with the utilitarian art tendencies of the age, and for the annihilation of
which painting in general had more or less consistently worked till this time.
Style is line. And modern art was so far advanced, that Classicism could not be a
mere echo, and the new line a mere repetition of the old. Capable hands took
care that the classic line should become an enduring element in modern painting,
and should exercise the most salutary influence to this day, though less directly
perhaps than the Delacroix tradition of colour.

The majority of pedagogues can still urge very cogent reasons for the retention
of Greek and Latin in the curriculum, not as vehicles of culture in themselves,
but as the best possible form of gymnastics for the intellect ; in the same way, the
cool neutrality of classic form has its advantages as an educational factor. It is
idiotic to expect a student to draw and paint from Nature, as idiotic as it would
be to set a man who was taking his first lesson in mechanics before a modern steam-
engine in order to make the elements of the science clear to him. The organs
that are to do justice to the complex phenomena of Nature, must first be educated ;
that in Paris this training is still based upon classic tradition, explains to some ex
tent the enormous difference between the French average of artistic proficiency, and
that of other countries. The Frenchman goes to school, and to masters who,
be they never so Philistine, know something of the principles of teaching. Lecoq
de Boisbaudran, in whose school so many modern artists were formed, painted
indifferently himself, but the brilliant system of grammar he managed to instil into
his pupils, was none the less beneficial. In Paris, certain definite conceptions are
imposed on the ebullient talents, that would prefer to cover large surfaces, regardless
of what they represent ; they are given the skeleton that must be the substructure,
no matter how completely it may disappear under the luxuriant growth of
individuality

INGRES

No pedagogic considerations are necessary to make us do justice to the great
men who led the classic movement. The furious strife between Realism and
Classicism is at an end. We have dropped our battle-cries and have learnt to
see something more in these people than impersonal professors. They were above
all, guardians of culture, who worked a kind of cure upon neglected aesthetic
instincts. They not only took over an ancient form, renewing and transforming
it in a highly original manner ; they received and renewed the sense of form itself.
This alone is enough to make Ingres immortal. Under him art became an expres
sion of culture of the utmost purity, whereas under his master David it had
reigned by virtue of a turbulent grandeur that bore the unmistakable stamp of the
upstart. The creator of the Coronation was a great orator of tremendous power,
the true imperial painter, who girded on Roman form as a superficial ornament that
left his mighty loins free play. How little he really assimilated it may be seen when
he reveals himself, as in several of his portraits ; for instance, the brilliant
unfinished picture of the Marquise de Pastouret by her child's cradle at the
Chateau de Moreuil in Picardy, or the fine portraits in the Louvre, notably
the beautiful picture of Madame de Seriziat with her child. In the extraordinary
freshness of the colour and handling, this shows more affinity with FransHals than
with Rome.

Ingres, on the contrary, was never realistic like this, even in his most unguarded
moments. Lapauze, in his "Dessins de J. A. D. Ingres de Montauban" quotes the
dictum that Poussin would never have been the great artist he was, if he had not
professed a " doctrine." With Ingres this " doctrine " was not merely a scientific
theory that excites ?. cheap smile to-day, but a conscious organisation of far-reaching
artistic instincts. When Ingres became supreme, the great period of imperial activity
was past. Men had learnt to reflect. In the land of classic art Napoleon had seen only
the territory of predecessors akin to himself in spirit. Meanwhile men had drawn
nearer to the soul of classic art, or rather to its divine body. Mengs' copies of the
Pompeian frescoes had become widely known. Lord Elgin rescued the Parthenon
sculptures, the Germans discovered the /Eginetan remains. The field of art ex
tended, and with it that of perception. David had been a disguised Roman, Ingres
became a Greek, but in a very wide sense, far more universal from the purely
aesthetic standpoint than Goethe, for instance. He discovered the Greek spirit in
Giotto's frescoes, which he placed above those of Raphael as vehicles of expression,
and copied "on his knees" ; and yet he associated himself in friendly fashion with
Viollet-le-Duc's tendencies. He followed after line. If later on he concentrated
his sympathies more and more on the Greeks, it was because he found in them at
first hand what he was seeking. He was as essentially a draughtsman as David
was a painter ; nay more, he was the greatest draughtsman the world has known.
When the Renaissance discovered the marbles of the ancients, Italians and French
men began to make statues. The age was still vigorous enough to essay the same
material as that in which these masterpieces had been carried out. David tried his
hand unsuccessfully at sculpture. Ingres forbore, but this renunciation concen-

J. L. DAVID: THE THREE LADIES OF GHENT

(LES TRO1S DAMES DE GAND) LOUVRE, PARIS

INGRES 37

trated his expressive force in the more restricted field, till it became a quintessence
of extraordinary strength. He appears as a sort of reservoir of line, as one who
wished to transmit all the mighty impulse he received to his form. In his
Odalisque, his Baigneuse, and his Roger deli-vrant Angelique, he is like a bow strung
to its utmost tension, before the elastic vigour of which our minds, enervated
by contemplation of the colourists, involuntarily cower, as fearing to be
transfixed. His Bain Turc, in the Princesse de Broglie's collection, is equal
to Raphael's finest work, as truly one of the most brilliant consummations of our
modern art, as were the Vatican frescoes in the art of the Renaissance. Taking
him all in all, he was an incomparable artist, in spite of the comparisons he seems
to suggest, no epigone, but the poetic embodiment of the instincts of a nation
that had conquered the world, and saw in Napoleon's domination a natural symbol
of its own greatness, a greatness so far beyond Napoleon that its political downfall
remained a mere superficial episode, serving at most to stimulate its energies.

And it was not only the Frenchman in Ingres, but above all, the Northern
instinct that manifested itself with greater energy than ever before, almost with the
energy of a first encounter with the Greeks. He possessed the North before he
possessed the South, and a good deal more than he himself supposed. I can never
help thinking of Ingres' pencil portraits before drawings by Holbein, and of Ingres'
painting before Vermeer's Lace-maker. The Northern strain in him gave him that
intimacy, if we can so describe the quality, which we admire in his portraits of
private persons. If nothing of his work remained but the pencil drawings in the
Bonnat collection, he would be immortal. No artist has ever seized the thousand
aspects of the outward man as did Ingres, and he did it on little pieces of paper and
with pencils that gave only the sharpest line. His natural predilections no doubt
work decisively here. At twenty he could draw what he liked. Bonnat has
one of the earliest sheets, a unique portrait of M. Revoil, a drawing full of colour,
that owes nothing to the sharp point. It hangs between the wonderful portraits of
M. and Madame Leblanc, and it is difficult to believe that all three are by the
same hand. He was eighteen years old when he did it. Many would have been
satisfied to rest on such laurels. At twenty he looked upon it as a youthful error,
and became Ingres.

Perhaps the Northern element was also the true reason why Ingres never im
presses one as conventional in the narrow sense, and why one always arrives at a
personal relation to him. We must not, of course, take the colouristic tendencies
of our own day as the criterion by which to condemn all phenomena that do not
take colour as the basis of pictorial art, nor judge of Ingres so coarsely as does,
for instance, Montrosier, * whose attitude towards Ingres is typical of that of the
older generation. He praises the painter's application ! " Ne confondons pas la
patience avec le genie," &c. Montrosier describes how he once stood before a
Van Dyck with a ** really great " artist, and how the artist laid down the law as
follows :

" This artist [Van Dyck] was the painter of the decadence. All his persons
have the same gestures. Compare him with Holbein : when the latter paints a
miser, his gesture is avaricious ; when he portrays a soldier, it is peremptory ;
when the character is a philosopher, it is serious ; when a lover, passionate ..."

And Montrosier adds complacently that nothing could be more judicious, and
that the reproach might be addressed to Ingres as pertinently as to Van Dyck !
* "Peintres Moderncs." Paris, 1882.

38 THE DEVELOPiMENT OF MODERN ART

Finally he says of him what Rousseau said of the woman-writer and woman-
painter : " II n'a pas conclu."

Such criticism is beneath contempt. If ever a painter understood the con
clusions that escape this author it was Ingres. We are tempted to ask if ever, even
at the time of the Crusades, there were people whose attitude towards culture was
so gross as that of the generation which, thank God, is nearing its end. One of its
worst crimes is a certain grudging recognition it accords as a last insult to Ingres.
We cannot expect a Delacroix to applaud his arch-enemy; we can understand
the aversion he inspired in artists occupied with problems of colour. Artists
have a right to be idiots ; they owe it to themselves, indeed, and Ingres himself was
no exception to this rule. He was not only a prescription, a doctrine, but a
gigantic factor, whose eclecticism was a subsidiary thing, yet who, if we take him
aright, placed his exemplars in a new and purely aesthetic aspect, that of culture.
David was the academician, too essentially different, too uncultured, to give new
life to the inheritance from the past. He accepted it without reflection, when he
did not disregard it. Raphael Mengs was a German, and took a sentimental view
of the ancients ; he was not sufficiently gifted to hand it on. Ingres said — I
think his pupil Janmot records the phrase — "II faut manger cela." His quest of
pure form in the works of the ancients has been condemned as narrow ; it was
really great. He wanted to paint arabesques, not to point a moral.

The principle of his form of expression is no longer a subject of debate.
What might have been unseasonable and absurd in others was a great achievement
in him, because he succeeded in it. It is strange that the Romanticists should
have been so enthralled by Delacroix that they could not even see the intention of
the painter of the Odalisque. Baudelaire, of course, could not guess how negli
gible his own romanticism and how indispensable Ingres' non-idealism would some
day seem to us. They are always harping on his colour. Baudelaire makes
the amazing statement that Ingres had an ambition to shine as a colourist,
that he had dreams of competing with Velazquez and Lawrence, &c.* They
depreciate him for not having accomplished what no reasonable person can suppose
him ever to have attempted. As a fact, Ingres simply tinted his planes, that
is to say, he overlaid his modelewith colour. It is possible that this colour would
be very ugly if applied elsewhere ; I have not the courage to assert that it was not
the right thing, used as he used it. Ingres once made the very profound remark
that a great artist can always get the colour that suits his drawing. Perhaps some
day his will be extolled to the skies. As to his painting, on the other hand, there
are no longer two opinions. The Madame Granger of the Centennial Exhibition,
in which the painter Granger collaborated, is an immortal work, and no great
imaginative effort was required in 1900, to find the way from this to Courbet
or to the Sortie de Eal of Bazille, Manet's comrade and pupil. Considerations of
this sort, though from my point of view they touch but a small part of Ingres*
activity, show how far modern French artists are justified in acclaiming him as
the father of Naturalism. f

* Baudelaire's Salon of 1846, in his " Curiosites Esth£tiques."

t Roger Marx sees in him " un realiste impenitent inexorable, le fondateur officiel du naturalisme,"
agreeing here with Baudelaire. It is obvious that appreciation of Ingres is vitiated by the French
racial instinct. Or at least, such opinions, which are in direct contradiction, again, to those of
Montrosier, are only to be explained if we say that the convention, which enabled Ingres to express
himself to perfection, is so natural to the French, that they lose sight of the immensely specific tendency
it induced in him. If there is any comprehensible meaning at all in the term Naturalism, it can only

\ :!!*

INGRES: DRAWING OF A LADY

INGRES

As a fact, his importance is hardly to be overlooked even in the present.
Puvis is dead, Degas an old man ; but the medicine offered by the same hand to
these two widely different temperaments is not yet exhausted. The right stomach
is necessary if it is to work beneficially ; a constitution that, answering at once to
treatment, reacts and gives health to the body. The simile applies perfectly to
the doctrine of Ingres. Classicism became a poison everywhere where vigour
was lacking, in Germany at the beginning of the last century, in England in our
own times. Even here, however, it worked beneficently in so far as it cleared the
way, and made room for other things.

be used as an antithesis to inherited rule, and must refer to the unbridled play of instincts, alwayi
superaddcd by Ingres to an accepted formula. Man's pronouncement is the more remarkable, in thtt
he rightly sees in Ingres' portraits a continuation of those of David. All that is erroneously said of
Ingres might be more aptly applied to David, whose sympathy with the less chastened Roman ideal of
form made him more or less a Naturalist as compared with Ingres, and who consequently excelled in his
portraits, whereas his pupil never succeeded, even in his most brilliant portraits, in eclipsing his
Odalisque and other works of the same rank. And is not the difference in the disciples of the pair a
striking proof of this contention ? No Ingres could have produced a Gros. On the one hand we have
the boisterous fugue of a gifced plebeian, on the other the lyric melody of Chassiriau.

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY DtJRER

GERMAN ART

GERMANY now made atonement for the dependence on French art that had
marked the eighteenth century. Since the time of Diirer there had been no great
painter in Germany, and even at this era of florescence the essential genius of German
art expressed itself rather in design than in painting. On the other hand, Germany
was the one country in which the Germanic tradition had remained pure, and
where the influence of the Renaissance had been almost imperceptible. The
political events of the seventeenth century, the desolation wrought by the Thirty
Years War, were not the only causes that deterred her from taking part in the
beneficent artistic consummation, the migrations, so to speak, of the artistic in
stincts of various lands, that signalised the seventeenth, and still more, the eighteenth
century. She was less impressionable than other countries. They, too, had
known the scourge of war ; we have, indeed, instances of nations who produced
their greatest painters in periods of deepest political depression. The greatest poets
of Germany sang in the darkest days of her history. If there is no parallel to this
in her art, it is because her genius is deficient in the pictorial instinct. The
German is a musician, a poet, but not a painter. This opinion may be maintained
even before the works of the most brilliant of the early German masters, when we
see these out of Germany. The Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence contains
marvellous pictures both by Italians and Germans. Durer's Adoration of the Kingi
and Cranach's Eve are classic examples of the masters, and as it happens, their
pictorial qualities reach their highest point of accomplishment in these works,
notably in the case of Diirer. (To see Cranach at his greatest, we ought perhaps
to supplement the Eve by the Nymph in the Leipzig Museum.) ' Yet, looking at
the two examples we have cited in this place, it is just their pictorial qualities that
seem the least admirable of their merits. Marvellous as is the wealth of detail in
the Diirer, exquisite as is the cool nudity of the Eve, they seem to belong to a
different art from that of the Raphaels and Titians beside them. It is as if accident
had provided their authors with the same materials for wholly different purposes,
and it seems scarcely possible that their works should have been contemporary
with Raphael's. What we admire in the one, we forget entirely before the
other. This is not due to a difference of personality, such as that which
distinguishes a Raphael from a Leonardo ; it is not the difference of nationality,
as in the case of an Antonello and a Bellini, nor the dissimilarities of period and
culture — for great as these may be, a simultaneous study not only of Italian and
Northern examples, but of the works of all possible cultures, has so accustomed
us to them that they have become hardly more than a question of costume. The
difference here is one of species, 'irreconcilable as the antithesis on which they
partly rest : that of painting and sculpture, the difference between two
arts.

German art has never freed itself from the Gothic tradition. Its deareft,
most characteristic qualities remained Gothic, even after the Gothic form had

INGRES: MADAME RIVIERE

LOUVRE, PARIS

GERMAN ART 41

disappeared ; in other words, the Germans produced their effects by outline and not
by planes. For this reason they show to great advantage in wood-engraving ; DQrer
is more especially impressive in his prints.

It is, of course, the same characteristic which originally differentiated North and
South, that which distinguishes a Francis I. by Clouet from a Francis I. by Titian.
But that the distinction should have persisted in Germany, when it has died out
in all other Northern lands, is certainly remarkable. We may even say that it
became more emphatic with time, that certain of the early German masters,
Stephan Lochner and his circle, for instance, had a stronger sense of the pictorial
than later painters of equal talents, and that in Germany we cannot trace that
development of draughtsmanship into painting which we note in Flemish and
Dutch art. There are portraits by Holbein that recall Giorgione ; but what
Clouet took from him was not his sympathy with paint. No one can hesitate
which to prefer as between Francois Clouet and Titian, though both are equally
imposing. The pictorial quality in the Francis I. in the Louvre, by Titian, is so
seductive, so much more human in its stately splendour, so much more natural in
the means by which the expression of greatness is obtained, that it not only seems
nearer to us but more important. Clouet's greatness is more a result of a great
convention ; Titian's is the overwhelming personality of the artist, which makes
the vehicle of his art a material peculiarly his own, and wholly subservient to his
purpose, a personality to whose gifted vision a medal was a sufficient source of
inspiration for this vital portrait.

The linear convention persists among the Germans ; and in its progress it
manifests qualities of design, but never of painting. Take any purely German
artist of our age, from Rethel and Schwind to Gebhardt and Thoma, Kraus and
Menzel : these are typical Germans, without a drop of foreign blood ; they are
all draughtsmen. So, too, was the only German artist of the eighteenth century,
Chodowiecki. If we judge them as painters we wrong them ; as painters they
seem old-fashioned ; Frenchmen and Dutchmen of the fourth rank excelled
them. The smallest pencil drawing by Menzel tells us more of the artist
than any of his oily paintings,* interesting though these may be socially and
historically, and his immortal illustrations for Kugler's history are far more
impressive than his pictures of the same subjects.

It is not surprising that this ancient Germanic tendency should have found
complete satisfaction in a Classicism of pure design, indifferent and even hostile
to colour, nor that its exponents should finally, under Carstens, have arrived at
the logical conclusion of dispensing altogether with colour. Modern criticism
has perhaps dealt somewhat perfunctorily with Carstens and his successors, just as
it has with the classic phase of Goethe and of Schiller. In the case of the poets,
is it not probable that those strong and lucid minds chose more wisely than their
descendants can judge ? It is pertinent to ask : would they have done finer work
on other lines ? As regards Mengs and Carstens we may answer such a question
unhesitatingly in the negative. Mengs did his best work in Italy, and not with his
Gallicised portraits. Carstens, Overbeck, and Cornelius again were no geniuses,
and they turned their relative gifts to the best possible account. If they had not
had a creed for their guidance they would probably have accomplished even less
than they did, and we should not have found compensation for their respectable
tedium in those happily inspired details which only highly disciplined taste could

* I except certain admirable little early pictures.
VOL. I F

42 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

have achieved. This applies in a still greater degree to Genelli, the greatest man
of this little period, whose worse caprices cannot spoil our pleasure in his admirable
drawings.

Be this as it may, Winckelmann was inspired by a sound and brilliant
instinct, of far greater importance than the very vulnerable principles he and
Goethe deduced from it, principles which also evoked a work so typical of the
German attitude to art, as Lessing's " LaokOon."

It is surely by a curious irony that the writings of the two Germans,
Winckelmann and Mengs, exercised their most fruitful influence on the artists of
France. Of course their doctrine harmonised here with an ancient racial instinct —
a consideration that was apt to be forgotten at the time of the supremacy of the
French language. It was accepted in France, not because those who assimilated it
were fit for nothing else, and had nothing to lose ; but because they possessed the
just counterpoise, and could maintain their equilibrium against the classical
onslaught. Compare David's portraits with those of Cornelius and Carstens.
France was trying the classical experiment for the second time. Poussin had
been in Rome two hundred years before. A purely pictorial school had arisen in
France between the two phases, and though David and Ingres abjured this in their
polemics, they were not able to throw it off entirely in practice. The radical
difference in the reaction that took place against Classicism in France and Germany
is highly characteristic. France had her Gericault and her Delacroix, Germany the
" Nazarenes," again a school of draughtsmen, who superposed on the classical line
another which was partly a watery Pre-Raphaelism, partly a sentimental early
German revival, wholly inadequate for the fresco-painting to which the megalo
mania of Cornelius attempted to apply it. The Munich frescoes are perhaps the
sorriest phenomenon of impotence in existence ; lower than this it would be
impossible to sink.

Rethel and Schwind were the only strong personalities that rose among the
vapid sentimentalities of DOsseldorf and Munich. Schwind gave vigour to
the German note of Steinle and Fuhrich. He, again, was a Gothic master,
tenderer, softer, more lyrical than his prototypes. He might be called the German
Fra Angelico, but he did not play the same part in painting as the Italian. He
revived that ancient German strain, the most original manifestation of the German
spirit, the Volkslied, giving it artistic expression no less sincere than the limpid
fervour of Walther von der Vogelweide. He wrote his pictures, as if they had
been poems ; we feel as if we were turning over the pages of some beautiful book
as we look at his works. Ludwig Richter brought this book into the cosy
atmosphere of homely German living rooms. Is there any one in these days with
the courage — or the pen ! — to write such artless things ?

Germany made up in the nineteenth century for what she had missed in
the seventeenth — the assimilation of Italian and other ideals. To this tardy
development is due her retention of some fragments of the ancient German
tradition. This distinguishes Germany from France and England. Neither of
these has an original art, though they have original painters. What we describe
as French or English now is as definite to us as the difference between black and
white ; but each of these conceptions appears upon analysis extremely complicated.
Dividing them into their component parts, we can recognise every element, but we
find nothing of early French or early English, directly we get away from what is
purely superficial and ethnographical — types of faces and so on — and consider the

INGRES: LA GRANDE ODALISQUE

LOUVRE, PARIS

GERMAN ART 43

form of expression. Roughly speaking they are both, and more especially the
French, a continuation of the amalgamated painting of Italians, Flemings, Dutch
men, and that great master, Holbein. There are pictures by French Primitives,
in the Louvre, notably the superb Martyrdom of St. Denis ascribed to Jean Malouel,
so strikingly akin to the Italians of the time of Fra Angelico in colour, if not
altogether in composition, that we should not be surprised some day to find them
recognised as Italian works. It is only the black-bearded executioner in the so-
called Malouel who betrays the hand of the Northener. Fouquet was the first
great Frenchman, and though we may wax enthusiastic over the wonderful picture
lately acquired by the Berlin Museum, and the magnificent Charles VII. in the
Louvre, Fouquet was obviously a continuation of Van Eyck. Nicolas Froment is
a pure Fleming, and the coarsest of them all. Clouet grew up near Holbein,
Poussin journeyed to Rome, Watteau came from Venice, Delacroix from Rubens ;
the landscape painters of 1830 brought the Dutchmen to France, Manet the
Spaniards, Degas the Japanese . . . And in spite of all this, how unreasonable
should we be not to see one and the same painting in this history, one body, the
multitudinous portions of which only serve to make it invincible !

The Germans have no German painting, but they have still an original art. It
is true that the actual German ideal seems hardly a new acquisition, fond as we are
of describing it as such, but rather an ancient much-prized piece of furniture, which
lay forgotten in the attic, while the enemy was plundering the house, until, when
the time came to set everything in order again, the worthy housewife, Nationality,
brought it triumphantly forth. Unhappily, clean and polish it as we will, it does
not suit our new house. The two hundred years or so that it lay in the loft
cannot be rubbed away. Now French painting, though somewhat younger, is still
old enough. Why then is there no suggestion of the lumber-room in its tradition ?
Why is French art always modern, German art always old-fashioned ?

Because France received the necessary new blood by pairing at the right time,
when she was fresh and vigorous, and fusion by means of simple natural instincts
was possible, whereas Germany remained too long unmated.

Fruitful intercourse began for her in the nineteenth century, for Frederick the
Great's French acquisitions remained mere foreign imports during his life, benefi
cent as they proved afterwards to Pesne's circle and Tassaert's pupils, almost
against their will. In the nineteenth century, however, this intercourse was not a
leavening of the whole mass, as it had been in other lands, but the contact of
individuals, and that is why the great Germans stand so high. Germany had no
popular requirements to impose upon them ; thrown entirely upon their own
resources, they perfected what their forefathers had forgotten, and this they did
with individual, and not with national power.

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY DURER

ENGLAND'S CONTRIBUTION

HOGARTH

ENGLAND had amateurs before she possessed an art. Henry VIII. was Holbein's
best customer. Charles I.'s advisers bought the finest works of the Italians,
Flemings, and Dutchmen. From the time of Van Dyck, the great and little
masters of the seventeenth century had a second home on the Thames. If a taste
for the arts had been the determining factor, we might well wonder with Macaulay
why, at the end of Charles I I.'s reign, England had no native artist whose name
deserved remembrance. But this very wonder touches a portion of the problem
presented by the history of art in the island kingdom. For as a fact this poverty
was by no means astonishing, and the present state of things in England is a conse
quence of those same causes which Macaulay overlooked. The start was momentous.
All art is to some extent illustration, especially all youthful art. It should be
so, just as the first stories that delight a child should be fairy tales. But English
art ^as not. It did not spring from the nation, but came from without. It
matters little that its first products were imports, for the same thing happened in
other lands. But it was the demand and not only the supply that was an importa
tion. The English tried to graft before they had a stock. If German art resisted
inoculation overmuch, English art went to the opposite extreme. The faults of
German art were errors of development, the results of a violent interruption in
middle age. It had a happy nursery. English art had none. Lacking youth, it
lacked also enthusiasm, confident self-surrender to a great cause, the earnest purpose
which nerves the powers, gives self-sacrificing earnestness to individualism to help
it on its way, and rears, not egotists, but heroes. Every art requires concrete ideals
at the beginning, a body that even the poor can grasp and understand, in order to
rise to spiritual heights above all material aims. It was only the essays of
primitive times in the simplest variations which gave the period of fruition power
to materialise the abstractions of its ideal, and to create an art which still points out
the path to the future. All the elements of a nation must contribute to successful
natural selection. Although in our own times progress inevitably leads to an
aristocracy which sells the enjoyment of our highest good at a steadily increasing
price, the beginning was always purely democratic, and the remembrance of this
past, the knowledge that things were not thus brought about in purely arbitrary
fashion, comforts us in the contemplation of our multiple refinements. England's
dawning art was not the usual necessary utterance of the race. Not national but
plutocratic instincts stood round its cradle. It began with a commercial com
modity, the stereotyped portrait. Having so much, rich people wished to have
pictures too.

This origin deprived English painting of the power to speak to the hearts of
men. From the first it was by nature what it has now become of necessity : luxury,

46 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

and from this it took its character. To this it has remained faithful to the present
day, and this distinguishes it from all other national arts. Luxury does not rob
the others of their loftiest heritage, the function of stimulating the noblest impulses
of the nation, and of asserting themselves against its baser instincts, of remaining
a language to the evolution of which the best contribute, even if the people, having
learnt fresh combinations in the course of ages, no longer listen to it. But the art
of England at the beginning of the eighteenth century was not only non-lingual,
but anti-lingual. It veiled the thing to be expressed, the natural impulse, and
offered paint to its customers. Instead of painting faces, it rouged them, dwelt
upon costume and social convention, represented people as they wished to be
reflected in the mirror of fashionable esteem, and was fashion rather than art.

Two great men were ashamed of this tendency, and attempted to give a more
virile tone to their native art. The greater of these was Hogarth. He retrieved
what the others had missed, began to speak to his people by its means, was an
illustrator. He did not tell his story in conspicuous frescoes ; the age had become
too parsimonious for such outlay. We shall see that he nevertheless showed the
distinctive characteristics of the great beginners of national artistic manifestations,
without belying the century in which he lived or the task of the great personalities
of our modern world. Only one of his successors showed a mental vigour equal
to his — Constable. These rare spirits tower high above their compatriots, and
their very greatness prevented them from giving a rich blessing to their land.
They had their origin in opposition to the motive forces of English art-life, and
threw back to the elementary, innate peculiarities of the race : they were English
men before they became artists, men strong and wise before, urged by the necessity
of expressing themselves according to their temperament, they chose their craft ;
they had something to say before they had mastered their language. Hence they
were hardly understood in their native land as they deserved to be. But what
their fatherland lost, preferring the idols of the day, has been the gain of all
Europe. Just these men, who were Englishmen, who meant to speak only to
their own people, who are inconceivable in any other land, have found comprehen
sion for their best among foreigners, and borne their richest fruit on alien soil.

It is significant that Hogarth began at once with a reaction. His art was, and
had of necessity to be, a negation of all his countrymen had hitherto produced.
This was his tragedy, for this negation determined the sterile relation of his unique
fecundity to England. We need not ask how far he suffered under it. Tragedy
in the history of art does not depend on the fate of individuals. It is an established
tact that the negative beginning of his art gave a false direction to the relation of
his countrymen to him from the very outset.

The peculiar development of English culture, which, protected by the position
of the country, passed into modern materialism more rapidly than that of any other
nation, caused a premature expression of problems in art as in other domains. In
all progress there is a simultaneous working of analytical and synthetical elements.
Every great artist is at once affirmation and denial. The sound economy of national
development depends on the adjustment of these conflicting tendencies, so that no
stronger negation may be expected from the people than it can bear at a given
moment, in order to obtain positive advantage from the expression of genius.
Hogarth denied at a stage of development when what the nation needed above all
was a positive element. His mockery was directed against a latent national possession,
attested by his own art, but the sting came too soon to be recognised as a stimulating

HOGARTH: PF.G WOFFINGTON

SIR EDWARD TKNNANT'S COl.LKCTION

HOGARTH 47

synthesis. His first achievement, the caricature of William Kent, which dethroned
the bugbear of English society, tickled the risible muscles of his countrymen, and
this was its only result. Nevertheless, it had a very strong effect, if we may judge
by the episodes retailed by contemporaries. Some feared him, and others took a
malicious pleasure in his satire. He was looked upon as at least an amusing author.
Charles Lamb's dictum, that Hogarth was his favourite reading after Shakespeare,
marked the highest degree ot appreciation vouchsafed him. It was at once a doubtful
tribute to Shakespeare and a depreciation of Hogarth. No one recognised the
new world of form in this jester, the enthusiastic affirmation which expressed itself
with all the forces of the noblest optimism, and to which negation served merely as
the outward husk ; it was not, indeed, possible for any one to recognise it. For
such recognition would have implied a culture for which Hogarth himself supplied
the first elements. It would be unjust to wonder that he was misjudged. It
is certain that Hogarth could only deal as he did with the sting that had been
transformed into a paint-brush, and just as certain that his contemporaries could
only offer him a sympathy rooted in error, to which all influence on aesthetic
culture was denied. Walpole would have been as great a genius as Hogarth him
self, could he have appreciated Hogarth better than he did, and even in such a case
his isolated testimony would have had no result. The sphere to which a man's wit
reveals itself is removed by many strata from that other in which beauty of form is
understood. Even a cultivated race like the French could not do justice to Daumier
a century later for the same reason, although Daumier only veiled the national
affinity to the antique spirit in the most superficial manner. Recognition of some
easily apprehended quality suffices to obscure nobler traits in the consciousness of
the people. How much the more certain was this to be the case with a nation
whose instinct for artistic things had barely been awakened !

Hogarth himself was hardly conscious of his own importance at first. His
inexorable laughter alone seems to have inspired him. He had a pleasure in horrible
situations which would remind us of Goya, were he not devoid of any kind of
mysticism, a typical carnivorous Englishman, direct, exact, the true son of his
native land. He laughed like an Englishman ; he had the characteristic cruelty of
English comedy, which still strikes us as a strange world when we see it displayed
in the circus by grotesque clowns beating each other black and blue. That which
makes the effect is the naturalness, the logical quality in the nonsense of exaggera
tion, the style in the extravagance. This style does not concern itself with compli
cations. It is as evident in the laconic structure of English colloquy as in the
dry abruptness with which John Bull gets his own way everywhere. The cabman
on the high perch of his hansom commands it no less than the peer in the Upper
House. It is a style which impresses by something in it that is self-evident and
absolutely non-academic. We should call it barbaric, were it not so logical and
so natural.

Hogarth's pictures look like primitive art at a first glance. His early engravings
in particular have a thoroughly popular character. The episode is well to the fore.
The only recognisable intention is the determination to show everything that
happened at the given moment on the given spot. And what a multitude of things
are happening ! There is no corner in which we shall not find the contents of some
milk-pail splashing over a courtier's brocade, some drunken soldier fondling a
wench, something shattered or destroyed. Everything is absolutely credible,
in spite of — nay, indeed, because of — the impossible piling one upon another of

48 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

every imaginable scene. We do not at once know how far the presentment
is art, because at the moment we have not all the data for comparison by
which to check our impression ; but one thing is evident, that we are dealing
with realities. We have the same sensation here as before Callot's engravings
or the elder Breughel's snow-scenes. No one thinks of taking these painted
stories for history, and no one doubts their actuality. These things seem to
us more true than probable, and pass unchallenged, although if written or
described, the same events would provoke a smile at the artlessness of the state
ment. This comes from the fact that these incidents were composed for their own
sakes, and not with an eye to the spectator. The actors in them are taking their
pleasure, beating, deceiving, and murdering each other for their own satisfaction.
No glance ever strays across the footlights to the audience. This is carried
so far as to make some of the episodes incomprehensible. We cannot unravel
the meaning of certain details in the mummeries of The Fair, or understand
quite what is happening in the March to Finchley or the Four Times of the Day. It
is difficult to connect the various sections of the great series in the National Gallery
and the Soane Museum. There was no lack of commentators in the eighteenth
century, and among these the Germans were of course prominent.* The result
could but be negative. The value lies in the very things that elude the com
mentator, that escape an analysis of the historical, the humorous, and the satirical
elements. Only a very ingenuous mind will suppose that the incidents in Hogarth's
pictures were really transcribed, that people displayed their passions with so little
reticence, and showed such a lack of restraint under all circumstances. Hogarth
did not witness the dramas he depicted. But he grasped the dramatic possibilities
of his age in a manner that makes him comparable to Shakespeare, if we set aside the
usual significance of the drama, to which Shakespeare gave such a noble interpretation,
and turn our thoughts away from that which poetry contributes to the structure of
the piece upon the boards, from the specific character of the genre. Shakespeare
heard what the people about him were saying, and pondered their speech. And he
created his immortal plays because he was able to weld everything he absorbed
into an organic whole, because the amalgam was just as strong as the power with
which he grasped what the outside world had to offer him. Hogarth had an
intense perception of the typical movements of his characters under the stress of
emotion ; like Daumier after him, he grasped their fashion of laughing and crying,
and brought them into a relation which harmonises with the peculiarity of the parts
in a marvellous fashion. We might almost imagine that the artist saw all the
details that fascinated him distorted, with jagged broken organs, pressing forward
to unite with others, in order that so they might produce a reasonable result, the
only thing that seems reality to the artist, form. We care little what story
Shakespeare treats, whether he deals with a Brutus, an Othello, or a Falstaff, for

* See Lichtenberg's famous " Ausfuhrliche Erklarung der Hogarthschen Kupferstiche " (Gottingen
1794). The whole of the literature dealing with Hogarth down to our own times is a cheap
recapitulation of his wit. His contemporaries are mainly concerned for the morality of their hero,
John Trusler, for instance, in "The Works of Mr. Hogarth Moralized" (London, 1768), and Rouquet
in the over-rated letters in which he sententiously observes : " N'allez pourtant pas vous imaginer qu'il
y ait quelquechose d'obscene, selon les mceurs Angloises, dans les tableaux de Monsieur Hogarth "
(Lettres de Monsieur . . . a un de ses amis a Paris pour lui expliquer les estampes de Monsieur
Hogarth (London, 1746). Even the biographers of our day have made Hogarth's moral their text.
Armstrong and Dobson were the first to attempt an appreciation of the artist in their important volume
(Heinemann, London, 1902).

HOGARTH 49

he remains the same concentrated Englishman, whether he applies his poetry to
Roman or to Venetian legend. Neither are we greatly concerned whether tears
or smiles predominate in the drama, for we recognise these more general conceptions
as the instruments of higher powers, and hence the question as to whether the drama
agrees with the traditional event loses its importance for us. Things had to be as
the poet has made them. History is false if it teaches us otherwise, or rather, it
teaches other things, not those with which he dealt. Thus Hogarth — in a humbler,
less perfectly abstract manner — carries conviction by the amalgam which unites
his particles. The isolated local significance does not give the sense. The amalgam
is just as much a result of the methods of formative art, just as visible, that is to
say, as Shakespeare's marvellous power in suiting everything to the organs with
which we are best able to absorb his gift. In the one case the power of words rises
to abnormal heights, in the other the play of lines and planes and colour. It is not
their wit or their situations which make Shakespeare and Hogarth comparable ;
the elements in these which seem alike are as different as possible ; it is their
common faculty for making their occurrences live before our eyes. They achieved
this in different ways. The resemblance springs from a distant affinity in creative
impulse, due to the fact that they belonged to the same country. Like Shakes
peare, Hogarth required the incentive he gained from the opposition of his own
personality to the activities of his contemporaries, and it is obvious that his
passion could not have found expression in still-life. His anecdotes, unessential as
they are to the immortal quality of his art, are as inalienably a part of him as are
" Hamlet," " Macbeth," and the historical plays a part of Shakespeare. But
wher. we speak thus, we do not look upon the anecdotes as objective, as the
material circumstances which stimulated the creation, but we see them as parts of
the creator, and make use of them as necessary symbols for certain portions of his
nature. We mean Shakespeare when we talk of " Macbeth," and we mean
Hogarth to a certain extent when we mention Southwark Fair. The fact that this
process is much easier in the case of Shakespeare, that we feel we possess immeasurably
more of him than the stories he actually left us, and that the abstraction he accom
plished was far greater than that of Hogarth, places the poet far above the painter.
Shakespeare has shown himself in a hundred gradations, whereas, compared with him,
Hogarth was content with a narrow scale.

Hence, the incomprehensibility of certain of Hogarth's works, notably the
engravings, which preserve the reproductive character of all the prints of the day,
does not in the least diminish our enjoyment. We do not understand the details
of the episodes, but we grasp the general intention better than the artist's con
temporaries, who got no further than the allusions. Not in these, for which
his contemporaries had ten, and we have a hundred, interpretations ready, does
the intangible dramatic quality lie, but in the combination of emotions, the
eloquent gestures accompanying a varying dance. The strophe about the mystical
dance in Milton's " Paradise Lost," which Hogarth quotes in his " Analysis of
Beauty," might stand as the motto of his own art :

Mystical dance !
Mazes intricate

Mazes intricate

Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular

Then most, when most irregular they

seem.

Like every great artist, he danced his works, and his rhythm is so powerful that it
VOL. i c

5o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

helps us too over the passages which our curiosity would fain snatch from the context
and hand over to the speculations of the understanding.

The genesis of his works substantiates this basic quality of all Hogarth's art.
The drawings for his engravings in the British Museum and in the Fairfax Murray
collection, if we compare them with the ultimate prints, show that the primary pre
occupation was neither satire nor comedy, but rhythm. Only a few of these drawings
are first sketches. It is evident that Hogarth made a variety of studies before he
arrived at his final conception. There are drawings which approach the definitive
result very closely, and certainly do not represent the master's first idea, as, for
instance, Mr. Fairfax Murray's red chalk drawings for Gin Lane and Beer Street.
Even in these we note how Hogarth made the illustrative quality more pronounced
in transferring them to the copper-plate. Others reveal the comic element hardly
at all, or only in slight indications. The drastic quality lurks, inarticulate as yet,
in the play of dancing lines. In the drawing for the eleventh plate of the cycle
Industry and Idleness, nearly the whole of the sketches for which are in the British
Museum — a collection that adds amazingly to our sum of knowledge of the master
— the seething multitude in the public square, with its innumerable heads, dominates
the more intimate significance of the plate. The sketch for the shop scene in the
same series, which was never carried out on the copper, does not as yet indicate
whether the sentiment of this scene was to be grave or gay, but it divides the masses
with irresistible clarity, and gives the lines an expressive force that recalls Rembrandt.
The manner in which the broadly washed planes flow about the structure of lines
again suggests Daumier. Other sheets of the same series are pure dix-huitieme
siecle. The spectator's eye participates in the quivering movement of the microscopic
curves, and communicates only a beneficent vibration of forms to the mind. In the
Banquet — the drawing for the eighth plate — a child seems to have held the pen.
Everything sways, even the lines of the architecture. Slightly modified, the outline
of the seated figures might represent the wooded background of a drawing by Both.
The renunciation of detail might almost be described as playful in its arbitrariness.
But all this child-like element is really sincerity and genius. The ensemble is
ensured in an incomprehensible fashion. There is no insistence on the psychological
significance of any particular group ; the theme is the room with the long table of
diners, whose animal function is expressed by a saltatory line. It seems almost as
if satire, which is wont to find its objective in human figures, had here made the
room alone the butt, giving it the semblance of some rococo face, full of lines and
furrows. When we have once grasped this, we shall recognise this same physiognomy
in all Hogarth's interiors, even in those where the single faces seek to engage our
whole attention.

And further, we shall see in these drawings a fact confirmed by the pictures, and
obvious to every one who has studied the artist's work thoroughly, that Hogarth
did not keep closely to Nature, and was by no means intent on the direct reflection
of the material world. I do not feel at all assured that Muther was right in asserting*
that he was in the habit of sketching from the life in gaming-hells, brothels, and
dram-shops. I know no drawing of which this might safely be predicated. It
is, of course, evident that he did not paint these haunts and their inmates from
fancy, and that, like the author of "Moll Flanders," he had an extensive personal
knowledge of them. But he did not copy them. 1 am inclined to think that these
places and their customs were not very repulsive to him ; it would perhaps not be

* " Geschichte der englischen Malerei " (S. Fischer, 1903).

HOGARTH 51

too much to say that he was at his ease in them, in so far as the morality of this
moralist allowed him to be. Hence he had no need to copy them. He had
the instinct for these centres which no copying, had it been practised for a hundred
years, could have replaced. And what was better still, he had universal instincts,
not only for this shady side of life, but for every life ; he had the remarkable
faculty for expression which creates plastic forms out of what to ordinary mortals
becomes more or less conscious experience.

The biographical notices of Hogarth moreover give us some very definite indica
tions of his relations to Nature. We learn that he worked almost exclusively from
memory. He found, he tells us, " that he who could by any means acquire and
retain in his memory perfect ideas of the subjects he meant to draw, would have
as clear a knowledge of the figure as a man who can write freely hath of the
twenty-four letters of the alphabet and their infinite combinations (each of these
being composed of lines), and would consequently be an accurate designer. I
therefore endeavoured to habituate myself to the exercise of a sort of technical
memory, and by repeating in my own mind the parts of which objects were com
posed, I could by degrees combine and put them down with my pencil. Thus
with all the drawbacks which resulted from the circumstances I have mentioned, I
had one material advantage over my competitors, viz., the early habit I thus
acquired of retaining in my mind's eye, without coldly copying it on the spot,
whatever I intended to imitate. Sometimes, but too seldom, I took the life for
correcting the parts I had not perfectly enough remembered and then I transferred
them to my compositions."

The biographers confirm this account of his methods, which the whole character
of his art bears out. It contains in itself the master's protest against the pitiful
helplessness of his compatriots. An imitativeness devoid of any sort of earnest
purpose had found no antidote in the dull reproduction of Nature. Hogarth
sought in his calling above all things a means of measuring himself against the
world, and in his situation could only do this through a vigorous synthesis. He
was of the kind, if not of the stock of Rubens.

His rhythm has many affinities with that of the Fleming. A century and the
difference of race divide them. Hogarth has nothing of the royal manner of
Marie de' Medici's painter. He was a bourgeois to the core in a bourgeois land,
and lived in an age which was endeavouring to supersede the rhetoric of the
seventeenth century. Quantitatively, therefore, he bears the same relation to
Rubens as the contemporary Frenchmen. But his manner was more closely akin
to that of the master. Something of the peasants in the Louvre Kermesse, of
that very individual Rubens, lives in his scenes — reduced, of course, and seen
through the temperament of the eighteenth century. We are conscious of the
decorative rococo element even here, in spite of many a coarse detail. But his
decorative gift is less fluid than that of the Frenchmen, and this gives him advantages
greater than the countervailing disadvantages. His tougher manner, biting into
us as with barbed hooks, makes the deeper impression, whereas we enjoy the
pictures of the Watteau school like ripe fruits, melting in the mouth. He never
quite loses the obstinacy of the self-taught artist, he seldom shows himself a
virtuoso — when he does so it is to a degree almost unimaginable in an Englishman
— and never goes without a remainder into the familiar rhythm of the age. He has
a movement peculiar to himself — the dix-huitieme siecle expressed in masculine
terms. No Frenchman of the period painted a grotesque ; the " heure du berger "

52 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

could not endure harsh contrasts. Beside Hogarth, the Frenchmen seem to have
played always upon one string, leaving the rest of the instrument mute. Hogarth
is a larger world, more objective, its outlook more from above. His laughter does
not excite our responsive laughter, like the quirks of the jesters. He grasps more,
because he feels more strongly, although at the first blush his emotion may seem to
us only stronger hate. No Chardin or Fragonard could have painted certain things
in his pictures more sweetly than he has done. But these are always tone among
other tones, and the harsh shade beside them gives a richer variety. We always
feel something of the freshness of a beginning, whereas there is a presage of the end
in the sweetness of the alcove-painters.

This is true also in a wider sense. The analysis of art-history brings out many
ingredients which seem to present the sharpest contrasts to our perception.
Hogarth forces memory to jump from his contemporaries to such remote spirits as
Breughel. He is akin to all the grotesque painters. Even during his lifetime his
indebtedness to Jan Steen, Teniers, and Ostade, to say nothing of Callot, was
recognised. But Breughel is the salt in Hogarth, a constituent which could not be
replaced by a second name like the rest. Looking at the drunken woman on the
stairs, dropping her child over the balustrade, in Gin Lane, we are reminded of
Breughel's Blind Men and similar things. Details in A Medley, the scene in the
church, might have been taken from a Witches' Sabbath by Breughel or Bosch.
Such pages are to be found in all Hogarth's phases. Gin Lane was executed in
1751, A Medley ten years later, and even when the external resemblance vanishes
we seem to recognise something of the fantastic Fleming's daring style in the whole
manner of thought. And yet I do not know if Hogarth really knew Breughel.
The affinity — if it can so be called — has no trace of archaism ; the emotion fills the
form to the very brim. It is quite possible that here we have merely similar con
ditions leading to similar results. In any case, this primitive basis is indispensable
in the work. It gave the painter his firmness of structure, and prevented the
satirist from losing himself in the non-plastic.

Satire was, indeed, positively an advantage to his art. It apparently repressed his
artistic intentions only to distribute them the more happily in reality. When we
first glance at his interiors we see only the scene. It entices us to find out what is
going on there. But directly we get nearer the art takes us captive, and we scarcely
note that our original curiosity is being led by the nose. The art manifests itself
primarily as an astonishing suggestion of space. It is less in degree in the two
earliest cycles, A Harlot's Progress and The Rakes Progress, the first of which is only
complete in the engravings. The moral tale predominates here, the scene is more
important than the room. In the little cabinet of the Soane Museum we can
easily see how the painter's genius expanded, how it became more universal, more
pictorial, in its progress from these pictures to the late Election series. On the other
hand, there is a certain uncanny power in the details of the earlier works. The
gesture not only speaks, but acts. In the sixth part of The Rake's Progress, the
scene in the gaming-house, the furious gesture of the ruined spendthrift breaks
through the colourless darkness like a magical light. The picture, like many of
the others, has darkened very much, and was barbarically painted from the begin
ning. But it still affects us like a glimpse into half-fallen ruins, where details
preserved by chance urge our thoughts to reconstruction. Slight as the indications
are, they nevertheless give the self-absorption of each group with grim precision,
their indifference to the fate of the prodigal, whose scream penetrates to us like the

HOGARTH 53

echo of unseen forces. The primitive detail — primitive not intentionally, but
because of the unity of the conception — adds to the effect here, as it so often does in
Hogarth's works. The series reveals, further, much more tender gifts. The first
picture, in which the young spendthrift makes his arrangements for the rosy future,
foreshadows all the artist's future palette. The orange-brown coat of the tailor and
his red cap nestle against the silvery grey and blue of the hero's open waistcoat.
The blue is worked out in the spotted dress of the old woman, the strongest figure
in the composition, and the young one, the " bed-maker's daughter," completes
the harmony with her tender pink and yellow and her rich white. This bouquet
of colour stands out brilliantly against the Velazquez-like brown of the walls.
Hogarth's solicitude for the structure of his rooms can only be compared with that
of the best Dutch painters of interiors.

Before such pictures we need a little patience. If we hurry past them, as is our
wont in modern exhibitions, we might really note nothing but a painter of anecdotes.
But if we linger for a few minutes a remarkable transformation takes place ; the
anecdote disappears behind the actual vehicles of charm. This is noticeable in all
Hogarth's pictures. Only the consummate painting has survived of the biting
satire Calais Gate, in the National Gallery, by which Hogarth took his revenge
for his undeserved arrest in the year 1 748, when he wished to go to France. We
no longer know exactly what the huge joint of roast beef in the arms of the bony
servitor means, but we are delighted by the textures of the meat and of the white
cloths, and the juxtaposition of these details and the famished faces of the watch
does not convey to us only the vague indication of the allusion, but a very definite
impression of the flickering fantasy of the scene. Thus the story is not concentrated
as the literary painter would concentrate it, but is generalised in a manner worthy
of an artist. All that remains to suggest the origin of the picture is the figure of
the painter in the background sketching the gate — an allusion to the cause of his
arrest.

The consummate colour in the above-mentioned scene of The Rakes Progress,
is not common to the whole series. Hogarth fulfilled the promise there given
ten years later in the National Gallery masterpiece, the six-act cycle called
Marriage a la Mode. The progress lies in the development of the palette and
the elimination of all impertinent detail. If we include the first series, A Harlot's
Progress, in the comparison, we are conscious of following the evolution of a primi
tive into a master of the most varied effects in a still higher degree. The expansion
of the space that has taken place in the second of the Progresses is very considerable.
The reduction of the strapping figures, which do not stand in any very convincing
relation to their surroundings in the first series, gives a more rhythmic effect to
the second. In the third, maturity of colour is added to the rest. This belongs
solely to the painter, whereas the first two still betray Hogarth's beginnings as an
engraver. The Marriage a la Mode dates from the painter's most prolific period,
the time of his own portrait with the dog and the portrait of his sister, and shows
the maximum of pictorial charm imaginable in this genre. We feel as if we were
contemplating a diminutive fresco, so naturally is the vibration within the one
frame carried on into the next, affecting us as the portion of a many-limbed whole,
in which the development of the somewhat trivial story of a coquettish woman
and a frivolous viveur plays no very important part. In spite of Hogarth's
assertion that France did not possess any good colourist — the assertion which
goaded Diderot to such a comical outbreak of wrath in his "Salon" of 1765 — we

54 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

can only suggest the charm of these pictures by means of a French name, the same
which Diderot exploited against Webb and Hogarth — Chardin. Not to compare
the value of the one with that of the other. That which was the chief attraction
of the quiet painter of the Eenedidte was ill suited to the English dramatist, and
what the latter possessed he owed not to Chardin, even though Chardin, as Diderot
justly says, had earned the title of a great colourist long before Hogarth. We
might call the six pictures of Marriage a la Mode dramatised episodes out of
the same world which suggested the lyrics of Diderot's meditative friend. Chardin
seems the freer of the two. His greater culture ensures his greater indifference to
the fashionable standard. In these scenes, as a whole Hogarth is almost more
dix-huitieme siecle than the Frenchman. The rhythm which whispers faintly
in La Pourvoyeuse, still sounds over-loudly in comparison in the tenderest pictures
of the Englishman ; but, on the other hand, it has a luxuriance which overflows the
narrow confines of the frame. The difference increases on closer comparison.
All is straight and simple with Chardin ; he loves vertical lines, everything that
gives the quietest movement to his veil of colour. In the documents of the
author of " The Analysis of Beauty " the curve predominates. Everything is
arched, and the colour is made up of winding chains. It is only in their total
results that the palettes resemble each other from a distance, just as certain figures
in the pictures of the two artists resemble each other, because they bear the same
proportion to the rooms in which they are set. The genesis, however, is perfectly
distinct. The interiors themselves have nothing in common, and the persons who
inhabit them have perfectly different souls. In the one case they are animated,
mercurial temperaments, in the other calm, contemplative figures. Chardin
builds up the skeleton of his pictures with clear, well-organised colour-contrasts,
and the flesh consists of vaporous veils drawn over the whole ; the airy fabric is
woven of microscopic diamond-splinters. Hogarth dresses his little figures as
Rubens attires his Popes, and produces correlation by the accumulation of all kinds
of materials. The singing fop in the toilette scene of Marriage a la Mode is
royally arrayed. Such a minute detail as the trimming on the olive-grey sleeve,
in which orange is interwoven with gleaming red and blue, seems — I know not
how — to be taken from the vestments of the St. Lievin at Brussels, or some
kindred example of Rubensesque splendour. The Countess has always a particular
cachet. For the hair-dressing she wears a grayish pink skirt, partly concealed
by the rich folds of an orange dressing-gown. An exquisite corset, gray with
blue bows, supports her rounded bust, and over it falls the white toilette jacket,
with its gray shadows. The mise-en-scene is made up of the thousand important
nothings which furnish the existence of triflers. And yet these puppets Jive !
This is the amazing part of it all — a life among powder-boxes ! The Countess is
no clothes-peg. Her face has the seductive animal freshness of the little lady
who makes good use of her time. The granulated pink-and-white complexion,
set off by the glossy brown hair, reveals energy in the pursuit of pleasure — a
diabolical nervous energy. Even in the second picture, Shortly after Marriage,
where her ladyship seems very cheerful beside the future cuckold, we divine that
her activities will not confine themselves to details of dress, and we feel — I
blush to acknowledge it — a guilty sympathy with her sweet audacity. Such a
comprehensive individualisation of the eternal feminine on a small scale was
undreamt of by Chardin. Guys was the first to give a similar impression.

It is easy to understand that an artist capable of thus extending the traditional

HOGARTH 55

idea of beauty by virtue of his vital conceptions of the present had small respect for
the pictorial wares of his contemporaries, and that once, in jesting reference to the
exaggerated estimate ot Italian pictures, he wrote : " That grand Venus — as you
are pleased to call it — has not beauty enough for the character of an English
cook-maid."* Hogarth's unconcealed aversion from Italy is no less interesting in
the famous letter than the love of country which may be read between the lines.
This ideal attitude towards his native land, manifested on every possible occasion,
seems scarcely compatible with the mocking spirit that feared neither God nor man ;
yet it was not only the moral basis of the man, but the essential condition of his art.
How these two characteristics harmonised without forcing the artist to compromise
with the man is the key to Hogarth's psychology and to a true appreciation of
his greatness — above all, of his art. For the fact that in his pictures mockery
decked itself in beautiful colour and chose agreeable forms does not sufficiently
explain the phenomenon. The logic of this combination remains to be
discovered.

Hogarth's scenes are the utterances of a satirist who won monumental forms
from the things he lashed. We have already noted the introspective attitude of
the actors on his stage, the author's objective rendering. But this is not in itself
the stylistic force of the pictures. It merely precludes insipidity of style,
sentimentality of process, prevents what is injurious, but is not positively pro
gressive. That Hogarth's pictures are not lampoons, but caricatures in the
sense in which caricature may be called the basis of all great works of art, is
not a result of the objectivity of analytical vision. But is this objectivity in
Hogarth really so exclusively abstract, even in its obvious extent, as it would seem
to be in a superficial formulation ? In psychological terms, was Hogarth merely
concerned to ridicule ? The solution is not to be found in the smug morality of
the zealous biographer, intent on human episodes. This is evanescent, and cannot
examine conditions that were moral or immoral a hundred and fifty years ago by
the standards of to-day. The idea that Hogarth's satire aimed at the reformation of
those he satirised, even were it well-founded, could but turn us away from the
penetrating recognition of that satire itself. We require instinctive confirmations.
If we travel with Hogarth through the scenes of the Marriage a la Mode one thing,
at any rate, seems hard to believe — that the creator of the society whose misdeeds
he exposes so mercilessly stood entirely aloof therefrom. The details of his life
which have come down to us throw no light on the point. The fact of material
relation would not give us much information, and we know, indeed, that there
can have been no question of this. But the man who called Garrick his best
friend, the companion of Pope, whose caricaturist pencil was guided even in his
youthful works by the lofty spirit which felt itself drawn to Milton, understood
first before he hated. He fulfilled the postulate afterwards formulated by his
countryman Carlyle — he saw. His perception pierced through the ludicrous
kernel of things and beheld relative force and vitality even among the contemp
tible. The zealot who considered the ethical success of the popular series of
engravings, The Four Stages of Cruelty, by which he hoped to inculcate mercy
among his countrymen, a higher thing than the proud consciousness of having
produced Raphael's cartoons, could not in his best works refrain from treating his

* In a letter said to have been written by Hogarth under the pseudonym " Britophil" to a
London newspaper in 1737. Reprinted in extenso in John Nichols' "Genuine Works of William
Hogarth, with Biographical Anecdotes" (London 1808-10).

56 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

victims with more tenderness than pedagogy demanded. He could not have
given such seductive grace to the heroine of the Marriage a la Mode,
even in the duel scene, where the wretched woman kneels in her chemise
before her wounded husband, if he himself had been quite callous to her charm.
Nor should we find such rare tones of the palette in the poor sinner's death-bed
scene if the last word had been left to the moralist here. Of course, consciously
he may have accepted the part which appears the most natural one. It brought
him the facile satisfaction of the worthy citizen who is extolled by his intimates.
But splendour remained beautiful to the painter even when it masked vice
or absurdity. The frivolity of the upper classes must have been apparent to
the healthy mind of this friend of the people in the fashion of the day, and
Hogarth lost no opportunity of speaking his mind on this point. He succeeded
best in his famous picture of the year 1742, Taste in High Life. Even here, where
the moral tendency called for no restraint, where the theme is two old fools, whose
puppet-figures could not stir any human emotion in any spectator, even here the
decisive strain of Hogarth's subconsciousness mingles with his laughter. The work
is by no means exhausted when we have recognised the comicality of the personages.
Absurd as is the effect of the hooped skirt on that aged carcase, made up merely
of paint and false hair, whose arabesqued hands belong rather to the face than to
the body, idiotic as is her partner, to whom all existence, sex included, is com
pressed into the mechanism of a mincing gait, the ludicrous aspect of this monu
mental type of fashion-mania is not maintained before the greater complexity of
sensations which it evokes, directly or indirectly, according to the degree of
culture of the spectator. For it does not only condemn, though the ridiculous
is present in every detail, even in the grotesque pictures on the walls. It
has a positive side, though not in the popular manner, not by means of cheap
personifications. We do not see " the good " side by side with " the bad," nor bring
our examination to an end with a " quod erat demonstrandum." But the good is
shown in the evil. The false grace which Hogarth condemns is counteracted by a
grace which makes use of the same persons, the same gestures, and welds all the
absurd details into a common gesture, which, because it is harmonious, lifts the
soul to higher realms, far above those of morals. A microcosm becomes monu
mental, and after the evanescent wit has had its effect we still retain the permanence
of a new form, caring nothing from what paradoxes it sprang. The movements
of the two grimacing figures make up a magnificent arabesque. The monkey, which
breaks the gigantic curve like a rosette, was not set in the foreground merely with
a satiric intention, and in the second, I had almost said the third, female figure,
even taking it as a detail, there is scarcely a breath of negation ; or, rather, the
breath that remains seems merely the spice of this piquant grace. Effeminacy was not
merely satirised here. Out of the grotesqueness is evolved a charm which could
only have been wrought by the capacity for objectivity of an artistic soul, and
finally becomes so strong that we are conscious of titillation rather than of the
scourge. Beardsley, who of all Englishmen owes most to the author of Taste in
High Life, was the first to essay this kind of objectivity again, on a much smaller
scale. Mutatis mutandis ! The sphere of the late-born illustrator of " The Rape
of the Lock" no longer required the strong difference between subject and object,
and perhaps exaggerated his affection for the objects of his laughter, just as his
predecessor had exaggerated his hatred. That which brought the two children of
such different worlds together was a common sympathy. We are told that at

HOGARTH 57

the age of twenty Hogarth began his artistic career with an engraving from the
same poem of Pope's to which Beardsley owed one of his most exquisite
fantasies.

But we must not lose ourselves in admiration of a single fruit of Hogarth's
tree, which has perhaps a somewhat excessive attraction for us of to-day ; we
must not forget that it is only one of many. The subject of the last great cycle is
a world apart from that of the earlier series. It is an electioneering campaign in
four acts, the Election series. It dates from the year 1755, ten years after the
marriage story, and twenty years after The Rake's Progress. Garrick bought it, and
rejoiced in it to the last day of his life. It is now the great treasure of the Soane
Museum, where it shares the same gloomy little cabinet which shelters The Rake's
Progress and a variety of other things, useful and superfluous. It will be generally
agreed that this cycle is the masterpiece of the versatile painter. Though it has
nothing of the brilliant fin-de-siecle pleasantry of the pictures we have just been
considering, it has retained what is best in these, the same playfully triumphant
form. But here the victory implies the curbing of an inconceivable multitude of
effects. To get a clear idea of this it would be necessary to see the pictures in a
suitable room, where it would be possible to isolate each, and to look at them from
a proper distance. To imagine the details we must recall Jan Steen's most grotesque
types and kindred things. Faces of this kind swarm, and many a one shows a
close resemblance to famous prototypes. In the first picture, for instance, Enter
tainment (the banquet to the electors), the fellow in the red jacket with the glass in
his hand at the left-hand table, whose bestial joy draws the tongue out of his throat;
or the monstrous old woman on the extreme left, who is making the spruce
candidate pay for her political opinions in kind. This robust Dutch note
does not appear for the first time in this final series. It is to be found here and
there in many earlier pictures and engravings — the Cockpit, for instance — and even
in the figure of Bambridge in the Assize picture of 1729, in the National Portrait
Gallery. Sometimes we could believe that the heads had been taken directly out of
small Dutch pictures and put into Hogarth's. But the way in which they are
introduced is the remarkable thing. It might almost be asserted that Hogarth first
found the right use for grotesque masks, which are often mere isolated monstrosities
in the small Dutch pictures, by employing them as accents in his crowds of figures.
The general effect is as unlike Jan Steen as possible ; it is rather — rococo. A
skipping rhythm, like a merry streamlet, gliding over all sorts of grotesque stones,
which lie in all possible positions beneath the surface of its clear waters; perceptible
in spite of its infinity of detail, always animated to the point of frenzy, and yet a
single harmonious surface. A year earlier, in the March to Finchley of the
Foundling Hospital, we see how Hogarth compelled repose. Without the recurrent
red of the faces and uniforms the picture would fall to pieces. The perspective
of the colours completes the arrangement, still somewhat arbitrary here. In the
Election series this effect is multiplied. The colour becomes a net of innumerable
meshes, which follows the movements of the composition, and the composition,
for all the spontaneity of the impression, is so arranged that all the individual
movements complete a main direction. In the Entertainment the brownish,
granulated gray of the walls and tables gives a firm foundation for this play, which
is necessarily much more reticent in colour than in line. Gray-blue shades pre
dominate. The heads, heated to boiling-point by gluttony, may laugh, grin, and
scream as boisterously as they will; the pervading reddish-gray tone binds them to

VOL. I H

58 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

the quiet surface and before the uniform background into an ornament for the table,
which stands like a rock in the hurly-burly of the elements. The more lively
colour-contrasts appearing here and there are divided almost mathematically. Red
appears in the background to the left in the red jacket of the lewd fellow with
the glass, in the youth with the cask of the foreground, and to the right in the
costume of the decrepit devourer of oysters ; orange to the left in the flag, in the
middle in the violoncello, to the right in the carnations of the old woman, &c.
We never remark the scheme. Each of the four pictures is a world, a mood in
itself, and yet a part of the same story. In the second act, Canvassing for Votes,
where hard cash takes the place of wine and oysters, and greed is shown in all its
stages from extreme hunger to satiety, the extraordinary energy of the central group
with the farmer is only made possible by the repose of its surroundings. On the
one side a voting paper is thrust suddenly under the farmer's nose, while on the
other the host, crimson with persuasive energy, and almost bursting, sets forth the
virtues of the rival candidate, the while the worthy man calmly pockets the chinking
arguments of each. A conception becomes plastic form forthwith. Each of the three
preserves the corporeal entity proper to him — even the spiritual elements are
corporeal here — and at the same time the limbs of all three weave themselves
into a new mass, a Laok5on in small. In the last two pictures of the series
Hogarth enhances the fantastic character of his structural art, and again, as in the
others, tones down the wildness of the composition by the mild scale of bluish-
gray, orange, and brown. The scene of The Polling^ with the swarm upon the steps,
and the concentrated variety of individual scenes, is a charming, peaceful landscape,
accompanying the uproar with gentle chords. We recognise what Wilson's friend
might have become to the English school of landscape painting. Chairing the
Member (the apotheosis) rises in my memory as a tumultuous wave of humanity.
In the many-storeyed structure, with the fat candidate's arm-chair to crown it, each
detail contributes to the rhythm, without detriment to its objective structure.
If the boldness of Rubens and his followers, destroying a cosmos to build it up
afresh, fills us with admiration, this citizen of a smaller world teaches us to
appreciate the tough endurance which raises its pyramids with small stones.

Minuteness of structure was proper to Hogarth, as was also minuteness of
material. The idea of a picture grew up in his mind from the sum of single
observations, which he was able to seize and to co-ordinate. The converse method,
to which his ambition sometimes urged him, the production of an idea independent
of his daily sum of verifiable experience, was not so successful in his hands. He
had already in his thirties attempted " what the puffers in books call the great style
of history painting," the result being the two large pictures now in St. Bartholo
mew's Hospital, which he himself disparaged in later years, and not altogether
without cause. Shortly before his fiftieth year, and between that and his sixtieth
year, he returned to the charge, goaded by the patronising criticism which persisted
in looking upon him as an outsider, and painted several large Scriptural subjects,
even producing an altar-piece in 1756.* The Moses before Pharaoh's Daughter, in
the Foundling Hospital, seems to me the most interesting of these essays. It is
certainly the happiest of the many combinations with Rembrandt attempted by the
England of the eighteenth century. We note with satisfaction in the old man to
the left of the picture the translation of a veritable Rembrandtesque Jew into a new
world, and in the Moses, with his yellowish-red carnations, a relation to the great
* A triptych for St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. Now in the Fine Arts Academy, Clifton.

HOGARTH 59

prototype, based upon an earnest comprehension of transmitted treasure. Comical as
are the dignified periods in which Reynolds, of all people, stigmatised this departure
of Hogarth's as a regrettable aberration,* even a juster optimism might deem
them no fresh titles to fame for a master who had manifested so independent
a conception of the world. But a more penetrating appreciation would find
valuable indications of his personality in these works. Even the weaknesses of
great men attest their strength. Here we will be content to note that in
Hogarth's extensive life-work these disputable productions are quite insignificant
numerically, even if we include among them the' much-debated Sigismunda, the
weakest work of his old age.

On the other hand, Hogarth has left abundant proof that his art did not require
the " ridicule of life " to manifest its greatness. His portraits are unrivalled in the
portrait-ridden art of England. Hogarth as a portrait painter forms a chapter of
himself. I have referred the weakness of English painting to the fact that it was
a form of luxury, designed, not to be a medium of expression for the artist, but to
lend a pleasing elegance to the heads of the sitters. Hogarth was free from this
vice. He is distinguished from his colleagues, not because he used other colours,
because he was more or less skilful than they, but by his different conception of his
calling. He saw in portraiture exactly what he saw in all other painting. He
would only take people who amused him as his sitters. Art was not a business to
him, but experience, the possibility of giving clear forms to the things that moved
him. Hence the most striking quality in all his portraits is their inevitability.
This inner quality is not to be replaced in any way, not because it suggests any
particularly moral or sentimental reflections to us, but because it is the vehicle of that
motive energy which alone urges the highest capacities of the artist to manifest
themselves. There is scarcely one among the portraits that was not seen with all
the painter's powers. This is at once apparent in the manner in which the people
in his pictures fill the space. The Lord Lovat, of 1746, first sits in the arm-chair
before he becomes decorative, and sits with all his sitting power. His physiognomy
lies not only in the broad, intelligent face, but in the whole body, the exuberant
fleshiness of which we divine under the folds of the coat, even in the thick
hands with the calculating fingers. Nothing betrays the fact that this man was
executed the day after Hogarth painted him. But the energetic vitality of the
sitter, who had given the Government plenty of work, is emphasised in all its
variety. Hogarth himself pronounced the Captain Coram, of 1739, in the Foundling
Hospital (with its extraordinarily expressive face, kneaded with vigorous brush
strokes, and yet soft), his best portrait, because it revealed a certain affinity with
the genre of the day, and triumphed by those methods which were common to
Hogarth and his colleagues. The judgment seems to us somewhat extravagant
now, not because we do not think the Captain Coram a fine work — it is almost
unrivalled in its class — but because Hogarth is incomparably more individual in
other portraits. I am thinking not so much of works that approximate to the
specifically English sentiment of the day, such as the portraits of Garrick, Thornhill,

* "After this admirable artist had spent the greatest part of his life in an active, busy, and, we may
add, successful attention to the ridicule of life, after he had invented a new species of dramatic paint
ing, in which probably he will never be equalled . . .; he very imprudently, or rather presumptuously,
attempted the great historical style, for which his previous habits had by no means prepared him : he
was indeed so entirely unacquainted with the principles of this style, that he was not even aware that
any artificial preparation was at all necessary." [A Discourse, delivered to the Students etc. (London,

60 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

and Pellet, evidences of the superiority of a natural instinct to the dexterity of
the fashionable artist, or of the proud bearing of the little Duke of Cumberland in
the late Sir Charles Tennant's collection, where within a very small space there are
details which foreshadow Goya, but rather of certain female portraits, the Miss
Arnold in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, and the glorious works in the
National Gallery. These are imperishable documents of the most patrician English
spirit, contemporary with the portraits of Reynolds' school, and so far above the
best works of that circle that it is inconceivable why a country, simultaneously pro
ducing such distinct grades of artistic merit, should not have pronounced for the
better of the two. Hogarth's woman is not the doll which the others endow with
fine clothes and pretty gestures and insipid ideas. She speaks, works, bestirs herself
before our eyes, expresses herself with all the instincts of her nature, with her
temperament, her moods. The vivacity which could not accommodate itself to
the didactic purpose of the social drama in Marriage a la Mode without showing
the irrepressible freshness of the " cook-maid " in some form or other, bursts into
luxuriant bloom in portraits which were painted only on its account. The portrait
of his sister Ann is not only Hogarth's maturest work, but one of the most beautiful
faces of the eighteenth century. In the dress a rare harmony is produced by the
reddish-orange tones, rising to yellow and enframed in olive, the pink in the centre,
and the white tones of the illuminated lace, with its vivid lightning lines. In spite
of all this richness, the dress retains its airy, diaphanous character. We divine
the vigorous contours of the body under the stuff. From out the laces grows the
face, with its blooming mouth — in which the red becomes more intense, as in the
mouths of Vermeer's girlish faces — its beaming eyes, and its rich brown hair,
lighted by a final red. The wisdom of this colouring, on its dark green back
ground, is as far above the frippery of the English fashion-painters as is the natural
bloom of the skin above the " foreign aid " of the rouge-pot.

English as the result is, the means by which it is obtained are as un-English as
possible. All unconsciously, this Gallophobe here approximates to the colour-culture
of the land which was to produce a Delacroix. Of course, the extraordinary com
pactness of this mellow form was quite unknown in France at the time. It is only
the logic of the colour-language which strikes us as French, because it was finally
worked out in Paris, and not in England. I will not venture to say whether the
many currents of influence that set from the one country to the other in the
eighteenth century did not begin with Hogarth. The physiognomic element
remains very distinctive. The head of the artist's sister is of the same stamp as his
portrait of himself ; there is a dual family likeness. It has the same fat handling,
which never tends to resolve itself into colouristic vapour, but achieves vitality with
granular precision. Style never seduced Hogarth into a lack of respect for his
model. Just as in his popular scenes he notes the incident calmly in the midst of
the utmost tumult, so in his portraits he is above all truthful, and places the
necessity of creating human beings above the artist's desire to express himself in
beautiful figures. The picture of his six servants in the National Gallery is a most
remarkable document illustrating this principle. The absolutely pictorial relation
of one to another, the desire to decorate the surface with six faces, does not prevent
each head from looking as if only the endeavour, to fix it as faithfully as might be
on the canvas had set it by chance beside the rest. Each face reveals the technical
treatment best suited to its character. The old man in the back row on the right
seems to grow out of the material automatically like a Rembrandtesque face. Pink

HOGARTH: THE SHRIMP GIRL

NATIONAL GALLI-RY, LONDON

HOGARTH 61

and white mingle in the carnations, the eyebrows are rendered by a gentle stroke,
the grey hair enframes the face and flows into the uniform background. Every
thing is soft, mild, and fluid, like the character behind the features. The man in
the centre is utterly different. Here the firmer material, the stronger pink, the
decided brown of the hair, and the more energetic touch harmonise with the more
vivacious expression of the face, whose owner was undoubtedly the person of most
authority in the circle. Despite this differentiation, which is no less pronounced in
the female faces, the six belong unmistakably one to the other. They are, indeed,
said to have been relations, and this interconnection is indicated with as much
artistic variety as the individuality of each.

In the Shrimp-Girl Hogarth surpassed himself. Here for once the colourist
cast aside all considerations of the versatility of the master's gifts, forgot precision
in detail, and produced an impressionist work of the purest water under the stress
of a happy inspiration. Fragonard himself rarely handled the brush more loosely.
We scarcely remember that the creator of this indescribable face, which consists, not
of nose, mouth, and eyes, but of a single mass of melting tones, lived in the eighteenth
century. It was reserved for our age to throw down all the barriers between will
and instrument, and to permit the immediate transmission of strong personal
emotion to colour upon canvas. Yet Hogarth worked on these lines here. His
strenuous cumulative industry vanished. An impulse, effectual as a single grasp,
transformed the palette into a picture. The gray, brown, and pink tones run like
undammed streams among one another, guarding the secret of their relation
from inquiring eyes. The liquid eye has no more importance than any detail of
the costume — a dress no tailor could have devised ; it is a spot among other spots.
No detail is clearly distinguishable, no detail is wanting in this vital creature, who
stands before us, not only corporeally complete, but with the atmosphere in which
she lived and still lives. Something in the attitude recalls Rubens, the exuberant
freshness of the basket-bearer in the Flight of Lot in the Louvre. And here
memory is not confined to the consciousness of having the reduced forms of a
greater world before it, but, setting the impression beside the achievement of the
great artist, sees therein a result of equal value, a realisation of the most secret of
Rubens' ideas, and admires the same kind of energy in controlling swimming
masses. In addition it is a typically English work. Of all the pictures that show
us the London girl, this fresh and laughing face is the truest. It is the type of a
race, like Rembrandt's Cook, or one of Corot's young girls, or a Madonna
of Raphael's.

Hogarth also painted himself two or three times, and it is amazing that
the craftsman who applied this vaporous technique to the Shrimp-Girl should
have recorded what manner of man he was by such totally different means. He
portrayed himself with his bull-dog and with a palette on which he drew the
" line of beauty " — two emblems appropriate enough to the square face with its
intellectual forehead. The painting is classic. The creation has nothing of the
eighteenth century, but all the force and fervour of the great sixteenth and
seventeenth century portraitists. Like these, he wanted to paint a face. Costume,
the main preoccupation of his contemporaries, is a negligible quantity here ; the
reddish-brown coat over the black waistcoat served merely as a frame. But in the
dog, whose tints are indispensable to the colour-scheme of the picture, the keen
student of physiognomy reappears. Here, just as in the painter's own face, the
brush yields all its richness to the touch. The dog belonged to the man, as does

62 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

the broad, elastic, yellowish-brown stroke of his shaggy coat to the dark harmony
of the picture. The conception is more animal than that of the human countenance,
where all that the coarser strokes express in the dog appears in delicate shades.
Such symbolism was the language of the old masters. The modelling of the
face recalls the greatest foreigner who ever painted in England. Hogarth seems
to have been the only one who profited by him. In the little portrait of himself
again, in the National Portrait Gallery, where Hogarth is seated at his easel to
paint the Comic Muse, the plastic quality evokes Holbein.

This face makes us feel that the man who owned it had thoughts of his own
about the world and his art. The things he had to say about art he set down in a
book, which has met with the same scanty appreciation accorded to his pictures till the
last few years. A book in which the bull-dog that lurked in Hogarth sometimes
barks furiously, and perpetrates crude errors, such as those Diderot pilloried, yet,
on the whole, one of the best works on art extant. Lessing was one of the few who
read it with profit.* An artist's book, one-sided, as are all the theories of artists, and
therefore good, for the one-sidedness of strong personalities always shows the road
by which they have reached perfection, and contributes to our knowledge just as
their art contributes to our enjoyment.

Hogarth thought the curve more beautiful than the straight line. The uncom
promising nature of the dictum is disturbing. It is too just for acceptance. Every
child can see that straight or crooked can be neither beautiful nor ugly in itself, for
a single line in a work consisting of many is merely a fragment in the factors that
make up beauty. The unit cannot be demonstrated concretely. Even in the
simplest work it is not the detail reduced to a minimum which gives the result, but
the use of parts for a whole, and the curved line may be just as beautiful or just as
ugly in a given place as the straight. Had Hogarth contented himself with
the setting down of this sentence the ridicule it excited would have been
pardonable. But the sentence was put forward by superficial frivolity, which in
Hogarth's time, as in our own, delights to take some paradox, easily refutable
when divorced from its context, and to make this the excuse for throwing the
book into the corner. As a fact, the two forms which Hogarth opposed one to the
other were only symbols for different principles. The one, which he personified by
the straight line, represented immobility ; the other, which he typified by the curve,
stood for movement, as who should say death and life. He pointed out that art
demands suitable differentiation, the richest possible development of all the latent
motives in a subject, and the concentration of all this variety into a single
rhythmical expression. This he insisted on, not only for linear composition, but
also for colour, and was not content with his own art, but showed it in the other
arts. The symbolisation of the problem by the simple form of a curved line
was characteristic of an eighteenth-century master. He generalised a particular case
which the whole organisation of his genius led him to look upon as universal. If
we go back to the purpose of his conception we shall agree with him unreservedly.
Though not always right in practice, he was essentially right in principle. Under
the S-shaped line of the ornament on the title-page of the " Analysis of Beauty "
is the word " variety." Referring to this in the chapter containing his unjust
criticism of French painting, he says : " Upon the whole of this account we find
that the utmost beauty of colouring depends on the great principle of varying by
all the means of varying, and on the proper and artful union of that variety."

* "Laokoon."

HOGARTH 63

Hogarth extended the significance of his axioms more by his own works than
by the fund of brilliant observation with which he illustrated this leading axiom
of creative aesthetics — experiments which already foreshadow that which first
became familiar to men some hundred years later. His most distinguished variety
lay herein — that he gave to each task the special form suited to it, and that
he never repeated himself. The correlation of his works connotes an un
paralleled versatility. Every one who passes from the first Progresses to the
last series, from the engravings to the historical pictures, from the male to the
female portraits, is filled with astonishment at their organic richness. He was an
inventor, and more especially an inventor of forms. It was his own highest
variation that he, the satirist, was not content to analyse the absurdities of his
contemporaries, but followed after imperishable beauties.

After this demonstration we may well doubt whether Hogarth was in any
degree the artist drawn for us by contemporary biographers, and those who followed
them. It is certain that little more of the moralist remains than would furnish us
with a biographical note of dubious interest. What he wanted — or, rather, what
short-sighted commentators have supposed he wanted — bears no sort of proportion
to what he achieved, and what he himself has written about it affirms his mistrust
of such a petty conception. If it be true that his graver only enraged his con
temporaries, or stimulated them morally, frightening the vicious and edifying the
good, time has effaced the utilitarian character of his work, and all that remains of
his hatred, which found such vigorous expression, is love. The change has taught
us not only to know a new Hogarth, but some important facts about ourselves.
The humanity which could only judge of such gifts by coarse anthropological
standards led a different existence from that of our present, with its smiling indiffer
ence, its strange tranquillity, intent only on the beauty or ugliness of artistic action.
It seems marvellous indeed that a preacher out of such a world could also be a
great artist, leaving works behind him which after the lapse of centuries arouse
greater enthusiasm than they evoked among his contemporaries ; that the genius
of art not only suffered the coexistence of a mental state which seems to us
strangely circumscribed, but could even to a certain extent subordinate itself to
this secondary force. Such phenomena are impossible in these days. Every artist
of this age who should not resolutely reject the part gladly accepted by Hogarth
would probably be shut out from all participation in the propagation of beauty.
But the phenomenon really lies, not with Hogarth, but with us. He merely
expressed in a particular form what was common to all the older art of our culture —
the faculty for transposing strong, simple ideas, illuminating to every contemporary,
into art. He spoke as all great creators have spoken to their compatriots, more
or less intelligibly, never so far from the comprehension of the masses as an artist
of his calibre would be to-day. The phenomenon lies perhaps rather herein, that
we are able in these days to substitute abstractions for that far-reaching home-
feeling which serves as impulse to the creative genius, that an all too feeble
imagination suffices to give to forms the mighty speech that echoes through the
ages, and that we no longer need the primitive purpose in order to sun ourselves
in beauty. Hogarth was certainly an exceptional manifestation in the nation
whose serious aspects he recorded ; still more so in the art of his home, which
looked upon the Muse as a venal handmaid. But how much more of an exception
in normal humanity is the great artist of our own times, to whom what appeared
abstract to his predecessors must present itself as concrete.

THE PORTRAIT MANUFACTURERS

WE cannot imagine English art without the introduction Hogarth gave to English
painting. It also determines the artistic tendency of the development. Hogarth
was the first to declare war against the Continent. From the first noteworthy
beginnings of English painting down to Whistler, whom I assign to the English
school for reasons to be explained later, all the efforts of any moment have been
directed to the problem propounded by Hogarth. The manner of each of his
successors has been the outcome of his relation to the rococo. The problem was
not merely an aesthetic one ; it shows, as in a mirror, the human attributes of the
artists who dealt with it. The result, the emancipation from the rococo, is the
highest title to fame of English painting, and the most decisive factor in the
development of European art. It introduces the varied spectacle that unfolded
itself in the nineteenth century.

Hogarth was first a man and then an artist. He depicted certain aspects of
his nature in his art, sunned himself in its radiance, and was like a crystal in the
light. There is no print, no sketch, no picture of his, in which the man does not
speak to us. His was a sentiment that took these forms and was not taken by them.
It still remains when we have seen the whole work, like the power of a nature
element, which did all this, and could have done much more. When artists do
not seem to us inexhaustible after their own fashion they are never great.

Hogarth's contemporary compatriots, even the greatest among them, were
first "artistes" and afterwards men. Were they ever artists ? We use the word
so glibly, applying it both to Rembrandt and to a bookbinder, using the same
term to connote dexterity, industry, all that the intellect can accomplish by ideas,
and genius, the mighty and inexplicable, to which dexterity, industry, intellect,
and I know not what beside, are but as the fingers on the hand of a giant.
Hogarth had the great inclination for and against the world. He felt the impulse
to soar above the world, and to contemplate men and beasts, passions and vices,
and himself into the^bargain, with all his grave and comical, his fair and his ugly
aspects, like a panorama painter. He, who was so firmly rooted in the earth, to
whom a " cook-maid " was more than any " great Venus," who depicted nothing
but what he believed he had seen in the flesh, was an idealist, a fantastic, a sym
bolist, everything by which we designate the man averse from gross realities.

The others were nothing of the sort. They laughed at his bad spelling.
There is a whole literature touching the question whether he could write or not
— he who, like Rembrandt, of whom the same things were said, had the gift of
writing with pictures. They jeered at the technique of his scenes, which was
not according to rule, and forgot that he was the man to find his own rules, strong
enough to keep his pictures alive when those of his rivals should have perished.
They had something he lacked, something that is still, as at the time of the
Marriage & la Mode, more profitable than art — amenity. They had a courtesy
that was lamb-like in contrast to his bull-doggedness, and yet never lost sight of

REYNOLDS: LAVINIA, COUNTESS SPENCER

EARL SPENCER'S COLLECTION

THE PORTRAIT MANUFACTURERS 65

the necessity of looking after the beloved ego. They are further lauded for their
taste. People praise an artist for his taste when there is nothing else to be said
for him, and it would be blasphemy to insist on the quality in Hogarth. His
taste was so supreme that it seems a very different thing from the gift of the others.
With him it was a capacity for bringing the parts together rightly. It directs
the work as the conductor directs the orchestra. It is not this quality which is
lauded in the others. That which is called taste in Reynolds and his followers
is not theirs, but that of the pretty things in their pictures. It is at most a power
of selection, not creation, and means no more in art than in life — a question of
tailoring. This is prominent in English painting of the present day, and causes
English pictures to be, with few exceptions, shadowy compilations rather than
human documents. It is identical with what is called brilliant in the popular
portraits of the school. A mind which only contemplates, which does not sympathise
with every phase of a personality, which does not live in the life of its creations,
must perforce produce soulless things. Hence it is that all the brilliant painters
from Reynolds to Lawrence, who were content with conventional analysis, seem
like brutal materialists beside Hogarth, whom it is customary now, as in his life
time, to describe as a clumsy barbarian in comparison with his aristocratic colleagues.
That which pleases us at the first glance, that which we understand at once, is gene
rally the outside shell only, like to the dress and manners of a person, and it needs art
of our own to find out if it is hollow or if it contains a fruit. With Hogarth
the shell was satire, and we could not wonder if other painters had renounced it
and concentrated their ambitions purely upon form. Nay, they might even
have stood higher for this reason. If we knew no more of Reynolds and Hogarth
than that the one was a satirist and the other a painter, it would not be difficult
to decide in favour of the more famous of the pair, for we should be right in
placing the higher conception of art first. But such speculation is futile if we
do not go to the concrete, and find out how far the satire went with the one and
the painting with the other. I have tried to do the first of these in the preceding
chapter. We have seen that Hogarth did not win the key to immortality by his
wit and mockery. It was not with this spirit that he conquered his rivals, among
whom there may have been many satirists more subtle than he, but with the con
viction of a great artist, with the sacrificial courage which makes epic poets of
caricaturists.

English painting of the eighteenth century owes its origin to Van Dyck, to name
but the most decisive of manifold influences. Its good and its evil are alike traceable
to Van Dyck. Even Hogarth, who set up Van Dyck's bust in his house — I am
always tempted to wonder whether it was a caricature — took something from him ;
and that which pleased him in Van Dyck was not the worst part of the Flemish
master. The others confined themselves to imitation of his artistic methods.
Jabach, Van Dyck's travelled client, described to Despiles, the author of the
" Cours de Peinture par Principe," how the painter proceeded in London after
Charles I.'s favour had won the hearts of the Londoners for him:

" He gave the day and hour to persons who wished to be painted, and
never worked for more than an hour at any one portrait, whether sketch or
picture. At the stroke of the hour he rose, bowed to his sitter to signify that it
was enough for that day, and proceeded to give the day and hour for the next
sitting. While his assistant cleaned his brushes and set his new palette, the painter
received the next person who had an appointment. In this manner he worked on
VOL. i i

66 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

several portraits the same day with extraordinary rapidity. After he had made a
slight sketch, he made his sitter take the pose he had decided upon, and in a quarter
of an hour he drew the figure and costume in black and white on gray paper. . . .
This sketch he handed to skilful assistants, who then painted in the dresses from
the costumes themselves, which the clients sent to the studio at Van Dyck's
request. After the assistants had got the draperies to the best of their ability, he
worked over them lightly, and in a short time gave them the truth and art we
admire in them. For the hands he had persons of both sexes in the house who
served him as models."

It was less the reflection of the vigorous epoch on which Van Dyck had nourished
his talent, and the relative power of his best pictures, than the wise economy of
the man of business which became the recipe followed by Reynolds and his
alumni. When we read accounts of the activities of Reynolds' studio we
seem rather to be hearing of the clientele of a fashionable dentist than the energy
of an artist. Hogarth christened the practitioners of this method " portrait
manufacturers." In essentials they were the same after him as before him.
The evolution of English portrait painting was literally skin-deep. There is no
distinctive difference between the relatively underrated methods of Kneller and
those of his successors. Mannerism wears richer and more complex masks, but
the face beneath them is the same. Of course culture had increased. It is not
necessary to read the speeches of the first President of the Academy, the unctuous
tone of which is so far removed from Hogarth's strongly spiced utterances and the
incisive pronouncements of his theoretical subjectiveness, in order to recognise
the respectable average of cultivation in Sir Joshua's circle. Each of his pictures
reveals the same cultivation. If a preoccupation with lofty things is to be a
criterion, we cannot refuse recognition to this whole period of English art. And
a criterion it is, but not for the art of a whole period. This also profits undeniably
by the efforts of great predecessors if it has the necessary intensity in its vision ;
in fact, it may almost be said that the epochs of art are distinguished in their
achievements by the varying degrees of this intensity. This is the case, for
instance, if we compare the English eighteenth century with the nineteenth.
The fact that the former seems to us a relatively classic period comes only from the
higher degree of attention which Reynolds and his pupils accorded to their masters.
The essential difference is determined, not by change of exemplar, not by the circum
stance that the older generation preferred the masters of colour, and that the Pre-
Raphaelites went back to other artists, but by the fact that the relative intensity of
the relation between art and artists in the eighteenth century, modest as it was, if
taken absolutely, became very much weaker in the nineteenth century, relying more
than ever before on externals. The fundamental error which Hogarth avoided,
the sacrifice of personal sentiment to the taste of the connoisseur, was the decisive
factor in the eighteenth century. The circumstance that artist and connoisseur
were often united in one person, as in the case of Reynolds, makes this
intelligible, but not less disastrous in its consequences. In every great artist
there is, in addition to the complex suggestions of tradition, which reveal more
or less distinctly on which predecessor he is founded, a primitive spirit — we have
seen it plainly in Hogarth — which captivates us at once by its originality of outlook,
and makes that which the artist has derived from others seem a part of his own
world, not that of another. This is what we called the play of personality in
Hogarth, the play of exuberant power, turning to art only because no other

THE PORTRAIT MANUFACTURERS 67

medium offered equal possibilities of expression. It gives the spectator a con
viction of necessity, which is essential to him if he would recognise what
the artist offers him as no cultured pastime, but the highest effort of human
idealism. This same conviction underlies our criterion of the beauty of pictures.
Not that emotion must necessarily express itself in terms of art, but that no
good work can arise without emotion. That which we approve as " right " in it,
and acclaim as admirable with all the innumerable gradations of our illogical
powers of expression, is always the result of an immediate and powerful relation
of man — the creator — to his work. If this is lost, or even relaxed, if we but feel
the preponderance of craftsmanship over emotion, the suggestive force disappears,
and we shall have no difficulty in justifying our subjective distrust by objective
recognition of the weaknesses of the work. It is very difficult to formulate this
primitive defect, on which everything depends, for the standard to which we
might refer has yet to be constructed. A scientific language fit to set forth this
contest of opinions without lacunae does not exist as yet, and hence it is
always easy for hostile opinion to pronounce logical conceptions mere arbitrary
emanations of personality, and to dispose of the matter by the axiom that tastes
differ. That the decision has no more to do with taste in this sense than with art
does not prevent a constant repetition of such arguments.

The manufacturing character which Hogarth derided in his colleagues betrays
itself even in the most important personality of the school. Even Gainsborough
had not the power of the great portrayers of humanity, the penetrating eye to
which everything essential in appearance is revealed, the ruthlessness in sacrificing
everything superfluous to expression, which sometimes exasperated Hogarth's
clients. He painted his portraits for the sake of a detail or a group of details,
never forgot taste for elemental things and allowed a piece of stuff to become
more vital than his picture. No one can, of course, fail to see the charm of the
costumes in the Mrs. Siddons of the National Gallery, or the Perdita of the Wallace
Collection. But this charm only excites a vain desire to see the costumes per
haps without their wearers, or the wearers without the costumes. Our desire
is not at once stimulated and satisfied by the picture, but grows to a coarser
avidity, which would fain materialise beyond the picture. Many of his groups
against a hastily treated conventional landscape or a red curtain have the effect
of scene painting. This would not be a defect if the decorative element in them
exhausted the rhythm. But Gainsborough lacked the boldness for such treat
ment. He creates a compromise, and this produces fragments. Looking at the
large group of the Baillie family, we can imagine that if the vast red drapery
behind the group were to move the figures would dance with it, so much like a
drop-scene is the whole. Atmosphere is sacrificed to harmony. But this har
mony does not obtain throughout the picture. It is impossible to believe that
the arm outstretched to offer flowers to the child belongs to the boy in blue,
and the stability of the whole group is still more disquieting. Near this picture,
in the vestibule of the National Gallery, hangs one of Champaigne's portraits
of Richelieu. The crimson robe, the feudal expression of the face under the
purple skull-cap, the admonitory gesture of the hand, leave no doubt of the super
ficial purpose of the picture. Yet I know no portrait of the English School in
which representative character is so combined with solidity. No one would
speak of Champaigne in the same breath with the great portraitists of the seven
teenth century. But then he had not the intention of these great men, which

68 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

stimulated the ambition of the Englishmen ; he attempted less than they, and so
achieved a good deal more. The gesture, to which he gave himself up deliberately,
is appropriate ; no part of the picture disturbs the proposed harmony. Gains
borough's works lack this totality of harmonious impression. In the profile of his
daughter in the National Gallery his pictorial power was concentrated by his
affection for the sitter, and makes for the fusion of the work. But even here
there are differences of treatment in the face, and in the fine passage with the
hand, which disturb the harmony, and are due merely to a respect for convention.
Yet even setting his landscapes aside, Gainsborough touches us far more deeply
than his colleagues. In his portraits he has given us, not women, but a feminine
essence that almost suggests life. His elegance does not rise merely from the
fashion of the day, but from his discriminating feeling for all grace, and a manner
which was the outcome of his own nature. We do not see the women he tried to
create, but something of himself, which the others do not give us ; we feel some
thing of his own tender fragility in the weakness of his forms, we can imagine
what he was and what he would fain have been — a noble spirit, to whom all base
things were foreign — and we do not suffer under the repellent impression of bold
satisfaction with inadequacy which mars even the best works of the others for us.
His taste did not, indeed, save him from failures, of which those in the Dulwich
Gallery are not the worst examples. But he refrained from that criminal trifling
with the great heritage of the past of which Reynolds was guilty. That which
critics to this very day cannot forgive him, a certain superficiality of touch, apparent
even in the official portraits of the two Cumberlands, or the royal portraits at
Windsor, I am inclined to account a merit. It was a symptom of an independence
of mind which was a check to materialism, and tends to soften the asperity of
strictures upon the artist by convincing us of the generosity of the man.

This human element was conspicuously absent in Reynolds. He showed us
perhaps what he thought of Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and the Italians ; but this he
has told us in his " Discourses," and it was therefore unnecessary to paint pictures
for the purpose. On the other hand, he makes it impossible for us to get an
image of his personality that might add a fresh page to the art history which
deals in human manifestations. That which he tells us of his predecessors is not
that which seems to us most important. He is said to have destroyed a picture
by Titian to discover the secret of its technique.* He was for ever confounding
accident with cause, and attempted to reproduce the gestures of persons whose
feelings were unknown to him. To see a costume painter in Van Dyck was a
pardonable error. But Reynolds and his fellows took from Velazquez and Rem
brandt what Van Dyck could have given them, and this was no error, but high
treason. In the National Gallery hangs the famous Banished Lord, the most
Rembrandtesque of Reynolds' works, painted in deep brown tones with a red
drapery. A pendant may be found in the artist's own portrait, also in the National
Gallery, or the one with spectacles, in Buckingham Palace. The first thought
that occurs to us before these pictures involuntarily detracts from Rembrandt.
Man is always most accessible to the baser instincts, and thus in this case what we
first experience is an unexpected belittlement of the exemplar. We see with the
eyes of the plagiarist without being conscious of the plagiarism, and, revising
our estimate of Rembrandt, we submit that his art was, after all, perfectly simple,
and that it is going rather too far to place him above all his compeers.

* Related " inter alia," by Feuillet De Conches in his " Histoire de PEcole Anglaise de Peinture."

REYNOLDS: WHITE TUB PAVIOUR WITH A BEARD

KARL 01- CHE-:\VI-:'S COI.l.KCTION

THE PORTRAIT MANUFACTURERS 69

The similarity is surprising indeed. Not only the typical colour, but the
granular impasto is imitated, the porous flesh, the peculiar material. And, in
addition, this imitation does not lack an air of spontaneity ; it seems in some sense
a continuation, and even an improvement. That which was incomprehensible
in Rembrandt becomes quite natural here, as obvious as some effect of industrial
art. The inexpressible becomes a simple affair. Fortunately the error is no less
easy to correct than to make.

Reynolds resembles Rembrandt as the utterances of the phonograph resemble
the human voice. He reproduced the Dutchman dramatically, but without
drama. The Banished Lord is the most obvious melodrama. Rembrandt had
no organs for such cheap stage effects. By drama I mean the spectacle of excited
Nature that displays itself in every work of the unique master, the confluence of
mighty streams which never rest ; the conflict of dark forces which are never
weary, the stormy action of all the elements of the work which carry us away and
yet pour a divine peace into the soul. Reynolds painted with Rembrandt's
colours. We may even find his touch reproduced here and there. But as
applied by Reynolds, the touches seem to be marking time, so to speak.
They achieve nothing. That which Sandrart singled out as Rembrandt's
characteristic trait, that " he opened the eyes of all those who, according to
custom, were rather dyers than painters," was lost again in Reynolds. We do
not recognise the growth of the work of art, the treatment of its atoms, the
development of a conception into a creation, which alone awake our belief in
the beautiful, but there is an attempt to show the condition itself, the impression
we can only prepare for ourselves. Thus the supposed advance on Rembrandt
becomes a cheapening of the prototype ; the most important elements disappear,
and only a shadow remains.

No one can paint like Rembrandt, not because of his greatness, but because
the reproduction of a constellation of such instincts is impossible. Approxi
mations are conceivable, produced by glowing enthusiasm and an affinity of emotion.
They have occurred often enough, and we have seen new values evolved thereby ;
indeed, all art history is built up on such elective affinities. But in such cases
we shall always see the transmitted value appearing either as shell or germ of a new
one, transformed by a new emotion, not impoverished, as in the case of Reynolds,
but enriched. Thus through the rich texture of Hogarth's impulses we discover
Rubens, and this discovery detracts from neither artist. Our affection for the
great Fleming derives fresh nourishment from the testimony of a great successor,
and the fact that he was capable of absorbing such a mighty prototype to the
advantage of his art can but redound to Hogarth's credit. Reynolds also adds
something to the heritage of the past, but something of a purely negative kind.
Delacroix' admiration for the English School did not blind him to this negative
aspect of their relation to the old masters so especially apparent in Reynolds, and
it caused him — to his honour be it said — to deny Reynolds' title to mastery. He
held that the Englishmen were content to imitate more particularly the disfigure
ments produced by time in their exemplars. " Us ont cm en faisant des tableaux
enfumes faire des tableaux vigoureux, ils ont imite le rembrunissement que le
temps donne a tous les tableaux et surtout cet eclat ,factice que causent
les devernissages successifs qui rembrunissent certaines parties, en donnant
aux autres un eclat qui n'etait pas dans 1'intention des mattres." * Reynolds

* " Journal," iii. 70, 71. See also p. 377 for his criticism of Reynolds, Lawrence, and Turner.

7o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

exaggerated these supposed qualities of the old masters ; he made the shadows
round their star still denser, and helped on the destructive work of time
— which only weaklings and sentimentalists suppose to have improved Rem
brandt — by removing altogether treasures half concealed in the unpremeditated
darkness. His portion in his prototype was therefore robbery. Not only did
he add nothing, but he repaid the help he received by distortions.

This was the eventful part played by the famous protagonist. He dealt with
Van Dyck as with Rembrandt — witness his portrait of Two Gentlemen in the
National Gallery, and many others. He dealt in like fashion with the Italians,
as we see in his Death of Dido at Buckingham Palace, his Charity at Oxford, his
Children with a Net in the Alexander Henderson collection, &c. He it was above
all others who introduced into the new art the evil practice of replacing the
original work, the individuality of which demands the spectator's utmost powers
of attention, by an agreeable feuilleton, with which the economical reader is much
better pleased. He was a populariser in the worst sense, who is responsible for
the enervation of English art, and the consequences of whose achievements are
still undermining the health not of English art alone. The dismal false economy,
which everywhere allows artists such as Lenbach to usurp the place of greater
men, is due in no small measure to Reynolds and his school. It is true, no
doubt, that the Dutch and Italian masters had their epigoni long before
the time of Reynolds — pupils who imitated a master with or against his
consent, or envious persons whose gall or whose greed was stirred by the
rising star. Such base contemporary rivalries are unavoidable ; and, large as they
may loom in the biography of a hero, they are his concern, not ours, and are harm
less in the main. Bandinelli may have destroyed Michelangelo's cartoon, and
juggled away a few commissions from him. The injury was as a small stone in the
life-path of the great man, and, like all else that was irksome, served to form the
master who lives in our conception. But Reynolds attacked this conception
with unequalled dexterity under a mask of reverence. He put a pale simulacrum
in the place of the hero who should be a national hero in every land. The question
as to whether he was conscious of his crime or not is of secondary importance.
Even the by no means established contention that he at first attempted to make
the great masters contribute to the formation of a native tradition cannot miti
gate the fact that he was guilty of blasphemy against them. And just as he
vulgarised the others, so did he trifle with himself. He turned his emotion to
theatrical account. I know nothing more trivial than the famous Mrs. Siddons
as the Tragic Muse at Grosvenor House — or the monstrous replica in the Dulwich
Gallery — the Garrick between Comedy and Tragedy in Lord Rothschild's collection,
or the Infant Hercules in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. A divine justice
has decreed that dexterity, when not applied to a great task, has the effect of
making triviality appear still more trivial. Hence it is that the mastery displayed
in some of Reynolds' pictures cannot conceal the insignificance of his whole
activity from a lover of art to whom the meaning of noble artists has been re
vealed. The skill in some of the portraits is, of course, extraordinary. Many
of the portraits of Reynolds' friend Dr. Johnson have a startling intensity. We
feel that they are not to be classed among the 150 annual works turned out by
the painter, that they are the results of a concentration of the artist's will on an
object that excited his deepest interest. But even here the creative method
goes very little deeper. It treats the face as does a photographer when he is wise ;

ROMNEY: PORTRAIT OF MISS RAMUS

HON. W. J. D. SMITH'S COLLECTION

THE PORTRAIT MANUFACTURERS 71

that is to say, he places his model in the most natural position possible, and fixes
all the peculiarities of the moment. As the face is an interesting one, the picture
is interesting too; but it owes its charm not to the painter, but to Nature, and
in comparison to this must always remain a mere counterfeit, an accidental condi
tion rather than pulsing life. A great painter, on the other hand, knows how to
suggest the many-sidedness of actual life by the organisation of his work, not by deal
ing exclusively with the details which produce a certain impression in Nature,
details of which only a limited portion can be visible, but by creating a symbol
which reinforces that which is offered to the eye. There are some interesting
things among Reynolds' portraits of women too, which leave the triviality of a
Robinetta far behind. There are seductive details in the Perdita and the Mrs.
Braddyl in the Wallace Collection. The treatment of the powdered hair and of
the muslin has great pictorial charm. But here, as in so many portraits of the
school, the manner in which the face is rendered contradicts the rich handling
of the accessories. The more exquisitely the stuffs are treated, the greater is the
flatness and insipidity of the puppet masks. They often look like enlarged minia
tures in garments by Velazquez. Velazquez too, especially in his portraits of
children, often kept the faces quite smooth and loaded the impasto in the cos
tumes. But with him this antithesis has the effect of an artistic method, because
the complexion (to say nothing of the incomparable modelling which he veiled
in vapourous bloom) gave exactly the tone which the constellation of all the values
of the picture demands. With Reynolds, on the other hand, details play a part
of their own. In the famous Nelly O'Brien> of the same collection, the pale pink
silk drapery across the knees is treated with stupendous mastery ; but this treat
ment is so little in harmony with the rest that the spectator cannot help feeling
he is looking at the portrait of a quilt. Gainsborough's clumsinesses are avoided.
Reynolds' bodies are never impossible, like those of his greater colleague. He
had learnt to make a body credible according to rule. But many lesser men have
mastered this academic science without approaching the sphere where warm
interest in artistic things begins. Certain relations are observed in his colour.
In the Lord Heathfield of the National Gallery the purple of the coat tinges
the face ; and in like manner the greenish blue of Lady Albemarle's dress —
here again the centre of interest — throws its lustre on the pale face. Here and
in many other cases we note what were indubitably deliberate artistic relations.
But how poor are they all in comparison with the pretensions of these pictures 1
In all of them the colour dyes instead of animating. It does not spring forth from
the face, like the perfume of a flower or the breath of a human being, but has
been added to it from outside. Of course the relation given by Reynolds had to
arise ; it would have been impossible to leave such prominent details of colour
without effect upon the rest; but, further than this, there should have
been a much richer variation to justify the pretensions of these details and
the whole tone of the work. In the girl of Rembrandt's Susanna van Collen
with her Daughter in the Wallace Collection the tone of the face is closely
related to the coppery tint of the dress, but it is at the same time perfectly
independent in its action — to all appearances a natural quality of the flesh.
And among the relations which the inquirer seeks in order to get nearer to
the riddle of the effect, the one here disclosed, to which Reynolds confined him
self, seems to have arisen accidentally, because it is lost among a hundred
others. Yet how majestic is this simple work by the youthful Rembrandt, in

72 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

which his real gifts are barely indicated, when we compare it with the decorative
nullities on the opposite wall !

Gainsborough and Reynolds are the limits between which the gradations of
Romney, Hoppner, and Raeburn, down to Lawrence, the youthful prodigy of
the school, disport themselves. Not one of them rose above the standard fixed
by the moderation of their leader. Not one of them was able to cast off the title
which Hogarth coined for them. They were less talented and less well descended
than Gainsborough and less pernicious than Reynolds. Their ambition sank to
the level of amiable costumiers. Their people laugh before they have faces, and
are sentimental before they come to life. English art owes to them the peculiarity
that in the eighteenth century it is represented with one exception solely by
portraitists — a peculiarity shared by no other nation. Is this peculiarity an advan
tage ? It might, of course, have been one. The necessity that forced a painter to
exercise his gifts in a domain he shared with rivals was a cause of fruition in earlier
years. Man, the image of God, was perhaps not inferior as a model to the saintly
figures of the Church. But from the earliest times it has not been enough to have
the right model. The history of art shows us that the indispensable vehicle of the
beautiful is the depth of emotion which draws the artist to his model, the extent
of his love or of his hate, an emotion strong enough to tear him loose from earth
and set him to seek the ideal with his soul. This was lacking in these much-
praised painters. Their biographies may be compiled from the scale of their
prices. They were all cheap to begin with, and have become dear in course of time.

An art history confined to portraiture might have become the rarest of national
histories. The portraits of great masters have taught us not a little from the
fifteenth century onwards. Three centuries scarcely produced so many portraits
as did the school of Sir Joshua in fifty years. And yet we should know little of
England if we were to confine ourselves to that which her painters have told us.
They contradict all just ideas of the manners of a people who have been in the van
of European culture on a hundred serious questions. We like to think of the English
man as a City tradesman, plain, practical, intent on realities, severely disciplined,
precise, and we praise his honesty. We know his love of Nature, of a natural
mode of life, of a home. He who has spent but one day in London among citizens,
or in the country among country people, can divine the character of the nation,
which permeates all circles, and is comparatively but slightly affected by those
differences produced in other lands by the severance of work and social affairs.
I am always astonished afresh by this fidelity of the Englishman to himself, which
is so lacking in English art; and not only in the English art of the eighteenth century.
Indeed, it almost seems as if insincerity had increased since the time of Reynolds, as
if those dexterous artists who painted the mask of the eighteenth century had been
at least more truthful than their successors in the nineteenth. An art that has
turned its back resolutely upon life presents itself to us, made up not of flesh and
blood, but of insipid ideas, dry books and feeble sensations. The great Shakespeare's
fervour is not its exemplar. These pictures read like a book for bread-and-butter
misses, or a romance for empty-headed ladies. We may fairly doubt whether the
rational life makes for the culture of a people when art is looked upon as a thing
apart from culture.

How much healthier, how much more honest and robust, does the frivolous
dix-huitieme siecle of the French appear when compared with the manifestations
of the English costume-painters ! Only in Greuze do we recognise the absurd

RAEBURN: MRS. JAMES CAMPBELL

MR. I. .ML'IKMI-IAD'S COI.I.KCTION

THE PORTRAIT MANUFACTURERS 73

qualities of the Englishmen, and he might be struck out of history altogether
without affecting the picture. Watteau, Lancret, and Fragonard did not probe
any great depths in their models. They treated them as their light-hearted
age treated everything. Art was evolved from frivolous jests. Rembrandt and
Velazquez would have found little favour. But there was method in this frivolity.
It was genuine, and therefore, though lamentable for morality, prolific for art.
People showed themselves as they were, not because they were perfect, but because
it gave them pleasure to be what they were. Painting was the true child of its
period, which thought as artists painted, and saw no necessity to be different, as long
as the sun shone over the merriest of all kingdoms. Frivolity penetrated people
through and through, and therefore was without sentimentality. Sentimentality
was impossible, for reasons of taste. Everything had to be facile and pleasant —
everything, not only " 1'heure du berger." To represent light things lightly
was art. Silk was not to crackle like paper, and flesh was not to look like china.
Artists were sincere — sincere to the point of showing everything they thought
beautiful, not from morality, but from love of beautiful things. And because
their ideal was a healthy one it allowed of differentiation, and hence it was
that they thought less of adorning their fair sitters than of adorning their
pictures. The most significant works of the period are not portraits, but genre
pictures, and these are truer likenesses than the English portraits. The French
man's superiority lay in his more logical acceptance of the spirit of the age. The
individual is by no means heroic in his scenes, but he is free from the involuntary
comicality of the English heroic attitude. We might even call him a puppet —
which man really was in the mirror of this French conception of the world —
and might recognise regretfully that this type did not wander upon the heights
of humanity ; but in spite of all this we shall be obliged to admit that the
pictures which immortalised it were excellent.

VOL. I

WILSON AND GAINSBOROUGH

THE industry of the portrait manufacturers tended to keep not only
Hogarth in the shade, but still more one of his friends, who might have come
to the aid of English art from another side — Richard Wilson. It is pleasant
to think that these two were friends. The fact tells us more than many
biographical notices concerning the breadth of Hogarth's sympathies ; and
we are glad to find that, like him, Wilson had to bear the hostility of the
others. Hogarth's biting satire saved him from the worst obstacles that might
have been put in his path. In the case of Wilson this wise provision was lacking ;
no one feared the quiet dreamer. The consequence was that he had to reckon
with hunger in his old age, notwithstanding his membership of the Academy.
Reynolds had not even a condescending toleration for this colleague. Yet what
Wilson practised was, as a fact, nothing more than that which the President of
the Academy recommended to all his pupils, and carried on diligently himself —
propaganda for the noble masters of the past. But the landscape painter strayed
in the process into a totally neglected domain, that of Nature, and worked on more
logical, less subtle, and therefore more human lines. A simple question of material
had redeemed the plagiarism of the portrait-painters. They painted English ladies
and gentlemen, and so put matters right. Whereas George III. returned the
picture of Kew Gardens he had ordered from Wilson, on the ground that he had
received, not a landscape in the Italian style, but an Italian landscape.

Wilson began as a portrait painter. His early essays show that he might
have succeeded as well in this line as any of the others. He met Zuccarelli in
Venice and Joseph Vernet in Rome. The latter decided him. His first works
have much in common with those of Corot. What he lacked was continuity.
This want compels us to be cautious in our judgment of what he offered us, even
if we cannot but suppose that an instinct of community with his fellows, such as
that which illuminated the path of Corot, might have helped Wilson further
on his way. When he was dead patriotism attempted to make an English
Claude of him. He still passes as such. John van Dyke says : " He translated
Claude — that is, he Englished him — just as a century before Ruysdael had translated
Salvator Rosa into idiomatic, even classic Dutch.'"* A somewhat audacious
assertion. Wilson certainly translated Both f (in his large pictures) and Joseph
Vernet (in his smaller works), artists who were themselves translators, but not after
the fashion of a Ruysdael, in whom the prototype disappears completely. To have
done like Ruysdael, Wilson must have been another personality, and the art language
of England must have been a mightier one. No Germanic art of modern times has
had strength enough to absorb classic forms. Wilson, indeed, never thought of any
such thing. His temperament did not urge him on to the part of a great personality,

* "Old English Masters," Macmillan, London, 1902, p. 72.

t Cf. the landscape of the Van der Hoop Collection in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum (No. 591),
that of the Six Collection, that of the Hague (No. 21), etc.

WILSON AND GAINSBOROUGH 75

for which his gifts would have been insufficient. He was a melodious musician,
content to be played upon rather than to play himself. He had as little of Claude as
possible. The crystalline structure of a cool harmony was foreign to his inmost
nature. The quiet charm of Poussin's atmosphere was more attractive to him. Sir
George Beaumont, that bad painter and discriminating collector, understood the
relation when he grouped the works of his countryman — unfortunately not the best
— with their prototype, the exquisite little Phocion landscape, bequeathing them
finally to the State. This unpretentious little creation of the great Frenchman's, in
which the sonorous rhyme of the ideal figures is still banished to the twilight
woods and only the innocence of untouched Nature appears, contains the world
in which Wilson was happiest. He was never successful on a large canvas or with
lively action. When he ventures upon episode, as in the Destruction of Niobis
Children, he is insupportable, and presages the worst aberrations of the English
School. When he leaves his small composition, he becomes more confused than
Dughet in his worst pictures. His material is like a thin veil which one dare not
expose to the four winds of heaven. It is the same thing with him and with all
his French and Dutch colleagues of the same class. But when he restricts himself
and stretches his veil within narrow bounds, taking care to give it points of support
enough, here a bit of ruin, there a tree or two, in the background the pleasant out
line of a mountain chain, he achieves that refreshing charm of quiet pictures which
seem to shroud our nerves in down and pour contentment into our souls. On
these lines he sometimes (as in the small landscape at the Berlin Gallery) attains a
structure of the arabesque far beyond the Dutch and French eclectics, and suggest
ing t.he fruition of Dutch art rather than the decadence of the eighteenth century.
He was certainly no colossal genius, no original with lightning lyre, but an imitative
poet, who never concealed his sources of inspiration. Yet an aristocratic figure,
incapable of disguise, who allowed his origin to be plainly seen, and who chose his
method, not out of ignoble speculation, but because it harmonised with his most
intimate nature. The difference between Wilson's manner and that of his portrait-
painting contemporaries is no gradation, but the far-reaching difference between a
lofty and a vulgar mind which is manifest even where there is similarity of attitude.
The youthful Delacroix once wrote to a friend, touching the difference between
good and bad artists, that " les bons sont les vrais sages, ceux qui jouissent innocem-
ment de leur ame et de leurs facultes ; les mauvais sont des fous, heureux de leur
marotte et qui ne sont pas plus a plaindre que ceux qui vendent leur temps et
leur conscience aux folies des autres." *

The practical result was that Wilson succeeded by his method in establishing
certain fundamental elements of landscape painting. His emotion was so sincere
that it could not fail to prove the validity of its conception when it had a problem
before it to be overcome by its power. He showed by simple means what air
means in landscape, and the possibilities of organisation by well constructed
planes, indicated the degradation of colours, and above all the stylistic results
of illumination. And so convincing was his simple manner that he succeeded,
without suspecting it himself, in sowing the seed of a fruitful and far-reaching
development in an artistically barren land, and in an art prematurely given over
to a contemptible egotism. The despised starveling became the founder of a
school, which was to leave the brilliant plunder of the portrait manufacturers
far behind it. He, who was never forgiven for his love for the country
* " Lettres," Paris, Quantin, pp. 57, 58.

76 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

beyond the Alps which had given him knowledge, taught his successors to work
with their own organs.

Gainsborough seconded him here, appearing in a very different light from that
in which he figured among the portrait painters. He confessed himself that he
painted portraits for gain and landscapes for his pleasure, and the difference of
incentive makes itself very plainly felt in his pictures. As a landscape painter
he shows little of his quality as a portrait painter, his dexterity in detail, his
grace and splendour of bearing, even his lightness of handling. A laborious,
struggling spirit presides over the palette, tormenting himself with dark, unruly
colours, which threaten to veil the picture in colourless night. But his landscapes
have something that his portraits lack — physiognomies. They speak to us in
human tones, and we listen with greater pleasure to the stammering sentences
of his emotion than to his smooth, insignificant phrases. An unwonted gravity
informs the words. We learn to know the sensitive being who loved music so
passionately. In all his portraits, it is true, there is a breath of melancholy,
but in these it is more a final adjunct to the toilette, proper rather to the genre
than to the painter. Here, on the other hand, the artist's soul stirs. It may be
urged that sensibility in a landscape is in itself more agreeable than in a portrait,
and that the mere change of genre is refreshing after the many sentimental portraits
of the English School. But what we call sentimental in the disparaging sense is
scarcely perceptible in Gainsborough's portraits. He had too much taste and
distinction to fall into the snare to which Reynolds' coarser manner so readily
succumbed. He was more rococo than the people he represented ; and his
superiority appears in this, that something of the same essence came from him and
from Watteau. He made style, and this not merely as a portrait painter. We might
speak of Gainsborough landscapes just as people speak of Gainsborough hats. There
is the same curve in each. The brown foliage is sketched with the same rococo
slightness as the backgrounds of the famous portraits, where the trees serve the same
purpose as the wings on the stage. But the relation of the whole to the details has
undergone a complete change in the landscapes. Not only the foliage, but the
whole picture obeys a more vigorous impulse, and the sensibility therein owes
its origin to a stronger development of the personality. Though echoes of the rococo
mingle with both genres, they no more resemble one another than a Wilson resem
bles a Boucher. In the one the rococo is the final aim of the creator, in the
other the accidental ornament of the age. Here not only is it non-essential,
but it appears as the antithetical element, against which the personality
of the artist is fighting. That we can see the struggle is a merit in Gains
borough's landscapes, which is not discounted by the impression that he was
not always the victor in the contest, that he did not always succeed in presenting
his scene with the relative finality of his portraits. The portraitist only got com
pleteness by taking his task lightly. Others showed that a superficial completeness
was to be achieved with even inferior pretensions.

Gainsborough began his artistic career with landscapes, before he had seen Van
Dyck. Dutch prototypes are mentioned, Wynants in particular. All those other
artists who had affinities with Wilson might be included. But I think he copied
Nature more even than these, yet after the manner of a young man, who looks
upon Nature not as a whole, but in detail. He said himself when he wandered
through the Suffolk lanes, a youth not twenty years old, that there was " no pic
turesque clump of trees, nor even a single tree of any beauty, no, nor hedgerow,

WILSON AND GAINSBOROUGH 77

stem, nor post," in his home which he did not know by heart. These details he
brought together in pictures, in which Wynants' convention helped him. We
have such compilations in the landscape of the Dublin Gallery and the typical
work of his early period, the Great Cornard Wood of the National Gallery, both
painted before 1750, when Gainsborough was yet in his teens. The latter is not a
wood, but an assemblage of well-studied trees, not one picture, but at least two,
one of which, the larger left half, has much beauty. The high tones enhance
the want of unity. The work resembles Wilson as far as the first essay of an
awkward, self-taught youth could resemble a refined eclectic. Another difference
is the absence of Italian reminiscences. Gainsborough never visited Italy. This
was a disadvantage, for to this was perhaps due his inability to work with planes.
It was an advantage, since it saved him from the seductions that led Wilson
astray. If he did not succeed in accomplishing the development of his Cornard
Wood into his Market Cart by the help of purely native tradition — and how
could he have done so with the tradition of his native land ? — he at least kept
within the limits proper to him, and solved the problem as a Northerner, in the
only fashion which his compatriots could work out further. The Italian sun
cannot be transposed to England. It is not true that Wilson anglicised Claude,
but it may truly be said that Gainsborough made Wilson an Englishman. He
eliminated what was ascribed to Claude, not merely by replacing Wilson's
Bayaderes and dreamy pilgrims of southern origin by native figures, but by a
modification of the scenery itself due to observation of English landscape. The
National Gallery contains all the important documents of this development.
The line is not quite stable, it makes various curves, because it arose from almost
heterogeneous impulses ; and we are the less able to trace it definitely because
the dates of very few of the pictures are known. The little view of Dedham
with the wood in the foreground and the glimpse of the church nestling
among the trees of the background is one of the culminating-points. Beside
the best Wilson it is as Nature to construction ; and yet I am inclined to see
more charm in Wilson's slight but truly poetical structure than is customary
out of England. The relation between the two is obvious ; the road to the
little Landscape with Figures of the older man, where girls are undressing to
bathe in a sunny lake, or the charming perspective with the ruin in the fore
ground and the inevitable tower in the middle distance, is easy to follow.*
And whereas Wilson's delicate poems arouse our subtlest emotions, after the
manner of certain modern English poems, which are merely rhythm and melody,
and achieve beauty not by what they offer but by what they conceal, we feel an
intimate sympathy before Gainsborough's Dedham. Even the foreigner seems
to hear echoes of home, so strong is the love of the soil expressed in the little
picture. And this is not merely the sentimental effect produced by the " good,
kindly, happy man " of whose pictures Constable wrote : " On looking at them
we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them." All Wilson's delicacy-
is retained here, the delicacy which distributes emotion in subtle channels, and
is not content with the coarse excitement of sensational feeling. Gainsborough
attempted to strengthen this sublimated effect under the influence of Rem
brandt. It was natural that the tender Wilson could not withstand this rivalry,
and that Gainsborough declared himself more and more strongly for the great
Dutchman. A greater artist would not have been able to bring two such opposite
* National Gallery, Nos. 1290 and 301.

78 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

worlds into equilibrium. Rembrandt gave Gainsborough consolidation of colour.
He taught him to manage large masses. But it cannot be denied that the disadvan
tages outweighed the obligations. Gainsborough was alien to the whole nature of
the Rembrandtesque conception. His light-hearted merriment and his superficial
melancholy had no organs for Rembrandt's fervour, and the gentle dreamer who
was very capable of ennobling Wilson was caught a helpless captive in the net of
the strongest personality of the seventeenth century. The examples most accessible
to him may have been harmful to him. Although he by no means shared the
general enthusiasm for Sir Joshua, he could not altogether resist the suggestion
of the supposed help his colleague had received from the old masters, and
neither Reynolds nor any other contemporary could show him how to modify
what he imitated. His borrowing resembles that of the rest in so far as he
was content with a generalisation of the prototype. The great difference was
that he had no speculative aims. He was not only too honest, but too unskilful.
The question is not purely one of moral considerations, but has an important
bearing on the aesthetic result. For as a fact he gave us much more of Rem
brandt than his infinitely more dexterous rival, and this because — paradoxical
as it may seem — he had less affinity with Rembrandt. Reynolds had a far truer
comprehension of the technique of his exemplar ; he appeared desirous of main
taining the same diversity, complicated his pose thereby, and made it almost
impossible for his contemporaries to recognise the genuineness of his whole con
ception. Even the extravagant patriotism of his own countrymen could not
compare Gainsborough's landscapes with Rembrandt's pictures without being
convinced of the natural difference of their respective powers ; but these land
scapes show in a very primitive degree the same clear-sighted and elementary
harmony of the author's emotion with the chosen form which is peculiar to
Rembrandt's pictures. He painted thus, not because he had perceived the effect
this manner had upon the public — the cold reception accorded to his landscapes
would soon have taught him better ; not because, like Reynolds, he had mastered
this and many other forms of imitation, but because this manner alone seemed to
him natural and rational. He understood Rembrandt with the whole strength of
his enthusiasm, but he understood him after the fashion of one who nevertheless
remained himself, of one who was temperamentally a rococo artist, the absolute
antithesis of Rembrandt.

Before we can either do justice to Gainsborough himself or understand the
consequences of his art we must probe the psychological depths of this problem.
We must admit that the difference between Rembrandt and Reynolds lowers the
imitator, and that Gainsborough's shortcomings in the same path are of a purer,
a more tragic kind. It was no lack of intelligence that hampered Gainsborough,
but the difference between individuality and surroundings. He shared the
experience of many in these days, that the natural possibilities of development
are denied to knowledge and to will. He desired to practise a great free art,
in which personality is the dominant force, and remained fettered by all the
dainty bonds which the author of the Blue Boy owed to his successes. Reynolds
was the more modern of the two. Nothing bound him to the soil, not even the
rococo, for he shook this off when he pleased. He was the forerunner of the many
who belong to no age, who practise art to-day, just as they practise something
else to-morrow, the ruthless, unfeeling egotists, individualists, but not after the
manner of the great personalities who offer the divine gift of their being to art.

WILSON AND GAINSBOROUGH 79

The weaknesses of the landscapes are obvious. Gainsborough saw only the
shadows round Rembrandt's illumination, and under-estimated the glow that
gleams through the darkness. He sought out an opening in a wood where
cows come to drink, or a cart with gaily clad figures fills up the forest path, and
round these he poured deep shadow. The process produces finely illuminated
groups, but a vast proportion of the picture is squandered to form a frame. His
yearning for unity of expression drove him to stake his all on a single card, the con
trast of this central motive with the surrounding shadows. He overlooked the fact
that as in Nature the value of unity depends only on the many-sidedness of the
effects, so art can only achieve the richness of its original by the manifold aspects
of effects directed to a single end. He lacked Hogarth's variety. This beauty has
already caused a material deterioration in many of his pictures. The effect of
the landscape in the Diploma Gallery has been practically destroyed by the black
masses in the middle and on either side. There are worse examples still, which
look like asphalted surfaces with spots of light here and there. Bad pigment
is not solely to blame. It is as if Nature were avenging the false economy of
art. She destroys all that is not held together by a thousand threads.

Gainsborough the landscape painter had obviously to pay the debts of Gains
borough the portraitist. The disproportionate emphasis bestowed on the central
motive was due to the perverse conception of the portrait painter, who made a
distinction between figure and scenery, and only preserved himself from the same
results in this genre by the hasty treatment of the whole. Had Gainsborough
given himself up as unconsciously to his temperament in portraits, had he not
contented himself with a splendour restricted to costume in his creations, the
tragedy would have made itself felt just as keenly here. The gamut of his artistic
means obeyed only his dallying mood. How weak it was is shown clearly enough
thereby. In addition to this, the large scale of his pictures told against him.
It is not an accident that Gainsborough's smallest landscapes are his best. His
sketches and studies are greatly superior to his pictures. We see Gainsborough
at his best in the British Museum, not in the National Gallery. In the Arthur
Kay collection there are landscapes of a vaporous delicacy, in which the swift
chalk has fixed every gradation of the atmosphere. The figures in these sheets
are no compact, isolated portraits, but a portion, subordinated to rhythm, of the
whole, combined with the landscape by relations intangible as air. Nothing
could be more fluid, more supple, than those brilliant little water-colours, which
Constable and Turner never wearied of studying. Cheramy of Paris owns a
fascinating example, two riders on white horses in an undulating landscape. It
seems compounded of light and air, all in a single pale golden tone, and yet we
feel as if we were with the riders on the wide plain, and could see all that they
see.

I would give all the Mrs. Siddons gladly for one or two studies of English
servant-maids and peasant girls by Gainsborough, though I am quite alive to the
many agreeable things I should have to renounce in the exchange. Of course
these studies have not the decorative quality which furnishes the wall of a room.
They lack the magnificence of the stately ladies, before whom the spectator has the
agreeable sense of having been invited to visit wealthy acquaintances. But the
exchange would be neither more nor less reckless than that of the most mag
nificent screen from Old Nippon for a perfect small drawing by Rembrandt, and no
one would hesitate who cares more for purely spontaneous poetry than for the

8o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

most dexterous routine work. It is only in these sheets that Gainsborough rises
to the level of the old masters, and only before them may we cite without blas
phemy those illustrious names with which the praises of the most commonplace
works are interlarded in English art-literature. In his landscapes we are never
reminded of the master whom Gainsborough followed. It is a significant fact
that not one of Gainsborough's successful drawings reminds us of Rembrandt,
though the shadow of Rubens rises behind them — that same Rubens whom
Hogarth shows us. Here again, as with the author of the Progresses, the mighty
shadow creeps into the line of the descendant, and Gainsborough also shows a
diminutive of the giant's features. We seem to find the same things in a small
world under different symbols ; a tributary of that broad stream, not mighty, but
charming with its pleasant windings between lower, closer banks. Art is humanity
on a higher plane. In artists as in men we love not only what is peculiar to them,
but that which ennobles their idiosyncrasy. This nobility comes from con
centration. But such concentration does not inhere in all individual effort. It
must spring from the nature of the particularity, and express an emotion which
ensures the best use of gifts, making them beautiful. No contortions will serve
it. Artists are leapers, not rope-dancers. Only when a work is the outcome of
perfect harmony between its creator and his form of expression does it become art.
This harmony is no more coexistent with the gift than is a wise use of our senses
vouchsafed us together with them. It must be invented ; and not only the tem
perament and qualities of the subject, but also the artist's surroundings may
help or hinder him in the process. In the case of soft transitional natures like
that of Gainsborough, in which extreme tenderness is allied to sanguine enthusiasm,
a vast deal depends upon the circumstances under which they spend their lives.
Imagine Corot, another painter who excelled both in landscape and portraiture,
in an art nourished upon official portraits, and among people who only react to
crudely emphasised effects ! Would he have had courage for his fragility, the
endurance to transform this fragility into the strength of his later work, amidst
the Rembrandtesque greatness of which we can still trace the loose touch of the
dreamer ? Would he have had the incredible capacity to become vigorous and at
the same time to retain the tenderness of his native gift ?

We must think of all these circumstances if we would be just to Gainsborough.
It was not the best works of this generous artist which were prized by the purchasers
of his pictures, and had he appeared only with these, shown himself in his true
aspect, that is to say, he would hardly have escaped the fate of Wilson. When
he died most of his landscapes were still hanging in his own studio, or on the walls
of his intimate friends. The prodigal presented a good many to the carrier who
used to take his pictures from Bath to London. He gave away a famous work in
return for a solo on the violin. Nothing was more salutary for English art than
the spectacle of such generosity. Among all the money-makers, big and little,
here was one who gave with eager hands, who loved to give, and was not engulfed
in the plutocratic tradition of the land. His will went beyond what he gave,
and had a far-reaching influence for good. Gainsborough's service to the art of
his country is not so much that since him England has known good landscapes,
as that since him sincerity to a personal conviction has gained ground.
Wilson's comrade had unconsciously become the representative of an anti-Wilsonian
tendency. The painter of Great Cornard Wood and the painter of the Market
Cart were equally well disposed to their fore-runner. The transformation

GAINSBOROUGH: STUDY FOR A PORTRAIT (1760)

J. P. HESKLTINE'S COLLECTION

WILSON AND GAINSBOROUGH 81

had taken place without any dramatic reaction, and, as we have indicated,
it scarcely touched Gainsborough's actual nature. It was otherwise with
his contemporaries. English art was not capable of making such an objective
choice as the universalism of Holland at the time of Vermeer. A very ripe
culture was required to combine the heritage of Vermeer's great teacher with the
purest reflection of sunny Italy. Gainsborough's successors had to declare for the
one or the other. The choice was a matter of course, as soon as the latent worth
of the two conceptions was taken into consideration. A venerated artist only begins
to exercise a real influence by his works some hundred years after his death. During
his lifetime admiration will place the ideal in advance of the actual achievement
even in the case of an exemplar absolutely free from all didactic purpose, and build
principles from what the creator himself refrained from formulating. In this case
it was a choice between English art and eclecticism. The decision, which was not
solely due to patriotism, was not unmindful that Wilson's conception of the
world rested on a weak foundation, and that his art was an exceptional case, only
successful as long as it was kept within narrow bounds. Gainsborough, on the
other hand, was so familiar to the youth of England, and his purpose so con
vincing, that down to the present day there has been no serious critical examina
tion of his work, though within the last ten years his real importance as compared
with Reynolds has come to be recognised. And on the whole, this is well.
Gainsborough is one of those artists whose very weaknesses are fruitful, because
their whole lives, with all their purposes, are so transparent that even the least
keen-sighted can see where the result requires completion. The defects of such
masters stimulate to effort no less than the virtues of others. Thus Gainsborough,
not Wilson, became the leader. History has confirmed the choice, and if the ex
cellence of successors pleads for the prototype Gainsborough achieved a great deal.
A good deal of brown sauce came into the English School through him, and many
others less agreeable than Old Crome used it. The idea that the light of the
great Dutchman might be approached in shadow cost many pictures, even after
Gainsborough's death. But though a foreigner cannot share the over-estimation
of the school which produced so many hands and so few heads, no one can refuse
respect to the remarkable pictorial level achieved by this landscape painter. It
was from this level that the greatest Englishman since Hogarth, Constable, was
able to advance. The first master of the new florescence of European painting
was a pure fruit of English ground. There is not an iota of Wilson to be found
in his work. I shall try to show how it was only by holding aloof from all eclecticism
that he did the bold deed to which contemporary England owes her finest pictures,
and modern painting throughout the world its most stimulating impetus. There
were exceptions who sought another road, and remained nearer to Wilson. They
afford the negative counter-test. Even the dazzling apparition of Turner does
not prove Gainsborough to have been in the wrong when he saw future salvation
in the woods of his home, and in a simple native speech.

VOL. I

TURNER

THE exceptional character of Turner's whole existence contributed in no slight
degree to his prestige. In a circle of simple people, whose ideas are of a very
obvious description, the unusual person, who is not so easily understood, soon
gains the ascendency. Compared with Turner's complexity, Old Crome takes on
a bourgeois touch and Constable becomes coarse. The sentimentality of Morland,
who watered down Gainsborough's idyls, and repeated himself ad nauseam, gradu
ally became transparent, and failed to satisfy subtler requirements, and this senti
mentality makes us so suspicious that we are apt to overlook the qualities of a
Wilkie. Such pictures as Wilkie's Spanish Girl in the Tennant collection reveal
an admirable colourist, and his productions with the painter's natural implement,
the brush, ensure him a place of honour in European painting. It is due to
the motives of his best-known pictures that this place is not yet freely
accorded him on the Continent. Beside all these people Turner appears a
phenomenon. When we enter the last of the rooms devoted to the English
School at the National Gallery we seem to lack any standard by which to
judge of his manner. After the placid pictures of his contemporaries we are
not prepared for what we find here. The effect is that of a magical apotheosis
concluding some harmless and by no means imaginative story. The others
show us a gentle twilight of grays and browns ; Turner blazes forth in fiery
enchantment. On the one hand, cheerful amenity or meditative dignity, and
even when the drama is in a grave key a consolatory indication of a happy ending ;
on the other, feverish excitement, violent haste even in the idyl, breaking all
bounds in drama, not English, not French, but exotic, although it is impossible
to say to what strange zone such colour and such images belong. There are,
indeed, allusions to ancient things. Fragments of mythology are revealed through
clouds illumined by lightning flashes. But these sign-posts serve but to increase
our bewilderment, for we see them in conjunction with things which destroy their
accustomed meaning and give them the aspects of ghosts running about in broad
daylight. When we seem to be examining a scene from the " Odyssey" we hear
cannon-shots. The fireworks of a modern city are let off against the sky of Arcady
under the title of A Night in Venice. We know not whether in the turmoil of
winds raised by a snowstorm or a simoom, Hannibal, the wreck of a steamer,
or the threatening fist of Polyphemus will appear. The atmosphere of modern
London shrouds the gesture of the Hesperides, and near a valley where nymphs
are dancing races an express train, a new dragon Ladon with the eyes of a real loco
motive. Here indeed was material enough for excitement. Turner's age has
no other example of such eccentricities, still less the ages before him, even if we
search through the whole span to the first dawn of art. The most striking pheno
mena of the late Renaissance shrink to the semblance of harmless jests. The whole
of Japanese art is not so strange as the fantasy of this one man, and all the Greeks
and Romans had not so many ideas as had Turner in a single day. It was reserved

TURNER 83

for our age, which achieves everything, to produce artists just as remarkable.
Next year may provide us with a spirit whose versatility shall throw Turner into
the shade. For who will venture to determine the boundaries of this develop
ment ? We can more surely surmise how many chemical elements will draw
man's spirit to the light as how many worlds of thought we have still to expect
from painters and sculptors.

Turner's beginnings were modest and akin to those of Gainsborough. Like
the latter, he began with Wilson. His diploma picture, Dolbadern, was an
obvious reminiscence, and all the youthful works painted at the end of
the century approximate very closely to his exemplar. They give the same
site, the lake, the ruins, the little figures with the classic gestures. Yet it is easy
to distinguish between the two artists. The Turner of this period is, if we set
aside some rare exceptions,' an insipid reflection of his predecessor. We are
amazed to see how much life Wilson possessed, and inclined to find new charms
in his rococo. Turner, it seems, had not taken over this rococo, or had laid it
aside in the course of his activity, and in this his greater independence became
apparent. A rococo master in the nineteenth century would have been anti
quated, and not remarkable in any other way, and Turner, a sorcerer even among
the most dexterous of the Englishmen, is not in the least old-fashioned. But
in Wilson's rococo there is not only the distinctive mark of the eighteenth century,
but a wise gradation of colour, a stimulating play of planes, a rhythm directed to
pictorial ends. Gainsborough attempted to replace this rococo by the richer
methods of another world, which were more agreeable to his desire for liberty.
Turner took the matter more easily. If the reduction of the picture to the scenario
implies the greater freedom of the artist, Turner is incomparably freer than his
predecessor ; and, indeed, no small portion of his fame is based upon this. But
the recognition of this, even if we admit the doubtful premise, yields no positive
value. The freedom of an artist, as of an individual, remains an empty concep
tion, until we know the opposition it resisted and the results of the emancipation.
The entire Turner problem, one of the most typical problems in modern art-
history, is contained within the meshes of this simple consideration.

Turner was not content with the Wilson of the small landscapes ; he also drew
the large canvases into his domain. And while he was far from achieving the
peculiar excellence of the former, he came very near to the latter. His large
compositions of the first years of the nineteenth century, The Tenth Plague of
Egypt, The Destruction of Sodom, &c., belong to the same category as the Niobe
picture and similar works of W'ilson's, in which the charm of the rococo master
is reduced to a minimum. A feature common to the two is that the details
fill the frame without any convincing relation one to another. The difference
lies in such a thing, for instance, as that in the pictures of the one persons,
in those of the other whole cities, are destroyed. Turner's sphere of interest
was larger. When he painted these pictures he was also painting more realistic
works, such as the agitated sea-piece with the shipwreck and the fishing-
boats, or the famous coast-scene, The Sunrise, historical pictures like the
Death of Nelson, English river-scenes and harmless genre, to say nothing of
other essays. This extraordinary versatility was not developed gradually in
the space of some ten years, but forthwith. Before Turner was thirty he had
produced several works in each of the domains of painting. But this rapid
extension of the creative sphere was merely peripherical, and responded to no

84 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

spiritual necessity. It did not raise him a hair's breadth above Wilson's modest
level, and merely complicated an eclecticism which seems to us natural and par
donable in Wilson and in Turner crassly disproportionate. It was the same poor,
thin technique, whether it was applied to a stormy sea with drowning men or to
smoking ruins, whether it made use of contemporary or antique gesture ; and it is
the more disappointing in Turner because it presents itself with inordinate pre
tension, and is in no sense due to the enthusiasm of a fervid epigone. Wilson
could only work in the one way. Within his modest sphere, he went through all
the phases of his beloved exemplars, and in his merits as in his weaknesses appears
as the reflection of his greater relatives. The kinship ennobles his dependence.
Turner's motives were more egotistical. Wilkie had had a great success at the
Royal Academy in 1 806 with his Pillage Politicians. The following year Turner
exhibited his Blacksmith's Shop, a picture very unlike anything he had previously
shown. It was quite in Wilkie's vein — argumentative persons in a workaday
setting — but the actors and the scenery were somewhat altered ; the schema without
the subtleties of Wilkie, who concealed the charm of piquant colour under a simple
design. A superficial observer might conclude from this that Turner had this
string too upon his lyre, and was therefore greater than his exemplar. To
keener eyes, which delight in probing the system of an artist, Turner's stuff was
clumsy imitation. He did not betray himself so obviously again. As a boy he
had studied in Reynolds' school in the Academy, the high school of plagiarism.
Sir Joshua never found an apter pupil.

His proceedings were identical in a different form. His piracy, masked by the
qualities of an apparently comprehensive personality, which exaggerated the
sentimental effect of the original it assimilated, and became equally injurious by its
distortion of the model, was more harmful than Sir Joshua's, because enriched with
a greater confusion of qualities. Claude became to Turner what Rembrandt was
to Reynolds. The experiment was a more favourable one, inasmuch as it dealt
with an artist whose system was less complicated, and who was therefore more
easily magnified. Claude's quiet shadow, his wide perspectives, which seem bald
to all garrulous spirits, invited decoration. The discreet colours could be replaced
by more resplendent tints, the whole style of composition seemed to allow of all
sorts of combinations. In the ten years between his Garden of the Hesperides
and his Dido Turner finally exchanged the lesser exemplar for the greater. It
was a question of scene-shifting.

Turner used Claude solely to improve his theatre. He discovered in Claude
what Gainsborough thought he had discovered in Rembrandt — the effective
central motive.* Two or three pictures, like the Bouillon Claude in the National
Gallery with the embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, had shown him the
advantages of an illuminated central motive surrounded by shadows. The
bright centre could be produced by a watery surface with ruins on either side

* The schema was indicated by a contemporary writer. Rippingille says : " In a great number of these
productions there is no proof of the true motive ; such pictures appear to be made by a recipe and to order.
They are tame and mannered to excess. Each contains a large splash of light in the centre, with certain
masses of darks grouped round. Nor is there often any variety, novelty, or ingenuity comprised in these ;
so that the treatment, in a few examples, becomes rapid and commonplace. This continued trick, often
marred in the process by slovenly treatment, has the less to recommend it since it has no claim to originality
in Art ; and as regards Nature, it is partial, insulting, and injurious to the boundless and eternal variety of
effects in which she presents herself to our notice and admiration " (quoted by Thornbury in his life,
new ed., London, 1897, p. 408).

TURNER 85

— the favourite form — by a battle-field, or a man-of-war, or a herd of cattle, &c.
A certain effect was always assured, an effect which could be prolonged. It was
only necessary to gradate the colour on every side, and to employ the greatest
possible number of objects for this gradation — dragons, nymphs, temples,
gondolas, &c. — preferably things with which romantic mortals rightly or wrongly
have fantastic associations. By this means an effect at once pictorial and agreeably
exciting was achieved. The obscurity of its genesis enhanced the charm. This
last circumstance was the decisive factor. Turner's emulation of Claude was an
unerring speculation on the hastiness of the general inspection of 'works of art.
He painted his pictures as the ordinary visitor to galleries is wont to see them.
Claude's Embarkation is not, literally speaking, any nearer to Nature than the
Turner which hangs beside it. Claude had no more seen his picture in Nature
than the creator of the Pantheon had seen the forms of his cupola. He had built
it himself. The whole scene, with the palace on the right, the Corinthian pillars
on the left, and the carriers in the boat in the foreground, was freely invented.
Freely, but not capriciously. There is nothing arbitrary in the arrangement
of the distance, where every line, every dot contributes to the effect of space
demanded by the law of perspective. Every child knows that this Italian Renais
sance building never contained the apartments of the Queen of Sheba. If the
ships and the people obviously did not belong to her legendary age, but to some
later period — nay, if they belonged to no age, and were creatures of the painter's
brain — they yet played the part of realities in the work, and played it faithfully,
as if the scene were no imaginary perspective, but actuality. For the proportion
which prescribed the relation of all the great parts, as of all the smallest details,
to their neighbours belongs to reality. It is the same with the colour. It is
true that Nature may not always show all the tints which enliven the raiment
of this festive multitude, though, indeed, there is nothing abnormal about them ;
reality, we might rather say, would clothe such incidents with more striking
and dazzling splendour, so that the eye of the spectator would be fatigued too
quickly to enjoy. Claude avoids this disturbing accident of magnificence. He
gives a harmony, which assigns to the colours solely the part played by the single
tones in a musical chord, or it would be more exact to say a sequence of chords,
the variations of a theme which gives perpetual new aspects in different chord
sequences. This is the case here, in this marvellous harmony of blue water
with gray architecture, with the tone of the sky, and the gold of the sun break
ing through the atmosphere. These three chromatic powers are the natural
vehicles of the harmony. The architecture and the sky have the repose neces
sary to ensure the equilibrium of the gleaming expanse of water. Together they
give the theme in the sustained three-four time of a simple fugue. There is
already an extraordinary richness in the play of the rippling waters, to which the
sunshine lends a metallic lustre. The waves seem to give just as many tones,
tones of one and the same colour, moving in equal rhythm, differing by shades, a
bluish lustre changing to a greenish one, veiled with silver, flowing continuously,
only recognisable in the mass as a uniform surface. The runs in which the motive
is repeated, are represented by the boats with their contents, the persons, both those
in gala dress in attendance on the queen, and more especially those on the shore in
the foreground, the spectators and slaves who are stowing away the baggage.
Here the eye again discovers the pure basis of the water in small quantities.
Claude's beloved deep blue appears in the dress of the man who is pulling the rope.

86 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

Close beside it blue and white meet for a differentiation of the silvery shade of
the water, and in the box which a tawny slave is lifting into the boat the blue is
grouped with black and an indescribable brick red, forming one of the rarest
of the many combinations. These chords, with the water playing about them,
concentrate all the colours that lurk in the picture, even the yellow of the sunlight.
They show, in addition to the linear perspective, the genesis of another, which,
in the group of the queen, with the soft red and blue garments, and further back,
in the more distant details, undergoes the same diminution noticeable in the
other perspective. And beside it a third scale, which makes everything that
tells through colour and arabesque appear in relative subordination, and without
which the charm of the details might be an exercise of taste. It is the soul of the
picture, the fundamental scale of all the other scales, the highest affirmation of the
law : light. In this we recognise the hero of the work. It enhances the effect,
but at the same time makes us acquainted with the whole complexity of pictorial
manifestation ; acts as intermediary between artist and spectator, just as the
actual sunshine does between us and the cosmos. We " see " what the artist
built, and organic nature emerges from the manifold ideas of his imagination.
The variations of the theme, which manifest themselves emphatically, are there
fore by no means arbitrary, not only because each of them has a legitimate motive,
but because their multiple effects are indispensable to the impression to be
produced. We can imagine a different architecture and other figures, a herd of
cattle or the side of a ship in the place of the water. But it is impossible to
modify the law which determines the illumination, the degradation of the colours
and the perspective. This guarantees the objectivity of the art for us, raises the
work above the limitations of the single work, and unites it with ourselves and
with all normally reacting beings of the future. And though we may not find
in every Claude the richness of the Embarkation, or the charm of its famous
pendant, the waterfall with the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, where the red,
blue, and yellow of the exquisite central group have the crystalline resonance of a
trio by Mozart, yet he always affords us glimpses into Nature — i.e., into well-con
structed harmonies. And when an occasional picture is less generous to us we
are affected as by a cloudy day, which prevents all the charm of Nature from
showing itself. Turner does not lack this or that quality to achieve a like degree of
impressiveness in his pictures, but the chief thing, the basis, not only of an effect
after the manner of Claude, but of any deep artistic impression. He exaggerates
the splendour. At a first glance his pictures may seem richer. They are fuller.
We get the impression, always avoided by Claude, of that proclamatory magni
ficence which stimulates curiosity. This curiosity is of necessity as ill satisfied here
as in reality, when, attracted by some striking scene in the street, we rush up breath
less to discover that the phenomenon is merely some trivial accident, some fantas
tically dressed simpleton, or the king driving by in his carriage. Excitement ceases
at the moment when we have realised the occurrence. Claude avoids this moment.
He too can arrest us at first by curiosity, by a striking gesture or something of the
kind. But when we come nearer, the net of his variations, invisible from afar, begins
to entangle us. That particular gesture is related to a hundred others, which con
tinue to fascinate us, and to set degrees of interest of increasing depth in motion.
Unobserved by ourselves, our passive curiosity becomes the active co-operation of
our subtlest organs, spiritual enrichment. Turner is a genre painter in com
parison, though not, of course, one of the usual kind. He too knew the danger

TURNER 87

of the momentary intoxication of curiosity. He does not avoid the moment,
nor does he transpose it into a system of organic effects, but prolongs it by all kinds
of devices, above all by the indistinctness of his action. He is a builder of
facades who seeks to mask the lack of definite structure by all sorts of decorations
on doors and windows, and to hide the bad materials under gay paint. But
his pictures are like such houses, uninhabitable. None of the decorative details
in Turner's Dido can compensate for the faulty construction. In spite of, or
rather because of, the rich architecture of the foreground the eye finds no true
point of support. The picture is slipping down, so to speak. The perspective
does not serve as a sounding-board for the motive introduced in the foreground,
to throw back the tones, enhanced by echo, but plants the effect in space. We
look past glistening things into nothingness. Here again the cunning craftsman
foresaw disaster. It was for this reason only that he put the bridge in the back
ground, which is meant to terminate the picture. An emergency bridge ! The
compactness of Claude's structure was not to be achieved by such petty means
as this.

Art is mathematics, though not of the calculable kind that can be demon
strated with a footrule. It leaves the personality full liberty to work with the
most primitive means imaginable. The old masters, who knew nothing of the
devices which are now familiar to the humblest draughtsman, managed to
paint divine pictures with the means at their disposal. This because they
proceeded logically within their sphere of effect, because they had the principle,
though not all modern applications of it, because they achieved harmony by
unities peculiar to themselves. Turner contradicts, not an abstract standpoint in
optics or in any other science, but himself, his own mathematics. When in the
Dido he suggests an atmospheric effect of perspective apparently far in advance
of Claude, he binds himself to a definite degree of knowledge, and if he does not
carry out this degree logically he is either insincere, because such thoroughness
would make other, and to him more important, effects difficult, or he is a bungler
who cannot think out what he has begun. It is not the beginning which is decisive.
The initial effort in many of Turner's pictures implies a power of conception
unique in his age. But this is as non-essential as the amazing displays of skill of
some infant prodigy. It is the execution that really matters. Hundreds before
and after Beethoven have had perhaps the same motives in their heads. His
glorious invention lay not in the idea of making a melody out of six tones, but in
creating a symbol of infinity out of these finite elements.

Thus in the Dido, the more convincingly Turner essays an effect of perspec
tive that should be an advance upon Claude, the more crudely do the lacunae
in his scale reveal themselves. It would be impossible for the figures on the left
to look as they do if the pillar beside them looked as it does. It is impossible that
we should be able to recognise the details of the bridge in the extreme background,
and even the structure of the masonry, if the atmosphere were not a mere arbitrary
presentment, but the basis of the whole composition, and it is impossible that the
central portions of the right side should bear the relation to their ends and the
whole of the banks should bear the relation to each other which Turner asserts.
The colour is treated after the same fashion as the perspective. Just as Claude's
whole arrangement is aped, so is the water imitated. But Turner modifies the
blue with his favourite golden yellow, and so introduces a foreign body into the
harmony, and one which demands a perfectly different harmony absolutely opposed

88 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

to Claude. The golden yellow remains an assertion which is by no means borne
out by the implication that it is in itself nearer to Nature. For the proof is not to
be found in the agreement of this part with a part in Nature, but only within the
frame of the picture, in the homogeneity of all parts. The lack of all deeper logic
in the relations of this colour to the others makes the picture gaudy rather than
rich in colour, and that part of the effect which seems to transcend Claude
really only exaggerates the same difference, very much to the disadvantage of
the imitator. The use of light emphasises this still further. Light is not for
Turner the sense that holds the picture together as the rhythm holds a poem,
but two things : firstly, one of the many factors with which he provides for the
plausibility of his naturalism (nota bene, very often, as in the Dido, with glaring ill-
success). A sun in the position indicated in this picture could not so illumine
the water and the banks. This would be unimportant if the aesthetic purpose of
the illumination were fulfilled — a purpose which is not, of course, concerned with
the demonstration of the concrete natural phenomenon, but only with the further
consequences of the relation of the light to the landscape, namely, with the stylistic
characteristics of the system of illumination. Claude's Embarkation, which
Ruskin compared to a child's primer, not only shows the naturalistic pheno
menon in incomparably closer agreement with our modern experience, a far
greater diversity of radial effects — especially apparent if we compare the reflec
tions on the water with Turner's treatment of a similar surface — but above all it
shows light as the stylistic element of the picture, bringing all the illuminated
portions together in a perfectly definite relation. It is just this second weighty
significance of the light which Turner overlooks altogether, replacing it by a
centre, in order to give prominence to certain portions of the picture, the objective
importance of which seem to him to warrant it. It is only this entirely extra-
pictorial consideration which can explain the ghostly moonlight illumination of
the Dido group on the left side of the work. It is the Bengal fire, which should
fitly celebrate the queen's foundation of the city. If we call this flame the sun,
we are driven to the conclusion that there are several suns in Turner's picture.
And this we should be willing to concede if these lords of light really ruled, if
from their multiplicity we got the warm harmony which Claude achieves in many
a night scene with the faint light of the crescent moon.

We must not make it a reproach to Turner, as certain English critics have done,
that he attempted anything so fantastic as the representation of a city's founda
tion. The naive mind has occasionally lighted upon things more remote, and
yet has produced credible beauty. But fantastry without system is an evil;
it is invention which does not aim at making plain what it has seen, either in
dreams or in reality, but confines itself to the curious idea of placing a non-historic
event upon the canvas.

The fantastic scene is here, as in the works of so many moderns, solely a means
of avoiding the artistic solution of a worthy task, and characterises the difference
between Claude's poetry and Turner's romanticism. We find the same dispro
portions in pictures of all kinds and of all periods by him. In the Bay of Bai<z
(National Gallery, No. 505) the delicate background, the blue mountain-fringed
water, has nothing in common with the crude foreground disfigured by the two
impossible trees, akin to the tree in the Carthage (N. G., No. 506). The same may be
said of the View of Venice (N. G., No. 370). To what giddy heights do the Canaletti
scorned by Ruskin soar when compared with these amateurish scenes ! The

TURNER 89

Ulysses deriding Polyphemus is quite formless. There is no reason why this
structure of rocks and ships should not be continued for a few metres to the right
with other masses of cloud and other suns. Many of Turner's pictures contain,
like this one, several pictures in one frame. If in the Carthage and similar works
we imagine one side away, we get a passable picture. In the Fighting Temeraire
this proceeding would leave a very fine sunset, and would produce perhaps the
best of Turners, whereas now the ostensibly more important left portion, with
the ships, in which a perfectly arbitrary attempt is made to repeat the harmony
of the sky, destroys the balance of the canvas. In one of his latest fantasies, the
famous Queen MaVs Grotto, Turner goes so far as to include three or four pictures
in the same frame. The division between the passage with the shooting Cupid
and the rest is distinctly perceptible in the drawing, as in the tone and colour —
the fiery red and yellow ; even the bluish white sky above is disturbing. The
grotto is the second part, the least interesting, in the vicious manner which even
the official catalogue of the gallery admits to be " almost formless." * The third
would be the right side, with the remarkable person who is being drawn in the
air by the swan, and the crowd of other figures. Even after this division by three
there would still remain the lofty ruin in the background, which bears no relation
to any of the other parts.

To pile things up ! This became Turner's principle more and more as the
years passed by. To bring together as many things as a frame would hold, then
to shake them up vigorously, and leave the rest to Ruskin ! And especially
heterogeneous things. The soap bubbles in the Vision of Medea of 1831, or, in
the Landing of the Prince of Orange, the white shield with the definite blue coat
of arms on a ship in the mists of the background, the outline of whose masts and
sails is barely distinguishable, and other such variety effects, are comparatively
harmless when compared with the Fire at Sea, with its Rubensesque infernal
cascade illuminated in the modern manner, or the Great Western Railway, where
the dance of nixies obligingly diverts attention from the paltry rendering of the
chief motive, or the fireworks of the painter's last years. It was but seldom that
Turner resisted this theatrical devil. The Burial of Wilkie, where the atmo
sphere, compounded of blue, black, and white, blends all the portions of the com
position harmoniously, only succeeded because Turner was content with a simple
scale of colour and moderate dimensions, and had Dutch models not beyond his
powers before his eyes. The other exceptions also owe their relative artistic com
pleteness to the artist's limitations. The not very vigorous, yet nervous organism
of the waves in the little sea-piece Port Ruysdael (N. G., No. 536) is a refreshing
oasis in the desert of his last period. Comparison of this picture with the earlier
sea-pieces shows a distinct advance. The Port Ruysdael is infinitely superior to
wretched genre scenes like the Calais Pier of 1803 (N. G., No. 472), in which Turner
forestalls Achenbach's maritime tragedies, or the simpler but no less helpless marines
such as the Bligh Sands of 1809 (N.G.,No.496). In this picture Turner seems really
to have caught something of the spirit of the distinguished master of Dutch marine
painting. The advance could be further demonstrated by various other works,
if we could examine Turner's production without reference to the bewildering
complexity of opposing tendencies. But how little the character evolved from
such a sifting would typify the actual tendency of the artist !

* See the large illustrated catalogue (Cassell & Co., 1900, iii. 332) in reference to the Undine picture
(No. 549) of the same year.

VOL. I M

9o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

I fail to follow the critics who have the perspicacity to distinguish different
styles or periods in Turner's development. Robert de la Sizeranne has finally
put forward this suggestive classification : the classic, Wilsonian style of the first
period, the realistic style of the middle period, and the " evocational " or purely
Turnerian style of the last period.* Among these the last category bears the
most characteristic name. When a phenomenon loses all relation to concrete
representation, it is itself taken as a pattern, and a new rule is built up from a purely
arbitrary incident. To my mind, Turner never had what may legitimately be called
style. If Turner's fantastic imprimatur can be called style, and his painting art in
the higher sense, then all the masters to whom we owe our artistic culture have lived
in vain, and art is not to be looked upon as the loftiest affirmation of law, but as an
intoxicating phenomenon of an ephemeral kind. On the other hand, he shows
fragments of style-culture. Firstly, fragments of bygone epochs, which accompany
his whole activity to the end ; and, secondly, fragments of a synthesis, which are also
apparent in all his periods, but more especially in the last. To the first he un
doubtedly owed his best pictures. They are not his most original works ; indeed,
they are, as a whole, far removed from the general conception of the purely
Turnerian style, and will seem unimportant to those who place originality above the
recognition of law. Most of them belong to his earlier years, and are of small dimen
sions. There are about half a dozen in the National Gallery. The best of them are
hung together, enframing the Burial of Wilkie, and are simple landscapes, devoid
of all fantastic elements, obviously inspired by Wilson's tradition, but portraying
a Nature truly felt by the artist, and seen with a painter's eye. Later on Turner
never showed such sincere surrender to the object as in the Clapbam Common,
the charming group of anglers, and the famous trees which seem to greet
us in every corner like old friends, or in the Clievedon on Thames, with
with the cows in the water. There are in various private collections in England
a number of similar pictures of the same period, showing the same promising
beginnings of a landscape painter with freer vision than Wilson and an airier
flight than Gainsborough, who might have continued these two predecessors.

The fragments of a new synthesis arise from Turner's susceptibility to the
imponderable charm of atmosphere. This tendency is characteristically modern.
Turner had a prescience of the path modern landscape would take. His per
sonal utterances, recorded by Ruskin, reveal a more or less sure consciousness of
the importance of the physical phenomena of air and light for the future. This
perception is manifested in many pictures of all periods. If in the Snowstorm
of 1812 (N. G., No. 490) we suppress the whole of the lower part, with the im
possible Hannibal episode, there remains a very remarkable representation of an
atmospheric phenomenon, which achieves an impresssion of reality. He him
self carried out the suggested suppression in later pictures. The Snowstorm
of 1842 (N. G., No. 530) shows the play of the agitated atmosphere without the
distressing heterogeneous genre scene. Even if we did not know that Turner
had experienced this storm himself upon the water, we should suppose it. One
of the sea-pieces in the James Orrock collection of the same year gives the decom
position of the moist element by movement and light, and convinces in spite
of the garish colour.

Turner's strongest power of suggestion rests on this capacity. It was com
bined with an opposite and much less prominent tendency. Turner recorded
* Studio, special number, 1903, p. 3.

TURNER: "THE FIGHTING TEMERAIRE'

NATIONAL GAI.I.I-RV, LONDON

TURNER: THE GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY

NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

TURNER 91

certain details of Nature conscientiously, drawing a tree or a leaf with great
fidelity, or reproducing mountain formations convincingly. The bewildering
impression produced by his pictures was aggravated when the spectator discovered
suggestions of the old masters in this conglomerate of unwonted actualities,
affinities to Cuyp in the silky atmosphere of his landscape, reminiscences of van de
Velde in a river scene, or one of the venerable classic forms in this new light. But
even those who, preserving their reverence for the old masters under the magic
of the innovator, were recalcitrant to the suggestion of the naturalistic detail,
and saw the comic aspect of Ruskin's mineralogical and botanical expositions,
succumbed to the charm of the magician's atmosphere. The most cultivated
French connoisseur of the time, carried away by Turner's effects of light, declared :
" Claude, le supreme illuminateur, n'a jamais rien fait d'aussi prodigieux." *
Leslie, one of the best of the English critics, was not blind to his compatriot's
limitations. He perceived the theatricality of his art. " For my own part, when
I look at the Building of Carthage I feel as if I were in a theatre decorated with
the most splendid of drop-scenes ; but when I stand before Claude's Embarka
tion I am in the open air enjoying the sea-breeze and listening to the plash
of waves on the beach." More prudent than Burger, he guards against deprecia
tion of Claude, and puts Ruskin aside with touching patience. But he does not
persevere in his perfectly right course, and instead of concluding logically he
avails himself of the outlet which has served so many hundreds since his time,
declaring that the aims of the two artists were not the same. Finally, when Turner
comes into direct rivalry with Claude he is subdued : " Claude could not paint
a storm."

This suggestion was, in fact, but one of the stages of Ruskin's naturalism, based
upon the degradation of art to a purely reproductive manifestation. The
rarity of the Nature reproduced does not make the reproduction a work of art.
Before those Turners which are restricted to the representation of atmosphere
or of certain effects of light, and are not disfigured at the outset by heterogeneous
things, do we not seem to be observing Nature demonstrations of a special kind ?
Their sphere of interest lies outside aesthetics, and so is very speedily exhausted.
For how should a bit of canvas overlaid with colour give us objective information
concerning the movement of air or the optics of light ? Photography and the
spectroscope are better aids than the unscientific methods of a painter, and the
idea that a picture by Turner adds materially to our knowledge of Nature could
only occur to those dilettante minds which might be termed the amphibia of
opinion, because they live partly in art, partly in science, and are at home in neither.
Beings like Ruskin are the deposits of an age which set about giving natural science
its own field of labour. We do not look for, nor can we find, the physical qualities
of the storm, nor the optics of rays of light, in art ; what it should give us is a
symbol of their might. Even the vigour of a Rubens cannot turn a windmill or
warm our skins. But Rubens gave an unerring image of storm by showing the
effect of the elements upon his creatures, the manner in which trees, men, and clouds
were bent by the same force, and his whole cosmos was stirred by the same agita
tion. In his Meleager and Atalanta at Brussels we do not see the storm which
blows away our hats and buffets our limbs. We are quiet enough before the
picture, and yet we rightly feel ourselves carried away. The motive power is
not the threatening extrinsic element, but Rubens the god, who sits enthroned
* Burger, in " Lcs Tresors d'Art en Angleterre."

92 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

above his world, and whose " quos ego " sets the winds in motion. If at a first
glance the audacity of some of his human structures fills us with alarm, it
seems to have been evoked merely to enhance our subsequent sense of security
in this play of the elements. For however vigorous the gesture may be, there
is always something more vigorous which enforces repose. We find nothing
of this in Turner. We see conditions. Nature was perhaps like this when he
beheld it at a given moment. But whereas here nothing remains after this
supposition, we do not even consider the point in the case of Rubens. The
security he inspires is not based on an extra-pictorial examination of facts, but on
the picture itself. What he asserts is proved, not by Nature, but by himself;
and herein lies our prescriptive right to call Rubens Nature. Turner lacks what
Aristotle calls (in tragedy) the philosophic principle, and what Lessing formulated,
when he desired the elimination of surprising phenomena in drama, and demanded
the genesis of characters and passions. He was curious, and he satisfied curiosity:
He was no constructive spirit, who opposed the depth of his organism to the
cosmos, and evoked a new Nature out of Nature, but a purely receptive organ,
assimilating all he encountered, governed only by physiological limits. Turner
reproduced Nature or his own fantastic ideas just as he had at first reproduced
art. Nevertheless we may discern fragments of a new synthesis in Turner's
works, though in no sense do they support the monstrous assertion that Turner had
a decisive influence on the nineteenth century, and was even the pioneer of modern
painting. It would be disastrous indeed for our art if it were based even in the
smallest degree on the weakness of such ancestors. The qualities most opposite
to Turner's idiosyncrasies are those which have loosed the pinions of nineteenth-
century painting for its loftiest flights — a thorough comprehension of its artistic
inheritance, a deepening of independence, and above all, stern self-discipline and
purity of sentiment. Even the personal relation of one or the other great master
to Turner cannot be demonstrated. The assertion of various art historians that
the Impressionists are the descendants of Turner is an outcome of that concep
tion which sees form in Turner, does not remark his formlessness, and takes
Impressionism for a colour-category, instead of recognising its colours as variable
constituents in a new system of beauty.

The newly arranged Turner Room in the Tate Gallery is well calculated to
confirm the error. The effect is more harmonious than that of the large room in
the National Gallery, because the pictures are for the most part of Turner's last
period. At a first glance they might be taken for misty Monets of a late date,
full of light colours and tender tones. The Thames from above Waterloo Bridge
(No. 1992) seems to presage the London impressions of the French painter. But
that which the aged Monet really has in common with Turner here, his content
ment with " tours de force " of the palette, is not a quality that will add to his
fame. Still we should be amazed at the richness of Monet, even in these works of
his old age, if we could see them side by side with Turner's Thames pictures.
Even here, where the minimum was demanded of the painter, a closer examination
reveals Turner's lack of order. The colours are harmoniously juxtaposed, but
they do not cover the drawing. The details are falling to pieces. The vague
outlines of the steamer, the bridge, etc, seem to have nothing to do with the
structure of the picture. Such a charge could never be brought against the
weakest Monet. In some of the renderings of atmosphere, on the other hand,
(e.g., Nos. 1980, 1984, 1987), all Turner's usual defects are absent. Our eyes

TURNER 93

seem to be veiled by a vapourous haze. But this purely sensuous phenomenon
exhausts the charm. The eye wanders helplessly from one picture to another,
and finds nothing to arrest it, nothing to call forth a vibration in the soul of the
spectator. The manner suggests Whistler. He too turned such accidental
aspects of atmosphere as those of Nos. 531 and 1990, for instance, to a like insignifi
cant account, and I shall show later on how this pseudo-modern approached
Turner in other ways. In the Evening Star (No. 1991) even his Japanese aspect
is foreshadowed. Other fantastic examples (Nos. 552, 553, 554, 2066) recall
Monticelli, but if we examine them more closely, the point of contact is a ghostly
variety of colour, which in itself would never have made Monticelli the great
artist he was.

Turner's influence is confined to superficialities, to the production, so to
speak, of a veneer of valuable tendencies. In the creative process every artist
goes through an initial phase, in which he confines himself more or less to a passive
attitude. It is the first moment of suggestion, the allurement of Nature. The
motive is perceived, yet the artist has not exerted all that individual force of
perceptive activity which leads to creative conception. Every person who keeps
his eyes open will discover a thousand beauties every day. This depends on his
receptive faculty, not on a special gift, but on a possibility of abandoning him
self to agreeable impressions which depends on circumstances. He lingers
where another would pass by under the stress of business. This receptiveness
may become so strong as to induce expression. One ponders his impression,
another speaks of it ; this one describes it, that one would fain paint it. Each
of these essays in expression is an embryonic condition of artistic creation. The
master fortifies this receptiveness by an active tendency opposed to its passive
conditions. In reality he resists impressions more readily, chooses his moment
of self-abandonment more cautiously, selecting those occasions which will make it
most fruitful of results. He only loves where he feels safe in lavishing the whole
treasure of his tenderness, and receives only when he can requite the gift an
hundredfold. In his relation with Nature he is always the male. Artistic creation
consists in the systematic transformation of the thing given in accordance with
the mind of the creative personality. As God created the world after his own
image, so does the artist create his work. He gains a new value out of infinity —
i.e.9 he opposes himself to infinity, to what seems to him the unruly flood of
phenomena, arranges what was disorderly, divides, achieves a new order. That
which fascinates us in great works of art is the triumph of mind over material.
Turner consumed Nature instead of experiencing it. He made use of his paint
ing for those misty initial stages of thought which higher natures work out in their
heads, and in the process he hit the superficial characteristics of the motive like a
bad dramatist who has chanced on a good idea. He expressed himself prema
turely, before he had condensed his material ; and as soon as he saw his hasty
memoranda on canvas or paper they exercised a suggestive reflex influence upon
him, enticing him to ephemeral completions of this ephemeral condition. He
did not conquer his material ; he played with it. His connection with Nature
was a flirtation in which Nature was never taken captive. He had not the strong
fervour of the man who consciously applies all his strength to a worthy task, but
was an essentially feminine spirit, loquacious, coquettish, charming in trifles,
intent on surface and not on depth. He saw in Nature what he shows us of
himself, a beautiful, scintillating aspect, born of a fleeting impression, and reflect-

94 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

ing the same. We are not unmoved by his works, especially if we let them pass
us on the wing. We divine what he desired to give, what he might perhaps
have been able to give, a world woven of vapour, adorned with beauties more
fragile than the art of his time, and presaging things which have now taken solid
form, since the victories of the painters of light. He has given us an embryonic
condition of this art, the divination of a dilettante. If we must associate him
with Impressionism, it must be as the passive constituent of this phenomenon.
Of the essential qualities which led up to the summits of this art he had but one —
receptiveness. " He had beauty's phases at his fingers' ends," says the most clear
sighted of his critics, " but not its causes." *

Turner's passive attitude to the exterior world, his conception of art as a
channel for the flood of phenomena, and not as a regulating, transmuting organ,

* This is Armstrong's brilliant conclusion :

" In the case of Turner, we cannot satisfy our aesthetic appetites as we do before" the Titian. The more
intimately we look into the texture and constitution of his pictures the less significant, the less stimulating in
themselves, do they grow, and the more imperative does the necessity become to look through them to some
thing beyond and comparatively external. Turner, in short, does not create, he adumbrates ; he does not
present original and concrete ideas of his own, he reproduces and illustrates existing things, playing with
them, indeed, and enhancing them, so far as imitation can enhance the thing imitated, arranging them anew,
for the most part with extraordinary sympathy and vigour, but seldom depending on the power innate in the
language he is using to carry his own emotions into the souls of his fellow creatures. But this last sentence
is ambiguous. As it stands it might be taken to suggest that he had the right emotion, but deliberately curbed
its expression. That is not my meaning. What I mean is that he was weakly endowed with that emotion,
and that it was kept down and hidden away by the overpowering strength of the passion he shared with
his great exponent, a passion for the external beauty of inanimate things. He was content to perceive and be
moved by that beauty. He felt no consuming demand to know its cause and use the knowledge for the
delving of new and self-existing forms of beauty out of the microcosm within himself. He watched pheno
mena and learnt them ; classed them and recombined them, with all kinds of personal modifications, exaggera
tions, and enhancements ; but he was not inquisitive into the why they produced the effects of beauty, sub
limity, repose, or horror which they did. He had beauty's phases at his fingers' ends, but not its causes. He
could show you bow trees, mountains, rivers, mists, even dews and frosts, adorned the earth, but the instinctive
grip of the uncompromising artist on the why, and the consequence of such a grip, the power to create
beauty without the help of immediate imitation, he only possessed in a limited degree.

" All this argument brings me round to what I said at starting, that Turner was a mediator rather than a
maker, that his instinct was towards explanation, illustration, and insistence rather than towards creation,
that his pictures exist for what they tell us rather than for what they are, and, consequently, that his achieve
ment must be measured, more than that of any other famous painter, by collation with free and pre-existing
beauty. He was no virtuoso. He never hung upon the charms of his instrument, coaxing it to make the
most of its essential and distinctive gifts and persuade the stander-by that no rival medium could pour
passion so richly from one human vessel to another. The sympathetic caress of a Giardini, the despotic
lunge and finger-sweep, alive with nerve and will, of a Stevens or a Gilbert, the balanced drag of a Metsu or
a Chardin, building up in ecstasy things which offered in their own substance the seeds of their own immor
tality, had no parallel in him. He kicked at the limitations of his medium, and employed a more willing
ingenuity in pushing on beyond it than in showing its native felicity. And to this, it must finally be said,
he owes the unprecedented worship he now enjoys. The multitude will never again understand the arts.
The probability is that as the generations pass and man creeps farther and farther away from his primitive
condition his comprehension of Nature's language, of those multitudinous signals by which the good of
things was made known to his young and eager sense, will slowly die away, until at the last a capricious criti
cism will be substituted for the old instincts, and a long succession of reactions for the logical development
of the great and simple ages of the world. Meanwhile the contest goes on between those who see beauty
but not its cause, and those who see both the one and the other. For the former art is imitation, reproduc
tion, illustration, selection, everything which involves the supremacy of the object and the humble obedience
— which is by no means the same thing as the deliberate self-suppression — of the artist ; for the latter it is
the creation of beauty by welding its elements — line, colour, sound, whatever sense can grasp — into an organic
whole, justifying its own existence by its share in the balanced order which controls all vitality. On the
result of the struggle between these two conflicting ideas depends the final verdict on the achievement of
Turner." ("Turner," by Sir Walter Armstrong; Thos. Agnew & Sons, London, 1902.)

TURNER 95

explains his productiveness. The most prolific geniuses do not approach him
in the extent of their output. Armstrong reckons some 21,000 pictures, draw
ings, and sketches, and among them " 2000 more or less finished works of art."
Compared with this mass of production, Reynolds' activity was a trifle. Turner
might be called the landscape manufacturer, a pendant to the class stigmatised by
Hogarth. Whether he made large profits, whether he was content with the
prestige of an original and his assurance of posthumous fame, and coveted no
public honours, whether his lasciviousness was more jealously concealed than Sir
Joshua's dignified egotism, are all secondary questions. Technological considera
tions are also of little moment beside this significant conception of his calling. To
seek an explanation in Turner's taste for water-colour would be to mistake effect for
cause. Constable's definition of the oil pictures as " large water-colours " does
not exhaust their defects. We could forgive Turner his sins upon canvas if he
made amends for them on paper. But the least exacting critic cannot accept
such atonement. The water-colours are more normal than the pictures. They
conform more organically to the history of this favourite branch of English art,
and the level of excellence in this subordinate art is so modest that Turner is
more impressive in this domain. But if we compare him with the greatest of
these " little masters," with John Cozens and Girtin, whose superiority he him
self honestly acknowledged, we shall find the same relation we have already noted
between his pictures and those of Wilson and Gainsborough. Here again he
replaces the essential elements in the tendencies of his predecessors by a hastiness
of conception which suggests a freer and more modern attitude, but lacks all
thoroughness. Thornbury's superficial dictum that " Girtin was a great artist
and Turner a great poet " ' sufficiently indicates the sphere of Turner's
effects. I think, however, that Turner was certainly less inclined to encumber
the delicate structure of his water-colours with his grotesque fancies. Their
hastiness ensures their primitive harmony, and their unpretentiousness spares
them that sharp antagonism which is evoked by the pictures. But how slight
are the spoils of the patient souls who have waded through the sea of papers
in the cellars of the National Gallery ! The same schema on every
wall; the same indications of promise in every sheet, and always the
same disappointment. We imagine we are approaching the soul of the chameleon,
and only find a new receipt. Turner's joke at a party, when the salad was
handed, that a Turner could be made by admixture of the mustard sauce
with the green of the leaves and the red of the beetroot, was cruel earnest.
I prefer his " Liber Studiorum " to his coloured drawings. The tone of the aqua
tint has more vitality than the variegated tints of the water-colours, and the
charm of Turner in his early period is more apparent here than anywhere else.
We must pass over all the fantastic motives, and those that incline to classicism,
for these show the artist's weaknesses even more glaringly than the pictures.
But the purely landscape motives, such as Nos. 37 and 43, where his treatment of
light is more convincing than in his most brilliant pictures, the View of Basle
(No. 43), with the rich atmosphere, &c., contain enduring beauties, while in some
very dry drawings a certain satisfaction is to be had in the truth which is so
distressingly lacking elsewhere. Of course the object Turner had in view when he
prepared the book, one which itself reveals volumes concerning the man, is no
more accomplished here than in the pictures he had hung between the two
• " Life of J. M. W. Turner," London, 1899, p. 64.

96 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

Claudes. Beside the " Liber Veritatis " the " Liber Studiorum " sinks to the level
of cheap literature, and this in the face of what the English critic rightly calls an
unfair rivalry, by which reproductions of Claude's works, collected together
without his knowledge and without his supervision, indeed, several generations
after his death, were brought into competition with a series prepared with the
greatest care by Turner himself. The " Liber Veritatis " reads like a pastoral
poem. The tender love-story of Daphnis and Chloe sounds between the lines.
Other passages are like an epic of foreign lands and peoples and their strange
fates. Ruskin was distressed to find no natural history in this book. He praises
the poetry in Turner's descriptions of travel.

In the later drawings and sketches, again, the monochromes are superior to the
polychromes. There are one or two fascinating things among the Wanderings
by the Seine, the originals of which are preserved in the National Gallery. The
St. Denis of the second series, published in 1835 — the river with the silhouettes
of the people in the foreground, the dark masses of houses on the bank and
the cathedral in the distance — shows the magic of which Turner was capable
when he was not a conscious magician and was not seduced by his palette. The
famous sketch of his latest period, A Pilot Boat, in the National Gallery, needed
only to have been carried a shade further to become a masterpiece, and it was not
by chance that the painter executed it in plain sepia. His pleasure in the arabesque
of his brush-stroke was as dangerous to him as the allurements of his facile colour.
When he was stippling his minute perspectives he thought first of the stipple,
then of the perspective. Hence many of his landscape drawings look like half-
effaced topographical maps. The spectator is no longer able to keep the mean
ing of the signs together. In many of the panoramas we know that the sub
ject is a landscape merely by some detail quite outside the technical structure.
The technique is ornamental before it fulfils its natural purpose. It becomes
that " infernale commodite de la brosse " which Delacroix dreaded, which never
fails to expose every painter to mannerism who does not set the concentration of
expression before him as his safest guide. The well-known story of the landscape
that was hung upside down may or may not be true. It was certainly possible.
There are plenty of late Turners which might be so hung without any material
injury to the effect, while there are still in these days many amateurs whose
insistence on the ornamental in painting leads them to accept this anecdote as a
criterion of mastery.

Like the landscape painter Gainsborough, Turner left many fragments at his
death. After Hogarth's universal form, compact as a cannon-ball, came Wilson,
a weaker spirit, who had to content himself with a reflection of his age. He owes
his harmony to his incapacity for resistance. The form of his time was solid
enough to carry him. In Gainsborough the same age warred in vain against
the perception of a modern mind. It succumbed. But its defeat did not give
victory. The pliancy of the rococo master " malgre lui," who examines Nature
and Art for favourite motives and gives himself up to selfless enthusiasm did not,
and could not, evolve the new synthesis. The new man had to make tabula rasa of
rococo, had to withdraw into himself once for all, to be alone with the fervour
of his emotion, to accomplish the creative act of a new form for his age. Gains
borough longed to do so. He thirsted after consciousness ; he did not want to
give forth the sounds evoked by the age from his susceptibility, but to evoke
sounds himself. He sought after a new birth of the cosmos, and turned to the

TURNER 97

master who had made a like venture with success some hundred years before.
His work is a fragment to which the warm impulse of life clings, and it could be
no more. Turner followed. The development was obscured. For a moment
it seemed as if the age had made a prodigious leap forward. Turner began with
Wilson, and, if we are to credit English enthusiasts, he ended at the zenith of
that new art unborn at his birth. But he gives only a fantastic prophecy of
what was coming, a presage which reddened the skies, but left it uncertain whether
the red heralded morning or evening. He failed to announce the basis on which
the new art was to rise, and contributed no serviceable building-stone himself.
That which he announced was subject for grave forebodings. Should the new
structure really serve merely for the intoxication of inferior minds ? Would
the new masters show themselves as treacherous to the old as Turner to Claude ?
Would they interpret Nature just as coarsely, deal as hastily and as heartlessly
with art ? But eyes steeled by contemplation of Hogarth's lofty art can with
stand the dazzling effect of Turner's aerial witchery. One needs but the standard
given by development from its earliest beginnings to recognise that the novelty is
merely apparent. If we break through the convenient mist which will only keep
back the most uncritical we find the old futilities, once more the rococo. Not,
indeed, the friend or the foe of struggling predecessors, not the rococo of Wilson
and Gainsborough ; more modern, seeking to deal with God's sun as the peaceful
architectural painters of the eighteenth century dealt with their broken columns.
A false rococo ; it forfeited the body, and lost both form and emotion ; born, not of
desire, but of necessity, the makeshift of painter-writers. The product was not
even Turner's own. Other dexterous painters had been before him, who attempted
to replace strong forms by feeble ideas, and gave a more facile interpreta
tion of Hogarth's variety. It is the rococo of Fuseli and Stothard,* which
had matured another and no less suggestive variant in Blake ; incapable of
treating pure realities, it took refuge in mysticism. It was this develop
ment, not that comprised in Wilson, to which Turner belonged. He must,
indeed, be reckoned among the men of the present. He inaugurated that
series of problematic figures who did not open the way to modern art, but
who threatened to close it. They seek to show their modernism by turning
away from the law of their predecessors, and have deluded the present with the
belief that their arbitrary notions are the fulfilment of the new law. Each of the
countries which have contributed to modern development has produced several
such personages. Each has its special type of degenerate. But the essential
fallacy is always the same : the supposed extension of the domain of art by
tendencies lying outside its boundaries. The danger lies in the popular prestige
of thesp pseudo-moderns. Not only do they usurp the place of more useful
beings, but they infect the whole region. Their errors are more prolific than
the wisdom of the great masters. Among all the variants, the Turner problem
is the most complicated, and therefore contains the greatest dangers. The
worship of originality characteristic of our age, which delights in novelty, acclaims
the most extravagant orgies here. The aureole gains in splendour from an extremely

* In his best pictures, among which I do not include the famous Northamptonshire decoration,
Stothard is greatly superior to Turner, who made use of him just as he made use of Wilkie. Com
pare his Sans Souci in the National Gallery (No. 1829) with Turner's so-called Bird-Cage in the
Tate Gallery (No. 507). In spite of its crudity how much more sincere is the " dix-huiticme
siecle " effect in the Stothard, how much sounder the colour ! Turner's scene is like a caricature of
Watteau.

VOL. I N

98 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

pliant schema, which does not operate like the Bocklin cliche (the German variant),
with premises easily recognisable as false, but appeals to a stronger gymnastic of
culture and more delicately attuned organs of sensation. The problem here lies,
not in the manner, but in the degree of effect. Turner, in fact, expressed him
self artistically. He made use of artistic means for non-artistic ends. He was
really a luministe, familiar with the phenomena of the atmosphere, who knew
how to turn them to account, and who had, as Dayes said, " a superficial notion
of form," but nevertheless a notion of form on which he played spontaneously
without any perceptible reserve of underlying emotion. The difference
between the invention of a man who has sublime things to tell us, and uses a
system of complicated effects for the purpose, and an eccentric who wishes to
amaze us, and perhaps himself, and who builds up a no less complicated structure for
the purpose, is not very clear from a distance. The less legible art becomes to
the eye of the layman, the more easily does the burlesque succeed. There is no
fantastry in which the fantastic cannot discover a meaning, and all the rest depends
merely upon how much such fantastic persons will write and print in order to
transform their personal idea into general suggestion. Turner's burlesque had
this peculiarity, that the parody was written before the original.

TURNER. SOLWAY MOSS. (AFTER THE ETCHING.)

CONSTABLE

Dcniquc sit quid YIS
simplex duntaxat ct unum. — HORACE.

ENGLAND'S successful leap in a direction which had escaped the versatile artist
who seemed to have embraced every side of art was more or less contemporary
with Turner. Nothing could be more remarkable than the fact that England had
room for a Constable at the moment when she had produced Turner, the most
bewildering result of her fundamentally erroneous conception of art, the richest
type of her poverty. It is impossible to imagine a stronger contrast. We cannot
indicate more strikingly what is unconditionally allied to great art, what is un
conditionally remote from it, than by the names of the two contemporaries. The
exemplification is so striking because Turner draped the inartistic in the most
enchanting robes, and Constable presented the artistic in the simplest guise.

Constable's few references to the colleague who was held up to him, not by
Ruskin alone, as a being enthroned on unattainable heights, are full of respect,
and show the same self-effacement as his reverence for Reynolds, his dependence
upon Stothard, and his estimate of Fuseli. We find it difficult in these days to
understand such mildness, especially in a man capable of such healthy and inde
pendent work. We are accustomed to less eclectic geniuses, whose fidelity to
their chosen task justifies the bluntness of their judgments upon other aims and
tendencies ; we are distrustful of those who profess to understand everything, and
doubt whether their indulgence to others is compatible with the necessary stern
ness to themselves. Nowhere is good-nature more akin to weakness than in art.

But Constable's judgments were not inspired merely by good-nature. He could
be pungent enough about those whose work had no redeeming qualities. His
attitude to art differed from that of his contemporaries, and the gentleness of his
criticism is a symptom of this attitude. His relation was freer. He was less dependent
on the productions of others than Turner, less so even than Gainsborogh, and much
less so than Wilson. He was the first artist since Hogarth who looked upon
painting as a purely instinctive manifestation. He was more instinctive, more
direct than Hogarth ; indeed, it may be said of him that no one before him had
dealt so naturally with art. For the majority of his compatriots painting was a
charming and profitable business connected with a life of comfort, a holiday
enjoyment for the poor, a luxury for the rich, a thing bearing no true relation
to the realities of life, but giving man an illusion to support him in the seriousness
of his existence. The illusion had a thousand degrees, embracing not merely the
higher and richer fields of sentimentality, but playing upon all the registers of
eclecticism. Art was to be beautiful above all things, and beauty was what w.is found
agreeable in the art of the old masters. The period of the portraitists had striven
to establish this in every shade. English art possessed a reflection of the Dutch
men, a reflection of the Spaniards and of the Italians. To this store Turner
had added a reflection of Nature— creating the instructive landscape. He

ioo THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

had painted romantic scenery, adding appropriate figures calculated to anthropo-
morphosise the character of the scenery. Constable took no part at all in any
of this process. He never painted for the love of good painting or of beautiful
Nature. His art is more elementary. " When I sit down to make a sketch from
Nature the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture."*
No eclecticism, evidently ! No breath of an alien art came between the
individual and Nature. He carried this so far that many of his contemporaries
questioned his title to be considered an artist, even when they praised his pictures.
They thought there was something in Constable essentially different from all they
had hitherto accounted art. He was to them a child of Nature of a peculiar dis
position, who substituted truth for beauty, and made amends by his sincerity for
his inability to respond to the traditional demands of art. Bazalgette, the French
translator of Leslie's biography, has recently noted this attitude of the painter.
In his charming preface he speaks of Constable's " souci minimum du style."
He thinks that the Englishman looked upon Nature as mistress, on his art —
" produit direct de la terre " — as servant, and that he laid hold of reality for its
own sake, " non pour le parti qu'un peintre peut en tirer en le deformant." f
Such a conception might easily have led to a naturalism " sans phrase," against
which no one, indeed, protested more vigorously than Constable himself. The
painter of the Hay-Wain gave us new forms, but not new aesthetics. His art
was as remote as possible from Ruskin's natural history ideals, and was, in contrast
to that of Turner, system in the best sense. It did not reveal certain hitherto
unnoted aspects of a given object — what we suppose to be this is either illusive
or unimportant — but simply variations of the beautiful, which is eternal, like
Nature, to which Horace addressed his odes and Goethe owed his inspiration. In
principle it did not differ from the art proclaimed by the official father of English
painting. In the summer of 1813 the famous Reynolds Exhibition took place,
inaugurated by an official banquet which the as yet unknown miller's son attended
with some pride. Leslie gives a fragment of a letter in which Constable writes
enthusiastically to his betrothed of the presidential speech. " Although the
style of Sir Joshua Reynolds," he says, " might differ in appearance from the
style of those specimens of art which are considered the nearest to perfection in
the ancient Greek sculpture, and the productions of the great schools of Italy,
yet his works were to be ranked with them, their aim being essentially the same —
the attainment of Nature with simplicity and truth." J The lofty words no
longer seem very applicable to the subject of this convivial enthusiasm, but
they might be used very aptly in praise of the man who accepted them so
unquestioningly, recommending his betrothed to go to the exhibition very
often, in order to get an idea of the true nature of painting from these magnifi
cent works. For in them was to be found " the finest feeling of art that ever
existed."

The illustrious President of the Academy would hardly have returned the com
pliment. He would have been no more disposed to recognise the simple landscape
painter's relation to that high art of which he accounted himself a representative
than he had been in the case of Hogarth. The relation was very similar. A

* " Life and Letters of John Constable," by C. R. Leslie (new ed. ; London, Chapman & Hall,
1896).

" John Constable d'apres les Souvenirs recueillis par C. R. Leslie." Paris, Floury, 1905.
t Leslie, p. 49.

CONSTABLE. 101

kindred strength of personality, enabling them to preserve the originality of their
outlook, to see with their own eyes and act upon this vision, brings Hogarth
and Constable together, and places them outside the official school of their
native land. In spite of this, or, indeed, because of this, they are the more vigour-
ously English. They gave us something that could only have arisen in England,
and the product, relatively independent of the Continental movement, forms an
indispensable constituent of European art. Within this relationship Hogarth's
aggressive character and Constable's so-called naturalism appear as secondary
tendencies, governed both by contemporary influences and by the special tempera
ments of the two, and this difference is but a superficial veil over their common
work at the same ideal. The objective of the one was the rococo, with which his
contemporary compatriots had a more or less illegitimate connection ; the other
accomplished the liberation that had been prepared, and steered the little craft
of the new art from the sandbanks to the open sea, where only it could prove its
stoutness.

102 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

CONSTABLE AND CLAUDE

Constable also followed a tradition. " A self-taught artist," he said, " is one
taught by a very ignorant person " ; and the sentences with which he prefaced
a series of four lectures in 1836 on the history of landscape painting are very
typical :

" I am here on behalf of my own profession, and I trust it is with no intrusive
spirit that I now stand before you ; but I am anxious that the world should be
inclined to look to painters for information on painting. I hope to show that ours
is a regularly taught profession ; that it is scientific as well as poetic, that imagina
tion alone never did and never can produce works that are to stand by a com
parison with realities ; and to show, by tracing the connecting links in the history
of landscape painting, that no great painter was ever self-taught."

An old master might have said these words ; and were such truths manifest to the
present generation, were all agreed with the preacher of these golden axioms as to
the double function of art, scientific and poetic, could all see therein a regularly
taught profession, which should purify imaginative power, our modern culture
would have made a gigantic advance. That the speaker should have been Constable,
that the word Nature is absent from these curt categorical sentences, not because
he was not thinking of Nature, but because the thought seemed to him a matter
of course, should give food for reflection to those who insist on Constable's
naturalism.

Constable, then, relied upon predecessors just as Hogarth did, but not at all
after the manner of the school of Reynolds. A circle of geniuses reveals itself in
him, becoming greater and greater the further we penetrate into the nature of
the artist. But whereas the spirits of those who were turned to account by the
others rise with angry gestures against the productions of their epigoni, we seem
to see Constable himself within the circle, and those who helped him glance
kindly at him, almost as if thanking him for what he owes them.

No name was so often on his lips as that of Claude, the same Claude Turner
aspired to rival. The occasions when in his youth he visited Sir George Beau
mont's fine collection were red-letter days, and even in his latest period he always
returned to the master with fresh enthusiasm. Yet there is no picture by him
which bears any external resemblance to any of Claude's works. We never find the
famous stately buildings in any of his landscapes. No nymph, no daintily aproned
Italian rests in the shadow. She would seem as extraordinary here as if we were
really to meet her during a country walk in England. No Biblical story is enacted
by the figures, no scene from mythology. A cart with reapers still in the vapour
of the field where they have toiled till they are weary, horses towing a barge along
a canal, resting or working men and animals — these are the only episodes in his
pictures, besides that which goes on in a landscape irrespective of man's collabora
tion. And this to him was the chief thing. Yet his likeness to Claude is appreciable.
It reveals itself to him who does not look upon the nixies and ruins in the great
Frenchman's pictures as the most important things, but can pierce beyond details to
Claude's organism. To him the artist of the " Liber Veritatis " appears rejuvenated
in many an early work of Constable's, making him say that if such a spirit had

CONSTABLE AND CLAUDE 103

arisen in the time of Constable he would have painted in the manner of the
English miller's son. The truth is the same in each ; not, of course, the objective
truth. This is impossible, not merely because Constable lived two centuries
later than Claude, and had a correspondingly greater experience of humanity
at his disposal. How insignificant is this progress which has brought Nature in
general nearer to man, as compared with the knowledge which a great artist
evolves from himself ! Impossible, rather, because two such complete per
sonalities, were they contemporaries, or divided by centuries, would never fix
their eyes on the same things, even though they were both landscape painters —
nay, even if they both painted the same landscape. It is not realism, but that
Veritas so aptly linked with Claude's life-work, which reappears in Constable.
Nothing impresses us so strongly in the Frenchman's pictures as the harmony
between the work and the soul of the artist. Claude is so clearly manifested in his
pictures that our memory carries away no actual landscape, but something higher,
the idea of a marvellously inspired humanity, which, inversely, we are no longer
able to connect with the customary realities of a landscape. The form is above
reality, as thought is above the body. The part played by Poussin and Claude in
the history of landscape is of great importance, but this historical consideration
is but a small matter in comparison with the importance of these spiritual heroes
to the development of human idealism. The only possible continuation of
Titian and Veronese was through victory over their glorious materialism.
Their splendour could not be increased ; but it could be spiritualised.
Constable had this spiritual value in his mind when he called Poussin's
littl.e Phocion landscape, which had also stirred Gainsborough's enthusiasm,
" full of religion and moral feeling." The Englishman's realism was not
disposed to travel further on this road. Claude's lofty spirituality is as im
possible in our age as the simplicity of Mozart's exquisite poetry. We no
longer possess the organs for such contemplativeness. The alertness necessary
in our age makes us too vigilant, directs our minds too inexorably to concentrated
thought, makes us too full of doubts and yearnings to keep our souls as unruffled
as the pellucid surface in which Claude's humanity is mirrored ; and when
contemporaries seek to give us similar impressions we are not unjustly sus
picious of their simplicity, which cannot or will not give us what it should,
while their completeness lacks the unsophisticated Veritas. But Constable was
able to steep his soul in his work after the manner of Claude, to become one with
his painting, and to penetrate its forms so intimately that a spirit seems to emanate
from his pictures too, which is no longer landscape, but aims at higher concep
tions. His final result is also the idyl, differing, indeed, from Claude's magic
world, and still more remote from the eighteenth century, which set the idyl above
everything, and because it had no affinity for that of the old masters, created a
new one, smaller than Claude's wide fields. It transformed the spacious Nature

• Presented to the nation by Sir George Beaumont in 1826. It represents a wooded region near
a city. In the foreground a man in a plain robe, supposed to be Phocion, is washing his feet at a
public fountain, as if to indicate the purity and simplicity of his life. Bazalgette fails entirely to under
stand Constable's remark. " Que peut bien £tre un paysage moral ? " he asks in amazement. " On ne voit
pas trop comment le peintre revolutionnaire et realiste uniquement soucieui de verite qu'etait Constable,
peut a ce point admirer 1'academique et froid Nicolas Poussin. II ctait vraisemblablement seduit par
1'intense harmonic de couleurs et de composition qu'offre parfois le peintre des Arcadies." This is a
typical confirmation of the naturalism I have just ascribed to many of Constable's worshippers, which
leads inevitably to a denial of his art.

io4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

of the classic landscape painters into a well-kept garden, and was compelled to re
present the idyllic by tender groups of daintily dressed persons. Constable could
not call back either the spirituality of the one or the tenderness of the other.
It is because, more determined than his compatriots, he gave up all idea of reach
ing Eldorado by the road of the old masters, because he did not attempt to make
idyls, but bore within him what even in these times of ours we might call the
emotions of an idyllist, that he succeeds in producing an impression akin to that
produced by Claude upon our minds. His landscapes too have the inestimable
gift of shedding peace, of breathing calm ; and they achieve this without raising
a wall between us and our age, without deceiving our senses, but rather the reverse,
since they enable us to recognise what is around us better than the cursory glance
of the hasty observer can do. This power of perception was not derived from Claude.
Constable looked only with his own eyes, and took in other things than the classic
painter. But that high example taught him to keep the same equilibrium in what he
saw afresh. And it is, no doubt, chiefly this balance of parts that makes his idyls
so precious. The life-history of the man corresponds with his art. It glides along
gently as a cloudless summer day. No shepherd's biography could be simpler. A
peaceful childhood in his father's mill, where the boy learned to watch the clouds,
and outside in the woods, where he became familiar with the trees. A worthy father,
with the usual distrust of the artist's calling ; a no less worthy and highly intelligent
mother, more lenient to her son's secret yearnings. A long engagement — an
inevitable complication ! — to a lovable girl. Maria Bicknell was the daughter
of a dignified lawyer, who, like Saskia's guardian before him, did not take kindly to
the idea of the miller's son as his son-in-law, and the granddaughter of a still
more inexorable clergyman of considerable means. The obdurate old man's
money-bags threatened the happiness of the loving couple. Young Constable
further embroiled himself with the purse-proud cleric by a malicious caricature,
and Miss Bicknell was warned that she would be promptly disinherited if she
married the good-for-nothing painter. She hesitated to incur the penalty,
not for lack of sympathy with her John, but because it would have been rash,
and contrary to all the family traditions. They must wait, and John resigned
himself good-humouredly to the inevitable. The love-letters cover five years,
till he was forty and she thirty. The poems and letters of Covvper, " the poet of
religion and Nature," a favourite author of both, reflect the emotions of the
lovers. " I believe," wrote Constable, " we can do nothing worse than indulge
in useless sensibility " ; and his betrothed exhorts him not to sacrifice concentra
tion in his work to love. As was the engagement, so was the marriage — twelve
years of undimmed happiness, brought to a close by the death of the wise and
loving wife. Not quite ten years had passed, spent by the widower in quiet
resignation, surrounded by beloved children and faithful friends, when he died
at the age of sixty-one, the doctors being unable to name any specific disease as
the cause of death.

The course of this worthy existence had but one thing momentous about it :
art. But art was nothing extraordinary in Constable's life. Unlike the activities
of many great men, it did not manifest tendencies totally opposed to the rest of
his being ; it was in rare but literal harmony with the rest of his personality.
There was nothing abnormal about it. Painting was Constable's natural intellectual
form of existence, and we could no more conceive of him apart from it than we
could conceive of any cultured person without their thoughts and emotions.

CONSTABLE AND CLAUDE 105

" Painting is with me but another word for feeling," he wrote to his kind and
faithful friend the Rev. John Fisher.* Hence the impossibility of putting
any sort of constraint upon his Muse, his inability to complete portraits he
had undertaken for the sake of money — portraits he left unfinished, to the
stupefaction of his friends and even of his betrothed. Hence the fact that he
was no more successful with religious pictures than Hogarth. Every step outside
the path of pure instinct was prejudicial to him. This path led him to paint
what he had about him, what he loved, and only to paint when he wished.
The originals of his pictures lie within the space of some three miles, on the
banks of the Stour, at Bergholt, and in Dedham Vale, where he spent his youth,
and whither he always returned. It was by no means a rugged Nature, but
a cultivated landscape, with well-tilled fields and trim woods, with farms and
windmills. " Those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful : that is, I
had often thought of pictures of them before I ever touched a pencil." The
phrase is characteristic, and recalls Gainsborough's assertion that this same
East Suffolk had made him a painter.

Gainsborough and Constable were natives of the same district, and their
common home seems to have given them a certain kinship. There are many
affinities between the view of Dedham by Gainsborough and Constable's pictures
of the same motive. Constable's earlier renderings more particularly suggest
his predecessor. The earliest of these is the beautiful little sketch of 1802 in
the South Kensington Museum (No. 124), which the artist used some twenty-six
years later as the basis of a large and comparatively detailed picture, far removed
indeed from Gainsborough. In the sketch Constable had caught something of
his compatriot's dreaminess. In the motive he is differentiated by this, that he
does not, like Gainsborough, set a few trees in the foreground through the foliage
of which we look, as upon the stage, in order to make the distant view of the
light background more effective, but leaves the whole plain open. We need
not inquire which of the two renderings comes nearer to Nature. Nothing is more
likely than that Gainsborough really found the trees thus conveniently disposed.
Constable's choice was more natural, because he avoided every sort of theatrical
effect, even such as Nature herself provided, and left a wider field for effects, not of
Nature, but of Art. His landscape compelled him to develop a richer play of
linear and colouristic values than Gainsborough, who was content with the simple
opposition of the two planes. Constable's Dedham of 1809 in the National
Gallery (No. 1822) is still closer to his predecessor as regards motive. The point of
view is obviously almost identical, save that Constable kept rather more to the
right, and therefore the church tower, which in the elder man's picture comes
nearer to the left, stands in the centre of his composition. Nevertheless the pic
tures as a whole resemble each other but little. We almost feel as if Gainsborough
had painted the landscape lying on the ground, and Constable while flying over
it. The playfulness of the older painter is in even stronger contrast to the large
masses of the younger man, who achieves far greater variety, in spite of his incom
parably broader handling. They remain akin in the intimacy of effect, the
indescribable sense of well-being. But this sensation which attracts us in Gains
borough appears on a much higher level, so to speak, in Constable. It does not
fascinate us at once ; it is interwoven with a web of more neutral phenomena ; but
the effect is all the stronger when we have once grasped it. The relation to

* Leslie, p. 105.
VOL. I O

io6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

the beloved predecessor was not always so free as in the example we have been
considering. Constable studied Gainsborough conscientiously. There are many
landscapes dating from the first years of the century which clearly reveal this
influence. On Barnes Common, in the National Gallery (No. 1066), with the
famous windmill, the Lake Windermere in the Cheramy collection, &c., look like
enlargements of small things by Gainsborough. The affinity persists at a later
period, long after Constable had conquered independence. The advantages of
the central motive struck him also. The Hay-Wain, the Cornfield, the Valley Farm,
and others seem like free continuations of Gainsborough's landscapes. But the
sequel leaves the beginning far behind. Gainsborough never quite got rid of the
notion that landscape should be a background for something. He was always
thinking of a stage, and enclosed his central motive hermetically. Constable
opened his pictures, letting the light in from every side, and especially from above.
The whole world seems to have grown lighter, more fruitful, and richer in a decade
or two. Even the richness of those very elements which Gainsborough had in his
mind had increased. The opening up does not impair the mystery of Nature, it
does not banish poetry ; only that which is to be shown no longer lies so con
veniently in the way. Constable perceived that Nature never thinks of the lyrical
or dramatic when she distributes her mountains and valleys, her trees and meadows,
that all these dispositions are automatic, as soon as the richness is there which
seems thus to one, and otherwise to another, and that the only essential thing is to
create that fundamental cause of our delight in the world, richness.

Constable was the richer of the two. He had in himself, in his strong and
healthy activity, all that Gainsborough learned from tradition. He saw in a
tree a vehicle of more varied events than those which the romanticism of a rococo
master laid in its friendly shade. The tree lived out of its own vigour in its own
cosmos, not only in our fancy ; it was no concept, but an actual being. In his
last lecture at Hampstead he painted in playful words the fate of an ash which he
had drawn, and he was more in earnest than his listeners imagined when he
spoke as if he were dealing with the life-history of a person. " Many of my Hamp
stead friends," he said, " may remember this young lady at the entrance to the
village. Her fate was distressing, for it is scarcely too much to say that she died
of a broken heart. I made this drawing when she was in full health and beauty.
On passing some time afterwards I saw to my grief that a wretched board had
been nailed to her side, on which was written in large letters, ' All vagrants and
beggars will be dealt with according to law.' The tree seemed to have felt the
disgrace, for even then some of the top branches had withered. Two long spike
nails had been driven far into her side. In another year one half became paralysed,
and not long after the other shared the same fate, and this beautiful creature was
cut down to a stump just high enough to hold the board." The fanciful
words seem to me to show a more convincing feeling for Nature than all that
Ruskin extracted from Turner's documents. As we may well suppose, this kind of
Nature was not at all to the taste of Ruskin, who thought nothing so truly " high
art " as Turner's " real trees " and " real mountains." He was repelled by the
homely motives, or fell into the grotesque mistake of comparing Constable with
Berghem.f Constable was able to justify his simplicity. As he spoke of the tree, so

* Leslie, pp. 103-4.

t Leslie draws attention to the comparison, mentioning Constable's horror of everything connected
with Berghem.

CONSTABLE AND CLAUDE 107

he painted it. Not in such a manner as to stamp the rendering with a sentimental
sympathy ; this would have been somewhat after the fashion of the board on
the tree ; but rather with the solicitude of the portrait painter before a beloved
model. The two large water-colour studies of trees in the South Kensington
Museum (Nos. 1248 and 49) are treated with an exactitude of detail that recalls
Japanese masters, though the details never degenerate into the pettiness that marks
so many English nature-studies. We are shown all the characteristics of the tree —
the stem, the branches, down to the smallest twig, the foliage — and yet we see
before us a tree, and not a collection of its peculiarities. The greater richness
as compared with Gainsborough was, in fact, greater objectivity. Gainsborough
certainly did not love Nature less sincerely ; he may, indeed, have been more tender
to her. With Constable, on the other hand, we are less conscious of this love as
such than of its result. Benjamin West understood this when he said of the
study young Constable showed him, " You must have loved Nature very much
before you could have painted this." * In art, indeed, it is not so much
loving that is important as to have loved — i.e., the emotion which was strong
enough to become objective. We can refer the various degrees of excellence
in English artists from Hogarth onwards to the varying degrees of this
capacity for objectivity, and then, in spite of certain formal resemblances, we
shall see the essential difference between Constable and Gainsborough and
between Constable and Turner almost palpably before us. Of the three,
Turner's emotion was the most superficial ; it lay in his finger-tips. Con
stable's was in the deepest recesses of his nature. The essential similarity of
Constable and Claude, in spite of all their formal difference, reveals the same
kind of conception. As in the case of all delicate things, we can only arrive at a
clear conception of the relation between the two by a circuitous route.

Claude was Constable's noblest affection, the figure he approached with the
purest feelings, as the youth approaches his first love. He worshipped him from afar,
and the consciousness of a kindred emotion sufficed him as the price of his self-
surrender. It was this Platonic relation only which proved fruitful. Turner's
egotism resulted merely in a convention " a la " Claude, and carried the imitator
far away from the spirit of his exemplar. Constable's unconventional manner
struck Delacroix as even superior to Claude. On one occasion in an enthusiastic
eulogy of the Englishman, he asks whether after all some of Claude's landscapes
are not injured by the conventional character of certain trees in the foreground.!
We may be sure that Delacroix was not concerned here with the relative value
of different systems, but that he pronounced an absolute judgment. We
have to reach Claude's blooming Paradise over crumbling ruins. The thieves
who wanted to plunder the garden were fools enough to be content with the
debris.

* Leslie, p. 15.

t In his notes on "L'Ideal et le Realisme."

io8 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

CONSTABLE AND THE DUTCHMEN

Constable's relation to the Dutchmen was entirely different. He espoused
them, and the fruit of this union was a glorious art epoch that still endures. He
accomplished the task his contemporaries in Holland neglected. There the great
masters who had begun the conquest of landscape in Rembrandt's time had been
succeeded in the eighteenth century by a feeble race who had to suffer for the sins
of the subtle Italianisers, Berghem, Poelemberg, Moucheron, Karel du Jardin, &c.
Nothing of Van Goyen's and Ruysdael's realism remained. In obscure little
masters such as Dirk van der Laen, who extended into the nineteenth century, some
faint reflex of the great epoch still persisted,* more a curious relic than an earnest
of brighter things in the future. The vitality of Dutch painting had been ex
hausted, on the one hand in the rococo, on the other in classicism. It was a
remarkable dispensation that Constable, who had no greater reverence than for
Claude, should have re-established the healthy tendency which had been lost
through a mistaken conception of his favourite's influence. And it was a bene
ficent dispensation. For this disposition safeguarded the reaction from the
opposite extreme, and did not allow a sickly idealism to be followed by a no less
disastrous naturalism.

A whole volume might be devoted to setting forth in detail the part played by
Constable as the successor of the Dutchmen. C. J. Holmes has attempted
it, and has at least suggested the point of departure, f The limitations of
the Dutchmen lay in the specialised character of their painting. Constable
combined them. Holmes, of course, makes the boundaries of the Dutch school
too narrow. To bring his hero into stronger relief he minimises the importance
of the results achieved before him. It will not do to reproach a Cuyp, a Van
Goyen, a Van de Velde even with a shade of mannerism, least of all when one
sees in Wilson the revival of landscape, as does the author. He accuses these
great men of a lack of " true naturalism," and declares that Hobbema never
painted " a real oak," nor Van de Velde " a real sea." " Such criticism excites
distrust. It suggests that ill-considered naturalism of which I have already
spoken. To see in Constable the superlative degree of a conception
based solely upon objective truth to Nature is to deny his artistic gift. It
is only because he was able to transpose his naturalism into a thoroughly
concrete convention that he is important. And this convention relied mainly
on the laws of beauty taught us by the Dutchmen. They, according to
Holmes, were merely interesting craftsmen, and we can get nothing from them

* Dirk van der Laen, the author of the charming view of a country house in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum,
formerly ascribed to Vermeer of Delft. He lived from 1759 to 1829. The Cuyp tradition was carried on
into the nineteenth century by the brothers Strij, Kobell, and others.

t "Constable and his Influence on Landscape-painting " (A. Constable & Co., 1902), more especially in
the chapter that deals with Constable's predecessors. See also the same writer's shorter study in the Artist's
Library, edited by L. Binyon (London, 1901).

CONSTABLE AND THE DUTCHMEN 109

which would not be better learnt from Claude, Titian, or Rubens.* Holmes
imagined that here he was following up his hero's train of thought in the
lecture where he enumerated four memorable works as landmarks in landscape
painting : Titian's Peter Martyr, in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Poussin's
Deluge, in the Louvre, Rubens' Rainbow landscape in the Wallace Collection,
and Rembrandt's Mill, in the Marquis of Lansdowne's collection. Leslie's
notes do not enable us to exhaust Constable's reasoning. But that the
characteristic landscapes of the Dutchmen are rightly excluded from this parti
cular category is no argument against their importance. The criterion, which
reckons with four names in art, avoids all differentiation, and precludes a con
sideration of landscape as such no less than the appreciation of gifts less supreme
than those of Titian, yet indispensable in a fuller survey of art-history. The
Titian, destroyed in the fire of 1867, is known to us only by the excellent old copy.
Constable himself had never seen the original, and he might more fitly have cited
Giorgione's Concert Champhre, which he knew. Development shows the struggle
made by painting for her own house, when she freed herself from decoration in the
architect's sense in order to become decorative in the painter's sense. The stages
from Rembrandt to Constable are not, of course, so long as those from Rembrandt
back to the Venetians. But our recognition of the great pioneers should not
blind us to the fact that the achievements of the seventeenth-century Dutchmen
were no less necessary than theirs. We are easily led to depreciate them from
the outset, because we view the process of development from the Venetians
to Poussin and Rubens at a greater distance ; it is like a monument rising far
from us on an open plain, whereas the structure of the " little " Dutchmen still
shelters us. We may compare the various participants in the work of develop
ment to the phases of great revolutions. A Titian, a Rubens, a Poussin accom
plished the personal, the momentous act of history. Spain put forth Velazquez,
and Holland Rembrandt, as champions. All these heroes of painting were
worlds in themselves, self-contained programmes, in whom participation in the
general history of development seems subordinate to the individual develop
ment they themselves experienced. They decreed freedom, and the nations
listened to them with glowing enthusiasm. They blew up tradition. Each of
them left ruins behind him. The school from which they sprang fell to
pieces like the shell of the egg from which life has emerged. To wish that
the world might consist solely of such heroes is unreasonable. Were this to
happen, art would consume itself, and the world would gain nothing from it,
because it would lack the norm necessary to get at the right distance from the
summits. We owe the possibility of supporting ourselves upon these to smaller
people, who repaired the net torn by the others, and so made a place in it for the
new. They are the peaceful revolutionaries, who take internal affairs upon
themselves, so to speak, and organise all the branches of the new regime with
industry and intelligence. We should scarcely hesitate to sacrifice all Rembrandt's
contemporaries for his sake, but this is a resolution we only make after having
possessed them, and we could not deny that Rembrandt alone could not replace them.
The oft-repeated assertion that he contained all the others in himself is grotesquely
superficial. Van Goyen, the father of a whole generation of glorious landscape
painters, the grandfather of a Hobbema,who carried over the heritage of the great

• Holmes, p. 44.

no THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

period to the eighteenth century, stands as firmly on his own feet as Rembrandt
himself. If we made his smaller stature a reproach to him, it would be as if we
reproached the butterfly for being weaker than the lion. The public is still at
the puerile standpoint of Fromentin, who forgot Van Goyen, not in Rembrandt,
but in Jacob Ruysdael. Among the landscape painters there is many another great
one who is not swallowed up in the shadow of the painter of the Syndics. Cuyp
is nearer to Poussin than to his own great countryman. Potter's realism is the
exact opposite of Rembrandt's art. It would be foolish to look for the elegance
of a Terborch in Rembrandt, and we give but a faint idea of the greatest of the
Dutch painters of interiors, who was also the greatest of the landscape painters,
when we describe him as the pupil or the descendant of the mighty Amsterdam
master. Yet all of them, from Vermeer back to Van Goyen, bore the impress of
Rembrandt ; all were his debtors. But the ray each received from him was not his
vital principle ; it was an addition to his own property. All these and many another
exist beside, and not through him. Each one of the two dozen names that are dear to
us indicates a locality in the Holland of art, where Rembrandt towers aloft, a giant
in Lilliput. And each one of these localities is an individual cultivated organism,
lying picturesquely between rivers, canals, and meadows. If we pass over the land in
a balloon, they may seem insignificant ; one may look very much like the other,
and very unlike the one Colossus who rises suddenly like a mountain in flat sur
rounding country. Among the " stay-at-home people," as Constable called the
Dutch, Rembrandt is the least Dutch, not because he was of another stock, but
because he was so great. That in him which may reasonably be called Dutch is
such a fragment of his being that it does not explain him. No one ever remained
so close to Nature and at the same time rose so high above it. To understand
his greatness we must look at it from below. If we do this as becomes our own
littleness, the other localities we shall note in his neighbourhood will reveal many
exquisite things, and we shall see with amazement how community with the others
tends but to increase his own variety. This, I think, was Constable's attitude
to the Dutchmen. His method was not a cheap, summary criticism, which has
eyes only for the greatest, and for this very reason fails to grasp it altogether ; yet
his taste was severe, for the Dutch mannerists found no mercy from him ; but
with this severity he combined an instinct for the Dutch spirit, and thence a
mind open to all its manifestations. He bears eloquent testimony to this in
his lectures, still more in his pictures. Constable was not of Rembrandt's in
spired genus. The portrait of him by Gardner in the South Kensington Museum
at the age of twenty, and that in the National Portrait Gallery, painted by himself
a few years later, show a handsome young man of sympathetic but not especially
striking aspect, the same well-disposed personality that reveals itself in the love-
letters. Leslie's mediocre drawing of him in later life, and a study by Maclise,*
have bequeathed us a well-cut normal English head, that might belong to some
gentle scientist of a typically urban class. The passion of a Rembrandt did not
lurk behind that high, smooth forehead. And yet they were kinsmen, and kinsmen
by no means in a superficial and evasive degree. It was not, however, a relation
that could be termed an elective affinity. Constable had every possible respect
for the painter of the famous Mill. Yet we are conscious of a certain
note of reserve in his recognition. Constable was more deeply conscious of the
ravages wrought by Rembrandt in the English School than he would admit, and
* Both reproduced in Leslie's work.

CONSTABLE AND THE DUTCHMEN in

in his inmost heart there was perhaps a slight and almost unconscious resentment
against the great and ruthless master. The impetuosity of the giant alarmed
him. He loved clarity, the crystalline play of Claude, to \vhom Rembrandt would
certainly have been a sealed book. He wished to make his perception deep and
searching, to deal with all there is to see in Nature, but to go no further, to give
nothing that cannot be seen.

For this reason the other Dutchmen were nearer to him than Rembrandt.
Ruysdael stood next to Claude in his affections, and was in his opinion a genius
opposed, yet equal to the Frenchman. Cuyp, Jan Steen, even Pieter de Hoogh,
are more frequently cited by him than the father of Dutch painting. He com
mends them as " more artless." * Much as he admired the power of building up a
landscape out of chiaroscuro, success on these lines seemed to him rather a happy
accident than the certain norm for other architects. The art therein was to him too
much formulated principle to include all he saw in Nature. Here we come in
contact with one of the limitations of Constable, which not only contracted his
acsthetical perceptions, but also cast its shadow over his development as a
painter. The error of judgment is easily refuted, and Constable himself
abandoned it when he unconsciously approached Rembrandt on another side, as we
shall show. But we shall not get to the heart of the matter by hasty condem
nation of the weakness of his perception ; this would only furnish us with a cheap
reason for depreciating the master before we had grasped his high qualities.
Constable recoiled before Rembrandt's great decisions, because they seemed to
him to cut off a wealth of effects he found in Nature, the unobtrusiveness of which
appealed more to him, and, as he supposed, rightly enough from his own
standpoint, diminished the remoteness of the painter from the object. These
effects he found already indicated in those Dutchmen to whom he felt himself
more closely akin. He would, indeed, have been a simpleton had he sacrificed
the economy of his own temperament to Rembrandt's prestige.

Constable's relation to the Dutchmen does not depend for its importance on
the discovery by him of hitherto unknown artists. He was not the first who had
recognised forces other than Rembrandt in Holland. By name at least, the whole
of Dutch art was known to English collectors at the outset of his career. Even
Wilson is not to be referred solely to the rococo of the French. In him and in
George Lambert, too, we find traces of the best of the Dutchmen. In the next
generation Thomas Barker in particular continued that amalgamation of Wil-
sonian and Dutch tendencies inaugurated by Gainsborough. Turner had dis
covered Cuyp, and he repeated all the effects he noted in the fine examples of
English collections. While he was making his material softer and more liquid,
James Ward, his senior by several years, was subjecting his exemplars to a kind of
petrifying process, and giving an ominous foretaste of the realism of the Pre-
Raphaelites. For three years he toiled at a version of the famous Bull at The
Hague, until nothing remained of that freshness of Potter's which had triumphed
over all his elaboration. Old Crome approached Hobbema with more delicate
organs, and the side-glances he cast at Rembrandt the while taught him not a

* " The other great painters of the Dutch School were more artless ; so apparently unstudied, indeed, are
the worlcs of many of them — for instance, Jan Steen and De Hoogh — that they seem put together almost
without thought, yet it would be impossible to alter or leave out the smallest object or to change any part
of their light, shade, or colour without injury to their pictures — a proof that their art is consummate." (Leslie,
p. 391.) The inference as to Rembrandt is obvious.

ii2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

little. His brother-in-law Ladbroke and the other Norwich painters, Cotman,
&c., kept still more closely to their Dutch models. Calcott, called, like several
others of his calibre, the English Claude, was none the less an imitator of Cuyp
and of the Dutch marine painters. Nasmyth's waterfalls seem to his countrymen
like real Ruysdaels, and his Hobbemas fetched higher prices for a time than the
Dutch examples of that master. Holland, then, existed in England before Con
stable. But it is hardly too much to say that if all these evidences of familiarity
with Dutch art were to disappear suddenly from England, the aspect of European
art would not be sensibly affected. The relation of successors to predecessors,
broadly speaking, was in every case that which Turner demonstrated with greater
skill than the rest. The greater men took from the great masters of the past,
the smaller men from the smaller masters. No one added anything. But it
must be admitted that the little thieves were more reverent than the big ones,
and that a more sincere tradition was possible and had indeed arisen even in
Constable's youth as an outcome of Crome, Barker, Callcott, and Nasmyth, than
was yielded by Turner's reflections.

Constable's attitude to the illustrious school was quite different. What
delighted him in the old landscape-painters was the delicacy of their self-abandon
ment to Nature. He did not take the one or the other of them as his master,
did not paint animal-pieces a la Cuyp or scenery in the style of Ruysdael. He always
painted English landscape with English figures. And the term English is not to
be understood as designating a particular genre in the way in which we apply
it to English portraits, which have a certain specific character. Every one of the
places he depicted might be identified ; every detail might be recognised by con
temporaries did any such survive. It was not the motive, therefore, which Con
stable borrowed from the Dutchmen. This, indeed, plays no very momentous
part in his pictures. The same view of Dedham, the same spot at Hampstead,
or in his friend Fisher's park, recur constantly, and when he painted the lock with
the horse for the first time he probably seemed to himself a very fanciful person.
Yet he never repeated himself, and Turner's varied pictures seem a perpetual
monotony compared with his ; he was an inexhaustible inventor, not of situations
but of means whereby the effective in visible Nature might be transmuted into paint
ing. A section of a landscape of a few miles suffices to make us recognise with astonish
ment the immeasurable forces of the cosmos. As the art of an individual can only
grasp certain sides of this effectiveness, those corresponding to his inclinations and
capacities, it will penetrate the more deeply the more wisely its creator restricts
his field of observation at the outset. Expansions of this field are necessary,
to give the artist new chances, to refresh him. But every expansion of what
is given him from outside weakens him at the same time, because it compels
him to keep his most delicate powers in abeyance until the coarse rind of
the material has been pierced. It is hardly necessary to say, that what
may profitably be taken from without is not confined within the limits of
a particular landscape, but extends to a certain class of motives. The Dutch
were masters of this economy. They placed the deepening of their individual
manner above the many-sidedness of the material, and appealed to highly
cultivated emotions. Far-reaching competition drove the individual to special
isation in a narrow field. The country was small, and there were many
artists. They were compelled to live in close proximity. The culture which
compelled each not to differ from his neighbour by crude externals, but to

CONSTABLE AND THE DUTCHMEN 113

remain true to the intimate characteristics of the land, was sublime. Two
leading manners are apparent in the multitudinous Dutch renderings of the
same object. Both are methods of reduction. The one deals with the envelope
of landscape, with atmosphere, and conceives of that which lies beneath it as an
immutable solid. It distributes light and to a certain extent leaves the single
forms of Nature, i.t., the profiles of the scene, untouched, intent only upon getting
rich, or at any rate specific effects of light from the chosen section of Nature.

Its medium is tone. It dissolves the world in the softness of manifold grada
tions, and is careful to leave no trace of the instrument behind. The other
manner adopts the opposite principle. Not only does it show the brush-stroke,
but it makes this an element of itself, forming it into an arabesque system de
signed to enforce the character of the model. The extreme of both methods is
imperfect. Light without the object illuminated is ineffective. Linear design
without a feeling for light leads us back to the Primitives. In a centre so highly
developed as that of Dutch painting in the seventeenth century such extremes
were unimaginable. What we call a tendency nowadays in our barbaric art-
conditions, was able to assert itself without the frenzied sharpness of paradox.
Even the most strongly marked contrasts had certain essential qualities in common ;
it was in shades only that the characteristic point of view made itself felt. Hence
we find both methods used by all the artists of the great period, and it is only
the predominance of the one or the other that stamps them. The one manner
is represented by the doyen of Dutch marine painters, Simon de Vlieger,
who made his sea-fights credible by enveloping them in haze, and later, when he
painted the tranquil sea-piece in the Schwerin Museum, needed no animated
motive in order to assert himself. His pupil Willem van de Velde and others con
tinued him. None among them carried atmospheric painting farther than Jan
van de Cappelle, whom Rembrandt honoured with a portrait. Two or three of
his works in the National Gallery and in the Stockholm Museum are magical in
their effect. Water, earth and sky are painted in a single colour, of which it is
difficult to say whether it is white or black ; it hardly suggests colour at all, or even
any material ; it is a medium softer, suppler and richer than the softest and richest
silk, in which figures, ships, clouds, sky and waves seem to exist in a strange noiseless
peace. The best Van de Veldes seem clamorous beside them, and Ruysdael's
materialism becomes almost insupportable. We might ascribe these marines to
another world, if the things in them were not so manifestly Dutch. Van de
Cappelle was the inventor of those transcendental effects which have seduced so
many dreamers since his time. Turner certainly studied him, especially at the
time when he painted his Burial of Wilkie at Sea, producing no more than a
mirage of the reality. That which he dreamt of adding to the charm of the
original, a deliberate visionary element, is just what Van de Cappelle avoided with
incomparable mastery. The vision of the Dutchman was a perception of the
fugitive, that of the Englishman fugitive perception. This method was the
antithesis of Van Goyen and his school. His tonal art maintains itself between
slighter differences, and we even note how, as he grew older, he got his effects with
less and less of material means. In his last period, which, like Rembrandt's, was his
best, he renders a life full of colour with a bluish tone, and a blond that we scarcely
recognise as colour, by the most neutral means imaginable. His material is not in
itself beautiful, like Van de Cappelle's atmosphere. It has not the seductive
quality of certain little panels by Aart van der Neer, the deep amber tone of
VOL. i p

ii4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

which delights us before we know what it represents. The life in the quivering
strokes carries us away with it. It is more than beautiful. We admire the spirit
which can set down the outline of a town on the clear horizon with a few trembling
touches, [and as in the famous View of Dordrecht in the Amsterdam Rijks
Museum, merely by modulation of the brush-strokes fills a section of Nature
with a gigantic perspective, revealing all its accidents. Cuyp combined
the two. In his most mature period he depended on the charm of atmo
sphere — the coast scene with the mill in the Carstanjen collection is closely
allied to the Van de Cappelle of the same collection, and he loved to divest
his great sturdy cows of all their animal qualities by means of the golden light of
the sun. In smaller pictures, such as the landscape at the Hague, and more
especially in such early works as the view of dunes in the Berlin Gallery, he
remains closer to Van Goyen, and seems to add breadth to the methods of his
inspirer.

All these methods, subtly as they serve their purpose, are no mere tricks of
art, but forms for highly subjective conceptions. Remarkable men of simple
aspect are behind them, philosophers, who combined the quiet irony of the sage
with the meditative calm of their delight in Nature, who understood the world
above which they rose, admirable victors over the existence to which they clung
with all their fibres. And side by side with these were others, who take their
stand between the two tendencies. They were absorbed neither by the atmo
sphere of the one group, nor the arabesque of the other, but delighted in colour.
The web of tone woven by Van Goyen and Cuyp accorded ill with their robustness.
It was not given them to express themselves by an unmistakable handwriting in the
smallest things. They concealed their specific manner under more ingenuous
forms. Ruysdael's realism seems clumsy compared with de Vlieger, his illumina
tion impure beside Van de Cappelle's phenomena of light. Relatively, he is
rather a copyist than a creator. And yet we cannot but feel that a beautiful bit
of old Holland would be lacking if we did not possess him. Hobbema's colour is
of a higher order, because it fastens less upon the superficial. In the famous
Avenue of Middelharnis in the National Gallery the colour emphasises the mar
vellous perspective with extraordinary taste. In the House at the Edge of a Wood
of the Carstanjen collection a new colour is created by the flowing together of
the moist brown green of the leaves with the grey of the hedge, a colour not to be
found on any palette, in which we enjoy the manner of its production even more
than the exquisite silvery brilliance. It is true that Hobbema composes rather with
beautiful trees and picturesquely situated cottages than with abstract forms. Yet
he and other artists like him preserved that healthy naturalism which gave
nourishment to all Dutch expression. If, as Ruskin says, they were soul
less painters, we can only wonder the more at the greatness of an epoch in
which the intellectually barren achieved such powerful manifestations. It is to
them that Constable seems to go back, the Constable, at any rate, of the large
finished pictures, the Hay Wain, the Cornfield, the Valley Farm, the Lock pictures
&c. Neither Cuyp nor Van Goyen, nor any of the more subtle Dutchmen, are
contained therein. At a first glance these works suggest the painters who are, rela
tively, the coarser masters of Dutch landscape. The objective content is similar to
that of their masterpieces in the Antwerp Museum, at Buckingham Palace, &c.,
and, judging by Constable's own utterances, he was more akin to the circle of
Hobbema and Ruysdael than to those artists whom we justly rank above them.

CONSTABLE AND THE DUTCHMEN 115

Constable's whole style made this almost inevitable. He was far too independent
to emulate the very individual abstractions of a Van Goyen, a Cuyp or a Vermeer,
the extract of the efforts of an entire race, which had only become possible under
the highly specific conditions of this people and their epoch. A man like Con
stable could and would only approach these results by his own road, on which
he travelled alone over that part of the way which their own insight and the
help of great compatriots had spared them.

Let us recall his attitude to Claude, how he took nothing specific from this
favourite exemplar, but did his very utmost to recognise the law that governed the
transference of emotion to the work. He was too rich himself and too honest to
do more than this. Hobbema and Ruysdael, whose cast of mind was sympathetic
to him, exacted no intimate participation from him, but played somewhat the
part of the natural model for him. To him their comparatively slight concentra
tion implied less remoteness from Nature. The traditional element he received
from them by no means limited the development of individual gifts very different
in most respects from those of the two Dutchmen.

If we look closer, if we actually place a Hobbema or a Ruysdael beside a Con
stable, the difference is immeasurable. The " more artless " he applied to them
as compared with Rembrandt might be just as aptly used in comparing his work
with theirs, with this distinction, that here we are not obliged to make the weighty
reservation demanded in a comparison of Rembrandt with the landscape painters.
Yet we may admit that only the freedom of emotion of many of the early Dutch
painters could have led to such works. But this freedom is a relative conception,
which becomes the norm in the course of time. It is not easy to prove that
the Hay Wain is better as painting than the House at the Edge of a Wood. The
virtuosity of Hobbema, who here accomplished the uttermost with the given
means, is hardly to be surpassed. Constable, on the other hand, is very much
stronger as emotion ; we might even call him a virtuoso of emotion, if the
term were not ill-suited to the nobility of his mind.

By a strange dispensation, the beautiful is the more easily achieved the less
deliberately it is pursued. This is not only the case in art. A beautiful attitude in
a human being is the result of a tension or relaxation of emotion governing the limbs.
It is not what we see but what we divine behind it which delights us. It is not
the beautiful, but a glimpse into the higher power which produced it that
strengthens us, enlarges our experience and so prolongs the moment that it becomes
eternity. If we perceive that the excited person is conscious of his excitement,
it becomes finite, and our illusion vanishes. We have a bit of lifeless material
before us. The distinction is hardly so crude in any one of the great Dutchmen
of the seventeenth century. In the days of Rembrandt emotion remained
at a higher level even among the most hardened materialists. But in a circle
where so many were working in the same direction the impulse which led to the
greatest accomplishment could not be given to every one. The abnormal culture
of painters and the refinement of public taste circumscribed the influence of
genius. Faultless pictures were painted, the syntax of the pictorial was extended
to an unprecedented degree, but the ideal conditions for the production of tha
work of art were relaxed. People learned to paint fine pictures just as they
learned any other trade, and only a greater dexterity raised the artist above the
artisan. Our age, which has no artificers, made a virtue of necessity, and refined
our instinct for the individual. We now recognise a tincture of the industrial element

n6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

in people who were nevertheless personalities, and we are able to determine the
difference between them and great artists. And therefore we suspect that Ruys-
dael was less bent upon giving powerful and candid utterance to his impressions
than upon making his brown and russet harmonise perfectly with the gray of his
sky. We find that in many of his pictures his concern for the telling passage
condemns the rest of the work to a comparative immobility. In our admiration of
Hobbema's gems we do not quite forget that they lie on the surface, and that an
immense prodigality of detail was necessary to produce effects, the perfect harmony
of which deceive us as to their extent. Many of his landscapes do not avoid a
certain over-insistent picturesqueness. The frame encloses so much, that our
fancy can add nothing to it. And so we feel at times as if we too were enclosed
in a frame, and see the Nature we would fain enlarge circumscribed. That each
Dutchman, from the greatest to the smallest, is distinctly recognisable, does not
strike us as a satisfaction that silences all objections. We do not find in all
these developments of individuality the ultimate form considered as the highest
spiritual aim ; rather is it looked upon as a practical type, and what at a first
glance seems a token of personality has to be recognised as a limitation of the
personality. This is noticeable in a Van de Cappelle, in a slighter degree in a
Van Goyen, and even in the great Cuyp. Limitation to a single circle of experi
ences leads not only to concentration ; it may also seduce into virtuosity.

The essential difference between Constable and the Dutch landscape painters
lies in the absence of all virtuosity of this description. The difference would be
unimportant were it a mere negative one, or were it necessary to see a hundred
pictures by Constable to assure ourselves that he did not repeat himself, or that he
repeated himself otherwise than his predecessors. But the difference is positive,
for it appears in every picture. Constable's force of conviction is stronger ;
analytically considered, the effectiveness of his methods is greater. We trace his
relation to Hobbema in his system of colour, in the style of his contrasts. But how
much more vigourous is his colour ! How much richer and more varied are his con
trasts ! To become rich, to multiply, to utilise the impulse, the gift of a higher soul,
economically, was his principle. He could not create the impulse himself. It
came to him from his blood, his race had given it to him. It was not so mighty
as the enthusiasm of a Rembrandt, not so inspiring as the frenzy of a Rubens.
Behind it there was always a harmless person, who took a reasonable view of life.
He was great because he was able to press on to the goal with a simplicity
which did not lack the English sturdiness. A mightier spirit would have solved
the problem otherwise. That a Constable was necessary for Constable's task
was the vivifying element in his existence.

The task was to evolve a modern system for painting out of tradition, the
tradition of the Dutchmen, since they alone had worked at landscape. And
landscape alone, as Constable clearly saw, was capable of giving contemporary
painting the right model. Standing far off enough to see only the determining
aspect of Dutch art, the manner in which the Dutchmen had divided the surface
of the picture became their characteristic idiosyncrasy.

Other English landscape painters had also learnt the elementary law of art
from the Dutchmen, the effectiveness of contrast ; but they had immediately
given a coarse interpretation to the phenomenon, seeing in light a magical element,
and in dark an obscurity, and thereby setting up a stage for sentimentality. Con
stable purified contrast with the sincerity of the Dutchmen from all conventional

CONSTABLE AND THE DUTCHMEN 117

significance, and submitted calmly to the reproach of being a mere artisan.
Every picture was to him a new expression of his relation to the world, at which
he worked with all the force of his emotion. But each was also to him what a
picture was to the Dutchmen, a framework for light and colour, a framework it was
necessary to strengthen by all the means of knowledge. Constable was a master
of the division of surface. He carried it so far, and achieved so many hitherto
unattainable effects by its means, that he may almost be considered to have re
discovered a method which nowadays seems to embrace the whole nature of
painting. It was not only composition to which he gave airiness by skilful
division. Where his predecessors, both immediate and remote, had seen
a tone, a plane, he discovered innumerable differentiations, the harmony of
which yielded a proportionately richer resonance. His whole history consists
of continuous progress upon these lines. The generalising brown and gray of
his first period, a reflection of his study of the old masters and his English pre
decessors, yielded to an ever increasing richness. He noted the devastation
wrought in Gainsborough's picture by an inordinate use of asphaltum, and recog
nised the lack of structure in the dense foliage of his contemporaries. There
are no black Constables. The Valley Farm in the Louvre (fortunately skied)
would be an exception if it were genuine. The version of the same motive in the
Cheramy collection is the darkest as compared with the two examples hanging
opposite to each other in the National Gallery, and in this there is no dead point
the size of a pin's head. Yet he did not avoid the use of black. It was indeed
one of his favourite colours, and we may even regret that he was not more cautious
in his choice of the dark pigment in several pictures. The black of many of Con
stable's groups of trees is unequalled for intensity in any other English landscape,
still less in any Dutch one. But these trees are set against a spacious sky that
occupies two-thirds of the whole picture. The gray of the clouds peeps through
the trunks and twigs, penetrates the darkness, and surrounds it with gleaming
light. In his sketches, coal-black is always surrounded by fiery red and pure
white. Whereas his predecessors used black for a dreamy darkness, Constable
made light with it by using it for contrast. Even in this there is an analytic
element of the first importance to Constable's relation to the Dutchmen. He
gave a new significance to colour contrasts, and if he did not always " leave " his
pigments with absolute frankness, he broke them less than others, and so arrived
promptly at the basis for a stronger synthesis. Absolute purity of colour was
not his aim in this. Turner's efforts in this direction were quite foreign to him.
Colour chemistry was not enriched by him. His basis is as frank a brown as the
favourite tint of the Dutchmen. The difference is merely this, that his landscapes
do not impress us as brown, because they are so divided that they never suggest
a summarised application of colour, brown like that of the Dutchmen, or black
like that of Gainsborough.

The brushing serves the same purpose in a much greater degree than the
combinations of the palette. The reproach brought with more or less justice
against Hobbema and occasionally against Ruysdael, that their realism approaches
a kind of reproduction, is levelled against the inadequacy of a method which
interpolates non-pictorial expedients — i.e., media foreign to painting as such —
between the natural means of the painter and his result, expedients the more
harmful in landscape, inasmuch as here art demands a swift transcript of the
impression. In many Dutch pictures we see the drawing under the veil of colour.

n8 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

Some of Ruysdael's solitary tree-trunks with their proclamatory naturalism suggest
that the modelling was not carried out together with the painting, but was com
pleted before the painting had covered the canvas. This gives the colour the
effect of tinting. Constable, on the other hand, always shows his material quite
frankly, building up the whole with the same material. His incidents are not
tinted representations, but the colour itself supports the incident. His syn
thesis is greater, in the widest sense. The unit, of which the picture gives a
multiple is not the tree, the leaf, or the stone, in a word, nothing natural, but
colour, or more precisely, a brush-stroke bearing colour, and representing not
the tree, the leaf, the stone, but a generalisation of these things. Constable
once said to William Collins that a picture is like a sum, " for it is wrong
if you can take away or add a figure to it." * The addition or subtraction
is more or less possible in a picture where the unit is some realistic concep
tion — a battle-piece, for instance, representing only soldiers, a landscape
dealing only with trees, meadows, water, etc., any genre picture of some
comic or pathetic incident. The sense might be conveyed with other " figures."
We read such a picture without regard to the colour, the brush-stroke, all
that has accidentally contributed to its significance. Constable aimed at a
new gesture, consisting not of the outstretched arm or the proud glance, nor
of a romantically curved mountain formation, but giving eloquent ex
pression to the material under whatever form expressed, before it grouped itelf
to the usual summary conception. His sea is water before it becomes waves.
His leaves express the green of a leaf before they grow together into foliage, his
clouds, the most exquisite feature of his pictures, by which we can most clearly
measure how far he excelled all the Dutch landscape painters, are the atmospheric
element of the heavens before they have taken on those threatening or friendly
aspects we are accustomed to attribute to them. With drama such as this, he made
form clothe itself with thought instantaneously, achieved something akin to
Shakespeare, in whom what we perhaps most admire is the manner in which the
action marches with the idea, never preceding it nor dragging behind it, as with
the weaker dramatists, who are not absolutely masters of their material. And just
as with Shakespeare we ourselves add tragedy or comedy while the poet is content
with drama, so Constable's pictures invite all we ourselves would contribute,
without tingeing our mood dark or light. His landscapes neither mourn as we
perhaps might wish to mourn, nor rejoice as we might wish to do another time, but
they stretch strong hands to us, the warm pressure of which gives us pleasure.
He aimed at progression, not at a condition of existence. This explains why he
was content with so few motives. The motive was the treatment, not the given
scene. The Glebe Farm in the Cheramy collection is made up of great thick
masses. The gray of the colossal sky fights with the Giorgionesque brown of the
trees, and the red of the girl against the tree trunk looks like the blood shed in the
combat. The sketch for this picture in the National Gallery (No. 1823) is very
different. The fact that the same place is represented is a superficial matter. The
real scene is entirely altered. Everything flows in the picture. The blond
tone is as inseparable from the thin brushing as is the dark from the massive impasto
of the Parisian variant. Finally, in the ultimate version a new material is obtained
by other means. It is crystalline in structure : Hobbema's tree-tops are decked
with silver points. A different scale underlies the Hay-Wain variants, yet another
• " Memoirs of the Life of William Collins," London, 1848, i. p. 56.

CONSTABLE: THE CORNFIELD

NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

CONSTABLE AND THE DUTCHMEN 119

the Dedham pictures. The reiterated scene gains something akin to unity of
place in drama. In the Hampstead series, Constable finally abandoned the
central motive, and thus gave up his last connection with the narrower tradition
of his home. Gainsborough's pleasant woodland pool has become a detail among
other details, and has lost all its shadowy environment. The motive in itself
is uninteresting to a degree. Save for a hillock by no means attractive in form in
the foreground, all we see is a wide plain. The actual symbol dwindles to a
nothing. And yet I know of nothing more fitted to show Constable's art to
advantage. He must have felt this himself, or he would hardly have painted
this bit of land so often.

It is here that he differs essentially from the rest of his countrymen. The
pictures of the portrait-painters of the eighteenth century are differentiated only by
the faces, and therefore never have a face. Gainsborough never gets away from
convention. His foliage always consists of the same flat pointed splashes. He has
a fixed formula for things which by their nature are subject to perpetual change
and owe their beauty to the fluidity of their appearance. Morland made rococo
trees as one makes rococo furniture. His objects and Gainsborough's too have
an artistic structure of their own, but as this always consists of the same jagged
brush-stroke, it is too one-sided, and does not clothe the design, but lies upon it
like decoration. At the Morland Exhibition at South Kensington in 1904 the
spectator could not stifle his yawns. The variety of the subjects with their
monotony of treatment lost all variety of effect after the first six pictures. If
Constable's series dealing with a single theme were brought together, the identity
of motive would only help to give the impression of an irregular mosaic frieze,
forming in its entirety a marvellous decoration for an interior, yet inviting inspection
of every component part by its individual treatment of detail.

The same quality differentiates Constable from the Dutch landscape painters
and brings him near to Rembrandt. Rembrandt, too, does not exhaust him
self with the external motive, if indeed we can use such a term at all in connection
with such a dramatist, to whom what has been said above of Shakespeare applies in
a still higher degree. The objector, to whom the invention, &c., of the Biblical
scenes is dear, need only think of the master's portraits of himself. In these, the
most moving portraits of our era, conventional conceptions have but little part.
We get no nearer to their character when we recognise a time-worn head in those
of the later period, a younger face in the earlier examples, if we call them laughing
or serious. What attracts us is the second face, seen outside the countenance,
the materialised conception, which succeeds in immortalising the highest qualities
of its creator in abstract images.

Constable, too, gave us portraits of himself in his landscapes, so intimate had
every tree and every other detail become to him in his repeated contemplation of
them as the reflections of his own moods. He felt himself as completely one with
Hampstead or Dedham as Rembrandt had felt with his own face, and he succeeded
in winning forms out of the practised concentration of his emotion. These are
not, of course, so mighty as the vessel into which Rembrandt poured the fulness of
his spirit, partly because they were distributed over a wider area. The almost painful
focussing of power upon such a minimum of objective as Rembrandt saw in his
mirror, eludes a less vigourous tension. Rembrandt was anchored fast upon one spot,
the seething emotion of his spirit was directed to a single point. The relation of
this emotion to the calm of the object gives the daemoniac element which verges

120 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

on tragedy, even when genius emerges victor from the terrible conflict. No
Constable makes this impression upon us. He holds himself and us in airier bonds.
His task does not, like that of Rembrandt, transcend all our conceptions of the
capabilities of an individual. His life was pettier and less remote from that of his
fellows. But in his existence also we can trace the power which drives the
individual to a never-resting self-expression, and the fruit has not suffered from
the fact that the tree was closer to us.

Rembrandt's phases, from the first sketch to the finished picture, show increasing
richness of power and breadth of structure. The same may be said of his whole
development. His tendency is towards greater restraint and simplicity, a more
determined rejection of the non-essential. A first survey of Constable's life work
tempts us to see something of the same kind in him. He too gains breadth, as we
shall show by particular instances, becomes more vigourous with years, and the
broader form answers to a greater depth of conception. But his progress has not
the unswerving tendency of Rembrandt's growth. It was less marvellous, though
even in proximity with the giant the individuality of his being suffers no loss.
The amazing thing in his case is a sudden knowledge, acquired in a few years, and
in a partial concentration of his nature, to which we owe the unique quality of his
sketches. But he does not manifest the same unbroken enrichment to the end.
Whether, as his biographers declare, his marriage with a much loved wife deter
mined the character of his art, it is difficult to say. Be this as it may, the term
1817-1828 is the most prolific in his career. The Rembrandtesque develop
ment is manifest down to the close of this period. But as I shall show, the decade
that preceded his marriage brought to light his own scarcely surpassed riches.

But the relation of the English miller's son to his Dutch confrere is not
confined to these abstract affinities. The painter who showed such coolness in his
dicta concerning the great master, sometimes approached him very closely. It
was indeed, perhaps, the conditional nature of his admiration which makes
the relation valuable. There are landscapes by Constable which we cannot but
describe as Rembrandtesque. They resemble, not Rembrandt's landscapes,
but his portraits. The expressive vigour of the big brush-strokes with which
the landscape is modelled, recalls the fashion in which the aged Rembrandt
built up a face. I may instance Mr. Alexander Young's sketch of 1819
for the White Horse, the Mill near Brighton of 1828, in the South Kensington
Museum, and kindred works. The form is not quite so pregnant as in
Rembrandt's faces, the strokes do not carry quite so much. But here it is less
a difference of power than a different system of division that manifests itself.
Constable's pictures became more and more fluid, and they would not have ful
filled their task had not this fruitfulness of rain-soaked earth, unnecessary to Rem
brandt's purpose, been suggested in them. This yields a further element of the
synthesis accomplished by Constable. ,,. ., 5:,

CONSTABLE AND RUBENS 121

CONSTABLE AND RUBENS

Fuseli's jest as to the overcoat and umbrella required by the admirer of Constable's
pictures referred to the dripping, fluid element in all his friend's best works, a
quality quite alien to the Dutchmen, though they were guiltless of the terrible
dryness characteristic of many English and German landscapes painted under their
influence in the first half of the nineteenth century. Constable showed early
indications of the quality which ensured the freshness of his pictures, and the
great example of Rubens encouraged him to develop his own tendency. His
reverence for the Fleming ran parallel with his love for the Dutchmen. His
landscapes, as far as analysis reveals foreign constituents in them at all, contain
both forces in equal measure. Rubens was the turbulent driving energy who
drew him to the light, and who yet was no more able than Rembrandt to turn the
head of one whose eyes were fixed so stedfastly on Nature. Constable inclined
more to him than to Rembrandt, but after the manner of a Northerner, who,
swiftly as his blood may flow, retains a certain sedateness. There was nothing in him
which could follow the Italian element in Michelangelo's great successor, and here
he was at one with Hogarth, but he recognised Rubens' clear intelligence behind
his frenzied energy, and was attracted by the happy naturalism of the chatelain
of Steen. Rubens taught him to take heed of blond tones, enticed him out of
Gainsborough's woodland thickets into the open air, and encouraged him to
invest the sunsets of certain sea-pieces with all the splendour of his palette.
Such examples, in which the affinity seems perceptible even in the colour-scheme,
are rare. The Louvre owns one of the best.* But the handling of the early
period is the happiest result of intense preoccupation with the great master. I
mean the exquisite suppleness of the brush, the power of reproducing the
form of a detail to perfection by a winding stroke, and giving its light-value
and its local colour. Later on, this downy softness gave way to a preference
for fat, and preferably straight strokes. But reminiscences of Rubens still
linger, if not in details, at least in the great outlines of composition.

Rembrandt seems to have had more influence on the sketches, Rubens on the
pictures. The slanting motives in Rubens' landscapes suggested to Constable the
development of a composition rich in diagonals, and his exemplar was especially
serviceable to him where he had to reckon with detailed foregrounds and wide
perspectives, as, for instance, in the lock-pictures, The Lock, The Leaping Horse,
Flatford Mill, &c., and again in the series of works connected with the Salisbury
Cathedral from the Meadows. The service was of an ideal kind and illustrates the
felicity of all Constable's relations to the old masters. Our attention is not arrested
by some accident in the model, reappearing under another form in the imitator,

* Weymouth 'Bay. — In an article on " The Representation of the British School in the Louvre" in
the Burlington Magazine (p. 341, March 1907), by P. M. Turner, the genuineness of this picture is
called in question, quite groundlessly, in my opinion On the other hand, the writer is perhaps
justified in ascribing The Windmill vn. the Louvre to Webb. I also concur in the attribution of The
Cottage (Louvre, No. 1806) to F. W. Watts (Burlington Magazine, July 1907, pp. 226, 227).

VOL. I Q

122 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

but we see the superiority of the old master revealed in the virtues of his disciple
and this generalisation increases our respect for both. Constable took the
brightness and lucidity of Rubens' motive as his pattern, the organisation that
penetrates every detail and preserves the purity of the theme even in the
greatest wealth of variations. Rubens ennobled his realism, and taught him to
detail form, not object ; it was his example which brought about that " absence
of everything stagnant " over which Constable himself expressed his naive creative
joy in writing to his friend Fisher about The Lock.*

The Rubens cycle of the Four Seasons was as familiar to him as his own pictures.
It was brought to England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, from the
Palazzo Balbi, and to Constable's distress was here divided up into three portions.
One picture, the beloved Rainbow, now in the Wallace Collection, was acquired by
the Earl of Orford ; the Chateau de Steen, now in the National Gallery, by
Sir George Beaumont, and the other two went to Windsor Castle. It may seem
over -bold to compare these manifestations of a lordly genius, who playfully
expanded the surfaces confined within the limits of a frame, giving them the
spacious splendour of fresco, and even here, where he was concerned with modest
things, allowed his personality to overflow in still wilder exuberance than was his
wont, with the pictures of the modern, which make no claim to be anything but
landscapes. Nature, whom the one moulded with unprecedented force, more
despotically than any after him, was approached by Constable with the reverent
love of a son in the modest garb of a Hobbema, and it is against all probability
that the expression of such a mind, however successful, could even approach the
power of that subjectivity.

But setting aside the obvious difference in absolute potentiality of the two
artists, the suggestion of such a possibility leaves out of account the necessary
and beneficent evolution of time, which forbids any artist to measure himself in the
closer sense with his predecessors. Constable could not pretend to equal Rubens
with the gesture of a Rubens. That form was not an outcome of Rubens' power
alone, but was also the gesture of a multitude. To this multitude, which in
those days an artist could fire by vigourous action, Rubens made his appeal, winning
strength for his performance from his confidence in the echo of his appeal. A
Rubens in these days would be like an orator setting forth revolutionary ideas to
empty benches. A modern artist of Rubens' power would not be rhetorical ;
he would find subtler modes of expression. This was Constable's method.
The problem was to make the hidden effect as rich as possible. The solution
could only come through a transposition of power, by employing organs of a
work of art more or less independent of the vehicles of Rubensesque beauty.
The Fleming's dominant effect Hes in his modelling. This made a comparatively
summary system of colour necessary. Rubens would have dammed the river of
his forms if he had divided it into too many affluents by colour, and he would
have become illegible. It is true that the richness of his pictures is not due solely
to the play of forms ; the part assigned to the palette is by no means negligible ; but
important as this is, it is the modelling which is decisive. The colour is a splendid,
amazingly supple material, created on the palette, i.e.* outside the picture, with
which Rubens moulded, as the sculptor moulds his clay. The colouristic varia
tions may be compared to the reflections of some costly stuff, the appearance

* " My * Lock ' is now on my easel ; it is silvery, windy, and delicious, all health, and the absence of every
thing stagnant, and is wonderfully got together." (Leslie, p. 173.)

D S
< 2

DQ 2

CONSTABLE AND RUBENS 123

of which changes according to the forms it has to cover. I crave indulgence for the
crudity of a comparison suggested by my desire to make myself understood.
Constable had from the beginning to renounce Rubens' play of forms. The
tree, the river, the sky, all realities, were to him no relative conceptions, which
could be made into pictures by modification of their forms, but things which had
to substantiate the degree of his objective knowledge. Transmutation into an
artistic system could only succeed by turning the natural connection between
all things in a landscape to good account. Rubens looked at details at close
quarters ; in a wood he saw, not an inseparable whole, but a collection of trees,
and he sought to give the illusion of multiplicity by the special elaboration of a
tree or a few trees. He could only bring this product of units together by means
of a conventional line. If, on the other hand, the painter, as the natural integral
conception requires, took the landscape regardless of details, from a fixed point,
masses arose which could not be limited by line. Line accordingly gave up its
stylistic part to colour, or, to be more precise, to the coloured patch. On this
Constable concentrated his whole art. He neglected modelling comparatively,
created no arbitrary contours, but suppressed all he could renounce, and thus
enriched the surface all the more. He modelled his spots of colour as Rubens
had modelled his forms.

We recognise the principle as an eccentric as well as a concentric system in
comparison to Rubens' method — eccentric in so far as Constable unloosed what
Rubens held together, and concentric in so far as he gathered up into masses
what the other had left scattered. Modern painting has worked out the system
mor2 and more completely. Constable himself demonstrated it in the most
logical manner in his sketches. In his pictures we can recognise the difference
of the two conceptions more in details than in the whole. The showy horses in the
foreground of the later cathedral pictures are clearly the descendants of the
Brabantine stallions who passed a contemplative life in the stables of the Chateau
de Steen. Rubens painted his favourites as monuments, exaggerated their forms to
colossal dimensions, and made it certain that every one who came across such a
steed should always have the type in his mind's eye. The stable was but a frame
for the colossus, and the landscape round his men and animals was almost the
same to him. Even in the two pendants of the Seasons the horses appear as the
incarnate life of Nature. They would be impossible, if we took them out of
the picture ; it would be dragged awry, the trees would fall ; they seem to carry the
whole landscape on their mighty backs. Constable too never neglected his
accessory figures. The forms are not so colossal, but they are more compact ;
they belong absolutely to the landscape in which they are set, and to no other ;
but their relation to their surroundings is calmer, the structure more closely knit.
The animals show less. The eye involuntarily hurries away from them to the
gleaming water and the silvery trees. We take in fewer single motives ; the
sounds are softer and quieter. But rich chords are heard among these softer
tones. I may give one instance among many. The red of the caparisons of the
Flanders team is also always used for the draught horses of the valley farm.
Rubens uses such red patches very often, just as Claude does, as decorative ad
juncts. They lie flat, float upon the stream of his materia, and have the same
value only that they have upon the palette. With Constable, on the other hand,
the red becomes an important factor in the structure. He gives the colour a
Rubensesque splendour by modelling the patch, and so evokes a new illusion of

124 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

reality inherent in the nature of the pictorial. For in Nature too we should, at
the given moment, first note the red gleaming in the sun upon the horses, before
we took in its form, and even afterwards this effect of colour remains important for
the formation of our impression. Long before Constable, Hobbema had made the
experiment, and had begun to turn it to account. Reminiscences of him are
to be found in Constable's large pictures, often closely associated with traces of
the Antwerp master.

The variation of the etoffage in The Rainbow and the Chateau de Steen incited
Constable to essay a similar pendant for his various versions of The Hay-Wain.
In the pictures of this name in the National Gallery and South Kensington, the
waggon goes forth empty, as in the Chateau de Steen, whereas in the Cheramy
version it returns, as in The Rainbow, heavily laden.*

It is not easy to decide which is the more attractive of the two compositions.
In the famous London picture the planes are larger, the farm lies very picturesquely
among the trees, and the pool with the cart gives a valuable richness to the fore
ground. In the much smaller Hay Wain in Paris, it is evident that the scene at
the back of the farm was represented. Consequently, the haymakers loading the
cart, who appear in the distance only in the National Gallery picture, are quite
near here, and close the horizon with a fine group, its keynote a gleaming white.
The painting has none of the cool silvery effect of the final conception ; it is
more akin to the large sketch at South Kensington, but it surpasses this in force
of expression. The pendants give various modes of expression rather than
external variations of the motive. In the London Hay Wain we have the idyl.
The relation of man and Nature is expressed as one of life-giving peace. Rubens
has disappeared ; we see an inspired and ennobled Hobbema. Whatever the
mood on entering the National Gallery, five minutes before the Hay Wain give
calm and peace. In the Parisian picture Nature is nearer and more aggressive.
The sun blazes. Men and beasts seem to bleed in the heat. Red mingles even
with the brown of the twigs. Marvellous is the mighty vault of foliage over
the cart, truly that " formidable cathedrale des constructions vegetatives," with
which Sensier compared Rousseau's trees. We seem to recognise Rubens' vigour
in every twig, in every leaf, in every germ.

Constable built up another kind of mighty edifice with his clouds, which also
reminds us of Rubens at times. His skies are the faces of his landscapes. They
reflect the happenings on the earth below, translated into curves, and appear as the
seat of the spirit who reigns, welding together the dismembered body beneath.
" I have often been advised," he wrote to Fisher, " to consider my sky as a white
sheet thrown behind the objects. Certainly, if the sky is obtrusive, as mine are,
it is bad ; but if it is evaded, as mine are not, it is worse ; it must and always
shall with me make an effectual part of the composition.!

Both obtrusiveness and neglect in the treatment of the sky are opposed to
unity of composition. Constable's own words, no less than the praise accorded
to his skies, even in his life, by critics otherwise hostile, seem to support the charge
of obtrusiveness. There may be some truth in his self-reproach. But Constable
generalised it over-hastily. In a hundred examples the sky is not too prominent
by a single shade. At times the life-long habit of observation of the firmament,
of the " source of light in Nature," may have led to an exaggerated materialisation

• Painted, no doubt, about the same time, 1821. t Leslie, p. 104.

CONSTABLE AND RUBENS 125

of the airy structure. But this defect does not injure the composition ; rather
does the decorative element in the picture gain therefrom ; it is only the necessary
difference between the consistence of the sky and that of the rest which suffers.
Instances are to be found exclusively in the late period ; the often painted
Stoke Church is a very typical example. The white church seems to have
been precipitated from the white mass of the clouds, a condensation of the
wild element of the air. The local colour is restricted to differentiation of the
white masses by imperceptible tones. The impasto, laid on almost entirely with
the palette knife, is proper rather to modelling than to painting, and is brilliantly
appropriate to the architectonic detail of the old cathedral. How remote is this
Constable from Rubens' luscious handling ! And yet even here, where the brush
seems to have abdicated all its rights, in the juicy green-rimmed brown of the
groups of trees, in the floating shadows, enlivened, where they are deepest, by
the deliberate red dots, we trace something of Rubens' fluidity, yielding to the
threatening solidification.

The strongly marked sky in such pictures made a greater emphasis of the
earth necesary and so the whole became too robust, and the richness of the con
ception was lost. True, this defect is often redeemed by the unified power of
the handling. In many cases, the most loaded among various versions of the
same design is the happiest. This is true, for instance, of the pictures known as
Spring. The motive is a field with peasants ploughing, a group of trees on the left
and the mill — in which Constable himself is said to have worked — on the right.
The first version is the little sketch of 1814 in the South Kensington Museum
(No. 144), a correct but not very inspiring Nature-study. The same mill painted
in Constable's last decade, and now in the Cheramy collection, is a much more
animated work. Here the palette-knife usurps the function of the brush. The
stormy sky is put in in broad masses. Great lumps of pure flattened white are veiled
with dark cloudy configurations. On the left, the sky drops gradually lower and
lower towards the ground. The earth is much slighter in structure than the con
vulsed cloud-vault. The proportion convinces absolutely. The particles of
colour/akin to the widely opened pores of the humus, suggest the heavily breathing
soil, expectant of relief. Coal-black are the fat, glistening clods, furrowed by
the blood-red plough. Horses and man, even the mill, look small in the turmoil.
They will soon yield the stage to the storm, which will plough up the earth
more deeply than man's puny shares. The sky overpowers the earth in this
picture, but not the form ; and all that is " obtrusive " is the power of the element,
which here makes heaven and earth its plaything on a small scale no less powerfully
than on the vast scale of Rubens.

126 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

CONSTABLE'S SKETCHES

As long as attention is directed to the most important feature of Constable's
work, his sketches will always arouse the enthusiasm they evoke in our own days.
When I speak of the sketches, I mean, of course, to exclude those which were purely
studies, a large number of which are preserved in the British Museum. Beside
those we are considering here they are quite unimportant. As Lord Windsor
says, Constable's sketches were not intended for the eyes of strangers, and never
for sale.*

It was not until many decades after his death that the majority of them
passed into collections. But this was the case with the works of many masters.
What distinguishes them is that they are even free from the utilitarianism which
the thought of his future picture imposes on the artist. They were not what is
called the first idea of a work, a necessarily provisional form, which only reveals
certain sides of the future picture. The slight importance Constable attached to
the motive would have made the greater number of them superfluous, had this
been so. Besides, every comparison of them with the pictures shows the absence
of all essential relation between the two. The sketches were made for their own
sakes. Their technique is peculiarly their own. Their form does not permit of
completion. On the other hand, they cannot be classed wth the small pictures
which Nasmyth, Callcott and others painted before and simultaneously. Even
though the small examples of these artists are far superior to their larger works,
they yet betray that dependence on the Dutchmen which reduced so many
painters ofj their period to the status of epigoni. Constable's relation to the
land of Hobbema seems, on the contrary, to disappear altogether in the sketches, and
nothing is more conspicuously absent in them than the seductive nicety of the small
Anglo-Dutch picture. He is never greater than here, and I say greater advisedly,
for the particles of paint are much more roughly treated than in the pictures.
The sketches were a kind of journal. That which is lacking in Constable's letters
and written memoranda is richly supplied in these. Many of the little panels
have a ticket on the back with the date and hour of execution. They were painted
records of events which turned on atmosphere and light. The mode of these
occurrences forced the easygoing painter to work with the utmost rapidity.
The complexity of the phenomenon demanded a perfectly simple and legible
handwriting.

Holland's sedate landscape painters had known nothing of such require
ments. For them too Nature was the guide for art ; they painted what they
saw, each according to his temperament, but above all, they wanted to paint
pictures. This was Constable's last consideration. Nor can it be said that he was
urged on by his temperament. He seems to have been an equable man, unvexed
by personal ambition. He behaved as inconspicuously as possible. Necessity
urged him to follow after certain things which could only be obtained in this
* "John Constable," London, 1903, p. 188.

CONSTABLE'S SKETCHES 127

way. This necessity arose from the times, from the instinct of progress ; the
spur of research guided his brush.

With Constable the history of those factors that make for art-production —
another history of development, which still awaits its chronicler — entered upon a new
phase. His sketches are the first and most memorable steps of a painting which finds
itself bereft of all the art vehicles of earlier ages. In the primitive epoch Nature
was the corrective for tendencies which in themselves were completely indepen
dent of Nature. To the great realists of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen
turies, it was a new element which, above all, had to be reproduced. That which
excluded a destructive literalness was not the will of the individual, but the
prescriptions of the guilds. These lost their authority even in seventeenth-century
Holland, and were entirely broken down by the French Revolution. For the
new age the reproduction of Nature was the one artistic aim that remained. This
purpose threatened to annihilate art as soon as it was achieved, because then the
powers of the artist were robbed of their last discipline. We may take it that
the degree of realism which Hobbema and Ruysdael offered in their conceptions
of Nature, was not above the level that is now achieved by mechanical means, i.e.,
that the art-stimulants arising from the Nature of their day would, relatively
speaking, find satisfaction to-day in amateur photography. By this I do not of
course mean that Dutch pictures might be manufactured nowadays by photographic
processes. New requirements obviated such a danger. That which had stirred
the longing of Ruysdael and Hobbema was outshone by aims which lay beyond
the visible world of Dutch models, and so new inventions became necessary to
the artist. Art obtained new stimulants.

Henry Richter, a little known contemporary of Constable's, wrote an amusing
colloquy between Rembrandt, Rubens, Teniers, Cuyp and other great shades of
the past, with modern artists of the author's period.* The conversation turns
on the new discovery of daylight, the " plein air " painting of the period, and
in spite of the calm proper to the ghostly disputants, we note the warmth with
which then as now, the right methods are debated, the right colour, the right light,
and everything else bearing on the thema, Nature. At the close, one of the living
ventures to ask the illustrious dead what results they expect from the intro
duction of the newly discovered daylight into the pictures of the moderns. Rem
brandt and Cuyp welcome it with effusive enthusiasm, and Cuyp even goes so far
as to propose that instead of loan exhibitions of famous masters, there should be
yearly demonstrations of honest studies of light with decent premiums and sub
stantial purchases. Thus, at a relatively small cost a very valuable school for the
study of colour would arise, in which laymen and artists alike might educate
themselves in the knowledge of Nature.

The same demands will continue to be formulated with a little more or a little
less na'ivet£ in similar circumstances. We cannot conceive of development
without this fiction. Art as an end in itself is of course conceivable objectively as a
source of the highest joy apart from any purpose, but not subjectively, i.t., in the
hands of the artist. It is beyond our powers of conception that important persons
can give themselves up to an abstraction with the intensity necessary for the creation
of a work of art. The " expression of personality " is merely a paraphrase post
festum. No artist of to-day feels the force that urges to such expression without a
yearning after Nature. It was Nature, then, which inspired Constable. Hitherto
• "Daylight, a recent discovery in the art of Painting." Ackermann. London. 1817.

128 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

the intensity of his conception of Nature has been unsurpassed, and it is a
question whether it could be greater. This applies not only to the domain of
his art. We find nothing in the literature of his country that corresponds to his
aspirations, nothing in that of contemporary France, far less of Germany. J. J.
Rousseau's hymns to Nature are too essentially hymns even to suggest a
like intimacy of relation. The letters of the youthful Flaubert, who was
fifteen when Constable died, show the beginnings of such a spirit in poetry.
Only in the time of an individual comprehension of art transcending that of every
other epoch could Nature have been understood as it was by this great man.
Even now the delicate bloom of the naturalism in Flaubert's letters is so unique,
that it can be better defined by comparison with Constable than with a fellow
craftsman. And in like manner the spirit in Constable's sketches seems to me to
be better suggested by a comparison with the poet than by some parallel in art
history.

That which places Constable's so-called finished pictures beneath the sketches,
is the painter's respect for an obsolete guild prescription. It is no cheap
respect, consciously speculative, but rather a slight fetter of instinct. Perhaps
it was unavoidable. In his sketches Constable ventured upon things which
we can readily believe required a new generation to make them into pictures.
At the same time, I do not overlook the difficulty of distinguishing between
Constable's sketches and his pictures, and, setting aside late pictures such as the
Cenotaph, to formulate the difference clearly. The format is not always a criterion
even for the highest quality of Constable. There are works considerably larger
than the generality of his small pictures, which come very near in excellence to the
most subtle of the sketches.

Two qualities characterise the sketches. A direct interpretation of Nature,
of which it is difficult to speak unless the pictures are before one, and of which
reproductions can give no idea ; and an effect I cannot, taking into account the
poverty of our speech, describe otherwise than as decorative. The most effective
element in both qualities is their association. The latest, and in particular
the latest English art movement, has not accustomed us to the conjunction of
decorative effects with naturalistic works, and hence the modern conception
has arisen, that the decorative quality of a work of art is in proportion to its
remoteness from Nature. The logical consequence of this idea leads to the wall
paper, and excludes painting as such entirely. In Constable, decoration is only
that which also subserves the highest purpose of art, conception, the adornment
of a surface within whose tiny bounds the cosmos manifests all its richness.

For the last few years, a number of Constable's sketches have been hanging in
the National Gallery, in the corner of the room where the large examples are
exhibited. They attract the eye as if they were so many lights, inviting attention,
in spite of their small size, at a distance from which, in general, only large works
would be noticed. We see nothing of the incident represented. The eye seeks
them without consulting the mind, because they offer a most agreeable and
beneficent surface. They produce the effects of a fine carpet, but surpass the
textile in beauty by reason of their greater richness and variety. Just as a skilful
jeweller is not only careful to procure costly stones, to produce harmonies with
the colour-effects of the various parts, but also to have each stone so cut that it
will show most fire and be employed to the greatest advantage, so Constable not
only juxtaposed harmonious colour effects, but with palette-knife, brush, and

CONSTABLE: COAST SCENE

CHF.RAMY COLLECTION, PARIS

CONSTABLE'S SKETCHES 129

fingers formed each individual particle of pigment, and thus enhanced the splendour
of the whole far beyond the given qualities of the material. And all this, not for the
sake of splendour, for which no purpose can be imagined sufficiently lofty to exclude
every thought of materialism, but in order to give an image of Nature in the shortest
possible manner, a reproduction which is concrete, because it fixes a clearly deter
mined section, yet is the highest abstraction, because at the same time it depicts
not only a state but growth, less the moment than the forces that led to it. Such
is the impression produced by the Dedham Vale in the National Gallery, or the
Hampstead Heath sketch in the Cheramy collection — a flood of colour, the
flaming vigour of which suggests I know not what mystical connection of the
artist with the earth he represented. On the back he wrote after the date —
9 August, 1823 — " Stormy evening after a fine day. It rained all the next day."
This means, that such was the impression made by Nature at that moment on a
man of Constable's extraordinarily subtle senses. We feel as if he had been
conscious of such variations of effect in the soil, and was himself part of the
things he painted — nerve and quivering sensation rather than creator.

These little works might be more aptly called sketches of Nature than sketches
for pictures, representations of elementary conditions divined rather than seen.
In them the earth does not appear picturesque, though nothing non-pictorial
has gone to the rendering, but active, a great procreative element, embracing
all existence.

Of such sketches Constable produced hundreds. There is a whole roomful^at
South Kensington ; they hang modestly on the staircase of the Diploma Gallery,
and rouse high expectations of what is to follow in the rooms beyond. In the
Tate Gallery they form almost the sole precious asset in the cargo of con
temporary English art. On the Continent, Cheramy comes nearest to the
English collections with a series of some thirty, for the most part brilliant works.
Certain dealers in Paris and at Munich, have also formed collections of some
importance. Among the Continental museums other than the Louvre, the Berlin
Gallery owns two little landscapes on the Stour, not of the first quality, and the
Munich Pinacothek a fine sketch of Hampstead Heath.

The variety of the sketches makes it impossible to classify them. We can
group the large pictures according to technique, and trace a development therein,
but this is impossible with the sketches. The most remarkable thing about them,
especially in the middle period, is the conjunction of the carpet-like spotty effects
with a gliding brush-stroke of the utmost softness. One or two little sea-pieces
at South Kensington painted at Brighton in 1824, illustrate the rarer, more supple
method very distinctly. It is shown even more richly in Cheramy's sea-piece,
A Coast Scene with Fishing Boat. Here we are not reminded of De Vlieger or
Van de Cappelle. Even the most refined works of these subtle masters have not
the characteristic quality of Constable. Their substance is, roughly speaking, more
material, thin rather than delicate. They set us at once in a tender atmosphere,
and are content to extend this condition, not allowing us to co-operate in its
creation. They give the anomaly of an effect of nature rather than an evidence of
their power of creation. Constable suggests our contemporaries, and the best of
these, Manet above all. Things like this little Coast Scene are the first evidences
of that conception of Nature which we call Impressionism, and give indications
of everything that Manet brought into the same domain, in nuce, of course, but
the instances are by no means isolated or accidental. The period after the

VOL. I R

1 3o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

years of apprenticeship, that of Constable's mellowest painting, which many
connoisseurs prefer to all the rest, is rich in such indications. The Bridge over
the Mole of 1807 in the Alexander Young collection, has a striking affinity with
Corot's broad manner, which was adopted by the Impressionists. At South
Kensington there are several pictures of medium size, unsurpassable models of
that grace of modern brushing, which so easily makes us forget its fragility. No
Whistler ever achieved the effect, half smears, half strokes, and yet perfect con
struction, of the landscape on the Stour (No. 325), with the boats in the foreground,
and the vapourous silhouette of Dedham church on the horizon, or the powerful
Nature built up of broad touches of the other landscape, Flatford Mill. To
about the same time — 1810 — we owe the profile of a girl in the same collection,
a work with which we should never have credited the painter of the tiresome
portraits executed a few years earlier. It is a remarkable evidence of the master's
comprehensive gifts. The flesh painting stultifies all our preconceptions of a
landscape painter's art, and suggests that Constable might have become one of
the great painters of women, if he had not preferred his trees and windmills.
Here only do we note a connection between Constable and the famous school of his
country. In this girlish profile there lurks a higher conception of the grace of
him who immortalised the features of Lady Hamilton. There is the same virtuosity,
modelling with the brush and dispensing with any preliminary drawing, but it has
this advantage, that it does not arrest us as a tourde force. The delicately sugges
tive method is to be found also among the English masters of the eighteenth century,
and it must be admitted that their traditional dexterity was helpful to Constable,
but more serious than they, he did not make dexterity his aim. His purpose was
not to give a summary idea of grace, but, as in his landscapes, to reflect Nature.
It is not that the intention is nobler — as to this, there may be two opinions — but
the painter's power of expression is greater. In this single head we see a new
aspect of Constable ; the impression we have received of his suppleness and
tenderness, purified by the influence of Rubens, is deepened, and another ex
perience is added to the rest. With the older English masters we are always
marking time. And this difference does away with the affinity which the
historian might infer from a certain similarity of technique. Our first impression,
as we stand before this head, suggests, not Romney and his contemporaries, but
Manet.* And the impression persists, although, on closer comparison with a
head .by Manet, we are surprised at the difference of character.

Constable was never younger than at this period. One can imagine nothing
daintier than the little Fillage Fair of 1810 at South Kensington, the booths with
the swarming crowd, whose liveliness of movement electrifies us, although we are
quite unable to distinguish bodies, or even faces. So too he has depicted life in
the Thames Docks in London with dots of colour that become animate. The
persons in some of the Hampstead sketches are not much bigger than pin-heads.
Three such dots in various colours constitute a group, a dozen a many-headed
multitude ; it is impossible to imagine greater precision than we evolve from what
is shown us.

When Constable took over the helm, this pointillisme had already a glorious
international history. The Canaletti owed it their rococo pictures. They, for
their part, had not invented the technique themselves, although it suited them
as if it had been made expressly for them. Canaletto's gifted friend, Tiepolo,

* The likeness has been pointed out by Holmes and other English writers.

CONSTABLE'S SKETCHES 131

was distinguished from his great predecessors by the fact that he expressed in dots
what they had leisure to write down calmly. Italy would scarcely have discovered
this technique without foreign intervention ; it was too alien to the old tradition
of the land. Long before Tiepolo, it had been practised in Holland. The
greatest of the Dutchmen had not disdained to beautify the ornament of his gar
ments by its means. His successors developed the method, and Vermeer fashioned
his canal out of sparkling dots. The Dutchmen who went to Italy both gave and
received. They recognised the increase of charm to be got by combination with
the richer colour of the Italians, noted the effect of the little luminous central
groups in Claude's landscapes and the possibility of welding those isolated decora
tive details, which Claude looked upon as mere adjuncts and often had put in
by other hands, into closer union with the rest. In many cases Claude polished
the blue, yellow and red of the groups to smooth surfaces, letting them appear as
if the light played about them rather than as luminous themselves, and placing
them preferably in the cool shadow, where their delightful gesture provided
plenty of variety. The Dutch were less careful, aiming rather at the vitality of the
little figures than at their splendour. The greatest among them never used colour
as decoration, but to enhance the naturalness of expression.

Canaletto had to choose between the two conceptions. He did not decide
for either, but took with great taste from each. Belotto and certain anonymous
imitators who cared more for the carnival delights of the moment than for the
future of painting, sometimes reduced their pictures to a primitive dance of more
or less rounded dots. Their mannerism is too gay and harmless to excite resent
ment. One, to whom the Muses had given all lovely things, brought a higher
conception into the game. Guardi, with a truer pictorial instinct, checked
the over facile rhythm of his great teacher and chose unity, intent at once on
greater richness and more intimate connection. His well-built vessels laden with
gaily coloured wares sail like stately spice warehouses on the Grand Canal. The
little figures in the Piazza have all the rococo daintiness ; but the colour, more
supple than in the pictures of his predecessors, not only clothes the multitude,
but animates it. This is more sincere as art, and higher as taste. His arcades
are as expressive as portraits, and far surpass the contemporary works of the French
architectural painters. He gave back to the technique of dots (pointillisme) the
relative importance bestowed upon it by the Dutch, but enriched it with all the
results of the intermediate stages.

It is quite certain that the successes of these artists were not without their
influence in England, to which country Canaletto paid a visit in 1746 that lasted two
years. It is the home of many brilliant works of his school. The beautiful view
of the Thames by an unknown English painter of the second half of the eighteenth
century in the National Gallery (No. 1681) is not the only evidence of his in
fluence. Guardi's traces are more easily followed. Constable's younger com
patriot, Bonington, gave himself up unreservedly to the Venetian when he went
to Italy on the conclusion of his years of study in Paris. Cheramy has two small
views of the Piazza of St. Mark, one of which might be a free copy on a small scale
of the beautiful Guardi formerly in the possession of the Princesse Mathilde.*
At this time Bonington had nothing to substitute for the golden tones of his
prototype, and contented himself by replacing the costume and the whole spirit
of the Venetian dix-huitieme siecle with the costume of his period, not without

* No. 62 in the catalogue of the sale «t the Hotel Drouot, Paris, in 1904.

1 32 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

prejudice to the results. The impressionism of the exemplar makes way for a
stiff frostiness, and the hard blue sky is a poor substitute for Guardi's magical
atmosphere. It was not long, however, before Bonington threw off this allegiance
for a nobler one. But until his early death, the landscapes of Guardi's school did
him good service.

Whether Constable took the " glittering points " of which MacColl speaks in
his chapter on Constable * from the same source is an open question. He was
made of sterner stuff than Bonington, and was not so easily influenced. But I
am inclined to think that the Venetians of the eighteenth century had some share
in the reverence he accorded to their predecessors. Many of the small pictures
attest this, Cheramy's sketch of the Isle of Wight among others. From a hill in
the foreground a company of soldiers and women in holiday dress contemplate
the landscape. The gay tints of the uniforms stand out with the brilliance of
lightning against the blue-green of the vapourous landscape. The relation is yet
more evident in the remarkable view of the Thames Docks in the same col
lection, where the boats are rendered by white dots upon the blue-gray water.
In this little picture too, we recognise one of the many bridges to Whistler who,
armed with Constable and Japan, returned again to Venice, to get a new note
out of the instrument. In him the last echo of Canaletto, the master he placed
above all others, died away.

Turner and the whole of the English landscape painters make use of the dot as
an accent. Gainsborough had already applied it to his little blond sketches,
which Constable diligently studied. For Turner they were a refuge, the means
by which he sought to give his fantasies the handling of oil-pictures, an ex
pedient which, however, never succeeded in concealing the character of the
" large water-colours." Constable too, at the beginning of his career, had accepted
the tradition of the English water-colour painters. From 1801 to 1806 he was a
good deal under the influence of Cozens, whom he once declared to be the greatest
of landscape painters, and more particularly of Girtin. The majority of the
numerous water-colour drawings in South Kensington were painted in 1806,
and represent Constable's most important production of this year. The coming
master found in Girtin a counterpoise both against Claude and the Dutchmen,
and a preparation for Rubens. After a short apprenticeship, during which he
did not disdain to copy Girtin, and also painted works of his own which are scarcely
distinguishable from those of the other, he began to subordinate the methods he
had acquired to his new aims. Turner contented himself with transferring
Girtin to canvas. Constable accomplished the amalgamation of the water-colour
tradition, a valuable affluent of English art, with the main stream, because he did
not allow one stimulant or the other to prescribe an artistic ideal to him, which
would in either case have circumscribed his development, but applied the means
to a better understanding of Nature. The View of Windermere of 1807 still
shows traces of the water-colour, the arrangement of the masses and the summary
character of the colour point to Girtin, more especially the background with the
shrouded blue-gray plateau, on which the yellow light of the sun is striking.
Girtin seems to have joined hands with Gainsborough. The dainty and appe
tising aspects of the scene come from the one, the romanticism of the sequestered
shade from the other. The technique accentuates the dual character of the
picture. The thin tones are powdered in all the illuminated portions with little
* "Nineteenth Century Art" (J. Maclehose, Glasgow, 1903), p. 74.

CONSTABLE: Jl'BlLEE AT EAST BERGHOLT AFTER WATERLOO

Clll-UAMV COLLECTION,

CONSTABLE'S SKETCHES 133

colour-particles of various sizes. These dots produce variety, and give relief to a
detail here and there which would otherwise be too shadowy, but their effect is not
akin to that of the strokes and splashes in the pictures painted a few years later.
Whereas later Constable's units resemble the words in a short sentence, the
points here play the part of inter-punctuation, and many of them are like the
dash by which emotional writers suggest unformulated ideas. In this picture, a
very typical example of his early period, Constable approaches his contemporary
compatriots. He never came so near to Turner again, more especially in the
mountainous background, where the dainty details are evolved from a mysterious
vapour, beneath a sky which is really " evaded,'* which gives little presage of
the mighty vaults the later Constable was wont to build over his compositions, and
is rather a convenient background than an organic part of the composition. The
painter still seeks to surpass the aquarellist by his material. And yet the little
work gives some indication of the master who was to come. It has none of Turner's
theatrical frippery. The loose and indefinite character of the forms is due to
lack of skill. We feel that the simplicity of this beginning will not be prejudicial
to growth. The love of Nature, which is less at home in the mountains than in
the quiet valley, which provided the red-coated oarsman in the boat, and the red-
roofed mill in the shade of the wood, is of good augury. It is true that this un
convincing mill gives little promise of the later Constable's mill pictures.

Some few years later the sparkling points had become the eyes of his landscapes ;
they stood in the right places and regulated the whole picture. They lose their
arbitrary and supplemental aspect, and are distributed with more semblance of
inevitability. The sketches become sections, showing a deeper and more serious
conception ; the audacity of the youth becomes the resolution of the man.
From about 1820 onwards Constable was completely master of his means, as far as
the sketches are concerned. He worked in masses, and in a manner consonant
with masses. His broad handling did not impair the animation we have noted in
early sketches such as the Village Fair of 1810. But the piquant note gave way
to stronger expression. The technique of Cheramy's Jubilee at East Bergholt
after Waterloo recalls that of the wonderful sketch for the Salisbury Cathedral in the
National Gallery (No. 1814), painted in 1831, and may have been executed a few
years earlier. Constable witnessed the occurrence in 1824. In a public square
surrounded by trees a many-headed crowd has gathered to see the hanging in
effigy of the hated Corsican. The gallows rise beside a gigantic cream-white flag,
and from it dangles a stuffed figure of Napoleon. Only the movement of the
comical episode is recorded, nay, the movement seems to be itself the episode,
the rhythm of the black and white multitude, of the flags, the trees, the clouds,
even of the houses. He treats his fellow creatures yet more summarily in the
many sketches for his inauguration of Waterloo Bridge in 1817. He tended
more and more to a synthesis for the life of the cosmos, and to suppression of
detail, under which head he conceived of man in landscape.

Much of this freshness is lost in Constable's large pictures. A great deal of
the loss is hardly avoidable. Energy, making use of larger and more versatile forms,
naturally loses in concentration what it gains in extent. But Constable's loss
was not solely of this normal kind. It was at once larger and smaller. If we
compare the finished picture of 1819, The White Horse, in the Pierpont Morgan
collection, with Mr. Alexander Young's sketch, we can scarcely believe that both
are not only by the same master, but of the same period — the same year indeed,

i34 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

according to Holmes. Both are wonderful things. The finished picture is the
greatest possible culmination of the work begun by the Dutchmen ; an idyl of
Nature with all the customary details, everything faithfully reproduced in perfect
harmony, and we admire both the perfection and the wise economy which could
give so many things, without letting them appear too numerous. The sketch
bears the same relation to it as does a late Rembrandt to a Hobbema. All the
typical character of Dutch landscape has been blown away. There are no details.
Where the boat appears in the picture, stretches the mighty black mass of the
trees. Even the chief motives are indeterminate. Whether the surface in the fore
ground represents water or dry land can only be said by one who remembers
the picture. A few roofs in the background are the only concrete touches save
the trees. But the mind of the spectator has long since flown over the keyboard
of objective conception and rejoices in the splendour of the gigantic form, a world
apart from delight in the reality of a boat, a tree, a pool of water. The truth of a
symbol of earth and sky, of elementary forces, has been revealed to him. The
knowledge that the same bit of Nature has served for model in both pictures is
disquieting. We are uneasy at the anomaly of two such opposite forms of
expression simultaneously used. The usual antithesis of sketch and picture does
not cover it. The sketch in the Young collection and the Pierpont Morgan pic
ture could never have borne the implied relation one to another. This anomaly
increases the difficulty of deciding which of the two forms Constable esteemed
more highly. We are tempted to call the Young picture poetry and the other
prose, without getting to the root of the matter. For the prose of a poet who is
also a master of prose will always reveal the peculiarities of conception shown in
his verse. But in Constable's case we often have the impression that his works
are not only by different persons, but due to different conceptions of the world.
And the phenomenon is not diminished by the circumstance that the results of
both conceptions are masterpieces.

Sometimes we shall decide unreservedly in favour of the sketches, especially in
the works of the last period. Format and definition add nothing in these cases ;
the details are relatively obtrusive, the curt expression is lost. On the other hand,
it would be unjust to condemn all Constable's later work as inferior. It comprises
too many, if not of his finest, at any rate of his ripest works, in which there is
scarcely a hint of failing powers. In a summary review such as the present, we
shall have to admit that the last five years of his life contributed little to the great
sum of his achievement, if we except one or two memorable works. He confined
himself for the most part to transformations of existing works, and broke no new
ground. His English biographers refer this cessation of creative activity to tech
nique, and make his exaggerated use of the palette-knife responsible. They are
so far right, that most of the later works are spread upon the canvas rather than
painted. Whereas in his youth Constable began with the brush, and only used
the palette-knife to give breadth to the brush, at certain moments in later life he
began his compositions with the knife, and used the brush for ornamentation.
He felt expression slipping away from him, and tried to indemnify himself by
exaggeration of method. To preserve unity, he gave up the differentiation with
which he had spoilt us in the beginning. The result was an increase of breadth
without apparent justification, and, more frequently, an exaggerated spottiness.
The Cenotaph of 1836, the year of Constable's death, is still brilliant, but we
feel as if the artist's whole purpose had been exhausted with this material effect.

CONSTABLE'S SKETCHES 135

The glittering points of the leaves, used in former pictures for decoration, are the
design itself here. In other examples, the mosaic seems to have been made for
the sake of mosaic, never in the sketches, strange to say, where the decorative value
might justify such exaggeration, but in the less decorative large pictures. We
miss the breath of Nature under the large splashes of colour. Others again, such
as the Romantic House, decompose the form which should have been poetised, and are
far inferior to similar motives of the earlier period. And yet together with the
Romantic House, at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1832, appeared the grandiose
Waterloo Bridge, the resume of a labour of many years, a work which in itself
justifies revision of an over hasty verdict on the last period.

136 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

CONSTABLE AND THE PRESENT

That which is often made a reproach to critics of modern art, that they praise
even the weaknesses of their heroes, is certainly inapplicable to our criticism of the
first modern. We make relatively larger demands upon him than upon the average
greatness of the transition period. A Wilson or a Gainsborough always fares better,
because from the first they only keep us at a moderate distance from the normal, and
we are apt to become too generous in our appreciations of the relative. We
are inordinately grateful to Turner, when for once we find him productive, and all
his braggadocio does not prevent us from believing him when for once he speaks
the truth. Constable, who even in the weak moments of his last period is immeasur
ably superior to his fellows, we judge by his incomparable display of power, even
in those hours of exhaustion when he can no longer offer us the same wealth of
gifts.

But this criticism also shows the peculiarity of our attitude to its object.
Constable has not yet become historical to us ; we are so near to him, that
we still watch every change in his fortunes with anxiety. We follow him like a
favourite racehorse, and every little swerve wrings an exclamation from us.
He will not become historical until our whole epoch has attained the platonic
dignity of historical existence. This knowledge makes us cherish his qualities
and his weaknesses as our own characteristics, gives us confidence in the course
we are following, and sharpens our perception of obstacles. It also over-steps
the limits set by nationality. All Constable's relations to his compatriots seem
to us insignificant, as compared with the ties that bind him to that cosmos
of modern art which was revealed by him, and is still growing. It may well fill
every modern Englishman with joy to follow the course on which Constable
accomplished the last and greatest portion of culture's task, the liberation of
English art from rococo influences. His countrymen may be justly proud of
the knowledge that the grandson carried out the promise of the grandfather
Hogarth, to get Art from Nature, and that he gave a most fruitful interpretation to
the gospel of " variety." But spirits still greater than his English predecessors were
at work in Constable. Behind the shades of Hogarth, Wilson, and Gainsborough,
rise Rubens, Claude and Rembrandt. This is the reason that both the foreigner
and the cosmopolitan Englishman feel a sympathy with Constable more far-
reaching than the sentiment rooted in the soil which he evokes in many of his
fellow countrymen. We cannot say as much of any of his contemporaries in
England. However much we may admire Crome or Wilkie, we are always con
scious of a certain provincialism in them, which robs their speech of what may be
called the classic, the universal accent. Constable's absolute, not his relative
accomplishment, and even more the healthiness of his ideal, give him a place in
the art-life of all progressive nations.

History bears persistent testimony to what I may call the Europeanism of

CONSTABLE AND THE PRESENT 137

Constable. Like Hogarth, he left little trace in England. But if in Hogarth's
case our regret at this is softened by our consciousness that it was not easy in his
day to choose out the universal and permanent elements from the complexity of
the manifestation, we are at a loss to explain England's relation to her greatest son.
No benefit was derived from him during his lifetime. His fame was established
by a few intimate friends. This is not very exceptional. But when he died,
he ceased to exist for England, not only for the public but also for art. Not only
did no one make use of his legacy, but with it his countrymen renounced the
movement which had brought him forth. English landscape already existed
when Constable appeared. What he added to it was enough to have made England
at one stroke the leader of European art. One might have supposed that the
generation which grew up with the picture of Waterloo Bridge would have felt
irresistibly impelled to carry on what this work had begun. Nothing of the sort
happened. Bonington was exhausted long before Constable himself laid down
the brush, and even had he not been stricken down untimely, he would never have
been the heir of Constable. He was unfitted for the office, not by incapacity,
but by his tendencies. Links between the two were not lacking ; Bonington
once essayed a composition in the style of the Hay Wain, a Hay Wain of Italian
origin. He was not of the same fibre. The picture of his housekeeper in the
Louvre is the only one of his works which has the vigourous directness of manner
characteristic of his great friend. It is not his supreme work, indeed, it has not
even his typical qualities, his extraordinary delicacy of taste and his tender grace
of touch and colour. But it might be possible to conceive of this as a bridge to
Constable and beyond him. It remained an isolated effort. The true Bonington
threw in his lot with the French colourists who hailed from Venice, and from
that Rubens who invented flesh-painting — not from him who dwelt among
peasants and horses in the Chateau de Steen. In that room of the Wallace Collec
tion where the relations between Prudhon, Delacroix, Decamps, Isabey, Diaz
and Meissonier are as evident as if they had worked in the same studio, the unique
collection of Bonington's works is in the right place. No one would take them
to be the work of an Englishman of Constable's school. The gaily coloured cos
tumes common to Bonington, Willde, and Etty, show his Anglicism in no very
favourable light.

William Mailer mingled an insipid romanticism with Constable's gravity, and
made clever sketches with a skill as remote from his prototype as Dantsic from
Bergholt. In our own times again an Anglo-German — Muhrmann — has made
essays in Constable's manner.

But apart from this Anglo-Frenchman and German-Englishman nothing
remains of Constable in his native land. Burger noticed the sterility of his in
fluence in England,* and Lord Windsor, who quotes the passage, remarks that
this may have been true in Burger's time : " Up to 1860 there is little evidence
of Constable's influence, and though there is plenty of it now, it has come less
directly from him than coloured, as it were, through French spectacles." f

This " plenty " seems to reduce itself to one instance, that of the Anglo-
American Whistler, whose ephemeral relation to Constable will be examined in
a subequent chapter. With this hardly legitimate exception there has been nothing
in the last forty years to modify Burger's pronouncement. To accept Holmes'

* " Histoire des Peintres." 1863.
t "Constable." 1903.
VOL. I S

138 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

demonstration of a following in contemporary England, one must either be an
Englishman, or have little perception of Constable.*

What his fatherland neglected was taken over by the Continent. Strange
as this neglect may seem, the rapidity with which Europe assimilated Constable
is even more remarkable. The movement began in Paris. France had the
necessary conditions for the part. Not the culture of her painters — this
sprang from a tradition alien to Constable and was rather of a nature to make
her hostile to him — but a purpose. France needed what Constable had to
give. The Empire had driven out the rococo with violence and had created a
condition answering to an abnormal state of national excitement, which could
only be prolonged by the decorative requirements of an Imperator. The
intensification of revolutionary ideas which had crowned the eighteenth cen
tury, could not subsist after Napoleon's abdication, and was fain to seek the
basis of an art in harmony with the portion of the race that was capable of
development. At this moment it was discovered what had arisen on the other
side of the Channel, an art following after Nature with the utmost independence.
Archaeology had not been superseded there ; it seemed never to have troubled
any one seriously. Results even more brilliant than those of David had not
succeeded in concealing the mechanical nature of an artistic doctrine, the exact
opposite of which was flourishing in England. Freedom, the dream of the
young generation, had long been a normal form of artistic practice there, and it
was made clear to the disinherited, that it was possible to paint without the
receipts that had been lost in the Revolution, and also without those new ones
whose author had been driven out in 1816 with Napoleon. This enormous
difference between the tendencies of the two nations must be borne in mind, if
we would understand the hymns of praise sung by Frenchmen to English painters
of the second rank. The tendency was so astonishing to them, that they had no
leisure to criticise its exponents. The young Frenchman saw the traditional
English freedom with eyes sharpened by enthusiasm. Not only did contem
poraries paint on national principles ; their fathers and grandfathers had done
the same, and what they had left undone, what, it might be hoped, could be done
better, was a further cause for gratitude in those who came after. The doctrine,
like all logical ideas, was more effectual than the example.

Bonington was one of its disseminators. The friend of Gericault and Dela
croix, with the suggestive faculty of a delicate susceptibility, conscious of the
advantages derived from a mixture of French and English culture in his own works,
he was able both by his words and by his works to forward that rapprochement of
the two nations, so often realised in the eighteenth century. Gericault was the
first to take the journey to London. In a letter of May 6, 1821, he wrote to his
friend Horace Vernet, that his (Vernet's) talent lacked nothing but " d'etre trempe
a Pecole anglaise." His enthusiasm for the Royal Academy Exhibition was un
bounded. " Vous ne pouvez pas vous faire une idee des beaux portraits de cette
annee, d'un grand nombre de paysages et de tableaux de genre, des animaux peints
par Ward et par Landseer, ag£ de dix-huit ans : les maitres n'ont rien produit
de mieux en ce genre ; il ne faut point rougir de retourner a Pecole ; on ne peut
arriver au beau dans les arts que par des comparaisons. Chaque ecole a son carac-
tere. Si 1'on pouvait parvenir a la reunion de toutes les qualites, n'aurait on
pas atteint la perfection ? . . . Je faisais a 1'Exposition le vceu de voir plac6 dans
* " John Constable," Holmes, p. 205.

CONSTABLE AND THE PRESENT 139

notre Musee une quantite des tableaux que j'avais sous les yeux. Je desirais cela
comme une lec.on qui serait plus utile que de penser longtemps. Que je voudrais
pouvoir montrer aux plus habiles meme plusieurs portraits qui ressemblent tant
a la nature, dont les poses faciles ne laissent rien a desirer, et dont on peut vrai-
ment dire qu'il ne leur manque que la parole. Combien aussi seraient utile a
voir les expressions touchantes de Wilkie (he writes Wilky). Dans un petit tab
leau, et d'un sujet des plus simples il a su tirer un parti admirable. La scene se
passe aux Invalides ; il suppose qu'a la nouvelle d'une victoire, ces veterans se
reunissent pour lire le bulletin et se rejouir. II a varie tous ses caracteres avec
bien du sentiment. Je ne vous parlerai que d'une seule figure qui m'a paru la
plus parfaite et dont la pose et 1'expression arrachent les larmes quelque bon que
Ton tienne. C'est une femme d'un soldat qui, occupee de son mari, parcourt
d'un ceil inquiet et hagard la liste des morts . . . Votre imagination vous dira tout
ce que son visage decompose exprime. II n'y a ni crepes, ni deuil ; le vin au contraire
coule a toutes les tables, et le ciel n'est point sillonne d'eclairs d'un presage funeste.
II arrive cependant au dernier pathetique comme la nature elle-meme. Je ne
crains pas que vous me taxiez d'anglomanie ; vous savez comme moi ce que nous
avons de bon et ce qui nous manque."

We are not surprised to find that at this primitive stage of perception
Gericault had no word of appreciation for Constable's Hay Wain which appeared
for the first time at this exhibition. True, this may have been due to the re
cipient of the letter, to whom the anecdotes of the English school would certainly
have appealed more than its loftier flights. But that the painter's instinct had
already left the secondary phase of such interest far behind is shown by the noble
pictures of the Epsom races painted this year, especially by the little gem in the
Louvre, in the brilliant freshness of colour and touch of which the best art of
England manifests its vivifying influence. Among Gericault's figure-subjects,
painted with flaming red touches, the magnificent head in the Eissler collection
at Vienna shows this influence the most clearly.

At the instance of their young admirers in France, the Englishmen made their
first appearance at a Paris Salon in 1824. The exhibitors were Bonington,
who had been seen there before, Constable, Lawrence, Copley Fielding, Thales
Fielding, Harding and William Wyld.* Constable, with his Hay Wain, his
Lock on the Stour, and one of his small Hampstead Heath pictures, was hailed at
once both by friend and foe as the leader of the invasion. The opponents were,
of course, in the majority. The coarser spirits were represented by the anonymous
critic who summed up all objections to the Hay Wain in the famous comparison
of the sponge soaked in colour and thrown at the canvas. The opinion of the
more moderate found utterance in the criticism of Stendhal, who, while
admitting the merits of the works, regretfully pointed out their lack of idealism,
or in the more drastic phrase in which it was asserted that these hymns to Nature
were beautiful, but " meant nothing." Constable was much amused, and quoted
a phrase of Northcote's against the Parisians : " They know as little of Nature as
a hackney coach-horse does of a pasture." Some intelligent persons of Delacroix'
circle divined that the performances of the English visitors would leave permanent
traces. They had shared the spontaneous reaction of the young painter of the
Massacre de Scio, who, swiftly making up his mind, essayed to turn the new

* Bazalgette enumerates the pictures in his preface, and gives an interesting selection from the
Parisian criticisms.

140 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

experience to account by adopting Constable's method of division in his lately
finished Salon picture. I shall try in a subsequent chapter to show the further
consequences of the impression in the whole development of the French leader.
Delacroix waxed enthusiastic not only over Constable, but over the novelty
of the whole English school, even though he did not go quite so far as
Gericault. His letters from London in 1825 show that he remained the French
man in England. " L'Angleterre me semble peu amusante," he writes to Pierret :
" II n'y aurait qu'un motif bien puissant comme, par exemple, d'y faire des affaires
qui put m'y retenir." *

He thought highly of Lawrence : " La fleur de la politesse et un veritable
peintre de grands seigneurs ; " still more highly of Wilkie, especially in his sketches
— " il gate regulierement ce qu'il fait de beau " — but gives the palm to Bonington,
Turner and Constable. With Bonington, whose acquaintance he had already
made in 1819, he shared a studio after returning from England, and the com
panionship was not unprofitable to him. " J'ai eu quelque temps Bonington
dans mon atelier," he writes to Soulier in 1826. " J'ai bien regrette que tu n'y sois
pas. II y a terriblement a gagner dans la societe de ce luron-la, et je te jure que
je m'en suis bien trouve." Later on he found occasion to modify, not his sym
pathy with the man, who always remained dearer to him than any other English
man, .but his admiration for the artist. He recognised the danger of dexterity
in Bonington's " touche coquette.". . . " Sa main 1'entrainait, et c'est ce
sacrifice des plus nobles qualites a une malheureuse facilite, qui fait dechoir
aujourd'hui ses ouvrages et les marque d'un cachet de faiblesse comme ceux des
Vanloo." f His admiration for Lawrence also cooled in time. In a letter of
1858 to Th. Sylvestre he speaks of " 1'exageration de moyens d'effet qui sentent
un peu trop 1'ecole de Reynolds." J His riper opinion of Turner, whom at first
he had ranked with Constable, I have already recorded. On the other hand, his
relation to Constable — " homme admirable, une des gloires anglaises " — remained
unaltered, and it is a testimony to the sincerity of the great Romanticist, that the
fundamental differences of their natures did not prevent him from recognising
the essential community of their conceptions, and profiting by it. As far as I
know, they never became better acquainted. Constable had no organs for the
characteristic manner of his admirer, and Delacroix' complex mind could find out
no other relation to him than the impression he had worked out so logically on
first seeing the Hay Wain. The advantage he derived is set forth in a phrase :
" Constable dit que la superiorite du vert de ses prairies tient a ce qu'il est compose
d'une multitude de verts differents. Le defaut d'intensite et de vie a la verdure
du commun des paysages, c'est qu'ils la font ordinairement d'une teinte uniforme ; "
and he adds : " Ce qu'il dit ici du vert des prairies peut s'appliquer a tous les
autres tons." §

The whole secret revealed to him by the Hay Wain lies in this reflection,
and all he had to do thenceforth was to carry out the variations of the principle in
his own spirit. If we look upon the basis of these variations as the thema
which has persisted from Delacroix to the pioneers of Impressionism, we cannot
but recognise in Constable the father of modern painting, if it is to have a father
at all. That he left his children and grandchildren enough to do has been shown

* " Lettres," p. 82.

"Journal," ii. pp. 278, 279. He tempered the severity of this judgment later on, cf. iii. p. 188.
% " Lettres," p. 295 ; cf. also " Journal," iii. p. 377. § " Journal," i. p. 234.

DELACROIX: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

LOUVRE. PARIS

CONSTABLE AND THE PRESENT 141

by the results. These are so various, that the tracing back of them all to one pair
of eyes is only permissible in the sense which circumscribes and completes all specu
lations touching the personal origin of impersonal facts. With comparatively
slight reservations, we may see in Constable the leading spirit of the landscape
school of 1830. By this I mean the men who applied themselves exclusively
to landscape, above all Rousseau, Dupre and Daubigny. Paul Huet may perhaps be
looked upon as the first of this generation. He had been a friend of Gericault's
since 1822, and was one of Bonington's comrades in Gros' atelier. Constable's
friend, William Reynolds, who engraved The Lock and painted with some talent,
influenced him, even before he had seen Constable's works himself. Huet's
pictures in the Louvre are of his late period, writing of which in his journal
Delacroix said : " Ce pauvre Huet n'a plus le moindre talent ; c'est de la peinture
de vieillard, et il n'y a plus 1'ombre de couleur." But there are some small
pictures painted about 1830, which partly explain the enthusiasm of Mantz,
Alexandre Decamps, Btlrger and others, who hailed him as a pioneer. Earlier
still Georges Michel had come under the influence of the English landscape school,
but his life was too lonely to propagate it, and he himself got no further than a
sincere but colourless feeling for Nature. Both translated the English manner
rather than Constable into French. In him they saw more what he had in
common with Crome and others than his personal qualities, and they themselves
were not sufficiently individual to add anything. From these early disciples to Manet
and Monet, we can trace an ever deeper appreciation of Constable's programme, or
rather of his effects, an appreciation that gradually shook off the accidental element
of the first discovery, and aimed increasingly at the universal. W'e may compare
the development with the perspective of a well-formed bay to the open sea, and
so recognise not only Constable's fertilising influence, but also the achievements
of his successors.

With Rousseau, the shore was still comparatively near. Sensier, a victim to
that biographic mania which refuses to allow any relation between the hero of the
tale and the rest of mankind, and perhaps also dazzled by the later Rousseau's
extraordinary versatility, attempted to deny any sort of connection between his
friend and Constable, f Rousseau, born in 1812, exhibited the first results of
his nature-studies in 1831, showing how much he had profited by the works
of the old Dutch masters. In 1832 he saw Constable, and we find the date 1833
on one of his finest early works, the large landscape of the Kucheleff collection in
the St. Petersburg Academy (No. 308). The whole arrangement, the little hillock,
the cart with the red-capped peasant, at once recalls the Hay Wain and similar
pictures, and also shows differentiation as compared with the Dutchmen, of whom
we have in this same gallery a very typical example in the Constable manner,
the Hobbema with the mill beside a pond. The division of the colour, by
means of which Rousseau was afterwards to approach the Impressionists, is in
conceivable without Constable, both in the Petersburg picture and many other
examples. It is true that we are also astonished here by the primordial Gallic
quality in Rousseau, the passion that breaks like a cry of Nature out of this very
truthfully treated landscape. This was lacking in Constable, and this is why he
sometimes seems tame beside Rousseau.

* " Journal," p. 377. What he wrote to Huet later about the Inondation now in the Louvre was
merely a civility to his old friend.

t " Souvenir sur Rousseau." Paris. L. Techner, 1872.

1 42 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

Dupr£ will, I fear, lose in importance as Constable becomes more popular.
The exaggerated prestige of the school of 1830 should be discounted mainly in his
direction. It is scarcely comprehensible nowadays that there was a time when
his reputation was much above that of the great Englishman. Daubigny, the
youngest of the generation, went farthest in turning the heritage to good account.
Constable's most decisive influence on modern landscape manifests itself first in
his vigourously brushed planes. Rousseau and his circle had restricted themselves
to the pictures. Daubigny and his immediate followers worked out the hints
given in Constable's sketches and transposed them to large canvases. The
result was a new kind of picture. It is only now, watching the successors of
Manet and Monet at work, that we are beginning to get some idea of the extent
of this new conception.

Constable's connection with French painting brings him into the closest
relation with the development of European art. There is hardly a serious school
of painting of the nineteenth century which has not some secret link with him. On
the other hand, his influence outside of France was almost as insignificant as in his
native land. In Germany we find isolated traces of him, without any important
results. The little nature studies of Dahl, to whom German landscape of the
early nineteenth century owes a good deal, have a certain likeness to the Constable
sketches of the middle period. Blechen and Fearnley come nearer to the Berg-
holt master. Blechen's little sea-piece with the lonely spectator on the shore, in
the Berlin National Gallery, might almost pass for a Constable, and there are one
or two small works by Fearnley at Christiania in the same manner. But I can find
no trace of a direct relation in any one of these cases. Dahl left Copenhagen
in 1818 for Dresden. He meditated a journey to London, but this, according to
his biographer A. Aubert, never came to pass. His characteristic studies began
about 1820. Fearnley frequently came into contact with Englishmen, but
according to Aubert, not till 1832 in Italy, where he may certainly have seen
pictures by Bonington and Turner. When he came to London several years later,
he greatly admired Turner. *

His most important Nature-studies, as, for instance, the Scharfenberg, are dated
1829, and are sufficiently explained by the influence of his master, Dahl. Blechen,
too, came into frequent contact with Dahl at Dresden, and failing any evidence
that works of Constable's were exhibited in Germany before 1830, he too must be
reckoned among the disciples of Dahl. It is true there are various indications
that the fame of the Hay Wain, after setting Paris in a ferment in 1824, had
penetrated to Germany. Did the Hamburg painters, Wasmann and Morgenstern,
arrive at their joyous landscapes alone, or by the intervention of Dahl ? Was
that Impressionist-in-little, C. F. Gille, who has left us charming studies dated
1833, indebted to Fearnley or to a greater artist ? and is the early promise of
Achenbach sufficiently explained by his acquaintance with a painter so little sure
of himself as that same Fearnley, with whom he went to Norway in 1839 ? The
exhibition of Constable's works in a Berlin hotel, vouched for by Menzel in a
conversation with Tschudi, took place before 1845. What the best German
painter of the period owed to this contact I have tried to show in another work.f
But this exhibition, which Menzel eagerly studied, was certainly not the first

* In the collection of Hofjagermeister Fearnley, of Christiana, there is a little picture of Turner
on varnishing day, 1837, at the Royal Academy,
t " Der junge Menzel." Insel Verlag. 1906.

CONSTABLE AND THE PRESENT 143

opportunity the Germans had had of reckoning with Constable. Beyond a
doubt, the Munich landscape-painter, August Seidel, had seen Constable. His
compatriot and contemporary, Anton Teichlein, was not unmoved by the example
of the Englishman. Of course here, as in so many other cases, Constable's influence
was mingled with that of the Fontainebleau masters, who were known to the
German public before their great instigator.

In Vienna Constable was better appreciated. A school, which even in the
eighteenth century was an important offshoot of England, and owed much to
Lawrence and Wilkie at the beginning of the nineteenth, no doubt paid homage to
the greatest English master. It is true that the genre-pictures attracted most
attention. Amerling, Danhauser and Fendi, who were in close touch with English
art, were never able to make up their minds to give free rein to their inclination for
landscape, and Waldmuller, whose fresh renderings of the district round Vienna
sometimes recall Constable, did not, as far as I know, make acquaintance with
the master's pictures till later.

Constable never knew the glory of the conqueror, and even after his death
remained a quiet spirit. He lacked the kindling quality of astounding personali
ties. His art was too well organised to attract attention from afar ; it had that
simplicity of perfection, which repels the public and the public's painters; it was too
thorough, too free from the picturesque, to awaken that astonishment which
smoothes the way for enthusiasm. His gift attains the abstract purity of the
scientific fact, and its benefits are so universal that the giver is scarcely
remembered.

FROM DELACROIX TO COURBET

EUGENE DELACROIX

Wir sind vielleicht zu antik gewesen
Nun wollen wir es moderner lesen.

GOETHE.

To write adequately about Delacroix would be to relate the whole history of
modern art. If I devote but one short chapter to him here, it is partly because
the whole compass of this work would be not too great to appreciate him worthily,
partly, indeed, because my book deals with little else but the results of his art and
of his ideas. The brief notes that follow are designed merely to call the reader's
attention to certain important aspects of Delacroix' art, on which I shall dwell in
greater detail elsewhere, in connection with other artists. He lurks in all of them.
Just as there is a touch of Goethe in most of the poets of the nineteenth century,
so Delacroix was the spirit who communicated some particle of himself to all the
important painters of his age. Yet no great Frenchman is so little appreciated
out of France. To appreciate him fully it is perhaps essential to be a Frenchman.
No German gallery owns any of his works. Thanks to the English colourists
of his day, he is somewhat better known on this side of the Channel. There
are a few good pictures by him in the Wallace collection, and in the lonides
collection at South Kensington. But even here his art has never been seriously
considered. His compatriots undervalued him, even after he had become famous.
He had a great deal more than passion and rhetoric, and, indeed, I am not sure
that the latter-day cynics who question the reality of his pathos are not more right
than they suppose, and that the heart whose wild pulsations we seem to feel in his
pictures was not associated with a perfectly cool head. The hasty judgment that
ascribes everything to the familiar daemon, is as erroneous in his case as in that of
many another great man. The important thing to realise is that he had a great
intellect, that he was cold enough to evolve a rational standard from his wishes and
emotions, warm enough to soar above this standard by his power. He could
paint. He grasped at mighty things ; Dante spoke to him before his beard had
grown. There was need of this mighty force to strike down Classicism, which
threatened to become a draughtsman's speciality. Painting needed the impetus
he gave it to carry it along into our century. And he it was who laid that tragic
element in its cradle, with which it is struggling for life to-day.

We may say perhaps that he was the last great painter who was a man of
profound culture. We stand before his earliest portrait of himself and are thrilled
by the painting, astounded at the energy of the brushing and also of the face it
has evoked.

Of his private life I will only say that he wrote marvellous letters, and kept a
journal which should be a sort of Bible for young painters.

Enthusiasm is clarified by contemplation of Delacroix. For George Sand and

DELACROIX: FRAGMENT FROM THE MASSACRE OF SCIO, 1838

CHERAMY COLLECTION, PARIS

EUGENE DELACROIX 145

Musset and finally for Baudelaire, who got nearer to him, he was so essentially
romantic suggestion, from which they drew vigour for their own achieve
ments — Chopin, too, owed him several inspirations — that his deepest artistic
meaning escaped them. He was not unconscious of this himself, and spoke of
George Sand much more coolly than she of him. He had a great respect for
Madame de Stae'l. Baudelaire, to whom he had every reason to be grateful, he
treated with the elaborate courtesy characteristic of him, and was much more
intimate with the philosopher-painter, Chenavard, Ingres' pupil, whose culture
seemed to him more profitable than that of the other. He had the natural
repulsion of a man of trained intellect to the frenzies of undisciplined emotion,
and knew himself to be by no means a Fleur du Mai*

His life-long endeavour was to find a conventional language, which should
nevertheless be capable of fettering his strong expression. He worked daily at
the technique of this language, and it was as laborious to him as the invention of
his design was easy. In his facility of dramatic utterance, he was a Romantic, but
when his mighty mind had taken its rapid flight through space, the faithful
workman followed after, smoothing with almost bourgeois exactitude the road
which his lightning invention had struck out in the new domain. That which
exhausted him and made him the sick man who wasted one-third of his time in
order to make himself capable of working in the other two-thirds, was not the
unhealthy intoxication of an over-heated imagination, but the terrific energy of a
worker who hated nothing so much as the slovenly technique of modern art, and
who strained every nerve, to give the unconscious forces of his genius the most
conscious form imaginable. A perfectly simple, cool-headed man, who loved
music, not because it is the most purely sensuous art, but because it affords the
purest conventional form. He refreshed himself with Mozart, was never quite
able to convert himself to Beethoven, abhorred the modern French composers,
and was the first to condemn Wagner.

* " Delacroix, lac de sang, hante de mauvais anges
Ombrage par un dais de sapins toujours vert
Oil, sous un ciel chagrin, des fanfares ctranges
Passent comme un soupir ctouftc de Weber."

BAUDELAIRE, " Fleurs du Mai."

As far as I can remember, Delacroix never made more than a passing reference to this enthusiastic
adherent in any of his numerous notes and letters. I remember, however, what he once wrote in his
journal at Dieppe, when Chenavard had been lamenting to him : " II me semble toujours que cette
qualit6 de philosophe implique, avec 1'habitude de reflcchir plus attentivement sur Phomme et la vie,
celle de prendre les choses commc elles sont et dc diriger vers le bien ou le mieux possible cette vie et
nos passions. Eh bien, non ! Tous ces songeurs sont agitcs comme les autrcs, il semble que la
contemplation de 1'csprit de 1'homme, plus dignc de pitie que d'admiration, leur 6te cette sercnit£ qui
est souvent le partage de ceux qui se sont attelcs h une oeuvre plus pratique, et a mon avis plus digne
d'efforts. . . .

II me trouve heureux, et il a raison, et je me trouve bien plus heureux encore, depuis que j'ai vu sa
misere. [He is speaking of Chenavard.] Sa dcsolante doctrine sur la decadence necessairc des arts
est peut-ctre vraic, mais il faut s'interdire mcme d'y penser. . . .

Un homme vit dans son siecle et fait bien de parler a ses contemporams un langage qu'ils puisscnt
comprendre et qui puisse les toucher. . . . Ce qui fixe 1'attcntion dans ses ouvrages n'est pas la
conformitc avec les idecs de son temps : cet avantage, si e'en est un, se retrouve dans tous les hommes
mediocres qui pullulcnt dans chaque siecle et qui courent apr£s la favcur en flattant miserablement le
goQt du moment ; c'est en se servant de la langue de ses contemporains qu'il doit, en quelque sorte,
leur enseigner des choses que n'exprimait pas cette langue, et si sa reputation merite de durer, c'est
qu'il aura etc un excmple vivant du gout dans un temps ou le gout ctait mcconnu."

VOL. I T

146 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

This same being was so susceptible to sound, that he had the " Divine Comedy"
read aloud to him with a strong accentuation of the rhythm while he was
painting his Dante picture, and was almost magnetised in the process. A very
complex intellect, estimating Shakespeare and Calderon as mighty savages, capable
of painting with vulgar details, and at the same time of saying immortal things
about the nonsense of exaggerated local colour, which might have been aimed at the
modern naturalism of German literature ; take him all in all, a universal genius,
and therefore a universal artist too. Ingres sought for universal line ; he made
an experiment that was bound to fail, and that will never lose the character of the
abnormal, using the term in the most favourable sense. Delacroix was not only
his pictorial opposite, but a richer, more picturesque entity, to whom the whole
world was fused in magic tints ; whose mind was open to all impressions, no
matter whence they came, and in whose life and works the whole first half of the
nineteenth century is marvellously reflected. He showed himself a modern, for
whereas Ingres specialised, he did his utmost not to appear as the master of one
particular genre ; he reminds us of Goethe, and this in spite of his having painted
Gotz von Berlichmgen ! Affinities rarely appreciate each other , he had very
little veneration for the poets who provided him with themes ; Walter Scott
seemed to him hardly less important than Shakespeare and Goethe ; he found
pictures in all three, and preferred Ariosto to them all, because it is impossible to
take anything away from Ariosto.* This wholesome nonsense, to which we
find parallels in Goethe, also tended to preserve him.

His coolness of judgment gave him a right perspective in considering his
own art His master Rubens was the only being concerning whom he did not
change his opinion throughout his life, and in whose praise he waxes fervid.
There were moments when Rubens engulfed him, notably in the large easel-
picture, the Death of Sardanapalus in Baron Vitta's collection, painted shortly
after the Massacre of Scio, and still more evidently in the fragment of the same
picture, belonging to M. Cheramy, the florid, luscious colour of which is
difficult to explain when we compare it with that of the Massacre. And just as
we prefer certain of Rubens' small sketches to certain of his great pictures, so, for
the same reasons, we are inclined to rank the exquisite little study of the whole
composition (also in the Cheramy collection) above both the large picture and
this masterly fragment.

Delacroix saw how Rubens and his predecessor Michelangelo had achieved
their grandiose effects, namely, by the exaggeration of certain proportions, and he
understood that the imitation of such heroes must lead to decadence. He saw
this degeneration — as did the classicists, though on somewhat different grounds —
in the French art of the eighteenth century, to which he was not only unsym
pathetic, but antagonistic. Watteau was the only artist of the school for whom
he felt some indulgence in later life ; he never mentions Fragonard. He had
nothing of the Fleming in him ; Rubens showed him how to achieve the grandeur
of Italian composition without foregoing vigorous expression. Frans Hals was
almost unknown to him. He was a Latin, a Frenchman akin to those who
looked on when Primaticcio painted Fontainebleau for Francis I. He loved
Poussin.

In Delacroix we see what race bestows on the individual. The Germans, and
later, the English went to Italy and came home to paint literature. Delacroix

* "Journal de Delacroix."

EUGENE DELACROIX 147

was never in Italy ; all he possessed of her was what she had given to France.
The Renaissance had parted into two currents ; two sisters, the second of which,
though so much the younger, was not the less like her senior. A* dweller in
France knew what Italy was like. The Renaissance here had been less a conquest
than a restoration ; it dropped the first syllable, and was beginning and continua
tion in one.

It is nevertheless regrettable that Delacroix never carried out his intention of
visiting Venice. He only knew Titian and Veronese ; at Venice he would not
only have made the acquaintance of Tintoretto, but he would have recognised the
relation of all these artists to their age, and would probably have discovered that
his connection with his own was less complete. He had the Latin racial instincts ;
they were at once his strength and his weakness. No less than Prud'hon or
David, he felt that Watteau's tradition carried certain dangers in its train.
He was right. Boucher and his disciples had not the vitality to make our art
fruitful. They stood and fell with their time, from whose style they sprang,
symptoms of a very individual epoch, but not themselves individuals. Fragonard's
colour had always too much of the nimble dexterity of the decorator, as soon as
it was applied to great decoration. The brilliant panels purchased a few years
ago by Mr. Pierpont Morgan show the exhaustion of the age. Its painting had
become too slight.

Delacroix sought to translate, not this, but its original essence, Rubens, into
poetry, and to dissolve it in the French tradition. Even in such early work as the
frieze in the throne-room of the Palais Bourbon, the colossal nude figures of which
were still wholly Rubensesque, he strives for more strenuous expression. With
the Fleming it was the flesh that was eloquent, with Delacroix the gesture. Even
in his most mature pictures, Rubens has not the lofty poetry of the naked bodies
that cling to Dante's boat in Delacroix' earliest work. I mean the three classic
bodies in the centre, which form the artistic base for the figures in the ship.
They are worthy of the poet himself. A generation later, Rodin, France's
greatest sculptor, built upon a like foundation.

But Rubens is in the Dante's Boat too : in the loathsome creature on the left,
who holds on to the vessel with his teeth, and the group in the foreground. They
recall details in the Last Judgment at Munich, and similar things. In spite of all
the deductions of modern colourists, the Dante s Boat is the strongest of the
master's works, notwithstanding the " brown sauce " in which it swims, and the
superficial lack of independence. Later, Delacroix gained in beauty, richness,
and perfection, but he rarely again gave utterance at once so powerful and so
spontaneous to the mighty undertone of his individuality. He slipped his rough
husk, rubbed off his asperities by contact with the world, and losing those
peculiarities that at first repel in his works, he also lost something of the
vehemence that made him great. This must always happen with men like
Delacroix, in whom temperament is everything. Poussin and Rembrandt did not
reach their full perfection till their old age : Poussin, because he had need of the
utmost formal calm, Rembrandt, because the highest spiritual experience was
necessary to him. Delacroix is inspiration. His art is the closest possible
approximation to the creative force of the poet, for whom all the ripe experience
of life cannot replace the " first fine careless rapture." But, if his later works
are less forceful than those of his youth, they are perhaps even more important,
as expressions of his individuality and revelations of his conception of form.

148 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

The Massacre of Set o is not quite on a level with the Dante s Boat in this respect.
It is not so unique, so homogeneous ; yet here, too, is a mighty work, so vigorous
that its dependence on a tradition is barely noticeable.

To Gros much is forgiven, because he fostered Delacroix and Gericault for a
time. We toil patiently through his dreary battles in the great gallery at Versailles,
searching for an atom of the genius of his two successors, the genius that shines
forth in Delacroix' Taillebourg, in this gallery, in spite of all with which it has
to contend. If we compare this gigantic picture with the magnificent sketches
for it belonging to M. Gallimard and M. Haro in Paris,* we recognise the great
gulf that divides Gros from Delacroix. It is a gem, a battle-piece in which,
despite the fury of combat that pervades it, a peaceful element makes itself
felt above the tumult, inviting the senses to deeper, subtler emotions than
could be suggested by a realistic scene of war. When Renoir saw the
Gallimard sketch, he said it was like a bunch of roses — a phrase no less honour
able to the picture than to Renoir himself, the grateful disciple who grafted
the roses of this art on to his own. This marvellous quality is lost in the large
picture. The composition, too, is much finer in the smaller work. It is, indeed,
a flower-piece, in which warriors and horsemen are the blossoms, yet it has all the
verve of Rubens in the same genre. Delacroix had evidently seen the Munich
Battle of the Amazons, or one of the sketches for it. His architecture is used in
the same way, the prancing horse in the centre may have done duty as a model for
Gericault as well as for Delacroix, and we may perhaps recognise it again in the
horse of Chasseriau's Macbeth, rearing at the encounter with the three witches. But
whereas Rubens' Flemish frenzy exalted vast orgies and exaggerated the elements
of disorder, in order to riot in the tangle of vehement bodies, we find in Delacroix
a higher culture, that delivered movement from the burden of brute-fury, a nobler
passion, that dominates the hurly-burly and introduces order even in violence.

Such passion did not lack themes in the days of Byron and Victor Hugo.
Delacroix was one of the most fervid in that age of eager enthusiasm. To his
contemporaries he appeared rather as a tribune full of generous ideas, than as the
apostle of a new art. The threnody in which Cleuziow appreciated him in 1864
is typical of all the rest.t Greece is more to the fore than colour and line in
most of them. These ideas have long been out of date, but Delacroix' emotion
is as living now as it seemed in those days to his sympathisers ; indeed, it has
gained that plastic sincerity, which compels belief, whether we admit the value
of the conviction or not. Such are the history-painters who live.

Gros is not of their number, in spite of his unruly strength and his extra
ordinary capacity, in spite of that heroic gallantry which seems to us such a natural
reflection of the great epoch. There was in him a lurking barbarism, which ignored
the noblest French instincts.

It was not Gros, but Gericault and Delacroix who legitimised the counter-
Revolution. Gericault, a splendid athletic youth of the purest nature, the noblest
race, a young giant, to whom no exertion was an effort ; the other, passion de-

* M. Haro's sketch, which hung in Delacroix' studio till his death, shows the original design for
the Versailles picture. The architect made him cut away part of the bridge, and the master often
lamented the consequent injury to his composition.

t " L'CEuvre de Delacroix." By Henri du Cleuziow. It was reprinted in a little volume twenty-
years later, by Marpon and Flammarion. Paris, 1885.

GERICAULT: THE MAD WOMAN (LA FOLLE)

CHERAMY COLLECTION, PARIS

EUGENE DELACROIX ,49

materialised, and kindling only for the beautiful, a master who assimilated all the
mastery of others, yet never turned away his eyes from heaven or blenched before
the splendour of the revelations vouchsafed him.

o Gericault's influence on the whole generation of the early nineteenth century was
incalculable ; the generosity of their art came from him, the simplicity of a
patrician cast of thought. He was perhaps the most gifted of them all, an incom
parable portrait-painter, whom Delacroix followed without ever overtaking.
There is a series of portraits of mysterious types by Gericault — two of these, the
famous La Folle and Le Fouy are in the Cheramy collection — the tremendous force
of expression in which seems almost to bridge over the gulf between our age
and Rembrandt. His equestrian portraits in the Louvre take away our breath ;
his landscapes are like heroic deeds.

Everything Gericault touched became immense. The same man who mul
tiplied Gros a hundredfold with a few strokes of the brush, painted the Radeau
de la M&ftuet which clangs through its gallery in the Louvre like a trumpet-blast.
It is a shriek of wildest passion, though its echo has tones full of exquisite,
peaceful harmonies.*

This raft was the cradle of the painter of Dante s "Boat^ and those who think
the obvious relation of this work to GeVicault's detracts from Delacroix' greatness
forget that nothing less than this mighty precursor was necessary to make
Delacroix possible. Even if we infer from Fromentin's memoranda f that
Gericault collaborated in the Dante 's "Boat, we have only the greater reason to
extol the goodness of Providence, which so brilliantly atoned for Gericault's cruel
fate in the person of Delacroix. With such vast possessions, the personal ceases to
exist. Delacroix's note, in which he records how he ran through the streets like a
madman after seeing the Raft of the Medusa would be of little interest, if the
consequences of this revelation had not been expressed in a lasting fashion.

Delacroix had a clearer perception of Rubens than had Gcricault ; it gave his
modelling fusion and animation, and endowed even his historical pictures in the
spirit of Gros (such as the Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi in the
Bordeaux Museum, the forerunner of the 28 July in the Louvre) with a flexibility
that Gericault lacked and that was essential for after-development.

In the JWassatre of_ Scio Delacroix indicates almost the whole sum of what he
had to say in composition.

In the splendid group with the horse dragging the half-naked girl, there is
the germ of the great Hun picture in the Library of the Palais Bourbon ; the
dead mother with the babe at her breast in the foreground to the right, is the
future Medea, and the whole has the effect of a gloomy pendant to the gorgeous
Entry into Constantinople. As yet these are laboriously combined fragments, that
lie side by side like rough blocks of stone. If we compare the Massacre with the
Wreck of the Don Juan or the Lake of Gcnnesareth, we shall see how far more
closely all the details are welded into a whole later on. In these he achieves that
famous unity which, as he beautifully said, can only be got by sacrifice. The ship
in the Don Juan is of the same material as the sea ; there are no details now.
The passion of the conception is dissolved and permeates the whole. In the
Sea of Gennesareth the figures, the ship with its sails, and the waves make up a

* In the sketch belonging to M. Moreau-N61aton the harmony of the torins is more perfect, and
all that disturbs the rhythm in the Louvre picture is avoided,
t " Eugene Fromentin." By L. Gonsc.

150 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

perfect, many -toned melody, in which no one instrument overpowers the others,
and only the rhythm prevails. He did not need movement. He took it for
convenience' sake. His wonderful Women of Algeria is entirely without action,
and it is perhaps his greatest achievement.

Delacroix' Eastern subjects gave colour to modern painting. His journey to
Africa was a voyage by way of Venice. All great men have a propensity to look
behind their prototypes. He saw behind Veronese and Titian, and the works
of his friend Bonington and of the much-admired Turner, who also knew Italian
colour through a French medium (Claude Lorrain), taught him that he himself
needed a more intense nature, rather than the originals in Venice. He would
never have found what he brought back from Africa in Venice. In the Algerian
Women he cleaned his palette, and finally renounced Gros' brown sauce.
Colour glows splendidly beside colour, and new contrasts produce new tones.
When he painted the Entry into Constantinople a gleam of sunshine fell upon the
art of France, and Europe hastened to warm herself and recover from the frost
of Classicism. Here and in the Heliodorus of St. Sulpice, and even earlier in the
splendid ceiling in the Louvre, he did not, like his great forerunners, modify
the Venetians; he surpassed them in strength of colour. This ceiling in the
Galerie d'Apollon glistens like fine mosaic, and triumphantly asserts itself in the
profusion or gilding.

He gave modern painting not only colour but a garment of her own.
Prud'hon's genius had run about naked, so to speak. Delacroix taught us the
dramatic quality of colour, which can convey the deepest mysticism, and represents
something altogether different from that which the modern school-colourist sees in
it. Van Gogh understood him. In a letter to Emile Bernard he writes: "Ah !
le beau tableau d'Eugene Delacroix, la barque du Christ sur la mer de Genesareth.*
Lui, avec son aureole d'un pale citron — dormant, lumineux, dans la tache de violet
dramatique, de bleu sombre, de rouge sang, du groupe des disciples ahuris, sur la
terrible mer d'emeraude montant, montant jusque tout en haut du cadre . . ."

The admirable Thorny Thiery collection has given the Louvre brilliant
examples of the master in every phase, even his latest and ripest period, which
would otherwise have been unrepresented in the national museum. It is
astonishing to see how youthful the man in Delacroix remained as the artist
matured. It needed the unquenched ardour of youth to paint the Rebecca and the
Templar, which he produced in 1858, when he was past sixty. The Pentecostal
tongues of fire seem to glow in the painting.

After his Eastern travels, in other words during his greatest period, Delacroix
changed very little. In his subjects especially he was always conservative. In
Moreau's and Robaut's catalogues of his gigantic work, we note how he
treated the same subjects at different periods. He did so, no doubt, from a
kind of respect for the idea that had given him such grandiose results as the
Medea ; it acted as an auto-suggestion firing his imagination and enabling him
to go still further. He called this "se faire la main." The owner of the frag
ment of the Massacre told me that Delacroix painted it in 1838, to get his hand
in for the Taking of Constantinople. He thus gave an objective, as it were, to his
daemon ; he could not control it, but was able so to prepare himself that he might
be ready when the inspiration came. Thus he accustomed himself to paint his

* He was referring to one of the many sketches of the composition, one of the finest of which
belongs to M. Gallimard.

DELACROIX: HORSE AND TIGER (LITHOGRAPH,

CHKRAMY AND A. ROL'AKT COLLECTIONS, PARIS

EUGENE DELACROIX 151

most brilliant conceptions, such as this fragment from the Massacre of Scio, with
the same vigour, though not in the same manner as in the original picture in glow
ing colour instead of Gros' sauce ; he made still-life pieces out of his inspirations.

Sometimes ideas occurred to him a tempo. The splendid large sketch, King
1(odrigo losing his Crown, formerly belonging to Dumas the Elder and now to
Cheramy, was painted in three hours. Dumas had requested his artist-friends,
Delacroix among the number, to decorate a room in his new villa (it was in 1830),
with panels. The pictures were to be ready on a certain day, when Dumas was to
give a ball. When the day arrived, only the panel assigned to Delacroix remained
empty. At noon the painter came to the house, and was aghast at the large
surface reserved for him ; he had meant to paint only a few flowers, " Listen,"
said Dumas, " I have just been reading something that will do for you," and he
described the first canto of the " Romancero," in which Rodrigo loses his crown.
Delacroix began at once, and had painted the whole scene by sunset, in the most
unusual colours, a harmony in yellow, unique in his work. Great was the
enthusiasm in the evening, when the friends saw the picture ; Barye, in particular,
who had contributed an excellent panel, is said to have been beside himself.*

It is difficult to do justice to his most important work, the ceiling-pictures and
the two hemicycles in the Library of the Palais Bourbon. A young Frenchman,
Jules Rais, called it the French Sistine Chapel,t and it certainly recalls the other
in the wretched misapplication of its treasures. Sometimes in the morning,
when the sun lights up the long room cheerfully, we get some idea of the wealth
of action that is wasted here. The two hemicycles are antithetical ; one is the
purest lyric poetry, the peaceful Orpheus among the Greeks, the other the most
frantic drama, the horrors of war, Attila devastating Italy. A whole world of
pictures surges between the two. Many of these recall Poussin, especially the
peaceful scene, where the oxen pass quietly along, surrounded by joyous naked
figures. It is the mature Poussin again, to whom the beautiful, though unhappily
almost invisible cupola in the Library of the Luxembourg owes something of
its peculiarly sweet and solemn character Delacroix' composition is not so
rhythmic as the poetry of the beautiful Bacchanalia, but on the other hand, it
is more fiery and virile. The Education of tfchilles is marked by the most
admirable symmetry in its vigour. Others among these marvellous pentagonal
pendentives suggest that earlier Poussin who, before he left France, painted the
fine ceiling for Richelieu.J The Attila is perhaps Delacroix' most brilliant achieve
ment of the period. To a deputy who objected that he had never seen such
a horse, Thiers, who had given Delacroix the commission, retorted : " Vous voulez
done avoir vu le cheval d'Attila ? " No criticism could have been more apposite.
There is a wild, almost dzemoniac creative energy in the composition, that far out
strips the school of Poussin; yet the reverence due to Poussin is not outraged
thereby.

It is lamentable that these paintings should not be removed and replaced by
copies, as Geffrey § lately proposed, that the originals might be preserved.

* See Dumas' " Memoires," 1898, vol. ix. p. no.

t " Le Palais et la Chambre des Deputes," in the " Revue Universclle " of October 15, 1902.

J Now No. 735 in the Louvre (Salle du Poussin).

§ "Les Peintures d'Eugene Delacroix £ la Bibliothequc de la Chambre des Deputes," 1903
With reproductions. Delacroix was obliged to repaint a large part of his work, owing to the defective
state of the surface. The Peace is now disfigured by a large crack. This and the pendant in the
other dome are painted on the wall ; the ceiling pictures are on canvas. They might easily be saved.

152 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

Like so many other things in France they are threatened with ruin. Happily, a
single work is but as a drop in the ocean to the life-work of an artist so prolific
that Rubens alone can be compared with him. And his fame is already secure in
the tradition of his native land.

The devotion young France accords to Delacroix imposes silence as to his
weaknesses. These were so obvious, and so easily overcome by the contemporary
generation, that it never occurs to any one in France to discuss them. The
German, on the other hand, who prides himself on nothing so much as on his
victory over Romanticism, is generally so much repelled by them that he fails
to enjoy the rest. We may admit that the fluttering ends of drapery in many of
his works are often disagreeable, even in his Louvre ceiling ; in the Chapel of St.
Sulpice the Raphaelesque action is no truer than in the prototype. It is in this
chapel that the younger generation has made a practice of paying homage to the
master ; it is one of the few places where light and position do not make it
impossible to see the picture. Long after leaving it, one seems to be still in the
whirlpool of colour, and this feeling is more enduring than the discomfort
produced by certain rhetorical details of the composition, which finally resolve
themselves into mere superficialities. Who will dwell on these trifles so far as to
forget the consummate general structure, and the culminating audacity of the
ceiling. Delacroix, like every true Frenchman, is an orator, as was the simple
Millet, as is every young aspirant, even the greatest blagueur of the crew. The
Latin races talk with the hands, but what they say may be very remarkable
nevertheless. The unnatural in Delacroix' unsuccessful attitudes is a natural
extreme, which nevertheless recalls the marvellous norm in which he is so great.
Even his defects seem inevitable. He composed to some extent in sections,
in long-drawn gasps, as a worker accomplishes a heavy labour. This is evident in
all his great decorations. There are, of course, a thousand links binding these
components together, but he does not always succeed in fusing them. The
fluttering streamers and protruding legs that disfigure some of his pictures were
the result, not of exuberant rhetoric, but of the weariness of the toiler, who
forgets to remove his ladder after finishing his building. He had an unsatisfied
longing for a style to which every particle of the whole should contribute, an
ambition that was not to be realised, because his genius lacked that grain of
prudence which was also denied to Michelangelo. He was as gifted as an artist
can be in our age, and he had perhaps the tragic perception that the implied
restriction is very considerable.

He had Michelangelo's mysterious power of suggesting a drama by an arm
or a leg, a piece of flesh. Into everything he touched, he sent a mighty current of
life. To evolve harmonies from the titanic elements with which he worked was
a stupendous task. He brought to bear upon it a system of colour of like
intensity. Delacroix' colour does not lie on the canvas; it emanates from the
surface, and as it leaves this, seems to begin a new life of its own. Rubens and
the Venetians are outstripped. To others, he is as a ruby to an expanse of
painted glass. And all that can be urged against Delacroix is based on the
postulate, that it is impossible to make walls with rubies.

Superabundance, super-humanity. Nietzsche compared him to Wagner, but
the comparison is just neither to Delacroix nor to Wagner. Wagner was
centrifugal, the great and beautiful expanse; Delacroix is a sum of gigantic
forces, focussed to a minute point.

EUGENE DELACROIX 153

The smaller Delacroix arc, of course, the most finely organised colour
harmonies. Here he comes in contact with Constable. The relation between
the two is as that between Velazquez and Rubens, or in our own times, between
Manet and Renoir : the elective affinity of two utterly different temperaments.
These two great men may be studied side by side in the gallery that contains the
finest collection of Delacroix after the Louvre — M. Cheramy's huge studio in
Paris, a storehouse of pearls, where hundreds of treasures are garnered, apparently
without method, and even in bewildering disorder, but in reality bearing a definite
relation to one another — children of one family scattered throughout a world.*
Kneeling before a Delacroix in this dissecting-room for the student of occult
developments, one must be careful not to overturn an easel with a dozen tiny
Constables. Each has his family about him, Constable his English progenitors,
Delacroix his French relations. Genealogies are momentous things in art as
elsewhere. It is more important to trace them here than in the annals of mere
mortals, for through them the closest secrets of the origin of styles reveal them
selves. For this reason the hours spent in this mad medley are among the most
stimulating one can imagine. One does not learn a science here, but simply a means
of living a hundred years longer than other men, because one enjoys a hundredfold
more. The power of recognising a multitude in the concatenation presented by
a genius, enables us to enjoy not only the one but all the others, to grasp our
cosmos in its highest form and to discover in one law a hundred others.

In the Cheramy gallery, we recognise the superficiality of the phrase that has
been repeated in every art-history since Fromentin, as to Constable's influence upon
Delacroix. It is prejudicial not to Delacroix, but to those who desire to approach
him more closely, for it measures greatness by an utterly primitive standard. This
standard is the question of costume. Let us imagine an Italian and a German of
the purest blood in the drawing-room of an English lady, or the boudoir of a
French grande dame. They wear the same costume, because they belong to circles
which have discarded a national dress, and they speak the same language,11 which is
not necessarily their own, because it is a mark of good breeding to be master of a
tongue in which one can make oneself understood anywhere. As the result of a
thousand circumstances, they are all capable of behaving in a European fashion,
in other words, of accepting a convention the comprehension of which implies
gentle birth, and they pride themselves on making their temperament and their
peculiarities subject to this form.

The convention in our present case is stronger than that of the lady's salon ;
it represents the contemporary form of pictorial expression. In those high circles
in which Constable, Gericault, and Delacroix move, people express themselves as
they do. But we cannot deduce what is characteristic of each, from what is common
to all three. It is a matter of common knowledge that Delacroix re-painted
his Massacre of Scio after seeing the Hay Wain in the Salon. Gericault's letters,
and Delacroix' own comments on his London impressions, sufficiently show how
far he was indebted to the Englishman. I shall deal with this more fully in its
place. Here, I am rather concerned to insist on Delacroix' independence, for even
in these days there are some who, taking up the tale of Couture's pamphlet, f see

* It is characteristic of this accomplished connoisseur, that he should have bequeathed his finest
fragment of the Massacre to the London National Gallery, on condition that it shall hang beside the
best Constable.

t " Me"thode et Entretiens d'Atelier," par Thomas Couture, Paris, 1868.
VOL. I U

I54 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

in the master an irresponsible eclectic. What Delacroix found in Constable was
less a new formula of colour than a method of freeing himself from the entangle
ment of ill-defined images, of getting away from Gros, and giving clarity and
precision to his own style. Constable taught him a higher conception of colour,
but what would this have availed him, if he had not been capable of using it for
the development of his own personality ? Nothing could be more unlike
Constable's landscapes than the little gems of the Thorny Thiery collection. The
relative similarity of the two men lies in this, that they chose from their rich
heritage the elements that enabled them to adopt a higher convention, each after
his own manner. This could only be a convention of colour, for both were too
clear-sighted, too original, and too honest not to admit that colour must be the
first concern of the painter. Constable may seem the greater discoverer of the two,
because his native art offered him fewer elements which could be utilised, than that
of Delacroix, who was familiar with the great pictorial art of all the ages. But
Constable was the poorer of the two, not because he painted landscapes while the
other ranged over a wider field of subjects, but because there is a richer world of
enchantment in Delacroix, because he used the Englishman's gift for the revelation
of personal qualities of which there is no hint in the Hay Wain. His relation to
Constable is of the same order as his relation to Gericault. He fought his battle
with troops his predecessor had trained. That he conquered is the essential fact.
Finally, in all appreciations of Delacroix' colour, now the central point of interest,
we must be careful not to value him only for his palette. We can make carpets
with colour, but not pictures. There are people who forgive Delacroix all the rest
for the sake of his colour. But the rest is everything, just as with Rembrandt.

GOYA: VISION DE LA ROMERIA DE SAN ISIDRO

PRADO, MADRID

DAUMIER: DRINKING SONG (WATER-COLOUR)

TAVHRNIF.R COLLECTION, PARIS

HONORE DAUMIER 155

HONORE DAUMIER

In Rembrandt's shadow we meet Delacroix' great comrade, who also demonstrated
how great or how little the importance of colour may be. He forces us to a deep
conception of art, if we would appreciate him and yet not depreciate the other in
the process.

Delacroix fought with new methods for the heroic tradition of France.
Daumier made a virtue of necessity, and renounced the attempt to draw epic poetry
from the age. He may have believed in heroism none the less.

We should learn to pronounce Delacroix and Daumier in one breath. The one
was the conscience of the other, and in every artistic mortal the two elements they
represent must be combined to give perfect fruition. Our whole age lurks in three
strokes of Daumier's brush. He abandoned himself to his painting just as
Delacroix stood on his guard against his. The culture of the creator of the
Dante 's 'Boat was immeasurably above the author of the Centre Legislatif, but it is
like the boat itself, that struggles against the forces surrounding it, and never
reaches the shore. Daumier had the new barbaric healthiness : a huge nerve,
formed to divine all that is monstrous and vibratory in our age — and to laugh at
it ! His pictures are spasms of genius, of our genius, of that paradoxical genius of
the nineteenth century which we might describe by transposing what Ingres said of
Signorelli, " C'est beau, c'est tres beau, mais c'est laid ! " — "It is ugly, very ugly,
but extraordinarily beautiful ! "

Daumier's caricature was an expedient. It replaced the motley of those earlier
court fools, under cover of which wise men said profound but forbidden things.
The age was not of a temper to accept as serious an art such as this bourgeois who
hated the bourgeoisie offered it, nor would he have trusted himself to give such
serious expression to it, had he not believed that he was only jesting. He used the
tradition Delacroix had reverenced only to laugh at it, and found a stimulus in the
exaggeration of his freedom from its restraints. Everything that Michelangelo
and Rubens had set apart for the creation of the lofty and grandiose, he compressed
into a tiny surface, in which every particle became vociferous speech, a neighing
of the human herd, that no longer sounds comical. If the sign-manual of true
humour be the gravity that lurks in the back ground, Daumier must be accounted an
excellent jester. I do not know if his famous drawing of the Malade Imaginaire
was ever accepted as humorous : the living corpse upon the chair, the sweat
of terror on his brow, and the doctor with the death's head beside him, staring
into the corner paralysed with horror. But the supposition would be natural
enough. The doctor in particular is intended to be comic ; the absurdity of his
costume only serves to intensify the grim earnestness of the subject. This is the
wit of Pierrot as conceived by our age ; fundamentally, it is no less ghastly than
the most frenzied inventions of Daumier's forerunner, Goya. The cynical
monuments he erected in the law-courts of the Citizen Kingdom are not any
more laughable. What fascinated him in the lawyers was not only their rascality,
but the animality of their speech. He loved the mouth as Gericault loved
the horse. The famous water-colour, La Chanson a boirt* is a physiology

* Tavcrnier Collection, Paris ; reproduced here.

156 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

of the human mouth. The two advocates in the Cause Celebre are two beasts,
bellowing at each other ; our hands go up to our ears instinctively ; they seem to
have hideous limbs under their gowns with which they claw their flesh, which is
not as other men's flesh. The spectators sit like a whole world, dumbly attentive
to the combat between the grotesque monsters. A very different Shakespeare
this, to the one Delacroix understood ! The inhuman is embodied here ; it towers
aloft like the upheaval of some great city in convulsion, to a sky ceiled with the
planks of cofHns.

What harmless folks are those modern satirists who so easily incur the penalties
of the law, in comparison with Daumier ! It seems amazing that this man should
not have been torn limb from limb ; when he wished to say the most harmless thing,
he could not refrain from spitting in the face of the world at large. Most satirists
are sentimental folks ; this one employed the " anatomical expression " which the
peaceful Raphael Mengs thought reprehensible in Michelangelo ; the vulgarity of
his personages is not in their faces but in their bones ; their very marrow snarls
and gibbers. All the optimism which a divine illumination lent to the chisel of
the ancients seems here to have become a negation no less irresistible, and derived
from the very same sources. For Daumier was a classicist ; this is what
differentiates him most sharply from Goya, whom Mengs was never able to lead
into the right road ; something of the marble grandeur of the ancients lurks in
his every gesture. He has vast contours, vast surfaces, nothing superfluous
weakens the force of expression. It is notorious that he built up his victims first
in tone ; drawing came afterwards. It still bears the mighty thumb-mark of its
sculptor. No painter before or after him has ever understood how to weld with
the brush as he did. Bonington was the one artist of our epoch who foreshadowed
it, when he painted the picture of his housekeeper now in the Louvre. It seems
as if the price paid by such precursors must always be life. An aureole like that
which surrounds Gericault hovers about this Englishman, who died at the age
of twenty-seven. From this portrait of an elderly woman to Daumier's Berlioz
at Versailles there is but a step, though it is a good stride, certainly, from the
shrewd, somewhat perverse old dame with a weakness for the brandy bottle * to the
masterful male of the same family. The Berlioz might have been painted yester
day, if a man of such originality could have been found yesterday.! Manet is
here, Cezanne, and the greatest of the Germans. Poor Van Gogh lost his reason
half a century later in his efforts to paint in this manner. The portrait hangs in
the second (Attique) storey of the palace, near David's fine equestrian Bonaparte
and other respectable achievements, but one sees nothing else. All the rest seems
asleep, while this one work speaks to us of our inner life in lightning phrases.
Everything in it is novel. The black velvet of the coat gleams against the dark brown
background like the sleek fur of a cat. The rosette of the Legion d'Honneur
strikes a vehement red note in the harmony. The splendid tone of the high
neckcloth is got by a few touches of blue. We can count the brush strokes that
build up the flamboyant face in a few seconds, and yet the work is more complete
than anything the centuries have painted in this much decorated palace, besides
being one of the master's few finished works.

For in this again Daumier belongs to the men of to-day, unhappily ; he has

Delacroix also painted her with this same air of bibulous joviality.

t This modern note has given rise to doubts (perfectly groundless) as to the authenticity of the
work.

DAUMIER: PORTRA1

VERSAILLES .MUSEUM

OF BERLIOZ

HONORE DAUMIER 157

left hardly anything but sketches, splashes of colour that resolve themselves into
faces, the notes of a temperament that already had another design in view when
the hand was setting down the first. Yet these notes are like the leading words in
a sentence that give the sense unerringly. With Daumier the sketch is so pregnant
that the conception of finality ceases to play an important part. Ingres summed
up all linear conception in a line ; his Grecianism enabled him to simplify
Raphael and Guido. Daumier takes the strongest plastic expression, and veils
it in a remarkable substance that has the property of suggesting the essentials of
all it contains. A juggler with shadows, like Rembrandt, with whom alone he
may be aptly compared, a painter so mighty, that no terms can exaggerate the
greatness of his importance. Caricatures were his life studies. He needed no
convention to do all the rest with these. Like Rembrandt he dips his figures,
which he saw in barbaric sharpness of contour, into an atmosphere of
humanity, where mockery falls away, and we note only the deep breathing cf
a great soul. Such pictures are rare. The fact that he was condemned to work
at lithography for his daily bread has been justly regretted ; but one is apt to
forget, that this preliminary work was the bread of his art too, a necessary
compensation of the brain, just as were Leonardo's caricatures to the creator
of the Gioconda. And if the complete results are scanty, it may be argued that
perfection is in its nature rare. I am not sure that Daumier would have painted
many more finished works like the Seine Quay series under other conditions.
He never finished the beautiful Laveuse in the Bureau collection, though he
painted it more than once. Of the several versions of this motive, the most
elaborate is the Gallimard example, where the neglected background of the Bureau
version is exquisitely brought out in the form of houses. Apart from this, I
prefer the fine material of the Bureau picture and the pale golden yellow tone;
Daumier, too, was often in love with various aspects of one design, and therefore
hesitated to conclude them all at once. He has scarcely said all he had to say in
any one picture, but I doubt if greater leisure would have enabled him to do so.

The difference between the caricatures and these pictures is almost incompre
hensible at times. In his caricatures he makes his figures up of holes ; in his
pictures they are treated with a great prodigality of masses, as in the Bain,
formerly in the Lutz collection, or the Lutteurs of the Sarlin collection, one of the
picture that reveal the future for a century, and at the same time recall the past.
Michelangelo might have painted such things, if he had lived in our times.

I have a vague recollection of the famous Wagon de Troineme Classe which
Durand-Ruel sold to Mr. Borden, of New York, many years ago. M. Gallimard
owns a brilliant replica with variations. The figures sit there as if cast in a
mould, clumsy creatures such as Leibl showed us later, but simpler, more
vigourous, and marked by an intense reality that the Gallic race has never achieved
before or since. We see scarcely a colour, to say nothing ot a detail ; it is not
beautiful, nor is it a cunning transcript of nature. We stand before it helpless, as
before the two giants of the Quirinal, nay, more helpless, for here the tremendous
power of the work is even more unaccountable. Thus was the famous Realism
born, of which the nineteenth century is so proud, and it is well to remember that
it never became greater than its father had made it. Millet expounded it,
Courbet and Leibl organised it, and many others have elaborated it ; no one has
surpassed its original greatness.

Daumier's mysterious power becomes more intelligible when we see his

158 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

sculpture. He did very little ; his best known work is the caricature of Napoleon
III., Ratapoil, the wild figure, made up of hollows, which against all proba
bility is instinct with the most amazing vitality.* The finest is Roger Marx'
relief, reproduced here, the wonderful train of fugitives he painted so often,!
in which he reveals his affinity with Michelangelo more distinctly than anywhere
else.

Daumier was the first logical Impressionist, and none dared more greatly than
he without renouncing more. His aim was to multiply the elements that served
the movement at the expense of the rest. His is a kind of ghostly art. In his
numerous renderings of Don Quixote, he has made symbols of the two figures,
that give an almost metaphysical value to the conceptions of " fat " and
"thin." M. Bureau owns a sketch in which Sancho Pansa thrones it upon his
ass like some idol, and Don Quixote's figure shoots forward like an arrow, almost
horizontally. The whole essence of Cervantes' romance seems to lurk in this
opposition of thick to thin lines, and our delight in the parody deepens to a
recognition of mysterious natural laws. Or again, he gets the most extraordinary
effects of space by a few streaks of wash. M. Gallimard has a little drawing of
this kind, a group of four figures. Of the ten or a hundred thousand planes or
lines that would make up such a picture in nature, he takes the three or four that
are essential, and these he fashions so that they produce the harmony Nature
achieves with her thousand notes. Rodin adopted this method later for his
grandest designs, simplifying still farther and insisting more upon rhythm. He
has every reason to be grateful to Daumier.

There are people who question the value of this simplification, and conclude
from such examples as these that they are only useful to artists themselves
as exercises, and are of no account to the layman, because they do not seem
necessary to the finished work. He who is not content with Daumier's sketches,
may well question the raison d'etre of all art. They are not valuable only because
they have made all the art of the moderns, but because they are perfect in them
selves, because they reveal things that were only dimly divined before Daumier,
things that appear to us as essential as the progress of our present social
conditions, as compared with those of earlier times. A new art-language
arose from Daumier's sketchiness, at the syntax of which we are still
working. No historical considerations are necessary to compel admiration
for its power. Daumier himself created true epics therewith. We may call his
Don Quixote in the Berlin Gallery sketchy, if we choose to compare it with a
Meissonier. But we may as justly call it fresco-like, if we compare it from a
greater distance. It is not, in truth, the picture, but the eye of the spectator which
is sketchy. Nothing could be less pertinently laid to the charge of such pictures
than the reproach of obscurity and indistinctness implied in the term sketchy.
The master of shadow, who often avoided all precise form, painted when he
chose with outlines thick as the finger surrounding enamelled planes, and delighted
in a decoration that would well have borne expansion into fresco. In his
masterpiece, the Drama, one of the treasures of the Berlin gallery, this powerful
contour is combined with the most exquisitely liquid colour. Daumier could be

* Arscne Alexandra had twenty reproductions cast in bronze from his example ; they are in various
collections.

t One example in the Alexis Rouart collection, Paris. Roger Marx' relief, here reproduced, is the
only example in bronze, and was made by the galvano-plastic process from the original plaster model.

DAUMIER: THE TWO LAWYERS (LES DEUX AVOCATS) ,\VATER-COLOUR)

BUREAU COLLECTION, PARIS
WOODCUT BY MARX (L' IMAGE)
CORP. I-R. DKS GRAVEURS SUR BOIS

HONORE DAUMIER 159

a great colourist upon occasion. He substituted a fluid strawberry red for his
usual brown, painted blue atmosphere like Velazquez, pale golden backgrounds
like the most refined of the Dutchmen, and invented contrasts of pink and orange
which recall the Venetians. The picture of Christ and the Disciples in the
Amsterdam Ryksmuseum, is one of the best examples for this aspect of the
master. This versatility told against his fame as a painter, for it was combined
with an indifference to motive, which the stupidity of the public translated into
poverty of invention. The best artists of his day thought differently. Corot's
high estimate of him is well known. Delacroix copied many of his drawings.
Many of the younger men came still nearer to him.

Till quite lately this influence was practically non-existent for the public.
Collectors like Bureau, in whose family the worship of Daumier is a tradition, and
Rouart, perhaps the oldest living collector of Daumier's works, are rare. The
Centennial Exhibition of 1900, and the supplementary exhibition in the Ecole des
Beaux Arts revealed Daumier the painter to France.

It is to be hoped that the time will come when a monument will be raised to
him. On the base, where the contemplative symbols generally find a place, I
would put four artists : Millet, Cezanne, Meunier, and Van Gogh ; all in the

reverent attitude of worship.

*******

Delacroix and Daumier make up a remarkable synthesis. Their work, taken
in conjunction, embraces the art that had been before them, and the future to the
present day. Daumier's individual manner points backwards, not because we find
Michelangelo in him, but because his creative manner brings back the most
precious elements of the earlier masters. His genius was the mastery over space,
the justness of his modelling in every dimension, the power of placing the object
in the picture as firmly in all its ramifications as a form in the air, the art, which
the Germanic mind, eager for reality, has always understood better than has the
Latin intellect, the art which enabled Rembrandt to offer a triumphant resistance
to the seductions of its rival.

This art, which actually succeeded in giving everything in a picture, which
fixed the divine trinity, architecture, painting, and sculpture on a canvas, and con
fined it within the four barriers of a frame, was bound to fall, as soon as the
instinct of the age considered its tendency, and divined the dark side of this
concentration. In Daumier's hasty and deliberately fragmentary manner we divine
something like a doubt as to the basis of his creation, and we hear the mocking
laughter of the Decadent, who is content to bathe one tiny detail in Rembrandt's
mellow haze, and to leave another, a bare skeleton, rising stark and grisly into
the air.

Delacroix stands already on the other side. We shall look in vain to him for
the masterly assurance with which Daumier built up his figures, even when he left
them naked. He desired to decorate surfaces, not space ; but the implied re
nunciation gave him all that Daumier lacked. The gloom that fills space with
mystery, is inferior to the light that floods a surface. But what the greatest
masters of planes possessed, is revived, and the consciousness of a great intellect,
making use of a happy gift, was able to bring it to a point of splendour never
before achieved. The form that grasps such facts still trembles from the violence
of its own gesture ; the goblet that gleams before the future seems to overflow.

There is no lack of thirsty souls to drink of it.

160 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

CAMILLE COROT

His mother, whom he always called " La belle Dame," was a fashionable milliner
of Swiss origin, under the first and second Empires. His father, the son of a wig-
maker, was the cashier of the establishment.

The mother loved the boy tenderly. The father, a typical, commonplace
bourgeois, watched his career with amazement ; he was still full of naive astonish
ment when a purchaser came to his fifty-year-old son for a picture, and when the
Legion of Honour was bestowed, found it difficult to believe that the distinction
was not intended for himself, but for the painter. No undue difficulties were
made, when the youth chose the strange career of an artist. The old man placed
to his son's credit the sum of money he had set aside to establish him in business,
and gave him a sufficient allowance. The parents were not afraid he would
commit follies. Camille was a good lad.

Was it possible that a revolut-'onary artist should spring from such sur
roundings, where comfort and well-being reigned, and only the most delicate things
were dealt with, where every gesture contained some tasteful feminine essence ?
Everything seemed to negative such a possibility. Physically, however, he was
extraordinarily robust and powerful, like Courbet. The sexagenarian who rose
with the sun, who defied cold and wet, who dressed like a peasant, and went about
like a labourer, might have been the son of a peasant. It was only in his face that
all the gentleness of his nature manifested itself. It was like that of a country
priest of the best kind, whose piety seems to come to him from Nature.

In short, he seemed to be anything rather than a revolutionary. He was born
before the death of the eighteenth century, and was about a year older than
Delacroix, but nothing of the wild period had touched him. A virginal soul
dwelt in the sturdy body. His letters to his parents and friends read like the
outpourings of a schoolgirl. He was devout, went regularly to mass, and was not
ashamed to talk of " le bon Dieu " before the Bohemians.

No man was ever happier. He was able to gratify his modest aspirations to
the full. He had more friends than great princes, and can scarcely be said to
have known an enemy. Why should he not have been pious ? For his piety was
fettered by no narrow formula. It reveals itself in the phrase he once pronounced
touching a future life : " Well, at any rate, I hope we shall go on painting up
there." As has often been the case in France, it mixed up the beautiful with the
divinely ordained, angels with nymphs, Heaven with Olympus. Although a good
Christian, he was not a bad Pagan Greek. Theophile Gautier called him a poet,
but that is almost too true. This poet was a thorough bourgeois. When a friend
of his mature years taught him to fish, Corot forgot his painting for a fortnight in
his ardour for this characteristic amusement of the middle-class Parisian. Family
gatherings were his passion. He never missed a baptism or wedding ; in politics
he was a thorough-going Conservative ; Courbet impressed him greatly ; he was
not converted to Delacroix till his old age, and could never bear Manet. He was

CAMILLE COROT 161

certainly greater as an artist than as a man, or, at least, so it appears to us, because
good-nature is a quality we are not inclined to ascribe to the great. And yet " le
Pere Corot " and his works were as much one as body and soul. We feel some
what suspicious of such anecdotes as those which tell how Corot presented himself
to his friend Dutilleux, the mediocre landscape-painter, proposing that they should
paint " veritables chefs-d'oeuvre," together, or how he cleaned his flutes " to work
for the little birds in the wood." Who can believe such things nowadays ? Are
there any children left in the world ?

He, at any rate was a child ; we cannot describe his nature more exactly.
When dubious dealers brought him false pictures, he painted new ones for them over
the old ones — Roger Miles gives two or three amusing anecdotes in this con
nection* — and on his death-bed he signed a forgotten picture for Tedesco. He
was much more good-natured than the average child, but he had the optimism of
childhood. His biography, compiled with great industry by Moreau-Nelaton,
reads like the life-story of a child who lived to be eighty. f

He worked playfully, with a fancy characteristic of boyhood. There is a
certain childlike element in his art. When I look at his drawings I always feel
as if I were contemplating the works of a very young man, whose creations have
all the na'ivet£ of the beginner. He was at school in Rouen until he was eighteen,
then he was a clerk for eight years, then for a time with his contemporary, the
precocious classicist, Michallon, and when this artist, who had shown considerable
promise in certain small landscapes, died in 1822, Corot entered the atelier of
Victor Bertin, the academician par excellence. But, as a fact, he never studied in
any actual school. This was the great difference between him and Ingres, between
the new art and the old. Ingres was the highest expression of school, Corot of
self-teaching. " Confiance et conscience " was his axiom, two words that were
synonymous to him, for " conscience " to him applied only to his own standard,
his own sensations, as expressed in Nature. Nothing else seemed of moment to
him, he would think of nothing else, not even of the old masters. To be a
child, to open one's eyes, to dream — et voila ! Ingres succeeded in assimilating
the highest culture so intensely, one might almost say so physically, that his
formula seems almost like Nature. Almost, yet not quite. For we can never
forget, even before the 'Bain Turc, that we are looking at a painting, a construction,
and the most brilliant of the Odalisque drawings always suggest decoration.
Corot is purely human, but such is his divine instinct that the loveliest form is
also the most natural to him. Herein is his great charm, and also his absolutely
unique importance. The artistic parti-pris of the stylists, even of an Ingres, has
all manner of beauties, but it conceals the elementary. It works through
tradition. The artist does not identify himself with it altogether. The spectator
has to overcome the tradition before he can penetrate to the actual form of the
artist, to his humanity, and this circuitous way of approach wearies him occasion
ally. Nothing of this sort impedes us on our road to Corot. We believe his
statements at once, for in his method of communication, in every stroke, we trace
his creative emotion. It is this which makes Corot a modern. But he is not so
in every sense. The first need of an age, stripped of the ancient culture, was a
swift capacity for the expression of the human. This he had. But Delacroix and

* "Album classique des Chefs-d'oeuvre de Corot." (Braun et Cie., Paris, 1895.)
t " L'CEuvre de Corot par Alfred Robaut, catalogue raisonne" et illustre precede de 1'histoire de
Corot et de ses oeuvres par Eticnne Moreau-Nelaton." (H. Floury, Paris, 1905.)

VOL. I X

162 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

Daumier also worked to this end, and yet we do not reckon them among the
moderns. In both of these, the style-element of the old masters persisted, though it
had been tremendously modified. In Delacroix Romanticism made it rhetorical,
in Daumier it was applied to caricature. They were both Encyclopaedists of the
revolution of form, playing the part of Diderot, but they were not active
revolutionaries.

These were to come in formidable numbers. But Corot was not one of them.
He was without the subjectively rebellious strain that characterised Rousseau and
Dupre, and in a still greater degree, Courbet and his school. But it was just this
that gives him his unique position in his age, and makes the effect of his work so
beneficent. The revolutionaries came, and were bound to come. The age called
them forth. The programme followed automatically. Courbet's realism — not, of
course, his painting — was a phenomenon that might have been reckoned upon
almost mathematically. But Corot had no place in the programme. He was a
Heaven-sent surprise. It was just the non-revolutionary nature of his genius that
was wonder-working. It cut him off from the momentary success and from the
enthusiasm that was Courbet's portion, but it saved him from the unjust and
abysmal fall, from the monstrous fate of Courbet, who was thrust into a corner
like a disused piece of furniture, after having given the watch-word to the world.
Courbet was thought to have been disposed of with his programme, and those who
thought thus overlooked the fact that he towered immeasurably above it. Corot
had no formulated programme beyond his " confiance et conscience." But,
indeed, he realised the most positive of all programmes, that of preserving
tradition in the new spirit. It was the spirit, and not the form of tradition which
lived in him, and all unconsciously inspired him. He determined to paint only
what he saw, but in reality he painted at the same time all the impressions of a
man who was a Frenchman to his finger-tips, all the optimism of his happy race,
all the rich legendary lore of a son of the people. His nymphs spring from the
earth like his trees. He must have seen them. They are the organic beings of
his Nature, and when they are absent in his works, Nature is so painted that we
feel they must appear somewhere. This was so from the beginning, when he was
only thinking of learning to see from Nature, and it was this involuntarily
softened relation to Nature, which I hope to demonstrate more plainly, that gave
him his distinctive position among the Barbizon painters. One of its most
salient features was his comparative indifference to locality. Rousseau and Dupr6
were stationary folks ; Corot flew about the world like a butterfly, now here, now
there. His mobility seems difficult to reconcile with his contentment and well-
being, and yet they must have been compatible ; no one seems to have felt any
surprise at finding him in a new place every fortnight throughout the summer.

He rarely made incursions into Rousseau's domain. His world was not the
stately forest at Barbizon ; but rather the gentle beauty of the pond at Ville
d'Avray, with its coquettish surroundings, or Nantes, with its bridge and river, or
Arras with its long, oft-painted road, where his friends lived : simple, honest
admirers, quiet people like himself, among whom he perhaps was more at his ease
than among his philosophising colleagues Or Auvers, in the lovely valley of the
Oise, where he gave the house to Daumier ; the landscape glorified by Cezanne
and Pissarro, and finally by Van Gogh, a district at least as important in the
history of modern art as Barbizon.

But he cannot, indeed, be described as the painter of any special landscape.

CAMILLE COROT 163

His pictures were within him, and he needed external phenomena merely to
confirm his visions. He was one of those wonder-children, who are born with a
sense of form. It was long taken for granted that he had no aptitude for pure
form, that he was deliberately indistinct, that he could not draw, and, therefore,
was only master of his materials in twilight. As far as this can be made a
reproach to his art, it is by no means true. " II ne faut laisser d'indecision dans
aucune chose," he remarks in his note-book, when he made his first journey to
Italy. He was too conscientious to have accepted any such compromise. Those
who blame him for defective drawing insist on a kindred weakness in Velazquez,
Rembrandt and Rubens. In the true artistic sense, to draw means nothing else
than to paint ; the capacity to fix an impression received through the eye, by
means of pen or pencil, as well as brush, in accordance with the manner of the
executant and the degree of perfection incident thereto. His manner was not
that of the classicists, nor that of the Cinquecentisti. During his two years' sojourn
in Rome, he never entered the Sistine Chapel, and when he returned fifteen years
later, Michelangelo left him cold. He was, of course, indifferent to contour, as
was natural in an artist who saw everything in large masses, for whom only forms
and tones existed, or rather, indeed, only tones, but, who could create anything
he wished with tone. His drawings, alike the earliest, the portraits of the
milliners in the parental workshop, and the nymphs and dancers of his septua
genarian days, are made up of timid scratches. The child-like, self-taught character
of his art is most apparent here. Where his drawing is restricted to the pure
stroke, it is, in fact, mere memoranda, without any sort of artistic pretension.
Sometimes the sheets are covered with little circles and squares, which, as Andre
Michel tells us, were his shorthand notes. The circles denote light, the squares
shadow. No one would dream of comparing such memoranda with masterly
drawings, and, so far, therefore, the critics who say he drew badly are right. But
as soon as he admitted tone to the paper, there was a change. Corot could make
a landscape with three patches of shadow and as many strokes. It remained a
very delicate structure, for its creator wished it to be mobile, that it might grow
into the heart of the spectator. " Sa forme flottante," said Jean Rousseau, in his
charming study, "semble toujours en mouvement. Plusecrite elle serait immobile." 4
This was true of his drawings no less than of his pictures. Their tenderness is
without prejudice to their divine aroma. Millet waxed enthusiastic over them.
His best drawings, notably those that stir dreamy reminiscences of the antique,
are penetrated by the Corot-spirit. Renoir, and more especially Pissarro, recalled
them later on, and there are many who recognise a childlike genius of the same
order as Corot's in Bonnard's lithographed fantasies.

Tone was Corot's great medium. Form in a picture appeared to him solely in
the sum of the values. " What there is to see in painting," he said once, '* or
rather, what I look for, is the form, the whole, the equilibrium of tones. Colour
comes after this with me." Like Rembrandt, he made colour with light and shade.
Francois called him the Rembrandt of the open air. This is going a little too far.
He appears as the lark beside the eagle, not, as he himself modestly declared, when com
pared with Rousseau, but certainly when compared with the greatest of Dutchmen.
But who would dream of comparing grace with strength ? Corot built a nest suitable
to his genius. What great things were hatched in it, I hope presently to show.

* Jean Rousseau, " Camille Corot, suivi d'un Appendice par Alfred Robaut." (Paris, Librairie
del' Art, 1884.)

1 64 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

Corot was nearly thirty when he went to Rome to study seriously. He went
as a pupil of Bertin, and normally he would have had as such to draw nourishment
from the usual milch-cow, and become one of many. But, on the contrary, he
treated Rome as if it had been one of the environs of Paris — a place where one
could work from Nature just as well as outside the fortifications by the Seine.
The old masters of marble and painting might never have existed, as far
as he was concerned. He copied Nature, in his own manner, as faithfully as he
could. His earliest pictures are comparatively prosaic. We are only just
beginning to appreciate his early, and once despised period. This is a natural
reaction from the exaggerated worship bestowed on the lyric pictures of his later
years. Many of his earliest works verge on topography. Corot began at the
beginning. He studied the world before he set out to conquer it. There is no
very marked difference between his first Roman pictures, and those he painted
before leaving France. The style seems to lie more in the choice of subject, in
the pattern, and less in the handling. But beneath these externals the whole
Corot is concealed. The oft-copied bridge across the Tiber with the dome of
St. Peter's in the middle, and the tower of St. Angelo to the right, the somewhat
later view of the Colosseum in the Louvre, and other little pictures of the same
kind foreshadow the effect of space, the delicate colour, and subtle gradations of
later masterpieces. The Roman motives are innumerable and amazingly various.
His early landscapes differ as much as his later ones resemble each other. It
seems as if he had assimilated as many forms as possible in order to evolve unity
from them later on. Indeed, many a landscape of his first Roman sojourn served
as the background for some enchanted festival later on. Thus the little wooded
landscape of 1826 with the Colosseum in the background, formerly in the Doria
Gallery, became the famous T>anse de Nymphes of the Salon of 1850, now in the
Louvre. The drawings of this period, too, are the most correct he ever made.
They sometimes reveal a touching solicitude for accuracy of detail. But even
then his hand played him the trick of desiring to give more than his eye had seen.
The rocks range themselves into terraces, the groups of trees melt together in
cadenced lines, the rhythm asserts itself. As yet, Corot resisted the poetic
impulse, and strove to be guided by Nature rather than by himself. His Roman
period served him to create the solid anatomy of the structure that was to shelter
him later on, and part of the charm of this period may come from the suppressed
poems we divine beneath the conscientious realism.

In 1828 he returned, laden with pictures, and now his wanderings through
France began. He painted his first pictures of Ville d'Avray and Fontainebleau,
the sea at Dieppe and Honfleur, the quays of the ancient Rouen of his school
days, and tried to extort the respect of his family by one or two careful portraits,
which seemed to his distrustful relatives mere caricatures, in spite of their limpid
intensity. The landscapes are still more or less in the nature of reconnaissances,
brilliant topographical studies. In 1834 he went south for the second time.
This time he stayed in North Italy, at Pisa, where he sketched the medallion of
the Campo Santo, and at Florence where he found scenery ideally suited to his style
in the Boboli Gardens. At Venice he drew the architectonic details of the Piazza
with elaborate accuracy, and again brought a number of simple little pictures
home.

In 1835 he first came forward with a certain assurance, exhibiting his first large
picture, the Hagar in the Wilderness, at the Salon. The outcast Hagar kneels

DAUMIER: RATAPOIL, BRONZE

A. ROUART COLLECTION. PARIS

CAMILLE COROT 165

beside her sleeping boy in the foreground of a rocky landscape, and stretches her
arms despairingly to Heaven.

We scarcely recognise Corot here. After the little pictures of the preceding
period, in which he apparently follows submissively after Nature, the Hagar
in the Gallimard collection appears like the work of another artist. The
difference affects one almost unpleasantly, for it calls in question the very quality
the earlier works had taught us to prize, an innocent sincerity. The Hagar is a
conventional picture ; its relation to the Franco-Roman landscape school is obvious.
The landscape is " composed " after the classic receipt, the figures introduced on
the same principles, the motive may have been suggested by Benozzo Gozzoli in
the Campo Santo of Pisa. And this superficial conventionality tempts us to
overlook all there is of Corot in the picture.

The disappointment is, as a fact, the fault of the spectator himself. He who
looks for a revolutionary in Corot will always be wide of the mark. The develop
ment of modern art is not derived from Corot ; he took something from it and
gave something to it, but he did not play the decisive part which Rousseau
perhaps, of all his immediate contemporaries, most conspicuously filled. Rousseau
brought a fervid conviction and an abnormally complex equipment to the task of
creating a new landscape, in which there should be no particle of the ancient
construction of Poussin and Claude, the French successors of the Venetians. The
impulse to this movement came to him from the art most sharply opposed to that
of the Italians, the art of Holland, and set him on the only possible road by which
painting could again become the medium of an individual conception of Nature.
Corot held aloof from this adventure. He was in Italy when the first of the new
landscapes were painted. We must not forget that he was already a man when
•Rousseau, Dupr£ and Millet were born, that he survived Rousseau and Millet,
that he died about three years before Courbet and Daubigny, and was working to
the last hour of his life. He was thus in a position to embrace the entire development
of the others. This he did, but he would not have been Corot if he had been
merged therein. His originality lies in his strictly conditional assimilation of the
modern tendency. A part of his nature clung to other things, and was no less
pronounced a factor in his art.

Fromentin has described the conquest of the old Dutchmen by the Frenchmen
of 1 830 in one of his most brilliant chapters.* He sets Corot aside, declaring
him to be as little of a Dutchman as might be. This remark in the mouth of
a worshipper of the Dutchmen sounds almost like a reproach levelled at Corot
to exalt Rousseau. Just as is the dictum in itself, nothing could be falser than
such a critical conclusion. Setting aside personal results, it might fairly be urged,
that if the conquest of the Dutch was important, the preservation of the French
tradition was no less so ; that many great artists contributed to the first achieve
ment, whereas the other task was, in all essentials, the work of one man.

If the time should ever come when the consideration of art should no longer
be confined to the purely personal and obvious, in the contemplation of which the
essential is so apt to be forgotten ; if we should ever learn to deal more intelli
gently with the mediums of our enjoyment, there will, no doubt, be a complete
re-organisation of our museums. We shall see a new system of classification, not
by countries or centuries, or any such arbitrary considerations, but by the nature of
works, by the tendencies they illustrate. The spectator will no longer be called
* "Les Maitres d'Autrefois," p. 276.

1 66 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

upon to perform a series of mental gymnastics in a gallery, leaping like an acrobat
from one emotion to another, because every picture is in contrast to the next, and
appeals to a different sensation ; a sense of comfort will enhance his pleasure in the
work of art. Let us imagine a grouping of artists in families ; the works of one
man hung together, and not only so arranged, but further completed by his
predecessors and successors. Science would not be the only gainer ; the layman
would profit no less than the student. The homme moyen, who stands helplessly
before an unknown artist, and turns for illumination to his Baedeker, would
become familiar with many masters whom no art-histories can explain to him, if all
that now seems strange and incomprehensible in their work — I am thinking more
especially of the moderns — were set before him in its various stages of develop
ment. The connoisseur's enjoyment would also be increased, for the latent cause
of all aesthetic sensation, a chaotic recollection of beautiful things evoked by a
particular work, would be multiplied by the actual presence of a part at least of
these elements. No one would lose in the process, for the work of art that
suffered by such a family gathering — and perhaps there would be many such in
the newer museums — would prove that it had no right to its place. As aesthetic
maturity can only be attained by continuous comparison of works, and as the
process recommended would stimulate both knowledge and enjoyment, it is strange
that it should never have had a trial, and that the nearest approach to it should
have been the grouping of artists into " schools," a system of classification which
can give but a rough and ready suggestion of artistic affinities.

Were the plan I have suggested adopted, many unjustly depreciated masters
would come to their own again. Among the forerunners of Corot, for instance,
we should find the two favourites of the time of Louis XVI., Joseph Vernet and
Hubert-Robert. Vernet was extravagantly appreciated by Diderot, who dared to
rank him above Claude,* but succeeding generations were too ready to cast him
aside with other debris of the past. Corot had no great admiration for the large
landscapes extolled by Diderot, but, as his copy in the Cheramy collection shows,
he studied the more intimate pictures of the painter of ruins, and owed them
something of suggestion for what Diderot called ** clever des vapeurs sur la toile,"
an art we note even in the earliest of the Roman pictures. In Hubert-Robert, he
certainly cared less for the eternal architectural arrangements, once so admired by
the Parisians, than for the more sincere little pictures, such as the Water-Carrier
in the Louvre, where a delicate tone envelops the arabesque. With Vernet and
Hubert-Robert we should have to group L. G. Moreau, whose Meudon pictures
foreshadow the freshness of Corot's best time, and Simon Lantara, the first of the
Fontainebleau masters, who was painting in the famous forest as early as the
middle of the eighteenth century. In the circle of this remarkable vagabond we
find further Hue and Huet, and a German, Ferdinand Kobell, who made some
charming drawings in the style of the day.

Joseph Vernet and Hubert-Robert were in the van of the movement which
brought about the return to the antique, the reaction from Watteau. They
played a more important part in this double-edged achievement than David, who,
coming after them, covered up many of the noble tendencies of this reaction with
a frigid mask. Gabillot has shown this relation in a thoughtful work.t David
adopted the antique as a revolutionary badge in opposition to the art of fallen

* " Hubert- Robert et son Temps " by C. Gabillot. (Paris, Librairie de 1'Art, 1895.)
t Diderot's Salon of 1765.

CAMILLE COROT 167

tyranny. But, as a fact, the revival of the antique was the work of the same royal
mind that created the eighteenth century. Just as in architecture the Louis XVI.
style preceded the Empire, so the painters of Louis XVI. expressed in more
delicate accents what the artists of the Revolution so vehemently proclaimed.
This whole classic movement saw in the antique primarily Rome, whose more
compact relics appeared of greater importance than those of Greece to those who
were anxious to build. Gabillot calls the men of the Revolution " as little Greek
as possible. They are above all Roman. They might have found patterns of
heroism as easily in Athens and Sparta as in Rome. Their education impelled
them to remain Romans."

There is nothing of this Roman antiquity in Corot. He turns from David's
declamation to the milder influences of the eighteenth century, from which it is easy
to find one's way still farther back into the past. Several of the landscape painters of
the seventeenth century contributed to Corot's peculiar scenery, the earlier Francois
Millet in particular. This artist was not always in his Opera Comique vein ; he
appears sometimes as a genuine painter, in the large landscape, for instance, in the
Munich Pinacothek, where Dughet's languid atmosphere is replaced by the
freshness of a Northern temperament, and where classic form has only served for
the production of a new and natural vegetation. Or, to name one more among
many, Moucheron was also of the number, Moucheron, who occasionally treated
light after a fashion which seemed to us a new discovery two hundred years later,
when our contemporaries essayed it. I recall the little river-landscape in the
Stockholm Gallery, and similar things.

Millet and Moucheron are French names ; but the one first saw the light in
Antwerp, and is reckoned among the Flemish masters, in spite of his sojourn in
Paris from his youth to his early death, and the other, Frederick de Moucheron,
was a native of Embden. If we bear in mind Corot's relation to these and many
similar masters, we shall see that Fromentin's pronouncement as to Corot's entire
independence of the Dutchmen must be accepted with certain reservations. In
some of the Dutchmen of the purest blood, notably in Wynants, he might have
found precedents for some of the most important aspects of Corot's art. All he
would concede in this connection was that Corot too had worked at the canal
to the Promised Land which Rousseau built. He did not see that Corot had
established a communication for himself by continuing the relation of two centuries
earlier, and at the same time, fulfilling the domestic law of French art, the fusion
of Northern and Southern elements, to which all his glorious predecessors had
conformed.

We shall find that Corot, nevertheless, eventually arrived at Barbizon. But
this was not the most momentous stage in his development. His unconscious
sympathy with the older masters was far more important. He succeeded in
reinforcing his Virgilian poetry with the conviction of a purely natural instinct,
and in combining faint reminiscences of the form which Poussin and Claude had
made invincible, with the realism of a self-taught artist of the nineteenth century.
He had, naturally, to steer past many cliffs on his voyage to the goal. One of
these appears in his Hagar. This picture, which delighted all the critics of the old
school, such as Lenormant, who scoffed at Corot's little pictures for their want of
style, was inspired by the naive conception that a Salon picture should be painted
in the grand manner, and that the simplicity of the little pictures of nature would
be insufficient here. But if the construction of the Hagar betrays compromise,

i68 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

the veil of painting that overlies the classic skeleton is of a kind undreamt of by
Michallon and Bertin. Tone plays a very important part in the work, veiling the
romantic rocks, and animating the conventional emptiness of the background ;
we divine that Corot already held the threads of a brilliant and harmonious
development in his hand.

So far, he stands apart from the beginnings of his contemporary, Millet. This
difference shows us how high above Millet's exemplars of the forties was the
tradition to which Corot had reverted. Millet had the misfortune to begin under
Delaroche, and to receive the tradition from that uninspired source. Delaroche
had given the Salon picture the character it still ventures to present to the public
every year. The style of the large landscape compositions of the eighteenth century
was empty and arid, but, as Corot showed, it could be vivified. Delaroche was
always a still-born thing, without style, but with a secret willingness to flatter the
evil instincts of the masses. Within the limits prescribed for him, Millet could
have produced nothing but conventionalities, and his first attempts to please the
public — attempts to which " his poverty and not his will consented " — are beneath
criticism. After this false start, 'The Winnower of 1848 burst upon the world like
a bomb. This, Millet's first real picture, bore but the slightest relation to his
past. Perhaps the tragedy of this past was necessary, perhaps his enthusiasm would
never have developed so freely, if he had not previously been held down by his
unlucky beginnings. His whole art, indeed, the art of his whole circle to Van
Gogh, has the explosive character of The Winnower. In Corot there is no trace of
any such violent development. He showed his descent in his Hagar. To this he
was faithful all his life, though his brilliant career illumined these beginnings with
a retrospective lustre. He made his extremest compromise, to my mind, in his
St. Jerome with the absurd lion of the year 1837. We need only look at Millet's
picture of the same subject painted in 1846, or at his puerile nudities of the same
period, to understand the wide difference between the parallel stages of develop
ment of the two artists. Corot's Flight into Egypt of 1839-40, and the contem
porary Monk belonging to M. Moreau-Nelaton show the progress made since the
Hagar and the St. Jerome.

We shall return presently to the large compositions related to these religious
pictures. At the same time, seeking to give worthy expression to his piety, he
made essays in purely ecclesiastical art. He went regularly to church on Sundays,
and painted many church pictures. But the church in which he loved best to pray
and to paint was outside, in the open air. Its pillars were his beloved trees, the
birds its choristers, the sun was the preacher, and the holy angels became dancing
Bayaderes. As early as 1836 he had painted a bathing Diana with her playmates.
In the Silenus of the Salon of 1838 the nymphs dance in the wood for the first
time.

The " eternal feminine " has a place in every true idyl. Corot remained
unmarried all his life, but not on the same grounds as Menzel. Passion, of which
Menzel had too little, was too strong in Corot to allow of his warming himself at
a single flame. He never shook off the frou-frou of his mother's workshop, and
was surrounded by women in advanced old age. He reminds us of Goethe here.
His pictures were occasional poems, and they came to him spontaneously, like
verses to the enamoured poet. We might suppose him to have first found
himself, when he discovered the nymphs, and to have become his own master when
he was forty years old. Man plays but a small part in his pictures. He left man

COROT: ST. SEBASTIAN

CHF.RAMY COLLECTION, PARIS

CAMILLE COROT 169

to Millet. Even when Millet paints a woman, he gives the male aspect of her
personality, showing her as the fellow worker of the man. Corot devoted himself
to the other sex. Even during his first stay in Rome we find him painting
innumerable women of the people to a very small proportion of men. At first he
treated them as he did his landscapes of the same period, with the utmost
thoroughness, noting their costumes and using them for effects of colour. Later,
in Paris, he painted all the pretty milliners who came in his way, and created his
type, the young girl whose face we cannot well remember, of whose figure we
divine but a few lines, of whom we scarcely know more than that we caught a
glimpse of Happiness as she passed — a Nymph brushed by us ! As Collin said of
him, he painted, not Nature, but his love of her, and this was peculiarly his fashion
of treating Nature as revealed in woman. But the phrase has a still wider
application. It is not so much the objects in his pictures that charm us, be they
what they may, as the tone that envelops them, the peculiarly spheric quality of
the handling. This achievement of tone is the Alpha and Omega of his develop
ment. He made considerable progress towards it on his third Italian journey. In
1843 he was in Rome again. We shall see presently what he gained on this
occasion as a landscape-painter. It is hardly too much to say that landscape was
an intermittent element in Corot's art, which comes to the front more prominently
at certain periods, but never absorbs the artist entirely. We shall get a truer
insight into his peculiar and very comprehensive nature, if we endeavour to bring
out all the other^elements, and if we take especial note of his development in the
treatment of figures, which also personifies his artistic progress.

In Rome he no longer studied woman objectively, as he had done fifteen years
earlier, but as an element of style for future pictures. Ingres, who directed the
French Academy in Rome till 1841, exercised what I may call a localised, but not
an unimportant influence upon Corot at this period. At the Salon of 1843, Corot
exhibited a recumbent Odalisque, the inspiration of which was clearly due to Ingres'
great picture in the Louvre.

This picture, now in the Hazard collection, is less than a third the size of the
Ingres. It is also less magnificent, and lacks the exquisitely balanced arabesque of
its prototype. But on the other hand, it is more fleshy, more human, more actual,
and already points out the direction in which Corot was to surpass the great
classicist. Ingres's brilliant figure unites every splendour of modelling and contour.
But it does not breathe. Even in the soul of the most enthusiastic spectator, there
is a sense of something Jacking, something that is and must be absent in the
very essence of this art. It is the old difference between the arabesque of a
Quattrocento and the painting of a Rembrandt. With Ingres, line is so pliant an
instrument for the magical suggestion of space, that we forget we have a carefully
calculated, absolutely schematic effect before our eyes. It is only when we put an
artist of the other school beside him, that we see how the natural instinct of the
painter surpasses this scientific process. Corot, like Renoir after him, desired to
retain the maximum of a composition, but he would not renounce a painter's vital
nerve, the effect obtained by the division of the surface. Ingres' figures are lovelier
than any of Corot's, but they are eternally alone, without light or air, brilliant
objects. Corot sought to bring the beautiful dead to life. The picture mentioned
above was not the first of his Odalisques. Gallimard owns a little picture of the
same size, a Nymph of the Seine* dated 1837, the first of this brilliant series. Here

* " L'CEuvre de Corot," Robaut— Moreau— Nelaton, No. 458.
VOL. I Y

1 7o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

we already note an effect of distance and atmosphere which is a secret to all
mere painting. Ingres sought to concentrate everything in the one body,
and surrounded it with other beautiful forms. Corot sought to blend his
material with space, not only to harmonise his lines, but to make a continuous
atmosphere of the whole. The progressive development of his Odalisques
continued till he was past sixty ; not a development of the type, but of the
painting. The little picture of the recumbent nymph belonging to Katargy * was
probably painted about the same time as the Nymph of the Hazard collection.
The slender line of the body rises very little above the ground. In the course of
fifty years this body seems to grow and take on broader, more majestic contours.
The forms become rounder, the limbs learn movement, the flesh becomes more
elastic, and finally, perfected beauty emerges. The Toilette appeared at the Salon
of 1859. We might almost suppose that Corot foresaw his future course, when
we find him initiating the maturest of the works he dedicated to woman, with
this picture of a young woman decking herself for some festival, enveloped in the
tender atmosphere of Spring. The toilette is being made in the open air, among
birch-trees, on the margin of a little pool. The attendant fastens an ornament
carefully into the hair of the naked beauty, who raises her hands to her head to
help, dreaming the while, like one of Chasseriau's meditative figures. The attitude
is divine. The attendant stands as close as possible to her, leaving only the line
of her back free to the air. The rich lines of the profile are brought together by
the gown of the servant, the simple outline of which encloses the group on the
left side, so that the outside of the group towards the open air forms a quiet,
compact line, whereas on the inner side the movement is very effectively developed
and allows of the strongly marked projection of the knee. The spectator receives
an impression that this naked being is securely protected, a mingling of pleasure in
the form and enjoyment of the intimite of the scene. The beautiful proportion
between the group and the upper part of the picture, the happy shape and size of
the canvas, and above all, the characteristic handling contribute to this impression.
For the colour, the master relied on the emphasis of the brush-stroke and the
differentiation of the modelling. The only strong tone is the yellow in the dress
of the maid, which is deliberately painted in a more material and vehement fashion
than the rest, to balance the vaporous surface of the naked flesh. This vapourous
effect pervades the whole picture. It seems to lie in the atmosphere, which fills
both group and landscape with warm life.

In an analysis of Corot, it is difficult to avoid a term which has been so
mischievously applied, that one uses it unwillingly. I fear to suggest a false
idea, by describing Corot as chaste ; for in the first place, the quality for which I
can find no other word, forms no part of the accepted doctrine of abstinence, and
in the second, it exposes one to the danger of collision with those didactic aesthetes
who have made their conception of this virtue a criterion of art, and have too long
wearied mankind therewith. In Corot we find neither negation nor affirmation of
the sexual element, but that higher virtue, which first demands beauty from what is
sensual, before inquiring whether it is moral : the purity of the healthy. Corot
does not avoid the sweet magic of love, but he shows it only in its happy aspects,
as a Paradise where there is no need for repentance, where all its joys are set to the
rhythm of dancing feet and measured movement. This applies to his composition,
to the happy idiosyncrasy which makes him express desire in dance and song.
* "L'CEuvre de Corot," Robaut — Moreau — Nelaton, No. 540.

COROT: THE TOILET (1859)

DHSFOSSES COLLECTION. PARIS

CAMILLE COROT 171

But this joyful chastity also manifests itself instinctively in his treatment of details,
his touch, his handwriting. It makes up the loose texture of his painting, his
moderation in material, his involuntary hesitation to unveil beauty, that
interweaving of airy threads, that unuttered harmony which carries us back
to our youth, to the time when we wept and laughed for no particular reason,
and saw the world spread out before us, a glistening net full of pearls and precious
stones.

Corot's chastity lies in the fairy element he breathed into love. He idealised it
in a credible fashion, by making the atmosphere the symbol. Bathed in this
vapourous magic, his women, painted in the sixties, take on a brilliant loveliness.
In 1865, the same year in which another art hero, Manet, set forth his ideal in his
Olympia, Corot exhibited his Nymph reclining on a Tiger-Skin* and his Nymph
reclining on the Sea-Shore ,f the final result of the figure first created nearly
thirty years before. Among these numerous Odalisque-pictures there is one,
painted rather earlier, perhaps the most surprising thing in Corot's whole work,
which would alone have sufficed to immortalise him, the Bacchante with the
Panther. This is not one of Decamps' quadrupeds ; it has nothing in common
with Delacroix' bloodthirsty beasts, nor with Barye's stealthy great cats. Corot has
put a naked child to ride upon his panther. I do not think he painted it from
life, though the skin makes a magnificent effect. Rather did he find it in that
fairer world, where Titian also saw it, yoked with its fellow to the car of Bacchus,
when the victorious god flamed forth upon Ariadne ; where Poussin found it later
too, in the same Dionysiac cortege whence enthusiastic Greeks once lured it into
gleaming reliefs. The group occupies the foreground of a faintly indicated land
scape, and extends nearly the whole length of the long canvas. The panther and
the nymph are almost on the same plane, both in sharp profile, so that the anti
thesis of the long outstretched feminine limbs and the heavy beast is strongly
emphasised. In her extended hand the nymph holds out a dead bird to the
panther. The curve of her arm, completed by the little chubby rider, seems to
have surprised the most secret charms of beauty.

Ingres' supremacy was at an end. In 1864 Corot received twice as many
votes in the election to the Jury of the Salon. And yet there was something
of Ingres in this remote contemporary of that angry lion. A fragment of the
divine form to which Ingres had dedicated his life, too precious to fall a victim
to the stormy future, was clothed by Corot in magic garments and borne up to
unapproachable heights.

We can understand that Corot should have disliked Manet. The assailant of
modelling, the most essential process of the old masters, was incomprehensible to
him, and his preference for Courbet was a result of the different attitude adopted
by the latter on this question, and his skill in maintaining it. Beyond this, there
was nothing in common between the figure-painter Corot and Courbet save this —
that he was not a figure-painter only. He had other peers before his eyes, was
still dreaming, while the rest were formulating, and continued to make poems after
Courbet had declared all poetry to be ignoble. Hals and Goya, who penetrated
to him in France, did not disturb his idyl. That which they gave to the younger
men, he had always found in the land of his dreams, where Giorgione and
Correggio had lived. Poussin expanded his form, but remained comparatively
alien to him. The splendour of the Bacchanalia was not revealed to his timidity.
* L'CEuvre de Corot, No. 1377. j Ibid. No. 1376.

172 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

On the other hand, he adored Giorgione as Poussin adored Titian. He strove to
give naked figures in landscape the glow of the Concert champelre. Lacking
Giorgione's colour and his splendour, he had the same infinitely human sentiment
which raises Giorgione above his more gorgeous successors. In Corot's case, this
sentiment sprang from a much less serious temperament. Its sincerity was com
patible with laughter, nay, with exuberance, and this gaiety of temper found an
ideal comrade in Correggio. After Prud'hon, who has been called the French
Correggio, no one, Diaz not excepted, approached the painter of the Leda so closely
as Corot. The point of view from which he saw him differed from that of Prud'hon
and Diaz. Prud'hon had no greater ambition than to identify himself with the
beloved master. Diaz, with his enthusiasm for the Italians, sometimes approached
his prototypes so closely, that his exquisite idyls collide with an alien world of
feeling. Corot, on the other hand, dreamt before Correggio, as before Nature.
He looked from a greater distance, where the precise outlines of bodies were lost,
and retained but something of the sum of many gestures. In some of his groups
of dancing nymphs we might fancy we see the Berlin Leda multiplied indefinitely
and proportionately reduced. Scene, atmosphere, the whole structure of the
picture is more remote from Correggio than Delacroix from Rubens. But through
all the differences the hereditary strain makes itself felt, and awakes in us some
thing of the pleasure we feel, when, looking into a mirror, we recognise traces of
honoured progenitors.

Corot ennobled Correggio ; he set the sensuous beauty of the Leda in a
wider, breezier space, evoked legends yet more poetic, went back, his eyes still
fixed on the master, to greater and more distant times, when the gods were seen
in bodily shape among men, and dictated the Odes to Virgil. The chastity I have
ascribed to him is the antique spirit, which distinguishes him from Correggio.
It is said that he learnt Greek in his old age, to enable him to read Theocritus
in the original. It is certain that he had a closer affinity with the Greeks than
his contemporaries. And it is for this reason that he seems to us of such far-
reaching importance. We have seen how the classicism of Joseph Vernet's
circle was distorted by David to pseudo-Romanism. Prud'hon resisted this
tendency with a gentle determination. In his delicious drawings at Chantilly, in
the Louvre, &c., rather than in his large pictures, we find the reflex of a freer art ;
they suggest the spirit that was never amalgamated with the massive body of
Roman antiquity — Hellas. Corot ventured to paint in this fashion, and even more
resolutely than Prud'hon, banished all reminiscences of ancient Rome, in order to
bring himself the more closely into communion with an ideal Hellas. This ideal
he did not discern in the sculpture of the ancients. David would have found him
even less akin to himself than Prud'hon. Corot evolved his ideals from his
dreams. He painted landscape — the genre David's school pronounced con
temptible — took it from the environs of Paris, and painted it in the Greek spirit.
Instead of Hubert Robert's ruins, he set little naked maidens in it, who seem classical
to us now, though no one would have dared to call them so fifty years ago. He
did what Poussin and Claude succeeded in doing in the same natural manner. In
his review of the Salon of 1857, About wrote that Corot had seen things in Nature,
which had escaped the two great masters of the seventeenth century.*

It would be unjust to place the later artist above his predecessors on this account.
Poussin and Claude were to their age what Corot was to his, and he could never

* Nos Artistes au Salon de 1857.

CAMILLE COROT 173

have become what he was, had they not shown him the path he was to follow.
These two had already breathed a new spirit into the things of antiquity, had
given to the light in a picture the action formerly reserved for sharply defined
outlines, and had completed the great inventions of Veronese and Tintoretto. The
eighteenth century pondered long on this tradition. Corot did not only ponder it,
but worked it out, and made such an advance on the old path, that we are apt to
forget what had already been accomplished. We may say that he is more natural
than his predecessors, without reproach to Poussin and Claude. He was more
natural, because the whole world has become more natural. He is not less of
a poet, not less classical ; and this is a rare distinction to-day. The mingling
of his tender songs with the resonant fanfares of the new art has rejoiced
many hearts.

To that -Salon of 1857 described by About, Corot sent seven pictures, among
them five masterpieces, which secured the recognition of the sexagenarian painter
even by the general public. The first, the Concert Champetre, which belonged to
Dupre, and was bought after his death by the Due d'Aumale for Chantilly, was an
old picture; it had already figured at the Salon in 1844, but, simplified and
improved, it delighted the same people who had then passed it over. Others were :
the Destruction of Sodom * the Ronde de Nymphes, and a Shepherdess on the outskirts
of a wood, at sunset.

Theophile Gautier, who had already sung the painter's praises in 1839, now
wrote enthusiastically of his "verdures elyseens" and "ciels crepusculaires." The
epithets might lead one to suppose the master a comrade of Delacroix. Reminis
cences of the Dante's Boat were remote enough from the spirit of Corot, as I have
tried to picture it. The Romanticism of the one had nothing in common with the
idyllic poetry of the other. They were, in fact, two extremes, almost two worlds. On
the one hand, the flamboyant colourist, the turbulent temperament, the audacious
dramatist ; on the other, the singer who veiled his pastorals in tender tones.
But great artistic personalities are so richly endowed that they are rarely essentially
antithetical. They cannot be exhaustively summed up by the coarse standards we
apply to the average man. Their gentleness has its abysses, their passion its calm
oases, and we shall know them but imperfectly, if we ignore the contradictions that
complete their nature. In Corot's Christ in the Garden of Olives, of 1 849,! Delacroix*
famous picture of the same name, transformed by its passage through a more peace
ful imagination, lies as if under a veil. In the Destruction of Sodom Delacroix*
influence is very apparent. When Corot painted it originally, in 1843, he was a
stranger to Delacroix, and, as far as we can judge by a contemporary reproduction,
his composition was a classic one, in the spirit of his Hagar. Fourteen years later
he repainted the picture, modified the shape and size, and gave the composition that
dramatic unity of form, which seems a touching renunciation of his idyllic preferences.
Shortly before, he had painted the St. Sebastian, already mentioned, in the painting
of which — notably in the sketch — Delacroix' peculiar hatching is employed. In
the Dante and Virgil of 1859 there are similar affinities. But the influence of
Delacroix is most obvious in the Macbeth of the same year. The visitor to the
Wallace Museum, where so many surprises await one in connection with the art of
French Romanticism, stands astounded before this large picture. There is a
tremendous dramatic verve in the three witches, and the two riders on the startled

* This too had appeared in a different form at the Salon of 1844.
t In the Langres Museum.

174 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

horses in the ghostly, lurid landscape, and at first glance we should be less astonished
to find Delacroix' name in the inscription, than that of the actual author. We have
but to turn, however, to the neighbouring picture, Delacroix' gorgeous Execution of
the Doge, to see how great the difference really is. The Corot looks dark beside
this. He did not abandon his own more discreet manner, but it is as if some stirring
event had taken place in the life of the lyric poet, inspiring him, the limner of
gentle shepherdesses, to a mightier form of speech. I know not if this obvious
influence is to be referred to any particular picture of Delacroix'. It is possible
that Corot may have seen Chasseriau's version of the subject, which approaches
Delacroix very closely. When, in 1867, he saw his Macbeth again at the great
Exhibition, he could not refrain from certain sarcasms at his own expense. This
same brooding Romanticism lurks in certain other pictures. In the Stedelijk
Museum at Amsterdam, Delacroix' great Flight of Medea hangs in the same
room with Corot's Contrebandiers, the night-piece with the smugglers' horses
in the gloomy ravine. Here again we note a faint reflection of the painter of the
Medea.

The two artists first became acquainted in their later years, probably through
their common friend Dutilleux. In 1 847 Delacroix visited Corot's studio, and
recorded the happy impression made upon him by the Beautes Na'ives.* Corot,
less swift to form an opinion, came to admire Delacroix more and more as
years went by. He had many tendencies in common with him, notably his
veneration for Correggio, whom Delacroix ranked with Michelangelo, and may
well have had more sympathy with the nobility of mind which breathed from
every aspiration of the great painter and great man, than many of his contemporaries.
He admired him, above all, as a monumental painter, as the author of the ceiling
in the Louvre and of the large religious subjects, and it was perhaps Delacroix'
example which moved him to try his own powers in this field.

Corot as a monumental painter is an almost unknown entity. Nor can we
justly give him such a pretentious title, for his highest art is not to be found in
these essays. They indicate rather a quantitative expansion of his rich activity
than a new aspect of his genius ; but this quantum contains so many fine things
that we cannot pass it by as insignificant. His first attempt was typical of him.
Robaut tells us f that Corot arrived one day at the beginning of the forties to visit
his friend Robert at Mantes, and found workmen beginning to paint the bathroom.
The artist forthwith begged his " worthy colleagues " to make way for him. He
happened to have no implements with him, so he took the brushes and colours of
the house painters, supplemented them as well as he could at the local colour-
man's, and set to work. The room was small and ill-proportioned, like most
bath-rooms. Nothing daunted, Corot decorated the six panels of this cupboard
in a French villa with as many Souvenirs a Italic without any sort of preparation or
anything to guide him save his recollection. There is at least one picture among
the six, an oblong dessus-de-fen£tre with a view of the Grand Canal at Venice,
which repays a journey to Mantes.

The decorations of the little kiosque in the garden of the house at Ville
d'Avray, which Corot painted in 1847 for his old mother's birthday, must have
been a more charming achievement, for here great care was taken to harmonise the

* Delacroix " Journal," March 14, 1847.

t In "L'Art" for December 7, 1879. The panels are reproduced in " L'duvre de Corot,"
under Nos. 435 to 440.

CAMILLE COROT 175

various panels, and the dimensions suited the painter. Robaut very unjustly ranks
these panels below those of the Mantes bath room, because the different landscapes
seemed to him insufficiently individualised.* This deficiency was, in fact, due to
a preference for a general effect, as far as we can now judge. One of the two
largest panels, on which the little house itself is painted, is among Corot's most
fascinating works. The other pictures complete and extend this fascination. Any
stronger emphasis would have disturbed the idyl. The purity of the warm summer
harmony is of a far higher order than the improvisation at Mantes, which, happy
as it is, does not express Corot's highest gift, his melody.

Shortly before, he had painted the Baptism of Christ for the Church of St.
Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris, fortunately not on the wall, but on canvas. It
is one of his largest pictures, almost four metres high, and is Corot's most precious
contribution to monumental art in the conventional sense. The treatment is akin
to that of the Cinquecentisti, and the traditional action is retained ; but as such, it
loses all essential importance in the soft shadow in which Corot envelops it, and
becomes a new element in the landscape in which it takes place. Before this per
fect harmony, we sympathise with the enthusiasm of Delacroix, who recognised a
kindred spirit here. The same art, simplified, reappears in the four frescoes of the
church at Ville d'Avray. Here the landscape only serves as tone for the back
ground, but on the other hand, the scenes themselves, notably the Expulsion from
Paradise, are much more individual in style. Unfortunately, their position above
the windows is so unfavourable, that the spectator can hardly enjoy them to the
full.t

The fourteen scenes from the Passion in the village church of Rosny near
Mantes, and also the large Flight into Egypt, Corot's Salon picture of 1 840, at the
same place, have been so barbarously neglected by the local clergy that they are
already mere ruins. To the same period belong the four landscape panels painted
at Decamps' house at Fontainebleau, and afterwards in the possession of Sir
Frederick Leighton, and the four small ovals in Louis XV. panelling, at the
Chateau of Gruyeres, in Switzerland. In the sixties, when Daubigny exchanged
his floating studio on the Oise for a more stable summer residence at Auvers,
Corot painted some of his most beautiful decorative compositions on the new wall
of his friend's house. The largest of these served as pendant to a Don Quixote by
Daumier, and showed in the background the two typical Cervantes-figures which
Daumier painted so often.

This does not exhaust the list, but enough has been said to indicate the nature
of these works. They differ from the rest mainly in dimension, and by a grace of
handling even more airy and vapourous than usual. They have hardly added much
to his fame, and are indeed merely the overflow of an inexhaustible energy. Yet
they serve as a key to the right understanding of the master. They also help to
explain Corot's attitude to the most important school of the nineteenth century,
with which he has been too hastily confounded. A consideration of his work as a
landscape painter will throw further light on this point.

The Romantic element we have noted in the master, and his affinity to
Delacroix, disappear in the decorative side of his art. The yearning that breaks
into fervid psalmody in S. Sulpice and the Louvre ceiling is denied to the mild

* " L'CEuvre de Corot," Nos. 600 to 607. The panels are now in the possession of Lemerre, of
Paris.

t "L'CEuvre de Corot," Nos. 1074 to 1077, and 2311 to 2314.

176 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

poetry of the gentle dreamer. Taken in conjunction, these two artists sum up
the genius of their people. Corot's simple poetry springs, not from the " fine frenzy "
of Puget, whom Delacroix venerated above all his predecessors, but from the
gracious gardeners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose spirit still
adorns the art of our neighbours at times.

We might typify the art of the Primitives by a figure of a saint, that of the
florescence of the older painting by the portrait of a dignified man, that of the
eighteenth century by a pastoral scene. Our own period might be summed up in
a landscape. Here Painting — the isolated art — found a domain, in which the lack of
tradition was not a drawback, but an advantage. Its full possibilities could only
be revealed when individuals had gained sufficient vigour to insist on themselves in
art. Antique art ignored landscape. Ecclesiastical art had used glimpses of the
country for backgrounds. The Dutchmen of the seventeenth century, who had
no dealings either with the antique or with the Church, did not, even with their
glorious works, debar the future from taking possession of the domain as of a newly
discovered land. Indeed, what Ruysdael, Hobbema, van Goyen, and Aert van
der Neer began, seemed rather to call for a continuation.

Conditions so favourable to a modern development inhered in no other field of
the artistic heritage. Our unfitness to treat the votive picture is obvious, and the
reasons are clear to every layman. But even in portraiture, the full splendour
of the old masters is denied to us, and we delude ourselves if we see full com
pensation for this in our manner of characterisation. It is not a fact that our
portraits reproduce our epoch as those of the old painters reproduced theirs.
The difference, however, must not lead us to conclude that there is a difference
in artistic capacity. We cannot paint portraits as the early artists did. The
intensity with which the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries applied themselves
to this branch has made way for other tendencies, and had, in fact, to yield the
ground in order to make other and more appropriate concentrations possible
to us.

Thus, looked at from this distance, the doctrine of the unimportance of subject
seems hardly tenable. We cannot say that what is represented is of no moment,
if whole epochs have indeed shown a more perfect mastery of one thing than of
another, though it is folly to accept the easily recognised results of habit as
sufficiently important to justify an application of general rules to particular cases,
and a laying down of laws for the guidance of individual talents. The superstition
of the Classicists, that landscape in itself was unworthy of a painter's brush, the
narrowness of Valenciennes, the painter and aesthete of the Revolution, who
condemned Claude Lorrain as too realistic, because " the gods, demi-gods, nymphs,
and satyrs were absent from his beautiful scenes," and built up a thesis about land
scape on such premises,* were thoroughly pernicious. And something of this
superstition still clings to the amateur of the present day, whose admirations are
confined within certain limits prescribed by the title of the work, and who cares
only for landscape, or still-life, or imaginative subjects. He is unconscious that
he says little as to the beautiful by such classification, and merely betrays some
little personal defect of organisation, which dulls his perceptions as a tiny crack in
china deadens the ring of the vessel.

* " Elements de perspective pratique a 1'usage des Artistes, suivis de reflexions et conseils sur le
genre du paysage." Paris, Tan viii.

CAMILLE COROT 177

The votive picture was a suitable form in olden times, because the painter had
mastered it, because so many generations had worked at it, that finally the artist
who had special aptitudes for this subject was evolved. The portraits of the old
masters were not only presentments of this or the other patron, but reproductions
of a norm created by the age, a variation of the author according to the features of
the sitter, and therefore something altogether different to what we now mean by the
term. This means that even then the supposed subject was in reality form. When
David recommended his much-praised pupil, Gros, to paint a serious historical
picture, he really had his beloved antique in his mind.

Landscape marked out a new track. It created new conceptions, new methods
of turning these conceptions into pictures, new forms. For the older painters, who
thought only man worthy of representation, all nature outside of humanity was a
mere residuum. To the landscape-painter, man lost this isolated importance ; the
artistic conception became pantheistic. And with his importance, man lost the
world of forms which had gathered round him. The great arabesque evolved
from the contours of nude bodies was inapplicable to planes with fields and woods
and the sky in the background. Curves gave way to straight lines. And as the
curve had brought with it a whole cosmos of rounded forms, so the straight line
brought with it a world of strokes and angles of every kind, comparable to the
furrows left by a spade in the soil. But even the landscape painters had no idea
of renouncing the delineation of man. They brought him back, but no longer in
the form he had when the dramatic curve played about him. He became the man
of landscape, treated with the peculiarities of a method, which had accustomed the
painter to observe light on large surfaces. The new man was a part of the new
cosmos, a subject, where he had formerly reigned a king.

Corot was not more a landscape painter fundamentally than was Poussin,
though we must not under-estimate Poussin's landscape. He was not exclusively
a landscape painter. But was any great artist ever exclusive in this sense ? If
Rembrandt had painted only portraits, he would have remained the seer and the
visionary ; had he painted nothing but legends, he would have been none the less
the great mathematician. Indeed, was not all he did at once portraiture and
legend ? Is there any art which does not combine the two even in the least complex
subject ?

Corot was a landscape painter in so far as he lived in the nineteenth century
and expressed himself in the language of his age. If we take this expression in
detail, it differs little from that of any other great landscape painter, yet he appears
as a great poet by the side of excellent prose-writers. It was not the nymphs in
his pictures which gave him this advantage, but his perfect freedom in dealing with
a form created by himself and others (perhaps, indeed, more by others than by
himself), a form which kept those others fettered to details. He appears to us as
he did to the following generation of 1870, a greater personality, a richer artist, in
whom the result of development achieved a more concentrated form.

He himself was quite unconscious of his pre-eminence among the younger men
of his day. He attributed his unique position solely to his close adherence to the
ancient French tradition, and felt himself an alien among his comrades at Barbizon.
The tales of his intimate relations with Rousseau's circle are purely apocryphal.
Artists are, and must be, perverse in their judgments to some extent. Corot
himself, despite his amenity, was no exception to the rule. He once confessed to
Sensier that he could not take pleasure in the " art nouveau " ; by " new art "
VOL. i

178 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

he meant Millet ; ten years earlier he had meant Delacroix. And these two must
have been infinitely more sympathetic to him than such men as Cabat, Flers,
Dupre, and more especially Rousseau. To the Barbizon artists he appeared a
compromiser, venerable, nevertheless, because he was " le brave Pere Corot," but
to some extent vieux jeu. Moreau-Nelaton speaks of an " antagonisme inavoue
mais reel " * on the part of the Barbizon artists, and quotes contemporaries. We
can read something of the sort between the lines in Fromentin. We have hinted
at the essential reason for such an attitude in our consideration of the relation of
the men of 1 830 to the Dutch landscape painters. The former prided themselves on
being pure landscape painters, working only from Nature, and adduced this as a
proof of their sincerity. As a fact, they sat rather longer out of doors, and
painted as they looked, whereas Corot worked without so many glances at the
model ; a purely superficial difference, proceeding from the familiar fiction of a
difference of kind. Corot painted nymphs ; that was enough for the foes of
compromise !

But beneath the play of the nymphs there lay indeed a difference, which neither
party took into account : Corot was a painter of tone, the others were colourists.
In each case this essential argument must be completed by certain no less essential
reservations.

We have seen how tone was the most decisive factor in Corot's development,
how he brought it into the world with him, so to speak, for even in his first Roman
days, when he painted the delicious views of the Tiber Bridge, and was intent
merely on the collection of data, he bathed his objects in a vapourous envelope.
How abnormal such a beginning was among painters without Corot's specific
tendency may be seen if we recall the first Italian essays of such a gifted colourist
as Bonington ; those which deal with the same prospect are merciless in their
hardness.

This danger never existed for Corot. His art was as sensitive as his
personality. But just as his proverbial kindliness of heart was combined with
immense physical strength, so also his pliant form overlay an elementary vigour,
which preserved that pliancy from sentimental inanity.

During his second sojourn in Rome in 1843, we saw him in search of a form
for his pictures of women. At about the time when he produced the Destruction
of Sodom, he painted a series of his finest landscapes. The pearl of these, the
Gardens of the Villa JEste at Tivo/i, with the boy on the wall, is in the rich
collection of M. Henri Rouart, of Paris. This little picture has all the poetry of
the famous views of the Villa Medici in the Prado, painted when Velazquez was
still in the making, before he had got his generalising tone and grand style.
The veil that hangs over the Gardens of the Villa d'Este is still transparent. The
shadow conceals nothing we desire to see. The colour consists of a wealth of
distinct gradations, which, although they include the most delicate nuances, are
granular throughout, and so add continually to the richness of the effect. It is
as if we were enjoying some luscious fruit, and finding our enjoyment intensified
by a slight resistance in the texture. At Tivoli the natural accidents were all in
Corot's favour, the combination of architecture and rich vegetation, the picturesque
outlook. But he triumphs, too, where his material is less pictorial, as in M.
Rouart's other examplef or in M. Moreau-Nelaton's Cascatelles, or the remark
able little Genzano in the Cheramy collection. In hundreds of landscapes painted
• "L'CEuvre dc Corot," i. p. 240. t Ibid. No. 454.

CAMILLE COROT 179

the following year, Corot continued on the same road, now enclosing a far horizon
within his frame, in order to paint the vapourous distance of a quiet foreground,
now following the country folks along the highways or in the meadows, to paint
the intimate relation between man and nature in warm tones, now — as in the silent
pool of the Sarlin collection, which delighted us at the Centennial Exhibition —
enwrapping himself and us in solitude. There is a divine peace in this Nature,
we feel as if we were unnoticed spectators of the scene. Our eyes travel along with
the little, contented people of the pictures, wander over the thickets and between
the trees, and linger calmly on the houses and steeples. They are all familiar
things, though we have never seen the spot. We do not even yearn for them, so
close do we seem to them. It is as if the air of the pictures were playing about us
also.

This rich epoch of Corot is modified by two distinct tendencies. In the one
he yields to his poetic impulse, and devotes himself to tone, to the silvery-gray
light that suits his nymphs so well, and forgets a good many other things. In the
other he becomes a colourist.

Will the silver-gray landscapes with nymphs always retain their present
popularity ? It is probable that they will with the public, for they are the lightest
wares of the master's treasure-house. But the true worshipper of Corot's muse
will perhaps some day prize the animation of the nymphs less than the animation
of the brush in certain less monotonous pictures. The Matinee with the dancing
nymphs is the example every visitor to the Louvre prefers at first ; the picture is
easy to grasp, the loose play of the technique captivates at a glance. But this same
looseness is perhaps to blame, if the spectator is not kept in thrall, and if he feels
a certain chill in his admiration, when he finds the same quality in many others of
the famous pictures. We are, very rightly, fastidious in art. We have all the
more right to be so, especially with the greatest masters, because they owe us what
we give to them. The new place they conquer in our affections, not always with
out a certain loss to us, the novelty they force upon us, their whole claim is only
justified, if we feel the necessity for their new form. This necessity becomes
dubious at once, when form degenerates into mannerism.

Mannerism, though we recognise it readily in every exhibition, is difficult to
define. The term implies repetition ; we use it to reproach the artist for always
achieving the same result, for allowing himself to be governed by admiration of
himself, rather than by an artistic impulse. On the other hand, repetition is an
element in art, for without it there could be no style, either in individual works, or
in the whole achievement of an artist. But it becomes a defect, where it ceases to
be an advantage. Manner becomes mannerism, when the necessity for it no longer
appears absolutely logical, where it does not embrace every portion of the work
it has moulded, but leaves empty spaces. Manner is an artistic medium as long as
it serves its purpose perfectly, and does not disturb the harmony of the subjective
and objective, the elementary antecedent of every work of art. Mannerism is the
subject without object, originality without consciousness, the husk without the
kernel, the exaggeration of an element pleasing to the artist or to his public, at the
expense of the whole. As these definitions converge to a point where the line of
division between manner and mannerism is exceedingly slight, both may sometimes
be shown in the same artist, or even occasionally in the same work, and then, of
course, mannerism can only represent a delicate shade. This is the case in certain
of Corot's landscapes. By a concatenation of effects, he produced a phenomenon

i8o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

which we learnt to love as his atmosphere. It is a ladder of carefully weighed
effects, which can only be achieved if the painter thinks solely of the work in hand,
and forgets himself entirely. We mount the ladder for our enjoyment, and looking
down from it, see only the sum of these enchantments. With a much loved master,
we fly up the steps without counting them, almost without touching them : a glance,
and we are with him. His manner is so pronounced and has become so familiar to
us, that a nod suffices us. All the more securely, therefore, should the artist
build his ladder, for those who mount it are never the same. It must be strong
enough for eternity, strong enough to lead men up to Heaven as long as the
house stands.

This solidity of structure is sometimes wanting in the famous silver-gray land
scapes. The steps are half effaced, built up too hurriedly. Pictures which should
impress us by their depth, appear flat, or depth is suggested by flimsy devices.
The nymphs, who should be but the accessories of an exquisite landscape, dance in
a scene that fails to conceal all traces of the theatre from which it was sometimes
derived. The gray into which we would fain gaze, as in other Corots, without
fathoming its depths — the haze that consists, not of gray paint, but of a thousand
other things — covers a thin canvas all too superficially. It is still very beautiful. The
Louvre has none of the finest examples of this genre. For these we must go to the
Baigneuses of the Henri Rouart collection, and those belonging to Cuvelier and
Coats, the Bath of Diana in the Bordeaux Museum, the Nymphs at Chantilly, and
at Arnold and Tripp's, or the Pastorale in the Glasgow Gallery. In all these there
are imperishable qualities. There is a wide difference between the occasional
mannerism of Corot the ariist, and the occasional artistry of Besnard the mannerist !
If Corot had produced nothing else, he would have made good his title to our
veneration. But we ought not to exalt this art as his principal achievement, or
lavish admiration on the very things which are open to criticism.

It was no mercenary weakness that seduced Corot into mannerism, nor any
falling off in his powers. Others took the easy downward path when their years
were fewer and their achievement far less than his, but, as we shall see, Corot
retained his vigour to the end. I believe it was his very generosity and good
nature which made the little flaw in many admirable works ; the wish to give
pictures, just as he gave money, to make others happy — a nonchalance, which, far
removed from the introspective, self-exasperating daemon of Delacroix, and the
egotism of genius, lacked the grain of poison that great men must bear within
them to preserve their works.

But, if it be just to make such reservation, we must beware of over-hasty
generalisations. In certain over-enlightened art circles, this reservation has long
become a stock phrase, and instead of enumerating the relatively small proportion
of questionable works, all the later art of Corot is rejected. This is far more
unjust than it would be to make no mention of the exceptions.

For they are exceptions. They were not due to Corot's old age, nor even to a
period of his old age, but to a certain kind of picture, extending over many years,
and in many cases contemporary with works which the least appreciative could not
describe as senile. The Matinee appeared at the Salon of 1851, and was painted
the year before. Corot was then fifty-four, a relatively young man. The most
brilliant works in the manner of La Matinee were all later; it must be admitted
that there were examples even more mediocre than La Matinee among them, as,
for instance, the Souvenir a"Italie in the Louvre. But we need only pass into the

CAMILLE COROT 181

next room, where hang the Corots of the Thorny Thiery collection, to find later
works quite modern in conception, before which our reservations melt away like
soap bubbles.

With such pictures we might construct a new epoch in the life of Corot.
He seems, indeed, to have renewed his powers between his fiftieth and
sixtieth years. Or was it only that he adopted new methods, and changed
from a painter of tone to a colourist? — a colourist who worked with a broad,
frank brush, and, far from dreanning of nymphs in mists, made spontaneous
records of Nature.

No psychology can account for the simultaneous practice of two manners so
totally different. Even the Corot who exhibited three such pictures, all of about
the same dimensions, as the Macbeth^ the Toilette, the Cache-Cache, is a hard nut for
the art-philosopher to crack. But it must further be remembered that at the same
time he was painting like a richer, blonder Constable, and producing faithful
studies of Nature by hundreds. The perception we gain from witnessing the
logical development of our contemporaries — a Monet or a Liebermann — finds many
a riddle in the serene idyllist, Corot. It would seem as if art must have been
something less subjective to him, since he was able to evolve such varied pheno
mena therefrom, and yet it is difficult to imagine more direct " impressions " than
the gems of the Thorny Thiery collection.

All these works were painted in his last period, and, in so far as they lay
stress on colour, they show an obvious relation to the Barbizon painters, from
whom he seemed at one time so remote. It is possible that one of the youngest
members of the great landscape school, and, perhaps, the most important,
Daubigny, had something to do with this approximation.

Corot was on terms of close friendship with Daubigny, who, in 1 840, exhibited
a St. Jerome in the Desert, which may have appealed to the master. Twelve years
later they met in Dauphine, and were obviously mutually helpful. Daubigny had
meantime shaken off all classicism, and had freed himself from the influence of
Delaroche no less thoroughly than Millet. From this time forth Corot seems to
have adopted a more energetic touch, more decisive colour, something of the more
luscious technique of the younger artist. His planes begin to glisten.

In the Mesdag Museum at the Hague, where a worthy altar has been raised
to Daubigny, we can compare the two. Corot's Allee (No. 69), with its pure,
fluid greens and dazzling touches of white, harmonises well with the rapid, less
rhythmical sketches of Daubigny.

This phase of Corot's had probably been prepared by Constable, who gave the
strongest possible impetus to all the Frenchmen of his time. Corot first visited
England in 1 86 1 , but he may have seen enough of the Englishman's work before this
in Paris. Le Gue, the early picture with the loaded rack-waggon in a pool,* bears a
certain superficial likeness to the Hay Wain, though it has nothing of Constable's
handling. Of this we find more indication in certain studies executed in the forties,
as, for instance, the Rosen, the finest Corot in the Mesdag Museum (No. 65).
Constable, of course, had not the extraordinary lightness of touch, with which the
gigantic rocks are utilised here, nor the boldness of the point of sight, which Corot
took very far down, to make the stony mass more effective, nor the play of fancy,
which makes the whole picture look like an illustration for a poem. A
certain affinity of conception with Constable is more obvious in later studies, such
* "L'CEuvre dc Corot,'* No. 257 ; painted in 1832.

182 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

as that of the house mentioned above, which recalls the famous Constable sketch,
A Deserted Mill, among others.

As Corot grew older, his brush became broader. It was but rarely that he
applied this vigourous colouristic painting to large canvases. He reserved it for
his little surprises in the manner of the Thorny Thiery examples. For larger
pictures, he considered only his rhymed poetry sufficiently dignified, and in these
the handling is always subordinated more to tone than to contrast. Thus,
throughout his life we find the dualism we noted at the beginning. His nymphs
and baigneuses beautify and inspire the classicism, to which he paid tribute in his
youth with the Hagar; the little landscapes show the more intimate Corot, who,
in Rome, could not persuade himself to enter any museum but that of Nature.
The one gave to the other, it was the same man and yet I could scarcely name a
single picture, in which both sides are perfectly combined. This dualism is the
best refutation of a charge of deliberate mannerism, for mannerism is always one
sided, and tries in vain to conceal its weakness beneath variety of subject. It is
true that Corot painted many pictures in which, if we compare them with his finest
works, we cannot now recognise the creative necessity. He worked with no
consciousness of doing anything remarkable. His art was his natural form of
expression, and afforded him the satisfactory possibility of conversing with himself
and with his fellow men. It was his habit to repeat in ten pictures what he had
said in one, but we cannot say that the one might have been a more concentrated
work of its kind. This multiplicity must not be made a reproach to the master,
for it did not prevent his steady progress. He who is master of several creative
processes cannot become one-sided. We can easily perceive that the various
methods — the broad touch and the strong colour on the one hand, the tonal
painting with little dots on the other — were applied according to the design,
according to the impression he had received and wished to communicate. Naked
nixies and peasants required a different atmosphere. The hymn to woman had
always a secret separate shrine in Corot's work and in his heart.

In his old age, when he was long past sixty, this affection brought about a new
departure in his work. If woman in landscape had sometimes snapped her fingers
at him, now, in these works of his latest period, where she asserts herself alone, we
shall find the master on a rare — I had almost said, a unique — eminence.

Corot painted over two-and-a-half thousand pictures. I have tried to indicate
the various manners by which they may be classified. We have noted in passing
landscapes, portraits, idyls, romantic compositions, Odalisques, bathing nymphs,
church-pictures, frescoes, and then again landscapes — a whole art-history ! And
when we might suppose we had come to the end of the list, we find an array of
pictures with new characteristics, which make up yet another category. Woman
plays her part again in these, in settings chosen from among all the earlier manners,
but these women stand out sharply from the others. They are sufficiently differ
entiated by the fact that they are women. Looking at them, we cannot recall that
Corot ever gave us any feminine types before but his merry little nude maidens. These
others are grave and silent, and we have forgotten that Corot was once grave and
silent. They are still young, but they were not painted for their youth ; even in
the most girlish among them there is something of the matronly grace of the
famous Mandoline-player, formerly in the Desfosses collection. Sometimes they are
in the open air, fetching water from the spring, as in the beautiful picture of the

J*"3

VERMEER OF DELFT: THE SOLDIER AND THE LAUGHING GIRL

MRS. SAMUEL JOSEPH'S COLLECTION', LONDON
FROM AN ETCHING BY JACQUEMART

CAMILLE COROT 183

Behrens collection at Hamburg ; always alone, lost in thought, or resting dreamily
on the same panther-skin on which others — or perhaps they themselves — once
sunned their naked limbs. Or again, we find women with their children in a
lonely landscape.

There is a totally different tone in these idyls. They seem to have none of
the Greek feeling of earlier times. Now and again, indeed, we find a Greek — no
dancing nymph, but a wounded Eurydice.

Now, for the first time, we find woman in the house. Heretofore, it seemed
as if she could only flourish between trees, on the margin of pools among the dewy
grass. Now we see young girls in quiet, cosy rooms. They hold books in their
hands which they do not read, or they have crept in and seated themselves before
the master's easel with a guitar which they do not play.

They are rather Dutch than Greek. The airy draperies of the Elysian Fields
have become the neat dress of the bourgeoise. The technique harmonises therewith.
We are far from the misty envelope of the nymphs. The figures stand out in rich
tints from the solid walls of modern rooms. The art of atmosphere fascinates us
here, as before, but it has to reckon with the colourist. Clear harmonies illuminate
these pictures. They reflect the meditative calm of these people and of their
creator.

Here at last the direct influence of that land which was discovered by the
painters of Barbizon stands revealed. But even here Corot assimilates Holland in
a manner of his own, and not as did the series of painters from Daubigny to
Rousseau. He still keeps all that French tradition had given him, and enriches
his synthesis only with the most precious elements. The others learned from
Ruysdael and his circle. Corot went to the two who, with Hals, stand for the
greatest among the Dutch masters — Rembrandt and Vermeer.

Corot's instinctive sympathy with Rembrandt is traceable through his entire
work, and it shows how freely we must conceive of classicism, if we would under
stand such community. It helped him to a looser form. In his St. Sebastian there
is something of Rembrandt's Scourging of Christ in the Carstanjen collection, and
since the appearance of Rembrandt's remarkable idyl, the "Diana and Action of the
Salm-Salm collection,* at the Ddsseldorf Exhibition, we might almost say there
was a certain affinity even in this field. Corot is always daintier, not only in form
and dimension, but also in the invention of methods. But the little seated woman
in the studio of the Rouart collection and Madame Desfosses' gloomy Passeur are
thoroughly Rembrandtesque. In the little Rouart picture, Corot, by a marvellous
gradation of gray tones, achieves in small a majesty of effect akin to that we see in
greater splendour in Rembrandt's 'Delilah or Esther s Feast, and, in a less spectral
fashion, in certain portraits such as the Duke of Westminster's Lady with the Fan.
This last Corot saw during his visit to London in 1862.

Eight years earlier he had been in Holland and Belgium with Dutilleux.
According to the notes of this journey made by his friend, he was not much
impressed by the Anatomy Lesson and the Night Watch, but he admired the Syndics ,
and, though we hear nothing of this, the Dutch painters of interiors must certainly
have appealed to him. For shortly after his return he painted the two remarkable
pictures which stand alone in the work of the fifties, the Kitchen at Martes and
the Interior at Mas-BitierA

*Bode's " Rembrandt," Plate 196.

t " L'CEuvre de Corot," Nos. 824 and 826. Corot had never painted interiors before.

1 84 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

The intimacy so characteristic of his landscapes, takes on a new charm in this
typically Dutch genre. How differently people and things exist in Corot's rooms,
and in the agreeably painted interiors of Pieter de Hoogh ! The Dutch fashion-
painter, with his pleasant colour and clean handling, gives us a picture of the
utmost amenity. Even the light is only there to furnish the room. Corot makes
the room out of colour, the atmosphere out of light, and out of the whole a bit ot
life at which we seem to be looking unobserved.

To this art, which he thus essayed by chance, he returned later with great
mastery, when advancing age had made the comfort of interiors more material to
him. Forms he formerly bathed in morning and evening twilight, building them
up of a hundred floating, lurking, interwoven specks and touches, now stood out
in strong relief as large single figures surrounded by the light of a room, demanding
all the skill of a firm brush and strong colour. It is astonishing that a septuagenarian
should have had the vigour for this, the hardest task he had set himself, after the
immense and varied labours of his past life. The first single figures in this manner
coincide more or less with the two interiors. They were studies of Neapolitan
models, akin to the first Roman pictures of women, but infinitely riper and bolder.
M. Cheramy has an Italian woman * in which Corot's whole palette is applied : the
black and white in the hair and head-cloth, the pale yellow with the violet-gray
shadows in the complexion, the red in the back of the bodice and the striped apron,
the violet-brown in the sleeves, and, above all, the strong blue in the skirt ; the
same blue he afterwards made into a veritable triumph of colour. The Italian sits
on the ground in a very natural attitude, one arm on her jar, her hands and feet
carelessly crossed. The colours have something of the same naturalness. They
belong to the dress as evidently as the dress to the wearer ; a highly subtle degrada
tion of tones harmonises the contrasts. This degradation becomes ever more
masterly, and allows of an increase in dimensions and expression. In Durand-
Ruel's somewhat later Femme a la Pensee f we already note the tapestry-like
effect which gives a beautiful warmth to many of Corot's single figures. In this
class of pictures again, the older Corot became, the more did he make brushing
and colour play the part formerly assigned to his all-enveloping tone. This will be
best appreciated by a comparison of the six portraits of the woman before the easel. t
They began about 1865, and ended with the lady in the black velvet dress of the
Lyons Museum, painted in 1870. In the earlier examples Corot seems more pre
occupied with the pure contour, with the beautiful apparition in the room, which
he renders in blond tones, cool and gentle. Madame Esnault-Pelterie's picture,
with the exquisite rose-colour of the dress, is a masterly paraphrase of the Dutch
painters of interiors, but softer, freer, and more fluid than the genre-pictures
painted by the specialists of the seventeenth century. In the Lyons version, on
the other hand, he, like Rembrandt, penetrates more deeply into the art of
painting ; divides what was formerly kept together, even at the expense of the
modelling, shows himself architect rather than decorator, and creates a wholly
modern work. It is no isolated phenomenon. In many pictures of the same
period, that look like portraits and were painted from models, we find the same
painting. Durand Ruel had one of the finest, a threequarters length of a girl,
indescribably expressive, called La jeune Grecque§ It is as simple and transparent
as Rembrandt's young girl in the Stockholm Gallery, and one might almost add, as

*" L'CEuvre de Corot," No. 1037. t IbU.No. 1041.

t Ibid. Nos. 1557-1561. § Ibid. No. 1995.

COROT: THE STUDIO

KSNAULT-PF.LTERIE COLLECTION, PARIS

CAMILLE COROT 185

instinct with an incomprehensible mastery. Rembrandt touched the face and hands
more broadly and used stronger colour. But one is inclined to attribute this
difference not so much to superiority of powers as to a difference of temperament,
which was, of course, irreducible. The little Emma Dobigny, the model for this
picture, represents Corot's type as perfectly as Hendrickje Stoffels, or the
so-called Cook represents that of Rembrandt. We divine in it the master's
mental attitude, nay, his conception of life. No philosophy, but incarnate and
complete forms of sensation. In this picture, and in many others, Corot showed
the contemplative strain in woman, which does not complete itself in thought, but
remains in the senses — dreams without any firm basis. Women, and especially
Southern women, are excellent models for painters and sculptors, because their
whole nature is expressed in form. They think, live, and create forms, and are
untouched by the intellectuality which draws man inwards and saddens his external
aspect. Their being is still animal, and as they cultivate this animalism with their
instincts, and not with those of man, they avoid the ugly features of our hidden,
uncultured animalism. Corot's maiden is supreme Nature. No breath of senti
mentality or anecdote disturbs the purity of the conception. The picture seems
a reflection in a magic mirror into which the girl — and not the artist — is looking.
Rembrandt's little damsel at the window in the Stockholm Gallery is meditative
also. But she betrays, involuntarily, all the natural racial energy, which does not
sleep, even when it is not required. She is always alert, always listening for sounds
from without. Here the dream is woven of more definite thoughts. Rembrandt's
art suggests this just as Corot's painting reveals the nature of his model. Emma
Dobigny was a typical Parisienne, and yet La jeune Grecque is a very apt title for
the picture. The conception is Greek, in a higher sense even than Corot's mythic
fancies inspired by the Greek world. And it is this which marks the difference
between Corot and the great Dutchman. The elements that tempt us to draw com
parisons are the analogies of development, the transition in both instances from
tone to colour, from the husk to the kernel. Only one of the many skins with
which we may conceive the personality of a great artist to be overlaid, shows
Corot's affinity to Rembrandt. Beneath it there is always the painter who went to
Rome to study landscape. No matter how many of such skins we might discover,
the core would always be the Greek feeling. And this is also, the reason why,
before these, the maturest of Corot's creations, our memories hover between
Rembrandt and another master, superficially as sharply opposed to the Dutchman
as possible — Ingres. But we shall travel further still. We shall find that a
deeper comprehension of Corot's rich development will lead us back, if not to
Rembrandt, at least to his immediate neighbourhood.

And it is not Ingres the creator of Odalisques, not Ingres the painter,
but rather, the draughtsman Ingres, who achieved his greatest results by his most
restricted vehicles, who also set his faces before us like inspirations created by a
breath, purely human, and yet stripped of all human impedimenta. We find the
same mysterious plastic treatment in Corot's female faces. The Jeune Grecque is
just such a young girl as we might see any day, a good-humoured dreamy little
being, with a certain drollery in her gravity. But, in spite of all our easy insight
into this personality, an invisible power beguiles us to get more out of the face.
Nothing psychological or poetical ; however much we might read into it on these
lines, the really remarkable element would remain unperceived, if we were blind
to the presence of a second face. We feel something like this as we look :
VOL. i 2 A

1 86 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

out of the profile a second seems to grow, or rather, to hover before the other
in barely perceptible curves, a profile that has nothing human about it, but is a
symbol, a circle, an ellipse in space, a spherical something. This evocation, a
perfectly regular form, which we might suppose ourselves capable of defining by a
simple word, remains enigmatic, because, although perceptible, it exists only in the
imagination, and is formed, quite involuntarily, by the eyes, nose, hair, and mouth
of a girl who is looking at us. The spherical substitution of an abstract form for a
natural one, to which the artist compels us, is his art, and never did Corot bring it
to richer and fuller effect than in these pictures. The Femme a la Perle* is a
pendant to the Jeune Grecque, and is perhaps more mysterious, less simple. Here
we divine the artist's conscious achievement of a form which, for simplicity's sake,
we will call the antique. The constructive element of the symbol appears in direct
relation with the organic element of Nature. When we begin to examine the
details, we recognise the bridges over which we have passed. We see that the
curve from eye to forehead could not be like this in reality, that the nose in the
portrait is very different to the elevation between mouth and eyes in Nature, and
yet, when we attempt to grasp the difference, we remain spell-bound by the
plausible presentment. And now, too, we understand Corot's greater richness as
compared with Ingres. The necessary recoil of contemplation in the reproduction
of Nature as such is stronger with Corot. With Ingres we are more easily
detained by the arabesque, especially in the Odalisque pictures. The beauty of
these is above all praise, and is not called in question here. We have to analyse
our sensation in order to recognise what lies beyond the narrowly enclosed sphere
of Ingres' art. We soon perceive that the sharp classic contour softens, when we
turn to Ingres' portraits, and that the whole proportion changes when we turn
from the painter to the draughtsman. Ingres' drawings are of the utmost value,
because in them form goes into material without a remainder. All the limitations
of the painter disappear. The natural reduction of the palette to the gray and
white of pencil and paper leaves no remainder. With the painter Ingres we receive
a very precise form, but not to the same extent the double impression from symbol
and from Nature that strains our higher powers of interpretation to the uttermost.
The painter of La Femme a la Perle, on the other hand, gives strength to this
impulse. Roughly speaking, his effect upon us is double that of the other, though,
of course, he does not achieve twice the specific effect of Ingres. The beauty of
the Femme a la Perk does not lie wholly in the full oval of the face, in the
exquisitely modelled attitude, the symmetry of the folded hands, and the effect of
this beautifully shaped mass against the background, but also in the bloom of the
flesh, overlaid by a drapery of magnificent colours, and, above all, in the fact that
the whole form is woven of a texture which brings the different parts together no
less effectually than an arabesque.

Recognition of this superiority is not the result of a reaction in taste. This
has nothing to do with the present question. The laws of taste, always sublimely
observed by Ingres, can only meet relative requirements. Corot achieved more by
a deeper insight into the possibilities of his material, an insight which influences
our criticism automatically, because the results of this insight have become familiar
to us in the history of development. Hence it is that we feel something to be
lacking even in our perfect appreciation of a work by Ingres, and we see that
Corot gets a finer result. He makes a more exhaustive use of his material.

• " L'CEuvre de Corot," No. 1507 (1868-1870).

CAMILLE COROT 187

This appreciation would be unjust, if Corot's material had been essentially different,
if, for instance, he had painted like Manet, who aimed at the suppression of
modelling. But this was not the case. Corot's pictures of women have extra
ordinary plasticity. It is this alone which brings us to Ingres, just as Ingres
brought Corot to it. He has this plasticity and something more ; he multiplies
possibilities, not by increasing the plastic effect, but by a richer fulfilment of the
purpose served by plasticity. He does this more effectually than Ingres. We
have more parts to bring together in Corot's pictures. The efforts of our fancy,
the levers of enjoyment, are greater, and not the less secure. Indeed, they are
more secure, for there is less demand upon our sense of verisimilitude with Corot,
because the mediums of effect are more numerous. We enjoy a combination of
the plastic antique ideal, which predominates in Ingres, with the ideal of planes as
conceived by Rembrandt. Ingres' absolute negation of the Rembrandtesque ideal
was not a defect in his style. He gave tone to his planes with unerring precision.
Nothing could be more perverse than to call him a bad colourist in this sense.
Corot, however, achieves the same relative purity within his means, and more
perfectly by these means, for he does not only tint, he paints.

The Rembrandtesque quality of Corot's later manner manifests itself only in a
few aspects of his works. But there is an artist whose relation to the creator of
the Syndics finds its parallel in that of Corot to the master — Vermeer. And this
parallel throws a new light on some important characteristics of Corot.

It is rare, indeed, to find so many points of contact between two artists of such
different races and periods. Even the landscape painter, Vermeer, travelled on
paths distinctly akin to those of Corot at certain times. The street in the Six
Collection, and the superb View of Delft in the Hague Gallery reveal an artistic
conception divided by no impassable abyss from that of Corot the colourist.
Vermeer, is, no doubt, more precise. His sparkling dots are more neatly dis
tributed, his contrasts are set side by side like the houses in his town views, his
brush never strays suddenly over the whole surface of the picture, but divides it
accurately. But beneath this precision, which is, indeed, a characteristic of his
school, we seem to divine just such another child-like temperament, quietly
fashioning a world for himself. He does not penetrate into the depths, like
Rembrandt, does not become great with the final consequence of a powerful
drama, but decks himself with the delicate gradations of a gently emotional soul,
and compels us with the tenderness of his demands upon our admiration. We
adore the daintiness of Vermeer. He was one of the most aristocratic painters
of his time. His subtle sense of unusual effects of the most delicate kind and his
inventive genius preserved him from mannerism. But Vermeer claims our respect
further, in that this wisdom never made him pretentious, that he evinced his
faculty of producing new effects in art almost playfully, with an elegance that
scorned insistence, with the simplicity of the poet. And this brings nearer to our
parallel. We also find affinities in the experimental use of creative methods.
We must not, of course, over-estimate these elements, as far as they refer to
the landscape-painter Vermeer. The little figures in the entrances of the houses in
the Six Collection, or the luminous black and white personages on the salmon-
coloured banks of the Delft canal have come down to posterity not alone in Corot's
pictures. The whole of modern painting, beginning with Constable, must look
to Vermeer as its prototype, and Signac was wrong not to trace the history of his
group back to this, the most deliberate colour-divisionist of the old masters.

1 88 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

The affinities between the pictures of women by the two painters is much closer,
especially if we take Corot's latest period. In these we may note a remarkable
unanimity of temperament in the most subtle inflections. The girl's profile in
the Arenberg Gallery at Brussels, and still more, the magnificent head in the
Hague Gallery, show the same almost mysterious combination of accomplished
modelling and all the charms of painting. Such plastic purity was never achieved,
far less surpassed, by any other Dutchman. That which Ingres painted with the
pencil, the vapourous, rounded fulness, is perfectly preserved, and intoxicating
colours play in the vapour, and the multiplication of the charm of colour seems to
make the immaterial still more delicate. Our knowledge of racial characteristics
is considerably enlarged hereby, for I do not know what should prevent us from
describing Vermeer's profile as classical in the most liberal sense, as classical
as the girlish head in the Berlin Gallery, painted 200 years earlier by Petrus
Christus, one of the ancestral pictures of the whole series. Vermeer's maiden
would make just as good a young Greek as Corot's model. As with the Femme
a la Perle^ it is not the accidental cast of the model's features — in this case she was
called Bertha Goldschmidt, and so was probably of Germanic origin — which is
decisive, but rather the modification of the artist ; and in the two girlish heads at
Brussels and the Hague, and in the Dentelliere of the Louvre, the charm lies in the
second face which Vermeer created out of his model. But both artists preserved
the essentially national type in the most exquisite fashion. We see, not a restora
tion of a Greek statue, but a Dutchwoman and a Frenchwoman, whose very social
position we can divine. Vermeer's greater severity of form makes this less
evident at a first glance, he comes closer to Ingres than does Corot. But he, too,
preludes with the frankly natural origin of the figure — most apparent in the
Louvre Lace-maker — and thus ensures the solid basis of the effect. His Dutch
woman is certainly very different to Hendrickje Stoffels, but still she is a true
Dutchwoman ; the bony structure of the face may be seen in coarser outline every
day in the street. Nevertheless, a higher form flows from the oval, which seems
to us no less Greek than Corot's female figures. The very unusual cracks in the
two Vermeers at Brussels and the Hague make it impossible to follow the actual
painting very closely. But the main points may be observed in the well-hung
head in the Hague Museum. The colour-effect lies in the beautiful contrast of
blue and yellow, the favourite colours of both artists, and the reciprocal inter-
penetration of these colours, by which impure mixtures are avoided. The yellow of
the head-cloth is intensified in the jacket, and so threaded with blue tones, that it
inclines to olive. In the face, the darker yellow shades to pink. This pink is
marvellously gradated in the lips, and increases towards the inside of the mouth.
The stronger shade is applied in flecks upon the lighter, and thus preserves a
distinct series of gradations. The method is more cautious, I had almost said,
more appetising than Corot's, but very similar in principle and even in the manner
of laying on the paint. The mixture of very thin painting with economically
distributed and heavily loaded passages is characteristic of both painters. The
thick white impasto in the iris of the eye, the fashioning of the ear-ring ; the
concentration of the heightened colours on the more subdued tone, so that the
sparkling point crowns the tone ; the heightening of the yellow in the pendant
piece of the head-cloth by the loaded touch in the lighter shades, and finally, the
broad white strip of collar — these are all effects for which we may find parallels in
a simplified form in Corot. The peculiar, comparatively less shadowed form of

VERMEER OF DELFT: HEAD OF A GIRL

HAGUK MUSEUM

CAMILLE COROT 189

Vermeer remains. But we have only to remember the warmth of his faces in other
pictures, as in the milkmaid of the Six Collection, or the lady reading a letter in
the Dresden Gallery, to find further evidence of the affinity. For Vermeer's
manner of veiling the faces in his warmer pictures, is one of his most masterly
gifts. It distinguishes him sharply from Pieter de Hoogh and Terborch, who
sometimes make strenuous attempts to achieve the same effects, and who fail to
reach his level, even in their most brilliant works, because the effort isatoo evident.
Vermeer understood the necessity for sacrifice, and did not disturb the general
tone of the flesh by many colours, but he made his carnations vibrate under his
quivering brush. Corot's method was the same, and in the Jeune Grecque he
emphasised this granular effect as he had learnt to do many years earlier in La
Toilette.

All these affinities must not be taken as literally as it is necessary to state them
here for the sake of clarity. But the agreement of the two masters in many of
their sentiments may be accepted literally enough. In a consideration of methods,
the history of development sets its veto upon all narrow comparisons. We must
not overlook the evolution of the manual process. In the interval from Vermeer
to Corot, the handwriting has become more elaborate. Corot is not so precise in
the differentiation of tone and contrast ; he allows himself more freedom, and
creates a fragmentary form for himself, to enable him to keep pace with the swift
ness of his invention. But this relatively careless technique nevertheless derives to
a certain extent from Vermeer. I may indicate the process of evolution by saying
that Corot, working in the same dimensions, strengthened all the mediums of
effect, and consequently had to sacrifice many other factors present in Vermeer.
Where, for instance, Vermeer built up a complicated groundwork, and finally drew
the essential effect over the whole like a magic veil, Corot kept the final result in
view throughout, and from the first ensured the effect of details which finally decide
the character of the whole.

In the beautiful picture of the London National Gallery, we may, I think, see
the prototype of the Femme a la Perle. Vermeer surpasses himself here in the
splendour of his modelling, as does Corot in his portrait. In the forehead, which
in both cases gives the typical ornament to the face, we note a very similar adorn
ment. Corot's charming fancy of the pendant pearl on the forehead, by means of
which he strikes a symbolic note that echoes throughout the figure, might even be
referred to Vermeer, and to the peculiar effect of his ear-rings, &c. It is very
probable that Corot saw and studied the London picture, which belonged to Burger
in his time.

But this recognition of a single conscious inspiration does not exhaust the
curious depth of the affinity. Corot had always a great deal of personal wealth to
add to impulses from without ; he was too original to give himself up to a single
prepossession, and we could hardly pronounce his last years the supreme period of
his achievement if the fundamental qualities of his manner had suffered eclipse.
Among these we have already noted, as an early peculiarity, Corot's manner of
receiving Dutch influences through a French medium. Here again this was the
case. It is certain that he had seen Vermeer's works, and the Delft master may
have been to him what Hobbema was to the Barbizon painters ; but once more he
profited from the preparation of the influence by a French master of the eighteenth
century.

Not all, but much of the importance proper to Vermeer in the Dutch school

1 9o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

is ascribed in the French school to Chardin, the master of interiors and still-life.
He, too, looked at the Dutchmen — not only those as whose imitator he was long
honoured in France — and continued them. Corot's relation to a master two
hundred years earlier than himself required careful examination, because certain
creative impulses necessarily undergo modification in process of time, and obscure
the likeness. The hundred years less in the case of Chardin are favourable to our
examination, because they entail less change in the creative impulse. If we trace
the evolution back to Petrus Cristus, then the two hundred years between Vermeer
and his ancestor would have the same significance as the like term between the
Delft master and his descendant. Chardin's relation to Holland is obvious to all,
because his subjects coincide with the favourite motives of the old Dutch masters.
If we examine the relation more closely, the impression of a very close affinity
disappears, save in so far as it rests on a pure question of material. We begin to
seek out the Dutchmen, who really shared Chardin's idiosyncrasy, and finally, very
little of the similarity remains. It is only from the very best of the seventeenth-
century still-life painters that the road leads to the French master's fruit-pieces.
Kalf s pendant lemon-peel in the Berlin Museum shows one of the stages. Among
the very unequal works of Van Beyeren, there are one or two notable pictures, as,
for instance, the Hague still-life of the platter with the pieces of fish, rendered by
luminous white touches of paint on a gray-white ground. The indications are more
clearly recognisable in the finest of all Van Beyerens, that of the hare, the chicken,
and the red giblets, lately added to the Hague Museum. Such things remind us
of Chardin. But much as he obviously owes to his predecessors, he is decidedly
greater. Not only because the equanimity of perfection was natural to him, and
he never succumbed to the temptations of mannerism, but because his style as such
is more important. He, in his playful moments, masters what the others only
achieve in their best works, and does so by surer methods. Chardin's Hare at
Stockholm is simpler, and almost monumental in effect as compared with the works
of the Dutchmen, and yet the elements of the effect are multiplied. The single
little apple in the Hare picture makes a richer and stronger effect than a whole
picture by Kalf. On the other hand, Chardin's level of excellence brings him near
to the master who also painted still-life occasionally, though the still-life painters are
not to be named in the same breath with him, the Vermeer of the Reading Girl in
the Dresden Gallery, who ornamented the foreground of this gem with a plate of
fruit, painted in a glowing olive tone, which contains the whole essence of the
picture. In addition to this seductive glow of colour, which is obtained not by
contrast, but by handling, and is likewise to be found in Chardin, we note yet
another characteristic common to both. The monumental gravity of the Dresden
interior is not comparable to anything in Chardin. But Vermeer had another
manner beside that of the Dresden picture and of the girl in the tur-trimmed
jacket in the Berlin Museum ; he painted a few interiors, in which his seriousness
was not directed to the purity of an unparalleled harmony of forms, but called forth
a second quality in the master, which we have already noted. I mean the works
in which his daintiness is applied to a rendering of woman more akin to his land
scapes, such as the piquant little picture in the Rijks Museum, the mandoline
player with the amazingly lifelike servant-maid, or the large Allegory at the Hague.
Here Vermeer plies his brilliant tonal art more as a decorator, adorns the back
ground therewith, and sets his women in his rich-toned interiors with superb
assurance. The baroque element in the Allegory, already evinced by the gesture

CAMILLE COROT 191

with which the woman sets her foot upon the globe, is the vehicle of this change of
technique. Here, and in the picture of the two women in the Rijks Museum, the
master was not deterred from the contrasts he desired by a certain necessary
hardness, and here again we find the effect won by little flashing dots, as in the
landscapes. With this technique the landscape painter foreshadows that of
Canaletto, which, indeed, merely generalised and coarsened the style; the painter
of interiors heralds Chardin, and was continued by him in a sublime manner. In
Chardin's homely scenes of domestic life there is the same softness of perfect
gradation combined with freshness of contrast. It is not so much his conception
of colour as his relatively granulated touch, at a time when most of his contempo
raries showed an increasing preference for the brisk, decorative stroke, which
connects Chardin with Vermeer.

" His manner of painting is peculiar," wrote Bachaumont of Chardin. " He
puts one colour beside the other, almost without mixing them, so that his work
has a certain resemblance to mosaic or inlaying, like the needlework known as
point carre. And Gaston Schefer, who quotes this contemporary criticism, adds :
44 Chardin was, it appears, a kind of pointilliste. When we examine his pictures
closely they seem mere indications. But when we step back, everything clears up,
becomes distinct and flows together in a marvellous harmony." *

This seemed a peculiar method of working in Diderot's time, but it was no
longer so regarded in the days of the aged Corot, when this pointillisme had
already found adherents of various styles. And if Diderot and his contemporaries
had not forgotten Vermeer in favour of the then absurdly over-rated Teniers, they
might have discovered this pointillisme a hundred years earlier in the Delft
master. Chardin always reveals the eighteenth century, but the Dutchman subdues
and intensifies his manner. He shows the Dutch spirit in the reduction of the
space in his interiors, by which he gains a greater concentration of the effect, by
making his women middle-class housewives, and none the less charming. Life in
his delicious doll's houses is daintier than in the Dutch rooms, lighter, more cheer
ful, more graceful, but there is in them a breath of the same intensity that endears
the Dutch interiors to us. The Dutchman again combines the gentleness of
a highly refined conception with a delight in bold accents. In Chardin we see the
eighteenth century, reminiscent of the glorious past, in Vermeer a beauty instinct
with all the charms of the seventeenth century is rejuvenated by its relation to the
following epoch.

Corot has something of each. He accomplishes that which all the masters of
the nineteenth century accomplish, forming a link in a chain of development that had
extended as far as himself, and at the same time harking back to the seventeenth
century as did Delacroix, Courbet, Manet and many others. But the eighteenth
century was not so cavalierly treated by him as by others, who cast but a glance at
Watteau and Fragonard in passing. Chardin and Vermeer put together do not
make up Corot. But the mind which has grasped these two will look upon Corot
as an almost necessary complement.

Whenever I see in the Louvre the pastels, and the famous old head with the
horn spectacles, the portrait of Chardin by himself when he was nearly eighty years
old, I am reminded of le Pere Corot. It is the same type, the same indomitable
good-nature, almost the same shrewd bourgeois face. Although a century divides
them, they seem nearer to each other than Corot and the generation that came after
*" Les Grands Artistes. Chardin." Paris, Laurens, no date.

192 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

him. And nearer, fundamentally, than Corot and Vermeer. It is true that many
of Corot's single figures seem to have more in common with Vermeer's serious
women than with Chardin's little housewives. But the nuance that is opposed to
the parallel Vermeer — Corot, is just what the master of Ville d'Avray shares with
Chardin, the light and fluid quality of the form, I had almost said, of the manner
of life. Corot's relations to his compatriot are the reverse of those between
Chardin and Vermeer. He kept the doll's house element out of his interiors — hh
dolls were reserved for his silver-gray woods — increased the dimensions, paid far
more attention to persons than to their surroundings, and lavished on his figures
all the wealth which Chardin indicates by the scattered details of his delicious
world. We can judge how serious we have become, from the old age of the most
cheerful spirit of our times, if we compare him with the most serious of the
eighteenth century.

And yet the likeness in the two portraits is not deceptive. A last shimmer of
the golden time that refused to look at the reverse of life survives in the aged
Corot. That which makes his latest figures seem more serious than the earlier
ones, is the enrichment of the artist's effects, quite as much as the natural propen
sity of the mature to profounder meditation.

Thus the ring closes. All three strove after the same quiet beauty. Each
belongs to his century and yet extends beyond it, and in this portion with which
he belongs not to his age, but to eternity, he comes in contact with the others.
Thus the Dresden rhapsody in olive, Chardin's Benedicite, and the last of Corot's
women seated before an easel, belong together. The three painters seem even
more closely related, if, turning aside from individual pictures, we take account only
of what, in each of the three, appears to us as form in the widest sense, as individual
organ, as soul.

The similarity is no mere verbal one ; if it were so, it would be possible to dis
pense with one of the three. They are related, if we stand back so far from them,
that the lands and times in which they lived appear as enclosed masses, leaving
their silhouettes the more clearly visible and laying bare all the incidental
elements with which the passing hour endowed them. Among these incidentals
I should reckon the accidental resemblances in the methods of painting of various
artists. Yet he who comprehends art in the widest sense will find, that such affinities
are not purely fortuitous, in the case of great masters. If we penetrate deeply into
the being of these three artists of three rich artistic periods which we have grouped
together, we shall find more and more, that the manner of their painting
corresponded most intimately with their humanity, and that any attempt to
consider their technique apart from their personality, is inconclusive. And this
shows us, that the relations between the three are not accidental, but arise out of
the circumstance that three men who were alike — as far as such likeness is compatible
with the different times in which they lived — determined to be true to their nature
in dealing with their art.

When the future measures us of this generation from afar, it will perhaps think
it desirable to revise the favourable judgments accorded by us to certain artists.
It will deal most hardly with those whose relation to others seems accidental. It
is hardly conceivable that any age will attack the Corot whose spirit mates with
those of Vermeer and Chardin. As long as one of the trio is honoured, the other
two will seem indispensable.

COROT: THE LADY IN BLUE (LA DAME BLEUE) 1874

H. ROUART COLLECTION, PARIS

CAMILLE COROT 193

But we do not need to discern all these latent affinities in order to love Corot
He appeals to the amateur more readily than any great artist of the nineteenth
century. The layman, who stands before many contemporaries as before so many
enigmas, is charmed into praise of the beautiful before Corot ; so much of the old
and familiar seems to be in him, so natural does his novelty appear to us.
Corot's own emotion is so apparent in his pictures that we need but be susceptible
of emotion ourselves to become his admirers.

The development of his latest and strongest period was only arrested by death.
His colour increased in beauty with every picture. The Dame Bleue* in M. Henri
Rouart's collection — a perfect parure in blue, the richness of which depends more
upon the vehement brushing than upon variety of tones — and the Monk Playing
the Violoncello^ in Madam Amsinck's collection at Hamburg, both painted in
1874, when Corot was nearly eighty, show the same audacity of colour.

It is not only the breadth of the painting, appealing as this does to our modern
taste, but the wide humanity of his later works which makes me call Corot's last
years his happiest period. He was always sincere, even when he trifled. But here
he appears a great man, putting away childish things, and willing to sacrifice every
thing in order to win the highest results from the lavish gifts of his genius. If
some of his earlier works are dimmed by a breath of compromise, the best pictures
of his last period are the manifestations of a soul conscious of having to render
account to his Maker alone.

If we set aside the many works which recur in every period and are merely
modified reproductions of earlier conceptions, if we confine ourselves to what was,
for the moment, new in his production, his progressive approximation to the
ideals of modern painting is unmistakable. And yet we shall never reckon Corot
altogether a modern ; his creative form has no cogent relation to the Impressionists.
He went part of the way with them, but his eyes were always fixed on things
which had long vanished from their ken.

Corot was a dreamer. He had not the temperament of the great conquerors,
whose pictures take the world by storm. It may be for this reason that his
influence was confined to a narrow circle. Its benefits are less obvious than those
which Ingres and Delacroix conferred on their successors. Corot was not explicit
enough, he was too unconscious of his own abundance, to be the leader of a school
in the narrower sense. The things smaller men such as Lepine built up on his
foundations are negligible. Yet in some of the most important artists of the age
we find echoes of his spirit. Not in Manet ; he knew that Corot did not under
stand him, and stood apart from him, almost at an opposite pole. But the other
Impressionists owe not a little to this tacit master. His warm tonality was of
great service to them at their debut. Pissarro owes him most, then Monet, Sisley,
and others. The first landscapes of the new school owed their peculiar softness to
Corot's lyricism. During the conquest of light, thoughts went back to the master
of twilight. Since painters have begun to deal calmly with this victory Corot's
spirit has waxed prolific. Something of the great idyllist lives again in Bonnard.
Whereas Maurice Denis approaches Ingres' successors, Bonnard manifests the
higher classicism, with which he surpasses his companion as surely as did Corct
the painter of the Odalisques.

Among contemporary Germans, Waldmuller was the first to appreciate Corot,
though we find no direct traces of his enthusiastic admiration in his works. The

* " L'CEuvre de Corot," No. 2180. f Ibid. No. 2129.

VOL. I 2 B

194 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

Frankfort group (Burnitz, Eysen, V. Miiller, &c.) reveal the beneficent influence
of the master. Corot delivered the youthful Bocklin from Schirmer's dryness.

The French public has a boundless adoration for Corot. His popularity has
even put Millet into the shade. Material appreciation of his pictures exceeds all
reasonable measure. He is the only landscape painter of the great generation
whose works show a steady increase in price. Pictures Corot painted for 1000
francs in his last years command a hundredfold to-day. This is no result of the
fickle preference of amateurs ; it is due to a sounder instinct. Corot was unique.
When he died, it was not only the creator of glorious works who was buried, but
a style. He is behind us, and we may not look to the future for his equal. For,
with all his versatility, in spite of his far-reaching affinities with the most pre
eminent spirits, we must admit that Corot did not deal exhaustively with his age.
He was not deeply rooted in the present like Constable and Menzel ; he had not.
the astounding grasp of a new synthesis shown by Courbet ; he was not so
necessary as Monet. The audacity of a Renoir was denied him. His art was
like a smiling, well-protected coast, on which the waves ripple gently and never
break in fury. Our glowing passion turns rather to the great solitaries, rocky
islands warring against hostile elements. We feel more enthusiasm for these
because they rise from depths in which we fear to sink, because they accomplish
that for which our souls yearn. Yet who, trembling before all the novel forces
raging around, would not sometimes gladly linger in the quiet meadows which
Corot has preserved for the softer emotions that remain to us ?

MILLET: THE SOUP (LA

MARSEILLE MUSEUM

SOUPE) (SALON 1871

JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET 195

JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET

Theophile Silvestre tells us of a description Corot gave him of his early manner
of drawing. He began by drawing details of persons or groups that took his
fancy in the street. But as folks were not so obliging as to stand still till he had
finished, his sketch-book was full of half heads and fragmentary noses. He then
determined never to come home without a finished head, and set to work to fix the
general aspect of his groups in hasty outline drawings. If details escaped him, he
managed to suggest the character of the whole.

The whole of modern art has adopted this receipt, which was also that of
Rembrandt, Rubens, and Velazquez, and became genius in the hands of Daumier.
Millet made it an element of style.

It is difficult to estimate the extent of Millet's indebtedness to Daumier. His
biographers either suppress the fact altogether, or slur it over in a passing phrase.
They either do not see it, or they wish to be discreet. Art history is to them a
history of individuals, each of which must have invented everything. At bottom
it is merely the pettiness of the biographer who belittles greatness by over-estimating.
As if it detracted from the sum of achievement we call Delacroix, to admit that
the things we call Gericault contain greater elements ! The research of the art-
historian should concern itself with a state of being in which the individual
disappears and works endure. It may thus give living artists hints for their
personal edification, notably, examples of the golden fact that there always have been
and always will be spiritual relationships. The biographers who avoid such
researches are always those who accumulate anecdotes concerning the lives of their
heroes. In this way it is almost inevitable that they should at last declare, that
everything has already existed, and this discovery may lead them to that abhor
rence of all art which one has to regret nowadays in so many intelligent persons,
who seem to have lost all their enthusiasms.

But we who seek for art, will find our love of art strengthened by recognition
of the profound relation of great creations one to another. Reminiscences of
Daumier will not minimise our enjoyment of Millet, but on the contrary, will
give it a depth that will preserve us more especially from seeing in Millet a
sentimental peasant, a point of view that has received a good deal of support
from the kind of cult lavished on the sentiment of the Angelas. Millet is a
very much simpler artist than Daumier, who was in every way a more richly
artistic personality, and to whom it would have been impossible to have imposed
upon himself a simplification of pictorial means for a higher purpose such as that
entailed by Millet's Nature. For this reason, the painter of Don Quixote was not
cut out for an apostle ; he had too much baggage, and proposed almost more to his
universal genius than it gave him in works. In his hastiest drawings for the demands
of those who furnished his daily bread he was more of a painter than Millet in his
richest pictures. Millet had the very temperament of the great Primitives ; Daumiet
showed him the form, the elements of which belonged to the immediate present.

196 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

He took it, stripped off the linear contour, and filled it with the warm expression
of his love for his fellow men. Millet has even less need for oil as a medium than
the Primitives. Painting to him was often only a means of enhancing his drawing.
We never get so near to him as in the woodcuts which his brother executed, in his
pen-drawings, and his etchings, which are also more woodcuts than anything else.
Even lithography seems to circumscribe his artistic power. He has nowhere found
a more perfect medium of expression than such etchings as, for instance, the
woman blowing the spoon before feeding the child upon her lap, or La Lefon de
'Tricot. I do not mean by this that Millet's pictures are superfluous. A Christ
by Roger van der Weyden that measures a few centimetres may also be enlarged
tenfold, and the artist's powers will not fall short of the format.

It is strange that Millet should have been born in France. The more closely
he seems to approach the French genius in certain pictures of Daumier's, the more
remote from it he seems as a whole. His temperament is rather Germanic, and
this not only because no other French artist has so deeply influenced the Germans,
the Dutch and the Flemings, or because no other foreigner has ever so stirred the
German imagination, but because of his material form. In his pictures he appears
as a na'fve Rembrandt ; in his drawings he writes classic things in a simplified
handwriting, akin to that of Diirer. Of all his generation, the Dutchmen gave
him most. In his works, as in so many of Corot's interiors, we find beauties of
the time of Vermeer, and it is amazing that they should accord with the very
Michelangelesque grandeur that reveals its elemental nudity in certain of his
drawings.

The great landscape school of Rousseau, Corot, and Dupre accomplished a
deed of artistic policy, when it brought Ruysdael and Vermeer to French
painting. France had need of the piece of bread that Dutch sincerity offered
her, to keep her from dissolution in the arms of the beloved Rubens, and, on the
other side, to infuse into the beautiful classic phrase something of that Nature
which the landscape painter of literature, J. J. Rousseau, had opportunely applied
to language.

Millet played a special part in the transaction. Corot and Diaz were seeking
for some intermediary between the imported anti-Latin spirit and the ancient
French muse, Diaz more especially in the Delacroix tradition, Corot, with a
greater and freer instinct, in his typically French idyl. But neither Corot nor
Diaz replenished the new earth ; they merely adorned it. Corot's God-given
genius transformed it into a land of dreams, in which the ever youthful Greek
legend was at home. We should never have felt the want of anything more, had
not Millet come, bringing to the vast work of Rousseau, whose trees stretch into
the world like giant hands, the gift of speech, an expression of depth and gravity,
which held its own against the influences of Rubens and of classicism alike, and
henceforth took its place beside them. He set human beings in this new land
scape, not this or that individual, but the strenuous type whose spirit was born of
this landscape. This could only be the peasant. He made him not beautiful or
pleasing, but great, so great that his head towers into the azure, while his heavy
wooden shoes grow to the soil. Millet was a peasant in the same complete
sense as Rubens, his antithesis, was a patrician.

We can understand why Van Gogh reverenced Millet for remaining in his
own sphere. It was only thus that, after a long interval, the world knew one of

AUVERGNATE PEASANT WOMAN SPINNING

FROM A WOODCUT BY PARIS AFTER J. F. MILLET

198 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

the great race again, in whose creation all humanity participates with a long-drawn
breath, one of those who must come from time to time, that the world may not
be thrown out of balance by sheer genius, the great collectivism who makes the
mad mass of selfish activity once more kindle for the common weal.

What makes him immortal is, that through it all he was and remained an
artist, that, the time being not ripe for the communism to which he had turned,
he had strength enough to forego it in resolute impersonality. To no one was
the danger of weakness more obvious. His contemporaries perhaps only needed
the cross upon his pictures to hail him saviour. He preferred that he and his
should bear it, and awaited the valuation of his pictures in millions in the

hereafter.

*******

Just as a whole host of imitators laid hold of the synthesis that Michelangelo
left behind him, so also the synthesis of Millet found many to continue it. The
result has not been " a style," as in the case of Michelangelo, not only because
Millet's activity was restricted to the field of painting, but because of the period
in which he appeared, a period, be it remembered, which is far from complete as
yet. The melancholy decadence which was the immediate outcome of Michel
angelo's achievement, inevitable with such an exemplar at that particular period,
consoles us somewhat for the humble fate of the later artist. That it has nevertheless
borne fruit I shall attempt to show, as far as it is possible to demonstrate the fact
from the manifestations of the short time that has passed since Millet's death.
Perhaps I shall be able in the process to indicate one of the most remarkable antitheses
of art-history. Of course Millet suffers from comparison with Michelangelo no less
than do his disciples if set beside Rubens. But whereas Michelangelo's formula,
as applied to the contemporary forces that produce style, might have been an
Apres-moi-le-deluge, Millet, in an age so much poorer in beauty, seems to offer
the germ of a new form which may perhaps — 1 say it with all diffidence — bring
about a return to a more universal language, that shall not be confined to painting.
The reconstruction is as slow as the destruction was rapid. The structure will
never rise spontaneously from this hidden artistic fertilisation as did the Re
naissance. But all collaboration in the task of re-uniting life and art is precious.
If it should succeed, the mysterious figure of Daumier will claim recognition
together with Millet, as one to whom a memorable part was assigned in the

development it has been left to the future to work out.

*******

Millet's immediate influence upon the French was nugatory. The usual thing
happened. It is not until the prophet is acclaimed by strangers that he is admitted
to the sanctuary in his native land.

The Millet idea found its way to Holland ; Israels baptized the discovery and
made it more accessible. He baptized it with brown sauce, and there was no end
to the guests who came to the feast. At one time there was scarcely a Dutchman
that wielded a paint-brush who did not work for awhile a la Israels ; even the
modern exotics, the Toorops, Thorn Prikkers and the rest, began in this way.
Millet became a means of popularising Rembrandt, a proceeding that did little for
either, and led its adherents far away from the true Dutch tradition of Vermeer's
best period. Israels saw in Rembrandt and in Millet only that which may be re
duced to a formula. This formula was applied to all sorts of new subjects, and
when a more or less incidental attempt was made to formulate anew, it was not

MILLET: DRAWING

WOODCUT BY THE CORP. FRAN?. DES GRAVHURS SUR BOIS

JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET

199

advantageous to the result. And yet it was a Dutchman who was to go to the
root of Millet's art and prove its value.

Israels saw only its emotional side, and in his hands Dutch art became senti
mental for the first time. It was an extravagance that became negative, so to
speak. He emphasised the elements that Millet always or nearly always avoided.
The pictorial envelope which was added was not the natural epidermis employed
by Rembrandt, but a net spread for sensibility. It became the melancholy genre
as opposed to the cheerful vein of Knaus, 8cc., and it had the advantage of a
less trivial form, that was not merely illustrative.

It was thus that Millet reached Germany. We will look for him there
later on.

• ==. ~ .^

DRAWING BY J. F. MILLET

AFTER A WOODCUT BY A. LAVIEILLE

200 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

SEGANTINI

No school could carry on the manner of Millet. This primitive could only
exercise a fruitful influence on primitive forces. Peasants have understood him,
sturdy children of Nature, who take small account of knowledge and of letters,
who are guided only by Nature in what they do and what they leave undone, who
belong to themselves and their own instincts, and who, when they obey something
outside themselves, are only led to do so by their instinct.

Segantini is one of these. He is mainly important as a type, as an indication
of what may be arrived at, taking Millet as the point of departure, and not by
any means as an ideal. He oscillates between curious ideas and changeful
technique ; but his processes are those of a peasant ; it is difficult to discuss them ;
they are inconsequences such as are only possible to consequent natures.

Segantini, too, translated Millet into romantic terms, even more flagrantly
than the others, but so frankly that it causes us less discomfort, and does not
excite suspicion. He has not the genius to evoke the spectator's own sensations,
the conscious hymn of praise ; he puts them into the picture ; he has not the
cool lucidity of the really great artist, and still less of the taste that supplies
the defect in others. He bathes his thoughts in Nature, and clothes them in
the local colour of his life in the Engadine Alps ; but thought is always prominent
in the foreground.

Yet all this is done unconsciously, and does not affect the thing itself, for
through it all we are conscious of a purely artistic personality, to whom his creation
is all-important. He gives us what he has. Line is his medium of fascination ;
it has become more slender, not so virile as Millet's in spite of its crudity, but yet
not weakly. There is something new in it, something we do not find in Millet,
perhaps because we do not seek it — rhythm. Of course, if we use this term in
the widest sense, and take it to mean an individual law of line, a peculiar
distribution of masses, Millet has it in superabundant, unsurpassed degree.
But we mean something that Millet perhaps despised, but which pleases us to
day, the extraordinary lyric quality, the cadence of the line in Segantini's
drawings.

His sense of colour came to his aid here ; this, too, is an element of strength
in his manner. In this child of Nature we find conventions that are not in
Nature, certainly, but that give a splendid completeness to his treatment of line.
His distribution of planes is sometimes almost schematic ; his contrasts, not always
deliberate, but always strong, his yellow, his white, are not studies from Nature,
but effects proper to the decorator. His pictures are full of light, but
connoisseurs will feel the want of air. That he attains to Nature nevertheless, is
his art. For this Segantini has given us once more the Alpine landscape, of which
painters have so long been afraid.

Segantini's emotional fantasy does not jar upon us, solely because it is not con
templative but naive, or, rather, it appears so. He was the first to show us what it

SEGANTINI: MOTHERS (LE MAORI)

(A. DRAWING)

SEGANTINI: LA VACCA BAGNATA

FLKRSHF.IM COLLECTION, I RANKI ORT-ON-THF.-MAIN

SEGANTINI 201

looks like on the mountain-tops, when we contemplate them from above, and not
from below. The phenomena he deals with are in themselves so remarkable, that
a fantastic element seems hardly abnormal in treating them. He creates a milieu,
and if we believe in it, it is easy enough to accept what he tells us is happening there.
This is the secret of all the arts. And then the fancy of this quondam swineherd
works with a certain loftiness. It does not merely oscillate between tears and
laughter as does the art of his compatriots, even the greatest among them. It
has the beneficent repose that eye and mind demand in wall decorations ; it seems
important only by its form, and only its pictorial qualities give it meaning. The
weaknesses of this art are by no means slight. How should an Italian of the
Engadine avoid all faults of taste ! The robust technique, which has failed to
absorb any of those elements of Daumier that lurk in Millet, sometimes conceals
a lack of precision ; it becomes coarse, that it may not seem weak ; not only
naive, but uncultivated. And the large surfaces do not always suggest creative
exuberance; the sun in these pictures sometimes glitters judiciously, dazzling the
eye that might detect their emptiness.

Nevertheless Segantini will count, at least in our times, as a pioneer on a new
domain, in which no other artist out of France has worked so earnestly. He
might have gone far indeed, if he had had the good fortune to meet with the
artist, who strove after a kindred ideal far from Alpine heights, in Brittany and
at Aries, an artist to whom Segantini was perhaps superior by virtue of his physical
health.

VOL. I 2 C

202 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Lux mea crux —
Crux mea lux !

NIETZSCHE.

Van Gogh got nearer to the root of the matter. There has perhaps, indeed,
never been any one who, quite unconsciously, penetrated so deeply into what we
are now agreed to recognise as artistic. He himself turned to it merely as the
most natural means of expression.

Van Gogh came from Holland, and was of the generation of Israels. He was
born at Groot Zundert on March 30, 1853, and up to his thirtieth year had not
found his vocation. Everything and nothing revealed the artist in him ; every
thing, because he had within him a consciousness of the divine fire, a veritably
elemental craving to express himself; and nothing, because painting by no
means presented itself to him as the natural manifestation of this craving. He
was of the stuff of which, in earlier days, the great benefactors of the human race
were made ; he was essentially an idealist, consumed with a yearning affection for
humanity, a man who, under all circumstances, would always have been eager to
do good. A natural inclination, the sole commercial element in which was a
desire to occupy himself usefully with beautiful things, led him as a young man to
seek employment with art-dealers. For several years he was with the well-known
firm of Goupil in London, Paris, and the Hague. In 1876 he renounced business ;
and, obeying his dearest instincts, became a teacher in a school in England,
working till the end of the year at Ramsgate and at Isleworth. Difficulties of
all kinds only served to strengthen his convictions, and finally to make him
resolve to extend his sphere of usefulness by becoming a clergyman. He was
a Protestant ; his father, the pastor of a small congregation, encouraged him in
his determination, and in 1877 Vincent went to Amsterdam to begin his theo
logical studies. But the struggle with all the forms and superficialities that overlie
the essentials of faith, became too irksome to him. These were dark days ; he
felt impelled to change his calling once more ; his family looked upon him as
a castaway. The following year he left his native land again, this time for
Brussels, and accepted a mission from the Protestant congregation to the workmen
in the Borinage, reading the Scriptures to them, and expounding the primitive
Gospel as he himself understood it.

This period, about the year 1880, was a decisive one in his life. His
experiences among his miners were those of every warm-hearted person who is
brought into contact with miners for the first time. Intelligent enough not
to blind himself to the fact that his unpractised speech could offer little indeed to
these mute victims of a sombre lot, everything that he saw increased his longing
for a medium of expression ; for him there was but one idea in these surround
ings, where everything tended naturally to become a symbol to him ; this was, to

204 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

insistent upon order, where disorder is habitual in all relations of life. Julien
Leclerc, who made his acquaintance in 1888, describes him as a nervous, chilly
individual, suggestive of Spinoza, and concealing a violent intellectual activity
under an exterior reserve.

Vincent breathed freely again, when he found himself once more among
peasants at Aries. His letters to Emile Bernard and to his brother, published by the
" Mercure d~ France," reveal his conception of art, a conception which would only
have excited the laughter of the boulevardier. " Christ," he says, " was the
greatest of all artists, because He made immortal men, and not works of art,
because His words, which He, as a grand seigneur, disdained to set down in writing,
were mightier in their power over others than marbles and pictures, because He
knew that they would endure, when the forms of the world in which He lived
had long passed away." Here we have the whole of Van Gogh, the man who
believed, even more fervently than in art, in a tremendous pure creative power,
given to men to make others happy ; which urges the individual not to gratify
his own vanity by his art, but to find satisfaction in the hard fate of a great artist
such as he himself was. He repeatedly lamented to his brother, that pictures and
statues were not living things. It depressed him to think " that life is created
with less effort than art."

It was natural that Millet should influence him : Millet, whose attitude to
Christianity was akin to his own, and who invented the divine gesture of his
Sower to express it. But Millet was made of other stuff. He enjoyed the Nature
he painted. The gravity that breathes from his pictures is that of the country
man, familiar with hard work, but confident of its results. Van Gogh is all harsh
tragedy ; he did not go to Nature ; she dragged him to her. To be nearer to
her, he, the Dutchman, nourished in the northern calm of Rembrandt, Frans
Hals, and Vermeer, went to the wonderland of France, to Provence, where the
sun bathes the earth in pure colour, and men and things are still as simple and as
great as when the Romans built their arenas there.

Frans Hals was the Dutch element in Van Gogh, who always retained his
peculiar vehement handling. With all the impetuosity Frans Hals employed to
give life and colour to his portraits, with all the turbulent vigour Daumier used
to kindle his darkest sauce to flames, and with an irresistible impulse towards
symbolism, Van Gogh rushed upon the new country, in which all the conditions
were sharply opposed to those of his own nation : flame met flame. All his
pictures are battle ; battle in the literal sense ; he painted, buffeted by the mistral ;
the effects he sought lasted sometimes but a few moments, and had to be got in
one sitting. And even more urgently was he driven forward by the frantic fire
within, that blazed high under the burning skies above him : creating, creating —
" Vite, vite, vite et press£ comme le moissonneur qui se tait sous le soleil ardent,
se concentre pour en abattre."

Van Gogh seemed hardly to paint his pictures, but rather to breathe them on
to the canvas, panting and gasping. We may take it that he painted about three-
fifths of his pictures at Aries. His stay here lasted from 1887 to the middle
of 1889. In this space of a little over two years, he painted several hundred
pictures. These were slight superficial manifestations, implying long and ex
hausting preparation. Van Gogh may aptly be called a Vulcan ; the phrase a
Romantic writer applied to Delacroix was no less descriptive of him : he carried
about a sun in his head and a hurricane in his heart. But in his case, a certain

VINCENT VAN GOGH 205

pathological significance must be read into the poetic words. All that this man
undertook was carried to a terrific pitch. It is gruesome to see him paint — a
kind of orgy, in which the colours were splashed about like blood. He did
not paint with hands, but with naked senses ; special organs were given him.
He became one with the Nature he created, and painted himself in the flaming
clouds, wherein a thousand suns threaten the earth with destruction, in the
startled trees that seem to cry aloud to Heaven, in the awful immensity of his
plains. He seems sometimes to have made himself a hole in the earth and to
have painted from it. This was how he executed the picture belonging to the
younger Bernheim, which so delighted Monet, Les Coquelicots, a landscape without
a sky, a kind of microscopic slide, showing a bit of fruitful earth. He ventured
upon still-life, the genre in which Cezanne did his best work. Van Gogh's idea
was to calm himself with these essays. He was fond of setting a fruit-basket
diagonally across the canvas and filling it with apples. With the great Cezanne
these subjects were actually " still-life," a splendid and grandiose version of the
Dutch "nature morte," the most remarkable creation of a brilliantly selected palette.
With Van Gogh, the term " still-life," applied to these amazingly vital masses of
fruit seems almost an irony. Vallotton owns one of the " sedatives," as Vincent
called them. The apples glow, they seem to be on the point of bursting ; the
whole essence of their species seems to be concentrated in them ; a piece of furious
vitality has fallen by chance into this basket. We marvel at the extraordinary
and unerring taste that has placed the basket thus and not otherwise, and piled
the fruits just in this fashion. We are often surprised at Cezanne's arbitrariness,
his indifference to questions of arrangement in spite of his careful calculation of
effects. In the wildest of Van Gogh's fantasies one can always trace a strong,
methodical hand, co-ordinating images and welding them into pictures, occasionally
by an almost superhuman effort, and often achieving extraordinary delicacy the
while. M. Maurice Fabre's Gipsies with their van, M. Schuffenecker's Route de
Provence with the mail-coach, and M. Hessel's 'Drawbridge are lyric harmonies full
of the most dainty passages, in which the painter's temperament only serves to make
the grace he saw as vital as possible. Of course we must not look for sentimen
tal charm in this grace, and we must accept the means of which it makes use. We
must not think of Raphael, but must remember that a smile sometimes broke
even into the stupendous decorative art of primitive races.

But indeed it is difficult to express Van Gogh in terms of art. His was animal-
art, if we may so express it, because it is always absolutely vital, because it is
power ; and power is always beauty. His harmonies are of a physical order, and
therefore outside the melancholy or the delight to which the mind is stirred by
other sorrowful or cheerful pictures. The reaction induced by his works is at first
a purely physical one. The planes of his canvases, which seem to have been pro
duced, not by brushes, but by the stonemason's implements, scream, and we are
sometimes tempted to scream in unison, just as we feel inclined during a storm
to shout aloud with the thunder. It is the cry of the human animal, whose blood
is quickened by the enigmatic relation of the individual to the cosmos, who yearns
to penetrate into his environment, into Nature, and destroys either this or himself
if he does not succeed. Van Gogh did not produce his art ; it was as much a part
of himself as is some material function a part of the body ; it was not something
external to him, but his closest idiosyncrasy, joy or suffering. To this man,
who first turned to art in his later years, and then perhaps only as to a pis

206 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

aller, it was apparently a thing inherent, with which perforce he had to live
and die.

That this pathological phenomenon should have resulted in aesthetic achieve
ment is no more remarkable than that Nature, of whatever kind it may be, produces
beauty. Van Gogh regarded a striving after perfection as a natural morality. He
was a cleanly animal. He owed more to Daumier and to Delacroix than to all the
Impressionists.* Here the peasant, who regretted that Paris did not possess more
" tableaux en sabots," found a kindred spirit. When he took the group of the
three topers with the child at the table, from Daumier's Euveurs^ he did Daumier
the highest honour in his power and — like Delacroix, when he used Raphael's
composition in the Vatican for his Heliodorus in St. Sulpice — added to his own laurels
by producing one of his most individual pictures. He found in Daumier the
justification of his own linear exaggerations, the flaming play of his aspiring lines,
that seem to crouch in order to strike more surely. He had also a great admira
tion for Cezanne, and an unbounded veneration for Monticelli, to whom he was
drawn more closely by that magic South where Cezanne painted his fruits and the
old gipsy his marvellous colour fantasies. In a letter to Aurier, containing
perhaps the most complete revelation of an artist's psychology ever penned — it
appears in Aurier's (Euvres Posthumcs — he almost indignantly assigns the praise
awarded to himself to Monticelli, even ranking Jeannin's and the aged Guost's flower-
pieces above his own works. He esteemed Meissonier, because Mauve thought
highly of him, and venerated Ziem, because Ziem venerated Delacroix. This
naivete does not, however, preclude very delicate appreciations. He speaks of a
Monticelli at Lille, "autrement riche et certes non moins fran^ais que le Depart
•pour Cythere de Watteau," and opines that no other artist has approved himself so
directly the heir of Delacroix, though Monticelli received Delacroix' teaching at
secondhand, through Diaz and Ziem. . . .

These few lines also contain all the physiology of Monticelli that was valuable
to Van Gogh. He made his start under the spell of the Impressionists. Pissarro had
the same influence upon him as upon Gauguin and later upon Bernard. His Quatorze
Juillet a Asmeres^ one of the very best of his pre-Arlesian pictures, is painted very
thinly, the colour divided into minute green and yellow particles on a gray ground.
At Aries he came to think this technique insufficient. He was temperamentally
incapable of consistent work on this system, by which Signac fixed the vapourous
quality of Southern landscape ; and further, he had not time for it. The exact
opposite attracted him in Monticelli : the heavy fabric of loaded colour, with which
the old magician produced his thousand accidents. Van Gogh exaggerated this,
but at the same time, he simplified it, he rejected what was petty and incidental,
reduced the palette to single pure colours, laid on in large, coarse fragments, and
added his own temperament as the amalgam.

There are many pictures in a single picture by Van Gogh. His brush
strokes not only give things that force themselves upon the eye from a distance
with elemental power, but they combine to produce an extraordinary play on the

* He wrote in 1888 from Aries : "Je trouve que ce que j'ai appris a Paris s'en va, et que je
reviens aux idees qui m'etaient venues a la campagne avant de connaitre les Impressionistes. Et je
serais peu ctonn£ si sous peu les Impressionistes trouvaient a redire sur ma facon de faire qui a plutot
e^e fecondee par les idees de Delacroix que par les leurs."

t Van Gogh's picture belongs to M. Aghion, Paris. The Daumier, which Vincent turned to
account, of course only very freely, after the fashion of Millet or Delacroix, is, I think, in America.

VINCENT VAN GOGH: THE GOOD SAMARITAN

PAINTED FROM A LITHOGRAPH AFTER THE PICTURE BY DELACROIX

VINCENT VAN GOGH 207

surface, forming a free and varied ornament and giving a mysterious animation to
the background, as well as a rare splendour of texture to things that stand out
against it in sharply defined contours. Fundamentally it is, of course, nothing but
a development of the granulations which give the quality to every surface in
painting ; a special structure of the brush-strokes, in short, that development of
the manual clement in brushing which the Venetians began; that which distinguishes
the later painting from that of the Primitives ; that which, apart from colour and
composition in the vulgar sense, delights us in Titian and Tintoretto, Rubens and
Watteau, Delacroix and Monet, that on which the majority of contemporary
painters base the whole of their art. But Van Gogh uses it as a means which
determines the character of his pictures more clearly than any other element in
them, a means whereby he concentrates his material in a colour-extract of all
possible materials. Nothing was farther from his purpose than optical illusion ;
no modelling tempts us to believe in a corporeal presence, his picture is always
as flat as a Gobelin tapestry ; but it has a richness no textile could approach,
even if woven of gold and precious stones, and this richness is so organic, that it
affects us like Nature itself. His palette may be told off on the fingers of
one hand. Prussian blue, pure yellow to orange, emerald and Veronese green,
and red were to him what white, gray, rose-colour and black were to Velazquez,
lemon yellow, pale blue, and pearl gray to Vermeer. The problem of com
plementary colours was in his hand, so to speak, rather than in his head ; it did
not dominate him. He ventured on the most daring combinations, juxtaposed a
resonant Prussian blue and a tender red, but chose his quantities so unerringly that
his most audacious effects seem the most natural. He never used blue without an
accompanying yellow, or his luminous red without orange. M. Aghion's extra
ordinary picture, the avenue with the Roman tombs at Aries, is a marvellous
example of this system. Into the two mighty rows of trees, that stand in front
against the blue, and behind run into the pure yellow of the sky, brought to a
narrow strip by the perspective, shoot streams of orange tinged with red, forming
deep blood-red pools upon the ground. It is a colossal combat of colours, that
take on an almost objective significance, so convincing is the manner in which
they are used.*

We must grasp Van Gogh thoroughly, to recognise the relative nature of all
modern colour-theories, and above all, to get some definite idea of the inscrutable
laws that govern the quantitative distribution of colour-masses. Roughly speaking,
it might almost be supposed that the quantity of a colour juxtaposed to one or more
other colours, is of greater importance than the quality, and behind this is concealed
again, the old, inestimable importance of composition in a picture. Hence it may
perhaps be said that Van Gogh's finest work is Le 'Bon Samaritainy which is a free
rendering of Delacroix' lithograph. In this work of from 60 to 70 cm. Van
Gogh exhausted his whole palette. The dominant is blue, and to this all the
colours of the picture are brought into relation. It begins in the background,
which contains in nuce all those elements that are brought into vigourous contrast
in the dramatic group. The light blue tones, which also distinguish the famous
contemporary ravine- pictures painted at Aries, predominate in the background.
They are enriched with white, occasionally with pink, light green, and to the
left, with dark orange. The contours of the mountains rise in delicate grada
tions to pale pink, and at the highest point to pale green, and are given in waved

* C/. what he himself said of his colour-symbolism, in the foot-note below.

208 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

brush-strokes, which accentuate the direction of the inner hatchings. The
group is composed of the somewhat rusty but brilliant colour of the mule,
(produced by a mixture of lac de garance, white and blue), the Prussian blue of
the wounded man's drapery, and the orange of the Samaritan's. But such dry
enumerations as these fail to suggest any idea of the richness of effect, even when
reinforced by our excellent reproduction. The beast in particular, whose strangely
deep colour is the focus of the whole picture, defies description. It forms a
mysterious ground tone for the still more mysterious flesh-tones of the sufferer and
the dark skin of the Samaritan. The blue swells marvellously from the back
ground to the foreground, /'.<?., from above to below, reaching its utmost volume
in the Samaritan's breeches, where it blends into a resonant chord with the orange
of the tunic, and the greenish yellow tones of the legs. On the other side, the
orange stands on a field made up of strong, bright green splashes of colour on the
fading blue. Here the light pink of the road winds upwards into the mountains,
is repeated in the soil of the foreground, and above near the pale green of the cleft
between the mountains ; it strikes a stronger note in the border of the Samaritan's
turban, where it leads up from the tawny flesh tones to the isolated deep-red
of the fez, that glows ruby-like in the centre, the fiery eye of the picture.

Apart from Delacroix and Daumier, Van Gogh, when he sought inspiration
from others in composition, relied on Millet with a sort of fervid veneration — on
that Millet, be it understood, who comprised Daumier. Theodore van Gogh's
widow at Bassum has a number of drawings, which Vincent borrowed more or less
from Millet. He looked upon Millet, not as a rival to be surpassed, but as the
embodiment of a doctrine, almost of a religion, in which he believed. " Rembrandt
and Delacroix," he wrote, "painted the person of Jesus, Millet his teaching."

Of this teaching, we are here concerned only with those traditional elements to
which Millet gave form. For Van Gogh it was a kind of haven, and I pass over
the superfluous question how much he added to Millet, or Millet to him. It was
not poverty of invention that drew him to Millet and Delacroix, but rather an
excess of productive energy, which he was only able to curb by keeping it within
the limits of a prescribed alien form. Let us hear what he says himself in one of
his letters :

" Eusse-je eu les forces pour continuer, j'aurais fait des saints et des saintes
femmes d'apres nature, qui auraient paru d'un autre age : c/auraient ete des
bourgeois d' a present, ayant pourtant des rapports avec des chretiens fort primitifs.
— Les emotions que cela cause sont cependant trop fortes. J'y resterais.

" Mais plus tard, plus tard je ne dis pas que je ne viendrai pas a la charge. . . .
II ne faut passenger a tout cela, il faut faire, fut-ce des etudes de chouxet de salade
pour se calmer, et apres avoir ete calme, alors . . . ce dont on sera capable."

Well, he painted his saints, after all. Every picture he painted was holy
ecstasy, even when the theme was a bunch of lettuces.

A primitive in a sense we can hardly conceive nowadays, lived in this creature.
For years he had dreams of a great association of artists. He believed that an
individual could do nothing of permanent value, and longed for works " that
transcend the powers of the individual." He frequently begged his friends
Gauguin and Bernard to come to Aries and collaborate with him. One was to
undertake composition, another colour, etc. The project had also become an
idee fixe with his brother. Theodore van Gogh, the younger of the two, who
provided for Vincent's material wants with touching affection, had slowly gained

VINCENT VAN GOGH 209

over Boussod et Valadon to the Impressionists ; he arranged exhibitions of Pissarros,
Seurats, Monets, Renoirs and the rest, and contributed not a little to their con
quest of the public. The brothers wished to found a society which should exhibit
the best works of the moderns in the large towns of FVance and of foreign countries,
giving fit representation to recognised painters, and the means of living and work
ing to the others. All that was lacking was a generous banker to provide the
funds.

Vincent found in Millet the basis of a primitive popular art, models for
portraits of humanity. He made the gravity of Millet graver, I might almost
say more Lutheran. The ancient Greek spirit which breathes from many of
Millet's soft pencil drawings like a natural sound, gives place in him to a gigantic,
almost a barbaric instinct, in relation to which the Millet form appears only as a
softening element. There is nothing classical about him ; he reminds us rather
of the early Gothic stonemasons ; the technique of his drawings is that of the
old wood-carvers ; some of his faces look as if they had been cut with a blunt
knife in hard wood. The ugliness of his personages, the " mangeurs de pommes
de terre," carries the primitive ruggedness of the older painters to the region of the
colossal, where it occasionally resembles materialised phantoms of horror. He
projected such things as La Berceuse not for amateurs, but for common folks, and
it was one of his — all too natural — disappointments, that no peasant would give
himself up to sitting.* In his painted portraits, the hard wood of the drawings
seems sometimes to be blent with gleaming metal. Schuffenecker owns the most
masterly of his portraits of himself. No one who has seen this tremendous head
with the square forehead, the staring eyes and despairing jaw can ever forget it.
It is so full of a terrible grandeur of line, colour, and psychology, that it takes
away one's breath, and it is hard to know whether one is repelled by its monstrous
exaggeration of beauty, or by the lurking madness in the head that conceived it.

Van Gogh's self-destruction in the cause of artistic expression is tragic, because

* In " Les Hommes d'Aujourd'hui " (vol. viii. p. 390) Emile Bernard quotes a passage from a
letter about La Berceuse : " La nuit, en mer, les pecheurs voient sur 1'avant de leur barque une femme
surnaturelle dont 1'aspect ne les effraie point, car elle est la berceuse, celle qui tirait les cordes de la
corbeille ou momes ils geignaient ; c'est elle qui revient chanter au roulis du grand berceau de planches
les cantiques de 1'enfance, les cantiques qui reposent et qui consolent de la dure vie." He says that
Van Gogh painted La Berceuse intending to hang it up in some sailors' tavern in Marseilles or Sainte-
Marie. Two large suns were to hang upon it right and left, the strong yellow of which was to
symbolise the brightness of love. In these poems we feel the spirit of Zola, whose influence
upon Van Gogh was stronger than that of any other poet of his time. In the beautiful letter from
Aries already quoted, he formulated his symbolism : " Au lieu de chercher a rendre exactement ce que
j'ai devant les yeux, je me sers de la couleur plus arbitrairement pour m'cxprimer fortement. Lzissons
cela en tant que theorie, mais je vais te donner un exemple de ce que je vcux dire ; je voudrais faire
le portrait d'un ami artiste qui rcve de grands rcves, qui travaille comme le rossignol chante, parce que
c'est ainsi la nature. Get homme sera blond. Je voudrai mettre dans le tableau 1'amour que j'ai pour
lui. Je le peindrai done tel quel aussi fidclement que je pourrai — pour commencer. Mais le tableau
n'est pas fini ainsi. Pour le finir je vais maintenant ctre coloriste arbitraire. J'exagere le blond de sa
chevelure, j'arrive aux tons oranges, aux chromes, au citron pale. Derriere la tetc — au lieu de
peindre le mur banal du mesquin appartement — je peins 1'infini, je fais un fond simple du bleu le plus
riche, le plus intense que je puisse confectionner, et par cette simple combinaison, la t£te blonde
eclairee sur ce fond bleu riche obtient un effect mysterieux comme 1'etoile dans 1'azur profond.
Pareillement, dans le portrait de paysan j'ai precede de cette fa^on. Mais en supposant 1'homme
terrible que j'avais a faire, en plein midi, en pleine fournaise de la moisson. De la, des oranges
fulgurants comme du fer rougi, de la, des tons de vieil or lumineux dans les tenebres. Ah, mon cher !
les bonnes personnes ne verront dans cette exageration que de la caricature. Mais qu'est-ce que cela
nous fait ? "

VOL. I 2 D

210 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

it was a natural sacrifice, not a self-defilement, the act of a perfectly healthy con
sciousness, shattered by insufficient physical powers of resistance. " The more
ill I am, the more of an artist do I become," he writes, with no thoughts of per
verse joys in his mind. He records the same simple fact with which Delacroix
reckoned, and Rembrandt, " the old wounded lion with a cloth round his head,
still grasping his palette." The tragic result was inevitable, because it fulfilled a
natural doom. The only means by which he could escape despair, retain his self-
respect, and repay the devotion of the brother who had spent so much on canvas
and colours was, to make constant progress, to loosen more and more the slender
threads that bound his individuality to a failing body, and penetrate ever more
deeply into the mystery that dazzles the eyes, to give bodily substance to the
artistic soul, even when it was parting soul and body. It was heroism, because
the result was hardly doubtful to him, a peasant's heroism, because it went straight
on its way without any dramatic gesture, simply and naturally. In one of his
letters Vincent speaks of a worthy fellow who died for lack of a proper doctor :
" He bore it quietly and reasonably, only saying : * It is a pity I can't have any
other doctor.' He died with a shrug of the shoulders that I shall never forget."

In some such fashion Vincent's death must be explained. Even in the early
days at Aries, when Gauguin was with him, be once threatened to cast off the weary
flesh. He came to himself again, and went voluntarily to the Aries asylum, where
he painted some wonderful things, among others the Schuffenecker portrait of
himself, the cloistered garden of the asylum with the splendid flower-beds (belong
ing to Hessel), and some beautiful flower-pieces. In his letters to Theo he reveals
a marvellous memory, clinging to childish recollections, as if to interpose his home
between himself and the strange power that sought his life ; he recovered so far,
that he went to Saint Remy, to find a new field of activity there. But his brother
was in trouble, and when Vincent came to visit him in Paris he recognised his
own danger, and looked about him for help. He found it in Dr. Cachet.

Gachet, who still pursues his avocation and his art robustly,* had a comfortable,
hospitable house at Auvers-sur-Oise, near Valmandois, where Daumier spent his last
years of blindness. Daubigny painted there, Cezanne came thither in 1880 at
Cachet's recommendation, and lived there for several years, painting many fine
things ; to many others the happy land and the old artist-doctor's table were a
solace. Even Van Gogh seemed to have painted himself into health at Auvers.
He came in the middle of 1889. His Auvers pictures have not, of course, the
intoxicating richness of strong colour revealed to him by the south ; but on the
other hand, he achieved an unprecedented development in his play of line. His
own portrait and his portrait of Gachet are purely rhythmic works, quite free from
hardness, marked by a perfectly conscious application of his unrivalled talent for
decorative tasks. In the roses, and in the arrangement of chestnut leaves and
blossoms, a happy harmonious spirit seems to be weaving its beautiful dreams,
remote from all dramatic violence.

Any one who had followed the course of Van Gogh's life could hardly have
been deceived by the change. The last epoch was a beautiful interlude, but it could
only have preluded night-fall. Van Gogh had said what he had to say. Beings
like him must fight fever by fever. When he had raged his fill, as far as this is
possible to decent folks, he had to go, swiftly, in the midst of beauty, to escape a

* He is a painter, and, together with his son, a yearly contributor to the Independants under the
name of Van Ryssel.

VINCENT VAN GOGH: PUBLIC GARDENS AT ARLES

GUSTAVE FAYET COLLECTION, BEZIERS

VINCENT VAN GOGH 211

long decline into ugliness, into idiotic illness. When the doctor found him with
the bullet in his body, and asked him the unnecessary why, he shrugged his
shoulders. That night and the day following they smoked several pipes together,
talking of art and of other beautiful things. Cachet thinks the smell of turpentine
was injurious to Van Gogh, and also that painting in the open air had done him
no good ; he could not overcome the habit of tearing his hat off when he was at
work, and the sun at last burnt all the hair off" his scalp, till it was only separated
from the brain by a thin case of bone. He died on July 28, 1890.

They buried him in the little churchyard at Auvers, and the old doctor planted
a great cluster of yellow sunflowers over him, which were in full bloom when I was
there last.*

I have dealt elsewhere with Van Gogh's anarchism, showing what seems
to me his strong positive instinct, as opposed to the rhetorical anarchism of
Morris, Crane, and others. His work is the strongest possible contrast to an
indolent, state-supported art, meet to adorn the house of mediocrity. He destroys
it. Here he may appear as the ruthless barbarian, casting off all regard for the
law of the dwelling. The same hostility shows itself in Munch, another anarchist
of equal sincerity. But what seems to the Philistine barbarism in Van Gogh, is
often actually so in Munch. It must be evident that it is impossible to conceive
of an interior in which Munch's most typical works would be in keeping, and this
at once restricts his importance to the field of the extremest abstract art. Van
Gogh merely negatives the contemporary domicile. In this, his pictures have the
effect of blows with a club. But a setting where he would be harmonious, which
he could adorn, is not only conceivable, but already in process of evolution, and
here, again, his sacrifice is glorified with the nimbus of the peasant, who fertilises
the earth anew with his own blood. It is improbable that the time will ever come
when his pictures will be appreciated by the layman ; it is more conceivable that
pictures should cease to be produced altogether, than that Van Gogh's should
become popular. But his portion in the development of the modern interior is
already assured ; it is indirect, but all the more penetrating for this reason ; his
tints and colours are elements, which serve and will serve in the most varied form.
This gives him perhaps a greater importance than can be appreciated by a genera
tion so near to William Morris as our own. Here, indeed, there is something new.
The mind intent on the consciously decorative effort of our times found in Van
Gogh, and not solely in his latest pictures, unhoped-for and very novel sustenance.
It is indeed possible that this treasure conceals the one perfectly novel element of
our essays in the formation of a style. If the connection seems slight we must
remember in all humility that our efforts in this direction are in their infancy, and
that this is the reason why this aspect of Van Gogh has hitherto served merely to
complete the many-sided relations, which all progressive art will link with his
wealth. Even his treatment of the coloured surface is calculated to deepen the
teaching of the Japanese, so fruitful at present ; it completes what Degas and
Lautrec added to the importation, keeping the golden principle of simplification
always in view. At the same time he achieves a splendour of effect beyond any
thing ever yet achieved by easel pictures. His masterpiece, The Ravine, a render-

* Dr. Cachet is at work on a monograph of Van Gogh, to be illustrated with etchings from the
artist's pictures. He has pressed his son and several other young men into his service, and they first
copy the pictures stroke for stroke in colour, and then etch them on the copper. He intends to deal
with Cezanne in the same manner.

212 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

ing of a remarkable rocky chasm near Aries, an intoxicating harmony of rich blue
tones, is a technical model of incalculable value. Nature seems merely to have
been used to enhance the richness of the tapestry-like effect by an accidental
abnormal concatenation of strong lines, which disappear into an infinity of new
planes. If it should prove feasible to transfer such works to large surfaces, and
make them durable, we might almost cherish the illusion of having gained a
decorative method equal to that of the old mosaicists, and combining the splendour
of Gobelin with its distinction.

Modern decorative artists have not been unmoved by Van Gogh. His surfaces
have proved helpful to the young Parisian painters, Denis, Ranson, Serusier, and
Bonnard, and his brush-stroke to the most important of modern ornamentists, Van
de Velde. Van Gogh has sifted out from the great epoch of the Impressionists
not all, but some highly important results, destined to a far-reaching influence even
outside the sphere of abstract painting to which this school confined itself.

If we keep this connection in view and trace the road back from Van Gogh to
his greatest exemplar, the beloved master of Barbizon appears in a new light deeply
intertwined with all that moves us to-day. Van Gogh drew Millet into the
radiant circle of Manet, Monet, and Cezanne, who were in danger of forgetting
him, and reminded them what Millet's great fructifier, Daumier, had possessed of
pictorial power.

And at the same time, this last of the great Dutchmen who had drifted to a
foreign haven maintained his national tradition. He brought back to it what it had
lent to the great French generation of 1830, remaining faithful to its noblest law :
that we must follow Nature, and more especially our own nature.

CONSTANTIN MEUNIER 213

CONSTANTIN MEUNIER

As line is all that can remain to us of Millet, line, to which so many aspirations
are directed in these latter days. Millet was predestined to give an impetus to
sculpture, which, down to his time, had never lost touch with Italy, and had
always shown embarrassment when brought into the most superficial relation to
modernity. It was natural enough that peasant painting should be translated into
plaster and bronze, without further result than the attainment of what became in
these mediums a doubly deplorable genre-art.

Between the years 1870 and 1880 Belgium was a sanctuary of the Millet cult.
While the last descendant of the great Flemish colourists, Henri de Braekeleer,
was giving final expression to the old Netherlandish tradition in his richly coloured
interiors, a very democratic, sternly realistic community, deriving partly from
Millet, partly from Courbet, was growing up in and round Brussels. One of its
members was Rops, whose first pictures and drawings bear the stamp of Millet very
distinctly — a beautified Millet — and who was perhaps indebted to the Barbizon
master's line for the one solid element of his art. Meunier, a far more vigourous
artist, was his colleague.

Meunier was no facile craftsman. More than once he changed his tools ; when
the clay was refractory, be tried the brush, and vice versa. For a long time success
seemed to elude him. Like many of his generation, and nearly all his school, he
was an old man before recognition came to him.

Sculpture, to which he did not devote himself entirely till his maturity, was the
one form of expression proper to him. His so-called pictures, mere coloured
drawings, are serious narratives. He has things to say, which are interesting
because they were unknown till he declared them ; but they are not set
forth with that richness which creates out of itself, and not out of the thing it
envelops.

His sculpture is very different. This man, with his gentle childlike heart, to
whom the miners of his native land were not only interesting subjects but beloved
brethren, needed an art that should compel a certain compression of ideas. He
contented himself by making expressive busts of his people. One thing was of
service to him here, his respect for the old masters. This reverence, which
tends to destroy the individuality of most sculptors, gave Meunier the realist
strength. The classic convention was for him the indispensable restraining influence
of a healthy nature. He makes it evident that the comparison of Michelangelo and
Millet is no empty phrase. This was perhaps his main achievement: he proclaimed,
in his modest language, the connection between these two great men.

The voluntary restrictions, which prevented any strong individualisation in
Meunier's work, which necessitated his constant use of the familiar type he had pro
duced years before in a small and exquisite relief of a workman's head, preserved
him from those realistic trivialities to which he might have been tempted by his

2i4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

materials. We can imagine what a thorough-going " naturalist " would have made
of a gang of raw puddlers !

Meunier, unlike the poet of The Weavers, did not spring from the same stock
as those whose history he recorded. He knew nothing of social theories and of
pathology. But he was as impressionable as the clay he moulded. And everything
he felt, as he watched his workers going forth to their labour in the morning,
and returning bent and weary in the evening, he sought to express in the few forms,
the stern convention he had made his law, and to incorporate with classic forms.

It was thus he succeeded in creating his type. Just as the ancients had made
theirs to express strength and beauty, so his embodied the ideal of labour. Only
thus could he honour the people whom he loved, and thus he contributed to the
enlightenment of our age, and did perhaps more for the proletariat than all the
social agitators. He gave something better than pity — dignity. He treated them
as the ancients had treated their Zeus, their Hector, their David.

He shows us, not the sweat of the worker, but his nobility ; not the individual
in the lowliness of his destiny, but the race, the genus of toil ; no episode, but the
essence of this solemn history.

His method is that of Millet ; he sacrifices the best of which he is capable,
to a single strong expression. There was no genius in this expression ; compared
with the mighty fount of light that gushed from Daumier's hand as soon as he
touched the clay, his successor's radiance is that of the little lamp which his miners
carry to their work, the lamp that is their substitute for the sun.

But Meunier had the sincerest form of talent, which does not seek to give more
than it possesses. It is not perhaps possible to say very much that is new by his
method, but he will always remain an example of the virtue which was his finest
heritage from Millet : honesty.

And for the people with whom he dealt his seems the only possible treatment.
They are hardly individuals. The dreary toil that bends their bones all in one
direction makes them all alike ; exertion wears away superfluous flesh and leaves
only skin, bone, and muscle ; the common life under a common pressure even
destroys the difference of sex.

And yet from this uniform mass there flows a mighty idea, a revival of the old
watchword of the Church : Suffer, that ye may live.

Meunier laid hold of the idea with the same fervour that once inspired the
artist-servant of the Church and raised a monument therewith.

Simplicity alone can produce such harmonies. It is evident that this medita
tive idealism pales before the brilliant gesture of the great cynic, Daumier, who
mocked at his own age with all the weight of antiquity. We are deeply touched
by the redeeming act of Millet, who found a compromise, winning love from
mockery. We stand helpless, with an admiration akin to horror, before Daumier's
gigantic force. Millet softens its cruelty, calming the furious line of the con
queror. Meunier shows it to the people.

Meunier stands in much the same relation to Millet as did the painters of the
Quattrocento to Donatello. Then it was the sculptor who gave inspiration to the
painter ; here it is the painter who gives to the sculptor.

The situation corresponds to the development of our art-history, and makes
it almost superfluous to point out those pictorial elements which, in the good and
the bad sense, Meunier 's art shares with all modern sculpture. We will not
insist on the imperfections of an art that approaches another too closely, not to

CONSTANTIN MEUNIER: HARVEST

(A RELIEF FROM THE ..LABOUR" MONUMENT)

CONSTANTIN MEUNIER 215

lose something of its own original compass; let us rejoice rather in the culminating
power of that other in Millet, becoming rich enough to give of its abundance.*
*******

In the art of foreign countries Millet was an encouragement to Romanticism
that was not without its dangers. Millet's inexhaustible value could only manifest
itself to its full extent after a strong revulsion to Nature, after the conquest of
physiological knowledge to the fullest extent. In France, where this process was
carried out, Millet became a help, at the very moment when this physiological
side of painting threatened to lose itself in infinity.

He helped many. To Camille Pissarro, the most diligent conqueror of
Nature, Millet gave a line that served the veteran of Eragny in the production of
his happiest idyls. But more important and more typical of Millet's position in
modern painting was the support he lent to a greater artist. In his desire to
resolve painting into divine colours, and into a pictorial rhythm guided by the
highest inspiration, Renoir found a safe refuge in Millet, who kept him from
stumbling in a very hazardous path. In his red chalk drawings, where Nature
herself seems to be singing the sweetest melodies, it is a milder Millet who gives
the note. Millet rarely has that germinal quality which whispers in the young
man's drawings ; when he is in a like tender vein, he makes Greek verses which the
Impressionist could not understand. Yet Renoir seems akin to him ; he is of the
same family. Even Millet's classicism is not altogether lost in his descendant.
In his most imposing creations, where the son greatly surpasses the father by
other means, a reminiscence of the great master who bore about in his breast a
world of which even he himself was hardly conscious, steals into the concert like
some familiar melody.

Wholly classical in feeling, Millet nevertheless created a new perspective side
by side with that of the classicists, which, being natural, has this advantage over
the old forms, that natural painters can turn it to account. And thus the
Fontainebleau master will be of use to many who are not solely concerned with
the painting of reflected sunlight.

Delacroix was the flesh, Millet the marrow of French painting. We must
not lightly dub the one a Romanticist, the other a Realist. Nothing could be
more remote from the genius of Millet than the brutal destruction of high ideals
symbolised by Klinger's translations of Menzel into stone. Rather was he the
gardener, who fastens up the heavy trusses of drooping blossom, and waters
their roots. His genius embraced not only a resistance to the allurements of
nebulous worlds, but a strong impulse to the necessary evolutions of our art.

* The reader is referred to the two recent biographies of Meunier, by Camille Leraonnier (Floury,
Paris), and Karl Scheffler (Bard, Berlin).

MANET: AT PERE LATHUILE'S (1879)

VAN CUTSEN COLLECTION, BRUSSELS

MANET: BOATING (1874)

HAVEMEYER COLLECTION, NEW YORK

BOOK II

THE PILLARS OF MODERN PAINTING

VOL. I

COURBET: THE WOMAN AND THE WAVE
(LA FEMME A LA VAGUE)

PHOTOGRAPH DURAND-RUEL

GUSTAVE COURBET 221

Courbet never thought at all over his painting. He thought what he did good,
and had every right to be proud of it. Peasant that he was, he would not wait
for success, and took every means to press forward, even the most perverse. If
Proudhon had assured him that his painting could cure the gout, it is probable
that he would not have disclaimed the gift.

We should be obliged to repeat Zola, if we were to examine Proudhon's relation
to Courbet. Everything there is to say about it is written in " Mes Haines."
Proudhon's monstrous blasphemy, " Du Principe de 1'Art et de sa Destination
sociale " might have been fathered by a German. (Instead of Courbet the writer
would have found a Bocklin or a Pre-Raphaelite, and both would have passed for
great men to all time.)

The case in France, strange to say, was that the artist was a genius and the
interpreter was blind, and that Zola was able to point out the under-estima-
tion of which the idealist had been guilty. The arrogant Courbet, over whose
manners well-bred people wrung their hands, was never more modest than when
he gave himself up to the " Destination sociale " of his short-sighted friend.

His own theory at its best was not all nonsense. He wanted truth, more
truth than his contemporaries offered. But which ? The pictures are here to
demonstrate, the demagogue vexes us no longer. Did he really ever paint " with
a purpose ? " I know one picture only which might be supposed to illustrate a
theory, the Aumone (Tun Mendia?it, painted at the end of the sixties, in which a
beggar gives a coin to a little boy ; and even in this very uncharacteristic work the
painting partly counteracts the painful impression. All the rest, from the first
portrait of himself to the grandiose Stag-pictures and The Wave are pure art.
The truth he saw was not the coarse Realism which flaunted in huge letters on
the sign of the exhibition shed in 1855. " Faire de 1'art vivant, tel est mon
but ! " he said in Castagnary's pompous preamble to the catalogue. This
was what Courbet brought : a stronger life than any other of his time.
And with it came the necessary, the useful. He discovered a new system of cells
for art, a form of expression which contained that which man could use, and
opened a directly accessible form to genius. It is true that his sense of superiority
to his contemporaries verged on insolence. But this self-consciousness was not
baseless. It did not rest upon Proudhon's illustration, nor upon his theory.
It was the perfectly natural expression of an unapproachable superiority, the
consciousness of a being, who felt his muscles to be stronger than those of his
neighbours, and was better able to do what he desired to do than any one of them.
He could not poetise, would not seek inspiration in the theatre, read even less
than Millet, and wrote in the style of a grandiloquent provincial hair-dresser.
But he was a painter. Corot made an appreciable approach to instinct, but
remained a dreamer. Courbet got ten times nearer, and remained absolutely
conscious. And if he expressed his consciousness of having hastened develop
ment by several generations in mad phrases, we must remember that in his
essential and enduring speech, his painting, he advanced steadily, to the time
when he painted his last great picture, and perhaps had more reason for pride
than he himself supposed. He might certainly have advanced more tangible
claims to importance than he did in the phrases of his pronunciamentos.

Courbet was born with all the animal instincts of the rustic. Strong, sensual,
unfettered by a prejudice that did not rest on the most matter-of-fact consciousness
of purpose. I, I and once more I. How shall I arrive at power, at enjoyment ?

222 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

This was his gospel. He wanted to paint. He went to the galleries ^and looked
for the masters who did this best. By painting he meant one special thing :
the greatest, most direct effect to be won by brush and colour. He did not
dream of spiritual things the while, did not translate or reflect, but grasped at
the root of the matter. Generations may have deposited their knowledge of
nature in him, peasants like himself, who thought only of the riches to be won
from the earth, the material use of matter. Now he in his turn, fastens upon
Hals and Zurbaran and Ribera, the great materialists, just as his forefathers
found the right soil for their needs. The exclusiveness of his tendencies becomes
his strength. Not one of his painting predecessors had been able to resist
the Italians. This lay in their race, their culture. Italianism helped them,
brought about the inter-play of kindred elements, introduced a lyrical and
decorative strain, but weakened them, as all eclecticism weakens even the
strongest. Courbet was the first Frenchman who turned laughing away from
them. What he says about Raphael, is almost identical with the famous dictum of
Velazquez. When, on the other hand, he makes use of the Spaniards and the
Dutchmen, he does so after the manner of a peasant finding a good manure for his
ground. Theophile Silvestre quotes the following : " J'ai traverse la tradition
comme un bon nageur passerait une riviere ; les academiciens s'y sont tous noyes."
To these themselves he was as indifferent as to the Italians. How did they
do it ? interested him — not what did they think, what did they give their age ?
How they could be useful to him at the particular moment was the only thing
in question. Thus his barbarism helped him, cutting everything away that
might have been too much for his purely instinctive genius. Every trace of
intellectuality would have weakened him, every spiritual accretion would have
diminished his power. He had the intellect and the esprit most serviceable to
Courbet, the painter-peasant. Of course, if he had not possessed genius,
nothing would have come of it all. But the more he remained a peasant, so
much the more was he a genius, that was his wisdom. " Savoir pour pouvoir ! "
was written in the famous preface to the catalogue of 1855. This peasant
was by no means ignorant. But he had learnt with eyes, and hands, not
with the brain. " C'est dans le doigt qu'est la finesse," he said to his doctor in
Switzerland, laughing at his colleagues who were ruining themselves with
expensive colours. As a painter, he was akin to Taine as a philosopher.
" Penser, surtout penser vite est une fete. L'esprit y trouve une sorte de
bal ; jugez de quel empressement il s'y porte," * said Taine. He thought
in an animal manner, just as Courbet painted in an animal manner. To paint,
and above all, to paint quickly is a festival. And with this he laid his finger
on the future. For if art was to preserve some remnant of a relation to
life, painting could only be carried on henceforth with the rapidity which
is in harmony with modern life. But whereas Taine in his haste dropped the
most important things under the table, and suffered from his speed, because
a cautious and comprehensive concentration is essential to philosophical thinking,
Courbet's narrowness resulted in an incomparable forcefulness, which dis
tinguishes all his masterpieces. And this forcefulness helps us over his defects.

This method, too, was art in the highest sense, or it would have had no
result. It was here that Delacroix went astray in his estimate of Courbet. As
Paul Flat has rightly said, " Imagination " and " Idealisation " were identical
* "Histoire de la Litterature anglaise," iii. p. 273 (new edition).

FRANS HALS: PORTRAIT OF WILLEM CROES

HAGUE MUSEUM

GUSTAVE COURBET 223

concepts to the painter of the Dante's Boat. The indispensable transformation
of nature in his case was effected according to a schema very personally conceived,
but nevertheless a heritage from the past, and derived from Rubens, the
Rubens who was descended from Michelangelo. The influence exercised by
Hals and Ribera upon Courbet is very different.

Delacroix' inheritance from his predecessors was combined with an intellectual
permeation of the material by the help of much literature and of original thought.
The manner of Hals took the artist back to Nature. Subjectively, of course,
both stood in the same relation to their prototypes. The Last Judgment was to
Delacroix very much what Hals' portraits or Rembrandt's women were to Cour
bet. For in Michelangelo's Christ he saw " neither a philosopher nor the hero
of a romance ; " he lauded the Last Judgment as a " feast of flesh." To Courbet
in like manner the creations of his favourites appeared as flesh. But this fleshli-
ness is a relative concept, which underwent emphatic modifications in the
interval that divides Delacroix from Courbet. Courbet found enlargement of pur
pose in his methods and became freer and freer. On the other hand, we find
Delacroix writing : " After all the new aberrations into which art may be
seduced by caprice and thirst for novelty, the great style of the Florentine
will always be the pole to which men will turn afresh to find the way
back to all greatness and all beauty." He was mistaken here. Even
a Michelangelo will only have a relative share in our modern history of
development, great as our enthusiasm may be for him, great as the enthusiasm
of all future art-loving generations must always be. And in painting this share
is far more restricted than that of Rembrandt or Velazquez or Frans Hals, as we
may now perceive after the generation or two since Delacroix. Fromentin's
witty dictum concerning Poussin might be applied to Michelangelo and the
whole of the Renaissance in relation to modern art : " On le consulte, on 1'admire,
on ne s'en sert pas." His value is above question, we are more alive to it to-day
than was the generation of a hundred years ago, but we know that our relation
to him must remain platonic, if we would not be led astray : Gericault's great
ness rested on this knowledge, in which he was Delacroix' superior. He found
a natural means of achieving, or at least of striving after, what Delacroix once
set up as an ideal, an ideal that cannot be consciously realised : a combination
of the manner of Velazquez with the manner of Michelangelo. Such combina
tions when deliberately attempted seem absurd, for the manner of the one ex
cludes that of the other. But earlier, before the mind is conscious of its will,
such an exquisite commingling may take place in the obscure motive forces of
the artist, and for a moment it seemed to have been realised when Gericault, the
creator of the Radeau de la Meduse painted his cavalry-men. Hence Delacroix'
unbounded admiration for the predecessor, and his very sceptical attitude to
wards Millet. The Michelangelesque element in the peasant-painter, who
was naive enough to reveal the insufficiency of his literary knowledge to Dela
croix, seemed to the latter " pretentious," *.*., superficial, and reading between
the lines we can see that with all his aversion from Courbet, he had more respect
for him than for Millet. Millet had not thought out Michelangelo. But in
Courbet, Delacroix recognised a logic intellectually narrow, but wholly fearless.
Courbet's lack of all relation to classic art precluded any approximation of the
two. Even Delacroix' brilliant intellect was unable to see that this was non-

* Preface to the " Journal."

224 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

essential ; but he admired the vigour of the young artist in one of the first pictures
by Courbet which came under his notice.*

He did not get beyond the subject at that time. The master to whom gesture
was as important as colour, who painted with it, indeed, was bound to under
estimate Courbet's first efforts, even if his esprit had not been repelled by the
other's, even if the aristocrat had not recoiled before the proletarian. But his
wisdom emerges triumphant even from this, the severest possible test that could
have been imposed on his judgment, for we shall see that he recognised qualities in
this new world, though they were not such as could suffice for him. That which really
repelled Delacroix, Courbet's personal conduct, estranged many other delicately
attuned lovers of art from the master of Ornans during his lifetime. If we in our
turn, would not be misled, we must discriminate carefully, dismissing the hypothesis
that there were two different elements in Courbet, his art and his humanity.
When we speak of the human frailties of an artist and of his countervailing virtues,
we mean no more than the obvious fact that in every personality, no matter
how lofty, there are defects side by side with qualities. Wider knowledge will
enable us to see that they are bound up together, and have a common origin, the
natural disposition. The great artist is the great man. If this seems difficult to
believe in the case of a Courbet, we must not forget that our doubts rest on no very
solid foundations. For all that has come down to us concerning his personal
misdeeds shows evidences of subjective colouring. The witnesses were in general
enemies of his art and must be dismissed. At least we can no longer see the con
nection of all the details in such a manner as to decide the question of guilt. But the
work of art lies before us, clear and distinct. And so the appearance of dualism
is a harmless illusion, when we recognise that every art rests upon humanity ;
it is even stimulating, because it forces us to look away from all accidents, and
fix our eyes on that which alone deserves higher consideration in the artistic being.
*******

Courbet's evolution is a difficult problem. There is some truth in Duret's
assertion that the master of Ornans never developed at all, because certain early
defects are repeated in the latest pictures, that he may rather be said to have
produced in a vegetable fashion, bringing forth good fruits one year and bad the
next, without any obvious reason for the variation.!

The question at any rate is not to be solved by any such simple conception
as that of pictorial evolution. Courbet had not one, but several developments.
These intersect each other at every point, contradict each other apparently, and
complicate the picture to such a degree, that it is easy enough to understand
why no one has hitherto attempted to look for an organism in this connection.
Even the artist's closest friends made glaring mistakes, and after 1882 Castagnary
was guilty of serious errors in dating the works in the catalogue of the Courbet
exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, because the master's evolution was not
clear to him.J

* The Baigneuses in the Salon of 1853. We must distinguish between Delacroix' hostility to realism
as a theory, and his repulsion for Courbet. The one was boundless, the other strictly limited. Thus
the sentence in the "Journal," i. p. 159, is directed against realism in general, and he certainly did not
mean to put the unimportant German painter Denner whom he cites in this connection, on the same
level as Courbet.

t Les Peintres fra^ais en 1867, par Theodore Duret (Paris: Dentu, 1867). We must not forget,
however, that Courbet had not finished his course in 1867.

I He attributes UHomme blesse, to the year 1854, whereas the picture had been refused at the
Salon of 1844, as is indicated in the little note that precedes the catalogue. Estignard, again, is not

GUSTAVE COURBET 225

Two things compete in Courbet to heighten expression : the plastic
and the pictorial tendency. The one indicates a very great artist of the
older style, who aims at plastic form, who therefore seeks to suppress
all suggestion of his implement, and to paint as smoothly as possible.
The other a great artist of the new style, relying more upon instinctive
creation, and getting form out of the brush-stroke ; a flat painter, the heir of
Rubens, Rembrandt and Velazquez, a creator of material. Confusion arises from
the fact that the period of the plastic tendency is not sharply denned. We find
contemporary works of both kinds, and even the two tendencies in the same
picture. Courbet the landscape painter is the purer artist, his nature manifested
itself most spontaneously before Nature. His portraits of single figures belong
to the same category. In each there is a steady augmentation of the purely
pictorial charm. This development is occasionally interrupted by the painter of
compositions, of genre and figure-pieces. Here the plastic tendency makes
itself felt. It is characteristically covered by what may be termed the
didactic in Courbet. As I have already insisted, this does not compromise the art
— Courbet's socialism is a journalistic phrase — but adds purely formal elements
thereto. The chief thread of the story is complicated thereby, and hence
many pictures appear as steps in a transition. We shall see that the final result
was the outcome of this.

This period of effort to obtain plastic effect lies therefore within the pictorial
period. It comprises works so far apart chronologically as the Cribleuses de Ble
of 1854 and the Proudhon portrait group of the year 1865. Here we have the
reverse of the phenomenon we observe in David's, and still more in Ingres' por
traits, which show more or less isolated pictorial tendencies in the midst of an
evolution of plasticism.

In the beginning Courbet painted with the softest brush. The Homme
Hesse in the Louvre, the Amants Heureux of 1844-45, the Homme a la. Pipe in the
Montpellier Museum, and many other early works are handled with extreme
tenderness. They recall Van Dyck, whom Courbet was copying at the time, and
certain Delacroix closely akin to Rubens. The great Romanticist undoubtedly
influenced him in his first period, as the copy of the Dantis Boat sufficiently
shows. The same influence also appears in many a landscape Delacroix' Pare
de Nobant of the Cheramy collection, painted in 1842 or 1843, is strikingly like
Courbet's wooded landscape of the same collection, in the flat treatment of the
foliage. Delacroix, again, justified Courbet's so-called realism in a few isolated
works or fragments. Pictures like the remarkable head of an old nun, painted
about 1843, like the cat and the flower-piece — all in the Cheramy collection — or
the corner of a studio in the Henri Rouart collection and other sketches of
interiors and still-life pieces, are more sharply realistic — one might almost say
precise — than the early Courbets.

In the succeeding years, the soft painting gradually became more tense, a
modification in which Courbet was helped by the master who had more influence
upon him than any other contemporary : Gericault. The magnificent portrait
by Gericault in the Salle des Portraits of the Louvre, said to be his own portrait,

very trustworthy. He dates the two copies after Hals and Rembrandt (painted in 1869), 1842, the
Homme a la Ceinture de Cuir, 1844, &c. Even the most important dates are questionable. Thus
the Louvre catalogue gives 1851 for the Entfrrement, whereas all the biographers agree (rightly) in
assigning it to the Salon of 1850.

VOL. I 2 F

226 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

and the Homme a la Ceinture de Cuir of 1849, the best of Courbet's early portraits,
are closely allied. They have the same generosity not merely of pose but of con
ception, a nobility in what is shown and in how it is shown, by which we should
recognise a portrait of the artist himself, even if he had painted another person. All
that has been written about Courbet's roughness and stupidity is discounted by
this picture. We shall see if he deserved the reproach later on ; at the time of his
glorious portrait of himself he was, what every artist must be in his art, a patrician.
Gericault's portrait is still more subjective than Courbet's. The white, cloudy
background makes a simple, vigourous harmony with the dun tone of the figure ; the
format, too, is more favourable, the width is pleasant to the eye. The superbly
modelled hands give greater elasticity to the Courbet. But here, too, the greater
precision is modified by the splendid dark general tone.

In later portraits, such as the black Rochefort, the same soft dark modelling
achieves perfect miracles of portraiture.

Still more obvious is the relation to Gericault's better-known manner, to the
creator of the magnificent Carabinier in the Louvre, &c., to the pictures in which
the brush swept the surface with vigourous strokes, no longer relying upon a veil
of tone to create harmonies. This relation manifests itself in the later Courbet.
But we have first to consider his middle period, the most remarkable, when he
produced the works with which his name will be written in history for all time.

The pictures of 1850 must have had the effect of a bursting shell. Even now
the impression they make is astounding. In the passage-room of the Louvre>
where the Enterrement languishes ignominiously, one squeezes oneself flat against
the opposite wall, to get at a suitable distance, not so much from the huge canvas
with its fifty life-size figures, or the gigantic landscape, whose line of gray rock
encloses the background like a natural circus, but rather from the portentous
vigour of expression. It is a Resurrection rather than a Burial, and this is true
in several senses. Here, for the first time since the seventeenth century, we have
a portrait-group equal to the best pictures of Hals and Rembrandt in the same
genre, and like these, rich in psychological suggestions, the sum of which is
nevertheless far above mere personal expression. Secondly, an art equal to that
of the great painters of the past comes to life again here, with all the charm of
the early masters, though its masterly gravity repels the facile admiration of the
amateur. Even when the Enterrement was painted, there were more modern
pictures, by which I mean works which more clearly presage the characteristics
of the Impressionists, and Courbet soon afterwards painted a considerable
number of such himself, which had a more far-reaching influence. But there
is not one of the whole century which reveals the same powerful mastery of the
old artistic methods and makes such a dignified effect by its highly individual
treatment of inherited assets. Gericault's Raft of the Medusa and the Massacre
of Scio are its predecessors, not relatives, but partners. Throughout the rest
of the century, the only painter who approaches Courbet at all as a painter of
such representative pictures is Manet. Even in this extremely limited series,
the Enterrement takes a prominent position. It lacks the special charm of
Gericault and Delacroix, for it is without any sort of relation to the classic element
of French art, nor has it the special beauty of the later men, for modern colour
was denied it. But whereas the others paid for this charm by a loss, a certain
sketchiness, which, unimportant as it may seem to us, gives them a touch
of decadence as compared with the old masters, the Enterrement within certain

GOYA: THE DANCE, DESIGN FOR TAPESTRY

TORREC1LLA COLLECTION, MADRID

GUSTAVE COURBET 227

time-limits appears as a work of unrivalled mastery, a piece of painting unique
in our age.

What had happened to Courbet when he began the gigantic work we can only-
guess, in the absence of any biography of the slightest discrimination. Before this
as we have seen, he was following after Van Dyck. The Spaniards, of whom he
always spoke with enthusiasm,* must have seemed a sudden revelation to him ;
his admiration was not confined to Velazquez ; the great portrait painter's
long neglected friend, Zurbaran, made a still more penetrating appeal to
him. Into the landscape of the Enterrement, especially the wonderfully veiled
farm-buildings on the left, the Velazquez of the Riding School, the Boar-
Hunt and kindred works has been transported almost unaltered. In the
figures, on the other hand, Spanish and northern elements are marvellously
blended, yet the Spanish colourist ousts the Spanish tone-painter. It might
be supposed that Courbet had seen Zurbaran's four episodes from the life of
St. Bonaventura, which hung together in Soult's collection till the fifties ; two
are now in the Louvre, and one in the Dresden and Berlin galleries respectively.
The two examples in the English National Gallery were also at the time in Louis
Philippe's collection in the Louvre. But the example Courbet had studied most
closely was obviously the finest work by Zurbaran in our latitudes, the Obsequies of
a Bishop in the Louvre. The similarity of many details, and these the most
admirable, is apparent at a glance, especially on the left side of the Enterrement.
The bright-eyed chorister in the foreground, in a white surplice, with a red cap
on his raven hair, is, as painting, identical with the youth who stands at the
Bishop's head in the Zurbaran. It is a proclamatory splendour of the same
order as that which distinguishes the Spanish colourist from his more reticent com
patriot, marked by a harmony which comes less from the rarity of the colour, than
from the extraordinary balance of the unmixed black, white, and red, and the yellow
of the censer, and showing a cool brilliance that moves us like the glance of great,
shadow-circled eyes. At the same time, Courbet did not forget the Caravaggesque
element in Zurbaran. f The wide, white linen bands of the coffin-bearers, whose
dignified figures enclose the picture on the left, gleam like the faces in the works
of the Italian.

This unabashed exploitation of the Spaniards distinguishes Courbet from the
school of Barbizon, and makes him seem like a man of a different race. We
cannot credit him with the discovery of Spain, for Daumier had cast a glance
into the art of which Goya was the final expression, and it seems to me probable
that Goya's sojourn in France had a certain influence upon French art, in
spite of the distance between Paris and Bordeaux. Gericault was familiar with
Goya's pictures ; Delacroix had a work by the painter of the Maja in his studio
in the twenties, and often spoke of him with enthusiasm. But all these relations
do not go beyond slight shades. Courbet gave the determining impulse, when he
brought about a new and rich development by the resolute appropriation of the
Spaniards.

From such traits in history we recognise the narrowness of the usual conception

* In the conversation with Silvestre, already quoted, he said : " Ribera, Zurbaran et surtout
Velazquez, je les admire : Ostade et Craesbeeck me seduisent entre tous les Hollandais et je venere
Holbein."

t Muther has drawn attention to the affinities of Courbet and Caravaggio (Geschichte der
Malerei im 19. Jahrhundert, ii. pp. 438, 449).

228 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

of personality. Without the Spaniards, Courbet, the revolutionary, in whom
his contemporaries saw only the iconoclast, and even the enemy of art, would be
unimaginable, and the achievement of the Impressionists who derive from Courbet,
impossible. His indebtedness, so far from minimising his personality, revealed its
value. It made of him just what his own time overlooked in its preoccupation with
his realism, the highly objective artist. Of course he did not stop short at the
discovery. He conquered in order to possess. To possess the one thing, he
added others thereto. Not arbitrarily, he found just the amalgam he could
use. He did not draw it all out of his own possession, but reached out after the
heritage of the past until he had created a new unity.

Herein lies the progress which Duret failed to recognise. This is the fashion
in which all art assets originate. We need but note how the Spanish element
in Courbet, which appears in relative isolation in the Enterrement^ is gradually
concentrated into a more and more organic, not to say personal method, and
we shall find the art -history of his whole life.

With this Spanish element he blended the energy of Frans Hals. The com
bination is not more striking than the similarity between the young man with the
plumed cap in Caravaggio's famous gambling scene at Dresden, and certain
loosely painted heads by the Haarlem master. The relation to Hals is freer than
that to the Spaniards. We might call the spirit of the whole group in the En-
terrement Hals-like, the sturdy life of the personages, the elemental vigour of their
faces, the reality with which it is all painted, and even the exaggerated use of
black, which, just as in certain examples of Hals seeks in vain to kill the energy
of the drawing. Every head is a portrait, and not only every head, every figure,
every one of the manifold attitudes. Even in later life Courbet rarely excelled
the art of the Enterrement as portraiture. Duret's head of Corbinaud of 1863, and
many portraits of the sixties, show the same veil of reddish tones over the material,
the mirror-like smoothness of which almost invites the hand to stroke it, and the
same uncompromising truth of presentment. This was decried as realism by
contemporaries, who declaimed against the ugliness of truth. The painter's
few friends, Champfleury, for instance, whom he immortalised in the masterly
Louvre portrait of 1854, were content to defend realism. They put the blame on
the artist's models, on the universal and individual ugliness of the world, for which
an honest painter was not to be held responsible ; i.e., they were guilty of an
assumption arbitrary as, or even more arbitrary than, that of their opponents. No
one recognised art in this fidelity to nature ; no one took up a position at the
right distance from the picture to receive an impression of unity from the colossal
planes. The fault of which Courbet was accused, the limitation of his concep
tion to the details of nature presented to the eye, was committed by every spec
tator who exhausted himself in picking out the discords from the whole. People
forgot that an orchestra so vast required strong motives to give it animation,
and that even caricature, no matter how biting, contributes to the enrichment
of material. They overlooked the chief thing : style.

The formation of Courbet's style began in his early period and ended with his
last important works. It is not only vital to his own history, but of immense
weight in modern painting generally. It does not consist of the modification of
details, but of the progressive alteration of his whole conception, and consequently
of all his methods. The Funeral at Ornans is one of the first stages on this very
devious road. His style lies less in the extraordinary variety of elements than in

GOYA: CHARLOTTE CORDAY

PHOTOGRAPH DURAND-RUEL

GUSTAVE COURBET 229

their summary use, as, for instance, in the distribution of the whole group, which,
realistic as it seems, has so arranged the numerous faces as to present the greatest
possible variety, thus forming an impressive, though non-demonstrable rhythm.
Hals had already proved the possibility of such an achievement in his large shoot
ing-pieces. The colour above all makes for style. Here Courbet parts company
with Zurbaran, who was thinking primarily of splendour, when he seemed to
give increased breadth to the great planes of his Louvre picture by his colour.
Courbet contracts his. The whole picture is built up of the main contrast of
black and red against the Velazquez-like background. The red is liquid as blood.
It streams from the carnations and hovers over the black figures like a symbol of
life over the grave. For it emphasises the psychological motive of the picture,
the contrast between the sorrow of the mourners and the vivacity of their faces.
This vivacity is enhanced by the red, but at the same time the monumental
rather than the dramatic element is increased. The red tones, equally distributed
over the faces, soften the vivid physiognomical details, obviate a genre-like appear
ance, and reserve the movement for the animation of the planes. It is most pro
nounced in the two precentors behind the kneeling sexton. Their alcoholic
visages under their singular coxcomb-hued head-dresses warm the whole picture.

Time, as in the case of all Courbets and all old masters, has refined the colour
and contributed not a little to the general effect. In the right-hand portion
the black has suffered. We must imagine the group of women as rich, relatively,
as the garde-champetre who stands before them, in a gray coat over a reddish
waistcoat, orange knee-breeches and grayish-blue stockings. The dark olive tones
of the women's dresses have all become black. The Louvre would be well advised
to bring them out again.

It may be urged against the Funeral at Ornans that, in common with all the
large representative pictures of the nineteenth century, it is comparatively non-
representative of its author. The unparalleled impression it made upon the
public and on the painter's colleagues was due to its subject. The audacity of re
presenting a real funeral, not with sentimental poses, but with the fixed and idiotic
expression of faces on such occasions, and further with portraits of utterly indifferent
people, exceeded the far greater audacity of giving such momentary represen
tations by the help of the old masters. The charge of ignorant folly might
have been transmuted into condemnation of the all too wise eclectic ; but the
one would have been no less unjust than the other, and such a point of view,
if logical, would have also depreciated the most exalted works of contemporaries.
The little Christ in the Garden of Olives reveals more of Delacroix' charac
teristic mastery than the Massacre of Scio ; the Carabinier means more for
Gericault than the R aft of the Medusa ; and a bunch of flowers of Manet's last
period is more individual than his Olympia. But what we call representative
entails the suppression of individuality, in favour of a multiplicity valuable
to the representation. We see more in it than a phase of the artist's development.
Such pictures create the standard for a whole epoch ; the standard, not only for
a degree of artistic expression, but for the generosity, the passion, the morality of
a period. In such moments art apparently re-conquers the right to speak to the
people, and the lover of art also finds a quiet joy in the beauty of this thought.
*******

The Funeral at Ornans is not Courbet's largest picture ; the Combat de
Cerfs is bigger, and the Atelier, with its three and a half by six metres, was the

230 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

largest of all. These works are not isolated examples. There are dozens of
similar dimensions, if not quite as extensive as the three above-named. A com
paratively large surface was natural to the master.

This tendency distinguishes Courbet from his contemporaries after Delacroix,
and was in itself a cause of distrust to the enemies of his realism. It is one reason
of his unpopularity. The French collector likes a picture he can handle, and the
stands of the dealers in the Rue Lafitte are made for works of modest dimensions.

He who would work with life-size figures and animate large surfaces must of
necessity become a monumental artist. The Funeral at Ornans was indeed the
solution of a monumental problem, one of the many successfully attempted by
the master. A common impulse of great energy informs the long line of figures.
In the Stone-breakers of the same Salon, now in the Dresden Gallery, Courbet
brought this impulse into a concentrated form of smaller extent, and showed
with what variety he proposed to treat his monumental themes.

Everything depends upon this. Style is like minted metal. One has his
pocket full of big bronze coins ; the weight is considerable, his pocket gapes.
Another carries the same number of coins in gold, and steps out lightly with a
treasure a thousand times more precious. Artistically, we are living in the sign
of the copper-standard. Plenty of cash, but little value. The few gold pieces
disappear under the heap of small change. It is all style. The one rattles as
bravely as the other in the pocket, nay, the pence make the most noise. Courbet's
fall is due to the anomaly, that he filled his pockets with gold pieces and went
about with them as if they were so much copper. No wonder that people there
upon took him for a coiner.

Would it have been so very difficult to make an easily legible style out of the
form of the Stone-breakers ? Any foreman in a furniture-shop can do it now. Was
it more difficult then ? The Englishmen, from whom ingenious critics have
traced Courbet's artistic descent, showed the contrary. A more dexterous
craftsman would, for instance, have set the lad who is carrying away the stones in
a more schematic relation to the breaker, perhaps even parallel ; he might con
ceivably have placed three other workers in appropriate attitudes beside them,
and then have congratulated himself on having surpassed the ^Eginetan marbles.
Courbet painted his figures as strongly as possible, but he showed that he was con
cerned not with lines but surface, and not only with surface but with an effect of
depth. And this was in no sense an idee fixe with him, but sprang from his
desire for richness, for greater power — and from his consciousness of being able
to make his effects on these lines. Millet was more modest. The reverence we
feel for him does not prevent us from seeing in him an easier manner of writing,
well adapted to his personality, and not less sincere, of great charm but not of
equal strength. He never painted so powerfully as Courbet painted in that
picture which was so closely akin to the Millet world of form. We may assume
that Courbet watched the early development of Millet with interest. Although
Millet was his senior by five years they started almost simultaneously. Courbet's
first landscapes were painted in 1841. The things Millet had done before this
date are negligible. Indeed, if we take his first important picture as the starting-
point, Courbet was the earlier of the two, for when he was painting his first por
traits, Millet exhibited his Laitiere at the Salon, the work Burger welcomed as
" une jolie esquisse dans le gout de Boucher." The Stone-breakers made its
appearance after Millet's Vanneur of 1848, and simultaneously with his Semeur of

GUSTAVE COURBET 231

1850. Even if Courbet received some purely superficial stimulus from these
pictures, there is absolutely no basis for the indebtedness to Millet assumed by
writers upon art. We might as reasonably, nay, more reasonably, assume that
Millet was influenced by Courbet when, in the Cherbourg sea-pieces of the war
year, he made an incursion into the domain of his junior.

For in reality there is no more likeness between the pictures of the two masters
then there is between any two persons we might meet in the same room.
I have spoken of Millet's relation to Daumier and of his classic origin in another
place. He was truly a painter with a purpose, in contrast to Courbet, on whose
purpose all the world, himself included, was for ever insisting ; he expressed his
tendency to synthesis with the utmost decision, and made it his goal in all his
works from the Vanneur onwards. Courbet's synthesis is only evident now
that we can survey the whole man and his following, all of which he himself was
unconscious. It was as strong a motive force in him as in Millet, nay, stronger,
but it remained instinctive, and this is why it was so mighty — and so clumsy. In
Millet more limited gifts came to the help of a more harmonious personality.
Courbet was driven hither and thither by an unbridled temperament, among
others to the point where Millet stood, but it was only one side among many,
and he controlled it as he controlled all others. Millet was always the same ;
he tottered when he left his narrow path. He carried over a fine formula to a
variety of things ; his pictures are differentiated more by symbol than by the
pictorial method which he took from the old masters, and reduced, without
developing it further. He is therefore monumental in a far more conventional
senso than his compatriot, in an essentially weaker sense, quantitatively as well as
qualitatively, we must add. Never did he attempt to transpose the exquisite
art of his small pictures into larger dimensions without serious loss. The Angelas
is inferior to any average Courbet, and Millet's most important essay in monumen
tal effect, the Hagar and Ishmael in the Mesdag Museum at the Hague, is a com
plete failure. In this, as in many other pictures of Millet's, the essential element,
a mastery of pictorial expression, is lacking. This explains why Millet was able
to express a great part of his nature by draughtsmanship, whereas Courbet with
out a brush and colour would have been like a man without limbs. The most
brilliant charcoal drawing could give no idea of the Stone-breakers or the Funeral
at Ornans, to say nothing of later works. They are only possible as paintings.

This difference might have been purely technical ; Millet might have been as
great a draughtsman as was Courbet a painter. But justice towards our two
masters demands that we should recognise the difference of potentiality. Style
in Millet, whether evolved by brush or pencil, was firmer than Millet him
self, and herein lies his limitation. The artist kept nothing over save a one
sided form, which expressed his nature well, but at the same time showed its narrow
boundaries, since he could not keep this form fluid, i.e., capable of expansion.
He has finished when he first gets the form suitable to him, and afterwards plays
the part of artisan rather than of genius to his invention. Courbet, on the other
hand, is not to be identified with any one work. He invents until he lays down
the brush. In other words, the difference between Millet and Courbet is that
between genius and talent, even if we must admit that Millet fulfils the conception
of talent in superabundant measure, and that Courbet falls short in some respects
of the standard of genius. Millet sought to supply the deficiency by a very
distinguished treatment of a literary tendency, and this has drawn a whole herd

232 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

of sentimental adherents and imitators to him since his death. The few great
artists who further developed the imperishable part of Millet disappear in the
multitude. Here again, without depreciating Millet's greatness, we can easily see
that insistence on the element of thought was expedient to help out artistic weak
ness. Courbet has been unjustly condemned for his renunciation of all such aid.

Millet brought strong lines into the atmosphere of the Dutchmen and
Spaniards ; Courbet essayed to set plastic bodies therein, i.e., to combine the
results of the old art with those of the new. His vehemence in the process
made it inevitable that he should light upon impossible tasks. Herein lies the
problematic quality of his art. As a landscape painter he was pre-eminently a
painter of planes, identifying himself at first with Velazquez, giving ever-increas
ing vigour to tone and colour, and painting with a temperament unrestrained by
reflection, just as Hals painted his personages : only material, only brush and
colour, only surface. But this did not suffice him. His rhetoric demanded a
personification — not that of genre, he was too deeply imbued with the old masters
and too honest for that ; but at least the significant presence of man and beast
in the landscape. As from his youth up he had confronted man as a realistic
portrait painter, a difference arose all the more readily in the combination of the
two domains, in that the two materials are not found conjoined in Nature in the
manner that seemed suitable to him. This difference does not make itself felt in the
Funeral and the Stone-breakers. In each he had a happy inspiration ; size and
colour came to his aid, while the solution was hastened perhaps unduly by the inter
mediary black. Courbet recognised the devastating quality of asphaltum, and
was too strongly averse to all compromise to content himself with such expedients.
But as soon as he attempted to substitute more solid colours, or essayed to make
the shadows effective, the problem presented itself in all its intensity. This
happened, as we see plainly enough, in the following year, 1851, with the
Demoiselles du Village. Here Courbet painted the figures and the landscape,
each unsurpassable in its way, quite independently the one of the other. The
landscape would be a masterpiece in itself without the figures ; the three
charming female figures with the little shepherdess would be an exquisite group
without the landscape. The two in one frame have the effect of a picture by two
different hands.

That this was Courbet's method we know from no less a witness than Delacroix,
who subjected the Baigneuses of the Salon of 1853 to a severe but not undeserved
criticism.* He was repelled not only by the lack of psychological relation between
the two naked figures, by the fact that " the gesture expressed nothing," but by
the non-pictorial connection between the figures and their surroundings. Delacroix
justified his criticism by the declaration that he had seen the sketch for the land
scape in Courbet's studio. This he found enlarged in the picture, and the two
bathing women had been put into it, a proceeding which is even more crudely
obvious here than in the Demoiselles de Village. To Delacroix, the creator of the
most fluid kind of painting, this was peculiarly abhorrent. He pronounced
a like unfavourable judgment upon the Lutteurs and the Fileuse of the same Salon.
He thought the background killed the two figures of the former, and that over

* •* Journal," ii. p. 159. In a foot-note he calls this picture Demoiselles de Village, a title chosen
by Qrarbet for the Catalogue, and still often used to distinguish the picture, now in the Montpellier
Museum. It must not be confounded with the Demoiselles tie Village faisant Faumontauttf Gardifmte dt
Fetches, of 1851, the work here reproduced.

GUSTAVE COURBET 233

3 ft. might have been cut away round them. He bestowed warm praise on the
distaff and the sleeping figure, but censured the heaviness of the dress and of the
chair. This last criticism seems to us exaggerated when we stand before the
gem of the Montpellier Museum. Time has perhaps softened the contrasts to
which Delacroix was so sensitive. It seems strange, however, that Delacroix
should have been blind to the close relation of these particular pictures to
his own works. Or was it that he did not wish to see it ? In 1852, a year
before the Baigneuses, Delacroix had painted his Lever* the interior with
the naked woman binding up her heavy tresses before a mirror. It con
tains much of the younger master's flesh-painting, but is more fused, and
therefore more harmonious, the work of a riper artist, who, for all his skill,
never lost sight of his end. Paul Mantz said of Delacroix that " il voyait son
tableau avant de le peindre." We might say the opposite of many pictures of
Courbet's middle period, the Baigneuses among them. Courbet was inspired by
an absolutely unconscious instinct, or, to be more exact, purely by an impression of
nature, and was only absolutely conscious in the impulse to reproduce this
impression. The faster he painted the more slowly did his thought follow, and
what this added was, as a rule, opposed to the creation of the instinct. Yet it
would seem that Courbet's development required this partitioning of the picture
to take in all that was typical of the artist and more especially that which
differentiated him and Delacroix. Beneath the fragmentary conception which
is in such striking contrast to the organic method of the painter of Dante's Boat
the necessities of a new synthesis lie hidden.

We learn from this how inadequate is language for the formulation of the
laws of art. Expressed in words, they seem to deal eternally with the reception
and the rejection of the same ideas ; the degree, on which everything depends,
only becomes intelligible through the name of the artist who accomplishes it. In
these days, when perspective is taught in the secondary schools, and every water-
colour painter can grapple with its most complicated problems, how little is con
veyed by such a phrase as that Courbet was a master of perspective ! But how
significant it becomes when we stand before the Cribleuses de Ble in the Nantes
Museum, Courbet's masterpiece of 1854. We should like to have had Delacroix'
opinion of this remarkable interior, and to know what Ingres thought of it. At
the Exhibition of 1900 people stood before it as before a riddle, and so, no
doubt, they did at the Exhibition of 1855. Courbet scarcely went farther than this
in the direction of plasticity, and before this picture it is easy to understand that
the painter would some day try his hand at sculpture. It is plastic without being
classic, a phenomenon unknown in France, save in the case of the Primitives,
until we come to Courbet. It has something of the grand old stylelessness of
the North, in which all seems nature and nothing convention, and a ruthless
sincerity is the sole form. The room is almost without atmosphere, it is
filled with forms only, but these are rendered with such mastery that their
apparently arbitrary position fixes every corner of the room in all dimen
sion. The kneeling girl who shakes the sieve — About called her indecent —
is as much a miracle of foreshortening as one of Michelangelo's Sibyls in a different
order of things. There is no question of a pictorial relation of the details ; the boy
who is looking into the corn-bin is a creation, almost a work of art, in himself.
In the group of the two girls an almost indescribable richness of arabesque is

* In the Auguste Vacquerie collection.
VOL. I 2 G

234 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

produced by the forms ; an arabesque of modelling in contrast to the linear
arabesque of the old masters. And here again, as in the Funeral, colour acts as a
secret amalgam to the unrelated masses ; but the black of the early work has made
way for an exquisite pale gold, with which the grey and pink of the dresses har
monise as perfectly as if Velazquez had breathed his spirit into this almost prodigal
realism.

The same spirit works its magic still more manifestly in the huge picture of
1855. The Atelier is a kind of resting-place in the ascent, a pause in which the
artist collects his thoughts. The five years that separate the Funeral and the
Atelier do not constitute a decisive epoch, the strongest phase of development
begins later. Who, indeed, could have found the right path unhesitatingly
amidst this chaos of gigantic projects, begun in one year, broken off in the next,
taken up again ten years later, and yet producing masterpieces every time
they appeared. It seems almost as if Courbet had struggled against his own
development in order not to sacrifice that portion of his mastery, which had to give
way to some other. In many contemporary pictures heterogeneous conceptions
are perceptible. Immediately after the Cribleuses, the strongest argument for
plasticity in all his art, he painted the softest, the most rich-toned of his works,
the recapitulation of everything with which the descendant of the Spaniards was
occupied. He expressed this after his own fashion by adding to the title in the
catalogue the pompous phrase : " allegoric reelle, determinant une phase de sept
annees de ma vie artistique," an absolute truth, for in the Atelier we have really
the artistic quintessence of a part of his nature and his life. The grotesqueness
lay only herein, that it was the author himself who formulated the fact. Of
course the public laughed, and the critics laid hold of the allegory and believed,
rightly or wrongly, that Courbet had used it to proclaim his Socialism afresh,
because he had grouped round his easel all kinds of contemporaries with whom he
had relations, and various class-types, which, indeed, he had painted elsewhere.*

To-day the significance of these persons and things has evaporated ; we are
scarcely impressed even by the brilliant characterisation of the portraits. What
we see is a magnificent piece of decoration.

Of all Courbet's works the Atelier is the one most akin to Velazquez. It is an
offering to the manes of the great Spaniard of the utmost dignity, for it entails no
sacrifice of individuality. Velazquez is not used as a clich6, there is nothing sub
servient, nothing he himself would have disdained. One master offers homage to
another, and honours both himself and his predecessor in the act.

The Atelier is the lyrical pendant to the Enterrement ; it is all sunny grace
and loveliness, just as the other was all dark and weighty earnest. It is constructed
more lightly, more loosely ; the oppressive facade of the Funeral is replaced by a
half circle extending far into the background. Where the colossal line of rocks
extends in the latter, the studio-walls, of the same Velazquez-tone as the other
background, with the effective patches made by the pictures, encloses the scene.
The centre of the composition is the painter in a dark gray jacket, his fine profile
relieved against the beautiful work on the easel — a brown wooded landscape with a
blue sky, closely related to the exquisitely outlined naked model, whose carnations,

* Courbet himself wrote to a friend concerning his picture : " Le sujet de mon tableau est si long
a expliquer quc je veux te le laisser deviner quand tu le verras, c'est Phistoire de mon atelier, ce qui
s'y passe moralement et physiquement, c'est passablement mysterieux, divinera qui pourra." L'Art,
1883.

GUSTAVE COURBET 235

naturalisticaily treated in reddish gray tones, shed a mild radiance throughout the
picture. The boy to the left of the artist is the most animated passage, a con
centrated gray with luminous carnations, a reminiscence of the delicious choir
boy in the Enterrement, but of a warmer simpler nature. The stuff on the floor
beside the naked model produces the pink Velazquez-tone. From this rich
centre the colour dies away into all the corners of the great room. It is the method
used by Velazquez in his portraits of the Infanta, monumentally applied. What
the face is in the Spaniard's portraits, the central group is here ; the fantastic
coiffure answers to the tendril-like offshoots formed by the grotesque subordinate
figures, and even in the darkness forms and faces seem to be moving. Courbet
did not take advantage of the complaisant shadow to which Velazquez gave such
charm, that many of his disciples of to-day are content to paint the nimbus with
out the body from which it radiates. His touch is always granulated, he does
not simulate form but paints it. His unresting skill created a decorative detail
in the drapery of the marvellous female figure on the extreme right, which recalls the
ornamentation on the stuffs of the Flemish masters. Rather than compromise he
preferred to sacrifice unity. Where others, after exerting themselves richly
would be content to indicate the limits of the pictures by a few strokes, Courbet
paints realistic portraits.

In the Defosses collection this picture enjoys a privilege rarely accorded to our
pictorial art. The enthusiasm of the collector has moved him to a princely deed.
He has devoted a whole room to the work, a vast interior lighted from above,
finely proportioned and gorgeously fitted. Heavy gilded architecture alternates
with panels of Gobelin tapestry, which accustom the eye to a gray-blue basis.
At the upper end of the room, extending across the whole width, the picture is
enframed in massive gilded pilasters. The effect is highly impressive. It affords
a proof, unique of its kind, that this much despised realism, the value of whose
existence has been at times limited to unessential verities, may compete with
the greatest art that has decorated churches and palaces ; that there are not two
arts, monumental and non-monumental, but only one, the art of beauty. No
Primitive could make a finer effect here. Imagine Botticelli's Spring in its original
place, or the altar-piece of an old Rhenish master. The effect would, no doubt,
be stronger, by virtue of the more visible expression of architectonic lines, and the
more surprising the less the spectator could find himself again in these lines. But
it cannot be accounted a defect in the modern work that it should lack strangeness.
Every really vital person will consider this an advantage. And that the power
seems less here is due to our inclination for that strangeness, and the impatience of
the first moment, which resists the quieter effects. This room gave me an im
movable confidence in our art and confirmed my secret repulsion to everything
which does not spring from the natural instinct of a personality. I should have
greeted the Botticelli reverentially, but should have thought it less at home here
than in the Florentine Academy. I could perhaps have given warmer welcome to
the wonderful Last Supper from San Salvi, whose harmonies are more attuned
to our own, but even the del Sarto could not have appealed to me so intimately
then as Courbet's profane work. When I last saw the Atelier I had just come from
the Primitives at DUsseldorf, and was about to visit the Sienese. Our agitated
existence provides us with sensations of which our grandfathers in post-
chaises never dreamt. The antithesis was almost unbearable when, before the
rose and pale gold of the modern, I recalled the lurid altar-piece of the old painter

236 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

of the Lower Rhine, one of the wild and grandiose masters, who fascinated us at
the Dllsseldorf Exhibition.

Before the Atelier our thoughts turn gratefully to Rubens and Rembrandt.
Between us and these two there are centuries also, and yet they are incomparably
nearer to us than the Primitives. In another three hundred years, when the
space of time has doubled, and the chronological difference between Velazquez
and his predecessors seems to have diminished correspondingly, Velazquez and the
others will not have become more remote to the painters of the day. Nay, for all
time, as long as painting is practised, these men will be held to belong not to a time
but to art, just as we already reckon the great Greeks.

What is the reason of this conception, which is too mighty, too rich in hundreds
of confirmatory symptoms to be purely imaginary ?

The conditions for research in art-history are never so favourable as when we
stand before an extraordinary picture. We think with the eye, testing rapidly ;
it is as if such an impression rouses everything that tells for and against it. The
keenness with which we grasp the work before us serves us for comprehension of
those that are absent, since it is not vision alone that opens art to us, but that
clairvoyant condition, akin to creation, in which our vivified experience is rein
forced by a thousand memories.

We get nearer to the reason if we carefully examine the various effects which
all sorts of typical works make upon us at such moments. The Rhenish or West-
phalian master at Dtlsseldorf struck our souls to earth with his terrific grotesques.
We could not at the moment have rejoiced in the warm modelling of Courbet's
naked figure. Cognition was in an abnormal state, as if brutalised by a sudden
almost animal instinct. I remember that the delicate complexion of the lady with
whom I was standing before the picture, distressed my eye, and that I longed
for something even more violent than the painter had given us. It was not a
bad picture, but one highly esteemed by experts and belauded by aesthetes ; the
effect it had upon me, 500 years after it was painted, bears witness to its power.
But it worked upon other and lesser emotions than the Courbet. The latter was
like some great human countenance of my own time. It did not drive me away
from to-day, but brought me nearer to it, brought me nearer to myself, showed
me things in myself which seemed to me necessary, legitimised me and my instinct.
The Primitive led me aside. It was not his subject-matter that repelled me, but
his manner of treating it, the wild fervour that seared and scarred, the deep humilia
tion, not of his martyr but of his own soul, the mocking laughter, not of his
tormentors but of his own conception. It was not his legend, but the insistence
with which he presented it that repelled me. He appealed to dim eyes, painting
as if I were callous, as if it were necessary for him to make manifold mechanical
repetition of what I saw at the first glance. It was always the same, a dark event
which confronted me, immovable, immutable, and held my eyes captive with the
fixity of its compelling gaze.

Men prayed before pictures such as these. Terror brought them to God.
And even now they affect us somewhat in the same manner. An unconscious
simulated petition creeps into enjoyment, the stammering of senses, no longer
related to spirit : hypnotism.

In others this tension was notably relaxed. We moved on, relieved by
Schongauer's amenity ; the gentleness of Jan Joest's holy conversation by the foun
tain rejoiced us like a kindly greeting ; Marmion's quiet musing allowed us to chat

VELAZQUEZ: POPE INNOCENT

nOKIA-PAMHLI PAI.ACT:, ROME

GUSTAVE COURBET 237

lightly together. The grimness of the face disappeared, Stephan Lochner miled.
It was not the milder episode but the manner in which it was treated, the soft
emotion of the painter making itself felt even now. Why do we call this mobile thing
painting just as we do the other rigid thing ? We never see Lochner twice alike,
he lives like ourselves, his thousand tones in one colour give an endless variety
of new images. Why, instead of painting simple reds and blues like the Primitive,
did he prepare his colour on the picture itself, making it something beyond the
episode, a veritable second sacrament, the image of his own personality ?

Dosseldorf had a thousand other differences between men and periods to
show. But the mightiest was to be found on the upper storey of the Exhibition,
where in the first room hung the Cuyp, Rembrandt's Christ at the Column and his
portrait of himself, laughing. In a moment everything else had sunk to a lower
level, and one felt as if uplifted to freedom. A many-coloured life. Laughter
rang out from solemn frames, subdued sobs arose from cheerful pictures. All
were speaking to each other and speaking to us, and we almost permitted our
selves to argue with Rembrandt. This is painting. Painting began when
humanity entered into art and myth gave way to it ; when the spectator no
longer feigned to pray before a picture, but prostrated his soul consciously and
enthusiastically at the feet of great personalities.

Courbet's great decoration belongs to this art. There is but one word to
describe both his manner and that of the Primitives : monumental. It depicts
the highest spiritual phase of two different worlds. In the one we must forget
existence in order to enjoy, in the other we must be able to enjoy in order to rejoice
in existence.

Which of the two is the higher — an inquiry which, rising far above the interest
of the amateur, addresses itself to the deepest impulse of beauty-loving personali
ties — can only be doubted by those who have not yet recognised the importance

of the question.

*******

The influence of Velazquez is no less evident in many other works of the same
period, and also in the Rencontre or Bon jour Monsieur Courbet of the Exhibition of
1855, now in the Montpellier Museum, in which the young master immortalised
his first worshipper, Bruyas, the purchaser of the Casseurs de Pierre, Les Baig-
neuses, La Fileuse, &c. But at the same time he retained the antithesis of the
Velazquez-idea, his strong modelling. In the Rencontre the profiles of the three
figures look as if they were cut out against the high horizon, notably the painter's
magnificent head with the much ridiculed " Assyrian " profile, and looking at
them we seem to have all the other dimensions of the body before us. Both
tendencies are apparent in the Demoiselles au bord de la Seine of 1856, and even
in the group of the Proudhon family of 1863, now in the Petit Palais. As we
know from the two dates to the left of the Proudhon, and the notes in the Cata
logue of the Courbet Exhibition of 1882, the artist painted his friend from memory,
as Proudhon had appeared to him twelve years before, seated on the threshold of
his house. This anecdote, revealing an absolutely phenomenal feat of memory,
would be easier to comprehend if Courbet had attempted to make the picture
a psychological memorial, which would have been peculiarly appropriate to his
relations with the philosopher. But the picture is the most faithful realism,
and more purely an artistic, almost a mathematical problem, than any of his works.
The preservation of plastic effect in the foreshortening of the principal figure

238 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

verges on the miraculous, and at the same time there is the most amazing fidelity
of likeness and truth of detail. The blue trousers and whitish grey blouse are
exact in every fold. We cannot quite throw off the impression that the artist
painted rather too rigidly here, fixing the body so exactly that it was impossible
to preserve the necessary mobility. The squat shape of the work and the lack
of connection with the group on the right side increase this effect. The children,
in momentary attitudes, are in themselves a picture, of the utmost refinement of
colour ; a reseda tone predominates in the dresses, illumined by the delicate
pinks of the young carnations. The liquid touch shows the most perfect mastery.
But nothing of all this found favour with the critics. Even such semi-adherents
as Burger condemned it, and even now the work is classed as mediocre because of
its "lack of intellectuality." In the biography published by Estignard in 1896,
the worst, indeed, of all the notices of the master so far perpetrated, the picture
is dismissed with amazing assurance as a fiasco.

Such criticism was facile enough. The defects of the Demoiselles au Bord de
la Seine, of the Proudbon, and of many kindred works are obvious. But that
there were exquisite things in these pictures too, that their whole manner made it
impossible to judge them by the criterion satisfied by every mediocre painter,
that it would have been easy enough to give the Cribleuses or the Demoiselles
less strenuous attitudes, to paint Proudhon without the children, or the children
without Proudhon — all this escaped these rigorous judges. Courbet lacked a
certain harmony, such works as these show it plainly enough ; but we must not
forget that this man had to master greater complexities than others. Harsh
judgment of him belongs to the same category as the censure audaciously meted
out to Michelangelo for centuries, when a gracious boy showed to greater advan
tage than the greatest genius the world has known. Men who give their all must
sometimes give fragments. The defect is a result of their richness, of natures
absorbed in production, of a hatred of all compromise. What is wanting in them is
supplied by their followers, who gather round such geniuses as the disciples round
Christ, and do their part towards turning the gold into current coin.

But in reality the artistic reproach was merely a pretext, masking repulsion
to very different aspects of Courbet's personality. The public was indignant,
not because his mathematics were occasionally at fault, not because of the
manner of his calculation, but because he calculated at all. What they really
blamed in him was the antithesis of the criticism they formulated. Courbet was
only too successful where the public accused him of failure ; for they were not less
clamorous against his single figures, where their criticisms lost even their relative
justness, against his portraits and his renderings of naked flesh ; these were indeed
perhaps the works that provoked the greatest hostility. This hatred gave the
strongest possible impetus to Courbet's development in the sixties. As a Socialist,
the character in which he appeared to the multitude in the fifties, he was looked
upon as less noxious. His supposed philosophy was discussed, and was pronounced
to be possibly a mere pastime for empty hours, the charm of contrast in the
merry time of the Second Empire. When Courbet had satisfied his hankering
after " 1'allegorie reelle," and had done enough revolutionary things, he devoted
himself solely to painting, and became revolutionary in a sense of which the
bourgeois had no notion.

The innovation lay in his landscapes. The great series of woodland and
hunting scenes was inaugurated as early as the fifties. There is a Stag of 1853

GUSTAVE COURBET 239

in the Marseilles Museum. Four years later he painted La Curee. The most
famous of the woodland pictures date from the sixties. The series concludes
with the remarkable Halali, in the Besan^on Museum, also of colossal size ; a
dramatic hunting scene in a magnificent snowy landscape, the last great figure-
piece, the apotheosis of this aspect of the inexhaustible master.

Of this period also the Louvre possesses about the best examples ; indeed, till
quite recently, Courbet was represented more brilliantly and more adequately
in the Louvre than any of his contemporaries. The Thorny Thiery Collection,
with its gems of 1830, has now made the proportion more equitable.

In this interval, from about 1853 to 1870, Courbet developed his landscape.
Le Mirage, the large landscape with a pond of 1855, lately acquired for the Schwa-
bach collection, Berlin, for all its peculiar lyric beauty, has a certain tameness of
handling. Compared with the Halali, the Curee, in spite of great charm of
modelling, seems hard and dull. Hounds, men, and trees are conscientiously
treated, but they look isolated ; the wood is sparse, we count the trees. Courbet,
who seems himself to have been conscious of its lack of concentration, took out
the dead stag and made one of his finest pictures of it, the work in the Mesdag
Museum. Here the green of the forest flows about the splendid brown of the
tree-trunks. The hanging carcase in the foreground is painted with gradations
of the same brown in every kind of tone, so that the vigorous modelling of the
beast is veiled in superb tone-painting, which produces absolute unity of
effect. The picture is painted like an old Dutch picture. Passing the hand
over it we discern no inequalities of surface. Beauty of material, which we get
from the old masters, quite irrespective of durability, as a special and industrial
quality, has also been given us by Courbet in this and in many other pictures.

The large Combat de Cerfs, of 1861, plays a part in this period comparable to
that of the Atelier and the Enterrement of an earlier stage. It collects results
and spreads them out homogeneously. The picture is skied in the Louvre, so
that the visitor can rarely get a lively impression of it. Like most of the
examples of this period, it is thinly painted with a very restricted palette, and
contains one of the master's finest compositions. The three stags form a boldly
curved ornament against the rectilinear system of the trees. The happy choice
of the planes, the harmonious relation of the group to the size and shape of the
canvas, and the quiet harmony of the colour procure a perfectly balanced effect.
It is a fresco in a new style. Were it installed like the Atelier it would appear as a
rare testimony to Courbet's gifts as a monumental artist. For here he hit upon a
composition which divides the whole picture equally, in spite of its colossal size.
It is much to be hoped that it may some day be suitably hung, flanked by the
other pictures of the same Salon (1861), which nearly all deal with venery. The
exception was the Roche Oragnon, a rocky tract of the Maizieres valley, hailed by
Th. Gautier as the work of a " talent magistral," a work in which Courbet entered
upon a new phase. About 1865, when the large woodland scenes, the Puits Noir,
the Remise de Ckevreuils, &c., were painted, Courbet's landscape was at its
zenith.

At his best period Courbet's gifts concentrate themselves to very compact
expression. The power which had formerly been directed to details of an im
portant but also of a problematic kind, now flowed into a single vigorous form.
Form sounds a bold term to apply to rhythms of the brush. A narrow specialist
might deem the modelling of the Proudhon more formal than the material of the

240 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

Puits Noir. Courbet himself was obviously not quite clear about it. For he had
no idea of laying logical hold on that which he achieved in moments of happy
inspiration : a surface undulating in a single rhythm. Even in his most brilliant
works of this period we trace a lingering tendency, due not to instinct but to
deliberation, to differentiate material, directly he introduces figures and animals
into his landscapes. The roes in the Remise de Chevreuils are hardly as yet
perfectly resolved constituents of the picture. Even in the huge Siesta, of the
year 1868, now in the Petit Palais, the force of the brown and white hides wars
with the green of the landscape. The struggle is certainly a grandiose spectacle,
and all the objections that may be urged are insignificant reservations. At most
such objections suffice to justify a higher estimate of the pure landscapes, such as
the Ruisseau du Puits Noir in the Louvre. In these the progress for which

Courbet stands in the history of art-development is most evident.

*******

This progress is based on the knowledge that the object per se plays no part in
art, and that it may be suppressed without making use of a traditional stylistic
method ; that only power asserts itself ; that the form of a tree, however beauti
ful, cannot be made a substitute for the forest ; that a part cannot contain the
organic quality of the mass. I do not believe that Courbet arrived at this knowledge
by reflection, for the idea is latent in all his early pictures, and even the greatest
painter could not produce works of art altogether without it. The advance was
rather a logical consequence of his earlier progress.

Zola called him a " faiseur de chair," thinking only of his women, la Femme
Couchee, la Femme a la Vague, la Femme au Perroquet, and the like, of whom
Courbet painted the animal aspects, the elementary quality of their nature.

Courbet's figures suggest the nude women both of Titian and of Rubens,
though we cannot class them with either. They are too boisterous for the calmly
breathing flesh of the Venetians, too equable for the splendours of Rubens.
Of course the affinity to Rubens' flesh-painting is the most obvious. In Les
Baigneuses this manifests itself even in the choice of subject. But later on Courbet
severed himself completely from the great glorifier of woman. He painted his
women more as the Dutchmen painted still-life. There is a very beautiful
example in the Mesdag Museum. A blond and tender form lies on a bed with
a red pillow. The gray background is partly covered by a curtain of dark olive
green. The gray is repeated more softly in the folds of the white sheet, and
still more soberly in the carnations, where it harmonises with a very tender tone
of the red cushion. Like these, all the other colours stand in a well-ordered
relation one to another, partly in warm contrast, partly organically blended.
There are no significant gestures, nothing that might lead to dramatic develop
ments. On the other hand, the forms are modelled with perfect plasticity and
marvellously composed in the space. The woman lies there in a fashion that
could not be improved upon for an object the artist seeks to bring into favourable
relation with other things in the same frame.

Of course this was no new method discovered by Courbet. The beauty
of every picture depends, more or less evidently, on the same principle of design.
But in all other renderings of woman the conscious or unconscious symbolism
of the artist makes a manifest addition. This brings the woman into prominence
by a spiritual relation ; and on this account he paints her differently, even if
only in slight shades, to all the rest, and makes our enjoyment of the beauty

GUSTAVE COURBET 241

of the creature so emphasised irradiate the rest of the composition. Titian's
sleeping Vtnus in the Tribuna is the queen of the picture, playing with its beauty.
An emanation from her lies upon everything in the room. Rubens' women
in the Bacchanalia communicate their frenzy to their companions, or, rather,
that which drives them and their companions on is a wild love-instinct, which
swiftly builds a bridge to our intelligence, transforming what the brush has
ruthlessly brought together into a higher degree of sensation. Woman was the
chief personage for Courbet too, but only in so far as she is distinguished from a
cushion, a curtain, or any other inanimate object by greater richness of planes,
lines and colour. Woman is only the richest detail of his pictures, not their
subject. He lays stress upon this relation, conceives woman as superficially as
possible, and hence he grasps those qualities in her which alone can be rendered
with admirable intensity.

Courbet made progress in this conception. He transferred his idea of " chair,"
the idea which sees only material in everything that can be painted, to all Nature,
and necessarily achieved his greatest effects where he found the greatest multi
plicity of objects, in landscape. Fine as his women and animals are, we see plainly
that in these his ambition never quite permitted the display of all his individual
powers. The remarkable dualism of his talents, which allowed him to make a
distinct advance in painting, and at the same time to preserve all the works of the
old masters, always induced him to work with the methods of the old masters
when the motive suggested competition with these. It was only in landscape
that he gathered all his powers together, in the field where the old masters had
made comparatively few conquests, and here he actually gave a new conception of
Nature, achieving a new, i.e., a progressive concentration of multiplicity. When
he was thinking only of himself, the material of his pictures received a perfectly
new physiognomy. The colouring of the Flemings disappeared, his preoccupation
with a polished smoothness of surface retired into the background. The brush
became a new implement — brush and knife at once. He no longer painted, but
forged, modelled, moulded his planes, and so produced effects which leave
Courbet, the disciple of the old masters, far behind, great as he was.

The whole history of painting shows a gradual development of surface, a
gradual disappearance of contour. The epidermis of the picture becomes more
vital, the symbol of Nature comes nearer, the conception of form becomes ever
wider and more comprehensive. In this development Courbet played a decisive
part. He made the beauty of nudity, not only that of woman, but that of
landscape the picture, stripped of all that does not make an effect on the eye.
He created a new synthesis of the elements of landscape painting, a new material,
which wrings a common characteristic from water, wood, rock and earth, and
represents their unity. He painted Nature not as something objective but as
something one with himself. His brush-strokes are mighty atoms of the life that
breathes under the circumscribed apparition.

Compared with this the landscape of the old masters is tame, in spite of all its
charm. No Primitive touched this impulse, which transformed all emotion into
power. The strongest line has the effect of trivial detail in comparison. Of
course, the new form is, in the last instance, as conventional a conception as line,
but the knowledge of this conception remains shrouded by the turmoil of instinct.
Form remains form, is not concerned with the understanding, but works like Nature
herself, in whom we recognise beauty long before we ask ourselves whence it arises.
VOL. i 2 H

242 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

But Courbet is divided from the landscape painters of the seventeenth century
by the same thing which separates himself from his old master period. To place him
unreservedly above them would be to fail in appreciation of their originality and
the necessities of historical development. The essential charm we find in them
belongs to them and is unsurpassed in its way. Courbet set it aside. But he
grasped what appeared to them in its first indications, the substitution of the
arabesque of impasto for the smooth surface. At the same time he abandoned
himself more unreservedly to his temperament than the lovers of quiet Dutch
canals, and painted with greater verve. As compared with them he might be
called a dramatic painter, although he never painted a drama. His power was
in itself dramatic, for it achieved the concentration of dramatic energy solely by
the capacity for penetrating externals.

This is why Courbet has no need of subject, why, indeed, it is injurious to him.
The more restricted the less psychological, the less spiritual the so-called content,
the richer, the more demoniacally tempestuous, the more powerful even to the

verge of sublimity was the picture.

*******

We see that Courbet's conception was remote indeed from the accustomed
method, in which the effect is got by the scenic composition of the picture.
Even the " naturalist," who intends only to represent what he sees, chooses the
nature best suited to his purpose ; he corrects it in order to achieve characteristic
effects of some kind by his subject — in other words, he composes. For Courbet,
on the other hand, the significance of the object in space — quite apart from its
symbolic significance, which, indeed, never existed for him — gradually retired
more and more into the background. He who strove so strenuously for form
aimed also at painting the conglomerate of Nature, not the forms of isolated
objects. Even light and air lost their supreme importance for him. Indeed,
he never consciously concerned himself about problems of light. The landscape of
1860, in the Stedelijk Museum, at Amsterdam, where, contrary to his custom,
he attempted a play of atmosphere, is peculiarly tame and dull in effect. The
lack of atmosphere in the Proudhon and many other pictures gave occasion for
many justifiable criticisms from his contemporaries. But they overlooked the
fact that Courbet could not, in the nature of things, paint otherwise, as long as he
desired to preserve the purity of his forms, and that his renunciation of unity in
effects of light, or rather of emphasis on such unity, sprang from his reluctance to
weaken the splendour of his realities. It is one of the many phenomena of this
career that the same man, who approached Ingres in this reluctance, afterwards
put Nature in a mortar, so to speak, in order to achieve absolute unity. But even
here again he was not actuated by considerations of light and atmosphere. It is
not air but colour that illumines his later pictures. The particle of colour as
moulded by him on the canvas becomes the vehicle of all the suggestive elements
which evoke the idea of the organic in the successful pictures of his predecessors.
He reduced pictorial expression to natural sound, as it were. For this he re
quired his extraordinary command of all the imaginable methods of his craft,
and a cold-blooded audacity. That such a procedure should have seemed like
the speech of a savage to spectators accustomed to concise representations and de
finite thoughts in pictures is hardly surprising. This generalising treatment was the
more repellent, when it was applied to the sacred human body. Courbet saw in
man a piece of flesh no less than in the ox he gave his pupils as a model, and the

GUSTAVE COURBET 243

ox was to Kim as much a piece of cellular tissue as the bark of a tree or a moss-
grown rock. The public took this as a personal affront. Each spectator un
consciously identified himself with the heroes of these pictures — even when the
heroes were oxen — and felt himself treated as vegetable matter. That Delacroix
himself had not been far from such a conception, when he threw his Christ in the
Garden of Olives on the ground as a piece of quivering flesh, was a fact that escaped
the Romanticist himself and all his circle. Delacroix too generalised, as does
every painter who attempts to relate the part to the whole. In his " Journal,"
he expressly defines genius as the gift of generalising, and tries to confute Courbet
by this very phrase.* That to all appearances he was doing something different
to Courbet proved convincing even to his wisdom. In reality the only difference
was that Delacroix allowed the spiritual impetus which led him to generalise to be
divined. He did not conceal his personal sympathy, which caused him to proceed
thus, but rather he showed it in his dramatic material, an unconscious and un
important compromise which nevertheless captivated the spectator. Courbet was
taken for something essentially different, at best, respectable perhaps, but deficient
in the characteristics of art. Even such a sincere admirer of Courbet as Duret
accepts his friend's " absence d'imagination " and " absence d'emotion " as proven
as late as 1867, not perceiving that he thereby denied the artist.

Courbet too felt emotion. Otherwise it would never have occurred to him
to paint. He expressed this when he was once asked how he painted his landscapes
by the answer : " Je suis emu." The phrase, like all others, especially when he
said it with a provincial accent, only served to make him ridiculous. Lafenestre
can certainly have met with little comprehension among his readers when, in his
discussion of the Salon, he said, in reference to Corot and Courbet, that there are a
thousand kinds of emotion roused by Nature, and that Courbet was moved by it
no less than Corot, only in a different manner, f People did not understand that
in Courbet the medium of emotion was only a stage deeper, and that the result
of this was a certain modification of the effect upon the spectator — the counter-
emotion. They had no idea that here one of those transformations was accom
plished which history had already witnessed dozens of times.

For what else is it that distinguishes one art epoch from another, one humanity
from another, if not this transformation ? The object, the world, the theme, the
law, this is always the same. It is only the subject that changes — that is to say,
the emotion. The standard varies from time to time. But every change in
the standard repels, and must repel, the multitude, for it is accomplished against
their will, and consequently appears to them in the light of a humiliation, even
when it is solely a question of aesthetic things. Delacroix painted his objects as
battle-pieces, and this pleased the mob, although it was by no means martially
disposed. Courbet treated them as still life, and this was considered unfeeling.
Generalisation was the art of the one no less than of the other ; it was only the
generaliser who had changed. At the same time, Courbet's art was by no means
an absolute novelty. Many of the Dutchmen had painted like him in all essentials.
But their manner of generalising, it appeared, was based on a conception, the
rollicking gaiety of which amuses posterity. Their genre style helped them.
Those, indeed, who went recklessly beyond the genre style, like the aged Rem
brandt, came off very badly with the method. The second Anatomy Lesson
was, no doubt, just as irritating to contemporaries as Courbet's Femme Coucbee.

* Journal, ii. p. 159. t " L'Art vivant" (Fischbacher : Paris, 1887).

244 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

It must be admitted that Courbet did all he could personally to make his manner
detestable to the public. He roared with laughter when they talked to him
of soul, and would not admit — was perhaps himself unconscious of the fact —
that his own things allowed plenty of scope for the discussion of soul, if people
did not restrict the term to the souls of painter-poets in action.

For it would be by no means audacious to reckon him among the disciples of
Romanticism ; not that of the Delacroix worshippers, but that of the widest
domain of Delacroix' art, if we strip this of all literary trappings, and go down
to essentials. In the beginning we noted certain affinities to the painter of the
Dante s Boat. These disappear in the course of years, but recur at the time
of full fruition, in the sixties. Courbet aimed at similar ends by different
methods. That he strikes us as so different from Delacroix is perhaps less his
fault than ours, because we find it so difficult to cast off the fetters of the
object, and are deceived by the less apparent character of his Romanticism.
His distant affinity to Daumier is more easily recognised. This his contem
poraries saw, and of course used to the detriment of Courbet. It was made
a reproach to him that he sought inspiration in Daumier's caricatures,
and emulated Hogarth. This seems less abusive to us now than it did
fifty years ago, when the comparison was intended to belittle both reputed
exemplar and supposed imitator. The vigourous line of Daumier's drawings may
have pleased Courbet, though he knew himself to be of other stuff. But he
was nearer to Daumier, the great painter, the creator of the Wagon
de troisieme Classe, &c., and we seem to find an echo of this sympathy
in many a sketch of Courbet's. More evident — nay, most unmistakable — is the
relation to another master of the same period, a painter highly esteemed by both
Delacroix and Daumier — Decamps. Decamps and Courbet are near relatives,
not only as animal painters, in which genre both made use of the same broad
methods — the two hounds in La Curee are of the same breed as Decamps' famous
dogs — but more especially as portrait painters, if we can term Courbet's flesh
paintings portraits, and can admit studies of four-footed sitters to the category.
In both there is the same sincerity, leading by a like road to the monumental.
When Decamps in his youth painted the Defaite des Cimbres, now in the Louvre,
he made the human horde grow out of the soil, in order to get the indescribable
effect of mass he has achieved. It is hardly necessary to see these hordes at all to
feel this same impression of a vast animated field, so strangely dramatic is the
formation of the surface. This was Courbet's way of thinking too, and in this
he was confirmed by his study of the greatest genius of that generation, the germ
of all the rest, Gericault, traces of whom we have already noted in Courbet's
early work. But it was at his ripest period that the painter of the Radeau de la
Meduse is most apparent, not so much in any special picture as in general outlook,
in temperament. Courbet shows the same dramatic quality which Gericault was
able to give to a face, a horse, a piece of ground, however flat and bare, the dramatic
quality which lies in the conception of the incident and the vigour of its render
ing. Not so seductively as his great forerunner, it is true, and without the charm
of splendid colour finally achieved by Gericault. Courbet's palette remained
old-fashioned. And he lacked the Hellenism of the young giant ; the plebeian
flavour in many of the pseudo-Socialist's pronouncements was very remote from
the innate nobility of the cavalier painter. But the vigour of instinct, the audacity
of power, is common to both. Both knew where the secret of effect lay.

COURBET: THE GROTTO OF THE LOIRE

PHOTOGRAPH DURAN'D-RUEL

COURBET: THE GROTTO

PHOTOGRAPH DURAND-RUEL

GUSTAVE COURBET 245

Gcricault accompanied Courbet to the threshold of his last artistic phase,
which we may call his phase of pure reason, a short but imperishable epoch.
This last stage he travelled quite alone. It is the period of his latest picture in the
Louvre, La Vague. It is, however, not possible to define it very precisely. There
are many contemporary pictures, portraits in particular, which show no relation
to this, and might very well have been painted ten years earlier.

The Trouville sea-pieces begin about the middle of the sixties. They are
legion. Castagnary asserts that he painted one every day in a few hours, and
produced about forty of them in the summer of 1865. They were at first quiet
surfaces, brilliantly divided, in which the perspective is only animated by
the various tones of the water under the various rays of light. His cele
brated phrase, " Le paysage est une affaire de tons," could not be more strik
ingly illustrated than by his sea-pieces — sea-portraits, as we might call them.
At first he painted them lovingly, almost with tenderness, so carefully did he trace
the blue surface which casts its lustre into the heavens and is reflected thence
again. Here he became a poet. The Femme a la Vague of the Faure collection,
painted in 1868, which to Courbet was perhaps merely the study of a naked torso
in the water, became a symbol. Here again he put all his strength into the
modelling of a female body, moulding the bust and the uplifted arms with con
summate mastery, and so preserving the rhythm of the sea in spite of the minute
painting that we seem to behold a personification of the wave.

But nothing approaches the vigour of expression with which he represented
the element itself without any accessories at this period. He was even a more
enthusiastic swimmer than sportsman, and we feel this in the latest sea-pieces.
They are painted as seen from the sea, not from the land — waves as they appear to
one buffeted by them. He expresses on a large scale the maximum of power
with a comparative minimum of visible space, sections of the whole raging welter
of the waters.

The Wave of 1870, in the Louvre, marks the culminating-point of this period ;
and it is not a solitary example. There are about a dozen variants — one in the
Berlin Gallery, one in the Stedelijk Museum at Amsterdam, others in private collec
tions. In the Louvre version the relation of the water to the blue-gray sky is
unusually beautiful, but on the other hand the over-insistent boats on the shore
and the shore itself are disturbing elements. The old fault which Delacroix
criticised is not even yet overcome. It is the same fault which dims the splendour
of the brilliant grotto pictures to some extent. In one of these a man is sitting
in the cave, in another we see a couple of deer. The proportion of these to the
rest is altogether faulty, not only as to size, but as to material. The rock is felt,
and translated into a wonderful new material. No detail is given, though we
seem to be standing close to it. It is the might of this upheld and upholding
homogeneous mass which is painted, and beside it the figures and animals look
trivial. In the Berlin example the shore occupies only a little bit of the left
side. In others we have only sea and sky. He never succeeded in animating these
roaring waves with ships in a credible fashion. All suggestion of humanity seems
a crime against this solitary Nature.

In 1870 Courbet reached the summit of his art, and descended rapidly into
the valley. He attempted to play a part in the Commune, and this was his un
doing. What was the precise degree of his offence, whether he was justly con
demned, whether the friends who exonerated him from all share in the destruction

246 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

of the Vendome column were right or not, are matters which no longer interest
us greatly. His interference in politics was one of the discords of his life, and,
like all the rest, it arose from an excess of vigour. He looked upon politics as a
blague, and found people who took the politician seriously, instead of allowing
some latitude to the artist.

In his last years he painted, in addition to portraits, a number of still-life
pictures, in which his delight in material achieved a final victory. A very
beautiful portrait of himself in high tones, painted in 1871 in the prison of Ste.
Pelagic, and now in the Mesdag Museum, as a pendant to the remarkable portrait
of Delacroix by himself, shows the combination of a mellow stroke-painting with
the most delicate tonal art in the hair and beard, a combination only possible to
this versatile master. The still-life pictures of the same period offer a final pro
blem for solution. It is indeed remarkable that at this stage, after his brilliant
landscapes and sea-pieces, Courbet should have set aside the results therein
achieved, and painted his fruit like an old master. In the same collection at The
Hague there is a picture with some wonderful apples, also painted in prison.
The fruits, rounded with a very fine brush, glow like the faces in the Enterre-
ment, but much more tenderly and purely. Whitish lights are reflected in the
smooth, deep red material. The apples lie in company with a duck and a blue
Delft jar in — a landscape. A stately brown tree enlivens the foreground, and
behind it stretches a superb whitish gray sky. This arrangement is still more striking
in the similar, but not quite so successful, still-life of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum.*
The apples here again are glowing red, except one, which stands out in vivid
yellow. Here, even more than in the Hague picture, the landscape is treated as if
the apples were important active agents. The tree behind them should be by
rights four times as large, and the reddish landscape four times as extensive. And
even this gross blunder in perspective, obviously the result of unaccustomed
painting without models, is overcome by the perfection of the material. We are
inclined to think we ourselves must be wrong, rather than attribute a glaring error
to the master.

The outlaw painted no more great works. Leaving the Parisian catastrophe
out of the question, it may be that his irregular life, and notably his immoderate
drinking, hastened his end. He died in the Swiss village of La Tour de Peilz

on the last day of 1877, aged fifty-seven years.

*******

If we survey Courbet's life-work, as far as it is possible so to do, his develop
ment becomes clear, to a certain extent. We see at least a definite course ; and
the fact that this is not the only one, and that the problem is not to be categori
cally solved, tends to increase the interest rather than to belittle the artist. We
understand that the softness of the forties had to go to make way for the momentous
works of the Enterrement period, and that the atmosphere from which these arose
had to be replaced by the mightier material of the later landscape painter. We
•see the steadily increasing unity which manifests itself in the woodland pictures,
and lastly in the sea-pieces, and feel that the constantly recurring contrast between
modelling of details and generalisation was necessary to make the end so superb.

We feel some surprise now that no one in the master's lifetime called atten
tion to this, the most important aspect from the artistic point of view, that no one

* Dated 1872. It is, moreover, the only genuine Courbet in the Rijksmuseum. The two landscapes
are forgeries.

CONSTANT™ GUYS: AT MABILLE <»-ATI

GUSTAVE COURBET 247

pointed out the unique combination of the weightiest problems of painting in a
single personality, that, amidst all the wrangling, no voice proclaimed Courbet's
lofty artistic attitude. To accuse this complexity of manifestations of being
limited, to dispose of Courbet by dubbing him a stupid fellow, as nearly all the
writers who have dealt with him have done, seems to me the height of folly.
It is sometimes urged that a critic who censures an artist has no right to be severe,
because he himself could not do better. This is, of course, absurd. But it is a
different matter when the critic fastens on personal things, as all Courbet's bio
graphers have done hitherto. Courbet's oft-proclaimed stupidity is a biographi
cal detail of secondary importance. It is true that we are not very favourably
impressed by sayings of his that have come down to us, or by certain transactions
of his that have been recorded. But is it not conceivable that a man who could
do what he liked as an artist, and who rose to this omnipotence from humble
origin, without finding one sensible companion among his many adherents, may
have paid for his consciousness and clarity as an artist by the weakness of other
parts of his intelligence ? It requires no great genius for analysis to understand
this combination of great artistic gifts with very human failings : a genius spurred
by an alcoholic imagination, condemned to carry about with him the mind of a
sly, greedy, and tyrannical peasant, and to pose before the coarse spirits of his
circle under a mask borrowed partly from Rabelais, partly from Don Quixote.
The only sensible book about Courbet that has appeared so far is the raw psycho
logy of a boon companion, who apparently confines himself to a record of the
pranks and jests of the man, with such sincerity that the artist's true face looks out
most poignantly from the tragi-comedy.*

Whether those who concerned themselves with art in France really knew him
I will not decide. In any case their judgments were over-hasty. The bare
fact, for instance, that he was fond of painting his own portrait has been sufficient
to establish his narrow-minded vanity in the minds of his biographers — I could
quote some half-dozen. There is not a single portrait of Courbet by himself that is
not a masterpiece of painting or drawing, and this should sufficiently explain the
existence of them all. No one has ever made it a reproach to Rembrandt that he
showed a like interest in his own countenance.

* ******

Courbet, the child of Nature, began by working after the fashion of the best
painters. He took the methods of the old masters as he found them, because he
could use them thus, and modified them afterwards in the manner best suited to
his purpose. He handled the brush with the same mastery they showed, and
when he saw that he could do more with the palette knife, he threw the brush
aside. Even this his critics have made a reproach to him ! Lemonnier writes
as if Courbet had been the inventor of this " vice nouveau," just as if Decamps
before him, Constable before him again, and before Constable many another
glorious master, Rembrandt above all, had not practised this "vice." Indeed,
Courbet continued the old masters, almost in a literal sense, save that in the span
of a single lifetime he went through a development similar to that of Rembrandt
in olden times, a development only accomplished by whole generations in earlier ages
still. If Rembrandt and Hals had lived some centuries later they would have
come to Courbet's manner.

* Gros-Kost : " Courbet, Souvenirs intimes " (Paris: Derveaui, 1880).

248 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

This brings me to an analytical element which I passed over before, in the
interests of continuity.

To give the Spaniards their full sponsorial rights, I merely glanced at the
influence of the Dutchmen. This asserts itself when that of Velazquez and
Zurbaran begins to wane. Strange to say, Courbet reminds us less of the great
tone-painters of Holland than of the masters whose chief preoccupation was
form. He recalls Potter, and even the " hard " Potter who painted the Young
Bull in the Mauritshuis. The weakness of this masterpiece, its lack of atmo
sphere, was also Courbet's weakness. But their beauties are identical too — the fine
modelling, the exhaustive handling of the theme to get the desired effect. We seem
to recognise the superb figure of the man by the tree in many of the Frenchman's
pictures. Among the painters of interiors, Aertsen seems to have attracted him
rather than Craesbeeck, in spite of his autobiographical assertions — the Aertsen
without the brown sauce, who enamelled rather than painted the cook in the
white apron and red skirt of the Brussels Gallery. Hals we found at the beginning.
Courbet remained true to him all his life. At his prime the greatest of the
Dutchmen came into his orbit. The Puits Noir landscapes are painted like
Rembrandt's latest portraits of himself. The relation to Hals is more intimate.
Courbet does not rise to the spiritual sphere of the Syndics. His humanity too
was akin to Hals. From all we know of the Haarlemer, he must have been a
similar personality — a genius who preferred the superficial aspects.

These influences gradually drove Velazquez and Zurbaran into the back
ground. The mature landscape painter shows no trace of their manner. But
we find affinities of structure in Goya's landscapes. The fine May-tree sketch in
the Berlin National Gallery, with its large planes spread with the palette knife,
would certainly have delighted Courbet.

Among the immediate predecessors of Courbet the landscape painter we must
not overlook Constable ; and this relation brought Courbet and Corot into line,
though the Englishman's influence on the two was of a very different kind. Corot
profited most ; he cleaned his palette. Courbet's colour was not affected in any
way, but, on the other hand, he was frequently stimulated by Constable's handling.
His temperament differed even more radically from the Englishman's than
Corot's less sharply defined individuality. Courbet's technique, like Corot's
methods, gained steadily in breadth, whereas Constable became sharper. Courbet's
whole field of development, moreover, was more complex. But it is obvious
that he had seen Constable. It is not unlikely that Georges Michel may have
served as intermediary. Michel, one of the first artists who painted the woods of
Fontainebleau, was a precursor whose importance has not been sufficiently insisted
upon.* Michel paid a visit to England at the time of Constable's greatest successes.
His resemblance to Courbet not only in the woodland scene in the Louvre, but in
certain more important landscapes, is striking. I am not, of course, comparing
him with Courbet at his best.

This necessary analysis may have led the reader to think of Courbet as an
artist interesting mainly by the various strains that met in him, or by the specu
lations concerning technique to which he gives rise. If so, the author rather
than his hero is at fault. Brilliantly as Courbet painted, no one was ever less
absorbed in mere manipulation. An illustration will make my point clearer. A
painter I have repeatedly mentioned, who was in certain respects closely related

* See Andre Michel, "Notes sur 1'Art moderne " (Colin et Cie. : Paris, 1896).

LlJ <

GUSTAVE COURBET 249

to Courbet, Decamps, was a craftsman in a much narrower sense, and it was just
his technical, or rather technological, preoccupations which placed him so far
below the master of Ornans. The procedure of his painting so fascinated him
that at last he had but one idea — how to make the weft of his picture more solid
and more brilliant. His painting became a kind of complicated handiwork; he
embroidered his pictures, regardless of all but the embroidery. He became a
brilliant artificer, a mannerist.

In Courbet's case the recklessness of the Bohemian tended to preserve him
from a declension due in a great measure to commercial considerations. But
even he was occasionally betrayed by his dexterity, and gave us pictures that
detract from the sum of his achievement. The Brussels Museum has had the
ill-luck to acquire three very different examples of the master, all of very inferior
quality. The portrait of Stevens, in an unpleasant brownish red tone, shows
the smooth painting without any of the obstacles which Courbet had to overcome
in the process — obstacles we must feel in order to appreciate the gift. The por
trait of Mme. Fontaine shows the same defect in another — a bluish black — tone.
In the most important of the three, the picture of the dancer Guerrero, great
qualities underlie every possible weakness. The portrait suffers most of all from
the unresolved harmony of the colouring. The degradation of the red skirt into
the detonating yellow red of the curtain on the left and the dull background to
the right is peculiarly unhappy. The hideous frame is yet another unfortunate
factor.

Fortunately these exceptions are rare, and they show none of that organisa
tion in error which marks the mannerist. He never reduced either his vices or
his virtues to a formula. It is this which differentiates him most sharply from
the old masters, especially from those to whom he is most nearly akin. Rembrandt
and Hals satisfy us by their perfectly logical development. With Courbet, as
we have seen, this development is to be traced only with certain reservations. It
was undoubtedly most prominent in the sixties, but this point of culmination is
not invariably above the level of the early works. We see, of course, the same artist.
Many sides have progressed ; but many others have remained stationary, though
we are conscious that they tended to greatness. The most remarkable thing is the
high level of his beginnings. Other artists come into the world with talent.
Courbet seems to have been born with mastery. He is like a living receptacle
of precious things. If this seems remarkable enough in our traditionless age,
the fact that this receptacle was a peasant makes it phenomenal. Examination
of his methods of painting rebounds ineffectually from this phenomenon. It may
bring us nearer to isolated pictures, but it tells us nothing of the source of the
stream.

* * * * * * *

Thus, for all the independent glory of his newer art, the audacious revolu
tionary appears before us linked to the past, with the old masters, the great Dutch
men and Spaniards of the golden age of painting, and not less closely with the
most notable artists of the age immediately preceding his own, with those decisive
influences which prepared the way for the art of the nineteenth century.

If any further justification for renewed appreciation of the master were
required, we might point to the position occupied by Courbet in the art of the
present. The generation of the second half of the nineteenth century in France,
Holland, Belgium, and Germany, and also to a certain degree in England, the

VOL. I 2 I

250 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

generation which gave us modern painting, pays homage to a beneficent master in
Courbet. Modern art has many tendencies. The further art advances, the more
various do they become. If we were asked to name the person who has exercised the
most momentous influence, and without whom our most important developments
would be unthinkable, we should cite Courbet. The most distinguished personalities
in France were so dependent upon him in their beginnings that it would hardly
be an exaggeration to call them his pupils.

In England, realism assimilated the ideas attributed to Courbet in France
rather than the master's painting. In Germany, on the other hand, the painter
of Ornans was accepted with fervour. Viktor Mailer, and afterwards Leibl,
•drew inspiration from him. Thoma, too, owes the fine works of his early
period to Courbet's influence. Round Leibl and Trilbner, and finally round
Liebermann, grew up a school, the only one in the Germany of the nineteenth
century that wanted to paint and only to paint. They honour Courbet as their
intellectual if not their active and personal founder.

Belgium is no less indebted to the master. Louis Dubois and Arton, Baron,
Boulanger, Sacre, and Rops — as far as he attempted to paint — in short, the whole
body of serious artists, who, gathering round Courbet's friend, Alfred Stevens, and
Henri de Braekeleer, gave the best in Belgian painting, derive more or less directly
from Courbet.

In the Holland of Maris, Mauve, and Mesdag he divides the honours of
inspiration with Daubigny and the older painters of Fontainebleau. In Scandi
navia, in Switzerland, and in all countries where artists concerned themselves
with the true nature of painting, Courbet's spirit made for progress.

In spite of this universal importance, in spite of the comprehensive work
which, setting aside all these relationships, strikes one as a mighty, immortal
life, Courbet stands in the cold shadow of forgetfulness. The dealer sets prices
ten and twenty times higher on his disciples' pictures than on his, and the
connoisseur restricts himself to historical appreciation. France is responsible —
the France who could not forget the man in the great artist. No doubt this
frame of mind will disappear with the eye-witnesses of the events of 1871. Cour
bet himself is to blame to some extent. In his last years he accepted the help of
inferior collaborators, and signed a number of landscapes he had barely touched.*

Strange to say, the rapidly consummated fame of the Impressionists was of
most vital disadvantage to him. France was sighing for more national artists.
The age demanded lighter colour, greater taste, purer harmonies. The Enterre-
ment a Ornans was eclipsed by the luminous splendour of the Dejeuner sur I 'Herbe.
This instinct has given us so many works much more exquisite, and not less — nay,
more — important, that we cannot reproach it. No references to history can guide
us in questions of feeling, nor any sense of justice to the dead. And if we had
to choose, who would not rather forego this one than the many indispensables ?
But is this hard choice really imposed upon us ? Is the space for great men in our
memory as limited as the room in a theatre ? Have we not reconquered others
who were deprived of the affection of humanity for decades and centuries because
they did not catch the taste of the day ? And here I may touch on the perverse
criterion that we ought all to resist : we ought not to treat great artists as matters
of taste. It is not so much justice to them as consideration for ourselves that
demands a more serious appreciation. Enjoyment of Rembrandt was denied

* Many of these were painted by his young friend B. Pata.

JONGKIND: VIEW OF HONFLEUR (1865)

PHOTOGRAPH DURAND-RUKL

SISLEY: THE FLOOD (L'INONDATION) (1875)

CA.MONDO COLLECTION, PARIS

GUSTAVE COURBET 251

to generations while a taste for the rococo prevailed because of the darkness
of his canvases or the homeliness of his figures. Another period turned away
from Rembrandt because its severity condemned him as baroque ; the Primitives
were a sealed book to another epoch. Fashions pass away. They are legitimate
forms of expression, the fulfilment of certain reactionary requirements. Great
artists should stand on a more assured basis, because that relation to taste
which their works reveal, in common with all human productions, does not exhaust
their value. What we love in them, what gives them their value to us, is more
than the directly serviceable impulsion, more than the strengthening of our
sense of line or colour, or the enrichment of our feeling for form, important as
this is. All these are profitable, but not essential, advantages auxiliary to the artist's
achievement. The greatness of that achievement lies in its affording us the
possibility of purely spiritual enjoyment. Every work of art is a victory over
materials. Its forms and colours are only the banners of the victor. His con
quest is what we can conquer afresh at any time ; the enthusiasm which exalts us is
inexhaustible, because it is impossible for us to approach the same work twice
in precisely the same condition. This is the immortal benefaction of art. And
as its gifts enrich us, it is to our interest to diminish the numbers of great for
gotten artists. For every forgotten genius means so many hours stolen from our
beatitude.

252 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

THE GENERATION OF 1870

UNDER the generic term "Impressionists," various artists have been grouped
together, some of whom had only this in common, that they exhibited together,
that together they endured the abuse of their peers and of the public, and
that they sought solace in each other. Their bond of union was what their
age scoffed at in their beginnings. It was the age when the luxurious Second
Empire was tottering to its fall ; the spirit of the times was singularly sterile in
the domain of painting, if we make an exception in the case: of Lami and his
circle.* Its instincts were for unrealities of every kind, rather than for the
rising splendour of the generation which succeeded the great race of 1830 in
France and in the world.

That age has passed away ; the generation with which Manet came to man
hood has been followed by another, which sees with astonishment, as the shadows
of the epoch roll away, how sharply those personalities whom it ignored stand out
in relief. All the more glorious therefore is the house which modern reverence
has built up round them, the sanctuary to which the best artists of our own day
resort to collect their strength for future works. Four mighty columns bear it
aloft : Manet, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir. They do not stand alone. Ought we not
perhaps to add to these four corner-stones of modern painting several others,
notably that of the most vital of contemporary masters, Monet ? We should not
hesitate, but that the four are all-sufficient for the structure. To others, no
longer among us, piety would fain offer the same tribute. I do not mean Puvis,
who built himself a temple of his own, but a less illustrious, though no less
inspired master, a contemporary of the men of 1830, whose influence was first
felt by the later members of the group : Jongkind, the Hieroshige of Europe,
whose inimitable little works in oil and water-colour, in the collections of Count
Camondo, Tavernier, and several others of our most fastidiousi connoisseurs, are
like premonitions of modern Impressionism. And one of the younger men, too
early lost to us, the one most closely akin to Jongkind, with whom he worked for
a long time, the artificer of the loveliest jewel of modern landscape, Sisley,
who as Roger Miles said, found the gestures of things, and whose death alone

* This exception, is of course, more important than the curt parenthesis above would seem to
imply. We are only just beginning to appreciate Heim, Bonhomme, Bonvin, and above all, Lami.
Eugene Lami, who died a nonogenarian in 1890, embodied the difference between the eighteenth
and the nineteenth centuries. With an exquisite tact, in which he concealed the most brilliant satire,
he painted the glittering Court of Napoleon III. and its women, with more gaiety and good humour
than the mordant Guys. He was a " little master " whose minute yet marvellously rich and free
technique is unparalleled in our times. Among other examples, the Centennial Exhibition included
his masterpiece, the entry of the Duchess of Orleans at the Tuileries, from the collection of M. Alexis
Rouart (brother of the famous collector of Corots), who owns a considerable number of this modern
St. Aubin's best works, and also fine examples of Heim and Bonhomme, &c. Strange to say, Lami is
unrepresented in the Parisian museums, save by two water-colours at the Luxembourg. We reproduce
one of the best sketches of his early period ; it has a charm of colour that recalls Constable, and heralds
the sporting pictures of Degas and his school.

MANET: THE NYMPH SURPRISED (NYMPHE SURPRISE) 1861

MANZI COLLECTION, PARIS
PHOTOGRAPH CA.MKNTRON

THE GENERATION OF 1870 253

made the fortunate possessors of his pictures the owners of property worth ten
times its orginal value.

The rank and file, who fought with less distinction, though with no less
merit, are innumerable. A veteran, mourned by many friends, has passed
away of late, a white-bearded old Jew, picturesque as any who ever sat to
Rembrandt, yet who had nothing of Rembrandt in him : Pissarro. With him and
with Monet, the meridional Bazille entered the lists. Manet taught him to
open his eyes, which looked through purer air at Montpellier than that vouchsafed
to the Parisian. His flower-pieces might have been painted by Manet in his last
period, and perhaps he will some day be recognised as the first of his generation,
to whom the principle of pleinairisme was revealed. His fame would have been
assured long ago, if he had followed Monet and Pissarro to London in 1870,
instead of remaining to fall by a German bullet.

To others, whose lives were longer, length of days did not bring renown.
Public interest is only just beginning to awaken in Lebourg, a painter whose
richness of tone was scarcely surpassed by any member of his school, and Vignon,
who so amply filled the space dividing Manet and Monet, had become, like his
kinsman, Cezanne, a blind old man before the slow-witted amateur began to
appreciate him. Boudin, one of the oldest of the group, Jongkind's best pupil
and Monet's most beneficent teacher, lived in obscurity till his death a few years
ago, when he was approaching his eightieth year. A distinguished woman,
immortalised by Mallarme, Berthe Morisot, interrupts the long line of men.
Her sympathy with Manet was that of a man, her complete assimilation of his
art was only possible to a woman. Eva Gonzal£s was always a pupil only ;
Berthe Morisot sublimated Manet. The nobility of her colour served her for
the representation of a modern symbol of womanhood, and her inimitable taste
enabled her to make the symbol purer and more brilliant than the art of her
exemplar had taught her. She always reminds me of the hapless Marie Bashkirtseft,
who wrote and thought as Berthe Morisot painted ; would she had found a
Manet instead of a Bastien-Lepage for guide !

I have named a few of these famous moderns of whom, till quite lately, it
was usual in conservative circles to speak as impetuous youths, and " Decadents,"
as we are fond of calling those who are healthier than their neighbours.

I believe their art to be as healthy as it is possible for art to be to-day. It is
certainly not sickly, but rather too healthy, too simple for our worship of the old
masters, and the only art that deserves to rank with the great art of the past, if,
indeed, any does so deserve.

For democratic in its origin as this art may seem to the conservative, it will
be easy to convince the true lover of the old masters that it springs from an
intimate relation to the great efforts of an earlier age. Not, of course, an organic
and methodical relation. It passed over a generation or two, and took from that
immediately preceding it only what it could turn to account : Delacroix and
Courbet. To that which is eternally the same, not young, not old, merely
existent ; which brandishes its brushes, claiming to be a pillar of our society, and
is so well suited to the world it bedaubs — it had no relation ; the abyss between
the two was as the difference between the gutturals of a savage and the speech
of a Florentine lady. But with the old, the eternally young, the eternally
rejuvenescent of a bygone age it has many bonds of union.

It was not its fault that these were not even more numerous. Nothing could

254 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

be more inept than the glib phrase that labels the natural expression of these
artists Naturalism. At best it is superfluous. In Paris, even in Courbet's day,
Naturalism was a purely artistic formula, which, however independently applied,
was bound up with the strongest tradition. The men of 1830, when they went
into the forest of Fontainebleau, to paint all day from Nature, took with them
something more than their primitive easels, primordial as they may have seemed
to themselves, and simple as they truly were as compared with their predecessors
of the eighteenth century. Consider the amazing versatility of Corot, the colouristic
magnificence of Daubigny, the monumental art of Millet. But when applied to
the painters of I 870 the term Naturalism becomes pure nonsense. It says no more
of their art than we should say of our clothes if we called them naturalistic.
Renoir is so perfectly human in his pictures, both in good and evil,
that we never wish him anything but what he is, though but few of his
pictures strike us as absolutely perfect. This modern sometimes shows a tincture
of Second Empire vulgarity that may be repulsive to some people ; but he who can
make a true estimate of values will be so carried away by the artist, that he will
finally accept such things as no less natural and indispensable than the voice of
some sympathetic person, which was at first unpleasant to our ears. These artists
go deeper perhaps than the favourites of our fathers, because they do not reveal
themselves at the first moment, nor, indeed, to every one. A Cezanne or a Gauguin
must be won by love ; they are quiet, solitary souls, who do not disclose their
secrets in trivial company. They never took part in the fashionable hubbub of
the great exhibitions ; at most they appeared in the Salon des Refuses or in the
anarchical community of the Independants ; and yet they are by no means anarchists.
In the midst of the thousand tendencies that make up the art of our day, the
Impressionists are a family, which, though each of its members disposes of his
own property, seems to be as closely knit together as the famous circle of Floren
tines who gathered round Filippo Lippi. The parallel is more natural and more
evident than the favourite comparison of the English aesthetes with the genera
tion of Botticelli. Even if the Impressionists produce no Quattrocento, if their
means and their sphere of influence continue to be superficially circumscribed, the
nobility of their conception and the vigour of their expression are none the less
lofty on this account ; and if the undaunted championship of many speaks well
for a cause, admiration is justified here.

The cause itself is not easy to formulate.* In this respect the Florentines
were more fortunate. Their goal shone forth in far more visible splendour, and
was recognised by the patronage of princes as by the consciousness of the people.
The comprehension of all surrounded and encouraged it. The later artists are
modern painters. But if ever our mourning over our abstract art may be mingled
with rejoicing, it is in the contemplation of these men.

* Camille Mauclair has lately essayed this in the chapter " La Theorie Impressioniste " of his
book " L'Impressionisme" (" Librairie de 1'Art Ancien and Moderne "), and has succeeded as far as
his general thesis is concerned. He is not to be implicitly followed in his grouping of individuals.

MANET: FISHING (LA PECHE) 1861

m.'RAND-RUEL COLLECTION

MANET: THE AL FRESCO LUNCHEON (LE DEJEUNER SUR
L'HERBE) 1863

MOREAU-NELATON COLLECTION, PARIS

EDOUARD MANET. PORTRAIT OF COURBET

G. MANET. OLYMPIA

FROM A WOODCUT BY THE PAINTER

MANET: LOLA DE VALENCE 1862

CAMONDO COLLECTION, PARIS
PHOTOGRAPH CAMENTRON

MANET AND HIS CIRCLE

MANET and his friends had two great harbingers — Delacroix and Courbet.
Manet, indeed, had yet another of an earlier period, to whom I should have
devoted a chapter here, had not others already written of him inimitably. This
was Francesco Goya.

None of the colourists of Manet's generation made men forget the colourist
Delacroix ; everything, or nearly everything, that tends to their glory increases his
fame ; he was their god. Delacroix' colour had come too early for the weakness
of humanity. When the trappings of Romanticism were cleared away, his palette
was thrown aside as one of its accessories. After the strong and healthy recognition
of reality by the great landscape school of 1830 and the realism of the school of
Courbet, painters were impelled to get at a right distance from Nature; this was
the logical way between the two manifestations that had come to an end. As
soon as it was consciously recognised, the method of Daumier and of Delacroix was
necessarily decisive. Why this way is modern, and why it achieves results which
respond to vital and weighty needs, I hope at least to indicate in due course. The
consciousness of this is a piece of modern culture. It is rooted in the postulate
that Manet and his circle gave us not Nature, but the natural, and that all
naturalisation of our instincts, i.e., all sharpening, purification, and amelioration, is
modern. Every joy is progress, and so therefore was Manet's achievement. That
achievement and its results had never occurred even to the magician Rubens,
and, going through the whole history of art, we may find something similar,
but never quite the same decisive consciousness. There are other values, the
perfection of which put us to the blush, but in spite of this we would not
exchange for them our own, the resplendent symbol of our best aspirations, our
happiness, our epoch.

Manet discovered, to the horrified amazement of the world, that a fine
feminine skin is neither yellow nor brown, but luminously white in the light,
especially in juxtaposition to dark colours, and that blood pulses, that nerves and
senses throb beneath it.

Millet painted the repose of life, and found greatness therein; he transmitted
to the simple action he represented a very great and very simple thought, which
was expressed in like terms by all his washerwomen, mothers, housewives, and
workmen of various kinds, and finally carried conviction by constant repetition of
the one sound in so many different forms. It was a generalisation that became
the more impressive, the more deliberately it was set forth. In comparison, the
realists were clumsy folk, more modest than Millet, for they allowed Nature to
think for herself, more presumptuous and more limited, for they expounded what
seemed to them the thoughts of Nature in their own narrow fashion.

Manet completed Courbet's material, and refrained from any sort of formulation,
in one sense or the other. He made those elements of the material that seemed
to him vital to his manner greater and firmer; not in order to subject it the more

VOL. I 2 K

258 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

intelligibly to an idea, a theory, but rather to make it as vital as possible, capable
of producing the effect of unity, and so of style ; a strong, original organism,
beautiful by that which makes it organic. This is the ancient process common to
all great — that is to say, to all instinctive — epochs, when artists were unconscious
of any obligation to create for the pleasure of others. Manet discovered a new
unity; no new law, as the aberrations of modern criticism would have us believe,
but a new means of working out the old law.

He had been educated by an enthusiastic study of the Spaniards and the
Venetians. Duret's* statement that Manet's enthusiasm for things Spanish dated
from the visit of a troupe of Spanish strollers to Paris contradicts the repeated
assertions as to his plagiarisms.

Manet was not the first Frenchman who made the Louvre extend to the
Prado. The supersession of the artistic element of Spain by her stronger sister on
the other side of the Pyrenees began as soon as French art became natural and inde
pendent, no longer " Eighteenth Century," and no longer " Empire." Delacroix
foreshadows it, and it becomes more obvious in Daumier and Gavarni. In
Courbet it reveals itself decisively. Guys already shows it in Manet's vein. That
which served to aggravate the weird decadence of this pioneer, whom we may call
the Blake of the Impressionists, was healthily absorbed by Manet, and remained a
precious possession to him and his friends. Most of the early Impressionists are
half Spaniards — Cezanne in his finest pictures; even Monet when he painted his
magnificent female portraits under the influence of Courbet; Renoir in one of the
best works of the whole period, The Naked Boy with the Cat; Bazille in the fine
Sortie du 'Sain of the Centennial Exhibition (1900), the pendant of Manet's
Olympia. Ribot adopted characteristic traits of his neighbours in another direction.
Monticelli even may have made incursions in their domain. In our own day,
the Belgian master, Evenepoel, who died a few years ago, followed in Manet's foot
steps to Spain. Sargent and Besnard, among others, are unimaginable without
Spain. Many obscure painters have travelled on the same road, and to-day the
Spanish element is as much a part of the ordinary painting of the boulevard —
though there is little enough of Manet in it — as is Otero's dancing a feature of the
Varietes repertory. Zuloaga has retaliated a little by taking back to the land of
Velazquez what the Frenchmen learned from his great compatriot.

For the men of 1870, the Spanish importation was very much what the Dutch
importation had been for those of 1830. But the purposes and forms of the two
operations were very dissimilar. That which was due to Manet was as essentially
a deliverance, an awakening, as that of 1830 was a suppression, almost a moral
lesson. What this latter gave the French genius was something intimate and
spiritual ; the Dutch material, as such, is rarely apparent in French work ; but the
Frenchmen who went to Spain painted Spanish pictures as naturally as the Roman
Frenchmen had adopted Italian forms.

Nothing could more strongly attest their artistic security than this confident

* In his " Histoire d'Edouard Manet" (Paris : H. Floury, 1902). This biography is especially
yaluable from the chronological point of view, giving very precise information as to the pictures
Manet painted before he saw the Prado. Zola had already referred to the question. In his study
in the " Revue du XlXeme. Siecle " for 1867 (afterwards republished by Dentu separately, and then
again in " Mes Haines ") he wrote : " II est bon de faire savoir que si E. M. a peint des « espada ' et
des ' maja,' c'est qu'il avait dans son atelier des ve"tements espagnols et qu'il les trouvait beaux de couleur.
II a traverse 1'Espagne en 1865 seulement." Manet's most important works, the Dejeuner sur THerbe^
Le t'itux Musicifn, O/ympia, &c., were all painted before his Spanish journey.

JOHN SARGENT: MADAME GAUTREAU

MANET AND HIS CIRCLE 259

self-surrender. Here again the principle of the preservation of artistic power was
omnipotent. A will stronger than that of the individual drove the new to the
old, and allowed it to choose, impelled by the unconscious force of dim racial
instincts, what was suited to its manner, watched for the moment most favourable
to assimilation, rejected, added, and created the right vessel to contain what had
been acquired. Goya was the last of the Spaniards, a phenomenon of will and of
invention. Like to a harsh, shrill, and wholly disconnected tone, he burst suddenly
from the flaccid Spanish art of the day, comparable to a Przybyszewski in
contemporary literature ; dramatic, disconcerting, full of deep, exacerbated emo
tions, hut, even in the best of his incomprehensible works, the ill-used foundling
of a shattered bankrupt civilisation ; most poignant in his bitter self-analysis ;
tried by the loftiest criterion, he seems the frenzy of genius. Goya rushed like
a demon upon his unhappy country, and tore the deepest from its depths. After
his passage the most precious of its treasures lay together with its rubbish in
wild confusion. It was the moment for the merciful and stronger sister to gather
up the fragments and to carry the remnant to a new home.

For it needed, setting aside the colour-science of the younger man, the ripe
power that Manet added to it, the noble simplicity, the calm coolness, which
Goya affects as the pause before the storm, but which is natural to Manet. We
are silent before the Olympia, whereas before the Maja we twitch and quiver.
The one excites, the other gives the highest art can give : repose.

This repose conjoined with tension of every faculty is common only to Manet
and the greatest of the Spaniards, who lived at a time when the Spanish grandezza
was not as yet embittered by irony. But the repose which a Court-painter working
in the shadow of a Philip IV. was forced by etiquette to portray, the truth which
he drew, almost against their will, from the models imposed on him, such as his
superb Innocent X., are more alien to us than the naked exuberance of strength in
Manet, who displays all the gifts Velazquez had partly to conceal with a boldness
limited only by his own moderation. True, he has not the majesty of the master
who painted Las Meninas ; such majesty is not of our period ; Whistler has
preserved so much of it as may be adapted to present conditions without absurdity.
Manet followed after that which Velazquez concealed, without forfeiting that
golden sense of harmony in the distribution of effects, which is the greatest
glory of his exemplar. The development of modern art, tending, as it does, to
leave this ideal farther and farther behind, seems here to have taken an unex
pected turn. Since the passing of the Greeks, this repose has only been seen in
the Primitives, and with them, it has sometimes more of immobility than of peace ;
it seem to have been only attainable by sequestration, by withdrawal to the silences
of cathedral aisles. It disappeared more and more, as the variety of our increas
ingly material interests took the artistic form of pictures, and the tumult of daily
life penetrated to the temple. And lo ! here came one who found dignity and
solemnity even in this daily round, steeping triviality in a radiance that trans
figures the meanest things ; one who appealed to the soul not through the mind
but through the eye, and yet discovered secrets. . . .

This art understood what we demand, or imagine we demand from painting, that
hybrid, as to which we do not know for whom or for what it exists ; understood
what it may be to us to-day, in our whirling, rushing present, with its lightning
images, its crowded impressions, the swift and continuous succession of which
incites our receptive faculties to almost superhuman efforts.

260 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

And because nothing is so hateful to it as banality, inertia — because it too
adores the moment's grace, the naked fact that may be dealt with successfully
once in a thousand times, it foregoes the attempt to moderate its effects. It
would rather appear unfinished, if it can only make the happy cast, and concen
trate itself in one fortunate moment that belongs wholly to it.

A wit on the staff of Charivari, who discovered a sunset by Monet labelled
Impressions in the first exhibition of the new school held at Nadar's in 1874,
thought it a good joke to christen the group Impressionists. The name has
survived, its irony has evaporated. It really suggests something of the pro
gramme, of course, in a deeper conception, which recognises valuable
tendencies in what is apparently arbitrary. It covers the efforts of an art based
upon Nature, to avoid the circumlocutions induced by the eclecticism of obsolete
traditions, to give painting all possible charms, yet only those proper to its means ;
and to renounce the making of smooth formulae, in order to give results the
more sharply and strikingly. If the name was new, the thing was old enough ;
it was the consciousness of those instincts which had governed a Veronese, a
Velazquez, a Rubens, the ancestors of these modern masters. Indeed, did not
the unknown pagan, who painted the Roman frescoes, of which there are a
few fragments in the Vatican Library, foreshadow Impressionism ? * In our
times, which restrict art more and more to its own domain, a tendency sprang up
to create by means that go the deeper, the more fugitive they seem to us in their
effects ; homoeopathic methods of the choicest, instead of the coarser gifts of our
forefathers.

The criticism that can do justice to this art must also be Impressionism. As
it renounces literature, as it appeals to the eye and not to the intellect, criticism,
inviting similar sensations by other means,can give but a vague suggestion thereof.
The usual methods of analysis soon fail one here. These pictures lack all direct
associative elements. The one thing possible so far in the discussion of these
matters, where the eye is not yet susceptible solely to sensuous charm, and words
dealing therewith necessarily lack the power of appropriate suggestion, is perhaps
to determine the domain in which these influences are worked out. It is already
difficult enough to talk about pictures. But in actual conversation, some help is
found in gesture, and in the possibility of turning to account every opportunity
that may present itself for gaining access to another mind, always provided that
one's interlocutor is intelligent enough to desire the greatest of conjoint delights :
the mutual enjoyment of a purely aesthetic emotion, unspoilt by any pressure of
personal equation. In writing, the one doubtful advantage we enjoy is immunity
from interruption. . . . And further, it is obvious that the satisfaction derived
from this art can only be relative, not only because the eye of the recipient must
always remain an unstable medium, but because even in ideal enjoyment, an
unrealisable wish to sound the utmost depths of sensation keeps the mind in
continual tension. Few modern works leave us with nothing to desire, and this
is their secret charm ; like wise women, they never give themselves altogether.

And if one can appreciate what they withhold, and see how they strive
to approach ever nearer to unattainable beauty by fresh and vernal paths,
can one ever weary of following them on their way, no longer as a spectator,
but almost as a collaborator, in the vain hope of being able to co-operate with

*The exquisite Triumph of Amor, in particular, is freer, lovelier and more poetical than anything
these fragments suggested to the painters of the Renaissance.

MANET: TOILERS OF THE SEA 1874

FAURE COLLECTION, PARIS
PHOTOGRAPH CA.MKNTRON

MANET AND HIS CIRCLE 261

the eye, and to win clear indications of their bliss from that which they have
won ?

It is necessary to have read the great poets, and the power of enjoying Beethoven
is a very desirable possession ; it has been asserted that familiarity with Nietzsche
is essential and a comprehension of Dostojewskij favourable to culture. We ought
to be quite certain that children are not brought by storks, and every man should
know something of our social conditions, that he may not fall under the wheels.
I do not hesitate to pronounce the appreciation of this French art created by
Manet no less beneficial. Of course, be it understood, for him who has the mind
for it. Art is not an essential for all. Bismarck got on very well without it, and
the majority of rulers carry on the business of government competently enough
without its help. Less than ever do we need it in these days, when the joy or
living is purchased at the cost of so much pain ; there are weightier things. But
if a man's disposition leads him to interest himself in art, if the individual allows
himself to enjoy at the expense of others, if within the sphere of the abstract, after
due care for material values, there should still be a desire for satisfactions other
than those of the stomach, this is the painting, if any, that we must acclaim. We
may dismiss once for all the famous tight-rope philosophy which declares that every
manner has its pros and cons, that Manet is a fine painter and BOcklin too, that it is
possible to admire both, and that both work to the same ends in their different
ways. What we must rather recognise is, that Manet is painting, and Bocklin
something else. This something may be loftier, it may seem to us Germans more
Germanic, and may furnish themes to the poets ; even from the artistic side it may
have Its value as a stimulant to decorative art, but with the typical art that we
reverence as painting, not merely because it is beautiful, but because it is a living
portion of ourselves, it has absolutely nothing to do. Bocklin is an unrivalled
creator of fanciful conceptions, often highly original, in which the pictorial element
is the most arbitrary quality. Manet created a vast collective idea out of the purely
pictorial ; all that this art, at which centuries have worked, can give. His sole aim
was to give to our senses — and to these alone — the most beautiful impressions, the
most beautiful material, the loveliest colour, a concentration of all that we find
scattered and intermingled in Nature. This concentration of arbitrary elements,
this unerring knowledge, directed to the greatest possible simplification of
the main sensuous effect, is the personal quality, not the invention or the
fancy, which are by no means sharply distinguished from those of other men.
What interests us in the Faure, or the Youth playing the Flute, the hundred
portraits of more or less famous contemporaries, or the many flower-pieces ?
Manet's one essay in anecdotic painting, the Murder of the Emperor Maximilian,
is hardly one of his most successful efforts. But let us just make the experiment
of hanging one of those flower-pieces of which Manet painted dozens, side by side
with one of the most exuberant Bocklins, into which the painter crowded every
thing the boldest fancy could have dreamed. At a first glance, the handful of
flowers will pass unnoticed, and all eyes will be riveted on the horsemen, the cliffs,
the extraordinary animals ; every one will want to know what is happening here, and
what the man who painted all this was really thinking about. But when we have
once grasped it, our interest dies down, slowly but surely; the understanding
reposes, satisfied with its work, proudly conscious that it may place this event also
ad acta. The senses have piayed a purely subsidiary part. Then the weary eye
falls upon the flowers, and everyone who cares for flowers at all will feel a hitherto

262 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

untouched chord vibrating in his soul. The agreeable sensation he has hitherto
enjoyed at the sight of flowers is suddenly intensified in a mysterious fashion.
He has not the whole of the living flower before him — perfume, motion, all that is
indispensable in Nature is lacking — and yet there is something here, of which he
scarcely dreamed, or which he perhaps dimly wished for, in the natural blossom: a
charm that conquers mortal fragility and evanescence, and does not approach us
too closely, in spite of its strength ; that avoids the dangers of the extremes in
Nature, and does not follow up enjoyment by regret or disgust. Here the eyes feel
no fatigue, and the understanding also seems to rest. Something else works upon
us through the eye, clarifies, calms, breathes exquisite tones into our being, evokes
sensations we have never felt before, yet which fill us with a kind of familiar
delight, waxes stronger and stronger, newer and richer, until we see only the two
or three flowers, before whose quiet power the frenzy of the other picture pales to
something meagre and remote. This is not because flowers are lovelier than
charges of cavalry or combats of Tritons. An earlier master whom B5cklin
honoured, Titian, also painted such wild scenes. There is in the Uffizi a cavalry
skirmish, which could scarcely be wilder or more frenzied ; this, again, has this
curious dual life ; and when we look at it, the physical elements retire altogether
and we admire the power and vitality of the art, not of the horses and riders.

The art of all the glorious tradition inaugurated by Manet lies in a profound
grasp of some small bit of life. Herein lies the beauty we may look for in the
present day, the result of the beautiful, the consciousness of delight that inspires
us in the enjoyment of perfect works. The world has become very much uglier
since the Venus of Milo was produced, but we shall not make it more beautiful
by imitating her form. We cannot get round life ; we must make our way
through it. When we really knew it, when we realise whence its forms arise, and
what purposes they serve, we shall love it. Manet's realism is a symbol of our
instinct of self-preservation. He did not record this or that beauty, but ours ; he
showed that we may be dignified even in trousers, that beauty is fluid, that it does
not dwell in this or that, but in everything, and more especially among all things.
A Rembrandt found it even in the entrails of the slaughtered ox that hangs in the
Louvre.

That which oppresses us in life is not the ugliness of certain phenomena, not
vice and malice and misery, but the darkness in which we live, our inability to
avoid the shock because we are not prepared for it, the stupidly animal,
undisciplined nature of our experience. And this very " Impressionism " that
aims at higher knowledge may be acquired from Manet. The greatness that lies in
his pictures is fragmentary, but even in fragments it gives perfection. It aims at
simplification, that it may give in a single stroke — the elementary, fundamental
stroke, which the freely handled brush of genius lays on the canvas — a thousand
strokes, the average of all. It is great in itself, because all it touches develops
into the strongest expression of its manner, because everything it sees is seen with
such unapproachable certainty that our consciousness reposes in the shadow of a
consciousness belonging to one stronger, greater, and richer than ourselves. The
marvel is that this something greater lives among us, with us, in us, without
seducing us by objective symbolism. The famous Nana is perhaps the most
convincing document for the expressive power of the non-essential. It is difficult
to imagine anything more pungent in the shallowest sense than this boudoir-scene,
from which Zola's novel has taken every possible element of ambiguity. Yet

MANET:BEFORETHEMIRROR(DEVANT LA PSYCHE) 1876

PHOTOGRAPH DURAND-RL'El.

MANET AND HIS CIRCLE 263

nothing could be greater, and the most pious Mantegna is not more worthy of
honour than this coquettish beast in corsets and lace petticoat. This is the true
Naturalism, which, like Nature herself, reveals the wonders of creation in the
lowest things, and Zola's famous phrase, which became its gospel, is only true if
we take the '* coin de la nature " for as little, and the " temperament " for as much
as possible.

It is not only that Manet's Naturalism was more sympathetic than that of his
friend Zola, however little the latter may deserve the depreciation of some
youthful poets, which has a touch of the sourness of certain historic grapes. The
difference may lie, perhaps, only in the difference of calling, and in the fact that
Zola was not only a titanic worker, but also a *' brave citoyen " whose intentions
are not always in happy harmony with those of the artist. His origin, too,
was obvious : Balzac and Taine are more familiar to us than Velazquez and
Goya ; it is easier to talk his language, though none has so far shown a like
talent in its use ; his technique is more transparent, though it will be long before
his plastic symbolism is surpassed. Manet was only a painter, but he was this to
such purpose that he has inclined us to look upon colour and brush-stroke as the
highest instruments of divine inspiration. His bequest is incomparably greater
than Zola's. In its own domain it is hardly to be measured, and it extends far
beyond this domain, directly we permit this art to serve for other standards as well
as its own. From him, an aristocrat to his finger-tips, our generation, the few who
feel themselves to be a generation in these days, learned to shun what is paltry
and to love what is noble. The natural vigour, that in Millet was combined with
a trace of proletarian ignorance and with obvious technical limitations, was in
Manet the consequence of an infallible creative power, able to do everything, but
doing only that which beseemed it.

This gives the measure also of Manet's superiority to Courbet. It is essential
to get a clear idea of their relative positions, not in order to arrive at a cheap and
misleading pronouncement as to their absolute values, but to understand the
development to which both contributed, the most important development of our
age. The temperament of the master of Ornans was robuster than that of the
creator of the Olympia, stronger, if unconsciousness be an element of strength,
for, indeed, all Courbet's adoption of Proudhon's theories implied self-deprecia
tion. Manet had the greater intellect, the higher taste, the finer culture, and
was the superior of the two in his sagacious use of his medium. He appears as
the higher manifestation of Courbet, purified but stripped of certain advantages
in the process. He subdued the animality of Courbet, but he never produced
works so moving as the Enterrement and La Vague. The Olympia and the
Dejeuner sur F Her be, in which, moreover, there are obvious traces of the pre
decessor, contain a decorative art, which, as such, minimises the degree of
dramatic directness, which Courbet achieved in his happiest moments. The
notion of thinking of nothing but Nature made the peasant Courbet strong.
He made use of the old masters without premeditation, like an artisan, as suitable
means to an end, concerning which he gave himself up to rudimentary ideas, but
which he commanded instinctively. Manet recognised his end clearly. In him,
as in Delacroix, temperament and knowledge combined to form a rare weapon.
He saw a new and logical ideal before him, requiring not only nature, vigour, and
power of impression, but also taking thought for the concentration of the im
pression, and seeking beauty even in the elements of the picture. Hence his

264 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

harmonious colour, his beautiful surface, we might almost say, his beautiful
models. Manet's colour, most splendid in his latest works, is colour-art, purer,
more essentially effective than Courbet's tone-painting. The latter took the
vapourous brown of Velazquez' background ; Manet took his rare contrasts, and
developed them further, without renouncing the rest. There are no passages in
Manet's later pictures which do not harmonise melodiously, whereas Courbet neg
lected the inner parts of many of his surfaces, nay, sometimes killed them by too
much black. Manet may be the lesser force, but he applied this force more
effectively and placed it more resolutely at the service of his aesthetics. He
carried generalisation much further. In some of Courbet's pictures individual planes
have the effect of large luminous spots in the darkness. They are comparatively
isolated, and are brought together only by repetition of the colour and by the
relation of the masses. Manet, in spite of a scheme of colour comprising much
stronger contrasts, creates a homogeneous, and apparently fluid material. No one
ever laid to heart the truth that no thing, no being of any kind, exists alone, but
always appears surrounded by space, by light, and by air, to more brilliant purpose
than Manet. He painted with a single sweep of the brush not only his details,
but his whole picture, thus providing for the utmost harmony — in other words,
produced the appearance of material nature in the most natural manner possible.
Manet and Courbet stand for soul and body. The mind of the spectator soars
as on wings before Manet's pictures, while the greatness of Courbet's creations
almost oppresses it. Courbet's genius is great by its terrestrial elements. Manet's
might be likened to some magic fluid, in which the eyes bathe and henceforth
see only beauty.

*******

Courbet had cleft the earth with mighty strokes of the spade, and bequeathed
us not only brilliant works, but the possibility of a new conception of Nature.
Manet realised this possibility beyond all expectation, and in spite of all he
owed to Courbet and to others, appears as the more harmonious, the more
fruitful artist. To the early end of his days, he created out of a rich
abundance. When he could no longer walk, he consoled himself in his arm
chair with the gem-like art of his still-life pieces. These he might fitly
have called " arrangements " ; arrangements of life, like everything else he
touched. His vases of flowers recall Delacroix' natures mortes ; the loveliest
of these little gems hang in the Salle Thorny Thierry. We feel inclined to
fall on our knees before two of them, the Roger ddlivrant Angtiique and the
Fiancee d* Abydos. We know not which to admire most, Manet's still-life pieces,
which have the effect of historical pictures, or Delacroix' historical pictures,
which look like still-life pieces.

Manet's doctrine was the recognition of painting as flat decoration ; the ruth
less suppression of all those elements used by the old masters to seduce the eye
by plastic illusion ; and the deliberate insistence on all the pictorial elements in their
stead. The relative nature of such axioms can only be determined by examples,
and we shall presently find in Leibl an antithesis that will give the necessary
opportunity for a demonstration.

Manet's most vigorous precursor in these principles was Rubens, and every
artist who, as a painter, was mainly concerned with painting, had at least fore
shadowed his convictions. He recognised this continuity with the clairvoyance
of genius, and propagated his creed like an apostle. This was the point of attack

MANET AND HIS CIRCLE

265

for the notorious hostility that assailed him ; not his colour, for Delacroix had
accustomed his contemporaries to this, but his apparent indifference to all con
structive detail. In his insufferable study on Manet, Albert Wolff records the
humorous repartees exchanged between the two great champions of the day,
Courbet and Manet. Courbet declared the Olympia was like the Queen of Spades
coming from the bath ! Manet retorted that Courbet's ideal was a billiard-ball !
Manet, as Wolff further relates, went so far as to vote against the award of a
medal to Puvis de Chavannes, because he could model an eye!* Not only was
such a feat but the very capacity to commit it, a crime in his eyes !

Thus must differences be emphasised, it seems, to give birth to schools !

* " La Capitals dc 1'Art " (Paris : Havard). Courbet said : " C'est plat, ce n'est pas model£, on dirait
une dame dc pique d'un jeu de cartes sortant du bain ! " Ce a quoi Manet, toujours pr£t a la riposte,
r£pondit : "Courbet nous embctc enfin avec ses model es ; son ideal a lui,c'cst une bille de billard ! '

. . . Quand il s'est agi de donner la mcdaille d'honneur a Puvis . . . Manet s'ecria en plein
Salon : " Jamais je ne voterai pour un homme qui sail modeler un ail ! "

EDOUARD MANET. PORTRAIT OF GUYS.
FROM A WOODCUT BY BELTRAND.

VOL. I

2 L

CEZANNE AND HIS CIRCLE

PAUL CEZANNE

CEZANNE was the boldest spirit in the circle of the Ecole de Batignolles that
gathered round Manet. The essential principle among all of them was not
colour — this varied in every case — but flat painting as opposed to modelling in
paint. In this Cezanne surpassed even the leader of the group. We may take it
for granted that in periods of evolution the matter round which the efforts of all
revolve will be fermenting at the same moment in individual minds, and that he
who is most articulate will become the leader of the rest. For this position
Cezanne was in no sense fitted. He was a very reserved person ; of the younger
generation none ever saw him ; artists who owe him everything never exchanged
a word with him. His very existence has been doubted. Since his sojourn with
Dr. Cachet he has never, as far as I know, left the South of France. He lives,
I have heard, at Aix. Cachet describes him as the exact antithesis of Van Gogh,
utterly incapable of formulating his purposes, absolutely unconscious, a bundle of
instincts, which he was anxious not to dissipate.

The result with him was a purely sensuous form of art. He gave what he
could and what he would, not a fraction more, and in external things not even so
much as this. Occasionally he did not even trouble himself to cover over certain
small blank spots on his pictures, and these are the despair of honest owners now
adays — others paint them over. But this superficial defect is really nothing more
nor less than the frayed out corner of a splendid old tapestry. Sometimes, indeed,
the whole tapestry is reduced to the warp. And even with this we cannot quarrel,
for the fabric is always lovely, even when it shows but a few threads.

Cezanne's whole character made for obscurity. It never occurred to him to
sign his pictures, like Guys and Van Gogh ; he never gave any sign of life beyond
pictures, and these had to be taken from him almost by force. Small wonder,
therefore, that he was an old man before it occurred to a few of his friends and
compatriots to notice him. It is only for the last few years that he has begun to
count at all in the art market. Like Van Gogh, he owes this recognition to the
little shop in the Rue Lafitte owned by Vollard, one of those remarkable dealers
only produced by Paris, who are sometimes better connoisseurs, or, rather, have
surer artistic instincts, than the connoisseurs themselves. The event that estab
lished his reputation was his friend Choquet's sale at Petit's in the summer of
1899. For three hot afternoons in the middle of the dead season, when there is
not a soul in Paris, purchasers fought for his best things, collected by an oddity
who had been laughed at as a madman a short time before.

If this enthusiasm was not merely a frantic outburst of snobbery, it was
remarkable enough. For, if we except Van Gogh, no one in modern art has

CEZANNE: THE RAPE (L'ENLEVEMENT)

PHOTOGRAPH DURAND-RUl-l.

CEZANNE: THE AL FRESCO LUNCHEON (LE DEJEUNER
SUR L'HERBE) 1865

VOI.LARD GALLERY, PARIS

PAUL CEZANNE 267

made stronger demands on aesthetic receptivity than Cezanne. Analysing him,
we find Courbet, Delacroix, Daumier, and the Dutchmen. Sometimes we might
suppose that he had known the old Am. Gautier, Murger's friend, who painted
such magnificent still-life pieces. But, in addition to all this, we are astonished
by something quite different, something enigmatic, that from a distance strikes us
as positive insanity. There is enlargement, and we cannot rightly say what is
enlarged. All art is exaggeration in some sense ; but here we are conscious
that the sense is hidden. Looking at the arched back of a fine black cat, I have
sometimes a very agreeable sensation. What produces it ? Not only colour, for
there is no contrast in the fur ; a tactile emotion is combined with pleasure in the
intense velvety black of the various almost imperceptible hairs. It sometimes
happens that the cat is in a room or against a wall of some pale colour. Her
eyes are gleaming through the fur, though I do not see them, and the slender
legs are moving imperceptibly. All this makes up the black of the cat's fur.

But how can such effects be produced in a picture ? The latent tactile im
pulse, which plays no inconsiderable part in the preference of cat-lovers, cannot
be reckoned with here, and yet the sense of pleasure I feel is even stronger. There
is no movement ; the subject before me is a simple still-life ; and yet I feel some
thing in the pupil of my eye quivering, as if set in motion by some movement
taking place in a higher dimension. Here again, we miss the accidental effect
produced by the wall of the room, which was so favourable to the cat, because it
afforded a number of little contrasts for the black ; we have only a large, flat
surface enclosed in a frame, and yet in the three or four tints of the picture we
find a wealth of gradually increasing contrasts. The colour-theory of the moderns
will not help us here. The Bernheims have things that prove the exact opposite :
black pictures ; a green coffee-pot and a green jar on a shelf against a gray wall.
The shadows are inky black, and this not fortuitously ; they are like huge black
rags, forming the chief value. In the Hessel collection six Cezannes hang on
one wail — one of the wonders of the world, where the most heterogeneous objects
combine to produce an effect as of Gobelin tapestry. One feels that the frames
are unnecessary, that the pictures might be sewn together without destroying
their essential value. Cezanne's system of colour may be compared to a kind of
kaleidoscope, in which what we see has been shaken together, and so shaken that
mosaic-pictures are produced, amazing in their vigourous contrasts of colour. The
relations seem to rise almost accidentally, and yet the coherence of the whole is
almost supernatural. His harmonies are so strong, one is tempted to believe that
to colour, and colour only, a like convincing power has been given as tc
rhythmic line. He sometimes makes use of a composition with an apparent
pleasure in banality; accident could hardly send a couple of pears and apples
rolling across the table more carelessly than he has placed them ; there is no trace
of arrangement or intention. His still- life pictures are so much alike that they
are often barely distinguishable one from another. How often he has painted the
absurd crumpled napkin, with the plate, the jar and the fruit ! And yet, every
time I see one of these pieces I feel as if I had been looking at some amazing
primitive sculptures or something akin to them. The effects he produces arc
primitive, though he makes no effort to this end ; primitive, in so far as they
give us that icy sense of grandeur which we enjoy in the contemplation of ancient
masterpieces ; he achieves style without the help of line, and solely by means of
this magical mosaic of colour, which — it seems almost absurd to say so — expresses

268 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

only exact realities. This is the most amazing part of the whole thing ; this
mosaic impresses us by its minute fidelity to Nature. Cezanne's apples are
painted like Velazquez' costumes, with that absolute directness which admits of
no modification. He has nothing of the revolutionary, save perhaps in some of
his nude studies in the open air, in which Daumier's influence is apparent. He is
much quieter than Van Gogh afterwards was ; his brushing is less vehement ; his
impasto is thin in comparison with that of Van Gogh. He has still less in common
with the colour-division of the Neo-Impressionists ; his methods are rather those
of the Dutchmen ; one might almost take him for an indirect descendant of
Vermeer. He paints life as Vermeer painted a carpet. But the melody for which
the Dutchmen used many-toned, complicated chords, Cezanne produces by means
of stronger, purer single notes. And as I have said, he is never concerned to make
an agreeable impression. His " academies " look like lumps of rough-hewn flesh.
Anatomy seems to be treated with lordly contempt ; and yet these blocks of flesh
live. In his rainy landscapes all Nature seems to be floating away, and yet there
is none of that realistic dexterity with which recognised landscape painters make
rain as wet as possible. He never painted a ray of reflected sunshine, and yet
there is a light in his pictures that is dangerous to works hung beside them. He
belongs to the generation of Manet and is the gospel of the younger painters.
They call him the sage. The altar at which he himself worships is Delacroix, as
we may see from his copies after the painter of the Medea. He expresses what we
divine in Delacroix ; he takes from him what Delacroix took from Rubens, when
he copied the great Fleming, and what Rubens found, when he copied the Italians.
How the one reproduced the other is the history of painting of our new art.

Cezanne was born in 1839, a year after Zola. Zola owned some of his early
pictures, painted between 1860-1870, when his friend was still under the imme
diate influence of Delacroix' Romanticists. At the Zola sale, Vollard bought the
large and superb Enlevement of 1865, a romantic episode, though the episode lay
rather in the bold design than in the subject. Cezanne's debut may be placed at
about the year 1858. This was the date of Vollard's Donkey, a little grisaille that
might have been painted in the seventeenth century by the brothers Le Nain, and
a number of nondescript Dutch scenes, which the artist may have copied from
some of the little masters in the Marseilles Gallery. As early as 1859 the real
Cezanne was foreshadowed in the richly painted Femme au Perroquet, also in
Vollard's possession. A woman at an open window holds a parrot on her hand.
The vehement handling suggests some vagrant disciple of Frans Hals, though
such an one would never have achieved the very free treatment of the foliage that
overhangs the window. A number of small landscapes, many of them on panel,
belong to this period, or a little later. They are palette-exercises, recognisable as
the work of Cezanne, even for those who have never seen such early things by
him. The brushing has already his peculiar vigour of touch, although it was
not yet applied to concrete things.

The greatness of Cezanne was manifested between 1860 and 1870, when,
under the purely superficial influence of Courbet, he painted his magnificent black
portraits and still-life subjects, one of which I have described. Then came the
Auvers time, about 1870. In company with Pissarro and Vignon he painted in
Daubigny's favourite district those beautiful landscapes, the broadest and most
vigorous works of his maturity. They are akin to the contemporary Pissarros,
which will perhaps some day be ranked above all this artist's later work, so rich

CEZANNE: STILL-LIFE

BHHNHKIM COLLECTION, PARIS

PAUL CEZANNE 269

in tone, so full of a passionate worship of colour are they. Cezanne's have more
virility, more severity of arrangement, greater boldness in the masses. A healthy
tincture of Courbet clung to him all his days. He never lost the vigour of
structure, that stimulates like champagne in his best pictures. He followed
Pissarro in that development to high tones, which Monet enjoined. It is obvious
that Cezanne never troubled himself so much about a revolution in technique as
the other Impressionists. Without Pissarro he would probably have gone on quietly
painting his blacks, and it is possible that his artistic importance would hardly
have suffered. Like Manet, he breathed his own individuality into every technique,
and made it significant. By this means he retained the originality which evapo
rated somewhat with Monet and Pissarro in successive technical evolutions.
Monet, too, was never so powerful as during the seventies. We can never be
grateful enough to him for the immense refinement of method we owe him, but it
cost him something of his strength. Cezanne is said to have expressed himself
very brilliantly about Monet, in dicta that prove his conviction of the advantages
of the new manner; he was certainly no innovator himself, but followed quietly
after the rest, only to make use of his own marvellous eye more efficiently than
any of the others. In a transition period rich in charm, he painted his memorable
aerial studies, sketches in which only one thing is complete, the atmosphere.
Count Kessler's picture, one of the finest, was probably painted between 1880 and
1885, the master's most prolific period. Compared with that of the earlier
landscapes, the palette is much purer. The colour is laid on very thinly, the
whitish grey of the canvas showing through everywhere, especially in the fore
ground, where a thin green is lightly applied, almost like a wash of water-colour.
Where the trees are growing, we see a light road, in which the tone of the canvas
is merely enriched by pale yellow, gray, and faint touches of blue ; then again we
have a green field, flecked with touches of stronger green, but on the whole of
exactly the same tone as the foreground. It is separated from the field behind it
by the relatively rich gradations of the low green bushes. This richness justifies
the pronounced orange of the field, which resolves itself into lighter tones in the
background. The facade of the little house is of the same tone as the road near
the trees, rather more strongly tinged with yellow, the roof is of the same brick
orange as the fields. An airy blue pervades the wide sky, and struggles for
mastery with the tone of the ground, which shows through plainly above the
green tree-tops.

The transparence of these varied tints, the cohesion of their variety, and the
wave-like structure of the chromatically equal planes, produce the illusion of air,
which we seem almost to breathe in from these Cezannes.

It is but a step from these to the pictures of 1886, in which the sketches are
transformed into works of masterly completeness.

We cannot see Provence without thinking of Cezanne. He paints it with a
positive fanaticism, inventing a peculiar style of painting to express its peculiar
character. It stands out sharply before our eyes, and we seem to be recognising
innumerable details in the pictures. As a fact, again, it is only colour and air,
and a structure of little brush-strokes, by which the wonderful land is still more
wonderfully recreated. Here, too, he shows a certain likeness to Pissarro, in the
very limited degree possible to artists so different in temperament. Like Manet,
Cezanne went on adding to his artistic treasure ; but he never cast away what he
had once acquired, and even here he still has something of Delacroix. The

270 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

grandiose Romanticism, that was an element in his immense black still-life pieces,
had, of course, disappeared before a system of greater refinement ; but the
essence of Delacroix, his extraordinary vivacity of touch, his structural use of
colour, remained. It was just at this time that Pissarro's handling became
uniform ; he was approaching his period of Neo-Impressionism. The variety
with which Cezanne applied his little brush-strokes sets all systems at defiance,
and yet is systematic in the highest sense. The instinct that always guided him,
gave to him here in rich abundance, and we enjoy his pictures with a kind of
physical instinct. He paints the warmth of his home, and we feel a glow as we
look at his landscapes ; he shows us the parched red earth, under which we divine
the hard stone, burning with the accumulated fire of centuries. How grateful
is the luxuriant vegetation beside this flaming sunshine, the green that overspreads
the ground like cooling waters ! The eternal heavens sink down behind it, in all
the tones of purest sapphire. The earth is but a puny interruption of this ever
lasting blue.

In these pictures, which at first sight may seem unimportant in comparison to
the more dramatic early works, in this trickling together of colours to form a
perfectly natural picture, in the purity of the palette which is restricted to red,
orange, blue, and green, and expresses every gradation with the utmost richness
and the perfect harmony of a perfectly natural taste, Cezanne's art achieves its
highest triumph. It was here that Van Gogh learned how red flows out of
orange. Duret owns a superb little Cezanne of this period, Les Terres Rouges,
and two of the most remarkable Van Goghs that may be accounted a direct
continuation of the older master; sulphur-coloured houses with deep blue roofs
and light blue smoke, round which flame woods of purple-red trees. They are
tapestries, worked in yellow and blue and notably in red, painted quite flat — which
was unusual in his case — encircled in a frankly decorative fashion with uniform
red outlines which enclose the exquisite purple tones in gleaming fire.

PIERRE BONNARD:

PHOTOGRAPH DRUET

THE BOULEVARD

VUILLARD. BONNARD. ROUSSEL 271

VUILLARD. BONNARD. ROUSSEL

No member of the school of Cezanne has succeeded in surpassing the master.
But, where there is no teacher, it is inaccurate to talk of a school. It was not by
spoken words that the seed was sown in this case. Nor is it Cezanne alone who
leads the youth of France. Renoir, Fantin, and, once again, Delacroix, divide
their homage. If I have, nevertheless, spoken of the School of Cezanne in this
connection, it is because certain essential aims of the younger men at least reveal
the influence of Cezanne, and because this inter-relation is the sole bond of union
between a number of very dissimilar painters. The three friends of Maurice
Denis, to whom the following all too brief chapter is devoted, should not be
grouped with Denis, Vallotton, and Gauguin's circle, to whom their relation is but
superficial ; they should be considered quite apart from this society. It is true
that like these, they started from synthesis, and claimed at first to be purely
decorative artists; each of them worked as an ornamentist, and even as an
industrial artist. But this reaction with them was but a recoil, enabling them to
rush forward more impetuously on the path of purely pictorial art. They have,
as a fact, far more in common with those great masters we have called the pillars
of modern painting, save that they lack all trace of that element of Courbet
which is perceptible in these their predecessors. The animal strain is altogether
foreign to their manner. As opposed to it, they might be called "spirituels."
This gives them the aspect of decadents as compared with the others. And they
are in fact decadents, in the same sense as their forerunners, and all modern
painters are decadent more or less ; and in a greater degree than the others,
their painting lacks the strong support of a clearly defined tendency, and of
a teacher. But tradition works in their highly developed instinct, and their taste
enables them to profit by it. In their technique, however, they are more remote
from the old masters, less methodical even than Renoir, who is said to have once
despairingly confided to an acquaintance that he had no notion how to paint, and
was inclined to give up art altogether, as he could not get beyond dilettantism —
or than Cezanne, whose spleen led him to take his place in a student's class at Aix
to learn drawing. All this is less incomprehensible than it sounds. It seems
absurd in relation to our admiration for their works ; but it seems natural to
them in relation to their admiration for the old masters. Their modesty blinds
them to the necessary compensations of development.

The old masters utter well-turned phrases ; as compared with these, the
words of the nineteenth-century leaders sound like suppressed exclamations ; the
younger men speak in interjections. And yet they echo back to us ; that is the
marvellous part of it. We may ask ourselves which is the greater miracle — the
pictures evolved from the bearish vigour of Courbet, or the harmonies that breathe
from the trembling essays of these young men.

They are all young still, born about the year 1865, are for the most part of
the same age — Vuillard is a year younger than Bonnard and Roussel — and made

272 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

their debut early in the nineties, when Denis organised a modest exhibition of his
own works and those of his friends at St. Germain. Parisians made their acquaintance
through Le Bare de Boutteville,and afterwards in the exhibitions of Les Independants,
to which they have remained faithful contributors. They are habitually classed
together, because they studied together* and developed together. But this develop
ment was worked out on very dissimilar lines, diverging more and more with years.

All three bear the same relation to Cezanne as did Fantin-Latour to Delacroix.
They are another genus, less grandiose, though no less artistic, of smaller dimen
sions, showing more sympathy with the large kakemono than with the modest
engraving. The great simplicity of the elders desired a decisive form of expres
sion, in which there is always something of the combative spirit that drove them
to the Salon des Refuses. The younger men are impelled less to fight for watch
words than to collect with all diligence, to enlarge and widen their aims, to keep
their eyes on what lies near them, and also on what is far off.

Cezanne was translated into more intimate terms by them. All three retained
his mosaic-like technique ; it seems, indeed, to have become more deliberate in
their hands. The pattern is changed ; the stitches are smaller, but at the same
time more evident. We see how the thing is done. The mysterious element in
Cezanne becomes more comprehensible ; the means are used so unerringly that
the effect can be demonstrated. There is no genius as yet in the matter, but an
extraordinary amount of talent ; their technical development affords a parallel to
the progress the Neo-Impressionists owed to Monet. Vuillard, the one whose
works are most in demand to-day, remains the still-life painter. He used
human beings in the composition of his still-life pieces, but the fact that they are
numan beings is not the important thing in the composition. All things seem to
serve him merely to enrich his palette. He groups them, and they seem to
disappear in the process ; in the little interiors he affects we see at first only walls,
windows, furniture, curtains, and such-like. The figures are hardly necessary, we
divine their presence from the surroundings. No artist has ever so suggested the
soul of an interior — the sense of habitation. There are people who see in him
only the gifted colourist and hieroglyphist, and it is possible that he desires no
higher fame himself; the unconscious charm of his art is all the more fascinating
for this. We enjoy the same sort of intimacy with him as in conversation with
certain agreeable people, when the talk results in a mutual perception of subtle
things, when thoughts no longer require words for their interchange, and we are
silent lest we should disturb them. We are sometimes reminded of little sketches
by Whistler ; but when Whistler gives himself up to pleasant intimations, Vuillard
begins to paint. There is always something in the background with him. It is
possible to have one of his interiors in the house for a month, and one fine day to
discover a figure in the corner, and not only a figure, but a whole story. Not a
story that can be told in words, be it understood ; they are painted corners. His
finest and simplest pictures — those which entitle him to rank among the modern
decorative masters — are in tempera.

There are superficial observers, who cannot distinguish Bonnard from Vuillard.
The two have as much in common as Andre Theuriet and Pierre Louys ; they
both speak French. It might be possible to confuse them, if technique were really
everything, and if all that lay behind it were meaningless. Bonnard is the poet of

* At Julian's under Bouguereau and Robert-Fleury ; Vuillard was also at the Ecole des Beaux Arts
for a very short time under Gei6me.

PIERRE BONNARD: UNE APRES-MIDI BOURGEO1SE

PROPERTY OF THE ARTIST

VUILLARD. BONNARD. ROUSSEL 273

the two. He makes the most ordinary things into delicious songs. Vuillard is
a perfectly simple soul, with delicate senses, who traced out his own circle very
distinctly. Bonnard has surprises in store for us. He seems to have desired every
thing, and to have been capable of many things.

He has no special material peculiar to himself, but everything he touches he
treats in some novel fashion ; he is racier than Vuillard — not so quiet and com
forting, but when he grasps a thing, he does so with more intensity. He seems
to paint with nerves, as the other does with senses. His landscapes quiver and
tremble with life. He does not meditate his effects like Vuillard, but thinks
with gestures that become pictures. We find marvellous ornaments in his surfaces,
which he disdains to make more comprehensible than they happen to be ; his
pictures are often more luminous than Vuillard's. He loves the race-courses
round Paris in misty weather, painting exquisite tones by way of accompaniment
to the tiny red and blue particles of the jockeys' silk jackets, like artistic settings
round gems. And then again he veils his thickets in the grayest green, and in
the shadow sets yellow tones dancing one with another, borne by tiny amoretti.
In certain nudes in the open air he uses Cezanne's studies of flesh-tones to
make decorations of the nude more rhythmic than Cezanne's, more piquant,
more stimulating. Both the friends shine as lithographers, and their prints,
which they execute themselves at Clot's workshops, demonstrate not only their
charm as colourists, but also how much their very individual handling — as
distinguished from colour — adds to the beauty of their pictures. Bonnard, in
spite of his versatility, seems to have set aims more fixed and definite before him,
which might finally lead him to wall decoration on a grand scale. He has already
worked on larger panels in collaboration with Vuillard and Denis, which un
fortunately were never set up in their destined place ; and in the two tripartite
pictures of the Hessel collection, notably the exquisite symphony in blue, where
the life of the Boulevard Clichy dimples like a bunch of roses, we divine a
yearning to expand, and to get effects in larger dimensions. Both in Vuillard
and in Bonnard we find traces of the influence of Lautrec, who essayed a slighter
technique in order to win greater flexibility.

Bonnard's most brilliant achievement so far is the large oblong panel, the
garden scene of the Salon of 1903, certainly one of the most important pictures
of the whole generation, a work that throws Vallotton's beautiful but subdued
panel by Vuillard quite into the shade. Once more it is a portrait-group,
but not of the kind the masterly possibilities of which Fantin showed. At
this Vallotton tried his hand in a portrait-group in the same Salon, where the
young men of this generation are gathered, as were the Impressionists in Fantin's
picture.*

Rather does it recall that more seriously conceived group, which rendered not
persons, but something of humanity, and was refused by the Jury just forty years
ago. Before the Dtjeuner sur rUerbe the spectator received two or three shocks,
which excited either enthusiasm or abhorrence, and sometimes both. Bonnard
has multiplied the shocks : they are less violent, but they produce the curious
oscillation that follows rhythm. This very remarkable family is certainly calcu
lated to irritate the plain man ; the father on the chaise-longue, the boy bolt
upright beside him, the portly matron, the girl gazing thoughtfully at the cat,
and the avuncular straw-hat in the foreground — all these invite the shafts of

* Ironically enough, round Cottct ! We reproduce Bonnard's group.
VOL. I 2 M

274 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

cheap ridicule. But the effect is always the same ; and to one it is grotesque, to
another full of tender poetry.

The fragmentary character of the Dejeuner has undergone a complete change
here. Even Manet could not refrain from a glance at the remarkable pictures his
brush set down, when he ordered it to paint men and women, green trees and other
beautiful things. Would he have pleased us better, if he had painted these things
more with an eye to objective truth than as pictures, if he had been less frag
mentary in the one case, more in the other ?

Bonnard carries the Manetian principle to an extreme in his picture ; he
banished every particle of shadow, and filled all the depths with marvellous colour.
As a colourist, Manet triumphs by his brushing, by his breadth ; in actual colour
the Dtjeuner is somewhat poor. Bonnard has shaken together such a wealth of
the sublimest effects, that even he who looks upon certain associations as an im
portant expedient, may be satisfied merely to admire this inexhaustible fount of
colour-values. It is like some overflowing store of beauty, where every glance
suffices to make one proof against ugliness, and where fresh novelties appear
every day.

Bonnard's talents as a book-illustrator are now generally recognised. Here he
gives us sketches, still more individual than his pictures, and here we catch as it
were a distant echo of the melody that underlies his whole being, explaining much
and allowing us to hope for much : a gentle, tender reminiscence of Greece, that
connects him with Denis. The connection reveals itself even in the poorly
printed sketches for Verlaine's " Parallelement," but far more obviously and
happily in his last work, the beautiful drawings for " Daphnis and Chloe," the
loveliest evocation of Greek grace.

Roussel's point of contact is here. He belongs to Bonnard, not to his brother-
in-law Vuillard. He is the most delicate of the three, a poet who breathes his
pastel-landscapes on to the canvas till they are like the wings of butterflies, and
whose one danger is that he may spoil by industry what he has accomplished by
intuition. One would fain lead him past wide walls, that he might lay his hand
on them to cover them with exquisite things, and then never allow him to see
them again. His magic touch marks him out for a decorator. Sometimes
Fragonard seems to have revived in him, but his nymphs are still airier than the
Graces of the eighteenth century. We appreciate him when we compare his art
with the more dazzling manner of such a dexterous painter as Charles Guerin,
who gets his decorative effect by a coarsening of Cezanne and the eighteenth
century. The youthful Pierre Laprade might be more appropriately grouped
with the triad ; he has the same sterling artistic qualities, and the same ambition
to translate a great exemplar — Manet in his case — into a more fluid form. It
is to be hoped that his charming elegance may avoid the dangerous quicksand of
chic and find tasks that will preserve him from mannerism.

Such has been the privilege of Bonnard and Roussel. It is their immunity
from every kind of affectation that has set them so high. They dread monotony,
and this is perhaps what has tended to keep them in the shade. Vuillard is more
easily classified than the other two ; the amateur remembers him, as soon as he
has recognised his "note." This is not said in his disparagement ; but perhaps
the two others will go farther, for up to the present they seem only to have been
playing, as in expectation of the moment that will bring them a great and decisive
task. All three are the apprentices of a new craft, and, setting aside all else,

K. X. ROUSSEL: HYLAS

I-'KNKON COLLECTION, PARIS

K. X. ROUSSEL: NYMPHS AND FAUN

J-ENEON COLLECTION, PARIS

VUILLARD. BONNARD. ROUSSEL 275

remarkable personalities for this reason, that, in spite of the dazzling brilliance
of the Impressionists, they found out a way in which, though they did not
ignore the experiences of the others, they nevertheless developed their own in
dividuality. Their works should not be hung side by side with those of Manet
and Degas ; not solely for their own sakes, but also a little for that of the greater
men. It is easy to overlook them in the company of these heroes ; but there are
times when, fatigued with the stronger effects of the others, we give them the
preference. They seem better attuned to us, to our dwellings, our moods, our
pleasures.*

• We reproduce a fine Vuillard as well as Bonnard's family group. These reproductions give at
least some suggestion of the originals. The reader will find it more difficult to get an idea of Bonnard,
the most important and remarkable artist of the group, from the other works here given. No-
reproduction could preserve the gem-like effect of the figures, etc., on the gray ground of the street
scene ; how, for instance, the basket on the left is brought into relation with it by an exquisite blue,,
and the relation of this gray to the green of the animated background. The girl on the left must be
imagined in very dark gray, with touches of pure black. These young painters learned how to use
black from Odilon Redon. In Bonnard's nude study the colour of the flesh is a wonderful pale olive
of indescribable lustre. Good pictures by Vallotton and Vuillard have lately been acquired by the
Luxembourg.

DEGAS: DANCERS (LES POINTES)

(PASTEL)

DEGAS AND HIS CIRCLE

EDGAR DEGAS

Hatred in a holy thing. — ZOLA.

ONE of the cheering elements in an historical survey of art is the study of its
regular and invariable developments. It is deeper and more encouraging than the
greatest epic poet could conceive it, simple and logical, but with that simplicity
which remains a mystery — the simplicity of such a fact as that two human beings
can produce a third.

The age needed an art ; to what end it knew not, having already a large in
heritance from other ages. It created one, found its exponents, and these pro
duced just what was needed for a development, of which they had no notion.
They worked as if in conclave, each in his little cell with a couple of assistants ;
and afterwards, when each had finished his work, it was exactly what was needed
to complete the rest.

Manet set forth the general programme : the new art was to be decoration
pure and simple ; Cezanne exhibited the texture of the stuff; Renoir painted
exquisite fragments for it, the feminine element that must be in all real painting ;
Degas drew for it.

All were fragmentary, Manet among the rest ; he conjures up but a suggestion
of the great billowy curtain, on which the "Dejeuner sur IHerbe was to be set ; but
this was just what we wanted to see. His Olympia has as much of Titian as we
can have to-day without deliberate imitation of Titian. His yearnings are ours.
Degas does not show the great enterprise in outline, but he gives European art an
anatomy, a medium, that has to do with the skeleton of art. And this medium
too is ours.

Degas is a modern and yet an ancient. In his inmost soul, I believe he despises
modern painting. When young painters bring their pictures to him, he passes
his hand over them, and only if he finds the surface quite smooth will he look at
the bearer. He divines something of the evanescence of painting in relief, and
would never practise it. Ingres knew the truth, a pupil of Ingres handed it on to
him. The painter must paint in such a manner, that nothing should run in from
outside, but that all should come from within, that all the glowing radiance should
be overlaid with a firm skin. He tried it once upon a time ; and not only long
ago, when Lamothe was still alive. Six years ago he had a large oil picture in his
studio, ballet-dancers in a park-scene, which he had begun some six years before ;
it is probably still unfinished. The old finish is no longer to be accomplished; it
does not harmonise with our modern nerves, our desires, our passionate delight
in colour, our pleasure in the throb and quiver of life. He himself could not
resist ; the colour-demon raged in him too, and his hand twitched each time he

278 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

saw a movement of that remarkable modern life which woman showed him.
Very seldom did he venture to paint with all his power ; he thought it too
ephemeral for canvas, and took paper and gaily coloured pencils. With these he
could let himself go.

We are conscious of a certain violent chagrin in Degas. Everything in him
centres in this : the indifference that allows him to trust his miracles of colour to
such fragile materials ; his scorn of publicity which amounts to misanthropy ; the
barbarous cynicism with which he empales his women. I can almost imagine that
he would take pleasure in hearing men abuse him ; he would look upon their
execrations as the howl of pain uttered by the beast beneath his heel.

Degas inspires fear ; one has the feeling of being observed for once in the
unflattering nakedness of instinct. At certain moments, every man is a mere
bundle of quivering cells, inordinately ugly and ludicrous. Degas has made
such moments monumental.

Liebermann, in his brilliant study on Degas, very justly insists on Degas'
relation to Daumier. Degas is not so rich as the slayer of lawyers, but harder.
He seems to be combating the classic tradition which transfigures Daumier's most
biting caricatures ; his chagrin vents itself even upon Ingres. Out of the faces of
courtesans, out of defiled flesh that rages in silence, out of the smiles of meagre
ballet-dancers, out of the pain that is almost pleasure again, he creates a new and
grandiose world of form, which follows its codex as strenuously as the doctrine
of Ingres. His form is a monstrous mask, like the devil's heads of the Japanese,
but more human — more bestial. There is not a stroke that is not inevitable. It
is hardly permissible to speak of correctness in this connection ; it is all more
exact than Nature ; her most secret essence, movement, as it arises in matter,
before the brain directs it, is reflected in frigid visions.*

Over all he sheds an intoxicating splendour of colour, pain bathes in marvellous
lights ; his stage-settings become Elysian fields, before which all tropical images
pale. His planes are like great butterfly-wings ; it seems as if every motion of
the air must stir this ethereal colour-dust, so carelessly strewn. He has laws for
the distribution of colour, that defy all analysis. It is not so much colour itself as
the flickering, darting quality of the touches. Sometimes ten, twenty rare tones
seem to have been produced by nothing but a bit of blue or violet, or that
purple, which runs through the picture like a forest path, that yellow, not laid
on the paper, but growing from it in organic fashion, like some strange micro
scopic fungus. In addition, there is an extraordinary certainty of vision, an
instinctive grasp of great effects, a renunciation of all that might give a smoother
reality to the complexity of forms as created by him, and the mysterious con
junction of a draughtsmanship subserving the keenest synthesis, with this foam-
born splendour of colour.

Long ago it was discovered that his draughtsmanship showed the influence of
the Japanese. There is certainly a good deal of Japan in it, but also uncommonly
little. The calligraphy of the Japanese, the slender curve, is conspicuously

* Gauguin well understood the paroxysm which Degas seeks in the theatre : " On the stage," says
Degas to himself, " everything is false, the light, the scenery, the hair of the dancers, their corsets, their
smiles. Only the effects produced by these, the arabesques, are right. . . . Sometimes the mascu-
linum, the male dancer, intervenes. He holds the danseuse, who gives herself to him. Yes, she gives
herself, but only for the moment. All you who expect love from a dancer, never hope to have it when
you hold her in your arms. The dancer only gives herself upon the stage."

DEGAS: HARLEQUIN

PASTEL)

AND COLUMBINE

EDGAR DEGAS

279

absent. Rather is Degas Gothic, his devil's mass suggests high cathedral windows,
the sunlight shining through their crimson glass. Many of the nude studies in
which he lingers over the carnations, the backs of the women he has shown
crouching in the bath, recall Japan, the fantastic interlacement of limbs where
bodies become mere implements of flesh. But they might also remind us of
Ingres, or of Michelangelo, or of any other genius who amused himself with the
human body, more especially, indeed, of the painter of the Bain Turc^ and the
sinister sweetness of that arabesque of limbs.

Degas has the same flexibility, but he adds a certain angularity to it, to give
sharpness and definition ; he seizes the joints, not the flesh. Even in Ingres we
note a shade of cruelty. In Degas it looms large and brutal. The puppets
Ingres shows us nestling in silken cushions, Degas sets dancing on tense strings ;
he rubs the flesh off, and reveals the movement of the bones. A jockey on his
horse becomes a combination of human and equine anatomies brought into action
by riding, and he carelessly throws a beautiful coloured skin over the whole. He
is a hundred times simpler than the Japanese. Where they play with lines, he
works with planes, and above all, he is thoroughly European.

Degas has almost given a conventional form to the Europe of our day ; a
convention very unlike that of the stylistic nations and epochs. His lines,
too, are eloquent of things beyond the subjects they represent. Among his
women, man makes himself heard, the modern Monsieur, cosmopolitan
humanity, in fact, born to-day with peculiar senses, peculiar nerves ; and also
the world as mirrored in these nerves and senses. Line, the vehicle of this
form, has no longer time for the long-drawn melody the earlier masters gave
it in their representative works. It has become more ordinary, more uncompro
misingly real ; it gives us Rttntgen rays, as it were, and the art it expresses feels
itself free from all dissimulation. But it shines gloriously, nevertheless, its splendour
is perhaps more genuine ; it harmonises with the discoveries of our age, which has
learnt to resist the stupefying influences of illusion, and to draw new beauty from
the laws of Nature. Degas works in the smallest space with the slightest means,
and in the shortest limit of time, just as in every other domain we of to-day seek
to snatch the greatest effects from the slightest means, and endeavour to make
the short span of our existence as rich and happy as possible with the smallest
amount of effort.

Degas's latest colour-phase is perhaps the finest of all. The earlier pastels,
more modest in colour, seek their effects in larger ensembles, occasionally treated
with the minuteness of miniatures. I remember one tiny opera scene, measuring
perhaps fifteen centimetres, which gave the ballet, the musicians, the people in the
boxes. There are numbers of such subjects on a larger scale. The beautiful
pastel of the Caillebotte bequest in the Luxembourg with the pas scul is one of
many ; Durand-Ruel, Camondo, and Lerolle own dozens. But the little example
I have mentioned was a marvel among them all ; it showed the master's almost
inconceivable power of dealing with space as he pleases.

Of course, the earlier works are more intimate in effect than the later ones.
Among our reproductions, we give the two exquisite pastels formerly in the
Tavernier collection, Les Pointes (between 1875-1880) and Arlcquin et Colombine
(about 1880). The old Dutch masters would have worked like this if they had
used pastel. In the large example belonging to Durand-Ruel, the two ladies on
the sofa in the ante-room, executed probably about the year 1889, Vermecr seems to

280 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

have come back to us. His superb olive tone is there, and also the marvellous
use of colour in an interior which distinguishes the Dutchman. An indescribable
effect of cosiness is produced by this corner-sofa, the greenish surface of the back,
finished at the top by a checkered upholstering, in the squares of which reddish
and bluish tones are used with incredible cunning. The attitudes of the two
women are no less masterly ; instinct with a subtle intimacy that has no touch of
sharpness here, and only gives a delicate suggestion of individuality to the sitters.
Again we are reminded of the great Dutchman, and of the women he painted in rooms.

Such pictures reveal Degas's radical Superiority in culture to all his friends.
This culture gave him the steadiness that preserved him from stumbling in bold
decorative fragments such as his Sortie de "Bain* a voluptuous arabesque, that yet
remains human and intimate. Later on, he got stronger effects ; he drew the three
marvellous pastels owned by Durand-Ruel, each of three dancers in different
attitudes and different colours ; one, pink, flame colour, and emerald ; the second
blue, violet and green ; the third a still more indescribable symphony of orange and
violet. They represent three stage-episodes, fairy scenes. And the dancers are
transformed ; they are not human beings, but decorations. Their skin is no human
epidermis ; the abnormal pores in which the pigment is secreted suggests the bark
of rare trees, the hide of legendary salamanders, a strange earth-crust overlying
brass. The development of painting in this disciple of Ingres defies analysis.
This discreet manipulator of gray tones, who in his pictures of washerwomen, in
his remarkable Cotton Factory, in his early sporting pictures, seemed only to stand
aloof from Nature in order to approach her more impressively, this cool observer
of life, this severest of realists, has created a world of fantastic beauty in which his
realism only serves to make the incredible probable and the impossible a matter
of course.

Behind this mystery we divine a man who is at no pains whatever to impress
himself upon the world as a remarkable personality, and his Mephistophelean
attitude towards humanity manifests itself finally as a suggestion ,which we, his
easily hypnotised contemporaries, work out for ourselves. If it be true that he is
governed by an abnormal conception of life, — the numerous anecdotes of his
personal moroseness have no doubt tended to an exaggerated estimate of this — that
he is a scornful misanthropist, with every reason for his attitude, we may find
comfort in the positive works due to this apparent or actual pessimism. What
strikes us as his chagrin, his cruelty, may be in fact the method of an artist,
unusual in these days, of expressing something in the things he represents, other
than what we so glibly refer to as Nature. Degas, when he paints his shop-girls,
always means something more than hats, dresses and faces, and this significance
for which the poor shop-girl and the well-known dancer are in themselves in
sufficient, offends our less aspiring minds. He invents movements, the mechanism
of which appears more significant than anything these movements could express, it
translated into actualities. For creatures whose chief pre-occupation seems to be
the carrying of band-boxes or the taking of baths, receive a certain hieratic impress
which seems to us incompatible with the mental attitude of these small fry, and
with that they call forth in ourselves. In a pastel belonging to M. Alexis Rouart,
the well-known collector of Chinese art, two milliners standing on severely
parallel planes one behind the other stir emotions in us that we are accustomed to
feel before the heroic conceptions of the old masters. This parallelism, or the

* In the Tavernler collection ; see reproduction.

DEGAS: THE BATH

PASTEL

LUXEMBOURG, PARIS

DEGAS: A CAFE ON THE BOULEVARD MONTMARTRE

PASTEL
LUXEMBOURG, PARIS

EDGAR DEGAS 281

object of this arrangement, is to be found in every Degas of the last thirty
years. If we note it carefully, we shall recognise in this also a homage to
the master's unique type, a new standpoint, and therewith a new history of his
art. Even in the early picture of the Henri Rouart collection, the two dancers
exercising at the bar (1878), the arabesque of arms and legs speaks a solemn
language, amidst the enchanting harmonies of gray and white and yellow.

It would be superficial indeed to pronounce this language merely a means
adopted by the painter to express his ill-temper. The latest pictures, such as
Durand-Ruel's series of dancers mentioned above, have nothing left that could
interest the expounder of painted philosophies, and everything that might permit
us to hope for the return of an art that should pass from the stage into life.

VOL. I

282 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

THE SUCCESSORS

DEGAS created a line. Daumier had a share in it, as in all typical results of modern
art, but Degas moulded it so strenuously that we must admit his creative rights
in it. This line persists among us. It became a sign-manual for the whole genera
tion of blagueurs, as appropriate to the art of to-day as was the sonorous phrase to
the period of Romanticism. It was natural that it should also penetrate deeply into
art-producing materia, and that it should become the great motor of modern
creation, in spite of the manner in which its author held aloof. Citing the
whole army of draughtsmen who work at newspaper illustration, from Forain to
Capiello, and many artists outside of France, we should only indicate the more
transitory side of Degas' influence. Forain has never become more than a very
brilliant interpreter, who expanded what Degas expressed more trenchantly in a
few symbols. His wit often produces its effect by means of a mechanical exaggera
tion, underlying which we detect the same weakness that betrays itself in most of
his essays in painting. He is simpler than Degas, but the poorer by this simplicity,
and it almost seems as if the value of these abstractions — especially in his later
manner — had been over-estimated, with the idea that it is hardly possible to go
too far in this stripping away of the superfluous adopted by the moderns. Instead
of using Degas for the purpose of synthesis, the fragment is reduced or enlarged
in fragmentary fashion. But the indian-ink drawings of a Hokusai remain superior
to all European essays in this genre.

The poster was the natural medium for this vivacity, and Cheret and Steinlen
have been the most happily inspired of those who have attempted to seize the brief
moment which the hasty eye can spare for it.

The future of painting lay in a greater task. The problem was, not only to
annex Degas' formula for the boulevardier, but to adapt it to tradition. It can
hardly be said that this has been accomplished as yet. The time allowed it has
been too short, and the strange and stubborn elements of the new line are as yet
too novel to assimilate with the spirit of Poussin. It seems piquant enough to
entice artists like Besnard to make advances to the bourgeois. But while men are
still seeking, the fruit has passed away to other regions, and has brought forth
new blossoms. Gauguin took it with him to the tropics. At Pont-Aven — I am
anticipating the development we are presently to trace — a school arose, to which
Gauguin gave the mighty linear impulse. Here synthesis is the main, nay, the
sole preoccupation. Did the old man ever dream of such successors ? Out of
his fiery iciness a consuming fire has passed into youth. The great fragments
have been pieced together by clumsy fingers, his vitriolic raillery has worked
beneficently in scaring away trivialities. The darkness of knowledge is trans
formed into profound symbolism, and from the flesh of the hetairai of our great
capitals men fashion — the images of saints and virgins !

Only one artist capable of grasping all that Degas possessed remained in
the vicinity of the great prototype. This was Lautrec, a painter who, under more
favourable conditions and with a longer term of life, might have greatly surpassed
his exemplar.

TOULOUSE-LAUTREC: A LA MIE

BF.RNHEIM COLLECTION, PARIS
PHOTOGRAPH DRUI-1T

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC 283

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

HERE, again, chagrin became creative force, intensified by purely physiological
elements. Lautrec came into the world in 1864, a scion of one of the most
ancient families of the French noblesse, with all the hereditary impulses of patrician
blood towards power and beauty. At the time when his forefathers, the Counts
of Toulouse, made their glorious tradition, such sons as he looked to knightly
prowess for distinction, and their descendants nowadays show the same ardour
in achieving the kind of hero-hood whose sphere is the narrow circle of club-life.
An accident, in which we might fitly recognise the hand of God, determined
Lautrec's fate from the outset. When a child, he broke both his legs, and his
constitution was not sound enough to accomplish the normal process of recovery.
He became a cripple. Only the upper part of his body developed, more especially
the head, the brain, which towered above those of his more robust contemporaries.
It was not often it met its match in the Paris of the waning nineteenth century.

Lautrec accepted the loss of his legs and adjusted his life to his conditions.
He took men and things very much on the surface, not so grimly as Degas, even
with a certain bonhomie. He had to seek beauty in the society where money and
pleasant speech gained him tolerance, and was not a little surprised to find many
beautiful things even there. He would sometimes come to his Montmartre
acquaintances and vow that to see such and such a Viennoise or Anglaise " c'est
a se mettre a genoux," and he was perfectly sincere when he showed his present
ments of them, and waxed eloquent in admiration of " la belle bete." If beauty
lies in abundant forms, the Parisian " demi-monde " is rich in charms. Its women
dress to be seen from a distance, like neo-Impressiomst pictures ; wishing to suggest
the bodies beneath their clothes, they emphasise those details of toilette that
harmonise with their anatomy. Of course they caricature the fashions created by
the most distinguished of their class, but we do not look to them for refinement.
There is a pictorial instinct in their arrangements of mass and colour, which is art
here no less than on canvas ; and the more they lay stress on what Nature has made
them, the more perfect are they after their kind. We may grant that they get
their reliefs with "shreds and patches," that a painted face seems unappetising to
our modern taste, and that the cocotte is a jade. These are details. We need not
approach them too closely. Here, again, aesthetics come to the help of morals ;
the nearer the spectator gets to these works of art the less attractive do they seem,
and intimacy with them strikes one less as sinful than as unintelligent — as though
one should attempt to judge a work of art by touching it.

Lautrec, at any rate, thought them beautiful, nor would it be just to call him
depraved on this account. It was merely a natural admiration for natural things,
and he had the art of making this peculiarity of his objects into pictures. He saw
in love with them, as was Leibl with his wrinkled peasants. This antediluvian
vigour of vice fascinated him, and in the "toupet" of these castaways he perhaps saw
some of the barbaric grandeur of prehistoric epochs. He certainly never dreamed
of scourging modern manners with his works. His quest was for pictures, and he
felt no repugnance when he took up his abode for months in a certain hospitable
house near the Boulevard, where he painted a notable series of portraits, which

284 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

Paris ought to possess. Fragonard has come to life again in these medallions. Nor
was he obscene when he painted his figurantes behind the scenes, when their
chic had ended in exhaustion, and the flesh relaxed into loose masses on pillows,
like ill-tied parcels. He delighted in these shapeless shapes, and painted draperies
that looked like women, and women that looked like draperies. He painted human
organisms, with scarcely anything human about them, and the marvel of it is that
they remain organic, such was the magic of his art. His methods were the same
in dealing with men. Bruant's cloak, his broad-brimmed felt hat, his famous
shawl, produced masterly planes, which linger in the mind like Volkslieder.
His friend and cousin, Tapie de Celeyran, introduced him to Pean. Here he
gloried in the broad white surface of the operator's apron, the widely opened jaws
of the patient, the surgeon's energetic grip, and painted the grandiose and terrible
picture now in his cousin's possession.*

But women interested him more than all the rest. He made them into poetry,
when he was not using them for fresco-drama. Daumier scarcely observed woman
at all, or treated her with scant courtesy. In Lautrec's lithographs she becomes the
Don Quixote of a fantastic epic, in which the very subordinate male part is occa
sionally played by Sancho Pansa. Sometimes he draws her slim and slender, a ghostly
lath-like figure. Yvette, Lender, and Jane Avril were his born types : he sketched
the hallucinations of the consumptive demirep, which take life and substance from
exhaustion ; he sought the grotesque in all the ironies of cosmopolis : the mixture
of the petty and gigantic peculiar to Paris, the colossal absurdity of a remnant of
the ancient forms of culture in the midst of a new world sharply opposed to it, the
folly of a traditional gesture to express the unutterable wants of the day. No
artist had a keener perception of our modern love of slender forms. He noted
our favourite dogs, the large, slim African sloghis, the Pierrot-like poodles, the
weedy horses, with their stilt-like legs. Avril was to him something in the nature
of a long-legged thoroughbred. He showed her in dances — as, for instance, in
the most brilliant of all posters, Avril au Jardin de Paris — where her dainty leg
has the grace of some delicate racer in motion. And La Goulue has affinities with
the robust circus-horses on which he poises his airy acrobats.

In his excellent study in Figaro Illustrt for 1902 (No. 145), Arsene
Alexandre notes the influence of the sporting painter Princeteau, who was Lautrec's
friend and neighbour at the beginning of his career. In 1883 he entered Bonnat's
studio, where he vexed his soul with dark heavy colours ; there is an old woman
praying painted at this period, which gives no hint of Lautrec's later development.
In 1884 he spent a barren year with Cormon. In 1885 he met Degas and found
his true path.

Lautrec is unimaginable without Degas. In his earlier works there are faces
and scenes in which we recognise the typical forms of the early Degas. We are
struck in particular by the affinities to the exquisite, but unhappily very rare
etchings of the older master. Not only did Degas show him the way to his own
special domain ; he taught him to create its special forms. But Lautrec dared to
do what Degas scorned, he painted his pictures, and that finally led him away from
Degas to a wider field. He belonged to a new generation ; and perfect as his
drawing was — certainly the most brilliant basis of his development — his special
importance lies in his mastery of large surfaces; it is hardly too much to call him
a monumental painter.

* Dr. Tapi6 de Celeyran also owns the most important collection of Lautrec's lithographs.

LAUTREC: THE MODE

BERNHEIM COLLECTION, PARIS
PHOTOGRAPH DRUKT

: REPOS Dl' JV

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC 285

His vigourous Moulin Rouge pictures affect us like frescoes, frescoes com
pounded of rouge and tulle and taffetas. Take, for instance, the Tromenade, in
M. Bernheim's collection, Paris, where the three cocottes walking arm in arm, fill
up the surface powerfully with three robust forms intersected on each side by the
frame. In the two pictures with which Lautrec adorned the exterior of La Goulue's
booth, his rare talent already revealed itself beneath the farce, especially in the one
where the foreground is gay with spectators and La Goulue swings her leg on the
stage. It recalls Seurat. Lautrec mocked at fresco, as at everything else, but in
spite of this, he found some fine motives for it. Such are his grandiose poster, Reine
dejoie, and his La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge, with the decorative black line of the
spectators' heads, and in the foreground the huge figure of the partner — a reminis
cence of Daumier's Ratapoil. Such again are many of his lithographs ; the most
brilliant of all, for instance, the Lender which appeared in Pan, with its masterly
distribution of line and colour, the completest victory over Japan and the most
dazzling illustration of Manet's programme of flat painting ever achieved on a
sheet of paper. His pictures teem with decorative details. The drawing Au
Cirque, where the little yellow figure dances in the centre, while the three Japanese
girls hold up their fans in the foreground, is an amazing linear invention.
Here psychology is dumb ; it is pure arabesque.

Lautrec's brushwork was as hasty as his drawing. He liked cardboard for a
background, and left as much as possible of the blank surface in his compositions.
He would have nothing to do with technical recipes. Seurat interested him, but
he would have laughed at the idea of a definite programme. In many of his
pictures we find some original little commas, which reveal his pleasure in ornament,
but this is not in any degree colour-division. At times he shows an exaggerated
negligence, but at his worst he could not be a renegade to his aristocratic taste, and
he chose his colours with the same careless confidence with which he scribbled his
arabesques. It was only in his last decade that he began to concern himself with
technique. Two visits to Spain had revealed Velazquez to him. Here he found
the completion of Degas. The result was the series of family portraits, in which
the crippled dwarf suddenly revealed himself an inimitable master, whose earnest
ness, brilliance, and technical accomplishments entitle him to rank among the
greatest painters of the nineteenth century. Great things were to be expected of
him in those days. There was such a maestria in these pictures, such a classic
repose in form and colour, that we bless the South of France which inspired them,
and could curse his beloved Paris, which destroyed him.

It was in vain that they gave him a keeper, of whom he made a brilliant
portrait, which he inscribed 4t Mon gardien quand j'etais fou." His birth was an
extravagance, and it was only by means of extravagances that his artistic being was
sustained. When it was forced into normal channels, his art was quenched and
with it his life, in the summer of 1901.

The outcome of Lautrec's fifteen years of activity is very considerable. He
must have painted about a hundred and thirty pictures. His lithographs are to
be reckoned by hundreds. There are some hundred and fifty important prints,
twenty-five posters, and several dozen theatrical programmes, menus, and such
like. The trifles he threw off at odd moments are innumerable. It was his habit
to draw on the stone at his printer's, Stern's, as other people write. He further
distinguished himself as an illustrator of books.

RENOIR JDYI.

KESSLBR COLLECTION , WEI>U\R

RENOIR: LADY ON HORSE-BACK (L'AMAZONE)

H. ROUART COLLECTION, PARIS

RENOIR AND HIS CIRCLE 289

of great colouristic richness. If, impelled by a desire to lay hold of something
whereby we may indicate the inexplicable effect, as we stand before the picture,
we recall the old English masters, we must recognise clearly that what there
is of Gainsborough in the work springs from sources so alien to the English
man's art that we must not press the comparison. No modern could get the air
of the <Mrs. Siddons, or of the sumptuous portrait in the Wallace collection.
Such things lie outside the domain of modern art. People who should emulate
the style of Mrs. Siddons in these days would be merely ludicrous; and modern
painters who have the distinction of a Gainsborough, manifest the quality
otherwise than Reynolds' famous rival. Yet there is nothing more opulent
than the work which most suggests comparisons drawn from the great epochs
of painting : La Loge. Heilbut, in his study on the picture,* very acutely
observes that it creates two modern types by the technical methods of the old
masters. If this result has been really achieved — and who can deny it ? — these
methods have been rejuvenated, and no single quality of the ancient art informs
the work, but all that could be of service here. We might trace Watteau and
Gainsborough, Velazquez, and the Venetians in Renoir. Heilbut showed less per
ception when he said the picture ought to be hung beside a Gainsborough, to test
it. Renoir would not lose by such a process, but Gainsborough would ! The
English qualities that we detect in Renoir are of course more abundant in Gains
borough — pour cause ! — but what shall we find of Renoir in Gainsborough !
Durand-Ruel's little girl, painted by Renoir two years later, is still more English.
It is noteworthy that he had never been in England at the time. When Manet
and Fissarrotook refuge in London in 1870, Renoir turned soldier. He first saw
the Thames several years later, and, like a true Frenchman, he took no pleasure
in the land of the hidden sun.

If we wish to define the difference between Renoir and the English, we
cannot do so better than by comparing this French portrait of a child with the
little girl painted by Whistler — with whom Renoir had more in common at one
time than with any other Englishman. The presentments of Miss Alexander and
of Mile. Durand-Ruel are as dissimilar as an English and a French child. It is
difficult to consider them apart from the differences of costume : Whistler dressed
the English girl with consummate elegance ; none of the flesh is visible but the
hands and face, and one cannot imagine this little lady without her clothes. The
little Durand-Ruel is a " gosse " pure and simple, as evidently made to be kissed
as is the other to be looked at, fresh and alluring with her bare neck and little
naked arms, wholly a child. And the painting of the Frenchman differs from
that of Whistler in the same way : it is immeasurably younger, healthier, more
vital. A comparison would be less legitimate, if Renoir had already acquired his
later purity of palette when he painted this work, and had thus possessed a more
obvious superiority. But of this there is little more than a hint. The beauty lies
in the stupendous painting. The shimmering blue-green of the little frock, a shade
more pronounced in the sash, cannot be described as a colour-value ; it is a painted
tissue, in which the sunlight plays a part. The little creature stands, an extra
ordinarily piquant apparition, against the faint green wall-paper flecked with red and
green. Piquant, but absolutely natural, and standing just as an actual child would
stand. Yet the whole composition is no less distinguished than the work of the
American : the child is less aristocratic, but not the technique ; this is royal, while

* " Die Impressionisten," Cassirer, Berlin.
VOL. I 2 O

9o THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

that of the other is no more than lordly. To me the portrait of the little Durand-
Ruel is a finer work ; there is more nature in it, more, that is, of the nature of
painting, more pictorial wealth. And, in spite of all the subtlety of the Whistler,
the purely colouristic qualities of the Frenchman are more sympathetic. This was
the miracle of Monet's chromatic achievement, that he placed the nature of painting
on a new basis, a basis of purely physiological and perfectly indisputable effect.
Monet is perhaps a barbarian of painting, but he was a phenomenon in his recog
nition of the fact, that the most enduring among the fascinations by which the eye
is governed, must certainly be something that has its root in natural laws, that a
picture made up of pure colours must make a more permanent aesthetic impression
than a picture equally powerful not so constituted. This is as self-evident as that
we never weary of a green meadow full of flowers. Even works so remarkable as
Whistler's portrait of his mother, undoubtedly the most brilliant and inspired
picture of the Courbet School, are not exceptions. The writer is far from accepting
the extreme consequences of the theories of modern colour-virtuosi, which will
be dealt with in a later chapter ; but, with all due reserve be it said : a whole
world divides us from this Whistler. It is superb in a museum, especially in the
Luxembourg, where we seldom see it, where mind and eye are impressed by the
greatness of the conception afresh each time we stand before it, without ever
arriving at any intimate appreciation of it. In this particular setting, Whistler is
perhaps more effective than any of the moderns. But, in spite of the veneration
it inspires — nay, perhaps, because of it — we should not wish to have such pictures
as this in our houses. Whistler, indeed, sometimes painted pictures it is impossible
to see too often, or to have too near. But the Mother is not one of these.

We are impelled to demand nowadays that which Art can use in Nature.
Monet brought what it must fain use. Nor could Renoir refuse to admit this
truth. The struggle for colour was never fiercer in any artist, for none had ever
more to lose. None achieved more precious results in the process.

Like Manet, Renoir started from black as his strongest colour, from the
"Bijou rose et noir " on which Baudelaire wrote his famous quatrain. This
black, which became so dangerous to Courbet, Renoir set himself to transform
into blue, i.e., he replaced a conventional harmony by a chromatic one. Delacroix
helped him in the process. In the cushions below, on the left, in the Women of
Algiers, we may find Renoir's palette after the Courbet period, as he used it in
La Loge and many other works. Beautiful as it was, he had to abandon his
kinship with the old masters, that he might become entirely master of himself.
The problem tormented him for many years. In the large Moulin de la Galette
of 1876 in the Luxembourg the victory still seems to hang in the balance. There
is a tumultuous quivering vitality in this al fresco dance, in which the sun seems
to be taking part, but we are conscious of a certain uneasiness, if we mentally
compare it with the Hagen picture. It is undoubtedly a beautiful sketch, but
how far short it falls of the perfection of the Lise or the Boy with the Cat, of
Manet's broad handling, or of the vigorous roughness of Monet, who seemed to
have been born for this kind of art ! Yet in the very same year he reached a certain
issue. Near the Moulin de la Galette in the Luxembourg hangs La Balan$oire, the
young girl leaning against a swing as she chatters to some young men. Here he has
found the chromatic basis. In the Moulin de la Galette, an ugly, colourless black in
the men's clothes still contends with the pure blue and yellow tones. The Swing is a
lovely symphony in blue, of the most enchanting purity ; the checkering of the rosy

FRAGONARD: WOMEN BATHING (LES BAIGNEUSES)

LOUVRE, F'ARIS

RENOIR: WOMEN BATHING (LES BAIGNEUSES)

BERN'HF.IM COLLECTION, PARIS

RENOIR AND HIS CIRCLE 291

path with patches of sunlight is an exquisite fancy; the lively figures glow with a
refreshing reality. In the next few years he ventured on greater tasks; he painted
the brilliant picture of the girl asleep in a chair, with a sleeping cat on her lap.
All the naturalistic suggestiveness of which he was master was set free ; he painted
the divinely animal, as Degas had painted the diabolically animal; the joy of life,
as the other had painted the scorn of life. A healthy carnality radiates from
innumerable feminine lips and eyes and breasts. Rubens comes to life again,
purged of his lewdness. Renoir's women are neither more nor less chaste than
his landscapes, his grasses and pools ; theirs is an Elysian carnality, not yet
convulsed by passion, still idyllic, still instinct with freedom and beauty. The love
of these beautiful creatures is not devastating, but health-giving, as the children
Renoir painted testify. Who has depicted babies like his ? They overflow with
health, and glow as if tinted with milk and blood. The famous Fair Children
Exhibition of 1895 in London lacked its brightest jewels, for Renoir was absent.

This poetry of naturalism, this serene rendering of dazzling flesh is unparalleled
in these days of over-heated brains. Looking at these pictures, it is difficult to
believe in the much talked of decadence of the Latin races.

He demonstrates with jubilant tints : a pink, delicate as the bloom on a ripe
peach, deepening into the red of a cleft tomato ; a blue brilliant as that of the
southern skies under which Renoir painted his best landscapes, an orange like
gleaming quartz. Like Degas, he achieves the most intoxicating beauty with
pastel. The Bernheims' picture of a nurse with two children (painted in the
nineties) renders the bloom of healthy skin in all its gradations ; the little granules
of the material appear as the microscopic down on a childish epidermis.

The small oil picture of children in a wood — another work of this, his most
resplendent colour-period — can hardly be appreciated in a reproduction, even in
one so excellent as that made for this volume. In the mixture of orange
and blue in the dress of the nurse and the coat of the dog, the sun seems
to have charmed all the yellow to the surface, that we may divine the floods of
purple below. It draws a pink from the boy's blue dress that should rejoice the
hearts of the Neo- Impressionists, and the strong blue-rimmed yellow of the
famous straw hat is another detail that agrees with their programme. But who
would wish to see this indescribable material divided after their fashion ! — the
golden purple of the baby, where the silken texture of the little frock becomes
a thousand times more silken in the golden hair ; the rosy white of the little girl's
dress beside it, and the magic confluence of all the colours of the foreground in
the woodland mystery of fairyland.

This painter does not create colour-harmonies, he makes materials, like
Watteau and Lancret, but his are more beautiful than theirs, more beautiful than
those of Rubens or even those of the gods of Venice. These artists are superior
to him in a thousand ways, they do much more with a poorer material.; but no painter
before Renoir ever so bewitched his material, that a little canvas like this one seems
to contain the sum of all costly things, and yet remains so true to realities, that
the effect is not that of a gem, but of the natural envelope of the objects repre
sented. The picture is by no means unique in Renoir's vast work, and yet there
are details in it that seem to spring from the happiest inspiration, that were not
necessary, but which, when we see them, affect us as the gifts of some inexhaustible
and lavish Croesus. The young girl, for instance, holds a piece of needlework in
her rosy fingers, just a wisp of stuff, made up of yellow and blue tones with a

292 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

touch of green. Looking at this, we take it to be the central point of the picture ;
the next day we find this in a tree-trunk, the next again in one of the faces. . . .

Here all theories and formulae are at fault ; we have to do with a richness
as full of wonders as Nature herself. Renoir's colour is, in fact, a natural in
stinct, already revealed in the son of the poor Limoges tailor, who was earning
a living by painting on china at the age of seventeen. There are china vases
decorated by him in the fifties, which are perfect Renoirs. The beautiful colours
seemed to bloom of themselves on the white porcelain. The black period, when
he and his friends were under the influence of Courbet, was the beginning of the
artist, not of the painter. He would, no doubt, have remained a china-painter to
the end, had not the unhappy invention of printing on porcelain destroyed the
flourishing art. But here again the ruin of the many proved the fortune of the
individual. The youth's position was desperate ; his hopes of getting work at
Sevres seemed unlikely to be realised. One day he was walking in the Rue du Bac
when he saw a shop, in which transparent blinds for churches were manufactured.
The business seemed to be flourishing, and the proprietor wanted more hands.
Renoir went in and offered himself. The master made no difficulties ; there
was the workshop, he could come next day, the pay was 30 francs a blind.
At the end of the first week he was the best workman on the premises, at the end
of the second he was earning 100 francs a day, because he could work ten times as
auickly as the rest. He thus made enough money to pay for a course at the
Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he met Monet, Bazille, and Sisley. In the summer
they all went to Fontainebleau together. Here Renoir made the acquaintance of
the aged Diaz, who took a fancy to him, gave him some lessons, and allowed him
to make use of his credit with the colourman. The young people painted their
dark landscapes no worse than the men of 1830, until one fine day Manet opened
their eyes. The reign of Courbet was not yet at an end, however, and in Monet,
Cezanne, and Renoir more especially, the influence of Courbet and of Manet strove
at first for the mastery. Cezanne's snow-scene, in the Vollard collection, painted,
no doubt, in the sixties, is unmistakably inspired by such Courbets as Duret's
snow -scene, though it is already mellower than Courbet's ; Manet's influence showed
itself at once in an increased fluidity of the palette.

When Renoir had absorbed this new theory of colour, his next pre-occupa-
tion was to conquer the solidity of structure he had hitherto neglected, and to
abandon the improvisation of the Impressionists.

About the year 1881 he painted the famous Dejeuner des Canotiers, the
young folks seated at a meal under an awning. In parts it is quite in Renoir's old
vein, an art that deals with joyous, fugitive charms, as in the dainty " tip-tilted
nose " of the grisette, who is coaxing the dog beside her to sit up, the merry
animation of the groups in the background, and above all, in the exquisite still-life
on the table. But the two bare-armed oarsmen reveal new elements ; they are
almost like statues in the midst of the painting.

The next period in Renoir's art is generally looked upon as barren, especially
in the circles of the Rue Lafitte, the non plus ultra of Impressionism. In reality
it was perhaps the most fruitful in its relation to the influence exercised by Renoir
in the development of art.

Even as a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Renoir had been an admirer
of Ingres, and in those frequent studies of the nude he made at nearly every period
of his activity, he never quite lost sight of the master. The time came when he

RENOIR AND HIS CIRCLE 293

approached him more closely than any other painter of his generation, Degas him
self not exceptol.

Degas and Renoir are antithetical in many ways, and among others in their
respective attitudes to Ingres. For Degas, Ingres was a starting-point, of which
he never quite lost sight ; his reverence for Ingres had a decisive influence on his
drawing, but is manifest only in the early Degas the painter. For Renoir, whose
artistic genesis was in sharp contrast to that of Degas, Ingres became a consum
mation. It is this that gives Renoir his distinction. From this moment he possessed
to the full all that had lain dormant in him. Financially, his position was still
wretched. No painter has had to wait more patiently for the favour of the
purchasing public. The early pictures I have described, sold for a few hundred
francs. The Hagen example for just 100. Nevertheless, he began to have
admirers in the eighties. At this moment he risked all that charmed the
amateur — his incomparable facture — and threw himself uncompromisingly into
draughtsmanship.

The decisive picture was Mons. E. J. Blanche's bathing-scene, painted about
1885. Two naked women lie on their linen wraps on the bank; a third stands
in the water, threatening to splash one of them ; a fourth stands with her back
to the spectator and binds up her hair ; and the head and shoulders of yet another
emerge from the water in the background. A woodland landscape encloses the
figures. The pose of the two women on the bank is purely Ingresque, and
indescribably beautiful. The foremost of the pair is seen in sharp profile ; support
ing herself with her left hand on the drapery, she raises her right hand and foot at
an exquisite angle to repel her playfellow in the water, whose back is turned nearly
full to the spectator. The voluptuous figure of the second woman on the bank is
even more happily posed ; confronting the spectator, her eyes fixed on her com
panion, she lifts the drapery over her shoulders with the most enchanting gesture.
Ingres would have made it more perfect. Renoir clung to a certain abruptness,
and this gives his figure a touch of delightful awkwardness that accords with the
subject, and adds to the charm of the expression. Nevertheless, the purely formal
inter-play of the limbs on the bank is admirable. The four hands and four feet
so close together would have been a danger for a weaker artist. A stylist would
have confined the picture to these two figures, and have been content to paint the
splendid movement of the rhythmic arms. One is tempted to regret that Renoir
did not. The consternation in the Rue Lafitte would have been great, the picture
still greater. The movement is weaker in the remaining figures, and the relations
are less convincing. The realist added the third figure ; he wanted to explain
the action on the bank. It is only in the distant woman, whose arms encircle her
head, that the master of form proclaims himself again.

The picture is, therefore, by no means perfect. If we imagine it hanging
between Fragonard's little gem, the Bathers of the Louvre, and Ingres' Odalisque ;
it loses on both sides. The figures have not the masterly convention of Fragonard's,
who distributes his limbs almost like ripples on the water, and suppresses Nature
when it would mar the decorative effect, and they are just as remote from the
perfect equilibrium of the painter of the Odalisque, who made one single immortal
line of the whole body. Yet Renoir, too, strove after Ingres' modelling ; even in
his early studies of the nude, long before he went to Italy, he reduced the form
in order to make the masses more compact. But in this there was nothing of the
Michelangelesque modelling that distinguishes French Baroque. Renoir is too

294 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

solid for this. His single figures, which he prefers to show in half-profile, stand
out in powerful outline against the sky. One of the most beautiful of these,
owned by Durand-Ruel and dated 1885, has the effect of a cloisonne enamel.*
Turning her back to the spectator, the model thrusts both hands into her chestnut
hair, on which lie heavy blue reflections. This is a Venus Anadyomene of a new
kind. She sits on an overhanging ledge of cliff, her feet rolled in a bathing-
sheet ; from thence the mighty line rises along the exquisite curve of the torso,
and the beautiful breast, runs sharply into the hollow under the arm and then
sweeps out to the marvellous angle of the elbow. The sharp contour is won only
by the perfect differentiation of flesh and of atmosphere, and not by contrasts
of colour. This technique is markedly distinguished from that of the earlier and
later periods. The figure is a smooth, firm plane, strongly relieved against the
surroundings, the background and so on, where Renoir's high-toned palette is
used in an airy fashion. Before this work we may be bold, and talk of monu
mental effects.

A visit to Italy effaced the harshnesses of the period. Renoir went to Venice,
where he painted some marvellous landscapes. Here he procured letters of intro
duction to Richard Wagner, the god of his, as of Fantin's idolatry, and though he
lost them he was able to paint a head of the composer at Palermo in a brief
sitting. It was a very remarkable, but necessarily hasty performance, which Wagner
laughingly pronounced very like a Protestant clergyman ! t

Returning to Paris with the sunshine of the south in his palette, Renoir
resumed the study of the nude, and now attained the culminating-point of his
admirable flesh-painting. The torsoes of his naked figures are always superbly
modelled. In the extremities, his desire for roundness and his inability to forego
pictorial effects, sometimes led to malformations, for which there are not always
obvious compensations. In his colour-technique, he continues to experiment to
this day, and if some of the excellences of an earlier period are lacking to his
last manner, it is only of late years that he has mastered the preparation of his
painting ground, that solid splendour which is so painfully deficient in Monet's
work. When he began to lay greater stress upon drawing, he reduced the oily
element in his colour. At the period of the Blanche picture, his canvases were
left so dry that the permanence of the work is endangered. This dryness, very
apparent in the Luxembourg picture, the young girls at the piano, exaggerates
certain malformations of the body produced by the passion for roundness, which
are characteristic of many Renoirs. But Renoir has this lofty affinity with
Rubens : he can never sink so low, but that his very weaknesses are capable of
producing abnormal elements of beauty. His scrofulous women have always
some regal qualities. As Mauclair, in his study on Renoir J very truly says,
we must always distinguish between "the defects of poverty and those of
exuberance." Rubens supplements defective harmonies by the turbulent force of
his temperament. His successor must content himself with a smaller field. He
is great when he concentrates his powers. Rubens, even when he loses himself in
immensity, remains a victorious, though a frenzied god.

* See reproduction.

t It was the day after the completion of the score of Parsifal, Wagner consented to sit, on con
dition that the sitting should not last more than twenty minutes, and Renoir did not exceed the limit.
The little picture now belongs to M. de Bonnieres. Renoir made a replica, in '93, better, but still
very sketchy, for Cheramy.

\ V Art dicoratif, Nos. 41 and 42 (February and March 1902).

RENOIR: WOMAN BATHING (BAIGNEUSE)

DURAND-RUEI. COLLECTION, PARIS

RENOIR AND HIS CIRCLE 295

No member of the whole circle has experimented so freely with colour as
Renoir. There are, in particular, many pictures of the eighties, painted on a dull
blue ground, that seem unsatisfactory at a first glance. I may instance the group
of young girls at a piano, on which is a bouquet, at present in the possession
of Durand-Ruel. The deliberate uniformity of colour, especially in the dull blue of
the ground, repels the naturalist. But if we give it time, the blue begins to work
with a mysterious power. It concentrates the scattered yellow tones, shows up the
beauty of the white and the vapourous pink and finally brings the spectator
to think the whole picture as natural and as perfect as the daintily chosen
bouquet. In this unity of tints that displeased him at first, he recognises a special
medium of style, whose function it is to show richness in new ways and to
complete that which the art that seeks style in outline had attempted.

In spite of its perfection, much of Renoir's vast and prolific work is frag
mentary, perhaps because it was only thus that it could retain all its value.
Without wasting much time in research Renoir has also made exorbitant demands
on his divine gift in the multiplicity of his works. When others have stayed
their hands, paralysed by the very intensity of their desire to create, he has gone
on producing and producing, even when the outlook has been most gloomy.
Like a marvellous river, in which magic forms are reflected, his activity rolls on ;
and still he accounts all days as lost when he has been unable at least to hold a

pencil in his crippled fingers.

* * * * * * *

The circle that formed round these great heroes of painting still eludes
definitive analysis. The influence of Degas is obvious throughout ; that of Renoir
is much more occult. If we should attempt to name all those who are indebted
to him, the catalogue would be unending. It would contain elements so diverse
as Seurat and Carriere, Gauguin, Bonnard, and Maurice Denis. His life work has
been too vast and many-sided to make it possible for us to speak, as yet, of the
school of Renoir. The direct affinities which Fauchet and others have attempted
to demonstrate are mainly noticeable as a purely technical tendency, making for
the production of solid canvases.

But indirectly, Renoir will be an influence reaching far beyond his age. Of
all the Impressionists he is the most essentially an artist in the traditional sense,
the one who, amidst all the immense progress of his time never forgot the old doc
trine, that to paint is above all things the function of the painter ; and wherever
and whenever there is painting in France, Renoir's art will remain an example.
Renoir's, and that of his three great friends. It may be that the example will
have results somewhat different to those we, its contemporaries, look for. The
time may come when, though the mighty personal achievement of these pro
tagonists shall have lost nothing of its prestige, they will be appraised as, after
all, but an important consequence of the upheaval accomplished by that great
Roman barbarian, David, the last fruits of the Revolution which destroyed all the
great national traditions of craftsmanship, and among them the divine prescription
that governed Watteau's art. Brilliant as their names appear in the new period of
history they inaugurated, they are not exempt from the tragedy inherent in their
daring deed. They ate at a new board, sometimes laden with dainties undreamt
of by their predecessors, but sometimes lacking necessaries, the bread and salt of
the old masters.

The old masters possessed not merely a complex tradition, governing compo-

296 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

sition. Their greatest treasure was knowledge of the materials of their craft, of
the processes to which panels, canvases and colours should be subjected, before
they began to think of artistic creation per se, a sum of experience, to which every
great master of technique among them added his quota, without setting aside what
had been already won.

Our great moderns never passed through this elementary school, and just as
technique was an easy matter to the ancients who had mastered their craft, so it
presented colossal difficulties to men who often owed their experience to chance,
to a sudden inspiration, to blind groping, and who sometimes had to risk the
greatest dangers and make immense exertions, to work out and perfect their
conceptions in accordance with their lofty ideals.

They had learnt nothing ; some of them came from the lowest social stratum.
They were all revolutionaries, and that which was offered them as long as they had
patience to listen to others, was so essentially trivial and ephemeral, that their
spirit of revolt drove them to deny the value of teaching altogether, and begin
with Nature. Hence the unrest in their careers, and sometimes in their pictures,
hence the makeshift and fragmentary element in their art. But these very
elements make them belong to us and perhaps to us alone. Distant epochs may
reject them perhaps, but if so, they will have to wipe us, their generation, out of
history also, and with us a great epoch. For this art expresses nothing more
vehemently than the stiff-necked, revolutionary force of our times. This creation
by the light of instinct, could not have flourished in any but a strenuous age.

Does it point upwards — will these mighty fragments weld themselves into a
great homogeneous force, gaining fresh strength from itself, without going back to
the ancient springs ? That is the question. We will examine a series of attempts
at organisation, based on the achievements of these pioneers. The logical conse
quence seems so assured, that we can hardly doubt a happy issue. But, neverthe
less, it behoves us not to lose sight of the relative nature of this result.

Monet, who influenced the whole circle, after he himself had sat at Manet's
feet, is the most seductive of the group. He was the first to draw conclusions ;
he did so with the barbaric ruthlessness that belongs to crucial decisions. If
among the great quartet there still lingered some personal reflex of the old art,
however they adapted and modified it for their own ends, Monet was untouched
by it. He is purely the child of his age, the bold proletarian, trusting only to
himself, his reason, and — his luck ! If we failed to recognise the relative quality
of his art, we might shut out the Louvre from our future artistic appreciations.
For from Monet onward the road leads away uncompromisingly from the old
masters. We may ask where it will end.

RENOIR: NUDE FIGURE ON THE BEACH

DUKAND-RUEL COLLECTION, PARIS

FROM A DRAWING BY FELIX VALLOTTON

VOL. I

2 P

FROM A DRAWING BY FELIX VALLOTTON FOR
"DIE INSEL"

CLAUDE MONET: THE BRIDGE AT ARGENTEUIL

FAURE COLLECTION PARIS

CLAUDE MONET: SAARDAM

TAVERNIER COLLECTION, PARIS
PHOTOGRAPH DRUKT

BOOK III

COLOUR AND COMPOSITION

I. COLOUR

CLAUDE MONET

The chief person in a picture is the light
in which everything is bathed. — TAINE.

MONET, like Manet, painted an alfresco meal, and at the time when Manet's star
was in the ascendant among the friends. It is blonder, softer, daintier than that
of the older man, like dawn before a fine summer day. Under the influence of his
friend, Monet painted amazingly impressive things ; his large portrait of a lady in
a splendid green gown — in a German collection, like the first-named picture —
must be reckoned among the representative portraits of all time.

Monet is just as essentially talent, as Manet was genius. With him, talent
manifested itself in a brilliantly trained eye, and the courage to obey it. Manet
had more brain ; (Monet seems only to incite the eye to thought ;"jand we can see
how, a.i he grew older, an almost scientific will moulded form in his work.
But he who delighted in the Monet of the seventies, and was not himself an
old man at this time, will feel no disappointment as he makes the transition
the artist judged necessary. In the landscapes of this time we find a style that
absolutely determines the composition, and affects the senses like poetry. It is
not Manet's great style, but a beneficent lyricism, avoiding the grander chords, that
it may be all the lovelier in simple ones.

The most beautiful landscape of our world, that of the environs of Paris, has
found the most beautiful artistic expression in Monet. The infinitely feminine
element, so caressing to the senses, that characterises this district, the tact, if one
may speak of tact in Nature, the sparkling quality which the Parisienne possesses,
and which, whatever may be said against her, always remains child-like and
lovable in her — all this is in the Monets painted when the artist was in his
thirties.

Parisians cannot be grateful enough for having this landscape so near them.
What may be said of Monet is applicable to the whole of Parisian art, indeed, to
the whole time-honoured culture of the city. For him who has lived in Paris as
a worker, the recollection of a fine Sunday out at Vetheuil, where Monet painted,
or anywhere else on the Seine — there is nothing ugly round Paris — is a re
membrance of something inexpressibly delightful. The sensation is akin to the
psychic value of pleasure in a work of art, the nature of which is best realised, if
we picture it as happiness remembered. It is, indeed, not only Nature one enjoys,
or the marked contrast between city and country, but the sense of a special dis
pensation that has spread just such country round just this town — something so
absolutely different from and yet so perfectly appropriate to it. Great cities are
monstrosities, ugly accidents of the Earth's pure body, appearing here and there

302 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

like warts on the skin. This one city is beautiful, and does not seem to have been
built up upon the earth, so much as to have grown out of it. Only here could
she have arisen. Were she not here, the woods that surround her, the hills from
which we descend to her, the water in which she is mirrored, would not be here
either. Everything around has, or seems to have, its relation to Paris — a relation
enhanced by the beautiful architectural works we find everywhere embedded in the
landscape. The aspect of this Nature seems to reflect the happy temperament of
the men who have made Paris, men who know what art is, because they possess
Nature.

From the landscape of about 1830 to Monet is a far cry. The gentle lovers
who had sat to Watteau and Fragonard were turned to stone at Millet's heavy
tread. The harsh art of his northern temperament discovered a monumental
gravity therein. The poetry of Corot and Diaz called forth song again, without
saying anything very expressive of this particular landscape. Once when the great
Rousseau came upon a woodman in the forest, he uttered the beautiful saying
recorded by Burty : " Do you know the difference between an oak and a lath ?
Out of an oak we can make a million laths, but millions of laths will not make
an oak." But he forgot the trees in the tree. Dupre and Daubigny sought
ambush in the heart of the forest, and already they have become to us children of
the woods. If we did not know where they worked, we should never believe that
their models, too, stood at the gates of Paris. They all went into the woods and
painted, and as we look at their pictures, saintly legends like that of Genevieve
rise to our minds. Monet stayed upon the hill-top and gazed down. His eyes
wandered over the garden terraces to the water, followed the coquettish windings
of the river with its swift boats and quiet islands, strayed into the valleys, climbed
the wooded hill opposite, and skirted the great line on the horizon that glitters in
the sunshine. Monet's landscapes have faces, like Tintoretto's pictures ; he has
studied the physiognomy of Nature.

Thoma made a German landscape by the methods necessary to give it the
characteristics it seems to German eyes to have ; Monet and Pissarro painted a
French landscape. The distinction is significant, no less for the country than for
the people. Indeed, the whole racial difference is implied here. The sun shines
upon the valleys of the Odenwald ; a French temperament would rejoice in the
light and colour here, as at home ; but the Germans have read their own
melancholy into the scene. The only new element in Thoma's art, however, is
this unaffected sadness ; his methods are terribly old-fashioned, though without
the beauty of the old works, and he would have passed unnoticed altogether had
he not appealed to the sentiment that is one of the " properties " of our cherished
Germanism. As a painter, Thoma may be called a colourer rather than a
colourist : that is to say, he brushes over his surfaces, and in the choice of colours
is guided by certain elementary maxims, which sometimes give curious results.
Artistic creation is at an end, in his case, as soon as he has finished his
drawing ; and all that this shows of completeness is a primitive renunciation, an
application of coarse methods to the makeshift of an ancient convention. We cannot
compare a Frenchman and a German it is said, and rightly so ; but that it is
impossible in this case is not to the credit of the German. We may imagine
the two temperaments, each an optical apparatus producing distinct results ; the
one, Thoma's, lets everything related to light and colour pass through it, and
retains nothing but a few lines ; the other, that of Monet, shows these phenomena as

CLAUDE MOXET: CLIFFS AND BEACH AT POURVILLF

PHOTOGRAPH Dl'RAND-Rfl-i.

CLAUDE MONET 303

they appear to an eye sensitive to light and colour. Both are methods of reduction,
as arc all artistic processes that deal with Nature ; the difference between them is,
that the one was practised with equal success some centuries ago, while the other
was discovered to-day, and has increased our knowledge tenfold. In Germany
one is led to the cruel conclusion that intellectual suggestiveness increases in
inverse proportion to artistic power of perception. Reaction will be more readily
effected in primitive beings before the primitive Thoma than before Monet, and
beings still more primitive will be more deeply stirred by an anonymous oleograph
than by either. These limitations are sometimes justified by the good the
populace gets out of these things ! Degas was perhaps wrong in maintaining that
it is no function of art to become popular. But no amount of popularity will
make mediocre art better.

Monet, however, has won popularity far beyond the boundaries of his native
land, and this will wax greater and greater, for his works have that peculiarly
cosmopolitan quality which makes for universal recognition. He painted not
only French landscapes, but landscape in general, as it appears to modern senses.
He has made these senses keener and purer, and has added to our natural capital of
beautiful things.

Of course, we must be able to bear Monet. It requires strong nerves, nerves
such as the people were wont to have ; failing these, we may possibly find him brutal,
lacking in that perfect harmony the French call " intimite," and so on. At every
exhibition of French art in London, we read that the Impressionists lack this
Whistlerian quality. This is hardly surprising if we take the conceptions of
European art that prevail in England into account. But earnest Germans have
also striven in vain to kindle before Monet's art, and have recorded kindred
judgments. The fault does not lie with Monet. In taking " intimite " as a
standard of excellence, there can be no question of purely personal tsate, by
virtue of which one person likes a particular picture, another some other of
equal merit, and of course it is possible to find a given picture by Sisley more
" intime " than one by Monet ; in certain cases, subjective elements contribute
to this result, such as the space for which the picture was meant. But if, on the
whole, we find, say Carriere and the Scotchmen " intime," and Monet, on the
whole, the reverse, this is no mere question of taste, but a misfortune, an almost
immoral perversity.

For this would mean that " intime " stands for subdued, dark or sentimental.
As a fact, it can only mean the nicely balanced harmony of tones, which is possible
with the most diverse colours, but which can only adequately reveal its charms as
long as it remains recognisable. Constable painted and wrote superbly on this
text. The English aesthete loves shadow. One cannot live with impunity in a
town like London, where the sun only shines on great occasions. But then no
one really lives in London. As soon as the normal Englishman leaves off work
he rushes into the open air. It would be natural to do the same in English art,
and Constable was wise in his generation. But if a man stays in the city and is
bent on painting — and God knows no city has more of picturesque material — he
should take the impression of misty London not as a means but as an end, not
copying the dust with colourless dirt, but using luminous colour to render the
London atmosphere, in which the essential element is not the dust, but the
colour. How Veronese would have painted this dust ! . . .

Rembrandt is commonly quoted in defence of dark painting — Rembrandt,

304 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

who got his darkness out of yellows and reds, whose gloom warms the eye like
glowing coals on which the gases are playing. Rembrandt does not avoid colour,
he seeks it to master it. The things he had to say demanded the suppression of
all material effects; he banished them to the background, but he never killed
them. One always feels as if it would be possible to remove innumerable
strata from his pictures, revealing a series of new beauties ; the oftener one sees
a fine Rembrandt the more one discovers in it.

Our attitude of to-day differs from that of Rembrandt. We are less discreet,
and necessarily so, for a revolutionary initiative has been forced on Art, a definite
acknowledgment, which must be followed by other professions of faith. The age
in which Rembrandt lived permitted him to concentrate himself in a lofty indi
vidualism, and to be, if that were possible, the greatest of artists without art. We
need more than ever the physics of artistry, because we are seeking a basis for
future developments, in order to oppose a new faith to the superstition, which
has destroyed all the fundamental laws of craftsmanship.

The instinct of self-preservation forbids us to compare our art with that of
Rembrandt. The points wherein the comparison would be in our favour would
make us traitors to him ; those which would put us at a disadvantage would force
us to question the whole logic of our progress.

One could almost wish that certain great factors could be withdrawn from
circulation at a period of decisive development, since we are not always capable of
attaining to the point whence such factors can be seen to confirm the development,
if this be a healthy one. The apparent negation of our purposes by these exemplars
perplexes us, and we have not always the courage to recognise that this negation
has only to be thoroughly examined to become affirmation. Yet we know by
experience that just at the moment of fiercest revolt against tradition the most
fruitful results have been won therefrom.

The contrast between Monet and his Scottish contemporaries is perhaps
seven times greater than that between Monet and Rembrandt, and the people
who are startled by a vivid Monet, are merely suffering, perhaps, from a con
stitutional inability to distinguish rouge from natural bloom. There are persons
with a defective sense for material, who, governed by the same defective instinct,
put up with badly proportioned walls, inferior stuffs, and artificial flowers. Between
these and the enemies of the new painting, who cannot tear themselves free from
the old, there is a noticeable shade of difference. These stand convicted of an
anachronism more dangerous and unnatural than the archaism of those who turn
to the old methods because present conditions forbid the satisfaction of their
definite and more particularly, their indefinite desires. It is anachronism to be
incapable of realising that we no longer live in houses such as those in which
Rembrandt painted, that Rembrandt is great, not because he worked in the shade,
but in spite of it, and that the sun, which Rembrandt saw stealing through the little
windows of his low-ceiled rooms to play on the heavy stuffs and gleaming metals of
their walls, shines gaily into our dwellings. Archaism may be progression in its
infancy, the first step on a new path, as it has often proved in our own times. But
the love of Dutch darkness for its own sake, when there are painters like Monet in
the world, is retrograde. It is permissible to feel doubtful as to the actual value of
pictorial art in the present day ; but it is idiotic to hang pictures in our houses
which do not even show symbolically the modernity of our developed instincts, and
force us, lest we outrage taste, to revive the gloomy interiors of the citizens of the

CLAUDE MONET: STILL-LIFE

PHOTOGRAPH, DURAND-RUEL

CLAUDE MONET 305

seventeenth century. He who seeks in the old masters merely the confirmation of
natural perception, has no need of' them. They were the vehicles of the impulses
of their age, the centres of its culture, the concentrations of its ideas. We are not yet
advanced enough to use them, if we are not strong enough to resist them. After
the monstrous polygamy of our instinct with all the muses of all the ages and
nations, it is time to recognise that salvation lies in the monogamy that produces
healthy children. As in every decision of such moment, practical considerations must
govern the issue : the healthiest woman, whose person promises most, is the best
mate. For such reasons, this modern French art is to be recommended. She is the
youngest and healthiest, and we must not reject her, because she is but moderately
endowed with nobility of feeling and moral sense.

The Impressionists have given us back normal vision. It is not their genius
so much as their healthiness that raises them above the abstract significance of every
purely artistic activity of our times, and gives them an aureole no less splendid
than the halo that encircles Nietzsche's head. A pious heart was essential to the
deepest conception of ecclesiastical art, a flexible mind to the appreciation of the
episodic painting of every kind that followed, an apprehension of the current pathos
to the monumental compositions of all periods. For this art, the only one proper to
us, the requisite is healthy senses. For the ideal of our age, which no less than
all other epochs, seeks to reconcile sense and reason, for this religion, which
even to-day has its piety, its rapture, its martyrs, this art has painted many
an altar-piece. Manet is its genius, Renoir and Cezanne stand like giant
Caryatides beside it. Monet may be accounted its best marksman. His im-
porcance lies in his healthiness. It is only on materialists that he works materially.
No rude awakening from dreams threatens the beauty of the illusions he creates
for us ; their limitations coincide with those of our modern art. And even on the
spiritual side Monet's treatment of his themes has been significant and far indeed
from brutal. Is there any more sympathetic conception of Dutch Nature than
the Saardam, with the two quaint houses by the waterside ? * It is more than a
landscape. In it Monet has painted the very spirit of the people which delights
in landscapes such as this ; not otherwise did the old Dutchmen work, who, when
they painted the simplest things, painted not only these, but a far-reaching con
ception of them.

There is a lyric poetry which needs no castles or ruins to call forth its
melodious numbers. It inheres in this French Naturalism, swelling to mightiest
passion in Monet's famous Belle-Isle series, the triumphant sequel to Courbet's
renderings of sea-waves. These marines, superficially mere pictures of the sea,
sound depths far greater than Bocklin's naiad-haunted waves, which too often seem
to be made of blue tin. The rush of the seething waters round the red-brown
fragments of rock, painted with strokes like breakers, sings a mightier song of the
greatness of the elements than the sturdiest of the Swiss master's Tritons ; and the
vast horizon in others, terrific, non-imaginative works, showing nothing but the
surface of the waters, are more powerful in their effects than all the famous sea-
idyls, with which German museums have been furnished during the past decade.
Good painting needs none of these objective monstrosities, and if it makes use of
them, it merely plays with them, as the wind plays among the leaves, and does not
attempt to give us drama or any other hocus-pocus by their means. It is
the attribute of good pictures to affect by brushing and colour. Of course,

* Formerly in the Tavernicr collection, now in the Stadel Institute, Frankfort.
VOL. I 2 Q

306 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

externals may impede the play of fancy, and it must be admitted that in his later
years, Monet seems almost to have invited such a risk. We can pardon the
irritation of susceptible persons at his exhibitions in the Georges Petit Galleries,
where we occasionally see some dozens of pictures, which show the same section
of the same branch in the same meadow, and are only to be distinguished by
gradations in the illumination. At a first glance these collections look like great
sets of colour-samples, and, indeed, this is what they very probably are. I have
seen people collecting more worthless things with enthusiasm. These have at
least a hygienic value. After visiting one of these exhibitions I often have the
same sensation as after a Turkish bath, a sensation not especially elevating from
the moral point of view, but physically pleasant and beneficent. We must not,
however, assume a priori that Monet repeated the same bit of Nature again and
again in a spirit of mere playfulness, for the same thing has been done by other
great artists. That he exhibited such studies is an evidence of the importance he
attached to the modification of colour by light. To him, the difference between
a tree-stump in the morning and the same in the afternoon was greater than the
difference between a man and a woman illuminated by the same sunshine. Of
course he carried this somewhat to extremes, especially when we think of the good
old times, which had but one illumination for all their requirements — and got it
by excluding sunlight ! We must not cavil at the tendency, for to this golden zeal,
which has in it something of the touching tenderness of the older Fontainebleau
painters, and springs from a deeper consciousness, we owe the rich scale of modern
colour. France owes him her relative familiarity with sensations that are not only
of service to the painter. The process has perhaps done little to increase an
extravagant worship of unapproachable genius, but it brings us closer to^art. There
is no sorcery in the matter.

Monet reveals h;mself best — so far as there is anything obscure to reveal — in
the garden he has*planted about his country house. He has made it on the same
principle as his pictures. A mass of red — gigantic carnations — stands against a
mass of white lilies ; beside them a forest of glowing sunflowers. Beyond, a tangle
of purple blossoms among clusters of glistening green. It is brilliant, because
every individual blossom contributes to the mass of colour, and beautiful, because
the mass is nevertheless homogeneous, a fair garden full of picturesque delights.

Monet's painting resembles a kind of flower which we can hardly imagine to
have existed before our times : the chrysanthemum. He paints forms akin to
their clusters of sinuous, slender-tongued petals, yellow without, red within ; to
their huge, snow-white ruffles, fit wear for a Pierrot ; to their ragged golden heads,
with thread-like reflexed plumes. We recall this flower-like quality when we talk
of his colour, or pronounce him a landscape painter or a naturalist. In reality he
is a great decorator, who is not afraid to show the means by which he gets his
effects. He recognised his own powers when he devoted his best hours to
his cathedral pictures, when he poured the lava-stream of his lightning-colour
over a huge form which presented itself to him as a piece of Nature. Here he
set his brush-strokes side by side, almost like stone against stone, creating a repro
duction not unworthy of the original. In the Rouen series there is something of
the splendour of the great masters who made human gestures the vehicles of their
distribution of light, and Monet, with his little flecks of colour, has given us
marvels comparable to those of the great glass-painters, with their scenes from the
Passion.

CAMILLE P1SSARO: THE EDGE OF THE LAKE (AU BORU DE L'EAU)

(WATF.R COLOUR)

CHERA.MY COLLECTION, PARIS

CAMILLE PISSARO: THE FOUNTAIN OF THE TUILERIES

BF.RNHEIM COLLECTION, PARIS

CLAUDE MONET 307

In Monet a nervous excitability of temperament wars with the intelligence of
the colourist ; Courbet's animalism with Delacroix' wisdom. His last period
shows the predominance of colour over brushing. He generalises in splendid
tones. Many friends of the earlier Monet miss, in his latest renderings of atmo
sphere, the robustness of the sixties, and are not content with richness of colour.
As a fact, even the Monet of the latest period is not merely a colourist. What I
said above, of a worthy manner of painting the London mists, was written before
the last exhibition of the Thames series. In the interval Monet realised the ideal.
In these last pictures we seem to see Westminster Abbey and the bridges gleaming
through the prism of a huge brilliant. And this brilliance is not solely due to the
palette. Whistler's Nocturnes have shown us what taste in colour means. But
put one of these latest Monets beside the most refined of the Chelsea scenes. We
shall see then what genius must add to taste to achieve that higher colour which
finally triumphs over all the artifices of the palette. Under the glowing mist the
old Monet is still vibrating. And this secret art is not unmeet to depict the
mystery which the London fog suggests.

With Monet it is impossible not to consider the laws that govern the painter.
There are sensitive minds which this artistic analysis revolts ; others find it
profitable. Monet's successors made this physiology very apparent.

FROM A JAPANESE WOODCUT

SEURAT: BATHING (LA BAIGNADE) FRAGMENT, 1884

FF.NEON COLLF.CTION, PARIS

SEURAT AND HIS CIRCLE

THE APOSTLE AND THE CONGREGATION

THE tendency of modern art is towards a transformation of the aesthetic relation
between producer and consumer. It aims at giving an ever-increasing activity to
the part of the spectator, and at restricting the artist to the presentment ot elements
deliberately disconnected. Enjoyment is thus made to depend upon a capacity for
carrying out a synthesis.

In Daumier we recognised the great conqueror of this fruitful domain, in
Manet the most mature and universal form of a synthesis of material. It was
inevitable and necessary that the tendency should expand among their successors.
This it did in both branches of painting, line and colour. It was only Van
Gogh's wide humanity which laid hold vigourously of both ends at once. While
he was painting his experiences, the two groups had already parted company.
That one stood nearest to him which vainly strove for definitive results under
the leadership of his friend Gauguin. We shall find it later on at Pont-Aven.
All the more resolute was the action of the other group, which derived from
Monet, Pissarro, Guillaumin, and others, and completed what their predecessors
had left for them to do. It was the easier part of the task, for the achievement
of which logic and an open eye sufficed, the more material part ; it left that
element of Jongkind that lurked in Impressionism untouched, and held fast to
colour. But we shall see that there was at least one among these successors who
was not only a disintegrating, but a contributory force.

The older men had discoursed of effects of distance, of a clean palette, of
pure colours ; they had travelled in the East or had learnt something of the
secrets of colour science by studying the methods of distinguished predecessors.
There was a shorter, simpler, and much safer way, which the calm speculation of
great savants had begun to mark out from the beginning of the nineteenth century,
and which was ready by the time Monet's successors set to work. In 1807 the
Englishman Thomas Young formulated his theory of the three stimulants of the
retina; in 1853 Dove's study on colour was published; in 1864 Chevreul's
decisive work * on colour-contrasts, in which the scientist for the first time
demanded obedience from the artist. In the eighties important results followed
quickly one on the other. In New York, O. N. Rood, in Germany, Helmholtz
and many others, shed a flood of light upon the subject and found solutions for
all the points with which science is competent to deal.

Once more painters appeared with books under their arms, but these were no
longer prescriptions for mythological compositions, dissertations on the ideal, dramas
or poems. The volumes looked terribly prosaic, and learned formulae took the

* " De la Loi du Contraste simultand des Coulcurs ct dc 1'Assortiment des Objets colories."

3io THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

place of familiar verse on artistic tongues. Even criticism associated itself with the
revolutionaries. Felix Feneon, one of the few methodical connoisseurs of France,
formulated their doctrines. The poet Gustave Kahn became the Baudelaire of the
Neo-Impressionists, and fought for them in many instructive essays.* Many
other young critics and poets, Lecomte, Christophe, Th. Nathanson, Verhaeren,
O. Mirbeau, &c., ranged themselves under the same banner and completed the new
syntax.

The coalition of art with science was a result no less natural than that with
poetry and music in the days of Romanticism, and infinitely more useful. Its value
lay less in the single and easily over-rated result than in the apprehension of the
idea that it was well for the artist, no less than for other men, to emerge from his
abstract sphere and share in the sympathetic study of Nature characteristic of the
age ; it was welcome as a symptom of a universal modern attitude.

In the main, it was the realisation of that organisatory idea of Taine's which Zola
had developed on other lines in literature. Taine was the first who ventured to
discourse to his pupils of the physiology of the ideal ; he laid bare the elements
of artistic creation with incomparable wisdom. His " Philosophic de 1'Art "
remains the basis of every reasonable system of aesthetics. None but a Frenchman
could have written it. Compare him with Haeckel in his treatment of artistic
questions. Taine combined with the acumen of the investigator the marvellous
instinct of a race saturated with art. He possessed what Bayersdorfer demanded
in the man of science : " an organ for the worlds that still await investigation."

The younger men were well prepared by this method, which succeeded in
avoiding the crude distinction between art and science, and yet laid hold of all the
physiological elements which could be of service to art. The scientific sense of
Neo-Impressionism rested, therefore, on a solid basis. But the great desideratum for
its trenchant and logical enforcement was an apostle who should demonstrate the
departure unequivocably in his own works.

This apostle came forward in George Seurat.

Seurat, of all who came with him and followed him, was perhaps the only
one who needed the technique he found, and in whom it did not tend to
destroy any valuable characteristics. Signac does not produce quite the same im
pression. The recollection of certain early landscapes, f which do not belong to the
technique of division, is scarcely to be effaced by the best of his later works.
He might have entered the lists with Monet's methods ; his individual gifts would
hardly have suffered in the process. Seurat, on the other hand, lacked all that
distinguished Monet and his circle ; he made up for it by something they were
without : a purely elementary creative force, directed solely to monumental ends.
His very first work, the Haignade, a gigantic composition, has the effect of a fresco.
The numerous persons bathing or resting on the bank were not put into the picture
merely to serve as patches of sunlight. In the carefully considered attitudes there
was nothing of Monet ; everything, in fact, was opposed to his solvent analysis. A
vigourous conventional structure manifested itself, that was not lost in the colour, but

* In " La Vie Moderne," April 9, 1887, and " L'Art Moderne " (Brussels), and "La Vogue"
(series ii. 1889, dealing with the Universal Exhibition). Feneon's best critical efforts are to be found
in a little volume long out of print, " Les Impressionistes en 1886" (Tresse and Stock), and in
"Les Impressionistes" (Vanier). His short monographs on Seurat, Signac, Luce, Pissarro, Dubois-
Pillet, &c., were also published by Vanier. Christophe's notices appeared mainly in " Les Hommes
d'Aujourd'hui," already quoted in connection with Van Gogh.

t We reproduce one of these.

SHURAT: SKETCH FOR "LA GRANDE JATTE" 1884

FKNEON COLLECTION, PARIS

THE APOSTLE AND THE CONGREGATION 311

adorned thereby. Seurat was the outcome, not of Turner, but of the Ecole des
Be;mx Arts. With Aman-Jean and Ernest Laurent, he was a pupil of old Lehmann,
who had worked in Ingres' studio. Feneon has told me of purely classical school
pictures which Seurat subsequently worked over, covering them with his fabric of
coloured dots. In the red cap of the boy to the right in the Baignade, he had
already begun to stipple (pointH/er) — red on red.* He felt impelled to enliven the
smooth monotony of the school-piece, and found a method which was of immense
advantage to him in other ways. He was a friend of Charles Henry, the much-
criticised Professor and Librarian of the Sorbonne, who had endeavoured, with
dubious success, to arrive by a more or less scientific process at the significance
of the linear and colour forms from which art may be speculatively created, an
expansion of the work of the aged Superville, who wrote the " Essai sur les Signes
inconditionnels dans 1'Art." Henry helped Seurat to construct a scientific basis.

Seurat's recipe for painting contains two elements : first, a prescription of
quantity, which gives a conventional application to Fechner's proposition as to
perceptible minima, and requires the laying on of colour in particles the size of
which shall be determined by the dimensions of the picture ; secondly, a prescrip
tion of quality, the unmixed use of the pure colours of the spectrum according to
the laws of the complementary problem. This part was taken over almost in its
entirety from the Impressionists.

Nothing could have proved more convincing than this simple theory, and no
one was better qualified to be its champion than Seurat. His methodical intelligence
enabled him not only to communicate it to his friends, but to inoculate them with
it. Signac adopted the doctrine at once, and became, if possible, a still more ardent
proselytiser, reinforcing the demonstrative force of his brush by that of his pen.
When, in 1886, Seurat's Grande Jatte was exhibited, Signac was at his side.
Both received the storm of abuse that broke over them with perfect equanimity,
and repulsed attacks with unruffled logic. In the course of this same year they
made a valuable ally in Dubois-Pillet.

Dubois-Pillet was a retired officer of the Garde Republicaine,f who occupied
his leisure with painting, and made up for the absence of positive talent by a strong
revolutionary strain. He, with many others, had been rejected by the same Salon
that refused Seurat's Baignade. Following the example of a more distinguished
circle of eleven years before, the despised innovators banded together and opened an
exhibition on May 15, 1884, in the temporary building of the Tuileries. Dubois-
Pillet found that, as before, the Refuses had it in them to stand without the help
of the Salon, and, with ready talent for organisation, he founded the Salon des
Independants, which opened in December 1 884, in the Pavilion de la Ville de Paris, in
the Champs Elysees. Among the contributions was a study by Seurat for La Grande
Jatte. Dubois-Pillet the painter was speedily forgotten, but the creator of the In
dependants deserves to be remembered by posterity, as the leader of that first and
freest " Secession," in whose galleries so many brilliant talents that but for him might
have waited perhaps twenty years for recognition have made their debut. The list
includes nearly every remarkable French artist of to-day, and many foreigners.

* In this case I must perforce use the term stipple (pointil/er), so vehemently tabooed by the Neo-
Impressionists, for the red dots are on red, and so do not divide colours, but animate the surface.
This early departure of Seurat's is not without its significance. It was not until later that he began to
set his particles of colour on a white ground. We reproduce the Baignade.

t See his biography in " Lcs Hommes d'Aujourd'hui " by J. Christophe.

3i2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

The Neo-Impressionists found a hospitable reception here. Adherents multiplied.
In 1887 M. Luce and Ch. Augrand joined their ranks, without adopting their
technique unreservedly. Cross followed, and the artists of Brussels, where Seurat
had exhibited in 1887 and 1889 at the Societe des XX. In 1888 his pictures
had been shown in Amsterdam, and had been much remarked by the younger
Dutchmen. Pissarro's adhesion in 1886 had greatly improved the position of
the group. Signac won a disciple in the Comte de la Rochefoucauld, who after
wards broke away to paint his remarkable kakemonos. Ernest Laurent used the
divisional technique more or less consistently in his portraits ; Lauzet, the delicate
engraver of Monticelli, followed for a while ; Petitjean and many others threw in
their lot with the group.

For the first time since the primitive periods, not only in France but anywhere,
there was a programme which brought the will of the individual into subjection to
a perfectly organic doctrine. It was the purest abstraction, but in a different sense
from that which had become usual. Whereas the painting of Monet abstracted
from all the processes of the old masters on behalf of the personality of the
author, personality tends to disappear here more and more in a method dis
tinguished from the technical convention of the old masters by deeper research
into the laws which the eye obeys. And this doctrine seemed to be not so much
the result of research as the product of the art of immediate predecessors, in
which the real stimulus to the development so far achieved was rightly recognised.
Setting Turner aside, it was enough to point to Delacroix. In his studies on
Delacroix' diary * Signac has shown that Delacroix had recognised the principles
of colour division in Constable's works, and had attempted to paint in accordance
therewith himself. He points out how in the Louvre picture, Women of Algiers in
an Interior^ the strong colouristic effect is won by gradations and the use of com
plementary colours, and traces the artist's progressive efforts in every new picture
to clear his palette and to give greater animation to his surfaces by division of
the brush stroke and of colour. It was enough to develop this evident tendency
and to sacrifice the rest. The sacrifice was made in respect of the differentiation of
texture as taught by the old Dutch masters. Detail of texture, whether that of
the skin or of clothing, was entirely subordinated. Even Monet neglected texture,
in comparison with Manet, who treated the physiology of flesh, of flowers, and of
stuffs all alike admirably. For Seurat there was but one unity of material : colour.

If this is indeed the essential thing, the conclusion is irrefutable. But the point
is obviously not whether this theorem is true or false, but how far it becomes a means
in the hand of the artist for utilising all the capacities he can show. Signac rightly
judges Delacroix to have been greatly superior to Monet, inasmuch as he produced
greater effects by schematic contrasts and by the avoidance of arbitrary mixtures,
although his palette was not composed exclusively of the pure colours used by the
Impressionists. Monet and Pissarro, revolutionaries far more arbitrary than the
painter of Dante s Boat, are often much dirtier in their general effects than Dela
croix, and as this occurs in pictures which can only justify their existence by the
utmost luminosity of tint, the difference appears a deficiency. Not merely a
deficiency according to the doctrines of research, but above all a relative deficiency
judged by the standard of the aspirations roused by these pictures. Gold must
glitter like gold if we attempt to use it for demonstration.

* In the " Revue Blanche" and " Revue Populaire des Beaux Arts." Reprinted in book form as
" D'Eugene Delacroix au Neo-Impressionisme," Paris, 1899.

SEURAT: LE CHAHUT (1890)

PHOTOGRAPH DRUF.T

THE APOSTLE AND THE CONGREGATION 313

But with Seurat the actual purpose lay deeper. His most perfect works are,
•strange to say, his black and white drawings, the remarkable robe of dots in
which he draped his classic studies of the nude. I must not, of course, be under
stood to wish that Seurat had used the same methods in his pictures ; I would
merely point out the momentous fact that the indescribable unity of Seurat's
drawings was hardly achieved in the same convincing fashion in his pictures, and
that what is lacking in these — judging them by the high standard of the drawings
— could not be supplied by the mere technique of Neo-Impressionism.

This would seem to show that only certain compositions admit of a logical
application of the technique — i.e., demonstrable treatment by the method of division.
Many of Seurat's marines certainly belong to this class — pictures which show only
a skilfully indented bit of shore, a few ships, and a sunlit expanse of sea ; as, for
instance, the picture in the Osthaus Museum — vast, placid surfaces, where reduction
brings out the charms of the original in the most agreeable fashion. Here we
have parts enframed by straight lines which urgently demand animation, and here
the eye perceives division to be no less necessary in mass than in colour.*

The decisive question thus presents itself automatically : how far is division
necessary and reasonable ? what laws determine its mechanics, now that its chemistry
has been discovered ?

It is hardly possible to over-estimate the debt we owe to Seurat for having
devoted his powers to this question rather than to technique as such. His
methodical mind sought for composition a solution which should go beyond the
limits of individual experience, and should call in the aid of science here as else
where. All it could say to him he had already learned more easily in the school of
that genius who had endowed France with monumental painting : Ingres. He
strove instinctively to enlarge this inheritance, and he certainly came to a truer
conclusion than those formulated by savants when he adopted the course of
development we may now follow distinctly from his first picture, the Baignade,
to his last, Le Cirque. Marines were exercises to him, as portraits were to Ingres ;
studies made in order to grasp what Nature has to offer of material for decisive
tasks. They also made it possible for him to give in certain phases of his develop
ment small finished works, where his own purpose did not as yet permit him to
achieve greater and more definitive results.

To achieve monumental painting, he started from the law of parallelism,
bequeathed to us by the Egyptians, by which all artists who aim at grandeur of
effect are more or less consciously enthralled. In his Baignade he liquidates the old
school, not in technique alone. La Grande Jatte is the first picture of the new.
This parallelism is terrific in its emptiness : it consists almost entirely of straight
lines that run into the picture instead of blending ; they are like the beams of a
house as yet uninhabitable. It is a poor but a very essential and thoroughly healthy
picture. During the next few years, when not occupied with landscapes — and
even then the tendency is perceptible — he was absorbed in the study of form suitable
for introduction into his space. It was now that he produced those delicious little
single figures in colour, and in black and white, in which he sought schematic
masses. He sees a slender dancer on the stage with her dress as a triangle
(Feneon's picture) ; on a plump coryphee the skirt becomes a bell (A fEden
Concert^ 1866, reproduced in La Vie Moderns}. In his nude studies he seeks to

* I must perforce use conventional terms here, inadequate though they be. By division of mass,
I mean the division of the material apart from colour ; by division of colour, the optical division.
VOL. I 2 R

3 14 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

resolve the masses into the simplest contrasts ; in his wonderful little landscape
sketches he shades the planes that Nature shows him. At the end of three years
he succeeded in grouping in a large picture several nude figures very effectively
posed individually (Count Kessler's Les Poseuses), but the decisive line of ensemble,
a definite rhythm, dominating the whole picture, was still denied him. The next
year he found it, on a small scale, in his schematic arrangement of strolling players
in a row in front of their booth (La Parade, at Messrs. Bernheim's, Paris). In
1889 he made his first success with a large single figure in a fine attitude (Femme
se poudrant, at Feneon's), following this up with his first decorative work, Le
Chahut, of 1890. Before his hand had completed what is in some respects the
finest memorial of his genius he has left us, Le Cirque, in which he touched his
goal, a transition from the harshness of straight lines to the flexibility of curved
parallels, the strenuous spirit that had ever striven upwards and knew nothing of
decline was quenched for ever.

Like Degas, Seurat took his types exclusively from the theatrical world.
Here we find the last of the mortals who still use gestures strongly directed out
wards. To the accentuation of the schematic character of this gesture the success
of all contemporary spectacle is due. Le Chahut is the artistic transference of
one of these not inartistic presentments of stage-decoration to canvas. The
skeleton of the picture is a pattern of parallel pairs of dancing legs, each of
which rests one foot on the inclined plane of the middle distance, and stretches
out the other symmetrically in the air. The perfect straightness of these broken
parallels is emphasised by the parallel line of the violoncello, which cuts off a
corner of the picture full of motives. To make the square distinct on the
two empty sides of the picture, the lamps are set along them. A broad stripe
runs vertically from top to bottom. This structure is enriched by a wealth of sub
systems, such as the beautiful sweep made by the broad white hem of the first
dancer's skirt, which encloses a play of parallel pink curves. The only perpendicular
figure is that of the 'cello player, a quiet mass, indispensable just where it is, to hide
the very sharp angle which would have been formed in the foreground, and to give a
vertical element in the lower part of the picture. If the picture has a weak spot, it
is certainly here, as this mass is the most independent detail of the whole, and also
stands out in the deepest blue tones. The vanishing line of spectators' heads,
forming a sharp angle terminating shortly before its junction with that of the plane
of the dancers, is a very subtle invention. All the rich details in the upper part
of the dancers' bodies, notably the exquisite decoration formed by the eyes, mouths,
hair, &c., serve to give the greatest possible variety to the parallel passages, and to
emphasise the chief directions. The colour consists exclusively of blue, red, and
yellow in equal particles, about the size of the head of a match, on a white ground.
The gradations, too, are absolutely schematic.

The advance made on this work in the Cirque, with its gleaming yellow curves,
marks a further progress in the mastery of composition. All angularity that could
be dispensed with has disappeared. The very colour seems softer and rounder.
He had conquered the means he had sought after with such mighty efforts, and
was capable of coping with the greatest tasks when he died at the age of thirty-
one, at the end of March 1891.

PAUL SIGNAC: 1HK COAS

FF.NF.ON COI.I.F.CTION, PARIS

CLAUDE MONET: THE FIELD OF

STERN COM.ECTION, BERLIN

POPPIES, VETHEUIL 1883

PAUL SIGNAC 315

PAUL SIGNAC

Und wcnn die That zuweilen
Ganz etwas anders bringt,

So lasst uns das crcilcn,
Was unverhofft gelingt.

GOETHE.

I HAVE shown how, at a moment when his artistic intentions were not as yet
clearly recognisable, Seurat invented a technique which may be accepted as the
logical consequence of Monet's Impressionism ; how he made use of this technique
henceforth throughout his life, for the embellishment of his compositions ; and how
Seurat's individual development to the works of his highest level gave a solution
to a problem of monumental art. In this problem the technique of division was only
one among many factors. It was the one he found the most rapidly, and preserved
much as he found it, without important modifications. On the other hand, he rose
gradually higher from year to year in that part of his work which had to do with
composition. In this tendency we recognised a desire to approximate to compact,
round forms, and to advance from his primitive parallels to a richer linear structure.
This progression is apparent in all his works, even in his landscapes, which might
be distinguished as of two classes : the primitive straight-lined, and the richer
rounded examples.

It now remains to inquire how far the great programme of the school that
grouped itself about Seurat has been carried out since his death.

From the first beginnings of Neo-Impressionism, Signac showed himself possessed
of a keener sense of the laws of contrast, and greater logic in their application than
Seurat. In the exhibition mentioned above, where the Eaignade made its appearance,
Signac was represented by several landscapes, in which the chromatic programme was
worked out with far greater mastery. The Eaignade had fewer pure elements than the
contemporary Monets, and only achieved harmony by its consummate artistic tact.
Signac's landscapes, on the other hand, present only prismatic colours ; and
if, in spite of this, they lack the repose of Seurat's large picture, this is due to
Signac's inferior command of the division of masses, in which the painter of La
Grande Jatte was a master from the beginning.

Like Monet, Signac achieved his results by a penetrating study of Nature.
Seurat also declared once that he could only paint what he saw. By this he meant
to insist that he could not find support in the elements of the Ingres school, but
required natural images for his creations. We have seen what he made of these
images. Signac, on the other hand, actually kept his eyes on Nature. Gifted
with a vision keener than that of Claude Monet, and to be reckoned among the
greatest wonders of creation — an anomaly of disposition which sometimes strikes
us as incomprehensible — he had the courage to produce the maximum of harmony
by a purely scientific process ; to determine what were the most purely luminous
bodies in Nature, and, relying only on this knowledge, and on an experience
chastened by exquisite taste, to paint pictures.

316 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

Thus it was that he, and not Seurat, became the creator of this Impressionism,
which seceded from Monet's school in order to continue it in the best sense. The
method was far in advance of Seurat's doctrine of colour. Compared with the
glowing tints and vibrating gradations of tone in Signac's pictures, Seurat's material
seems gray and lifeless. Signac modifies the almost mechanical treatment of La
Grande Jatte and Le Chahut by a differentiation that introduces ten values where
Seurat was content with one. Even Monet's latest colour-fantasies seem prosaic beside
those of his successor, who materialises visions which others only behold in dreams.
Modern art here arrives at a goal of development to which centuries have con
tributed. In his happiest moments he succeeded in giving the modern picture — that
makeshift with which we beautify our dwellings — a brilliant and even ideal form,
making it a beautiful spot on the wall, that lends itself readily to a frame, and repre
sents, if not all, yet the most valuable thing we need in a rational home — beautiful
colour in a beautiful form. In spite of all differences of individual gifts, the stages
that lead from Rembrandt's slaughtered ox to Signac's little sea-pieces denote a great
advance in the refinement of pictorial art as such, an unmistakable approximation of
the modern painter to a solution of the problem : how to give us Nature without
hanging it bodily on the walls. In the narrower historic sense, Signac determined
the great achievement of the nineteenth century, the creation of landscape. His
distant views of Mont St. Michel, compared with Monet's versions of the same
theme, are like the tones of a Straduarius after a fanfare of trumpets. They refine
the eye to such an extent that it sometimes seems hardly possible to tolerate any
thing else beside them. The speckly backgrounds that proclaim the fleeting nature
of all earthly things even in the most brilliant works of his colleagues, the necessity
with many works of finding the right place to view them from, in order to avoid
ugly glimpses behind the scenes, are here conspicuously absent, and the chief im
pression we receive is one of normal healthy beauty.

And in small things at least this art was not lacking in the charms which
Seurat sought in great ones. Signac, too, works in arabesque. It serves as a
delicate substructure for his vapourous painting. We discover it more especially
where he groups masses ; one of the most exquisite examples of this is the view of
Honfleur in the Kessler collection, here reproduced. Perhaps Signac never com
posed more happily than here — or it may be that Nature never came to his help in
more friendly fashion. Note how delicately the group of trees on the left is
balanced by the houses on the right, how exquisitely the steamboat moves along
between them, its faint cloud of smoke melting in the warm luminous air. In the
group of trees in particular there is a rich play of the most delicate involutions,
which run through the mass like coloured veins, and are the medium for the
remarkable relations with the surrounding air. Here the problem is solved with
positive genius. The colour, too, has extraordinary charm ; it is a play of light
blues and light pinks, enriched in the masses right and left by perfectly divided
yellow deepening to orange, and gaining also immensely by the very varied forma
tion of the colour-particles. For example, whereas the brilliantly observed move
ment of the water is suggested by horizontal strokes, that increase in vigour in the
centre, where the double pink shimmer falls upon it, the glitter of the sunny sky is
produced by touches absolutely different in direction. The feathery quality of
the trees on the left bank is due to the fact that here the particles of colour are not
in relief; the painting is perfectly flat, and even verges on the dreaded fusion of
colours.

PAUL SIGNAC: MORNING AT SAMOIS 1900

KESSLER COLLECTION, WEIMAR.

PAUL SIGNAC 317

In such pictures — for this work is no solitary example — the problem is solved
with a perfection unattainable by any other means. Here division is no longer
technique as with Seurat, no makeshift, but the thing itself, a kind of balsam for
the eyes. No other means would have approached what is here achieved ; and in
the recognition of the appropriate method here shown there is more than intelli
gence — a clairvoyance that comes near to genius. Signac's gifts seem to me no
less manifest in all his little colour-sketches, in which the delicate nervous energy
of this doctrinaire breaks out in a few dashes of aquatint, and we see in full
perfection all that hovered dimly before the old father of Impressionism, Jongkind.

318 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM AS AN ART-FORM

IF we consider Signac solely as the creator of his best works, as we are bound
to do, we shall pronounce him a man full of refinement, intelligence, and artistic
sensibility, who delights the eye with exquisite, finely tempered things. But we
shall have to judge of him quite differently as the head of a school, the propounder
of a theory, the creator of Neo-Impressionism, who is responsible for the far-
reaching influence of his work and doctrine on a large circle of like-minded
artists.

Signac the theorist does battle for his cause with the logic characteristic of that
cause, which is eloquent in the pictures.

When we read the admirable study by Signac mentioned above, we might
suppose that Delacroix had existed solely to provide a legacy of evidences for
the Neo-Impressionists. Is it really possible to forget the vigourous composition of
his early works in the colour of his later period, if indeed we are able to com
prehend his genius at all ? Such an attitude is as if one should declare Goethe's
treatise on colour to be the only thing worth reading among his works. What
should we say if yet another should make a claim of the same sort for Turner's
Liber Studiorum, in which there is certainly far more of the famous Englishman's
essential character than there is of Delacroix' individuality in the colour of his
Oriental subjects ? It was certainly not Signac's intention to raise doubts as to
the importance of Delacroix, who did a good deal more than write documents for
the Neo-Impressionists. But the marked manner in which a single aspect is here
emphasised raises doubts as to the harmony of this conception, and these doubts
are justified occasionally in the works themselves of the one-sided disciple. The
reverse of the medal appears as soon as we ask how far the Neo-Impressionists
may be accounted followers of Delacroix apart from his relative practice of division ;
what, for instance, is their attitude to his doctrine of composition, concerning which
we might also quote from the Journal ? This is no arbitrary question, but one very
pertinent to the matter.

The well-meaning committee of a certain exhibition once hung even a Turner
upside down. Nevertheless, all the earlier moderns clung to a composition which,
in spite of all its free reliance upon Nature, retains unmistakable common charac
teristics. It might be called the centripetal impulse as opposed to the centrifugal
style of composition adopted by the men of to-day. With those of 1830, with
Delacroix, Manet, Renoir, &c., the effect always works up to a central point,
which represents the heart of the picture, and, because it is natural, appears as the
organic centre and not as the traditional form. Degas and his school discarded this
principle for an asymmetry which serves the same purpose, in spite of the apparent
opposition. But in Monet's later works the effect is distributed, and with the Neo-
Impressionists the compact pictorial form tends more and more to disappear.

If this essential element in painting were replaced by the tasteful document we
might thankfully accept as the product of a period of transition, we might rest

. j(

HENRI EDMOND CROSS: FISHERMEN (VAR) 1901

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM AS AN ART-FORM 319

content. But of all the vast output of the Neo-Impressionists, how many of such
documents remain, if we exclude Signac's work? And how much of Signac remains
if we reckon only his successful essays ?

For we cannot account all successful that conforms to Chevreul's law. Chevreul
discovered a hygiene of optics, and he deserves all honour for his discovery. It
is excellent, as is every hygiene ; very important for the general weal of art, but
negligible in particular cases. The ideal observance of all hygienic measures would
not ensure a comfortable dwelling, and a neglect of very important hygienic rules
may at times prove salutary, since all effective action is compromise. The lack of
such observance only becomes painful when it is felt subjectively, when we are
alarmed in life by the defects of certain conditions of existence, in a work of art by
the absence of elementary premises. It is perhaps impossible to produce artistic
works which we can use, i.e., take into our dwellings without any relation to the
modern theory of colour ; for a part of our culture is involved in this development.
But it would be breaking down open doors to insist that a relative colour-hygiene
will suffice for the creation of immortal and essential works. This relativity is no
petty conception of compromise, as Henri Martin's triviality would lead us to
suppose. The true relativity is governed by laws much older than the modern
theory of colour, laws which served for the guidance of Veronese, Vermeer, and
Watteau. It is connected with a question of measure in which it matters less how
unity is produced than how the unities are employed. I say " less " advisedly ; I
do not mean that the creation of this unity, by which I understand the relative
purity of colour, could be left to chance ; nay, more : if it were possible for an
artist to achieve his unity by means of a perfectly pure form, as the doctrine of
optical fusion requires, he would undoubtedly deserve all praise. But it would
seem incomparably more important that he should advance in the right way from
his unity, on the path prescribed by his individual gifts. It is evident that this
perfect logic of the artist does not imply an exclusive application of Signac's
theories, for otherwise ail painters who had ever heard of these theories would
accept them. The theory is in itself so essentially correct and irrefutable that we
can scarcely understand why Pissarro, for instance, abandoned it after having
adopted it when he was already in his maturity. It is against all reason to ascribe
its rejection to the obstinacy, ambition, and vanity of artists. Setting aside the fact
that the doctrine belongs, not to Signac, but to science, of whom artists can hardly
feel jealous, every painter must admit that if he has been able to accomplish some
thing without a severe division of colour, he would probably do better still on a better
basis. But if Liebermann, for instance, remains faithful to his own methods, he
follows a well-justified instinct which recognises certain indefinable but indispensable
conditions of expression as those most favourable to his talent. This all applies
to the division of colour, not the division of masses, in connection with which other
weighty causes make any attempt at generalisation futile. As an educational factor
the value of the Neo-Impressionist colour-programme is unassailable. We may
admit that the education of the colour-sense which Signac preaches is wholly
beneficent. If this education could penetrate the whole artistic body, if that which
seems a bondage now should become an obvious gain, and if, consequently, the
whole sum of artistic creation should be directed according to Nature's laws, the
world would have made a considerable advance.

Before we inquire by what means this propaganda is carried on, and what
relation it bears to other factors of artistic creation, let us briefly consider

320 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

the second portion of its programme, its manner of dividing masses. Attacks
upon Neo-Impressionism are directed primarily against this aspect of its teaching,
its system of handling. And this is, indeed, its vulnerable side. Not theoretically,
for nothing that is founded on exact science can be vulnerable. But here the
scientific proposition is so right that it almost becomes wrong : it establishes a
principle, that of division into particles, but it allows so much latitude in the
manner of the division that it practically determines nothing. The interpreta
tion becomes radically false, if it prevents the artist from exercising the gift we
reverence in the art of brushing. Here we are not dealing with a unity which
under certain conditions replaces freedom by reflection, but with a natural gift
which not only determines the composition of the work of art, but, taken in the
abstract, is one of the essential factors in the effects which sum up the evolution
of the plastic arts. To abolish this mysterious liberty would be to touch the life
itself of art. And as long as it represents not only one of the few joys of the eye,
but also the mysterious creator of value, to whom we look for important advance
ment of the problems that lie beyond the painting of pictures, it must be very
carefully handled. The value of the great works of 1870 lies not only in compo
sition, not only in colour, not only in gradation of tone, but also in the wielding of
the brush, which, as the vehicle of the linear element, expresses all the intimate
charm that the suggestion of the material object affords us.

But do the Neo-Impressionists give an equivalent for this, even in their own
sphere ? Do they, if we judge them on their average, and not on a few brilliant
works, achieve that normal pictorial excellence which they claim to ensure ?

Here, as I have said, there is no theoretic certainty. The touch is to be
determined by the size of the picture. Is it to be measured by the centimetres of
the frame, and not rather by the unity of size which is the basis of the picture ?
Seurat used particles which, at the normal distance from which we view a picture,
produce optical fusion ; he achieves the vibration so advantageous to his large
surfaces by very simple means. Many Neo- Impressionist pictures — some indeed
of Signac's works, more especially the larger ones — fail to meet this requirement,
which should be a matter of course with them. They do not blend. The particles
and the distances between them become so large that the quiet general effect is
destroyed. The picture is an aggregation of separate effects.

Here we approach the point at which Neo-Impressionism, as represented by its
latest disciples, is condemned by its own logic.

If we are to believe that the external fusion of the elements in a picture is
unnecessary to the picture in everything outside the pure colour harmony, and that
this alone is enough to fulfil the purpose of a work of art, we find ourselves in the
domain of more or less abstract ornament. Indeed, a masterly juxtaposition of
splashes of colour will produce ornamental effects. If this be the object in view,
it is difficult to see why every means should not be employed to make these effects
as rich as possible, and it is obvious that artists like Vuillard or Bonnard, who bring
all the possibilities of mosaic effects into their domain, are richer than the Neo-
Impressionist, who admits but a limited number of these possibilities. But if it is
merely a matter of ornament, the discussion comes to an end, after it has gradually
dawned upon souls fully alive to ornament that ornament for its own sake is a lovely
but peculiarly superfluous pastime, just as demonstrable in its most secret nature
as other things which are without objective.

For thirty years and more we have been trained to the appreciation of " pointil-

DEGAS: MDU-E MALOT, DANCER (1870)

(PASTEL)

BLANCHE COLLECTION, PARIS

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM AS AN ART-FORM 321

lisme " ; we have reviewed the old art by its standard, and have made many reversals
of judgment which have enriched us. But if the Neo-Impressionists, who aspire
to direct ind'viduality logically, rely upon the effect produced by these touches of
pigment as such — in other words, if they see in the spot of colour, not merely a
particle governed by a higher purpose, but something abstract which, though dis
pensing with individuality of treatment, demands individual vision, they not only
stultify their own logic, but compel us to an aimless renunciation. Manet
possesses the mysterious faculty of giving impressions that suggest the greatest
things, in two or three swift strokes ; this is the mastery of a gifted hand which
can only express itself powerfully and creatively. To deprive such genius of
inspiration would be to approximate pictorial art to a highly developed form of
house-painting. For this we have as yet no use.

Seurat recognised this, or rather he was so radically strong and healthy that it
never occurred to him that the particle might become an end in itself. He may
have followed the one-sided development of the doctrine with which he was himself
identified at the outset, with quiet amusement. Now he would probably feel
alarmed, and seize his brush with redoubled energy to complete his task. This
completion is still lacking in Neo-Impressionism. It has created a material as
inspiring to the great creator, dreaming of monumental tasks, as is a finely veined
marble to the sculptor. Wisely employed, it is the most brilliant of materials if
there is a question of returning to those tasks which once sufficed to art, before
the difficult task of providing artistic joys for others was laid upon individuals. This,
the most logical of all perceptions, we shall seek in vain in Neo-Impressionism.
Seurat has remained the great primitive ; his achievement has scarcely found one
to prosecute it among his disciples, whereas what he used as a means has grown
into innumerable ends. With the exception of the Belgians, not one of the
original group has conceived the idea of building with this exquisite building
material.

To this we sometimes hear the retort that it is not the fault of Neo-Impres
sionism if the State and the private patron keep their walls to themselves. A
dozen martyrs are to the fore in the twinkling of an eye.

But we are by no means convinced that the originators of the art designed it
primarily for large surfaces. It may be a result of our crazy culture that they no
longer desire what their predecessors had accustomed themselves to forego. But
even if they did desire it, the exclusive suitability of a technique for certain un
attainable purposes would not excuse its partially perverted application to those at
our disposal. Signac and Cross, moreover, have proved conclusively how perfectly
adapted the technique is even to the most idyllic landscapes. That which is not
always adaptable is themselves, and the more they demonstrate the indubitable
justness of their theory the more arguments they adduce for their own relative
incapacity for certain tasks. The technique of Neo-Impressionism and that of the
Neo-Impressionists of to-day are two absolutely different things. What we have
to urge against it applies not to the theory, but to current practice. It is true that
no other technique admits of such luminous power in the surface ; but there are
hundreds of Neo-Impressionist pictures which are by no means luminous. They
do not produce a luminous effect in the only right sense, which conceives of this
quality, as of every other, relatively. The art-loving eye desires to see the concep
tion of luminosity ennobled by deeper aims, just, necessary, and creative. The
majority of these pictures are uninteresting. They do not give us what they could
VOL. i 2 s

322 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

and ought to give. They seek what is not within the province of the technique,
or give only what lies within that province, without giving art. They are, naturally,
helpless before the individual in Nature : the most precious quality in Nature, her
wealth of material, is interpreted by a technique which uses the same form to
suggest the flesh of a woman's breast and the flagstaff of a sailing-boat. Move
ment in Nature easily becomes with them a kind of paralysis, the more obvious
for being richly adorned with colour. If they work out an idea strictly according
to their principles, everything impels them to a purely decorative treatment, in
which all that works prejudicially to them in a picture by reason of their narrow
ness may turn to their advantage.

It is therefore impossible to exclude the question of purpose, when achieve
ment tends, more than in any other artistic movement, to confine itself to means.
And the simple retort that the demand for form, for the vessel that should
contain all these lights and colours, is wide of the mark, and that the justness
of the Neo-Impressionist theory is not to be impugned by an element which that
theory leaves untouched, is not conclusive. For as soon as Neo-Impressionism
manifests itself as Painting, it must be judged not on its Neo-Impressionistic, but
on its pictorial merits. The law of its being only becomes logical and valuable
if it is subordinated to the law of the more comprehensive style. Here the
particularity once so decisive may easily become of slight importance and all the
wordy theorising may be made abortive by the far-reaching achievement of a great
unconscious master bound by no rules, yet able to reach our emotions. Was it not
Delacroix, the buckler of the Neo-Impressionists, who made the blunt assertion :
" Donnez-moi de la boue, je vous ferai des chefs-d'oeuvre ! "

DEGAS: COMING FROM THE BATH (LA SORTIE DU BAIN)

(PASTEL)

TAVERNIER COLLECTION, PARIS

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM IN BRUSSELS

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM would seem specially adapted for a great school, governing a
colossal style, for a scheme such as that conceived by the unhappy idealist Van
Gogh, who dreamt of the impersonal expression of the individual in favour of a
mighty collective activity. The one thing lacking is style, the element which
worked so powerfully a thousand and two thousand years ago for the mosaicists,
the predecessors of the Impressionists.

Whether this will come or not, remains to be seen. The result is happily quite
independent of the fate of contemporary Neo- Impressionists. However pessimistic
our attitude towards certain achievements of the group, we see a rich prospect
before them in fields as yet unexplored. Even Denis owes a good deal to their
technique, and outside Paris, results are manifesting themselves in rich abundance.
France is perhaps least adapted, of all places, for its further evolution. For a
century past it has teemed with collectors, and artists come into the world with an
instinctive readiness to satisfy their demands. The task of propagation seems to
devolve naturally on countries which have further goals in view, and so will not
allow Neo-Impressionism to detain them over long.

Belgium first approached Seurat with the idea of continuing him. Finch, the
most active of the little colony which afterwards settled in Brussels, took the first
step. Whistler taught him to etch. He painted subdued sea-pieces at Ostend, and
longed for colour. His English blood gave him decorative aptitudes. In the new
doctrine he found authority for a flat painting, for which he foresaw greater facilities
in Belgium than in Paris. When Octave Maus founded the Societe des XX at
Brussels, just when the Independants formed their society in Paris, a good deal
of enthusiasm was shown in Paris, though on what grounds it was not quite clear.
The Twenty, among whom was Finch, consisted of very different elements,* young
and old, and they invited all sorts of artists to exhibit as guests. Whoever was
seeking out new paths, and was capable of giving expression to his ambitions, was
welcome. The foreign visitor owed Les XX the revelation of many obscure talents,
as for instance, the great Henri de Braekeleer, with his inimitable interiors, the
aged Xavier Mellery with his delicious little peasant pictures, and, last not least,
Constantin Meunier. Scarcely one of the great Parisians was unrepresented.
Rodin, who had worked in Brussels as a young man, was better known there at first
than in Paris ; Pissarro had many good friends in Belgium. When Seurat appeared,
Les XX gave him a brilliant reception.

* The twenty were : Achillc Chainaye, Franz Charlet, Guillaume Charlier, Henri de Groux,
Dario de Regoyos, Paul Dubois, James Ensor, A. W. Finch, Fernand Khnopff, Felicien Rops, Willy
Schlobach, Jan Toorop, Theo van Rysselberghe, G. van Strydonck, Isidore Verhcyden, Guillaume
Vogels, Rodolphe Wytsman, and one woman, Mile. Anna Boch. Octave Maus was the secretary, and
the treasurer made up the score. Later, Van de Veldc, Lemmen, and Minne joined. The exhibitions
were much smaller than those of the Independants, where all works sent in were hung without
reference to a jury. In Brussels they showed a happy talent for selection, and their exhibitions still
linger in the memory as ideal. When, after a distinguished career of ten years, Les XX became La
Libre Esthetique (1894), the exhibitions became more extensive, but they lost something of their
artistic prestige in the process, though many of these exhibitions may also be recalled with pleasure.

324 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN ART

In Brussels, Neo- Impressionism was less a school of painting than a practical
art programme of a comprehensive nature : to one group among Lcs XX, com
prising the most vigorous spirits of the association, it gave a system of colour.
They were, in addition to Finch, Theo van Rysselberghc, Henri v. d. Velde,
George Lemmen, and Anna Boch. As a painter, Rysselberghe was the happiest
among them. He was a native of Ghent (b. 1862), and when Seurat made his dis
covery, he was still young enough to crown an education by individual fruition. To
him, as to many others, the exhibition of La Grande Jattc in Paris in 1886 was a
revelation. He is sharply differentiated from the Parisian painters in this respect :
he saw in the technique a means of rendering the human figure, the essential element
of all monumental painting. He began with portraits. A journey to Morocco in
the winter of 1887 withdrew him, to his great advantage, from the narrow sphere
of the group. It may be that he saw larger lines in the East. In 1890 he painted
his Fcmmts Jans un Verger, in which his personal aptitude for decoration on a grand
scale stands revealed. He had not as yet made himself master of a strong system
of composition ; his gift was manifested in the long series of portraits to which he
devoted himself almost exclusively for six years. In these single figures, which he
set very effectively in the allotted space, he learnt the division of the surface.
An unerring taste preserved him from the temptation to essay superfluous orna
ment in details, which seduced Signac into the curious rainbow caricature of
F6neon.* The large group with which he concluded the series seems to set the
coping-stone on this portraiture.

All Ryssclberghe's works are rhythmic creations. The art he offers us does
not, perhaps, always spring from very profound sources. His conception some
times recalls Besnard's loose manner. But if it rarely rises to the lofty altitudes of
art, it avoids its cliffs ; and it is entitled to respect in these days, as the endeavour
of a simple, healthy person to use his art reasonably. In his first great decoration,
VHeure Chaude, our satisfaction in the very pleasing bathers is marred by the lack
of distinction. The picture has undeniable charms, but they lie rather too flat.
The composition, again, lacks firmness ; it slips from the right — the group on
land — to the left, where the girls are playing in the water, instead of merely leading
the eye along. We note the influence of the flimsy Paris Salon, not that of the
great French tradition to which Scurat owed so much. All the more do we rejoice
in the advance on this work which marks the Solvay wall-paintings, in which
Rysselberghc's best qualities have all combined for the creation of a modern idyl, a
masterpiece of the school and, indeed, of contemporary art.

Nco- Impressionism has served the other Bruxellois as a point of departure for
industrial art. Finch became a potter. About 1895, Count Sparre took him to
Hclsingfors, where he directs the manufacture of china by the peasants, though he
has not abandoned painting. Lemmen is indebted to the school for the fine colour of
his decorations on canvas and paper, in glass mosaic, and carpets. But he perhaps
owes more to Seurat the draughtsman than to Seurat the painter. At least, his
charcoal portraits heightened with colour seem to me by far the most remarkable
productions of his early period. A portrait group of three women exhibited
several years ago at the Libre Esthctiquc Gallery combined a peculiarly firm grasp
of physiognomy with a firmly knit and finely balanced form. The brilliant

* It figured in the exhibitions of the early nineties under the characteristic title, Sur f<m*il f**
fnJ rkjtkm^ue 4 mttum ft Samg/fi, tit tvmi tt dt teimtti, ftrtrnt <U M. Felix Ftuet*, and was not the

only unfortunate e»ay made by Sigaac.

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM IN BRUSSELS 325

typographist stood revealed in the rhythmic lines, and yet one could not avoid the
impression that the work was a faithful portrait. The manner did not appeal to
every one. If Rysselberghe sometimes appears frivolous, a perfect type of the
modern enterprising Belgian, the old slow Flemish blood still flows in the veins of
Lemmen, and seems almost antagonistic to the new form. His performance is
never trivial ; he has indeed given us magnificent inventions, but his very richness
is sometimes oppressive ; we are no longer accustomed to such opulence. His
rhythm inclines to breadth, like his ornament, which, in contrast to Van de Velde's
slender line, covers as much surface as possible. Nevertheless — and this is his
most beneficent quality — we shall never find a line in Lemmen that is not his own.
He has been strangely, we might almost say fortunately, neglected by modern
industry, for his ill success has driven him back to painting. For the last few
years he has been producing delightful interiors with very refined colour and
a draughtsmanship neither more nor less intent on arabesque than that of the old
Netherlanders. Unpretentious as they are, these pastels seem to me to represent
the most cultivated painting of contemporary Belgium ; they are the equivalent in
Brussels for Vuillard in Paris. Lemmen's sojourn in the domain of decoration has
given firmness to his hand : he is harsher than the Parisians, less amazing than
Bonnard, less subtle than Vuillard ; but, on the other hand, he gives something no
less independent in simpler form. He remains a Fleming, unconcerned with the
fluctuations of the artistic life about him, and intent on continuing the glorious
tradition of his native land, to which end De Braekeleer also worked.

Of all the Belgian Neo-Impressionists, Van de Velde was the one who remained
exclusively a painter for the shortest time, if indeed he was ever so. His develop
ment into the artist we now honour was in no sense due to Seurat's school. I

shall try to indicate his importance in a later chapter.

* * * * * * *

Thus in little Brussels we see Art mingling its current with Life, and this
result suffices to glorify the whole Impressionistic development. It may even
justify its perfunctory painting, the conditional nature of its technique — indeed, its
whole existence. Even now many of the Impressionists' pictures are falling from
the canvas like crumbling ashes ; others are turning to colourless dust within their
frames. The very splendour that most delighted contemporaries has been the first
to perish. Yet if we think of the results, for the moment most evident in Brussels,
but daily manifesting themselves more and more clearly wherever colour is being
used, our melancholy at the evanescence of these documents is relieved by the glad
reflection that the light they gave us was not extinguished until it had revealed the
way of the future.

FROM A DRAWING BY GEORGE LEMMEN

FROM AN ETCHING BY HENRI DE BRAEKELEER

END OF VOL. I

PIERRE BONNARD: NUDE STUDY

PHOTOGRAPH DRL'ET

PRINTED BY BALLANTVNE &• Co. LIMITED

AT THE BALLANTYNE PRESS

TAVISTOCK STREET

LONDON

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

6350

M313

1908

V.I

C.I

ROBA

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Modern art : a contribution to a new system of aesthetics"

See other formats