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SCHOOL OF ART

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THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART

fee.ARA.

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THE

MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

EDITED BY

WILFRID MEYNELL

ILLUSTRATED.

VOL. IY.

W. H. HOWELL & COMPANY.

Loosrooisr.

/VD

I/O

CONTENTS.

I'.MiK

FRANK DICKSEE, A.R.A. ... ... ... .1

THOMAS MORAN ..14

JAMES MC-NEILL WHISTLER 22

PAUL BAUDRY ... ... ... ... ... 30

DAVID NEAL ... ... ;i()

E. BLAIR LEIOHTON ... ... ... ... 49

Puvis DE CHAVANNES ... ... ... ... ... 55

WILLIAM B. HOLE, A.R.S.A. 07

ELIHU VEDDER 74

J. W. WATERHOUSE, A.R.A. X2

FRANZ DEFREGGER... ... ,s9

FRANCIS L>. MILLET ... 98

YEEND KING ... 102

JAMES SANT, R.A. ... ... 107

RAIMUNDO DE MADRAZO ... ... ... ... ... ... 114

WILLIAM J. HENNESSY, N.A. ... 122

GEORGE CLAUSEN, R.I. ... 127

SEYMOUR LUCAS, A.R.A. ... ... 1.35

JOSEPH ISRAELS ... ... ... ... ... ... 147

R. W. MACBETH, A.R.A. ... ... ... 154

JEAN-PAUL LAURENS ... ... 165

BASIL PEROFF ... 173

ALEXANDRE CARAVEL 179

LUDWIG PASSINI ... ING

GUSTAVE MOREAU ... 194

JEAN LEON GER6ME 202

EMILE WAUTERS ... 207

LUDWIG KNAUS ... 215

FRANZ LENBACH . 223

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAOE

Frank Dickseo, A.R.A., Portrait of 1

" 'Now recommenced tlio roign of rest and affection

and stillness' "... ... ... ... ... 2

" ' Close at her father's side was the gentle Evaugo-

line seated'" ... ... ... . .. 3

" The Embarkation " 4

" 'Farewell, farewell! one kiss and I'll descend' "... 6
" ' Eyes, look your last ! arms, take your last

embrace!'" . . ... ... ... 7

"Chivalry" ... 9

From tho " Graphic " Gallery of Beauty ... ... 10

"Memories" ... ... 12

Thomas Moran, Portrait and Autograph of ... . 14

" Tho Mountain of the Holy Cross, Colorado " .. 17

" The Haunt of the Kenaboek " 20

J. McNeill Whistler; "Portrait of Mrs. Whistler " 22
" Thomas Carlylo" ... 25

" Pablo Sarasate " 28

Paul Baudry; " A Decorative Panel " .. 30

Bust of Paul Baudry .31

" Cupid and Psycho " ... ..35

" M. Edmond About "... .36

David Neal, Portrait of 39

"Nuns at Prayer" 41

" Mr. Oliver Cromwll of Ely Visits Mr. John

Milton" 44

" Portrait of Mr. Frank G. Maeomber " .47

E. Blair Leighton ; " Un Gage d'Amour '* . . . . 49

" Tho Dying Copernicus " ... ..50

" The Doom Well of St. Madron " .52

" The Gladiator's Wife " ... .53

Puvis de Chavannes, Portrait of ... ... ... 56

" Le Bois Sacre cher aux Arts et aux Muses " ... 59
" La Famillo du Pecheur " ... 62

"A Study" ... .. 63

"A Study" 64

William B. Hole, A.R.S.A., " The Night's Catch " 67

"The End of the "45" 68

" Queen Mary's First Levee " ... ... ... 69

"' If thon Hadst Known '" ... 71

'"The Restoration!'" .72

Elihu Veddor, Portrait and Autograph of ... ... 74

" The Throne of Saturn " 76

"The Pleiades" 79

J. W. WaU-rhouse, A.R.A. ; " Favourites of tho

Emperor Honorius " ... ... ... ... 82

"The Oracle" ... 85

" A By-way in Old Rome- 86

Franz Defregger, Portrait and Autograph of ... 89

" A Domestic Catastrophe " ... ... ... !(0

" Sister and Brothers " . 92

" In the Tyrolese Highlands " 93

" Andreas Hofer in the Hof burg at Innsbruck . 96

Francis D. Millet ; " No Unwolcomn Guest" ... 98

"The Granddaugliter" 100

Teend King ; " A Question of Rent " . . . 102

" Fresh- Water Sailors " K>5

James Sant, R.A., Portrait and Autograph of ... 107

"Applicants for a Sou — Mentoncso Children" ... 110

"The Portrait of a Lady " ... ... Ill

"Genius is Heaven-Born" ... ... ... ... 112

Raimundo de Madrazo ; " Masks and Faces " ... 114

"My Model" 117

" Coquelin as Ruy Bias " ... ... ... ... 119

William J. Hennessy, N.A.; " 'Twixt Day and

Night" 122

"En Fete: Calvados"... ... 123

" The Return from School "... ... 124

"A Slimmer Evening" ... ... ... ... 125

" The Shrimpers " 126

George Clausen, R.I. ; " Sunday Morning" ... 127

" The Gleaners " 128

"Flora" 129

"A Field- Hand" ... 131

" The End of a Winter's Day " 132

"Girl's Head" 133

Seymour Lucas, A.R.A., Portrait and Autograph

of 135

" For the King and Cause " 136

" The Armada in Sight " 137

" A Whip for Van Tromp " ... ..'. 139

" The Favourite " 140

" After Culloden— Rebel Hunting" 144

" The Latest Scandal" ... 145

Joseph Israels, Portrait of ... 147

"Alone" '.. ... ... 149

" Tho Orphans of Katwijk " ... 152

R. W. Macbeth, A.R.A. ; " A Flood in the Feus ' 154

Vlll

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PACK

" Lauding Sardines at Low Tide " ... 155

" ' She's ta'en her mantle her about, and sat down by

the shore '" 157

" ' They've fa'en a weapon long: and sharp and cut

him by the knee '" ... ... ... ... 158

" 'Smile, lady, smile ! I will not set upon my brow

the coronet, till thou wilt gather roses white

to wear around its gems of light ' " 159

"'They rowed her in across the rolling foam, the

cruel, crawling foam '" ... ... ... 161

" ' He's ta'en his mithor by the hand, his six brothers

also, and they are on through Ebnoiid's wood

as fast as they could go ' " ... ... ... 162

"' Gentle herdsman, tell to me "' ... ... ... 163

Jean-Paul Laurens, Bronze of ... 165

"Catholic Sovereigns before the Grand Inquisitor " 168

"Last Moments of the Emperor Maximilian " ... 171

Basil Peroffi; " The Funeral" 173

"The Drawing- Master" 176

Alexandra Cabanel, Portrait and Autograph of ... 179

"Desdemona" 181

" Tamar and Absalom " ... ... ... ... 182

"Cleopatra" 184

Ludwig Passini ; " A Zucca Seller " ... 186

" A Tasso Reader" 188

PAGE

" The Procession of the Host " 191

"At Mass" 192

Gustave Moreau; " Frontispiece to the Fables of La

Fontaine : The Genius of Fable " 194

" The Head of Orpheus " 197

"David" 200

Jean Leon Gerome, Portrait and Autograph of ... 202

" The Turkish Bath " 204

" The Prisoner " 205

Emile Wauters, Portrait of 207

" A Villager of Ernzen " 208

"Mary of Burgundy Entreating the Sheriffs of
Ghent to Pardon Her Councillors Hugonet

and Humbercourt " ... ... ... ... 209

" Mary of Burgundy Swearing to Respect the Com-
munal Rights of Brussels, 1477 " 211

" Achmed : A Study in Tangiers " 213

Ludwig Knaus; "A Study"... ... ... ... 215

" A Peasant Boy " 216

" ' Ventre Aft'ame n'a point d'Oreilles' " ... ... 217

" Nurse and Nurseling " ... ... ... ... 219

"Mudlarks" .. 220

Franz Lenbach ;" Franz Liszt " 223

" His Holiness Pope Leo XIII." 226

" Otto Von Bismarck " 229

LIST OF PLATES.

"THE SYMBOL" Frank Dicksee, A.R.A.

" THE SECRET "

"PEINCE CHARLIE'S PARLIAMENT"

" ST. EULALIA"

"COQUELIN IN ' L'ElOUKDI ' "

"LADY BOUNTIFUL "

" HEBE IT is! "

"THE MADNESS OF HUGO VAN DEB. GOES"

E. Blair Leightou ...

W. B. Hole, A.R.S.A.

J. W. Water-house, A.R.A.

Raimiindo do Madra/.o

R. W. Macbeth, A.R.A. ...

Einile Wauters

Frontispiece.
... To face

114

154

161

207

THE

MODERN SCHOOL OF ART

FRANK DICKSEE, A R.A.

I HAT docs Frank Dicksee exhibit this year?" is a question so frequently
asked after the opening of each recurring exhibition at Burlington
House, that this fact alone is a sufficient testimony to the prominent
position attained, at a comparatively early age, by the young Associate
member of the lioyal Academy. Mr. Dicksee, like Sir Frederick Leightou
and a few others who might be named, is a direct illustration of "the
sudden making of splendid names." The exhibition of his famous picture, " Har-
mony," at once made him prominent among living artists, and, in spite of early
success — BO fatal to many — he still maintains his position as one of the most
painstaking and conscientious painters of the day.

2 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

Frank Dicksee was born on November 27th, 1853, in Kussell Place, Fitzroy
Square. He may be said to have been nurtured in an atmosphere of art. The
locality in which he was born, has long been associated with some of the foremost
names in the art of the present century. His father, Mr. T. F. Dicksee, has
been a prominent exhibitor at the Royal Academy for many years; his uncle, Mr.
John Dicksee, is also well known in the profession; and his sister has more than
once obtained a conspicuous position on the line at the Academy. It is seldom,
indeed, that so many members of the same family display such marked talent in
the same walk of art.

Mr. Frank Dicksee received his first lessons in art from his father. To use

"NOW RECOMMENCED THE UEIGX OF IlEST AND AFFECTION AND STILLNESS."

(From " Evangeline.")

his own phrase, he cannot remember when he did not draw. His love for art
grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength. At the age of sixteen
he left the school in Bloomsbury where he had been educated— an establishment
kept by the Eev. G. Henslow, now Professor Henslow— and worked at home for a
year to prepare himself for entering the schools of the Eoyal Academy, which he
succeeded in doing before he Avas seventeen.

In 1872 he was fortunate enough to obtain the silver medal for a drawing
from the antique, and in 1875 the gold medal for his picture of "Elijah Confronting
Ahab and Jezebel in Naboth's Vineyard." This picture was the first he exhibited
at the Eoyal Academy,* and was hung near the line, in what was then called
the Lecture Eoom. It is a fact worthy of note, that Mr. Hamo Thornycroft ob-
tained the gold medal for sculpture the same year, and was, by a curious coincidence,

* His first exhibited picture was hung at Suffolk Street, and purchased by the late General Pomoroy Colley.

FRANK DICKS EE, A.R.A. 3

elected an Associate of the Academy at the same time as Frank Dicksee. At
this period a great deal of Mr. Dicksee's time was devoted to illustrative work
for various magazines, including the Cornhill, CasselUs, and the Graphic. He also
worked for a considerable time with Mr. Holiday, making cartoons for church
windows, and decorative work generally. This varied experience, no doubt, did
much to foster that good drawing and careful finish of details for which his work
is distinguished.

His early and careful training was soon destined to bring about notable

" CLOSE AT JIEU FATHER'S SIDE WAS THE GENTLE EVANOELINK SKATED.
(From " Emngrlint.")

results. In 1877 the well- remembered picture, " Harmony," was exhibited, and it
is not too much to say that it took the world of London by storm. What the
Academicians themselves thought of it was indicated by the position in which it
was placed — that is, as a centre in the first room, and it was at once purchased
by the Council under the terms of the Chantrey bequest. This beautiful work, so
original both in subject and treatment, so instinct with true poetic feeling, must be
still vividly remembered by all who saw it on the Academy walls. The girl seated
at the organ, the lover listening in rapt attention, the glory of the evening light
through the stained-glass window forming an aureole round the girl's glistening hair,
the subdued but beautiful colour, the carefully finished yet not too prominent

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

detail, all formed a veritable poem on canvas, bringing indefinite association with
Adelaide Procter's "Lost Chord" and

" A twilight song ; while the shadows sleep
Dusk and deep."

and, indeed, with all beautiful abstractions, whether of music, poetry, or painting.

Mr. Aguew purchased the copyright of this picture, and published an etching
of it by Waltner, of which many thousand copies were sold. The painter's fame
was now assured, and the artistic world looked eagerly for the next production of
his pencil, but greatly to the regret of many of his friends Frank Dicksee did not ex-
hibit the following year. He
was much occupied in various
ways, among other things on
the illustrations for Cassell's
edition de luxe of " Evange-
line." From this series we
reproduce three drawings, in
which is apparent the grace
and attention with which
the scenes so simply but
carefully described in the
poet's hexameters have been
realised by the artist. First
comes a beautiful landscape
study in illustration of Long-
fellow's lines on the autumn

THE EM1JAKKATIOX.

evenings in Acadie : —

" Now recommenced the reign of rest and affection and stillness.
Day with its burden and heat had departed, and twilight descending
Brought back the evening star to the sky, and the herds to the homestead.
Pawing the ground they came, and resting their necks on each other,
And with their nostrils distended inhaling the freshness of evening.
Foremost, bearing the bell, Evangeline's beautiful heifer,
Proud of her snow-white hide, and the riband that waved from her collar,
Quietly paced and slow, as if conscious of human affection.
Then came the shepherd back with his bleating flocks from the sea-side
Where was their favourite pasture. Behind them followed the watch-dog,
Patient, full of importance, and grand in the pride of his instinct,
Walking from side to side wich a lordly air, and superbly
Waving his bushy tail, and urging forward the stragglers."

Next is the drawing of the interior of the home in Acadie where dwelt Evangeline
with her father before the catastrophe of loss and separation. It is winter, and
the farmer must needs leave his fields to the phases of the season, while in the
shelter of his cottage he awaits the return of the activities of seed-time : —

FRANK DICKSEE. A.R.A. 5

" Indoors, warm by the wide-mouthed fireplace idly the farmer
Sat in his elbow-chair, and watched how the flames and the smoke-wreaths
Struggled together, like foes in a burning city. Behind him,
Nodding and mocking along the wall, with gestures fantastic,
Darted his own huge shadow, and vanished away into darkness.
Faces, clumsily carved in oak, on the back of his arm-chair,
Laughed in the flickering light ; and the pewter plates on the dresser
Caught and reflected the flame, as shields of armies the sunshine.

*«»**»•»

Close at her father's side was the gentle Evangeline seated,
Spinning flax for the loom that stood in the corner behind her."

Mr. Dickseo's work on " Evangeline " suggested the subject for his next picture.
And doubtless illustrative art can hardly do better than give its attention to the
poem of which America has so long been proud. One of the best of Longfellow's
faculties was his pleasant pictorial power and his ease in narrative. His weakness
never appeared except when he attempted some strenuous kind of thought and
mental motion, as in two poems which we will not name, in face of their still
enormous popularity. The paintableness of " Evangeline " is part of its greatest
charm, and it is not to be wondered at that having as it were lived for a time
with the poem, Mr. Dicksec was not willing to leave it. In 1879 his picture of
the "Embarkation" was exhibited, and if not quite equal to "Harmony" in its
abstract subjective character, it was a work on a far more ambitious scale, and, at
the same time, interpreted in every lino and tone the true feeling of the poet
himself. The artist left nothing to chance in this picture. Apart from the careful
studies of figures, he visited Lynmouth in search of effects of evening light ; and
not in vain, as is evidenced by the beautiful after-glow in the evening sky and on
the surface of the glassy sea. The grouping of the numerous figures, the subdued
tone, and the fine head of Benedict Bellefontaine, were all admirably conceived,
and rendered the picture one of the most striking in the exhibition. As an
instance of the extreme pains bestowed on it, it may be mentioned that even when
it was approaching completion the painter still left nothing to chance. Being in
want of some details for the beach, he went down to Herne Bay and brought up
some wreckage and seaweed, in order that the minutest detail should be true to
Nature. The subject is from that passage of the poem in which the Acadian
farmers, their wives and little ones, are sent adrift to the chances of their sad sea-
voyage :

"There on the sea-beach

Piled in confusion lay the household goods of the peasants.
All day long between the shore and the ships did the boats ply.

• *•••*•

So with songs on their lips the Acadian peasants descended

Down from the church to the shore, amid their wives and their daughters.

Foremost the young men came ; and raising together their voices,

Sang they with tremulous li|w a chant of the Catholic Missions : —

'FAREWELL, FAREWELL! ONE KISS AND I'LL DESCEND."

(From the Original Drawing for "Borneo and Juliet.")

FRANK DICKSEE, A.R.A

" EVIS, LOOK voun LAST! AKMS, TAKE vovn LAST ESIHRACE!"

(From CtiftxcU'a " /,'cmeo and Juliet.")

'Sacred Heart <.f tlie Saviour! 0 inexhaustible fountain!

Fill our hearts this clay with strength anil sulmiission anil patience!"

But on the shores meanwhile the evening fires had been kindled,
Built of the drift wood thrown on the sands from wrecks in the tempest.
Round them shapes of gloom and sorrowful faces were gathered,
Voices of women wore heard, and of men, and the crying of children.
Onward from fire to fire, as from hearth to hearth in his parish,
Wandered the faithful priest, consoling and blessing and cheering,
Like unto shipwrecked Paul on Melita's desolate sea-shore.
Thus he approached the place where Evangeline sat with her father,
And in the flickering light beheld the face of the old man,
Haggard and hollow and wan, and without either thought or emotion,
E'en as the face of a clock from which the hands have been taken.
Vainly Evangeline strove with words and caresses to cheer him,
Vainly offered him food ; yet he moved not, he looked not, ho spake not,
But, with a vacant stare, ever gazed at the flickering firelight."

This picture was purchased by the Fine Art Society, and is now in the possession
of Mr. W. B. Greenfield, of Gloucester Square.

8 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

In 1877 Frank Dicksee was introduced to Sir W. Welby- Gregory, whose wife,
the Hon. Lucy Welby-Gregory, is well known as the founder of the School of Art
Needlework. At this period the baronet was rebuilding the family mansion at
Denton, and as he was anxious to have the fact recorded on canvas, Frank Dicksee
was commissioned to paint the well-known portrait groiip of Sir William and his
wife, which was exhibited in 1880. In this picture a model of the new mansion
was introduced, together with a beautiful specimen of embroidery — a product of the
School of Art. This group contains all the technical skill and fine colour for which
the painter was already distinguished, and though it made no appeal to popularity
by subject, it is undoubtedly one of the best, if not the very best, of the artist's
works. It led to many commissions for portraits, almost all of which the painter
declined, as he believed that his right path lay in another direction. In this year
Mr. Dicksee also exhibited a charming head of a girl at the Academy under the
title of "Benedicta." This picture was also bought by the Fine Art Society and
engraved by Cousins.

In January, 1881, at the age of twenty-seven, Mr. Dicksee was elected an
Associate of the Eoyal Academy, being the youngest of the members. His election
was followed by the exhibition the same year of his picture called " The Symbol."
It represents a group of revellers in the gayest costumes coming through an arch-
way in some old-world Italian town. The girls, beautiful in form and face, are
disporting themselves in true Bacchanalian fashion, but the attention of the leader
of the troupe, a gaily-dressed gallant, is suddenly arrested by an old man with a
basket of relics by the wayside, who holds up a crucifix for sale. The moral of
this story is conveyed by the motto attached to the title, "Is it nothing to you, all
ye that pass by?" A writer on art took the late William Eastlake to see this
picture when it was in the artist's studio. Eastlake— a nephew of Sir Charles-
was one of the keenest critics of the day. Though not resident in London, he was
acquainted with most of the leading artists, and never missed an opportunity of
going the round of the studios before the sending-iu day. On coming away from
Mr. Dicksee's, after seeing this picture, he said, " I have seen nothing to approach
that in colour and power in any of the studios I have visited. It reminds me of
the work of the old Venetians." It is a curious fact, however, that Frank Dicksee
did not visit Italy until after the production of this picture. He went there in the
following winter in company with his friend, Mr. Andrew Gow, A.K.A.

The succeeding year Mr. Dicksee exhibited what is perhaps the most purely
poetical of all his works, " A Love Story," with the motto attached :

" In whispers like the whispers of the leaves
That tremble round the nightingale."

This picture is so well known, by means of the engraving published by Agnew,
that it hardly needs description, except to say that in beauty of conception and
skilful work, especially in the tender rendering of moonlight, it fully maintained the

CHIVALRY.

10 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

reputation of the painter. This was followed in 1883 by the largest work Mr. Dicksee
had yet produced, namely, " Too Late," an illustration of the Parable of the Ten
Virgins. The figures were life-size, and the feeling throughout — to say nothing of the
fine execution — was of high character. The picture was purchased by Mr. Agnew.
Mr. Dicksee appeared to have descended into a more conventional groove, when

FROM THE "GRAPHIC" GALLERY OF BEAUTY.

(By Permission of the Proprietors of " The Graphic."')

he produced two pictures from a subject . which has been a favourite one with all
painters since the English school was founded, namely, " Borneo and Juliet." The
suggestion for the subject arose from the fact that Messrs. Cassell and Co. commis-
sioned the artist to illustrate this play in their "International Shakespeare." His
design for the scene in the vault has grace ; but for the well-thought-out compo-
sition and the charms of young beauty and expression the canvas in which Mr.

FRANK DICKSEE, A.U.A. 11

Dicksee treated the Balcony Scene, with its slender impassioned figures and pure light
of daybreak, is most memorable. The moment chosen is that of the supreme parting :

" My lord, my love, my friend !
I must hear from thee every ilny and hour,
For in a minute there are many days :
O ! by this count I shall be much in vears
Ere I again behold my Itomcn.

*****

O ! think'st thoti we shall ever meet again ? "

The picture was bought by Mr. Tooth, and is now in the possession of Mr. Churchill,
of Weybridge. An excellent etching of it by Waltner has recently been published.

A commission from J. Aird, Esq., of Hyde Park Terrace, resulted in tho
picture of "Chivalry," exhibited in 1885. In this picture— though here again the
subject was somewhat conventional — there was a return to the rich, harmonious
colouring of the artist's earlier work. The effect of the knight in complete armour,
in strong relief against the warm glow of the evening sky, was very striking, and
the whole picture seemed instinct with the feeling of the Venetians.

"Memories" appeared at the Royal Academy in 188(5. This picture contains
a deeper pathos than any previous work from the same hand, with the exception
perhaps of " Evangeline." True feeling is expressed in the face of the young
widow as, with the child at her knee, she sits listening to the girl at the piano,
and yearns

" For the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still."

The effect of this picture, which is very deep and rich in tone, was damaged at
the Academy by the proximity of some intensely light canvases. It was seen to
better advantage in the Manchester Exhibition, where it was afterwards exhibited.
It is now the property of Mr. William Carver, of Broughton. The Academy picture
of 1887 was " Ilcsperia," a single figure of a lady in red Venetian dress with garden
surroundings. One of Mr. Dicksee's slighter works was his " ideal " beauty contributed
to the gallery of beauties got together by tho Graphic. The idea of such a gallery
was pat to the time. It was the height of the beauty mania in London, when
nothing was so interesting as the comparison of the points of the conspicuous ladies
of society. It says much for the perdurable power of female loveliness that there
was not a violent reaction immediately afterwards, and that plainness in Avotnan
did not receive a short but overwhelming worship. For all the other London
manias have been followed by a corresponding phobia. They are enthusiasms too
fiery to last — whether the noble rage of the season be for spelling-bees or for tho
aesthetic reform of life. Many a painter, for instance, whoso career was decided
upon in the golden days of the cud of the " seventies," and who has since seen
the canvases accumulating unsold with their unframed faces to his studio wall, has
had reason to meditate on the "violent ends" of "violent delights."

FRANK DICKSEE, A.R.A. 13

In the case of the beauties, their reign of course could not conic to an end
of this kind, but it became a silent triumph when the time of the mania had
passed away for ever. While it lasted it produced amongst other things the graceful
Graphic gallery of ideals. Mr. Dicksee's contribution was one of the prettiest of
the series — showing a clear-outlined and firmly moulded face, with large eyelids and
full, well-finished mouth. The trifling of the time had a charming outcome.

Frank Dicksee should have a great future before him. With his intense de-
votion to his art, with his conquest over technical difficulties, with his fine poetic
feeling, and his actual shrinking from anything at all approaching the vulgar or
commonplace, we may look with confidence to the production of a long list of good
works. Judging by what he has done, it is safe to assert that there is no painter
living who has a more refined feeling for art. Indeed, he is one of the few ex-
ponents we have of poetic art, which does not take its subjects from common life,
nor from the books which have been so continually drawn upon, nor from the classics,
nor (except in the case of "Too Late") from the higher inspiration of the Scriptures.
He works up to an ideal evolved from his own inner consciousness. An idea strikes
his mind ; it grows, it is embodied on canvas, it assumes definite shape, but is
still more or less an abstract ideality; for, in many cases, when his picture is nearly
finished, he has not even given it a name. "Harmony" and "The Symbol" were
amplifications of Langham sketches which, according to the rules of tin- club, ex-
pressed ideas that crossed his mind on the spur of the moment.

It is somewhat difficult to define Mr. Dicksee's position with regard to con-
temporary art. His sources of inspiration do not appear to ho drawn from any
particular school or painter. His method is peculiarly his own. His texture is
exceedingly rich — the result of much previous loading. His colour, as before re-
marked, is suggestive of the Venetians, only we know that the feeling for colour is
intuitive, as he had no close acquaintance with the wonderful colourists of that
school. If asked whence he drew his inspirations, ho will tell you that he has
always been surrounded by an atmosphere of art, but that he cannot recall any
special circumstances beyond his daily surroundings that influenced his style or
fostered his love for painting. It is probable that, had his early studies been
pursued in the foreign galleries, or the studios of Paris or Brussels, his work would
not have been distinguished by such marked individuality. His conceptions are
born of a poetic mind, his skill results from careful training and intense and con-
tinuous application.

(From the Painting &y Hamilton Hamilton.)

THOMAS MORAN.

fMERICAN art has until recently been most distinguished, both at home
and abroad for its success in the department of landscape. Up to this
time the thought uppermost among Americans has been to explore the
vast territory which Providence has entrusted to their care, to discover
its hidden resources, and bring them into practical use in strengthening
and welding together the multitudes who are flocking to the Western
Continent from all parts of the earth. The landscape-painters of America have
contributed to further this grand result ; and never before has there been a nobler
opportunity afforded the artist to aid in the growth of his native land, and to
feel that, while ministering to his own love of the sublime and the beautiful, he

THOMAS MORAN. 15

was at the same time a teacher and a co-worker with the pioneer, the man of
science, and the soldier, who cleared, surveyed, and held this mighty continent,
and brought it under the mild sway of civilisation. The people aspired to learn
not only statistical facts regarding their heritage, but also its scenic attractions.
Nothing was amiss which could add to the sum of their knowledge of the subject.
And thus the artist had a mission marked out for him magnificent in the possi-
bilities it offered.

When landscape-r a:nting first began to find expression in America with Doughty,
Cole, and Durand, it was naturally faltering, and felt its way slowly. The means
for traversing the great spaces of the country were limited and tedious; but as
steamboats began to navigate the rivers, and railways covered the laud with a
network of steel, the landscape-painters kept pace with the march of improvement.
At that time the great modern school of European landscape-painting, headed
by such men as Turner, David Cox, Constable, Dupre, Corot, Daubigny, and
Itousseau, had not made its influence felt in America. The American artists were
acquainted only with such landscape art as that of Salvator, Claude, or Kuisdael.
Wo see suggestions of them all in the works of Cole, who, however, made a number
of successful efforts at an' original style. But Durand from the first abandoned
the conventional style of such painters, and expressed a sturdy realism, softened
by a rugged poetic sentiment. He loved the woods and waters of his own country
sincerely, and he clearly saw that the art of America was struggling for expression
under new conditions. His numerous successors have recognised the same fact, and
in representing the varied scenery of America have adapted their style to what they
saw before them. When one considers that the great majority have had the most
meagre opportunities of art-education, compared with those enjoyed by the students
of Paris and London, who have been nurtured in the very atmosphere of art, the
wonder is, not that they sometimes exhibit technical weakness, but that they have
so often produced works creditable to the artist and the country alike.

One' of the most distinguished of those painters who have demonstrated tho
quality of American art and the grandeur of American scenery is Thomas Moran.
He was born in Bolton, Lancashire, in 1837. His father was of Irish extraction,
and his mother was an Englishwoman. She must have been a woman of remark-
able force and character, when we consider the talent her sons have inherited from
their mother. One of them is a great landscape-painter, another has distinguished
himself as an animal-painter, while yet another has won reputation in marine-
painting. Her grandchildren are likewise rapidly winning position in genre. It is
noteworthy that the brothers are married to ladies who are well known as painters
and etchers. The family, therefore, already includes nine living artists of more
than average ability.

When Thomas Moran was seven years of age his parents crossed the Atlantic
and settled in Philadelphia. He received a fair education at school, and was then
placed with a wood-engraver, with whom ho remained two years, and acquired a

16 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

good knowledge of the art. This has undoubtedly been of the greatest service to
him, for it gave him firmness and steadiness of touch, together with accuracy and
persistent effort. It may be said to constitute all the direct art-education Mr. Moran
has ever received.

But, while he never took lessons in a studio, he was quick at observing, and
was happily so situated as to be brought into contact with a number of able artists,
at a time when Philadelphia was scarcely behind New York in richness of art in-
fluences and facilities. Chief among the artists with whom young Moran associated
was James Hamilton, the marine-painter, who was one of the most imaginative artists
of this century. Hamilton lived next door to the Morans, and took a great interest
in the early efforts of Thomas Moran. Not only did he aid him with wholesome
advice, but out of his scanty purse he sometimes purchased some of the young
artist's water-colours ; for after leaving the engraver's, Mr. Moran had devoted
himself to water-colour painting, and with such success that he was soon able to
find a rapid sale for his sketches.

At the age of twenty-three Mr. Moran took up oil-colours, and painted a scene
from Shelley's "Alastor." The subject was highly characteristic of his mental cast,
for imagination is perhaps his master quality. He sailed for England in 1802,
thirsting for larger opportunities of self-improvement. While in London he made a
special study of Turner's works in the National Gallery, several of which he carefully
copied. On his return to America, Mr. Moran's remarkable fertility of fancy, aided
by his great technical skill and rapidity of execution, brought numerous demands
on his pencil, and he soon acquired repute as an illustrator of books and maga-
zines. It was this which eventually led him to settle in New York ; Scribner's
Monthly gave him so many commissions that in order to be near the publishers he
removed to that city. As a proof of his readiness and popularity, it may be stated
that during some eight years, in addition to the large number of paintings and
etchings he produced, he designed over 2,000 illustrations.

Mr. Moran re-visited Europe in 1866, and made a careful study of the works
of the masters in France, Italy, and Germany. On his return in 1871 an oppor-
tunity was offered him of accompanying the United States' exploring expedition,
conducted by Professor Hayden, to the Yellowstone Kiver in Wyoming territory.
This river courses through a most extraordinary region. It is of sulphureous for-
mation. Hot springs and geysers abound, and the sulphur rocks and cliffs assume
the most fantastic shapes, and are tinted with vivid blue, red, and especially yellow
colours. Sometimes one can, without any stretch of fancy, imagine himself in some
deserted city of the orient, whose highly-coloured walls, battlements, palaces,
minarets, and towers yet remain, while all the inhabitants are gone except the
vulture and the kite and the lizard. Through a narrow tortuous scam in this
singular country winds the Yellowstone Eiver; the gorge is often 1,000 feet deep.
Mr. Moran took many careful sketches, chiefly in water-colours, of these impressive
scenes, some of which, we believe, are now owned at Salisbury, England. On his

HERE'S TO YOUR HEALTH

THE MOUNTAIN OF THK HOLY CHOSS, COLORADO.

18 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

return to New York lie resumed his impressions upon a canvas 12 feet long and
7 feet broad. It was called " The Grand Canon of the Yellowstone." The extra-
ordinary forms and colours it contained were a revelation to the public. No such
scenery had ever been discovered or imagined before. The terrible desolation, the
appalling magnificence and grandeur of these castellated cliffs, draped with the
hues of the rainbow, were bewilderingly fascinating. The representative character
of the work, as well as its artistic merit, gave it a national importance. It was
purchased by Congress for 10,000 dollars, and hung in the Capitol at Washington.

The following year Mr. Moran went to the famous valley of the Yosemite in
California, whence he returned with interesting studies. In 1873 he accompanied
the expedition conducted by Major Powell under the auspices of the Government,
to explore the little known country through which rolls the Colorado Eiver. The
tremendous character of this part of America may be gathered from the fact that
for 200 miles the level of the stream is lowered at the rate of 200 to 500 feet a
mile through a chasm averaging less than 300 feet in width. The walls of this
awful gorge are 7,000 feet in depth, the cliffs seeming to close in overhead, and
to leave only a faint crack through which the sky dimly appears.

The descent of this terrible river, to which the Acheron of the ancients in
Acarnania is a mere summer rivulet, has only twice been made. The first time
it was accomplished by James White, in 1867. lie had several companions who
were traversing the west with him. Being pursued by the Indians, their only
hope of escape was to betake themselves to the waters of this unknown river, of
whose appalling character they had only the faintest idea. Hastily constructing a
frail raft, and trusting themselves to Providence, they launched on the turbulent
tide. The provisions and all on board the raft were washed off in descending one
of the rapids, excepting White alone. For ten days after that he drifted with the
river, through that subterranean chasm, in a solitude such as no human being has
probably ever experienced before, and with scarce any expectation of ever re-visiting
the glimpses of the moon. But destiny was in his favour — the world needed to
know of this wonderful river. Almost dead with hunger and terror, he at last
arrived at the settlement of Colville, after a voyage that eclipses the exploits of
Sinbad the Sailor.

It is one of the most picturesque and least forbidding aspects of this river
that appears in the painting made by Mr. Moran on his return from this expedition.
It is of the same size as his Yellowstone picture ; and he calls it the " Grand
Chasm of the Colorado." This also was purchased by Congress for 10,000 dollars.

Mr. Moran' s zest of travel and exploration, his enthusiasm for the grander
aspects of Nature, had been, not satisfied, but stimulated by what he had already
seen, and urged him to further adventure. Therefore he turned his face westward
again in the following year. This time it was to the Eocky Mountains that he
directed his attention. The result was, if less startling, perhaps more pleasing
than that of his previous expeditions. He brought home with him studies which

THOMAS MORAN. ID

matured into a painting of marked originality and power. It was called " The
Mountain of the Holy Cross," and represents one of the most remarkable peaks of
the great range which forms the watershed of North America.

This mountain lies about 150 miles west of Denver. Its name is due to the
early Spanish missionaries, and was suggested by a curious phenomenon at the
summit. Two rifts or clefts in the rock several hundred feet in length bisect each
other in such wise as to form a cross. In these clefts the snow lies eternal ; when
it melts and flows from the great mountain in summer, it remains in that vast
sculptured cross, a white mark visible from a long distance.

Nor has Mr. Moran's genius confined itself to the delineation of the sublime
scenery of the great west. He has also visited the south and revelled in its
gorgeous colours and its affluence of tropic vegetation. The music of the palm
has touched his soul, and the tender azure of the skies which overarch Mexico's
Gulf has kindled his fancy. Among the number of admirable paintings suggested
by such scenes may be mentioned his " Ponce de Leon in Florida." This is a large
canvas, and represents a clearing, or rather an opening, in a dense, luxuriant grove
of palms and oaks, draped with the long festoons of Spanish moss. A little on
one side of this clearing De Leon and his companions are seen coming to a halt.
His versatility appears again in the representation of quiet woodland scenes about
home, or oozy flats near Brooklyn, above which loom, half hidden in mist, the
warehouses and wharves of a great city on a sullen, melancholy day in October.
Few artists, again, have undertaken to paint so many varieties of cloud-scenery.
Indeed, there is scarcely an effect of Nature which Mr. Moran has not represented,
and generally with excellent success. He makes a frank statement of what he
sees or desires to express. The imagination of the beholder is in no sense over-
taxed before his paintings. This, perhaps, is the true way when one is giving a
representation of an actual scene with strongly-marked features of its own ; and it
must be admitted that such a method is far more likely to win popular interest
than one that is more subtle and refined.

Another of his paintings shows a sublime, isolated peak, cloven in the
centre, that soars like a Titanic feudal tower above the banks of the Green
River, a .tributary of the Colorado. The colours of this natural fortress are vivid
copper, streaked with vermilion, and merging into leaden-grey. It is painted sun-
smitten against the foreboding gloom of a coming storm. The broad river flows
grandly at its base through an endless plain that fades off like the ocean into tho
infinite. In the foreground a troop of Indian warriors, in the gay accoutrements of
battle, are guiding their spirited ponies through long sere herbage to the river's
brink.

Among some of his more important works may also be mentioned " The
Pictured Hocks of Lake Superior," " The Track of the Storm," " The Flight into
Egypt," and " The Children of the Mountain." The highly-imaginative series of
drawings illustrating " Hiawatha " are also finely designed, and are in every way

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

worthy of the famous legend. One of the series, here engraved, illustrates the
following episode in Longfellow's poem : —

"Soon he readied the fiery serpents,
The Kenabeek, the great serpents,
Lying huge upon the water,
Sparkling, rippling in the water,
Lying coiled across the passage,
With their blazing crests uplifted,

THE HAUNT OF THE KENAI1KEK.

Breathing fiery fogs and vapours,

So that none could pass beyond them.

But the fearless Hiawatha
Cried aloud, and spake in this wise :
'Let me pass my way, Kenabeek,
Let me go upon my journey ! '
And they answered, hissing fiercely,
With their fiery breath made answer :
' Back, go back, O Shaugodaya !
Back to old Nokomis, Faint-heart ! '

Then the angry Hiawatha
Raised his mighty bow of ash-tree,
Seized his arrows, jasper-headed,
Shot them fast among the serpents ;

THOMAS MORAN. 21

Every twanging of the bow-string
Was a war-cry and a dentil-cry,
Every whizzing of an arrow
Was a death-song of Kenabeek."

In considering the variety and excellence of Mr. Moran's attainments in art,
it is impossible to assign him any other than very great ability. If ho has not
achieved the highest flights of art, he has yet exhibited extraordinary versatility in
doing many things and doing them well, together with a very unusual exuberance
of imagination. Furthermore, the public owe him a debt of gratitude for the enter-
prise and ability which have done so much to entertain and instruct.

F011TIIAIT OF MHS. WHISTLEK.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER.

IB. WHISTLEB is a notable artist and a notable personality in art,
and for both forms of conspicuousness he is indebted in part to the
good fortune of his talent. "It is not enough to be a great man,"
said a keen Frenchman; "one must come at the right time." To
which we may add that it is not enough to be a clever man ; one must
come at the right time to the right place. The right time and the
right place for the conspicuousness of an Impressionist was undoubtedly England
at the time when Mr. Whistler rose up and astonished her. In Paris he was
one of many ; here he was one indeed — a genus in himself. And the fact that
he has fixed himself in a country so dead to art as he considers England to be,
and that for the sake of living here he endures the exasperating remarks of his
critics when he might be at peace in the more intelligent atmosphere of France,
is sufficient proof that he appreciates the fitness — the fitness of contrast — which

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER. 23

is in his surroundings. For though he would he at peace in France, that peace
would he not unattended with a certain comparative ohscurity. A clever American
describes Byron's rides on the Lido as being taken in a " conspicuous solitude."
Inconspicuous solitude, we may believe, would not have had the same charms for
him ; nor, perhaps, would unexciting peace for this clever member of a clever school.
Here he had, and in a measure still keeps, a place, not as member, but as master.
Mr. Whistler was born of an American family of the South, which, as a
sketch of the life of his father tells us, "is of English origin, and is found towards
the end of the fifteenth century in Oxfordshire, at Goring and \Vhitchurch, on the
Thames. One branch of the family settled in Sussex, at Hastings and Battle,
being connected by marriage with the Websters of Battle Abbey, in which neighbour-
hood some of the family still live. Another lived in Essex, from which came Dr.
Daniel Whistler, President of the College of Physicians in London in the time of
Charles II., a quaint gentleman of 'rare humour,' frequently mentioned in ' Pepys's
Diary.' From the Oxfordshire branch came Ralph, son of Hugh Whistler of Goring,
who went to Ireland, and there founded the Irish branch of the family. From
this branch of the family came Major John Whistler, father of the distinguished
engineer, and the first representative of the family in America." The artist's
father was the consulting engineer for the St. Petersburg and Moscow Railway,
an office which he held at the request of the C/ar Nicholas. Hence camo his
early sojourn in Russia, but his education was at the military school at West
Point. His training there, however, did not produce a military vocation. His
fathers had been soldiers by a kind of tradition, but he early decided for the
career of his own talent — that of the art of painting. As a matter of course,
being an American, he went to Paris for the new studies which had then become
necessary, entering himself as a pupil of Gleyre. He early found his chief friends
among Impressionists, Degas being of the number. Here he began etching as
well as painting. His first notable picture was " The Little White Girl," to which
Mr. Swinburne, then also on his promotion to fame, wrote the sweetly musical
lines which bear the same title — lovely lines, like a tale told by a poet of that
now vanished school, full of sound and sweetness signifying little.

"White rose in red rose-garden

Is not so white;
Snowdrojis that plead for pardon

And pine for fright
Because the hard East blows
Over their marble rows
Grow not as this face grows from pale to bright

" Come snow, come wind or thunder

High up in air,
1 watch my face and wonder
At my bright hair;

24 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

Nought else exalts or grieves

The rose at heart that heaves

With love of her own leaves and lips that pair.

" I cannot see what pleasures

Or what pains were;
What pale new loves and treasures

New years will bear ;
What beam will fall, what shower,
What grief or joy for dower,
But one thing knows the flower; the flower is fair."

And so on. The white girl was standing at the side of a mirror, where the laws
of incidence and refraction would unfortunately not permit her to see her own
beauty, on which Mr. Swinburne imagines her to be gazing. But no matter ; it
was a very simple and very tastefully- arranged selection of the materials of the
scene. The painter showed already the sensitiveness with which he can exercise
the painter's prerogative of rejection. The figure and face were ugly — nor has Mr.
Whistler ever done anything to prove that he has any feeling for human beauty
— but the whole picture had a certain charm, and in the dawn of Impressionism
the manner was very new. The Salon rejected the " White Girl," but it attracted
attention at the Salon des Ilefuses, whither its painter had the good sense and
courage to send it. In 1865 it was at the Eoyal Academy — the picture of that
year about which everybody asked, "What do you think of it?" and of which
the late Tom Taylor — In after years vigorously assaulted by Mr. Whistler in print-
declared in the Times, if we remember right, that it was a poern on canvas. At
about the same time the artist exhibited other sketches (we ask indulgence for the
word) of a like character — notes of impressions of white dresses, furniture, balconies,
and incidental faces and figures. These earlier works were generally brighter in
colour and lighter in tone than the dark canvases that succeeded them later. It
was soon after this that the remarkable aiid admirable portrait of Mrs. Whistler,
the painter's mother, was stupidly hung over a door at the Koyal Academy. Nor
did it obtain even this place without a hard struggle, the majority of the Select-
ing Committee having rejected it, and being brought to reason by the threats and
persuasions of the late Sir William Boxall. Mr. Whistler not unnaturally sent
nothing more to the Academy, and, though he began to exhibit regularly at the
Salon, he was to be seen in London at the minor exhibitions and dealers' galleries
only, until the happy year 1877.

For then the unappreciated, the misunderstood, the superior, and the neglected,
came forward in the crimson rooms of the Grosvenor Gallery— always with the
exception of Dante Gabriel llossetti, who had a genuine distaste for the whole
system of public exhibitions, whether the show were set forth in Piccadilly or in
Bond Street. But for Mr. Burne-Jones and for Mr. Whistler the opening of Sir
Coutts Lindsay's gallery was a kind of resurrection. They were the two topics
of two or three seasons ; and perhaps the loudest talkers were the people who had

TIIOMAS CAKLYLK.
rernUtim of ttruri. Henry Cram oiU Co.)

26 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

lived in so curious an ignorance of the art-work of their time as to be ready to
hail both painters as new men. Mr. Whistler contributed to the Grosvenor for
seven years, his principal pictures there being the portraits of Carlyle, of Mr.
Irving as Philip II., of Miss Alexander, of Miss Corder, and of Lady Archibald
Campbell, with a large number of little night-scenes and fog-scenes, and bits of
river and bridge. Then came a succession of "single-artist" exhibitions in Bond
Street, where Mr. Whistler decorated his room according to the manner of his
pictures; and then again this wandering spirit seemed to have found a resting-
place in the most unlikely of places — the Gallery of British Artists, Suffolk Street.
For many long years the home of the most complete and contented Philistinism,
Suffolk Street had gradually begun to admit a leaven of art, and its walls presented
a queer mixture of insular with liberal practice and traditions. But the contrasts
became more striking than ever when Mr. Whistler was elected a member in 1884.
In the year following, his excellent portrait of Sefior Pablo Sarasate was the lion
of the Exhibition; and in 188G he was chosen President of the Society. Thence-
forth, of course, the place ceased to present contrasts ; it was re-created by the
new spirit, the disciples of the President forming his Selecting Committee.

It was in the first days of the Grosvenor Gallery that Mr. Whistler came into
litigious collision with Mr. Buskin, then Slade Professor at the University of Oxford.
That if they ever met sparks and fire would be struck out was obvious. Mr.
Buskin's whole body of doctrine, from the very young days in which he took the
duty of a teacher, on to his old age, was contradicted by Mr. Whistler's pictures.
With Buskin, painting was a kind of glorified handicraft, rather than what a man
of the younger school would understand by the word art ; it was to be elaborated
by the addition of fact to fact ; the artist was bound in the most literal sense to
hold a mirror up to Nature. Selecting from the materials of Nature was, according
to him, a presumption ; rejecting any from among them, a sacrilege. As regards
subject in painting, Mr. Buskin enforced lofty ideals and the didactic mission of Art.
And into this programme of faithful handiwork and high thoughts entered also a
love of all intense and positive colour — the pleasure of a child in scarlet and purple.
Mr. Whistler, on the other hand, holds that Art and Nature are two quite distinct
things ; that Art has to arrange, select, and refuse among the material of Nature,
touching a note here and there to make a melody, rather than banging down all
the keys together. He preaches to Englishmen, with all the zeal of a discoverer,
the idea — at least fifty years old in France — that Art has no didactic apostolate,
and no mission except to the eyes ; he holds that the adding of fact to fact brings
us no nearer to artistic truth, but rather that a picture must be true from the be-
ginning according to the artistic code of truth. Finally, he paints in soot-colours
and mud-colours, and far from enjoying primary hues, has little or no perception of
the loveliness of secondary or tertiary colour. Hence the Whistler-Buskin trial.
The two ways of Art are, and will always be, incompatible ; and their several
followers will say hard things of one another. It is only candid for the commen-

JAMES McNETLL WHISTLER. 27

tator to note, however, that Mr. Ruskin was too incensed by the artist's offences
to make the smallest effort to understand him or his aims. The difference between
a picture by Whistler and Nature as it appeared to his own eyes, seemed to
him to give to Whistler's work all the proportions and character of a downright
lie. The absence of any attempt at the kind of " finish " which can be attained
by adding fact to fact, had for Ruskin all the appearance of the incapacity of an
untaught impostor ; and he said so ; only ho used the dogmatic phrases to which
his pen is accustomed. To him the whole thing looked — as far as he would consent
to glance at it — like the rankest coxcombry and imposture. The offence took
almost a moral character; and when the jury found that he had libelled his
adversary (though but to the extent of a farthiug'swortli of amends) he took the
matter so gravely to heart that he resigned the Slade Professorship.

But, indeed, the whole trial might almost have shaken the jury system to its
fall. The absurdity of asking twelve untaught men to decide on the most difficult
and delicate problems of Art, under the guidance of counsel who knew, if possible,
a little less than themselves, produced a very rank kind of comedy. In the end the
critic was insulted by the adverse verdict, and the artist by the farthing damages.
It would have been better for every one, except the eminent lawyers employed, if
the Whistler-Ruskin trial had never come off. Perhaps those who suffered from it
most keenly were the artists who were called as witnesses, dragged to the box
under a subpoena, and forced to give reluctant testimony as to the amount of
" finish " which Mr. Whistler had succeeded in putting into his work — this precise
quality, as understood by those who used the word in court, being one which this
painter never made any attempt to obtain.

Whether his work would not be the better for more of the other kind of finish
—the fundamental Tightness of values and relations — which is proper to the school
of which Mr. Whistler is an eminent member, perhaps a master, may be a question.
He has no atmosphere, no light. Instead of air he studies various kinds of fog—
and studies them most delicately; and his "values" are the relative powers of
darkness, not of light. He never paints a sky. He has placed one of his cleverest
portraits on an asphalte floor and against a coal-black background, the whole
apparently representing a dressy woman in an inferno of the worldly. Now the
best achievement of the Impressionist school, to which Mr. Whistler belongs, is the
rendering of air — not air made palpable and comparatively easy to feel, by fog —
but atmosphere which is the medium of light.

A painter whom — to speak frankly — we would not take as an authority on art,
chanced to say a very just thing of Mr. Whistler's "arrangements" and "nocturnes"
—that they are less pictures than fine decorative plaques. Such in fact they are,
by reason of the painter's feeling for tone as distinct from values. " Tone " we take
to be the relative depth and lightness of any colour ; " values " to represent the
amount of light upon an object, and especially the relative emphasis which
that light seems to take from the nearness or distance of the things which it

PABLO SARA SATE.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER. 29

illumines. With such " values " Mr. Whistler declines to concern himself, hut his
sense of decorative tone is exquisite. Had he lived before the evil days which saw
the separation of art and handicraft, he would have been a fine decorator; and even
as it is, he achieved some of his best results in the " Peacock " room, in the
designing of frames, the arrangement of rooms, and in other work of the kind. In
frames he introduced the beautiful green gold which has so happy an effect. To
his feeling for tone he adds a rare sense of the right placing of objects, a sense
almost as fine as that of the Japanese — as fine, perhaps, as an Occidental artist can
possibly attain to. This is, we believe, the most distinguishing note of his talent.
In fact, we may take him as a teacher of the Oriental art of separate decoration
—the art which comes none too soon to save us from the utter weariness of
decoration by series, derived from Greece. Decoration by series and repetition, with
the poor relief of interchange, has become a dead dulness to us ; Japan and Mr.
Whistler offer us the life and interest of accident and incident, exquisitely managed.
Now it is worthy of note that series, repetition, and interchange, constitute the one
way of ornament explicitly recognised by Mr. lluskin ; of the Oriental way he has
apparently no idea — another reason for the Whistler-lluskin controversy. Not in
painting only but in decoration the two men are utterly at odds.

Mr. Whistler has far too perfect a sense of the dignity of decoration to quarrel
with us for considering him primarily a decorator. But we shall only too probably
touch him to the quick by calling him a literary man, and a singularly able one.
Perhaps, however, he will forgive us if we emphatically declare him innocent of
putting any of his literature into his painting. He is witty in his ideas, clever in
his choice of words, brief and full of " touch " —in a word, a model journalist of the
new school. He must have some sense — though a reluctant sense — of this truth,
for he has written much. We do not refer to his rather wearisome repetition in
print of the statement that he has slain and crushed his critics — a reiteration by
which he soothes his own soreness under much ignorant newspaper comment ; we
are alluding rather to the moments in which he has seriously set forth his aims
and principles — seriously, that is, for him, and according to his own way, which is
not the way of other men.

As an etcher Mr. Whistler has been proportionally more readily believed in
than as a painter. But then etching has a smaller constituency to begin with.
His manner of etching is in the most stenographic French manner, and his wildest
line is full of intention. But in this art too he grievously lacks beauty.

A DECORATIVE PANEL.

(By Permission of Messrf. Braun and Co., Paris.)

PAUL BAUDRY.

IKANCB justly mourns the death of Paul Baudry, one of the most gifted
of her sons. Painted decoration conceived on a grand scale, and taking
its proper place as one of the highest branches of art, is as important
in the days of the Eepublic as it was under the Boyalist or Imperial
regime. Whereas formerly its province was to enrich the palace of a king,
the nest of a royal favourite, or, later on, to adorn the grandiose construc-
tions which rose during the First and Second Empires, now it is deemed equally
indispensable for the completion of a reconstructed Hotel de Ville, for the ornament-
ation of the endless Mairies of the French capital, and above all for the embellish-
ment of the Pantheon, which, now once more a paganised temple, bids fair to
become a very museum of modern decorative art both sacred and secular.

Baudry had not the Tintoretto - like audacity of Delacroix, nor had he the
monumental grandexir of M. Puvis de Chavannes, the austere charm and calming

PAVL BAUDHY.

(From the Butt by Paul

32 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

influence of whose art make him the incomparably fit decorator of the church, or
the public edifice of the severer type : but the deceased painter had a more evenly-
sustained skill, a brighter and more joy-inspiring, if not a more serene and harmoni-
ous, scheme of colour, than that of the last-named great artist. His disappearance
is doubly to be regretted, because in his peculiar branch he leaves no successor of
sufficient influence to counteract the strenuous endeavour which is being made by
a number of artists of great merit and sincerity to prove, on the one hand, that
the blue - grey envelope, which is all they succeed in imitating in M. Puvis de
Chavanues' subtle schemes of mitigated colour, is the true, the only harmony for
decoration on a large scale ; on the other, that typical representations of the scenes
of the modern city and the country-side are henceforth to take the place of those
idealised types and personifications of things human and divine, those conceptions
of widest scope and most soaring phantasy, which are surely entitled to maintain
their supremacy among the subjects applied to decoration, even though they have
been irresistibly driven from other places by art of a tendency in closer accord with
the passions and aspirations of the day.

Paul Baudry was a Vendean, and was born at La Eoche-sur-Yon, on the 7th
of November, 1828. His family were workers of the humblest class ; his father
being busied all day in tbe forest as a " sabotier," and knowing but one relief from
toil — that of playing on an old violin which he possessed. This talent Baudry
inherited in a much higher degree, and it was the cause that a long struggle
established itself between him and his parents, whose ambition it was that he should
become a violinist, while he felt himself irresistibly attracted towards the vocation
of painter. The talent he revealed, after some very rudimentary instruction in paint-
ing, induced the municipality of his native town — in this displaying a rare sagacity

—to send him in the year 1844 to Paris, where in 1847 he obtained the second
prix de Rome, and in 1850 carried off the first prize with his " Zenobia Found on
the Banks of the Araxes." The four years passed in Eome at the Villa Medici
were spent in a searching and enthusiastic study of the great masters of the Revival

- chiefly those whose works formed the climax and close of that great period •
Michelangelo, Raphael, the Venetians, and Correggio. The first work sent by the
painter from the Eternal City was the well-known "La Fortune et 1'Enfant," the
morbidezza and mannered grace of which are clearly derived from Correggio, while
its scheme of colour approximates to that of Titian and his school, the individuality
of the modem painter nevertheless asserting itself, and thus redeeming the work
from condemnation as an absolute pasticcio. The admirable copy of Raphael's
" Jurisprudence " dates from the same period. Tbe last picture executed by Baudry
at Rome, during his first sojourn there, was the " Supplice d'une Vestale " (1857),
a huge composition, confused, and overloaded with personages, with much detriment
to its general effect, though some of the figures are in themselves admirable. This,
the painter's only essay in historical composition on the vast scale so often perforce
adopted by French artists, proves that, admirably as he understood how to impart

PAUL BAUDRY. 33

symmetry, rhythm, and movement, to decorative and symbolical compositions, the
calmer pouderation, the more soberly - ordered harmony which belong to the
treatment of historical subjects proper, was not equally within his grasp.

As a painter, Baudry was perhaps never at a higher technical level than in
the " Saint Jean-Baptiste " of the Luxembourg (1857), in which the boy-saint is
shown tenderly caressing a lamb. Neither here, however, nor in any other among
the very few works dealing with sacred or mystical scenes which the painter attempted,
do we find him in real touch with his subject, or approaching it either with that
simplicity of naive awe and reverence which is under the conditions of modern life
hardly attainable, or with that ardent human sympathy which alone can worthily
replace it. It is well, perhaps, for his reputation, that the great dream of his life
was not realised ; that the important series of scenes from the life of Jeanne d'Arc
with which the State bade him cover a portion of the wall-space of the Pantheon
remained unexecuted. Admirable as these would have been in many respects, we
cannot imagine that he would have succeeded in imparting to France's heroine the
spiritual aspect, the inner flame of consuming, mystic passion, and with this the
simplicity, which should be the chief element of such a conception. High technical
qualities allied to a peculiar grace were shown also in the "Leda" (1857); in the
" Petit Saint Jean " (1800), a delightful study of a modern Parisian child masquerading
with the inappropriate attributes of the Precursor; and in the delicious "La Perle
et la Vague " (18G2). Another excursion into the domains of history — the last,
indeed, if we have regard only to the completed work of the painter — was the
" Charlotte Corday " of 1861.

In or about 1854 arrived the critical moment of tho artist's life, for, in virtue
of his annual successes at the Salon, he was chosen to carry out the pictorial
decoration of the great foyer of the new Grand Opera. Never did great painter
show a more ardent devotion to art, a truer humility of spirit, than Baudry then
displayed. Conscious of the magnitude of his undertaking, distrustful, not of his
powers, but of his want of experience in this branch, he, no longer a struggling
yotith, but a master of high rank and reputation, returned to Home as a pupil,
devoted himself absolutely to the study of the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze, and
executed the series of magnificent copies of portions of the former work, which
were among the greatest attractions at the exhibition of his works. In 1867 he
was in England, completing from the originals his series of copies on a small scale
of the great Cartoons of Raphael at South Kensington.

The decoration of the foyer — in extent one of the vastest artistic undertakings
of modern times — occupied the painter almost exclusively during twelve years. The
subjects chosen for illustration are those most typical of music, of poetry, of the
witchery of dancing — for at the Opera, Terpsichore is worshipped as a divinity co-
equal with her sisters — and of the divine influence of beauty as an inseparable
element of the arts whose temple the Opera is, or should be. Thus Baudry has
given us new versions of such world-legends as "Apollo and Marsyas," "Orpheus

31. THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

and Eurydice," " Orpheus Slain by the Maenads," " Tyrtaous Inciting the Spartans
to Combat," "David before Saul," and "Salome Dancing before Herod." Eight
only of the Muses appear as single figures, one of their number, Polymnia, being
sacrificed to architectural exigencies.

Baudry, unable, after the completion of his magnum opus, to settle down at
once to labours more ordinary and less inspiring, undertook two successive journeys
to Egypt, whose aspect appears to have left no impress on his genius, and on his
return saw Athens, whose serene beauties, gilded with the halo of her glorkms
past, deeply moved him. Henceforth his energies were almost exclusively devoted
to the conception and execution of great painted decorations, in the peculiar style
in which he had proved himself without an equal among moderns. There had
already been produced in 1865, before the decorations of the Opera were under-
taken, an elaborate symbolical composition, " Les Heurcs," for the ceiling of
Madame de Paiva's house in the Champs Elysees, and there now followed the
" Glorification de la Loi," a vast plafond for the Court of Cassation, which gained
the Medaille d'Honneur at the Salon of 1881. It is marked by a splendour of
colour in the Venetian mode, by a sureness and vivacity of execution worthy of
all praise ; but the treatment of the high theme chosen shows an insufficient
appreciation of its noble gravity, and of the ideal character of the symbolism
which should have been devoted to its exposition. Here, even more than in the
decorations of the Opera, we are struck witli the parti pris of the painter, who,
fearing that his deep studies of the great Italian models might tempt him to a
conventional, lifeless reproduction of their distinctive qualities, determined, while
following the main principles with which he had so ardently sought to imbue
himself, to give his work vivacity and originality of aspect by the use of modern,
living types chosen from among his own surroundings. The artistic principle is
a just one, the effort praiseworthy and sincere in intention ; but, in carrying theory
into practice, Baudry was not altogether fortunate. The types selected were
frequently too frivolous in their " modernite," too strongly suggestive of the grisette
and the model, to take their place worthily in the noble conception of the artist.
Other important works were the " Noces de Cupidon et Psyche" (after Apuleius),
and " Phoebe*," both executed for the Vanderbilts of New York (1882), and " St.
Hubert" (1882), an important canvas destined to be the central ornament of a
huge chimneypiece at Chantilly. In this, abandoning for the time the style and
effects of the achieved Eenaissance, he aimed at the clear, even illumination, the
flatter decorative effects, of the frescoes of the fifteenth century.

All through his career Baudry practised with signal merit and success an
entirely distinct branch of his art, that of portrait-painting. In the portraits
belonging to the earlier part of his career he revealed a singular power of acutely
analysing human character, of seizing and perpetuating human individuality ; show-
ing a strong, if somewhat cold and unsympathetic, objectivity, the more remarkable
for the singular contrast which it afforded to the qualities of sensuous grace and

CUPID AND PSYCHE.
(By rcrmlstioii of Urun. Braun and Co., Tarb.)

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

charm which marked his other works of the same period. Conception and execu-
tion were based on, though not imitated from, the solid and unaffectedly truthful

M. EDMOXD ABOUT.
(By Permission oj Messrs. Braun and Co., Paris.)

school of portraiture which marked the earlier part of the century, and had for its
greatest exponents David, and, later on, Ingres. To this class belong the coldly
serene, the admirably true portraits of Beule (1857) and of Baron Dupin (1860),
full of individuality, and, as it were, revealing the very processes of thought in the

PAUL BAUDRY. 37

persons represented. The painter's masterpiece in this style is, however, the
famous portrait of Guizot (1860), in whose delineation are emphasised with singular
power the unbending energy, the unemotional intellectuality, which still, at that
period, marked his green, upright old age. Gradually the manner changes. The
portrait of Charles Gamier, architect of the Opera (18G8), has a sombre Venetian
glow, a great intensity of physical life, and a characterisation of mental attributes
less acute than that of the first series. In the portrait of Edmond About (1871),
relieved on a blue-green ground, somewhat after the manner of Holbein, and
illuminated after the same even fashion, but painted with a freedom and even
looseness of touch, excessive for its size, the personality is still admirably cha-
racterised, but there is at the same time apparent the aim to give at least equal
prominence to the decorative effect. In the large series of portraits executed by
the painter during his later years, his point of view appears still further to have
changed. His main object became the solution of new problems of colour and
decorative effect, the repetition of pictorial arrangements and colouristic juxta-
positions, which on a different scale and under different conditions had achieved
success. The painter apparently cared no longer to mould his figures so as com-
pletely to suggest their osseous and muscular structure, and, less interested than
in former days in the human side of the problem presented to him, he succeeded
less entirely in expressing their physical and mental individuality. The brain
could not forget its pre-occupation with problems of a different class, or the hand
its labours on a grander scale.

To define, at this stage, Baudry's exact position in the Parnassus of modern
French art, would be a task of great difficulty. It cannot well be maintained that
his faculty of artistic vision was of such supreme distinctiveness, or that his power
of giving forth anew, stamped with the unmistakable mark of his own individuality,
the impressions received by him from humanity and the outside world, was suffi-
ciently great to entitle him to a place beside such noble pioneers and innovators
as Delacroix, Corot, Millet, Rousseau, or even, it may be, beside such painter-poets
as Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau. Yet there must be conceded to him
in his own peculiar branch the first place among the artists of his time, not pre-
cisely as the greatest or most aspiring among masters of the art of decoration, but
certainly as the most admirable in accomplishment, the most brilliant, and the
most uniformly successful. As a portrait-painter, he must, too, if we have regard
rather to the works of his early and middle than to those of his later time, be
classed in all but the first rank — to attain which his sober mastery and keen
penetration need only have been tempered with a little more of that undefinable
yet inestimable quality of sympathy. Baudry's artistic temperament was a some-
what strange and complex one. While his interest in Nature, and, from a certain
point of view, in humanity, was intense and enthusiastic, and his studies of those
manifestations from which are to be evolved life, movement, grace, and rhythmic
harmony, were unwearying, his artistic nature was nevertheless in a sense a cold

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

one. Are we to surmise that lie dwelt so long with the immortals, was so occu-
pied in evoking for us their radiant presence, was so intent on presenting to us
anew the great symbolical legends of antiquity, that his heart a little forgot to
beat in unison with human interests and human wants ? Or are we rather to seek
the explanation in the peculiar idiosyncrasy of the artist? Whatever may be our
view as to the exact place which will ultimately be accorded to the great painter,
let us again record that none ever displayed a more single-minded devotion to art,
more absolutely devoted his whole energies to its practice and development, or
more entirely merged his life in his works. What great and happy result he
achieved during his too short life we have tried to show.

(t'nm a I'hat'ijrai'li by Kruill.)

DAVID NEAL.

JLBERT WOLFF said of Munkacsy : " II est un peintre fraiu/ais iiti en
Hongrie," an expression which has been paraphrased to describe tho
subject of this sketch as "a German painter, born in America." David
Neal is, however, an American artist by more titles than the accident
of birth. While a pupil and master of the Munich school, and an exponent
both of what it has accomplished and of what it aims to reach, he has
preserved an individuality which possesses, at least, a flavour of his native soil.
Unlike most of his fellow-countrymen who have studied art abroad, he has neither
fallen into imitation of his masters, nor lost his way in a vain pursuit of originality.
He was born in 1838, in the city of Lowell, Mass., which has been called the
Manchester of New England. Here his childhood was spent lip to the age of
fourteen, when his father, who had met with reverses in business, died ; and he
was left at that tender age to begin the battle of life, almost alone, and with but
little preparatory training for the struggle. Friends procured him, however, a
situation in New Orleans, for which place, many hundred miles distant, he sailed
from Boston, and became, on his arrival, wharf clerk with a firm dealing in
mahogany and other woods from Honduras and Brazil. In this employment he

40 THT1 MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

did not continue long, but at the end of a year, with the earnings he had saved,
started for California, via Chagres Eiver and Panama. He must have been a
surprise to the older Jasons who were his fellow-passengers.

Arrived at San Francisco, he was thrown by accident in the way of a friendly
wood-engraver, who took an interest in him, and proposed to teach him his art.
From his earliest youth he had been devoted to drawing, and he gladly accepted
the kind offer and congenial occupation. He was not destined, however, to achieve
his education in it. His talent as a draiightsman was more valuable than his dex-
terity with the graver, which was soon taken from him, and his work confined to
making the Indian ink drawings upon the blocks. In this his proficiency and
facility were such that he soon became the draughtsman for all the engravers in
the city. His success encouraged him to attempt higher flights, and he began to
paint portraits, and was employed by the police to sketch the likenesses of criminals
in the courts, for the Eogue's Gallery, without the knowledge of the involuntary
sitters. At the end of two years of profitable labour he had saved a certain sum.
With the true instinct of genius, he threw up his increasing employment, made the
long voyage back to New England, went back to the forms of a private school at
Andover, New Hampshire, and remained iipon them as long as his funds lasted.

The money spent, or rather exchanged for its equivalent in learning, he returned
to his home in the Pacific, where he found his old places open, and again went to
work, devoting every leisure hour to study. Among his friends and associates of
this period was Thomas Bret Harte, then, like himself, iinknown to fame ; another
was Charles Nahl, a German artist, the painter of the " Wallenstein " in the
Stuttgart Gallery, who gave the young draughtsman his first instruction and
encouragement, and decided his impulse towards art as a profession. Indeed, he
had already embarked on that voyage, and called his workshop a studio. Here
entered one day a well-to-do citizen, who, watching for a few moments the young
man at work, abruptly asked him —

" When do you intend to go to Europe ? "

The youth flushed at the thought. " As soon as I have the means," he
replied.

"How much have you?"

"Eight hundred dollars."

" Well, my wife and I are going to New York by the next steamer. You
had better go along."

With Neal it required but little time to make up his mind. His friend secured
him his passage to New York at half fare. At New York he took a German
steamer for Hamburg, where he arrived on New Year's Eve, 1862, his ears greeted
by music on the shore, of good omen — " Heil dir im Siegerkranz ! " — as he sailed
up the Elbe. He passed on withotit loitering to Munich, and began to work there
at the academy under Kaulbach. Here, like Benvenuto- Cellini, " about this time
he fell in love," a circumstance which resulted in his marrying the daughter of

DAVID NEAL. 41

the Chevalier Ainmiiller, the Director of the Eoyal Glass-painting Academy, the
reviver of that brilliant art (esteemed lost for four centuries) and well known in
Great Britain by his great works in St. Paul's, Westminster Abbey, St. George's
Chapel, Windsor, the Parliament House of Edinburgh, and the Cathedral of Glasgow.

WS AT FUAYKII.

This alliance, made romantic by difficulties and objections overcome, had important
results upon the young painter's evolution. At that time the painting class in the
academy languished under the feeble direction of Professor Anschutz, who was himself
conventional and methodical in an ultra-academical degree. He mixed, for instance,
all the tints upon his palette before beginning his work, which was then carried on
"line upon line, and precept upon precept." Mr. Neal had the good fortune,

42 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

therefore, instead of entering this class, to become the pupil of his father-in-law,
with whom he studied also the principles of architecture and perspective. When
Alexander Wagner, however, took the painting class, he returned to the academy,
and made, under that genial master, rapid progress. Here Ainmiillcr's influence
secured him, in 1869, admission into the atelier of Piloty, made famous not only
by his own works, but by those of his pupils, among whom, at this time, were
Makart, Gabriel Max, Kurtzbauer, Griitzner, Hermann, Kaulbach, and Defregger,
some of whom have since gone beyond their teacher. Wagner's final advice to his
pupil is worth quoting, for the advantage of other young artists : " Use large brushes
and stand up to your work ! "

Mr. Neal's first exhibited works were painted under the directions of his
father-in-law — himself an architectural painter of distinction. The subjects were
"St. Mark's, Venice," and "Westminster Abbey." For the first he made a journey
to Italy, and for the second to England. At Westminster he began his studies in
the abbey, with the ingenuous unconstraint with which he had worked at St. Mark's,
greatly to the indignation of the vergers, who exerted their authority to prevent it,
until, armed with a letter from a London architect to Dean Stanley, he petitioned
for admission, which, at first withheld, was finally granted, in consideration of the
long and expensive journey he had made for the purpose. Thenceforth he entered
the abbey by the dean's private door, and finished his studies without molestation.
The paintings were sent to New York, and exhibited at the National Academy,
where they were received with favour, and drew upon the artist the attention of
Emanuel Leutze and Albert Bierstadt, both of whom exerted much valuable influence
in his behalf.

The characteristic of the young artist which had led him to return to school
influenced his farther development. Cautiously feeling his way, advancing step by
step, his next composition was one in which "still-life" was prominent, and the
human figures introduced, while more than mere staffage, were of only secondary
importance. It was, in the main intention, a " study " on a large scale, but was
ingeniously combined with pictorial effect and interest. The picture was shown at
the exhibition of the works of the Piloty School at the Munich Eoyal Academy,
for the benefit of the wounded soldiers of the Franco - Prussian War in 1871, and
was quoted as one of the two most attractive works exhibited, the other being
" The Wrestlers " of Defregger. It was called — to give the child a name — " Eetour
de Chasse," and represented a richly covered table, littered with mediaeval objets
de luxe : inlaid arms, a glittering huntsman's horn, and a tall jug. In the fore-
ground a hound watches over a display of dead game, protecting it from the
incursions of an impudent spaniel. Behind the table, lolling in a high-backed
easy-chair, is a young lord of the manor, who holds out a wine-glass to a pretty
maid bringing in a flagon, and to whom he is evidently offering a compliment
more or less discreet.

This work gave the artist a local reputation ; but it was not until his next

DAVID NEAL. 43

picture was exhibited that his fame extended beyond the Iser, a result due in part
to the fact that the work found a purchaser in the then Lord Mayor of London,
Sir Benjamin Phillips. It was the first step towards high art, since convention
has consecrated that term to historical painting. It was his "James Watt," a
subject calculated to touch the popular heart : one of those anecdotes which, giving
as they do a glimpse into the evolution of genius, the world never tires of con-
templating. The idea of the picture had been one of the earliest formed by the
artist, and was conceived subjectively, and imbued with his own personality and
experience, both being in felicitous accord with the motive. The dreamy,
meditative boy, so lost in the study of the mysterious force issuing harmlessly from
the mouth of the kettle, as to be deaf to the reproof, or the invitation, of his aunt
calling him to the meal, at which the other members of the family are already
gathered, is but a reflection of himself. Such day-dreams had he dreamed, and
from them, equally, might be expected some kindred realisation. The picture was
in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1874.

It is in one sense a mortifying confession, but in another a national tribute—
the fact that the American public is still accustomed to echo English opinion in
matters of taste. Any artist— be it in literature, on the stage, or in painting—
who has received the " hall mark " of British favour, awakes at once to find
himself famous in the United States, and this benefit accrued to Mr. Neal. His
was not a head to be turned with success, however. He worked with the more
fervour, and with a conscientiousness which barely escaped timidity. He now began
his " First Meeting of Mary Stuart with Riz/io." The subject was once more an
advance in pretension, a higher goal of ambition. It presented new technical
difficulties to overcome, a deeper psychological moment to express ; it called for
more thought, and demanded the creative force of imagination. It was years upon
his easel. Fortunately by this time his means allowed him to make haste slowly.
He painted elaborate studies for every detail of costume and accessories. The
fortuitous arrival in Munich of Miss Gordon — a charming compatriot, herself an
artist — gave him the model for his lovely heroine, hitherto sought in vain.
The "authentic" portraits of the unfortunate Queen of Scots, the one at Abbotsford,
for instance, were not of a kind to inspire an artist who had made his own the
dictum of Ingres: " L'art ne doit etre que le beau et ne nous enseigner que le
beau ; " and he availed himself of a permissible poetic licence in the treatment of
a poetical theme. He took the same liberty with the features and figure of Rizzio,
which are certainly truer, in an aesthetic sense, than if lie had. followed the facts
given by possibly prejudiced contemporaries. The result was a beautiful picture,
too well known from prints and photographs to require description. The great
gold medal of the Bavarian Royal Academy crowned the work, which had a popu-
larity almost exceptional. The study head — rather than portrait — of Miss Gordon (Mrs.
Raymond) had, proportionately, equal success. In photographic reproductions it has
had a vogue surpassing even that of the celebrated portrait of the Countess Potocka.

fc.

DAVID NEAL. 45

The "Mary Stuart" was first exhibited at the " Kunst-Verein " of Munich in
1876, from whence it made almost the tour of Europe and America before reaching
its final destination, San Francisco. For some time afterwards Mr. Neal exercised
himself, as an athlete preparing for a race, in a sort of technical " training,"
painting numerous female heads, before he began his next work, the motive of
which was drawn from the lines in Uhland's noble ballad, the " Ulme zn Hirsau "

" O Stralil des Liclits, du tlringest
Hinab in jecle Gruft "-

which he sought to carry out in the minutest detail in the spirit of the tenth
century. For the architecture of the background, which is By/antine, he made
studies of the crypt of the cathedral at Freising, built in the year 824. This picture,
which Frederick Pecht called "a little masterpiece in grey," represents a youthful
nun at prayer, her beautiful uplifted face glorified by a beam of golden light from
the chapel window, which makes a fine contrast to the cooler tones of the rest of
the composition.

In 1877 he visited the United States, partly to exhibit his paintings, but
principally to fulfil a number of commissions for portraits. He was received with
great warmth, not merely by the citi/ens of his native place, but wherever he went,
"far beyond," he modestly declared, "anything I deserve — complimentary dinners,
receptions, &c. I have nearly worn out my swell dress-suit ! " He returned to
Munich in November, 1878, from whence he wrote : " Mrs. Neal met me in Paris.
Had it not been for the exhibition nothing could have kept me from hurrying
home by the first train, such was my longing to see my babies. My arrival there
was the occasion of a great festival on the part of the children, who had the rooms
you know so well handsomely decorated. They all seemed at first to be at least a
head taller, but after a week they managed to get back to their old proportions.
Thirteen months are a great deal upon a child's head." While in Paris he saw
and was greatly impressed by Munkacsy's " Milton," which was " one of the finest
pieces of colour" he had ever seen. He admired Makart's "Charles V." also, but
he confessed that French art had an elegance and purity of taste that no other
nation can approach. " The German pictures," he thought, " looked heavy alongside
the French."

He made a subsequent trip to Paris a few months later, with the approval of
his master and other counsellors. It was, however, to a certain extent a disappoint-
ment. " I have found here," he wrote, " everything so different from what I
anticipated, that if I conclude to return it will be upon quite a different principle."
Still, he profited greatly by his stay, short as it was. Among other pictures painted
while he was there was " La Chatelaine," head and bust of a young lady in the
costume of the seventeenth century, with a tapestried background. It coat him
seven weeks of hard labour and study, a proof of the thoroughness of the latter.
His model he described as one of the most charming young persons he had ever

46 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

met, " a poor, unfortunate girl, wlio actually died of a broken heart, whose history
would furnish material for the saddest romance."

Once more at home, he occupied himself with studies for several large works,
a " St. Mathilde," which was laid aside for his " Cloister," and the still more
important " Visit of Cromwell to Milton.'' His work on these was interrupted
for a time in 1881 by another journey to Paris, where he remained three months.
This time he felt " ripe " for it, and wrote enthusiastically of the progress he made.
While there he saw Munkiicsy's " Pilate," which more than realised his expectations.
"I have come to the conclusion,'' he wrote, "that there are only two great artists
living — Richard Wagner and Michael Muukacsy ! ' During this visit, the object
of which was evidently a special one, he made a sketch from a picture of Delacroix
in the Louvre : "as complete a symphony in colour as Beethoven ever put into

music."

In May, 1883, the "Oliver Cromwell of Ely Visits John Milton" was finished,
and exhibited at the Royal Academy in Berlin. In this picture, as in the artist's
" James Watt," his Puritan sympathies, and the nature and perceptions of a " self-
made man," are apparent, accounting in both cases for the successful comprehension
of the principal figure. It was another of his early conceptions, dating back to the
influences which surrounded his childhood, and associated with the familiar objects
of his life in New England, painted wood furniture, &c., which had been handed
down from the time of the Mayflower ; hence the interior and accessories are not
of the conventional Renaissance. His representation of Cromwell was that of the
farmer and brewer, but with a suggestion of the possibilities of the future, which
admitted the giving to the work a chai'acter foreboding the great political events
in store. While too modest to call his picture an historical one, preferring rather
to apply the German phrase Episoden Malerei, he neglected no means of giving
to it the verisimilitude of history. He sought, with his usual tenacity of purpose,
for authentic details of the hero's private life, and for accurate portraits of his
features. The account given of him by Carlyle appeared the most valuable, although
it overthrew most of the old traditions. On the one hand, he admitted, this made
his task lighter, by allowing his imagination more latitude. He procured all the
known likenesses, "each one of which differed entirely from the others;" nor was
the resulting confusion lessened by the plaster mask, said to have been taken
after the Protector's death at Whitehall, inasmuch as it was over life-size ! The
picture is, in composition, and above all in colour, the artist's masterpiece. " A
symphony in blue " it might be called in Grosvenor Gallery jargon. In technique
it is superb, leaving out a little abandon— a concession to the taste for bravura —
which has the result, however, of concealing the labour and painstaking with which
the thoroughness of the work was obtained. The greatest stress is placed upon
the "values" and upon force of colour. Every part was painted prima, and the
mosaics were skilfully joined, thus preserving crispness and freshness, breadth of
light, and clearness of tone.

DAVID NEAL.

I'OItTHAIT OK Mil. KUANS O. MAC OM1IEH.

One other work, the " Nuns at Prayer," exhibited on the eve of his last
voyage to America, and inspired by the passage out of Longfellow's " Golden
Legend "

" The ]>eace of God that passeth understanding
Reigns in these cloisters and these corridors" —

remains to be briefly noted with regard to its scheme of colour. It is one which
has become a favourite problem of modern painters — white upon white — what Mr.
Whistler might call a "sonata" in that colour. The nuns are clad in white, and

43 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

painted against a background of purest white, their dress broken only by the
draping of the black scapulars. On the left of the picture is a gleam of blue sky,
against which the grating and the foliage of the convent garden stand out in bold
relief. The work is more than a tour de force in colour, however, and the differen-
tiation of the three types of devotees is full of subtle psychological study.

A review of Mr. Neal's work would be incomplete which omitted a reference
to his portrait-painting, in which branch of art he has met with singular success,
a distinguished authority having even declared it to be his forte. It has been the
motive of his frequent voyages across the Atlantic of late years, and it has no doubt
been beneficial to his development, by drawing him out of the over-anxious perfection
of his work, and making his execution more magisterial and rapid. His portraits,
without being idealised, are yet far from the inanimate facts of the photograph, or
the brutal realism of some modern French masters. They are like and living, and
apart from the resemblance to the sitter, have a distinct value as works of art, and
as such are calculated to be treasured by posterity long after the affectionate interest
of friends and family in the originals has passed away. They bear the impress of
the study of Van Dyck, although perhaps more at second than at first hand —
through the works of Fraiiis Lenbach. The portrait of Mr. Macomber, the subject
of one of our illustrations, furnishes an excellent example of this branch of Mr.
Neal's painting.

W
K
o

a,
<?

"UN OAOE D'AMOUU."

E. BLAIR LEIGHTON.

NVENTION is a rare power in any school of art, and is not in the way
of increasing in the present movement towards the more strictly pictorial
qualities. Imagination and dramatic energy, in virtue of which a picture
is in any worthy sense a work of invention, are not common in the
intellectual order ; and their combination with the class of abilities that
make for any degree of technical success in painting is of course less com-
mon still. And Mr. Blair Leighton's distinction among the younger painters in
England is chiefly that he is an inventive painter — one who sets to work witli
vigour of fancy upon the conception of his matter. Such vigour must have its
value — value of rarity and of merit — whatever the class of subject on which it is
exercised ; and when dramatic subjects, full of movement and emotional expression,
are in question, this energy has its full effect ; it is, in fact, effective as well as
effectual. In this painter's work the intention is always dramatic.

It was not without difficulty that Mr. Blair Leighton adopted a career which
was nevertheless early and emphatically successful. His father was an artist and

o
o

Q
K

E. BLAIR LEIGHTON. 61

an Academy student, but his death when the little son (horn in 1854) who was to
follow in his steps was two years old, lelt no advocate for the artistic career
when a choice had to be made for the boy. Strongly bent towards painting, he
was as strongly discouraged by his family, and persuaded into commerce, as soon
as he left school. And in commerce he remained until his coming of age set him
free, when he proved that the old wish was as vital as ever. Mr. Blair Leighton
had in the intervening years "felt his feet" by persevering study in evening
classes ; happily for him, therefore, the invaluable and irretrievable time had not
been lost, and his explicit beginning was not so late as it seemed. Having made
the necessary drawings in the British Museum, the young student was quickly
admitted to the schools of the Royal Academy. During his school career his
studies were much interfered with by the necessity of doing wood-drawing, which
after a time altogether prevented his attendance during the day. But that he
made the utmost of his evenings in the Life-class is evident from the fact that
one of his studies gained the £10 premium for the best drawing made in that
class during the year.

In the year following Mr. Blair Leighton exhibited his first Academy picture,
" A Flaw in the Title," and was second in the competition for the gold medal for
historical painting, having lost the first place by a single vote. Since then he has
made an annual appearance at the Academy, generally with more than one picture.
In 1879 appeared " Until Death do us Part," a young work, in which the
rather obvious and trite story is not helped to any distinction by the hopeless
modern dress of the male figures. The painter has put his dots on his i's — to
use the French phrase — with rather unsparing precision. The elderly bridegroom,
the conscious bride, the jilted youth, who makes his accusing presence felt, the
commonplace casual occupants of the pews, form an ensemble perhaps more
emphatic than subtle. To the same year belongs " The Best of Friends must Part."
But the young painter gained rapidly in the command of his materials, and began
to set free, as it were, the dramatic imagination wnk-h was to be his distinctive
power. In 1880 Mr. Leighton exhibited " An Inspiration," notable for the
completeness of the execution — a completeness approaching far more nearly than
the most finished English work is wont to do, the comprehensiveness of Dutch
Work — " Awaiting an Answer," and " The Dying Copernicus." The last is a noble
subject, and illustrates the suggestive words of George Eliot : " He was made
to touch the first printed copy of his book when the sense of touch was gone,
and he saw it only as a dim object through the deepening dusk." It is the
24th of May, 1543, and the great German astronomer, seventy years old, lies
dying among his fellow ecclesiastics. The book which overthrew the Ptolemaic
system of the universe and taught a new science to mankind — " De Revolutionibus
Orbium Coelestium " — is brought to his failing hand by the friar who is about to
speed his soul beyond the stars. He leans on the shoulder of another friar (and
in a certain little lack of weight in the dying figure is tho only fault, or rather

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

defect, apparent in an admirable group), the whole scene being, far more than
death-bed pictures often are, expressive of the pathos of the inevitable hour. Great
beauty of execution and perfection of detail were again apparent in "Gossip"
(1881), and contemporary with this was the "Gage d' Amour," the graceful group
of a lady and her chivalric lover — she gravely fastening her crimson, velvet token
to his helmet, and he sitting his charger and pausing outside her window, with
the light on his uncovered head.

Mr. Blair Leighton has generally fared so well at the hands of the hanging

committee that his place
on or near the line seems
secure ; but he had his
turn of ill fortune in
1882, the unlucky pic-
ture being an even ex-
ceptionally well thought
out and complete com-
position, " The Foreign
Bride." The scene is a
rich last-century interior,
with a family, brilliant
and finished in costume,
at table. To them enter
the heir — essentially a
"pretty fellow," with all
the grace of his time in
his figure and bearing —
and his piquante bride
whom he presents. Mr.
Blair Leighton must be
a quick observer of feminine manner, for the stately mother who rises from her
chair is giving an English bow, distinctly but indefinably different from the foreign
bow so perfectly rendere'l in the action of the young bride. The rest of those seated
at table are on the very point of rising also, so that the whole group is in a
certain state of suppressed movement, very effectively presented. The details
throughout are singularly fine and full — for instance, in the painting of the little
watch hanging to the foreign lady's girdle — but the picture has ample repose and
space. Great care was bestowed by the painter also upon " Duty," a composition
of three figures in a mediaeval interior. A lady is persuading two languid young
men to the wars, and away from the lutes and flowers which adorn the picturesque
alcove where she sits. But of more powerful interest — perhaps the most dramatic
of all the painter's works — was the " Secret," in which the expression and action
make up a masterpiece, so tense is the conflict of duty, horror, and apprehension

THE DOOM WELL OF ST. MAUUON.

(From "British Ballads.")

TIIE GLADIATOR'S WIFE.

54 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

as to what terror may yet be disclosed. The situation is saved from violence and
from any suggestion of theatrical feeling by this reality of expression. And the same
may almost or altogether be said of a later picture, the " Confessional," in which
vigour of action nearly makes us believe in the slaying of an ecclesiastic by some
aggrieved layman who flies through the shades. The confessor falls headlong from
his box with so much completeness and thoroughness in his fall that the melo-
drama passes. In his " Gladiator's Wife " the artist found a better subject, a study
of keen emotion in the principal face and of expressive attitude in the accessory
figures. In all the actions is to be seen the suggestion of the incident of the
arena, that suggestion being concentrated in the beautiful face of the woman,
whose eyes and brows are strained with the tensity of her feeling.

Of Mr. Blair Leighton's work in black-and-white we give a specimen in his
illustration to the " British Ballads." It is " The Doom Well of St. Madron," the
late llev. 11. S. Hawker's spirited modern-antique ballad, which gives the artist his
subject. To that true song-writer we owe the lines :—

" And shall Trelawuey die 1
And shall Trelawney die ?
Then twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why,"

so often taken for an old national ballad. In the present case the verso tells how
St. Madron's well had such virtue that it scalded the hands of rebels and traitors,
and was cool as spring-water to the loyal. Thither, therefore, rode King Arthur and
his queen, and the twelve knights and page and squire, for the king was minded

to try their faith.

" Then they halted their steeds at St. Madron's cell,
And they stood by the monk of the clpistered well.
' Now off with your gauntlets,' King Arthur he cried,
' And glory or shame for our Tamar side.'

" Sir Bevis lie touched, and he found no fear ;
'Twas a benitee stonp to Sir Bedivere."

But last of the knights came Mordred, hailed by the king as his kinsman, his ancient,
and well-beloved.

" He plunged his right arm in the judgment well,
It bubbled and boiled like a cauldron of hell ;
He drew and he lifted his quivering limb —
Ha ! Sir Judas, how Madron had sodden him !

Doubtless we must forgive the illustrator for giving to the British monk the cord
with its three knots, denoting poverty, chastity, and obedience, invented by St.
Francis of Assisi for his order of friars some thousand or so of years later on. Artists
who are otherwise careful over their antiquarianism are apt to overlook such nice
distinctions in the profoundly important subject of Christian monasticisrn, and Mr.
Blair Leighton has many companions in his little error.

PUVIS DE CHAVANNES.

may at first appear somewhat strange that an artist who has long been
so widely known and so hotly discussed in France as M. Puvis do
Chavanncs, to whom must now be conceded, even by his detractors, a
place in the very first rank of living painters, should be in England
little more than a name. The reason is a sufficiently simple one : the art
of M. Puvis de Chavanncs is above all things decorative art, in the highest
sense of the term, and his works, destined for the most part for the adornment
of public edifices in France, arc in most cases on so vast a scale that their
very importance has impeded their finding their way to London. Indeed, mate-
rial difficulties, not easy to overcome, stand in the way of the adequate exhibi-
tion of one of his great monumental designs in England. The Grosvenor contains
no gallery sufficiently capacious to admit of full effect being secured for such a work
as, for instance, the " Bois Sacre Cher aux Arts et aux Muses." The proper
place for such works would bo the great gallery at the Eoyal Academy ; but un-
fortunately the members of that body have not in recent years shown a spirit so
accommodating or a degree of self-sacrifice in the cause of true art such as to raise
a hope that they would grant hospitality to any work so great in every sense of
the word as those just mentioned. We might in such case lack for a season some
few of the technically remarkable and otherwise conspicuous productions of certain
indefatigable members of the Academy whom it is unnecessary to enumerate. In
the meantime there is nothing to prevent smaller and less representative works,
or even, if nothing else can be obtained, a collection of his magnificent studies
and drawings, from being shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, where they could not
fail to produce a profound impression.

M. Puvis de Chavannes was born at Lyons on the 14th December, 1824, and
was in succession the pupil of Ary Scheffer and of Couture. He first exhibited in
Paris about the year 1854, at one of the minor galleries, the doors of the Salon
being then closed to him as they were to Gustave Courbet, and to many other
painters who have since won the highest renown. It is foreign to our present
purpose to enter into details with respect to his artistic training or the earlier and

PIEHRE PUVIS DK CHAVANNES.

(Painted by Leon Bonnat.)

1'UVIS DE CIIAVANNES. 57

more hesitating steps of his career, or to give particulars as to his private life :
this is in his case the less necessary, as the man is all ahsorbed in the artist, and
desires only to live and to he known to posterity through his achievement.

He must be judged chiefly by the grand decorative works of his maturity,
executed during the last twenty-five years, and from these there may be specially
singled out for notice: — Tbe great series of designs, " Le Eepos," " Le Travail,"
" La Paix," " La Guerre," and " Picardia," all now in the Musee de Picardie, at
Amiens ; the series of frescoes at the Pantheon illustrative of the early life of
St. Genevieve ; the great " Ludus pro P atria," also painted for Amiens; and
the grand decoration already referred to, " Le Bois Sacre Cher aux Arts et aiix
Muses*!' These are perhaps his greatest and most complete achievements, and
may be taken as most representative of his manner and mode of thought. The
cycle of designs at Amiens is one of the most important and original decorative
works executed by a modern painter. It is a painted epic of humanity, in which
are set forth, with perfect simplicity and directness, yet with ideal grandeur and
the largest generalisation, four great phases of human life.

" Lc Eepos" (executed in 1SG1) shows as its main group an old man, who,
seated on a mound overshadowed by a willow on the margin of a lake, declaims
verses to an intently listening group. IVyond, in the near distance, is a second
group, composed of shepherds and women who watch a litlle child essaying its
first footsteps. In the background is a prospect of richly wooded mountains.
" Le Travail" (execiitcd in 18(51.) shows four different groups. In the foreground
wood-cutters are seen chopping tree-trunks ; in the middle distance is the main
group of five herculean nude figures working at an anvil ; beyond is a labourer,
and to the right in the foreground appears a woman, lying on a couch of fern, to
whom another older woman presents a new-born infant : the background shows the
ocean fringed with rocks. It would be impossible to present more vividly, or with
more sympathy and breadth of conception and style, the great phases of human
labour here realised in the most direct and natural fashion, without any of the
cumbrous machinery of allegories and personifications for which this and the com-
panion subjects might easily have furnished a pretext. "La Paix" (executed in
1861) is an idyll of heroic conception and proportions. In the foreground, grouped
round a huge oleander-tree close upon the banks of a running stream, are seen in
various attitudes young warriors, big-limbed and long-haired, some nude, and some
half draped, and wearing their arms. A woman, over whom bends a shepherd clad
in leopard-skins, milks a goat, while another uudraped female figure offers a basket
piled high with grapes to a young man who sits on the edge of a stream. In the
background are youths engaged in friendly contest on horseback and on foot, and
beyond, closing in the picture on either side, are steep rocks, clothed half-way
with rich verdure, between which appears, walled in by them, a narrow winding
valley. All here breathes calm, security, and happiness without alloy, pure and
untainted, and without a trace of orgie or sensuality. "La Guerre" (executed

58 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

in 1801) is, botli in its scheme of colour and conception, in complete contrast with
the companion pictures. Female captives are seen crouching near the shattered
trunk of a tree, and in another group two old men lament over the corpses of their
slaughtered children, while apart a man straggles in the throes of the death-agony,
and two exhausted oxen stretched on the ground breathe their last : beyond,
three mounted warriors sound an alarm. The " Picardia " is, as beseems the sub-
ject, conceived in a homelier and less exalted, yet equally poetic and comprehensive
spirit. It is an embodiment of the industries and attributes of the province of
Picardy, realised by their actual presentment in a simplified and typical form : the
whole as usual framed in a huidscape of superb breadth and beauty.

The crowning achievement of the painter must, however, be deemed the series
of frescoes at the Pantheon (completed in 1877) illustrating the early youth of the
patron saint of Paris, St. Genevieve. It is here especially that M. Puvis de
Chavannes reveals himself as a master of decorative art, and a creative artist capable
of grappling with the most elevated themes in a spirit worthy of them, and of
rendering them with the noblest pathos and simplicity. These frescoes represent,
in three divisions separated by the half pillars which project from the walls of the
church, scenes from the childhood of the saint. In the first, she kneels a little
child clad in a simple drapery of white, absorbed in adoration before a rude cross
which she has fixed to the trunk of a tree. The two other divisions form in reality
one subject only. In the larger the Bishops St. Germain of Auxerre and St. Loup
of Troyes, journeying on their way to England, there to combat the Pelagian heresy,
have arrived in the environs of Nantcrrc ; among the devout crowd of men, women,
and children who have come out to meet them is the child Genevieve. St. Germain,
with whom is St. Loup, stands in the centre of the picture, his right hand placed
in benediction on her head. She looks up to him with reverential yet composed
mien. Bound upon the central group, clad in draperies of simple line and fold,
kneel women who have brought forward their children to pray, some with faces up-
turned in devout contemplation, some bowred and absorbed in prayer. Beyond is
a landscape of the most peaceful beauty ; farther still is a walled town of primitive
aspect. In the last division is seen a boat manned by four semi-nude figures,
on which the bishops are about to embark, while in the middle distance the figure
of a sick person, supported by two men, emerges from a hut to invoke relief from
the healing powers of the holy men. The whole work is highly typical of the
painter, and exhibits in a marked form his best qualities, and also, it must be
said, the drawbacks which to a certain extent explain the criticisms to which lie
has been subjected. The execution is, technically speaking, broad, simple, and
direct, as befits work of this type. The colouring must be pronounced, of its
peculiar kind, exquisitely well balanced and harmonious, if once we admit the
painter's scheme, which is to eschew as much as possible the contrast and relief
afforded by opposing masses of light and shade, and to give to his subjects a gentle,
even, and widespread illumination. Combined with masses of white and with

PUVIS DE ClfAVANNES.

flesh-tones delicate and wan
in tint, the painter employs
with extraordinary skill and
effect all shades of hlue and
its kindred tones, from the
deepest violet to the palest
lilac, using red and hues
akin to it only in a modified
and deadened form, shorn
of their full splendour, and
as a rule not in large masses.
Few will he found to deny
the mastery with which he
combines these elements,
and obtains from them their
fullest and most legitimate
effect. The landscape hack-
grounds, which constitute
so essential a part of his
works, are unsurpassed for
simple majesty of line, har-
mony of colour, and pathetic
suggestiveness, and above all
for the way in which they
are indissolubly linked to
the scenes which they frame
and complete. In the work
now under consideration no-
thing could be more har-
monious or grouped with
more exquisite art than the
central composition just de-
scribed. Here any too pro-
minent display of science
would have been obtrusive
and out of place : the im-
pression of holy calm and
peace which it was sought
to convey would have been
destroyed. The painter has,
however, succeeded in com-
posing his group with such

M)^eps|)

GO THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

perfect yet well- dissembled skill, that no thought of effort or of artifice enters the
mind of the spectator.

In the drawing, here as elsewhere iu most of his later and more representa-
tive works, the painter has, so far as can be judged from a comparison of his studies
with his finished designs, deliberately eliminated all detail in the delineation of
facial expression, in the representation of the human form, and even iu the folds and
adjustment of the draperies, which according to his view would detract from the
epic breadth and generalised character of his creations, and impart to them an
aspect too realistic and too individual. In this process of generalisation results
arc certainly often attained which arc akin to defective, or rather to insufficient,
drawing, especially in the rendering of the human form ; and it is this which has caused
it to be said and often repeated that M. Puvis de Chavannes cannot draw, and
has adopted his present system to hide deficiencies of training, though some of
the works at Amiens already described are the best proof of the contrary. The
series of drawings by the master shown at the Iilcole des Beaux-Arts must surely
have given the coup de r/rdce to this theory. These magnificent studies, for the
most part executed in "sanguine," are admirably correct and harmonious in line,
and show a breadth and splendour of style such as we are accustomed to meet
with only in the finest drawings of the early maturity of the Italian Kenaissance.
Two studies from the nude, here reproduced, though of less importance, amply
suffice to show the noble harmony of line, combined with perfect truth and vitality,
which marks the painter's style of draughtsmanship. Apart from the technical
question (which, however, especially in art of such aim and pretensions, is of the
highest importance), although the effects realised by the process above described
are often in their ultra-simplicity profoundly impressive, it must be owned that
there is much matter for regret in this persistency in carrying to an extreme
point the generalised rendering of the human face and form, the result being to
impart to them an impersonal character, which, oven in subjects such as those
affected by M. Puvis de Chavannes, robs them of half their significance and charm,
and cannot be deemed essential to the due expression of the painter's intentions.
The result, too, is sometimes an appearance of studied archaism, a seeming imita-
tion of the sublime but primitive art of Giotto and his followers, of which the
painter is himself unconscious, but which detracts from the high position his works
should take as original creations of elevated type and purpose. Raphael in the
Stanze of the Vatican, and Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, in works the most
vastly comprehensive, the most abstract in conception that the world has seen,
and yet the most essentially human, because they portray what is most noble and
enduring in humanity, have proved once and for ever that such a system pushed to
its extreme limits is not a necessary element in the vastest and most exalted themes.
They have shown that the most marked individuality in the types represented and
the highest technical perfection and finish do not detract from, but add to, the gran-
deur and lofty simplicity indispensable for the adequate treatment of such subjects.

VUV1S DE CHAVANNES. 61

Among the later works of the master, the " Ltulus pro Patria," which gained
the Medaille d'Houueur at the Salon of 1882, and the finished cartoon for which
was exhibited in 1880, should he specially noticed. It is a noble composition of
oblong shape and vast proportions in Avhich are represented groups of semi-nude
male figures, some competing in throwing the javelin, some engaged in other war-
like exercises, while others prepare for the friendly contest; further groups of men
and women are seen reclining in attitudes of repose on the ground, or standing,
contemplate the scene. This is one of the most characteristic examples of the
artist's method, and carries his principles to a point even more extreme than in the
frescoes at the Pantheon. As a purely decorative work the latest production of the
painter, the " Bois Sacre Cher aux Arts ct aux Muses," is certainly his greatest
achievement, though, from the nature of the subject, it has necessarily less than
usual of the human and pathetic clement, which, notwithstanding their abstract
character, is so prominent in all his works. This picture has been so recently and
frequently noticed that a detailed description is scarcely necessary. The noble
figures of the Muses and Arts are delineated with the usual severe simplicity in
the rendering of form and adjustment of draperies : they are broken up into distinct
groups, seemingly natural and unforced in arrangement, yet designed with admirable
art. In the centre is the fragment of an Ionic temple, Hanked on one side by
a large pool golden with the reflected rays of the setting sun. Two draped
female figures float with an imperceptible motion through the still evening air.
The landscape, which gladdens the eye with its contrasts of purple and pale
gold, shows huge upright tree of noble shape and gently swelling woods, with a
background of mountains of mystic aspect, whose hues vary from a faint blue to
a deep violet ; it produces an effect not easily to be forgotten, which even some-
what overshadows, both in interest and decorative effect, the finely harmonised
groups of figures. The design here given is the reproduction of a study by the
artist, which, however, in some respects differs from the finished work.

A fine specimen of the aims and manner of the master, although on a less
extensive scale than the great works above described, is the " Famillo du Pecheur,"
here engraved (painted in 1875). According to his wont, M. Puvis de Chavannes
has in this picture sought to give, not a representation of a fisherman's family
only, but in some sense a synthesis of the entire humble world typified, from the
infant who crawls among the pebbles seeking for shells, to the nobly-representative
figures of the father and mother, and that of the grandfather, a majestic yet touch-
ing type of old age, who lies taking his well-earned repose in the hull of a boat.
Nothing could more clearly illustrate the style and principles of the artist, as it
has been sought to explain them in connection with his main works ; further
comment on the picture is indeed, under the circumstances, unnecessary. There
may further be mentioned the decorative piece, " Doux Pays," exhibited in 188'2.
and now in its place on the staircase of M. Bonnat's house : it derives additional
interest from the fact that it was executed by M. Puvis de Chavannes in exchange

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

LA PAMILLE DU PKCHEUR.

for the admirable and perfectly truthful portrait of the painter by M. Bonnat
which is now in possession of the former artist, and is by his permission here re-
produced.

The art of M. Puvis de Chavannes, though in his imaginative designs he has

I'UVIS DE CHAVANNK8.

never approached purely modern subjects, and indeed but rarely (as in the Pantheon
frescoes) any which can be said to belong to a special time or place, is yet in one sense
distinctly modern : he is a
painter-poet of a temperament
such as only his century could
have produced, and most of
all in the element of peculiar
melancholy which he often un-
consciously infuses even into
his most abstract conceptions.
This quality is with him the
result of the broad human
sympathies which form the
basis of his artistic nature.
His pathetic power, though it
is the outcome of his time,
is yet distinctly his own; it
has neither the tragic inten-
sity of Jean Francois Millet,
nor on the other hand has it
anything in common with the
languorous despair and want
of real kinship with humanity
which mark the works of our
Burne- Jones and his school.
It is melancholy of a quality
which does not shut out hope,
and consorts well with the
painter's true ideality and
noble aspirations. Nothing
could better illustrate our
meaning than a comparison
of his profoundly sad yet not
despairing dreamer, the very
admirable " Pauvre Pechenr,"
with the figure, grandly tragic
in its abasement and utter
lack of hope, of Millet's " Le

Vigueron " (a work which recently appeared in the ficole des Beaux-Arts), in which
is typified with even greater intensity the toil and anguish which are the inheritance
of humanity. Both works are, however, pre-eminently the products of modern
thought and feeling, and could hardly have been conceived in any other age.

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

Like many other innovators, who feeling they have something new to say,
choose to say it in a strange and unfamiliar way, M. Puvis de Chavannes was at
the commencement of his artistic career derided as a fantastic visionary of a mild
type, to whom on account of the comparatively innocuous nature of his productions
a certain amount of contemptuous toleration was to be accorded. Recalling the
career of other and even greater men than he : Eugene Delacroix, detested and
persecuted hy Ingres and his followers; Millet, whose sublime types were in his

earlier time deemed rude, coarse, and uncouth ; and Corot, who at one time could
not even obtain for his landscapes access to the Salon : M. Puvis de Chavannes
has, however, persevered, serenely undaunted, nay, even perhaps too little affected
by genuine criticism. To-day, in the face of the magnificent works with which he
has enriched France, the painter is on too high a pedestal for criticism of the
merely contemptuous kind, and his critics are accordingly compelled to take up a
different position. None now attempt entirely to deny his immense talent and
pre-eminence in decorative art, nor the loftiness and simplicity of his conceptions.
But other means of attack must be found ; for was he not, with MM. Baudry, Jules
Lefebvre, and a few others, the chief and most imposing barrier to the inrushing
tide of realism, which, no longer content to occupy its proper and legitimate place

DE CHAVANNES. 65

iu the fields of genre, portrait, and landscape, would now invade the precincts of the
highest decorative art ? It is a fact that a serious attempt is heing made to
substitute for such noble and appropriate works as those devised by the painter
for the museum at Amiens, and by M. Baudry for the foyer of the Grand Opera,
productions in the style exhibited by M. Gervex in his highly dexterous, but mean,
unpleasant, and unornamental canvases devised for the decoration of one of the
Parisian Mairies (one of which series has been recently seen in London), or
eccentric experiments like the curious diptych of M. Besnard, "La Maladie — La
Convalescence " (exhibited at the Salon), a strange half-decorative, half-realistic
work, in which it has been sought to assimilate the two opposing styles. A well-
known Parisian critic has recently, in noticing the last work of M. Puvis de
Chavannes — the " Bois Sacre " — delivered himself somewhat to the following effect:
" We recognise his great ability as a designer and colourist, but he seeks here to
represent what he has never seen, and what we, the inhabitants of France, and
not of the Vale of Tempo, neither want any longer, nor understand. Wo ask
for something newer and more modern in type and conception, more completely
in sympathy with our humanity of to-day and its wants." Such a theory might
have its weight as applied to genre, landscape, and even to historical subjects, but
surely, as applied to the highest decorative and ideal art, it contains a, fallacy as
huge as can be conceived. All true art — especially the highest — must doubtless lie
based and built on Nature ; but must it not also proceed, if it lay claim to the
name of art, by way of selection, by searching out in Nature its noblest, truest, and
most essential elements, while neglecting such as from their merely accidental and
temporal nature are unworthy of being perpetuated '? Is not this the way in which
the greatest masters of decorative art, Giotto, Ghirlandajo, Michelangelo, and
Raphael, proceeded ? and would not the world have been poorer by its greatest
treasures — the frescoes of Assisi, the Sistine Chapel, the Cartoons, and the Stan/e
of the Vatican — if these, the great pioneers of art, who studied humanity and nature
with a closeness and an ardent sympathy never to be surpassed, had proceeded to
represent only the accidental realities and merely oiitward appearances of the every-
day world, as it appeared to the indifferent and the uninitiated? Is there not in the
conceptions of the great men whom we have just cited, and of those who follow
in their footsteps, a wider and more real sympathy, a truer reflection of humanity in
all that is most lasting and essential, than can be afforded by a representation of
subjects which may for the present age have a certain meaning, but to other
generations can have little or none ?

It is not therefore to be argued that M. Puvis de Chavannes, or even greater
than he, are to be exempt from earnest and thoughtful criticism, or are to be ap-
proached in that attitude of prostrate adoration which is so mistaken and often so
fatal to true art. In his case such a position is especially to be deprecated, for it
must be admitted, even by those who regard his art, as we do, as of the finest quality,
that by a mistaken and too rigid fidelity to his main principles he has sacrificed
96

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

some part of his artistic power and means of expression, and, by the ultra-simplicity
of his finished works, has missed a portion of the very effect at which he aims.
Is it too much to hope that in some crowning creations he will allow his magni-
ficent powers full scope, and — in this following the chiefs of the greatest period of
Italian art — will give to his art that individualised character and completeness which
he at present to some extent deliberately sacrifices ? As it is, his accomplished
work is perhaps the highest, if hardly the most complete, manifestation of the art
of modern France. He must take rank with the greatest painters of this century,
as one who has achieved great and lasting things, whose aims have always been
lofty and noble, and who has borne high the banner of the ideal and the essen-
tially true, at a time when the opposition was most powerful and the danger most
pressing.

H
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THE MOUTH CATCH.

WILLIAM B. HOLE, AR.S.A.

|E. HOLE lias chosen to belong to a group of Scotsmen who have re-
peated, in spite of the centralisation of these days, the local honours of
an older epoch. In the high times of the Edinburgh Review, when the
Northern capital was a capital indeed, with literary and artistic tradi-
tions of her own, there was hardly a stronger national seal upon her work
than has been set again in our own time by young men whose fame is im-
perial while their characteristics are Scottish. But Mr. Hole has improved upon the
local spirit of those who, however Northern their genius may be, have sought pub-
lishers and purchasers, audiences and exhibitions, in London. He is comparatively
a stranger at Burlington House, and the official honours he has accepted are from
the Scottish namesake of our Eoyal Academy. Eminent, therefore, has he become
in a groiip whose work shows the rare quality of inspiration as well as the now
abundant quality of art.

Nevertheless, Mr. Hole is by paternal blood a Southron, a member of an old
family of Devonshire squires. His father, a physician at Salisbury, died of cholera
in the memorable plague of 1849, falling at the post of duty and in the midst of
devoted labours to which, and to the love and respect in which his name was
held, a monument in Salisbury Cathedral bears witness. The young physician's
widow went to her own family in Edinburgh, taking with her her son of

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

three years old, and educated him there, chiefly at the Edinburgh Academy.
And when the time came for choosing a profession, although the hoy wished
ardently to he an artist, the idea was scouted by the family adviser, a dry old
Scotch lawyer, whose opinion of painters was contemptuous, and who was wont
to lament the lapse of the present esteemed President of the Eoyal Scottish Academy
from the honourable paths of business, in the words, "Douglas is just a stickit
banker." And the family adviser having influence in the absence of the father's
authority, William Hole was apprenticed to a firm of civil engineers, distinguished
for turning out clever members of — other professions. Here the future artist wasted

THE END UF THE '4y.

five good years, noted slightly for the beauty of his drawings and for the general
inaccuracy of his engineering, but learning a little of his profession and of many
other things, from the late Fleeming Jenkin, the gifted and lamented Professor of
Engineering in the Edinburgh University. During this time Mr. Hole took every
opportunity afforded by holidays of copying in the National Gallery, and of sketch-
ing from Nature. He also achieved pictures which occasionally found their way
into modest corners of the Eoyal Scottish Academy.

At the time when the unwilling and unprofitable apprenticeship was finished,
a friend chanced to say to the happily emancipated apprentice that if ever he wished
to go to Italy there was a passage in a trading vessel at his disposal. So before
settling down to the work of life Mr. Hole, in 1869, sailed from Swansea with fifty
pounds in his pocket, in a little trader, and, after an adventurous voyage, landed at
the port of Genoa. Some six months were spent in Italy in wandering up and

WILLIAM D. HOLE, A.R.8.A.

down, and sketching everything from morning till night. Nothing came amiss to
the happy artist— children, cattle, peasants, landscape, monks, ruins, and churches.
In Rome the wanderer made acquaintance with various artists, among others Mr.
Keeley Halswelle, who gave his junior the practical advice of which a young man
can make such good profit when his heart is in the matter, and of which no student
surely had ever been so de-
prived as Mr. Hole. To
Mr. Keeley Halswelle, in-
deed, he owed the sentence
which changed his life. It
was spoken in the course of
a severe criticism on a draw-
ing by Mr. Hole, who urged
in deprecation that he was
only an amateur. " Ah,"
said the painter, " I had
forgotten that." The say-
ing, so full of hope and
suggestion and regret, gave
to the future artist the idea
that he need not be an
amateiir for ever. Return-
ing to Scotland, he found
that nothing turned up for
him to do as an engineer.
He began then a real course
of study in art, entering the
School of Design in Edin-
burgh, which has been the
infant school of many an
excellent painter, and worked
diligently at drawing under

Mr. Hodder. Nevertheless, engineering was not yet explicitly abandoned, and during
a year longer, if anything in that profession had presented itself Mr. Hole would
have accepted it, and Scotland would have lost a true artist. But there was nothing
to do, and when Mr. Hole made explicit profession of his adoption of another career
no one could reproach him with engineering opportunities thrown away. His draw-
ings gained him admission into the Academy Life-school, and the beginning of the
new work was marked with that sign of a serious career begun — a commission.

From this time the young painter went on gradually, studying and exhibiting,
until, in 1878, he was elected an Associate of the Scottish Academy. At about this
time, encouraged by the approval of Mr. Hamerton, he tried etching, which has

QUEEN MAllv's FIRST LEV0.B.

70 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

ever since been an important part of his work. Mr. Hamerton has done good service
to the stenographic art — the art which interprets so sensitively the artist's mood, as
well as his temperament, that it expresses a tremor in the drawing of his breath or
an animation in his heartbeats ; for not by his eloquent propaganda only, bnt by
his incentive to young artists to etch, has Mr. Hamerton brought etching out of
its long-lasting obscurity. Mr. Hole was elected in 1885 a member of the Painter-
Etchers' Society, having joined the Scotch Society of Painters in Water-colours in
the previous year. Of the subjects of Mr. Hole's principal pictures some idea may
be formed from the following list by those who do not know his sincere and strongly
progressive work except through reproductions in the art magazines : — In 1875
appeared "Her Wedding Day," a bride taking leave of her grandparents; in the
following year " Taken Unawares," in which Mr. Hole took the comic view of the
cloister — always in the traditions of the British artist, who has been inclined to
ignore the tenderness, patience, and renunciations of convent life in order to find
out its probable or possible joke. How much a curious form of ingenious ^imagi-
nation can make of a monk's relation to his companions may be seen in Mr.
Browning's " Spanish Cloister," where the situation is satanically grotesque. No
painting, as far as we know, has gone to the length of this literature, but Mr.
Marks and Mr. Dendy Sadler are wont to make unsympathetic, though not mali-
cious, use of the monk. In Mr. Hole's picture the scene is the guard-room of a
castle, where a friar, who has fallen asleep, is sketched by a jester, while the men-
at-arms look on. "His Lordship" (1877) showed a village smithy to which a little
boy has been wheeled in an invalid chair ; and in the same year Mr. Hole began
that phase of Civil War subjects to which most young painters are fated by the
laws of their development. "A Wounded Enemy"— a Eoyalist officer tended by an
old woman in the Covenanters' camp — was followed by " The Alarm," in which
the scene is a besieged Eoyalist chapel ; at the call of a messenger, all present
are flying to arms. Next carne "The End of the '45." Here the painter, who
shows us a string of Jacobite prisoners led through a Highland village, im-
presses us with a sense of the physical misery which overpowers the mental
sorrow of despair for a lost cause. The wet, the wounds, the flapping of torn,
drenched raiment on cold limbs, make this a bitter progress to captivity. The
movement of the march is exceedingly well rendered. " A Straggler from the
Chevalier's Army," painted in the following year (1880), is a singularly vivid incident
of the past — a passage of life which the artist would almost seem to have witnessed,
so much familiarity and activity is there in his conception of the accidents of the
scene. A wounded Highlander is attacked by the tagrag of an English village,
and turns at bay. Here, too, the quality of movement is remarkable.

" Queen Mary's First Levee " is a passage of more repose. In the solemn-
looking interior of the royal bedchamber stands a tall canopied bed where the
baby Queen, lying on her mother's arm, received the oath of allegiance of the
Scottish nobility. " Prince Charlie's Parliament " is again an interior — this time

•/.
^

c
M

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

a Highland hut where the Pretender, in his adversity, sits in consultation with a
few adherents. His own face is worn, and there is an undemonstrative sadness
in the dignity of his action. A follower watches at the window, through which
a glimpse is caught of the mountain landscape; the old cottage woman sits over
the fire in the smoke-obscured background. In " The Night's Catch," the beauti-
ful Northern dawn is breaking over a highland loch, and boats are coming home-
ward in the pure and chilly light.
A crew just landed — they have toiled
all the night and caught little — divide
a small basketful of herrings. And
another fishing subject was " The Fill
of the Boats " —west highland fishing
craft loaded to the gunwale, hoisting
sail for home.

In 1885 Mr. Hole painted the
picture which, for gravity and dignity,
marked the highest point he had yet
reached. "If Thou Hadst Known"
is one of the few religious works seen
within late years at the Royal Aca-
demy, even if the name of religious
may be given to the subject merely,
without any reference to the artist's
capacity. Mr. Hole's work is reli-
gious in the painter's intention and
power, and in that artistic sincerity
without which moral sincerity has no
expression. The scene is conceived
with the full realisation which the
painter combines with nobility and
quiet. The night landscape of the
hill of Jerusalem shows the points
of light of a great city of antiquity ; a radiance reveals the forms and faces of
temples ; cressets shine out on terrace walls, and the soft specks of brilliance are
sprinkled amongst the foliage of the fertile days of Jerusalem. The soft Oriental
darkness is lost towards the west in lingering light, and large stars are overhead.
There is a suggestion of multitudinous, but remote, human life in the city, and of
deep solitude in the foreground hill with its seated figure. The Saviour's attitude
is meditative and composed rather than explicitly expressive. Mr. Hole's picture
in 1886 was a portrait of the Eev. Dr. Moody Stuart, in Geneva gown, descending
the pulpit stairs.

Among upwards of a hundred published etchings the principal are a series of

"THE RESTORATION!"

(From ll Kidnapped")

WILLIAM B. HOLE, A.R.S.A. 73

landscapes in illustration of an archaeological work ; portraits of professors and
officials of the Edinburgh University at the time of the tercentenary festival, for
which the sketches were taken from the subjects unawares while they were lecturing
or discussing, so that the characteristic living action has been felicitously caught ;
and six studies of celebrated Dandie Dininont terriers. Chief among the artist's
reproductive etchings are a plate of "If Thou Hadst Known," and one of the
portrait of Dr. Moody Stuart, while Mr. Hole is now engaged on etchings after
llousseau, Corot, Diaz, the Dutch brothers Maris, and other masters of modern
landscape. His principal book illustrations are those to Mr. II. L. Stevenson's
" Kidnapped."

ELIHU VEDDER.

AINLY to seek, in a work of art the qualities it never sought to give, to
judge an artist by a standard to which he never attempted to conform,
is an easy but indifferent form of criticism. We shall for the present,
therefore, disregard those problems of lighting and of tone, those delicate
realities which to many minds are among the chief pleasures of art. It is
not with these things that Mr. Vedder is concerned ; his talent is not per-
ceptive, but visionary and symbolic. His pictures enrich the poet's world within

ELIHU VEDDER. 75

us rather than the painter's world without. But, as he possesses, in addition to
this symbolic mind, a real sense of beauty, the lack of dexterity which disqualifies
him as a painter leaves him with a separate eminence as an artist.

Mr. Vedder was born in Varick Street in New York City, on the 26th of
February, 1830. His parents were first cousins, botli of the Schenectady family of
Vedders — old Dutch stock, dating back to the middle of the seventeenth century.
It was not for nothing that the ancestors of this American child had sprung from
the Netherlands. The painters of the Low Countries, skilful above all others in
light and colour ; the strange national legends of Holland, fantastically historical —
the influence of these things was to suffer a sea change before it finally inspired
Elihu Vedder. Transplanted to the New World, far from schools of painting or
monuments of history, the artistic instinct of the Dutch lost its traditional and
technical side. Only the desire for art remained ; the desire for art and the sense
of fantasy, which gifts, to the fullest degree, the little Elihu Vedder inherited.

There was no obvious channel to receive his imagination. His instinct was
unguided (or untrammelled, as you like it) by any national school. For this reason,
perhaps, the Rosa mystic a flourishes so well on American soil. The flowers of that
tree were early gathered by the painter we are noticing to-day. Very early his
work revealed those qualities which we are beginning to recognise as distinctly
American — that delicate curiosity about the soul ; that elegance not quite dis-
tinguished ; that Teuton humour or grotesqueness ; that charming, pathetic strange-
ness of idea, too often clad in a turgid phrase or a conventional type, which we
meet in the works of Hawthorne and of Poe, no less than in the drawings of Vedder
and Lafarge.

The psychical quality (which seems to us above all others the note of American
art) is veiy apparent in Mr. Vedder's work. It engrossed him early and had this
fatal drawback, that, having so much to say, he never cared to learn the best way
to say it. So it is that his form remains common while his idea is almost always
distinguished. He is one of the artists who are not painters ; and his work is
often as faulty in lighting, tone, atmosphere, and dexterity of texture, as it is
refined in conception and design. No severe course of study counteracted this
slovenliness of technique. Mr. Vedder never became a strenuous student in any
school. As a boy he was for a while with a painter named Mathison, in Sherburne,
New York; in 1856 he studied for a few months in the studio of Picot, in Paris.
He was now twenty, and had finished his course. With the exception of a few
lessons in drawing and anatomy from a Florentine named Buonajuti, he received no
further instruction.

Mr. Vedder did not settle in Europe. In 1861 (we believe) he had returned to
New York, where he rapidly earned a brilliant reputation. To this period belong
many works almost as well known in England as in America — " The Eoc's Egg,"
"The Questioner of the Sphinx," "The Lair of the Sea Serpent," and others.
The drawings certainly show a great love of the picturesque and the fantastic ;

THE THRONE OF SATURN.

(From, the " Rubdiydt" of Omar Khayyam.)

ELIHU VEDDER. 77

but from them we scarcely should have guessed the real extent of the painter's
imagination.

The time of the War Secession hecame, strangely enough, the heyday of
American art. There was a great demand for pictures, and very few producers
capable of an adequate supply. Mr. Vedder had a brilliant career before him ; but
he preferred, we suppose, an artistic milieu to a pre-eminence too easily obtained.
He did not care to be first in his village of Iberia when he might be second in
Home. This shows an unworldly temper which has had its reward. For since
18G6, when Mr. Vedder settled in Koine, he has produced a class of work far
superior to the mere fancy and quaintness of his earlier productions — pictures of
strange imagination, like the two "Sibyls" and the "Crucifixion;" pictures of
delicate attraction, like the "Lost Mind" and " Marsyas," which have made their
author's name familiar in two hemispheres. The last two — the "Marsyas" and
the " Lost Mind" — are to be placed among the national successes of American
art. The legs of the Marsyas are very long, the figure of the girl in the " Lost
Mind " is scarcely suggested under her mass of drapery ; but the conception of
both is signally fortunate. Both are well known to the English public through the
excellent engravings in Scribnei's Magazine for 1881. Mr. Vedder has painted nothing
more moving than the strange, Hawthorne-like pathos of the first. Through some
desolate Umbrian country, straight limestone mountain-walls ridged up behind her,
a young girl walks in a quasi-religious dress. The aimless hand, the vague glance,
the irresolute gesture, reveal that from that beautiful face the informing sense is
fled. Having wandered away on some fancied quest, she seeks among the desolate
rocks her lost mind. The ban-en, stony landscape, the bewildered, innocent face,
are full of poetic suggestion.

But higher we should rank the graceful fancy of " Marsyas," a fascinating little
design. At the edge of a leafless copse the youthful Marsyas sits. He is a satyr,
with goat's legs and hoofs and a charming boyish head. Sitting on the ground,
he plays his reedy pipes in the bare oak-tree's slender shade. A circle of little
hares, with listening ears and bright beady eyes, sit round him in the grass and
listen to his playing, unafraid of this musician who is a mere woodland creature like
themselves. It is very difficult to give an idea of the natural freshness of the
picture, with its landscape background of gnarled oaks and undulating snowy fields.
We have seen no work of Mr. Vedder's which has given us so high an estimate of
the artistic, as distinguished from the literary, side of his imagination.

Many who have been in Rome within the last twenty years have had the pleasure
of visiting Mr. Vedder's studio and seeing many of his pictures. They are, however,
by no means the only things of Mr. Vedder's making in that quaint and delightful
place. Particularly to be remembered are a beautiful cup which the artist had
modelled, and several strange little earrings; for, like the artists of old, some of
whom may have lived and painted on that very spot three centuries ago, Mr.
Vedder is capable of all manner of excursions from his own domain of painting ;

78 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

and the deftness and skill of his hands in fashioning these playthings of his
leisure make it evident that a theory rather than any incapacity of his must account
for the duluess of technique too frequent in his work.

The greater number of dilettanti in England had seen little of Mr. Tedder's
drawings until the appearance of his illustrations to the " Rubaiyat " of Omar
Khayyam. It is with interest and respect that all lovers of literature will
observe the impression made on a very modern mystical mind by the different and
Oriental mysticism of the twelfth century in Persia. Nothing can be more
unlike the mood of psychological curiosity, the delicate spiritualism, of the American
painter than this half- mystical Persian wine-song, frankly material and sensuous,
yet conscious of unknown and unfathomable influences — against which the poet
impiously rebels — melancholy, fatalistic, and audacious. To us the Italian details,
the facile inspiration of Mr. Vedder, jar with this different spirit. Only in the
arabesques, which, to our thinking, are more suggestive in this connection than
any figure-drawing is like to prove — only in these and in one piece, " The Eow
of Moving Shadow-Shapes," does the idea of Omar seem really approached. But
if they a~e taken as a set of notes, suggested in a thoughtful but unassimilative
mind by Omar's verses, these illustrations are a store of symbols, fancies, and
designs, which have a separate value of their own.

We engrave the signatorial " V," the graceful and fanciful " Pleiades," and the
weird and imposing suggestion of Omar in Saturn :—

"Up from Earth's Centre to the Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,
And many a Knot unravelled by the Road,
But not the Master-Knot of human fate."

Very charming and decorative is the design which illustrates the fourth quatrain.
An old man, reading, sits in the long grass of a hillside orchard ; the fruit-trees
overhead are all in bloom. Lower down the slope, a vase-shaped earthen fountain
stands half-hidden in tall flowering irises. Two fawns have come to the water
to drink. The delicacy of the design recalls the charming " Marsyas." It has
all the attraction of a stanza of Boiardo. This is purely decorative. More remark-
able, perhaps, are the designs which show Mr. Vedder's power as a symbol-artist.
First in this rank we should put the strange and simple arabesque which appears
again and again throughout this set of drawings. It is, as Wagnerians would say,
the leading motive of the work. Now it appears as a wind-blown scarf, and now
as swirling water ; now purely as an arabesque ; always it is a whirl of flowino-
curves, neither the beginning nor the end of which is seen, and which forms a most
suggestive hieroglyph for Omar's verse :—

" Into this Universe, and Why not knowing,
Nor Whence, like water willy-nilly flowing ;
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing."

M
Q

80 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

More direct and impressive than this is the illustration to the ninety-ninth
quatrain — " Ah, Love, could you and I with him conspire ! " A slender winged
boy shrinks back into the protecting grasp of an ancient sage ; before them on
the road lies a dove pierced with an arrow ; a vulture perched on a branch over-
head waits only for solitude to feast on the carrion. It is, we take it, a simple
and touching parable of the discord between love and death.

All this is Western enough, sufficiently Italian. But sometimes we are
tempted to wonder indeed why Mr. Vedder should consider his charming drawings
illustrative of Omar Khayyam. We are thinking of one picturesque and effective
study of a shepherdess in the Apennines driving down-hill in the evening her little
flock of goats, and spinning as she goes. Lower down an old woman rests on a
stone, having set on the ground the faggot of sticks and the fresh filled brazen
mezzina of water which she must carry homewards up the hill the younger one
descends so lightly. What has this pretty little sketch of life in the Apennines,
with its facile allegory of Youth and Age — what has this to do with Omar Khayyam ?
Wise people, perhaps, will accept the sketch, and not inquire too closely into the
connection, gathering roses where they may.

This will please a wide public. More subtle than it are the designs of the
defiant Eve, holding out her snake-bitten and embittered apple ; or the questioning,
weary spirits hurried in and out of existence along the self-same winding, endless
track ; or the magic shadow-maidens, seeking for something real and catching
only at the eluding clouds ; or the helpless human soul, seated naked in the
desert and weeping for her sins. The painter himself prefers, we believe, the
design known as " The Kiss of Death." All these show genuine imagination.
Another expressive and pathetic study illustrates the forty-fourth quatrain —

" Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Wer't not a Shame — wer't not a shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide 1 "

Here, in a smoke-like upward-curling mist, the shadowy sold elate and triumphant
issues from the fallen body, lying solid, earthly, dead and real, across a slab of
stone. A fine contrast is made between the inert death of the tangible body and
the life and activity of the phantasmal soul. It is in such fancies as these that
Mr. Vedder shows himself most individual.

It is still a question how far a poem so distinctively Eastern as the " Kubaiyat "
of Omar Khayyam lends itself to Western illustration. In Mr. Vedder's treat-
ment the pseudo-classic form and detail too often jar with our sense of fitness.
As a great poet once said to the musician who set his poem to a tune, "It had
its music already." Luckily for us, Mr. Vedder's tune can be enjoyed independent
of the verses he has set. He is essentially a man of the new world, of the new-
order of thinking and feeling, a mystic of no century but his own. It would be

ELI 11 U VEDDER.

most interesting if he would try his hand at the themes which Hawthorne so
successfully worked out. A modern subject, if possible American, subtle and mysti-
cal, would reveal his real capacity for rendering half-shades of feeling, for dealing
with psychical problems. He has yet to give us his " Blithedale Romance," or,
better still, his " Transformation " —his ''Marble Fawn." With his true sense of
the pathetic value of landscape, Mr. Vedder would render such a subject no less
beautiful than interesting. A series of "Notes from 'Transformation," as free
and individual as these from Omar, would have — to us at least — a far greater value
than the Oriental volume.

FAVOURITES OF THE EMI'EKOK HONOUIUS.

J. W. WATERHOUSE, A.RA.

[HE honours of Associateship in the Royal Academy have not often fallen
to men so early in life as to the painter of " St. Eulalia." With the
exception perhaps of Mr. Gregory, he was at his election the youngest
of the A.R.A.'s, and his promotion is the more notable because his
work lias ever been distinguished by qualities that appeal more to painters
than to popular tastes. His pictures, which are comparatively few, have
been exhibited in unbroken sequence at Burlington House since 1874, when the
artist first solicited public notice. Something like a dozen works form the solid
justification of the Academy's choice, and these almost wholly represent the art-
work of as many years. These facts must be ever present to any one who
would rightly estimate the painter's individuality. Youth is naturally the period
when production is most facile ; then the warm promptings of the creative faculty
are more irresistible than when the cold counsels of experience have disciplined the
aspirations, and the lessons of art and life are in some sort learned. The very
instincts of the young painter impel him at fervid speed on the road to over-pro-
duction, with its perilous results of iterations, mannerisms, and other enslaving
limitations. Thus of an unchastened passion are forged the bonds of servitude, and

ronanceo

it of the lost city that stirred his
„! that bound the land of his adoption to
is for him what she has been to so many artists
d probably speak lightly of these boyish reminiscenc!
ations of spiritual impulse but as accidents ; we,
in investing them with a deeper significance, and in vie\
jie shaping divinity, not the mere triiles of which the

Be this as it may, they appear to us more significant till
py showed a fondness for drawing, and like others who distiiij
I not a bright and shining light at school. Cradled into art!
ftainly was not, if the phrase implies that he displayed any precoj
s nourished in a forcing atmosphere of culture. Though he
Jio lisped in numbers, he was not without the example th|

eaving school he worked in the studio of his

'lie: cU'iiu'iit of liis craft. Kvcii (lien, ii

ST. EULALIA.

(From the Painting by If. J. WaUrhovx, AJt.A.)

fa of Mr. Gregory, he was at his v,-
u.A.'s, and his promotion is the more i
rer hcen distinguished by qualities that appei
popular tastes. His pictures, which are compa
3d in unbroken sequence at Burlington House sine
'solicited public notice. Something like a dozen work
of the Academy's choice, and these almost wholly r«
as many years. These facts must be ever present tt
/rightly estimate the painter's individuality. Youth is natui
'production is most facile; then the warm promptings of the
lore irresistible than when the cold counsels of experience have
\tions, and the lessons of art and life are in some sort learm
'•s of the young painter impel him at fervid speed on the roai
•'ith its perilous results of iterations, mannerisms, and
Vlis of an unchastened passion are forged the

J. }\'. WATFAIIIOUSE, A.R.A. 83

a mannered artificiality replaces stj'le. This much may be urged, apart from the
exuberance of precocity which is one of the rarest privileges of genius. The re-
ticence of Mr. Waterliouse's work, with its measured and deliberate outcome and
progress, is doubtless partly due to early education, though to a greater extent it
proceeds from a certain scrupulous conscientiousness, and conservatism of reverence,
that are innate. These moral qualities are precisely those above all others that are
the natural allies of the capacity for taking pains, the method of conception that
involves a long process of preoccupation, the mental habits that delay execution
until the whole process of conception is thoroughly exhausted. One thing which
intimately concerns Mr. Waterhouse's work is very clear: works of art thus conceived
cannot be produced with rapidity. To this mental habit of brooding introspection
is due the comparative paucity of Mr. Waterhouse's works, with much that is fresh
and virile and original in treatment.

John William Waterhouse was born at Rome in 1810. Five years later he
first saw England, but ever afterwards he took the warmest interest in Home and
her history. The French occupation and the career of Garibaldi were, of course,
the vaguest of memories ; yet it is interesting to note, as anticipating the special
direction of his subsequent studies, that when at school in Yorkshire he delighted
in reading of ancient Home and her heroic ages. As a boy he was wont to ex-
press to his schoolfellows the most perfect confidence in the Roman soldiers, and
was sure that they were equal to thrashing any fabulous number of moderns. Nor
was this feeling limited to the ordinary hero-worship of boys. At eight years of age
he acquired, through a friend of his mother, a veritable relic of Pompeii, a fragment
of plastered wall, which the young archaeologist treasured with unspeakable satis-
faction. It was a precious link between the present and the Italy of his dreams.
WThen subsequently, in 1877, his imagination was kindled by reading in the ruined
streets of Pompeii the melodranraticTromanec of its~u4ast days," he could not but think
of the small fragment of the lost city that stirred his boyish enthusiasm. Here was
the chain completed that bound the land of his adoption to that of his birth, and
henceforth Italy was for him what she has been to so many artists and poets. The
artist himself would probably speak lightly of these boyish reminiscences, regarding
them not as indications of spiritual impulse but as accidents ; we, however, are
probably justified in investing them with a deeper significance, and in viewing them
as evidence of the shaping divinity, not the mere trifles of which the round of
life is made up. Be this as it may, they appear to us more significant thnn the
fact that the boy showed a fondness for drawing, and like others who distinguish
themselves, was not a bright and shining light at school. Cradled into art i Mr.
Waterhouse certainly was not, if the phrase implies that he displayed any precocious
aptitude, or was nourished in a forcing atmosphere of culture. Though he was un-
like the poet who lisped in numbers, lie was not without the example that incites
imitation, for on leaving school he worked in the studio of his father, where he
mastered somewhat of the element of his craft. Even then, in the routine of studio

84 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

work, assisting his father by painting in the backgrounds of portraits, he was not
conscious of an all-compelling call to become a painter. He entered the Academy
schools, but attended only the evening classes; and it was not till his twentieth
year that he first felt moved to make art the serious study of his life. Previous
to this he was not averse from professions little sympathetic with art, and towards
engineering in particular was favourably inclined. Once formed, the resolution was
adhered to with characteristic tenacity, and the painter pursued his studies with
equal energy and conviction, till in due time the period of tutelage was passed, and
he was emboldened to hazard the attempt of a first picture destined for the
Academy.

It is tolerably clear that beyond a boyish taste for drawing, the early j^ears of
Mr. Waterhouse do not effectively illustrate the adage of Wordsworth. That he
made no haste to reveal himself may be fairly assumed, for it was not till 1874
that he took part in the annual show at the Academy, when his picture, " Sleep and
his Brother Death," was exhibited. The two figures recline side by side on a low
couch, beyond which are the pillars of a colonnade open to the night and touched
with moonlight. The interior is lit by a lamp, whose light streams on the foremost
figure, Sleep, whose head hangs in heavy stupor on his breast, and his right hand
grasps some poppies. By his side lies Death in dusky shadow, with head thrown back,
and the lines of the figure expressive of easeful lassitude. At his feet is an antique
lyre, while immediately in the foreground is a low round table. The imaginative
quality of this impressive picture lies in the poetical conception of the artist, in
the subservience of the allegory, the unobtrusiveness of the symbolism. Of Death,
the gloomy presence, and Sleep, the rosy infant, more than enough has been set
forth in grotesque and allegory to deprive the old poetic idea of all its piquancy.
To obtain great results from least suggestions, to re-inspire the outworn properties
of ancient symbolism, to vivify with fresh and sufficing significance a trite and dis-
carded theme, must be accounted among the high offices of the imagination. They,
at least, animated the aims of Mr. Waterhouse in this striking presentment of Sleep
and Death. The two figures are both young, and the beauty of youth belongs to
one as much as to the other, even as death has its own beauty of blank and
dreamless repose. The cunning simulation of death by sleep, the intimate corre-
lation of the two so quaintly expressed in Sir Thomas Browne's assertion that he
died daily, are emphasised by the strange likeness and unlikeness of the recumbent
figures. They might almost be two friends who have banqueted with Lucullus,
from one of whom the spirit has passed in the night, while life in the other is ex-
pressed only by the less easeful poise of the head, drowsed as though by some
opiate. It was but natural that a picture so suggestive and thoughtful, so serious
in aim, and so charged with emotional power, should attract considerable attention.

After this first success, Mr. Waterhouse exhibited at the Academy in the follow-
ing year a picture entirely removed in subject and treatment from his first work.
The "Miranda" was in no sense a dramatic illustration of Shakespeare, but was

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

rather, for all its pictorial effect, a purely academic study of the figure, set forth

in a spacious aerial medium
of broad, soft evening light
suffusing sea and sky. In
a foreground of sea - shore
Miranda, lightly draped, is
seated on a rock, watching
with clasped hands and partly
averted face the hrave ship
tossing in the offing ; the
blue sea breaks unheeded on
the sand, her eyes being
wholly absorbed by the
vessel, which is yet to suffer
through the magic of Pros-
pero. There is no sugges-
tion of the imaginative in-
sight and exhaustive ideal-
isation that are notable of
the vision of Sleep and
Death, though a satisfying
potency of coloiir and a
finely graduated brilliance
of illumination give admir-
able force and relief to the
figure. In 1876 the artist
achieved the distinction of
a place on the line with a
picture entitled " After the
Dance." The exhibition also
included Mr. Tadema's well-
known picture of the same
title, a coincidence that
much exercised the simple-
minded. The picture shows
a Eoman interior, with a
portion of the atrium and a
peep into the court beyond.
Two figures, a boy and a
girl, recline on cushions, one

sitting and the other languidly stretched on the tesselated pavement with a tam-
bourine alongside. In the distance a group of minstrels on the extreme left corn-

A BY-WAY IN OLD ROME.

J. W. WATERHOU8E, A.R.A. 87

plete the composition. The chief points of the picture are its simplicity of scheme,
its dexterous lighting, the harmonious colour, and the graceful abandon of the two
dancers. There is no pretence of archaeological display, nor any highly-wrought
detail, or accessories introduced for the mere mastery of textures, that might disturb
the impression of luxurious repose.

Between 1870 and 1883, in which year the artist was married, Mr. Waterhouse
exhibited at least one picture annually at the Academy, and gratified the desires
of his youth by re-visiting Italy. This visit established him in his old faith, and
directed his studies in Koman historical subjects. In 1883 he produced a work
which obtained more notice and criticism than anything he had yet exhibited. The
subject of the Emperor Honorius feeding his pet poultry was, however, not sug-
gested by Gibbon or the historians, but by a passage in Mr. Wilkie Collins's
" Antonina." This picture, which we are so lucky to reproduce, was the most
ambitious in scope of all the artist's works until the painting of the " Mariamne."
For so many years had historical genre been in a sad way in this country, that
the field was well opened to an artist ready with a boldly conceived and serious
example. Pure historical art being but a dead tradition, or in British art, at least,
somewhat impotent and unthriving, the best substitute, perhaps, lies in honest treat-
ment of such incidents as this of Mr. Waterhouse's choice. The subject was
eminently adapted to stimulate the pictorial invention of the artist and exercise his
equipment in the resources of the picturesque. He has certainly succeeded in
telling the story with refreshing simplicity and directness, and that, too, with as
strong an enforcement of its significance as was compatible with the limitations he
has himself set.

In dealing with the superb cynicism of Nero fiddling while Rome burned, some
pictorial suggestion of disaster might reasonably enter into the painter's scheme.
The indifference of the Emperor Honorius is but a repetition of that grim theme
in a minor key, less portentous in effect, less acutely tragic. Thus in Mr.
Waterhouse's picture we have none of the evidences of disaster, no furious irruption
of barbarians or panic-stricken citizens ; only the blind infatuation of the Emperor
who caresses and feeds the feathered bipeds of his little empire, heedless of the
obsequious messengers and the destinies of Home. A variant of this picture, which
remains unfinished, differs in some essential matters from the exhibited work. The
pose of Honorius suggests a peculiar insolence, an assumption of exasperating calm
that is less forcible in the finished picture ; the messengers of ill stand close about
him, with only a brief space between them and the Emperor, occupied by the
pigeons, guinea-fowls, -and other objects of the imperial pleasure. The scheme of
colour is warmer, more sumptuous, and in a livelier key, though the composition of
the finished work is far more studied and pleasing.

Our next example of Mr. Waterhouse's work is " The Oracle," one of those
pictures sure of popularity, though entirely free from the sensationalism that is the
common bid for popular applause. The semicircle of eager women, some pale,

88 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

others flushed, all agitated, and the pale priestess with her ear to the mouth of
the oracle ahout to deliver some mystery, are so potent with character, so sincerely
human, so admirable for the varied expression of passion, that the popularity of the
picture offers no enigma as popularity sometimes does. In the following year the
artist was represented by the " St. Eulalia,'^ a_jpicture of perfectly masterly technique.
The body of the young Eoman martyr is seen lying in the Forum, surrounded by the
fall of summer snow which, according to the tradition, veiled it from rude eyes.
Mr. Waterhouse has curiously enough made the snow fall everywhere except upon
her form. In the same season he had a single water-colour at the Institute, " A
By-Way in Old Rome," which we reproduce. This charming example of vivacious
piquant colour and pure limpid tone appeared uutitled in the catalogue, but the
figures in the drawing, with the details of their environment, are self-explanatory.
For slight motives of this kind Mr. Waterhouse keeps his more brilliant, interesting,
and impressiouary manner. It is in grave subjects that he paints with more ouiet-
ness and completeness. And foremost amongst these is the " Mariamne," the noble
composition of the wife of Herod the Great walking down the steps to her death,
while her false acciisers whisper into her _Jiusband's ear. The technique — illumina-
tion and execution — of this work is absolutely perfect. Part of the next summer
was spent by Mr. Waterhouse in Venice, of whose architectural glories and silent
water-ways he has recorded his impressions in not a few brilliant studies. Whether
he intends to enlist himself in the band of our modern Venetians there is no tellin".
It may be safely assumed of so conscientious and thorough an artist that if Venice
has any share in his next work it will be essential to his design, not the picturesque
adjunct to a study ; Venetian, that work will express something of the human
interest, the immemorial attributes of the city of painters, not the superficial
phases of life that enamour the tourist.

cheated right and

. his lauds ; lie even contemplated emigr

.-, to be a sculptor. Disregarding the outcry

and, armed with a letter from the village priest, so

-master of its technical school. The professor received

, after he had studied under him a few months, that hi

?d for painting than sculpture. He therefore proposed tin

inpany him to Munich, where he would introduce him to Pi

rhis was iu 1800. Piloty was just painting his famous '

that shows the tyrant, crowned with full-blown roses, lur

"•ait of evil triumph, through the ruins of burnt Home/

n his path. T

FRANZ D E F R E 0 G E R.

|N the fair lands that cluster round the water-shed of the Adriatic, in the
home of the Minnesinger Walter von der Vogelweide, within easy reach
of Titian's country, under the shadow of giant dolomites, lies many a
sunny green alp, stands many a lonely farmstead. In one of these was
horn to the peasant proprietor, in the April of 1835, an only son, baptised as
Franz Defregger. The little one's childhood was passed amid these idyllic
surroundings, and resembled for all the world that of a Theocritan shepherd. He
knew neither sorrow nor care as he spent the days tending his father's goats, imbib-
ing the while a love for his native land, and modelling his flocks and friends in
dough or clay, or carving them out of potatoes and carrots. The gift of a pan: of
scissors led him to cut landscapes out of paper ; the return of his father with the
fairing of a pencil marked an era in his career. For miles around no wall or door
was safe from the young artist ; he even imitated a bank-note so skilfully that he
99

seen lying in tn

filing to the tradition, veiled it iron
'enough made the snow fall everywhere excepl
fsou he had a single water-colour at the Institute;

eh we reproduce. This charming example of vivacJ
limpid tone appeared untitled in the catalogue, hut 1
with the details of their environment, are self-explanato
fthis kind Mr. Waterhouse keeps his more brilliant, iuterestr,
fanner. It is in grave subjects that he paints with moro oof

i -t pi I '/'

bss. And foremost amongst these is the " Mariamne," thejjl

' jUraiuMH

^vife of Herod the Great walking down the steps to h
eers whisper into her husbandjj car.

H
t»

o
Q

FRANZ DEFIIEGGER. 91

came near to being accused of forgery. Tall and robust at fifteen, he was employed
by his father as his labourer, and after that age Franz was too weary when the
day's work was done to give time to drawing. When he was twenty-two the elder
Defregger died suddenly, and Franz found himself the owner of the stately home-
stead. He soon proved himself incapable of managing it, selling cattle and goods
at a loss, and being cheated right and left. He cast about how he could rid
himself of his lands ; he even contemplated emigration to America. He resolved,
however, to be a sculptor. Disregarding the outcry of his relatives, he sold his
farm, and, armed with a letter from the village priest, sought Innsbruck and the
head-master of its technical school. The professor received him kindly, but told
him, after he had studied under him a few months, that his talents were better
suited for painting than sculpture. He therefore proposed that Defregger should
accompany him to Munich, where he would introduce him to Piloty.

This was in 1800. Piloty was just painting his famous " Nero," the great
picture that shows the tyrant, crowned with full-blown roses, lurching, with a kind
of rolling gait of evil triumph, through the ruins of burnt Home, while the falsely-
accused Christians lie slain hither and thither on his path. The picture made as
deep an impression upon the raw Tyrolese as the appearance of a stalwart yokel,
clad in his native leathern knee-hose and embroidered jacket, demanding to become
a pupil, made on the Munich artist. Piloty could not receive him, for his la.ck
of elementary knowledge, but he indicated the course that should be followed, and
for some time Defregger worked industriously at Munich. Its capricious climate,
however, told on his health, and, seeing after a while that his art also made no
progress, he listened to a friend, and went to study in Paris. Ignorant of the
language, he profited little by the instruction given, but he saw much that culti-
vated his eye. After a year, his health restored, he spent a summer in his native
village. Here he painted portraits of all his friends and relatives, made studies
after Nature, and began his first picture — that of a poacher who staggers into his
cottage severely wounded, just as his wife is bathing their little one. He took it
to Munich in 1864, and, after seeing it, Piloty admitted him into his studio.

" Speckbacher and his Son Anderl," the picture that created a certain furore
in 1868 and laid the foundations of Defregger's .fame, was the first he began in
Piloty's studio. The scene is laid in the village tavern, the head-quarters of the
insurgents, a party of whom have just returned from the fray. Among them is the
ten-year-old son of the gallant innkeeper and ally of Hofer, Joseph Speckbacher, who,
in defiance of his father's interdict, went forth to battle with the oppressors of the
fatherland. The characterisation of each face is excellent ; . the whole leaves a
powerful impression on the mind. It is this alternation between pure-minded senti-
ment, pathos, ingenuous humour, and the heroic, that is the strength of Defregger,
as it is also the characteristic of his countrymen, of whom he is an absolutely typical
representative. His art is free from all trickiness, all seeking after meretricious effect.
He strives but to be true, to tell his story with concrete simplicity. There are better

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

colourists and surer draughtsmen, but few artists surpass him in that easy natural
idealism of temperament which shows us the man through his art.

His next picture, " The Wrestlers," was followed by " The Brothers," another

SISTElt AND BROTHERS.

of his world-wide successes. This takes us into a well-to-do Tyrolese peasant par-
lour, where we see a fresh rosy lad of some fourteen summers, just returned for the
holidays, greeting the little brother who has appeared in the paternal home during
his absence. There is something gently ironical in the mode in which each, the
unconscious babe and the half-conscious boy, sums up the other. His next effort
was a departure from genre — an altar-piece dedicated to the church of his native

IN THE TYHOLKSK HIGHLANDS.

94 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

Dolsach, a Madonna enthroned, with St. Joseph reading at her feet. There are a
purity and an innocent archaism about the work that recall the Bellini school ; and
there is, besides, so much of true religious feeling that many have deplored that
Defregger has not farther pursued this department of art. It would seem that he
has not himself abandoned the idea, and that the painting of religions pictures is
what would above all crown his ambition.

Meantime Defregger had left Piloty's studio, and, seeing that painting brought
him not only fame but means, he married and bought himself a house in the
neighbourhood of Munich. It was not long after that a misfortune befell him, which
threatened permanently to check his activity, and keep him a prisoner on the sofa
for two years. It was an attack of rheumatic fever, which at last vanished in eight
days under the treatment of a peasant at Botzen. Grateful for this cure, delighted
with the climate and aspect of the sunburnt half-Italian town that is nestled away
under the dolomite peaks of the Jassathal, Defregger here bought himself a villa,
where year by year he goes to spend the summer holidays, and where at that time
he stayed for two years, painting in the happiness of his new-found health. Here,
among other works, he produced his famous "Ball on the Alp," his " Last Muster,"
and his "Italian Beggar Musicians." This last is especially attractive for the
delicate variety of types and of expressions introduced ; it is also a graphic repre-
sentation of the inherent differences 'twixt the downright simple Tyrolese and the
arch, innately-refined Italians, who, even as beggars in filthy rags, bear about them
that indefinable air which is given to them by the centuries of civilisation they
have had in advance of their rude northern neighbours. " The Ball on the Alp "
is pure Tyrol. The moment chosen is doubtless the end of the summer, when the
flocks are led down again to the valley and the huts are shut up for the winter.
Then shepherds and shepherdesses, their produce garnered, their herds successfully
reared, meet to celebrate their return to the haunts of men and the relative civili-
sation of village life. The picture breathes a robust gaiety. But " The Last
Muster" is the best, artistically, of all — is in some respects the painter's masterpiece.
It represents a scene in the wars of the Tyrolese liberation when it was found
needful to call out to active service even the veterans who can only be summoned
to arms on an emergency of life and death. The scene is a village street, through
which these patriarchs are defiling, armed with reaping-hooks, scythes beaten straight,
ploughshares, and pitchforks. The women and children of the hamlet watch them
eagerly and anxiously. There are no men left but a cripple and one desperately
wounded. It is a moving work, but it is entirely free from any attempt at depict-
ing pathos, that sentiment to which the peasant is a stranger. It is a sort of
folk-painting, as certain heroic ballads are folk-songs.

Defregger returned to Munich, where he bought for himself a house and large
garden in the palatial Konigstrasse. In this garden he built a studio, and here he
painted fast and well. With a number of genre scenes of life in the Tyrolese Alps,
he produced the "Visit," which found such favour in the Paris Exhibition of 1878:

FRANZ DEFREGGER. 95

two women who come to call on their friend's first haby ; a conventional theme
saved from insipidity by the artist's naivete. Far more worthy and important is
" The Keturn of the Victors," a sort of pendant to " The Last Muster," by which
Defregger is represented in the Berlin National Gallery. Here again the heroic
character of the Tyrolese is depicted with masterly knowledge ; their deep serious-
ness, their unselfish devotion. The street through which they pass is much like
that of "The Last Muster "-—long and narrow, bordered by the half-stone, half-
wooden houses of the Alps, with a luscious peep of green fir-woods and glistening
glaciers beyond.

The success of tins picture, completed in 187(3, enabled Defregger to gratify a
long-cherished desire, and paint the last moments of his hero, Andreas Hofer. To
this end he produced a series of studies which are among his most powerful attempts.
In the picture itself all his love for simple heroism, for ideal moments, found full
scope. It has been said of him with great truth that he is the optimist among
painters ; he never limns vice or vulgarity ; he knows how to extract from the lowest
village scene its higher essence. In its details the work is perhaps not so wholly
successful as its predecessors ; but the principal figure, of the hero marching to his
death, is one that graves itself indelibly into the memory. It is significant that
the picture was bought neither in Austria nor in the Tyrol, but wandered into
the Konigsberg Museum. The second Hofer picture was, however, painted by order
of the Emperor of Austria on the occasion of his silver wedding. It represents
Hofer in the Castle of Innsbruck, receiving a general's commission from the Emperor.
Although excellently carried out, the whole impression is neither as harmonious nor
as elevating as that of the first work.

That an artist inspired so successfully by religion and patriotism should still
recur to the most trivial of domestic incidents for his subjects is a fact very charac-
teristic of a native of those much-beloved highlands of the Austrian borderland. In
those Tyrolese hills domestic life is dear to the farmer ; the home is realised as the
very heart of the State — the sanctuary to guard which the political system and the
ramparts of the mountains are instituted and kept standing by heaven and the law.
To mountaineers all the incidents of cottage life are precious ; the painter of such is
as much inspired by patriotism as is the painter of the strenuous and intense Tyrolese
public history. Add to this the truth that outside the artist's country the world of
Europe is always amiably interested in the children and the daily labours of the
peasant, and that the buyer is included in that world of mild connaissetirs, and it
is not difficult to understand why Franz Defregger has chosen to be very widely
known by " A Domestic Catastrophe," " Sisters and Brothers," and " In the Tyrplese
Highlands." The first is a slightly humorous rendering of an incident that calls
forth emotions in man, woman, child, and dog — in all, indeed, except the old man
and the infant, who keep aloof in their own quiet way from the tragedies and
comedies of the household. In "Sister and Brothers'" Defregger gives a group in
the repose of childish occupations. And in the scene in the wayside inn parlour we

-
~

a
-

FRANZ DEFREGGER. 97

have a hackneyed motive enough — passages of raillery touched with flirtation between
tourists and the solid-cheeked inn-maiden. The Tyrol is over-run, or rather over-
walked, hy tourists of all the travelling nations, and in every inn there are rosy
Hebes. In this instance it is the Hebe who is accepting a little cup of nectar from
the traveller's flask. Her admirer in the background has doubts as to the propriety
of the joke, and is hesitating whether he shall openly resent the too free manners of
the laughing guests.

The execution of Defregger's pictures, is at times a little careless, notwith-
standing his great technical skill. His colour is that of the Munich school, rather
pronounced and a trifle hard. His greatest gift, after his good heart, is his power
of dramatic representation. Another of his qualities is that he has not only humour
but a genuine spirit of fun. He is not less attractive in his smaller works than in
his more ambitious. A deep feeling for and sympathetic insight into the poetry
of family life distinguish him. As for his insight into the character of animals,
especially of dogs and horses, whether he will yet carry oiit his desire to turn
from all these themes and become a purely religious painter remains to be seen.
It seems to us doubtful. The world does not make it easy for a successful man to
change his course, to take up a new line of activity; it demands from a finished
master that which it knows and is assured will prove excellent.

We have said that it is in the Konigstrasse of Munich that Defregger has
made his home. This street lies near the pretty part of the town known as the
English Garden, and consists of a single row of detached villas, each of which the
owner has built according to his idiosyncrasy. Defregger's is in the style, half
Italian Renaissance and half Tyrolese homestead, that distinguishes the houses
around the Adige valley. The interior is decorated with early German furniture,
such as the Tyrol shows to this day : old carved cupboards, majolica vases, painted
earthenware stoves, brass and pewter pots, and what not besides. One of his rooms
is an actual fac-simile of a Tyrolese peasant parlour.

100

NO UNWELCOME GUEST.

FRANCIS D. MILLET.

JHE American school has few more cosmopolitan members than Mr. F.
D. Millet, who has studied in their own cities the masters of Italy, the
Netherlands, France, and England, and has enjoyed interchange with
contemporary painters and students in Vienna, New York, Paris, Eome,
and London, keeping everywhere his thoughts as observant as his eyes. Born
at Mattapoisett, Massachusetts — and therefore in the most honourable sense
of the word a Yankee — about the middle of the century, Mr. Millet went for his
art training to the Royal Academy of Arts at Antwerp, where he studied under
Van Lerius and de Keyser, gaining the silver and gold medals of honour respec-
tively in 1872 and 1873. His choice has been divided between genre and portraits,
and some of the foremost of his countrymen have been his sitters. At the National
Academy at New York he exhibited in 1877, for instance, two portraits of which
Mr. Bayard Taylor wrote as follows :

"In the North Koom we first encounter Mr. Millet's portrait of Charles Francis
Adams, Junior. This and the portrait of Mark Twain (Mr. Samuel L. Clemens) at

FRANCIS D. MILLET. 99

the other end of the room, are his only contributions. The latter, owing to its
subject, is the more characteristic. Both portraits are excellent, yet with higher
flesh-tints than the originals; the figures are solid, detach themselves immediately
from the background, and are a refreshing contrast to the dim vapoury forms which
some portrait-painters give us."

There is a certain elementariness in the writer's appreciation of figures that "detach
themselves immediately from the background ; " but the opinion, whatever it may be
worth in itself, may be taken as a sign of the artist's standing among his country-
men. And a more striking sign is that he was selected as the American Art Juror
at the International Exhibition at Paris in 1878. His picture of the Bay of
Naples was at the Brussels Salon in 1875, and represented the artist at the Cen-
tennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in the following year. Our illustrations are from
two genre pictures in which are apparent, even in the black-and-white reproductions,
some specially pleasant qualities — among them an uncommon grace in the drawing
of the figures, and a sense of the charm of space and of sparing but well-put-in
detail. Both interiors are in themselves interesting. And the figure of the "guest"
himself in the first illustration is singularly easy and elegant in conception and
drawing. Mr. Millet shows also his ability in illumination. The motives are of
the best kind of narrative subjects ; that is, they tell a story without being the
illustration of a story ; they need no explanation, and the little incidents repre-
sented belong to every time. Thus, without being mere " arrangements " of this
or that colour or light-effect, they are strictly pictorial and not literary in con-
ception.

And Mr. Millet is doubtless all the more strict in keeping his pictures within
pictorial limitations, as he has an exceptional command of literary as well as of
artistic form. He has done good work in journalism, and in some of his magazine
papers there is a note of experience combined with a moderation of expression which
make literary strength. "Fugitive" writers, as well as those who work for lasting
interests, may be broadly divided into the class which writes without the mental
experience and, in amends for that, makes as much effect as possible with words ;
and the class which puts its mental experience into a quiet vocabulary. The former
takes its matter ready made. The latter has lived, whether actually or in vital
processes of individual imagination, through all that it presents. Mr. F. D. Millet
belongs to the latter class, and this quality of truth is evident in all the journalism
and other literary sketching which seems slight to a hasty reader. Besides this
characteristic, his writing shows the habit of intelligent seeing which belongs to the
artist and which is of so much value to the describer and narrator. Mr. Millet
has both eye and thought. In simple but powerful sentences, for instance, he has
sketched a phase of the Eusso-Turkish war — the passage of the Balkans — and after
making his reader feel for one moment something of the realities of war (for such
realisations come only by moments) he adds: "Unfortunately for her, Turkey has
no literature to chronicle, no art to perpetuate, the heroism of her defenders." Ho

FRANCIS D. MILLET. 101

has made his reader feel, aiid now he makes him think. The inimitable touch of
experience comes in where the writer tells us how he marched in the cold and in
garments soaked with rain and flood, holding his arms away from his sides to pre-
vent the increased sense of wet contact. Much of the same kind is to be found
in the curious little story of " Yatil " which Mr. Millet published in the Century
Magazine ; and there too are to be discovered slight passages of humour, not insisted
upon, let go almost as soon as caught, and all the more enjoyable for that slight-
ness. In fact he writes so well, and with so much evident benefit from his studies
and practice as a painter, that as in reading of Mr. Boughtou's rambles with his
dog in English fields, we have wished that painters and terriers would oftener give
us their impressions in the place of those of mere writers, so we have also desired
to have more American ^/ewe-painters and portrait-painters doing special correspond-
entship in Eastern Europe.

Mr. Millet's work in his own particular and chosen art is to be seen in the
principal international gatherings of pictures in the several centres of the Continent.
Munich, as well as Antwerp and Paris, has his canvases in its collections.

A QUESTION OF KENT.

YEEND KING.

MONG the young painters who have inherited nothing of the insular
and arriere art of the last generation, but have heen educated from
the first in better conditions, Mr. Yecnd King has won a place of his
own. Born in 1855, he certainly made his debut in the world when
English painting was in a condition dowdy and dull beyond description ;
when there was practically no interchange of feeling and teaching between
England and France ; when our self-satisfied island had no wish to be " in
touch" with international movements; and when all the real life which our art
possessed was due to the rather grotesque " pre-Raphaelites," who were in touch
with nothing more living than the work of the fifteenth century. But to be
born in the ebb of 1855 means to come of age in the full flood of 1876; and
1876 was, as nearly as possible, the time when the last silly and disastrous
traditions of protection in art ideas and of restrictions in educational interchange
had passed away. By that time a very large proportion of our young painters
were training in French studios and among companions of all nationalities in the
French fields. And of those who remained in England it may be said that inter-
national ideas were so much "in the air" that their influences were felt even in
the lecture-room of the Academy and even in the Life at South Kensington.

YEEND KING. 103

Mr. Yeend King went to Paris and entered " L'Atelier Bonnat," where, under
the "patron" of the place, the painter of the "Joh," "St. Vincent de Paul," the
" Christ," the " Victor Hugo," so much of the young talent of the world has been
fostered, directed, and stimulated. M. Bonnat's personality is a stimulating one,
and has its effect as well as his admirable method. Modesty, energy, and straight-
forward frankness, are the " patron's " chief characteristics. In person he is not
tall, but well-built and muscular, with a firm step, clear, earnest eyes, and features
rather of the Spanish than the French type. His method of teaching is as simple
and decided as his appearance. The students are left entirely to their own devices
during the first day of the week; on the second the "patron" comes round to
see how they have blocked-in their studies, and again on the last to see what they
have made of them. His plan is to leave each pupil absolutely free to follow his
own inclinations in all matters pertaining to choice of subject, method of work,
and materials ; and whether they do a study of a head, a half-length, or an entire
figure, whether they work in charcoal, in red or black chalk, or in colour, is all
the same to him, so long as he thinks they are doing their best. His attention
is always directed to the study as a whole, and he is a cheery and encouraging
critic — always praising when he conscientiously can, but always telling the students
very decidedly what is bad in their work. So unostentatiously does he enter, that
often only those near the door, who see him come in, know he is in the studio,
unless they guess it from the sudden subsidence of the usual hubbub, or hear the
whisper passed round, " Le patron y est ! " Once in, he goes straight at his work
of criticism and correction, of which each pupil gets on an average four or five
minutes at each visit. He whose turn has come suddenly hears over his shoulder,
in rapid and rather staccato utterance, some such phrase as this : " That's not bad ;
but . . . you must look at the figure more as a whole;" and then lie points
out the faults of proportion which prevent the ensemble, the " swabble," from being
good. He is very particular that the gesture of the figure should be true, and
that the type and character of face and form should be emphasised, even if ugly
in Nature. He always seems in earnest in what he says ; and so it may be imagined
how glad the pupil is to hear him say, as if he meant it, " The figure, as a whole,
is very good ; " or, " The likeness is capital ; " or, " The action of the figure is
very well rendered ; " or even now and then, " That's a good study." If ever he
does give thus much praise he seems never to forget it, and is sure, weeks after-
wards, if that particular student's work falls off in essentials, to bring it up in
judgment against him, saying, " You can do better than that."

Mr. Yeend King worked also in the studio of M. Fernand Cormon, the medal-
list and Salon prize-winner.

The young artist's distinction of style and truth of observation quickly gained
recognition. In 1879 he was elected a member of the Society of British Artists,
and in the same year he had at the Eoyal Academy a poetic picture, " Up Hill
and Down Dale," followed next season by " Birds of a Feather," and in 1880 by

104 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

" Alone " and " Saints and Sinners." The latter is a bright English landscape,
with two last-century ladies making their way, conscious of virtue, to the Sunday
service ; the " sinners " are the idle fishermen who lean over the village bridge,
and the tramps who sit, hopelessly and resignedly " out of it," by the road-side.
Both pictures — in common, indeed, with all Mr. Yeend King's work — have that
pleasantness of execution and charm of touch which we must as a nation confess
that we owe to foreign example. "Too Late," in 1881, was followed by "Con
Amore," "A Thames Backwater," "One Silver Summer's Morning," "Three Score
and Ten," " A Merry Heart Lightens Labour," " Streatley," " On the Medway,"
and " Memories."

To the Suffolk Street galleries Mr. Yeend King contributed " Le Quillier " and
" Freshwater Sailors," the charming subject of one of our illustrations ; and to the
Grosvenor Gallery, in 1887, "The Poet and the Peasant." "A Question of Eent "
is, as usual with this painter, a delicate and true landscape, with figures having a
character and an expression — figures which are subordinate in scale only, and by
no means in the power with which they are drawn and the cleverness in arrange-
ment with which they are put in.

To some cha/ming work in black-and-white, done among the village streets
and orchards of Brittany, Mr. Yeend King has added a few notes on an artist's
"Bound in France." After a protest against the practice of painters who, in
choosing their subjects, seem to be guided by the discovery of " empty tubes and
old paint-rags "-—so resolved are they to paint what has been painted before — he
proceeds :

" To those actuated by the feeling that they wish to find the picturesque for
themselves, and spend a holiday either trainping or cycling, a route into Brittany
nearly following the coast line may be suggested. If the start be from Paris, the
line to Granville might be chosen, and the train abandoned at Flers, for the
purpose of visiting Mortain. The road thence is charming, lined as it is with farm-
houses and cottages, which are beautifully out of repair, and most artistically
neglected. There is nothing at all bold in the landscape, the only inducement which
could possibly take one the same route again being the recollection of the sweet
variety of rustic forms that were passed, and of which no two were alike. At
Mortain itself the character of the country changes very suddenly, the near approach
to the town being marked by a gigantic crag, which seems to have been planted
by the roadside for the express purpose of causing speculation, and making an
advertising agent's mouth water at the splendid opportunity it would afford for his
powers. A steep ascent takes you into the town, and the valley which runs beneath,
with its two picturesque cascades and glimpses of river, is very Welsh in its general
feeling. A very pleasant summer might be spent in this tiny town. The orchards
that line the slope are beautiful in the later year, and must, without doubt, give
some splendid suggestions of subject when in blossom, for the town is always peeping
over, through, or under the boughs, and the silver haze of smoke, changing with

I
a
s

101

10G THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

every effect of sunshine, gives an idea of atmosphere that is most fairylike. Should
Mont Saint-Michel prove too strong an attraction to one who has never been there,
it can be reached by way of Pontorson or Avranches. The country soon becomes
uninteresting after leaving Mortain, and the road running between straight rows of
poplars only gains a kind of savage grandeur between Pontorson and the Mont when
approaching the sea."

Seeing all with the same single eye of the artist, Mr. Yeend King follows the
route by Dol, Diuan, Lamballe, St. Brieux, Quentin, Corky, and so on to Finis-
terre. Of St. Brieux he says :—

" It is, like Eouen, too busy to be worked in with comfort. This is exasperating,
as in one or two of the old streets subjects are to be found that perhaps are not
equalled elsewhere. One sees under an old house a stall (it cannot be called a
shop), open to the street, its pillars and panels most elaborately carved, and dating
from the fifteenth or sixteenth century, its counter bestrewn with brazen pots and
pans, and the smith appearing and disappearing behind them, as the ruddy flame of
his forge leaps and dies again."

It is, perhaps, not altogether needless to add that not all the charming nature
and life, sun and haze, of Brittany will confer on him who goes there for subjects
the sincerity of the eyes and the sensitiveness of the hand which can make good
pictures out of them. As with other things, a painter will bring away from Brittany
chiefly what he takes to it.

u Photograph l*y Messrs. Kcyrcttt and Zambra.)

JAMES SANT, R.A.

|0 record the names alone of the distinguished people who sit to a portrait-
painter of Mr. Sant's popularity and experience would fill columns.
Beyond, therefore, referring as chronologically as may he to a few of
the most noteworthy of his sitters, no attempt will he made in this
outline of his career to give a complete account or list of his works.

James Sant, created "Principal Painter in Ordinary to the Queen" in
1871, first saw the light at Croydon, in Surrey, on April 23rd, 1820, and within such
a span of years it would have heen hardly possihle, perhaps, for any artist in the
pursuit of his profession to have come into contact with a greater number of dis-
tinguished men, and noble and beautiful women, or to have been more completely
absorbed, as it were, by that circle of society into which his vocation led him.

By the time he was eight years of age the instinct which stirs a youngster
to demonstrate, automatically though it may be, the propensities which are in

108 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

him, began to assert itself, and tlie first evidence of the artist appeared in the
following fashion : — It seems there was extant in the family a sketch in pencil by
Edwin Landseer, made at Duppas Hill, Croydou, of young Sant's paternal grand-
father, an old gentleman of eighty, mounted on a certain wonderful cob. The child
became fascinated to a remarkable degree by this drawing, and after the manner of
his genus in such cases was for ever making rude attempts to copy it. He never
grew tired of the amusement— it was his love, his delight ; and by degrees, after
dozens of attempts, he produced a really admirable copy.

" This was my first love in art," says Mr. Sant, " and I really think I imbibed
my first taste for it from this fact." The power which he thus discovered he possessed
of reproducing the likeness of a person of whom, doubtless, he was very fond, and
with whose personal appearance and characteristics his observant boyish eyes were
thoroughly familiar, was sufficient to lend additional zest to the pursuit, and may
have started that inclination towards portraiture which has resulted in the achieve-
ment by the painter of his present position. However this may be, the incident is
surely an interesting and appropriate one for the outset of a portrait-painter's life, and
as Landseer's original sketch has been perpetuated by the burin of Charles Turner,
A.E.A., an eminent engraver of those days, it is natural to suppose that it possesses
a significance in the Sant family beyond its mere artistic merits. The natural bent
towards art displayed by the painter in his early days was first fostered and culti-
vated by that eminent patriarch of the English school of painting, John Varley,
whilst later on another renowned master, Sir A. Callcott, B.A., carried forward by
his refined instruction the good work begun by Varley. Thus prepared, young
Sant became a student at the Royal Academy, and during the course of the four
years in which he worked at the schools in Trafalgar Square laid the foundation
for that success which has been so marked a feature in the history of modern
portraiture.

When he was fairly launched on his career, his marriage, in 1851, with the
daughter of the late Dr. E. M. W. Thomson, Staff-Surgeon, Calcutta, must have had
no small influence in confirming the bent of his mind, and in keeping up the tone of
elegant refinement in which it was moulded by Nature. All who have the privilege
of the lady's acquaintance will be fully convinced of this.

Very rarely is it that a young artist starts with the idea of becoming a por-
trait-painter only. He generally drifts into it by reason of some early success in
making a likeness, and eventually, by the mere force of circumstances, abandons him-
self all but entirely to this lucrative branch of art. Such has been the case conspic-
uously with our present subject, who, years ago, found himself obliged to yield to
the force of fashionable favour which pressed in upon him from all sides, allowing
him by degrees less and less opportunity for exercising his ability as a painter of
subject pictures. One can hardly fail to regret this to some extent when one recalls
a certain grace which he infused into such early works as "Dick Whittington,"
"The Infant Sanrael " (painted in 1853), "Little Bed Biding Hood," "Morning and

JAM EH HA XT, R.A. 109

Evening," " She never told her love," "Harmony," " The Young Minstrels," " Saxon
Women," "The Boy Shakespeare," "The Miller's Daughter," " Young Steele," &c.
The engravings from many of these, however, afford pleasing and lasting proofs of
the range of Mr. Sant's abilities, whilst the skill he displays in the treatment of
child-life, hy which he is so widely known, renders all his portraits of children
nearly as attractive to the stranger as they can possibly be to the friends and
relatives of the little sitters themselves. The same may also be said of some of
his pictures of people of larger growth, for he never omits to introduce any
appropriate incident which can heighten the popularity of the canvas, and which
iu many instances has the effect of turning into subject pictures what in less cun-
ning hands would be nothing more than ordinary likenesses of ladies or gentlemen.
We may point to an example of this, as displayed in the picture (painted 1858)
of Lord Cardigan bonding over a map and explaining the charge of Balaklava to
the Prince Consort, the Koyal Children, the Duchess of Wellington, and Lord
Kivers, in the corridor of Windsor Castle. So far back as 1801 there was ex-
hibited at the French Gallery what is known as the Strawberry Hill collection
of Mr. Sant's works. These consisted of portraits of twenty-two friends and
relatives of the late Countess of Waldegrave, amongst whom, besides the lady
herself, for whom the rest were painted, were the Duchess of Sutherland, the
Marchioness of Westminster, the Lady Constance Grosvenor, the Countess of Shaftes-
bury, the Duke and Duchess d'Aumale, the Duchess of Wellington, the Duchess of
Devonshire, the Earl and Countess of Clarendon, Lord Lyndlmrst, the Marchioness
of Clanricarde, M. Van de Weyer the Belgian Minister, Viscount Stratford de
Redcliffe, Countess Morley, Earl Grey, and Bishop Wilberforce.

Here in itself we have a wealth of blue blood sufficient to link renown with
the name of any artist to whom the task of portraying fair women and brave men
falls as a career, and we can understand that the Royal Academicians were glad
to be able conscientiously to add the fashionable portrait-painter to the ranks of
their Associates, as they did soon after the exhibition of the Strawberry Hill
collection in 1861.

Naturally the professional life of a man in this position would seem to lie over
a path of roses. It is one ever increasing, we may imagine, in the pleasure of its
surroundings, albeit to chronicle each step might be tedious. That one, however,
which brought Mr. Saut on to the firm ground of full membership of the Royal
Academy must be noted. It was in 1870 that he achieved this distinction, due,
of course, mainly to a succession of meritorious portraits, but also in no small
degree to a picture exhibited in the preceding year (1869) of some Mentonese
children, and called "Applicants for a Sou," of which we are happy to be able,
through the artist's kindness, to present an engraving. It is a matter for congratu-
lation that he never quite abandons his old love, and gives us from time to time,
as in this instance, beautiful and characteristic heads which, not being mere por-
traits, have their own poetic tale to tell, woven for them by Mr. Sant, from his inner

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

artistic consciousness. The same year the Princess Beatrice and the late Duke of
Albany both sat to him ; and in 1871, on his appointment as Court painter, he was

APPLICANTS FOR A SOU--MENTONESE CHILDREN.

very naturally commissioned to paint a picture of Her Majesty with the Prince of
Wales' three eldest children— .and also a portrait of the Queen for the Turkish

JAMES SANT, R.A

Embassy. Amongst other contributions in 1871, which included portraits of Viscount
Sandon and Earl Eussell, we had another of his charming imaginative fancy subjects
in the shape of his diploma picture, entitled " The Schoolmaster's Daughter." In
1872 he had executed the royal com-
mission, and the portrait of the Queen,
with the Princes Albert Victor and
George and the Princess Victoria of
Wales, was of course the most note-
worthy of the canvases he exhibited that
year. Portraits alone marked 1873, but
in 1874 one of the prettiest and most
fascinating of Mr. Saut's interpretations
of child-life appeared. This was entitled
" Peaches," and from the conspicuous
position it occupied on the walls of
Burlington House, and from the general
admiration which it elicited, will still
be fresh in the memory of most ob-
servant visitors, for it must have tempted
many, if not to steal the dainty fruit,
at least to kiss the sweet baby face
which rivalled it in bloom. Portrait as
it was of his own youngest child, it was
yet a great deal more, and the canvas
formed a striking example of Mr. Sant's
peculiar gift in grasping all that is lov-
able and beautiful in a child's face.
From that year hardly an Academy
exhibition has been without a quasi-
subject picture from our painter's facile
hand. Alternating with the counterfeit
presentments of more fair women or
their lords, amongst whom we find the
names of " Mrs. Johnston Stansfeld,"
" Mademoiselle Zare Thalberg," " Lady
Marjoribanks of Ladykirk," " The Lady
Harlech," " Mrs. W. B. Eastwood and
Children," " Mrs. Surtees of Eedworth,"
"Lady Frances Bushby," "John Monck-
ton, Esq." (painted for the Town Hall, Manchester, by public subscription), " The
Lord Glamis," " Major Le Gendre of Huntroyde," " The Hon. Mortimer Tolle-
mache," &c. — alternating, we say, with these portraits and others, Mr. Sant has,

THE roHTKAIT OP A LADY.

112

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

during the past live years, added largely to his reputation by giving us canvases the
character of which may be guessed by those who have not been fortunate enough
to see them, from such titles as " The Early Post," " Maidens should be mild and
meek, swift to hear and slow to speak," "Gleanings," "Little Sarah," and "Ad-
versity." This last-named picture, which has become very generally known from

its many and varied re-
productions, is suggestive
of pathos and tenderness
of feeling. It shows that
his powers are far from
limited to expressing mere
superficial traits and beau-
ties.

It has been well said
by a thoughtful writer, that
" a portrait-painter has all
the advantages an historian
can have, with a task in-
comparably less arduous,
his subject being so defi-
nite, and of such narrow
compass." Farther on he
continues, " The artist has
the features set before him,
and is to breathe life and
characteristic expression
into them : a life which
shall have the calm of per-
manence, not the fitful
flush of the moment ; an
expression which shall ex-
hibit the entire and en-
during character, not the casual predominance of any one temporary feeling."
An example of how Mr. Sant carries out this expression of the aim of portraiture
is afforded by our illustration, "Portrait of a Lady," as all who have ever seen
the original will admit. The imaginative side of Mr. Sant's powers also com-
pletely tallies with the views held on this head by the same writer. " When the
artist makes use of a living head, however, in representing one of his dramatical
or poetical personages, he does not set it on the canvas in its bare outward reality,
but idealises it. He takes its general form and outlines, and animates it with
the character and feelings which he wishes to express, purifying it from what-
ever is at variance witli them." One of the best examples of this practice is the

GENIUS IS IIEAVEN-BORX.

(By Permission of W, Erans, Esq., Darley Abbey, Derby.)

JAMES 8ANT, R.A. 113

beautiful ideal study of a boy — " Genius is Heaven-born " —in which the eyes, cast
in a mysterious shadow, and all the delicate young features are used as the mere
vessels of thought and spirit.

Decidedly imbued with the spirit of some of the best of our earlier portrait-
painters, but without falling into plagiarism, Mr. Sant imparts to all he touches a
pleasant sense of refinement and high breeding. He contrives to bring into prominent
light the purest and most lovable characteristics of his various sitters, making you
say to yourself involuntarily, after looking at his work, "What nice people Mr. Sant
always gets to sit to him ! " His children, we repeat, are simply delightful, and it
is impossible not to surmise that the delineation of child-life, with its unstudied
grace and perfect freedom from self-consciousness, is especially congenial to him.
Indeed, the domesticity of his nature, and the frank affectionate tone which per-
vades his family circle, would lead all who have the privilege of looking in upon it
to understand why he paints as he does. The essence of an artist's labours not tin-
frequently, in a subtle sense, resembles himself, his home, and its surroundings, be-
sides being the outcome of his character and inner life. Upon the canvases of our
painter this spirit is distinctly visible, and not seldom something more than the
spirit, for it would be impossible that he should not avail himself professionally
of the resources granted to him in the faces that cluster round his fireside.

Looking back over Mr. Want's numerous well-known and much appreciated works,
we cannot wonder that he took his place long ago in a high rank of his pro-
fession. He has gauged his own powers most completely, and has not perilled
his reputation by attempts at sensational domestic scenes or grand historical
groups.

He may fairly rest content with the knowledge that the young generations to
come will point with delight and pleasure to the portraits of their mothers and grand-
mothers which he has limned, and with a little smile of secret self-complacency
will hope that they have inherited a share of that beauty and grace so pleasantly
handed down to them by the dexterous and brilliant brush of James Sant, It. A.

102

RAIMUNDO DE MADRAZO.

-x

MASKS AND PACES.

THE artist whose name stands at
the head of this article has
been the most generally famous of
contemporary Spanish painters since
the death of Mariano Fortuny. It
was in every way appropriate that
Madrazo should step into the place
of the painter of the " Vicaria " as
far as that was possible. They had
been comrades in their youth, and
later they became connected by
marriage. Fortuny 's wife was a
sister of Madrazo's. In the course
of their long and intimate friend-
ship it was inevitable that Madrazo
should be influenced by the brilliant
chief of the modern Spanish school ;
but he is no mere imitator, other-
wise he had been totally unfitted
to be Fortuny's successor in office.
Indeed, Kaimundo de Madrazo's
originality had been recognised
while his brother-in-law7 was yet
alive. The more independent kind
of critics had already discovered that
he too was a force in art, but it
was not until the general exhibition
of 1878 that his whole power was
seen. Now he is undoubtedly the
best known of the artists of his
nation, arid holds his place as the
most brilliant of a clever school.

As Don Kaimundo is still alive
(and may God preserve him many
years — " Que Dios le guarde muchos
afios," as his countrymen say), his

COQURLIN IV "L'KTOURDI."

(From tht Fainting by Kfailmm. By />rmf«»fon o/ Jlf. Corutant Cw/iiellii.)

RAIMUNDO DE U ADR A 00. 115

biography neither can nor ought to be written with any detail. The leading
facts, however, are known, and with their help and some slight knowledge of his
surroundings in youth, it is possible to form a tolerably satisfactory picture of his
career. He is then, to begin with, an artist by descent, the son of a distinguished
painter. It is easy to conceive of circumstances under which this hereditary connec-
tion with art would have been a misfortune. Had he been a weaker man he might
never have escaped from the studio in which he played as a child. If his father had
been a greater man, Madraxo's originality might equally have suffered. As a matter
of fact, however, his early connection with art has been a great benefit to him. His
hand and eyo no doubt became familiarised with the tools of his trade from infancy.
He wasted no years on uncongenial tasks, and was not compelled to force his way
into the world of art in spite of the opposition of his family, as many other men
have had to do. The benefit has not perhaps been wholly unmixed. The world
of art is large, but the studio is apt to be miserably narrow. A man may well
grow up in one a mere workman, taking no interest in anything which lias not a
visible connection with brushes and canvas. Madraxo has not wholly escaped the
influences of the workshop. It would be easy to show from his work that he has
lost not a little from the want of wider culture. Much of his painting is mere
clever workmanship in which manual dexterity is everything, and the subject is
destitute of poetry or human sympathy. But regret for this narrowness of training
is modified in his case by two considerations. As a Spaniard and a Madrileno he
had very little to learn from any general education he could have received. Nothing
indeed can be more superficial than the training given in Spanish schools and
universities. Those who come away from them wholly uninfluenced are the most
fortunate of their pupils. If Kainmndo de Madraxo grew up without such general
culture as his native country can afford, he at least learnt his business thoroughly.

It must also be remembered that his father's studio is an anteroom to one
of the greatest provinces in the world of art. Don Francisco de Madrazo is not
only a portrait-painter of distinction, hut is and long has been the director of the
famous Museo del Prado. For an artist the neighbourhood of such a collection of
pictures is in itself a liberal education. The name of Madrazo has been connected
with this famous gallery from its foundation in the reign of Ferdinand VII. A
Jose* de Madrazo (or perhaps he had no " de," the noble particle being a thing
most Spaniards affect when prosperity smiles on them) was one of the first artists
employed in forming it. In common with several of his fellow-artists he drew down
the savage satire of Kichard Ford for his complicity, real or supposed, in the
scandalous " restoration " of certain Murillos, which were scraped and flayed out of
all knowledge. Since those days of ignorance the family of Madrazo has come to
take sounder views of the treatment due to the masters.

Under the guidance of a father who was eminently competent to put him in
the right path, Raimundo de Madrazo doubtless got the most out of the Museo.
It is also only fair, after reflecting on the flashy and superficial character of modern

116 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

Spanish education, to note the fact that Spanish art-schools are often respectable.
There are good drawing-schools not only in Madrid, but in several of the pro-
vincial towns, which give scholarships and help students to go to Borne. Fortuny
learnt his rudiments in the obscure little town of Kens, his native place, in Catalonia,
and passed from there to Barcelona, In most of these schools the training in
drawing was classical and severe, and they do not appear to have degenerated as
yet. The young Madrazo, brought up at the head-quarters of Spanish art-education,
must have been trained in the most thorough way. His work now is as little
classical as need be, but the effects of an early drilling in a regard for form are
sufficiently visible. Like other young Spaniards, he finished his education in Paris.
We are told, and indeed some of his pictures show it plainly enough, that he has
been in Italy, but it must have been as a trained painter. Although there is a
Spanish academy at Rome, and many painters of that nation settle there, Paris
is their final school and their head-quarters. Madrazo finished his apprenticeship
under Leon Cogniet, an artist who seems to leave his pupils severely alone. This
experience ended, he began painting on his own account. He probably owed it
to his father's influence that he was employed when a young man to paint a
ceiling of Queen Isabel's hotel in Paris. Mariano Fortuny was employed in a
similar task by the same patron, and they worked together. Having once got a
good chance of showing his power, Madrazo rapidly made his way. For a time he
was overshadowed by bis brilliant friend, but from the first he had a recognised
place of his own, and since the exhibition of 1878 lie has been an acknowledged
leader. The rest of his life, even if we knew it, would doubtless be a record
of quiet, steady work, and journeys undertaken in search of subjects or new ex-
perience.

There is one fact which meets us on the very threshold in our attempt to

make a critical estimate of Madrazo's work. Although he is a thorough Spaniard,

he is by habitat a French artist. Like well-nigh every painter of his nation who

has any spark of genius, he lives and works in exile. Spain is proud of her artists,

will give them their training and praise them lavisbly when dead ; but she will not

or cannot find them the very large quantities of bread and butter required by the

modern painter who is able to find a market. This cannot fairly be attributed to

poverty. Spain is indeed poor in spite, or perhaps because, of continual bragging

about her inexhaustible resources ; but there is much stored-up wealth in some of

the cities, and money can always be found to build showy houses, and buy jewels.

Still larger quantities are lost at the gambling-table. The real explanation of the

neglect is the simple one that the Spaniards, though they support schools and

produce painters, and glory exceedingly in their popularity abroad, love money far

too well to part with it for anything artistic but portraits. It inevitably follows

that only the third and fourth rate men stay in Spain, and they have to eke

out an arduous existence with the help of photography and lesson-giving. "When,

a few years ago, a Catalan manufacturer of exceptional liberality bought two

MY MUDKL.

118 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

water-colours from a young countryman who had just returned from Koine, he obliged
the artist to give him a solemn promise never to reveal the name of the purchaser.
The precaution was needed to defend him against the rush of applications from
native talent which would have followed the astounding announcement that a
moneyed man living in the town had actually bought a picture. From a purely
commercial point of view the painters who have contrived to get a hold on a
foreign and particularly on the London market may have no reason to complain.
Artistically they cannot but suffer. The temptation to settle down into a purely
artificial studio-world in Koine or Paris is generally too strong for them, and they
end by losing all hold on reality, and placidly turning out mere prettinesses, or bits
of smartness in colour, which are tours de force and nothing else.

Kaimundo de Madrazo has escaped the fate of so many of his fellow-countrymen
to a considerable extent. Much of his work is no doubt merely frivolous and
smart. He has painted one smiling female model in a domino almost ad nauseam.
The Dresden China Shepherdess, or some such fancy dress figure which we have
given here, is a very fair specimen of the quite frivolous side of his art. Nothing
can well be smarter than this little drawing. In its way the Mask's combination
of knowing innocence and coquetry is perfect. The striped dress, the mantle,
the furs, and all the rest of the costume are clever in the last degree. Like
the masked ball itself, it is one of those things which it is well to see once in a
way, but which become duller than the dullest work with familiarity. Even in his
more ambitious efforts, such as the "After the Ball," there is a good deal of mere
painting of studio "properties." But there is also life. He is partly saved by his
genius for colour. With Madrazo colouring is not, what it has become with the
more slavish followers of Fortuuy, a mere matter of trickery. He does not
laboriously cover canvases with pigments just to show how he can put crimson
on red without being merely gaudy, or make white stand out against white. The
French Gallery in London has contained, among many of his works, one picture
by him which gave a bright idea of his work at its best. The subject was one
of the familiar boudoir scenes dear to his school : a girl playing a guitar, and a
group of listeners. There was, as usual, an excess of mere furniture, but then it
was made the means of showing a pleasant scheme of colour. The carpet, the
screen, and the bright mania of one of the men, harmonised well, and were painted
in a masterly style.

This same picture also shows another of the painter's qualities to advantage.
Madrazo can make his colour serve him to interpret human character. It is not
in this case— nor indeed in any case — a very elevated or poetic stamp of character
which he chooses to paint. His singing girl, her pretty little friend, the majos,
and the priest, are very ordinary Spaniards, but they have a certain human reality
and inspire a kind of sympathy. Nothing can be more hopelessly vulgar than
many of the figures in his "After the Ball." The effect of the picture is gained
by the cheap device of contrasting the most widely different costumes. Punch,
Pierrot, a Marquise, a Sultan, an officer of Hussars, a gentleman in a medieval

RAJMUNDO DK MADRAZO.

119

costume who is shaking him-
self into a modern great-coat,
footmen, street sweepers, Me-
phistopheles, and a dozen
figures besides, are all thrown
together in the cold morning
light. Such a picture can at
best only just escape being
utterly unprofitable, but Ma-
drazo's does so by virtue of
its truth. Under all the
frippery of the fancy dress
ball there is a kind of living
reality. The painter can also
catch a national type. A
comparison between two of
his church scenes will show
how well he can succeed in
this difficult task. There is
a study of the interior of a
church in Italy by him, in
which the Italian type is
excellently rendered. The
scene is simple enough : a
row of straw chairs ; a num-
ber of peasants kneeling, sit-
ting, or simply lying down
and sleeping; in the middle
a handsome woman in a fa-
shionable dress bending over
a prie-dieu -- introduced by
way of contrast of course,
and making no addition to
the real work of the picture
— form the whole. Put this
alongside of another which
he calls "Vespers" — the door
of a Spanish church, with
worshippers, beggars, and a
wonderful realistic old priest
hurrying in — and the accuracy
of the artist's power of ob-
servation will be seen at once.

COQUELIN AS KUY HI. As.
(C» rermiuion q/ M. Conitant

12o THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

There is no sort of doubt about the nationality, occupation, or character of any
one of his figures.

It is in keeping with this quality of human realism that Madrazo is an ad-
mirable portrait-painter. "Bon chien chasse de race;" and he has doubtless
inherited some of his faculty from his father, Don Francisco, who gave his proofs
long ago. But whatever he has inherited he has improved to the utmost by his
own strenuous industry. This side of his art is little known in England, but it
is said to be much appreciated in the United States. We have heard of portraits
painted for wealthy American visitors in Paris which have been carried back over
the Atlantic to be valued possessions in New York or Boston. His portrait of
Coquelin as Mascarille (reproduced by the famous actor's permission) is indeed a
masterpiece, as our readers may see. It deserves the epithet of " infernal brilliancy,"
which Mr. Henry James applied to the performance itself. There Coquelin stands,
in the words of the same fine critic, "looking like an old Venetian print, and
playing as if the author of the ' Etourdi ' were in the coulisse, prompting him."
Indiscreet admirers of Don Kaiuiundo have, with doubtful judgment, praised him for
imitating nobody. He does not. so we are told, ask himself how Velasquez, for
example, would have done such or such a tiling, but how lie, Madra/o, will do it.
If it were any honour to an artist to be above taking lessons from the great
Old Masters, the praise could not be given to Madrazo on the strength of this
portrait. It is the direct lineal descendant of the " Pablillos de Valladolid " — the
wonderful Velasquez. The actor stands dressed in the traditional striped costume
of the part, with the mantle folded across him, and the head turned to one side.
Whoever has seen Coquelin has probably had an opportunity of learning how
wonderfully he can contrive to cover his broad elastic face with a grin of fatuous
rascality. Those who have not can do so by looking at the portrait by Madrazo.
It is the very personification of the valet of Moliere's comedy. The actor's face
expresses all the elements of the character — the basis of animal greed, and the
surface of monkey trickery. As he stands in the portrait, he seems to be turning
the sweetness of his own smartness over under his tongue. His eyes are closed in
placid enjoyment, and there is a smile of self-satisfaction on his mouth, such as
comes just after his last roguery, and before the clumsy honesty of his master has
ruined everything. The fellow is obviously too clever for anything, and so genially
dishonest that he is almost harmless. The portrait will doubtless in due time take
its place in the foyer of the Maison de Moliere, and serve as an eternal lesson
to future actors who have to play the part of Mascarille.

Madrazo himself will have a better chance of living by this and other such
works than by his endless dominoes and majas. Clever as these latter are, they
are but a fashion. We cannot believe that any dexterity of workmanship can con-
fer permanent value on the painting of bric-a-brac and fancy dresses. The Dutch
painters made their studies of highly uninteresting things a possession for ever by
dint of good workmanship and fine colouring, but they painted the reality of things.

RA1MUNDO DE MADRAZO.

121

The defect of modern Spanish art is that it paints frippery, and cannot touch
humanity, except in masquerade. All the cleverness in the world cannot prevent
such work from becoming altogether wearisome, stale, flat, and unprofitable. Happily
there are signs that some at least of the younger Spanish painters are beginning
to be influenced by a manlier ambition. We have heard of Senor Pradilla as a
painter of strong and sober historical pictures, and we have seen -some very genuine
studies of Valentian peasant life by Jose Benlliure exhibited in London. It is to
be hoped that these are the first works of a new school which will not be satisfied
with painting odds and ends in a masterly manner, but will revert to the old theory
that the artist should have some feeling for poetry and some sympathy with life.

10:?

'TWIXT DAY AND KIG11T.

WILLIAM J, HENNESSY, N.A.

VERY large number of distinguished Americans, who have all the out-
ward habits, the ways of speech, and apparently all the temperament
of their transatlantic nationality, date their American citizenship from
earliest years, but not from birth. Their bodies were born in England,
in Ireland, in Germany, but their perceptions and their thoughts came to
life in the United States, and there are no Americans more American
than these. Of them is Mr. W. J. Hennessy, who was born in Thomastown,
Kilkenny, and taken to New York with his family when he was not many years
old, in 1849. At the age of seventeen he entered the National Academy, and
worked in New York until 1870, when he migrated to London, where he has
ever since exhibited annually what he paints in France. He was elected an Asso-
ciate of the National Academy in 1862 and a Member in the following year, and
he is a member of the American Society of Painters in Water-colours. Among the

WILLIAM J. HENNESST, N.A.

123

more important of Mr. Hennessy's pictures which are in the collections of the United
States are "Springtime" and "In Memoriam" (the property of Mr. Edwin Booth),
"The Wanderers," " Oil the Sands," and "A By-Path in Normandy."
Mr. Hennessy's ===-=

English career has pro-

. .-^MuMK/mG''

duced pictures which

in all the diversity of
the many - mannered
galleries of London
have a note of their
own. He is what
used to be called a
"grey painter," and
his greyness is not
vivified by those violets
and blues which Eng-
lish artists have loved
to mix with grey ; nor
by the illumination by
which the French
school gives a heart
of light to the quietest
of colours. Nor, again,
is his the grey of Mr.
Stanhope Forbes, into
which extreme and
subtle truth of rela-
tive tone brings an in-
terest and a beauty
that the tints of the
rainbow, of the sum-
mer ocean, or of a fiery
sunset might not rival.
Mr. Hennessy's grey
is a little dark, a little
heavy; and yet, seeing
Nature persistently in
this tone of colour, he never produces a dull picture, one in which there is not beau-
tiful life, of figure, vegetation, and atmosphere. When, in 1877, the Grosvenor Gallery
gave its golden opportunity to the eccentrics, it afforded its space, its repose, its beau-
tiful walls, and all its other happy artistic conditions, to a band of more legitimate
artists who, though not strangers to the Royal Academy, were still less known than

EN I'KI K : CALVADOS.

124

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

they should have been. Among these was Mr. Heilbiith, for instance, who made a
brilliant appearance in the first Grosvenor exhibitions. Mr. Watts, of course, every
one knew; nevertheless few people realised how little he had contributed to the
Eoyal Academy of late years. And there was a little group of landscape painters,
the late Cecil Lawson at their head, who would probably never have made their
rightful fame but for Sir Coutts Lindsay's enterprise. For the most part they were

THE KETUHN FROM SCHOOL.

(Reprotluced in foe-simile from a Drawing by the Artist.)

men who had walked, whether in one direction or in another, out of what is
the beaten — the very much beaten — track in England, though they might be
faithful inheritors of true and orthodox traditions in the more international
schools. Mr. Hennessy was obviously a painter who did not look at Nature in
the manner to which Mr. Vicat Cole (we take him as a type) had accustomed
the English public. And his work was more highly admired than widely known
until it began to take its annual honourable place at the Grosvenor.

Nevertheless his Academy pictures will assuredly not be forgotten. Each of
them has been salient. In 1877 there was "Notre Dame des Plots," a woman
and child praying in a Breton chapel by the sea ; and in 1878 " Summer Evening
by the Thames." Here the peaceful water was overspread by the "quiet-coloured"
sky ; trees with the night already among their boughs stood up on the right,

WILLIAM J. HENNESSY, N.A.

125

swans caught the last light on their cool plumage, and two heavy-laden boats

were rowing out to mid-stream. "A Sunbeam," the following year, had for its

companion a more important work, " The Aftermath," a sad autumnal landscape

by the waterside. Next came " A Daughter of Eve," the portrait of a little girl

with what Wordsworth would have called

a "woodland air" sitting on the lowest

branch of an old apple-tree, and just

about to enter on the pleasures of a ripe

apple. The child is alone in the picture,

but the artist has made her eyes vivid

of speech and life as they answer some

one in the spectator's place ; the picture

is full of vitality. With this was another

canvas — " Summer Days."

Strongly attached to orchard scenery
— to Nature in cultivation though not
made luxurious or trivial with mere gar-
dening — Mr. Hennessy next painted a
" Scene in a Normandy Cider Orchard;"
and in 1882 he exhibited another work-
in the motive of which peasants were
concerned— " En Fete: Calvados." A
charming group of young people are
tripping through the fields in the utmost
of holiday dress to some fair or church
festival " au village voisin." They are
decked with flowers as well as with their
well-frilled caps and their old elaborated
gold, and carry besides bouquets and
baskets with which the grave church of
the village will bloom anon, whether
the errand of these girls be concerned
with dance or with Saint's Day. The
grass is tall ; the delicate French trees
are full of charming drawing.

Peculiarly French in spirit is the
picture which represented Mr. Hennessy at the Grosvenor in 1883. Its title is
" With the Birds," and its motive a bough swinging over a soft green sward and
made into a perch by a slender lady, whose clinging draperies outline her long and
delicate limbs. The character and pose of the figure and the treatment of the head
have an indefinable Parisian character. Nor is the picture — primarily a portrait —
without a pleasant suggestiveness in its motive, for the damsel is raised up in her

A BL'MMEK EVKNINO.

12G

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

maiden meditation between earth and sky with no more earthly confidants for her
thoughts than the birds who are singing wild love songs at her ear. At the same
exhibition were "A Pastoral," "Jocund Spring," "A Straw Harvest: Calvados,"
" Summer Evening," and the singularly beautiful example of the artist's power,
" 'Twixt Day and Night." Here, as in all Mr. Hennessy's evening pictures, the
spectator should get into the scene if he would appreciate the tone, the air, and the
differences of plane which help to give her radiance to the moon just " gathering
light." He must surround himself with the atmosphere of which the artist has made
his study, and then he will be aware of all the tenderness of the effect. More

THE SHRIMPERS.

obvious and easily understood is the beauty of the drawing, whether in the trees
or in the figures. In "The Eeturn from School" it is again an effect of early
moonlight mixed with dusk, and again treated with a great reserve of colour and
an almost studied absence of " effectiveness."

More recently Mr. Hennessy has painted a bit of orchard in Brittany, in
which the execution and atmosphere have more freshness and animation than is
usual with him, and a scene in a hayfield, in slightly veiled sunshine, with a cloud-
laden sky full of distance. In another canvas he has achieved a triumph removed
from his usual attempts, in a tour de force of sunshine. It is a garden subject, and
a lady walks down a path facing the spectator with an open Japanese umbrella of
bright red open behind her head. This umbrella has the full sunshine upon its
other side, and it glows like a circle of light. The painter has certainly succeeded
in making red paint shine, and shine with such an illumination that the effect is
one of absolute illusion.

SUNDAY MOKNINO.

(From the Sketch /or the Painting.)

GEORGE CLAUSEN, R.I.

OUNG beyond the wont of painters was Mr. George Clausen when he made
the most valuable of all successes and the dearest to a true artist's
heart — a technical fame. It was in the studios and in the world of
painters that his name became suddenly known and notable. To be
praised there implies praise from the public, which learns sooner or later
from the counsels of those within the technical circle. But we need not
ask where a man wishes to find the beginnings of fame, whether among the
multitude or among the fit and few, whether he will be judged by his peers or
by those who, as regards his study and all that he has tried for, know neither the way
nor the aim. Perhaps there are none among noted Englishmen whose method has
been so sure as Mr. Clausen's of sympathy from his fellows, and who condescended
so little to ask for popular admiration by giving the public the prettinesses and
trivialities to which it has been accustomed. The love of beauty is not an ignoble
but a noble quality, and the craving for it is not a thing to be snubbed ; but this
public taste should be instructed to find beauty in natural and human things that
have no prettiness. Admiration is an art, and a very difficult and delicate one;

128

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

it must be taught, and it has too often been taught wrong. The ordinary picture-
seer, so untrained in the study of human beauty, for instance, that his ideals are
not much removed from a shop-girl's, needs to be taught all the dignities and

nobilities of true loveliness, after
which he should be led further
still — to the appreciation of the
beauty of the mere truth, the un-
approachable beauty of every pass-
age of Nature. People have be-
come decivilised in this matter of
their ideals, which is worse than
being uncivilised ; for no simple
and barbarous people would admire
the poor prettinesses — platitudes in
colour — which have been considered
beautiful in England during the
greater part of the present century.
Every artist who has the resolution
to undertake public education in
this matter does much for the pro-
paganda of simplicity, sincerity,
severity, and art, and much towards
the suppression and defeat of that
purely modern fiend, Vulgarity,
which makes a large part of this
world at once meretricious and dull.
Mr. George Clausen was born
in London in 1852. He studied
decorative art as practised at the
South Kensington schools, and was
afterwards employed as a designer
for three years. In 1873 he re-
turned to South Kensington as a
"National Scholar" for two years;
and since then, to quote the phrase

of his own most artistic modesty, he has been "trying to learn to paint." And the
time of this career of study occurred very fortunately. A student born in 1852
escapes the worst traditions of the middle of the century, and inherits the new move-
ment and life of the " seventies." His quasi-contemporaries — those a little on before
him— and which of us will ever quite gauge all that we owe to these elder brothers,
these pupil-teachers where we are pupils, the men of power and initiative a little
older than ourselves ? — his comrade-elders, we say, dower him with the fruit of

THK GLEANERS.

GEORGE CLAUSEN, P.I.

129

their experience while it is yet fresh and warm, allow him to " enter into their
labours," sparing him the work which is servitude and spurring him to the work
which is pure service. In Mr. Clausen's time these quasi-contemporaries were even
more than usually influential, inasmuch as they had just fully realised the value

of international interchange in art. Foreign painting had until then been a matter
of slight curiosity to Englishmen. So ignorant were most of our countrymen of
the great school of French landscape, for instance, that it was always taken for
granted, and repeated as a pleasant commonplace and platitude by all our writers
on art, that whatever " Academic " advantages the French might have over us, in

104

130 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

one thing England was confessedly ahead of her — the British painter's landscape
was the finest landscape in the world ! Of course, as it has proved, after a little
more study of the truths of the situation, English art was more behindhand in
landscape than in any other department of painting. And almost all — let us boldly
say all — that is really worthy and true in English landscape in its present regene-
rated state we owe to the example of French contemporaries ; whereas we have
happily learnt very little from the " Academic " figure-painting against which
younger France has herself rebelled once for all. An international interchange
had, of course, been effected in a material sense at the time of the two great
London International Exhibitions in 1851 and in 1862 ; but of a real interchange
of artistic thought there had been nothing whatever. The time was not fit for
it, and it came in its own time.

Mr. Long, E.A. — whoso manner was afterwards absolutely transformed — had
been obviously under foreign influence at one stage of his career. And to him,
with much good advice and help besides, Mr. Clausen owed the opening of his eyes
to foreign art. The young painter quickly and completely assimilated the principles
implied in the foreign schools, so completely that he did not need a long training
abroad. He was converted, so that he began to work on the lines practised in
France, and did so naturally and spontaneously, and not from an effort of imitation.
He simply cut himself off from the banal and ready-made traditions dying out in
his own country, and went to Nature with simple intention and executive distinction.
To do this one need not be a Frenchman, nor even paint much in French stiidios.
Mr. Clausen has, however, been much in Holland and in France. And, indeed, a
painter of the life he sees around him is inevitably drawn towards countries where
everyday life is still expressive and undisfigured. He has set himself to paint the
truth, but he will go by preference where the truth looks well — not necessarily
where it looks pretty, for the pretty is not the object of his search — but where it
has a certain human dignity still unmarred by ignoble conditions. And this is
happily the case with almost all working people abroad, as it is with us in our
fishing populations, among some classes of navvies, and last, not least, among our
engine-drivers, a singularly distinguished, simple, and powerful class of men, taken
in the mass. But, we repeat, the truth generally looks best abroad. The religion
of the greater part of the Continent creates incidents and give expressiveness. For
example, take, from Mr. Clausen's own work, the picture of peasants kneeling at
their wayside cross, and that of the flower-woman selling her daffodils in the east
wind of Haverstock Hill. Both are full of the beauty of truth, and in both cases
the painter has sincerely and sympathetically rendered the facts and their significance,
but the facts are more acceptable in the one picture than in the other. In the picture
last mentioned — "Flora" — the painter has, nevertheless, produced a most pathetic
study under difficulties which few artists would have faced. The difficulties we
allude to are by no means caused by the age and ugliness of the model ; they are
due not to any natural things, such as the coarse colour and the rude surface

GEORGE CLAUSEN, R.I.

131

wrought upon this human face by the suns and winds, but to the artificial degra-
dations of the woman's bonnet and of the sky-line of the architecture behind her.
These are the things that make the truth so difficult to paint in England. It is
not that an artist, worthy of the name, goes about searching for the young, smooth,
and prosperous things of the world; but he has a certain right to ask that the
asperities, rudenesses, and grim-
nesses of life shall be natural, and
not uglinesses produced by ignoble
architecture and siich depraved
habits of dress as the English
custom of wearing second-hand
apparel.

Therefore we say that Mr.
Clausen in his "Flora" produced
a most daring picture ; and the
same may be remarked of his
study of a "Field-Hand." For
this woman, too, who should have
the dignity of the open air about
her grey hair, wears a nonde-
script, degraded bonnet, made for
another head, and once the pride
of some third-rate bourgeoise in a
sooty street. It is in spite of the
obstacles presented by this most
important matter of clothing, that
Mr. Clausen has given to this
head also an undeniable dignity
of life. And how well he has
seized the character of the hands,
and especially of the wrist ! A
labouring woman's wrist, in its
peculiar straightness, its loss of
all the soft lines of the flesh, has a significance all its own. In " The Gleaners "
the painter has taken younger models, and the result is somewhat more common-
place. But here, as usual in his work, the study of light is very beautiful, deli-
cate, and true.

" The End of a Winter's Day " is perhaps the painter's most admirable work.
Here also he has gone abroad for his truths. The wood-gathering is French, so
are the sabots, and so, especially, are the trees. And now as regards these trees,
thin, delicate, and spiritual, with the moon and stars showing between their tall
forms, it must be allowed that they are more pictorial than the noble English tree.

A FIELD-HAND.

132

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

THE END OP A WINTERS DAT.

(From a Drawing by the Artist.)

The oak and the elms of our woods are very worlds of beauty, and as we stand
beneath and look up into their multitudinous depths and heights, the ear and eye
are filled with the loveliness which is one of the crowning achievements of Nature.

GEORGE CLAUSEN, R.I.

183

But still it is not loveliness that is paintable. The very richness and closeness of
the glorious detail so disguise the form, that the finest tree of an English park
is simply a lump in the landscape. There is no drawing in it, until winter has
begun to reveal its articulations ; and even then the general line is not the most
pictorial. Foremost among all paintable trees are perhaps the olive of Italy, with
its accidents of stem and branch, and its exquisite strength and delicacy of leaf-
form, the stone pine, and
the cypress. But after
these comes undoubtedly
the French poplar, with
its long lines admitting of
most subtle drawing, and
its sparing but soft and
tender leafage. The ar-
rangement in long lines
also is most delightful to
the artist, who obtains
quaint but lovely composi-
tion from the effects of
series and perspective. And
well has Mr. Clausen treated
a singularly beautiful sub-
ject in the solemn land-
scape of his picture — a
patient landscape of the
poor, resting in the winter
cold from the long cycle
of cultivation, under a me-
lancholy evening sky and
a watery crescent moon.
In the figures we get a
decided touch of the Fre-
derick Walker influence ;
but this is perhaps only in

the obvious likeness of the action of the boy, as he walks, looking out of the pic-
ture, with that of some remembered figure in one of Walker's groups. For un-
demonstrative expression Mr. Clausen has done nothing finer than this pair of
peasants, old and young, in the surroundings so poetically conceived. To another
class of subjects belongs the pretty genre study " The Novel." It is less charac-
teristic of the artist, inasmuch as he has been persistently an open-air painter.

A glance at the work of this still young career shows how steadfastly Mr.
Clausen has adhered to the practice which is with him a principle — that of painting

GIRL'S HEAD.

134 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

his own surroundings, his own time, and as far as possible his own country.
In this he has the precedent of the great masters, who painted contemporary
things even if they gave them historical names. As regards the work of the older
schools which has inspired him with special admiration, he has chosen that of Van
Eyck, Holbein, and Botticelli, with some of the earlier Italians. Coming to later
times, he gives allegiance to Kembrandt, De Hooghe, Hals, and Velasquez ; and
among the great moderns his masters are Millet, Rousseau, Corot, and Bastien
Lepage. Mental sincerity, distinction of style, and fresh respect for Nature, are
perhaps the three principal out of many and varied lessons to be learnt from these
three great groups of painters. Those lessons every student will accept with a
difference. He may learn from Velasquez the value of style — style that distinguishes
the kings and princes in art — but he does not necessarily aim at that special
manifestation of style which belonged to that greatest of all painters. He may
assimilate the absolute mental unworldliness of Botticelli, but he is not held to
practise it in Botticelli's manner. The teachings of all the great masters are
more fundamental and more general than the teachings of minor masters ; which
is perhaps the reason why the lesser ones have imitators and the greater ones
only disciples — why the students who learn from the greatest are the most free
and the most original of all pupils.

Mr. Clausen is one of the band of painters who have thrown in their lot
chiefly with the Institute. It would be absurd to speak of an Institute "school,"
for the rooms over which Sir James Lintou presides are as various as those ruled
over by Sir Frederick Leighton or Sir Coutts Lindsay. The accident of the place
of residence has very possibly as much to do with the gathering together of the
principal members of the Institute as any more technical motive influence. Hamp-
stead and Haverstock Hill house a little colony of Sir James's adherents; and on
those suburban slopes Mr. Clausen, painting resolutely the truths about him, has
found matter for his bravest if not for altogether his most charming work.

^ . >r

(From a Sketch by Iht ArlM.)

SEYMOUR LUCAS, A.R.A.

N Associate of the year 1886, Mr. Seymour Lucas has won his success
as quickly as legitimately. He has gained his distinction while young,
and after swift and steady progress. His art education hegan early,
for he had the good fortune to come under the encouraging protec-
tion of an uncle who gave his father sympathetic advice as to the boy's
training. Mr. John Lucas was himself a successful and much employed painter,
who had portraits of the Court and Legislature, the science and art of his time,
to do. This was when the present reign was new. The Prince Consort sat to
him for four portraits, the Princess Royal for two or three ; and he had for sitters
also the King of Hanover, the Iron Duke, Mr. Gladstone in his youth, Rogers,
Brunei, Stephenson, and Locke, the last three of whom were painted together
holding counsel over plans of the Menai Bridge. Besides his uncle, Mr. Seymour

136 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

Lucas had another artist relative — Mr. John Templeton Lucas, and with him
the young aspirant — after trying wood-carving with Mr. Gerard Robinson, to whom
he owed his first instruction in figure-drawing, and a more fruitless attempt
at sculpture— took several years of study. This was a preparation for the Eoyal
Academy schools, where Mr. Seymour Lucas went through such routine as was to
be had there, gaining little idea of any scheme of art, but nourishing his fancy the
while with romance of his own choosing. He read Scott with delight and avidity,

FOR THE KINO AND CAUSE.

(fiy Permission of Mr. J. K. Twinberrov.:)

and gained in those days of chivalrous enthusiasm the taste for historical genre
which has never left him. Cavaliers and Roundheads have certainly furnished the
tritest and most conventional of all subjects for the most trivial of all artists ; but
with our Associate they were invested with a strong and sincere human interest.
He studied the character of the time, and in the very costume he has always
striven to attain a correctness and an ease which make the dress show as part of
the man. Therefore the slight disparagement of the name " costume picture " is
by no means to be cast upon his historical work — work which, however gay and
gallant in subject, is gravely studious in method and preparation. In his Academy
School days Mr. Seymour Lucas joined the Gilbert Sketching Club, where all his

-
g
i.

105

138 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

romance and his pleasure in the past received more and more fostering. Out of
this pleasant competition came his first sale, when Mr. Tooth (who has since bought
many of the works of the pencil he first encouraged) gave him thirty shillings for
a successful club drawing. Mr. Seymour Lucas's pleasure was by no means spoilt
by the remembrance of the forty shillings which the models had cost him. A first
cheque is treasured as an earnest of success to come in the fair and open market
of the arts, and only pride itself could refuse to be delighted at the promise.
Thenceforth the young painter went on in a decisive and unchanged way as a
painter of masculine subjects from English history, in the days when history went
bravely dressed in doublet and hose, looking now with the careless face of a Cavalier
and now with the sour mien of a Roundhead — as Roundheads and Cavaliers were
presented in the novels that charmed the young artist's mind and made him a
Royalist for ever.

Mr. Seymour Lucas made his first hit at the Royal Academy with his "By
Hook or by Crook," exhibited in 1875, in which the feminine interest, not common
with him, was introduced. A maiden, whose father belongs to the Hanoverian
party, is courted by a young Jacobite, who takes his farewell before going off to
fight for his king. A brick wall, as well as the political difficulty, is between the
lovers; but they enjoy their "sweet sorrow," in spite of the unsympathetic presence
of the young soldier's servant waiting by. This picture was only the second its
painter had sent in, but it was hung on the line, and his prices immediately changed
so much for the better that he asked and received £100 for work which he would
contentedly have offered for .£20 the year before. In the same season he exhibited
another canvas which had the same slight kind of subject — " Fleeced," where a
young squire, unversed in the wicked ways of town, has been lightened of all his
portable property by a gambling party, and left to his reflections in the small
hours on the scene of his defeat. Next year's picture was " For the King and
Cause." The time is after the fight at Edgehill, and a wounded gentleman is carried
by his servants and retainers on the way towards his country house. In fear of
his speedy death, they lay down his litter and summon help from within a closed
gateway ; but their call is in vain. The door remains closed, and the devoted
Cavalier is doomed to end his days by the wayside. It was Civil War again in
1877, when Mr. Seymour Lucas — who continued to hold his own with the Hanging
Committee — was represented by " Intercepted Despatches." Here he showed a
Cromwellian messenger caught by two Royalists, who have him fast in the interior
of a wayside house — him and his saddle, and all that can be made to give up
the secrets of the enemy. They have tied the man to a chair, whence he twists
round to see what will befall ; and they have the saddle ripped open and the
precious papers under inspection. In the same Academy were exhibited " The
Burgomaster " —a Dutch subject — and "Debt and Danger," in which a Bond Street
gallant of the Georgian age is looking out of the window to watch his duns out
of sight before he can venture to sun himself in his favourite street. In the

SEYMOUR LUCAS, A.R.A. 139

following season came one of the painter's best successes— "An Ambuscade, Edge-
hill." Here is a company of the King's troops making their cautious way along
a country road suspected of danger. An old soldier leads, with a wary look-out ;

A W11IP KOH TAN TKOMT.

and at his side a younger man can scarcely restrain his rasher courage. The
movement of advance, with the expressiveness of care, is rendered with excellent
effect. An easier subject — more of a "costume picture," in fact — in the same
Academy was " As Dry as a Limekiln ; " a Cavalier, very evidently a bon vivant,
stands up by a once well-furnished table gazing into the empty cup he holds in

K
H

SEYMOUR LUCAS, A.R.A. 141

liaud. In "Unbreathed Memories" the artist introduced a female figure — a whole
female figure, we believe, for the first time ; and in " The Astrologer" an old student
of the stars is seen poring over his celestial maps of destiny. " Drawing the Long
Bow" shows an English soldier returned from the Thirty Years' War and taking
his ease in an English inn, where he is astonishing his landlord with travellers' and
warriors' tales in one.

A thoroughly successful picture belonging to this time, too, was the important
" Gordon Riots," hung on the line in a place of special honour as a pendant to
Lady Butler's " 'Listed for the Connaught Rangers." Mr. Seymour Lucas's work
that year attracted great attention ; there was a power in the drawing, a firmness
in the balance and action of the figures, which gave assurance of a draughtsman of
uncommon ability. The scene is near Bloomsbury Square, where the houses of
Lord Mansfield and others were looted and fired by the followers of the Protestant
lord. The mob is in the distance, kept somewhat at bay by the troops, who are
in the act of firing. Furniture and jewels, which the mob had flung from the
windows, are lying in the street, with one or two of the wounded. Mr. Seymour
Lucas refers us to the Annual Register of 17cSO, which has a full account of the
events of those wild days. Referring to this episode it says : '' A fifth desperate and
infernal gang went to the elegant house of Lord Mansfield in Bloomsbury Square,
which they, with the most unrelenting fury, set fire to and consumed. They began
by breaking down the doors and windows, and from every part of the house flung
the superb furniture into the street, where large fires were made to destroy it.
They then proceeded to his lordship's law-library and destroyed some thousand
volumes, with many capital manuscripts, mortgages, papers, and other deeds. The
rich wardrobe of wearing apparel and some very capital pictures were also burned ;
and they afterwards forced their way into his lordship's wine cellars, and plentifully
bestowed it upon the populace. A party of guards now arrived, and a magistrate
read the Riot Act, and then was obliged to give orders for a detachment to fire,
when about fourteen obeyed, and shot several men and women, and wounded others.
They were ordered to fire again, which they did, without effect. This did not
intimidate the mob; they began to pull the house down, and burn the floors, planks,
spars, &c., and destroyed the outhouses and stables ; so that in a short time the
whole was consumed. Lord and Lady Mansfield made their escape through a back
door a few minutes before the rioters broke in and took possession of the house."
More terrible was the aspect of the night. " As soon as the day was drawing
towards a close," says the same contemporary record, " one of the most dreadful
spectacles this country ever beheld was exhibited. Let those who were not
spectators of it judge what the inhabitants felt when they beheld at the same
instant the flames ascending and rolling in clouds from the King's Bench and
Fleet Prisons, from New Bridewell, from the toll-gate at Blackfriars Bridge, from
houses in every quarter of the town, and particularly from the bottom and middle
of Holborn, where the conflagration was horrible beyond description. The houses

142 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

that were first set on fire at this last-mentioned place both belonged to Mr.
Langdale, an eminent distiller, and contained immense quantities of spirituous liquors.
Six-and-thirty fires, all blazing at one time, and in different quarters of the City,
were to be seen from one spot. During the whole night men, women, and children,
were running up and down with such goods and effects as they wished most to
preserve. The tremendous roar of the authors of these horrible scenes was heard
at one instant, and at the next the dreadful reports of soldiers' muskets, firing in
platoons. ... In short, everything served to impress the mind with ideas of
universal anarchy and approaching desolation. Two attempts, in the course of the
day, were made upon the Bank ; but the rioters were so much intimidated by the
strength with which they beheld it guarded, that their attacks were but feebly
conducted, and they were repulsed at the first fire from the military. They made
an effort to break into the Pay Office likewise, and met the same fate. Several of
them fell in these skirmishes, and many were wounded." Mr. Seymour Lucas
made exact studies for the scene of his Gordon picture, and the work has a very
remarkable look of reality.

Equally careful, but with hardly such fortunate results, was he with next year's
canvas — " The Armada in Sight." For this he made his studies on the Hoe at
Plymouth, with the calm waters of the most beautiful harbour in England, and
Drake's Island in the middle distance. Here, too, the subject was one full of
vigour, but not concerned with actual movement ; but the Elizabethan hero and
his companions are not presented with quite the same power as had been the last
century troops. There is a certain stationariness in the principal groups which
would seem to imply that the painter's heart was not altogether in his design. The
subject is an excellent one, but it has not been altogether grasped with a strong
grip. This, to quote the catalogue, which quotes Hume and Smollett, is the
situation : "It was on the 19th of July that Fleming sailed into Plymouth and
announced that he had seen the Spanish fleet off the Lizard. This intelligence
was communicated to Drake as he and some of his officers were amusing themselves
with bowls on the Hoe. It caused a lively sensation, and a great manifestation of
alacrity to put to sea, which Drake laughingly checked by declaring that the match
should be played out, as there was plenty of time to win the game and beat the
Spaniards too." At about the same time appeared a slighter subject — "Beckoning
Without his Host"- — a Cavalier at an inn with his bill before him and an unexpected
emptiness in the pockets which he fingers in vain.

In the year of the exhibition of the Armada picture Mr. Seymour Lucas began
his study of a master whose influence has reformed his style and given him a
new ideal of artistic execution. On the Studio-Sunday of 1881, when his own work
was on view to his own friends, he saw in Mr. Long's studios a couple of copies
from Velasquez, of rare excellence. He had, of course, seen not copies only but
originals of Velasquez before, but it happened that these two studies made to him
a kind of revelation of style in painting. Until then his ideal had been in the

SEYMOUR LUCAS, A.R.A. 143

talent of Vandyck, but from that moment the executive genius of the great Spaniard
mastered him. After gazing at these momentous copies he met his own picture)
in its place on Varnishing Day, with profound dissatisfaction. The " Armada "
became a decidedly popular work, but to its painter it lacked what had suddenly
become most precious in his eyes ; and immediately after the opening of that
year's Academy he was far from the madding crowd of Burlington House, copying
Velasquez in the galleries of Madrid. The studies he brought home were invaluable
to him, and before long he was once more in Spain, having made his plans for a
longer stay, and steadier work there. Mr. Seymour Lucas's art-training had not
prepared him for delight in and practice of style, a quality which has no place—
except at long intervals a quite accidental one — in the Koyal Academy schools.
It may be said of many of our most popular elder painters that they work through
a whole successful career without ever naming to themselves this power of their
art. To our Associate it was, as it were, revealed at the moment when he could
receive it ; and from his first vow of allegiance to Velasquez the influence of the
master has never abated with him. His first picture to show it, by a great advance
of painter-like quality, wras " Charles I. Before Gloucester," a picture full of dignity
in the composition, and most picturesque in form and costume. Says Clarendon :
" The King having summoned the town of Gloucester to surrender . . . there
returned two citizens from the town (Major Pudsey and one Toby Jordan), with
lean, pale, and ugly visages, and in garb so strange and unusual, that at once gave
mirth to the most severe countenances and sadness to the most cheerful hearts ; who
concluded that such ambassadors could bring no less than a defiance." The artist
has perfectly avoided any caricature or broad farce in the figures of his two Puritans,
or in the restrained smiles of the King and his Council of War. After the second
visit to Spain Mr. Seymour Lucas painted " The Favourite," exhibited in 1882,
with "A Spy in the Camp" and "Disputed Strategy." The first-named shows a
group of courtiers awaiting the coming forth of the King's favoured friend from an
inner chamber. Envy, hatred, and any other passions inspired by the situation,
are under fair control and disguise here, if we compare this picture with Mr. L.
Pott's on the same subject, and bearing, if we mistake not, the same title, in which
the favourite is watched for by the assassin and his hirers. Mr. Seymour Lucas
gives us the comedy of the situation, and Mr. Pott, who has a very considerable
power of violent expression, the melodrama. " Disputed Strategy " belongs to a
series of the painter's works very distinct in the matter of size, being smaller, but
also much more concentrated in the thought and work which go to the perfection
of a composition. Officers in command are consulting at their improvised head-
quarters in a cottage, and on the rude table between them is a map of the fortifications
of the town they are attacking. While the younger general strongly urges an
attempt on a certain weak point, the elder is still dubious. Meanwhile the soldier
set to keep guard comes in with a bad report ; the generals have been long making
up their minds, and their followers are suffering by their inaction. "A Spy in the

144

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

Camp " is a scene from the campaigns of Marlborough ; a spy, disguised as a
hawker, has been detected, and is brought forward by the grenadiers, from whom
he tries to escape, while the general is scanning him through and through, and an
inferior officer has pen and paper in hand to take down any facts that may be
ascertained.

In 1883 appeared " My Country Cousin" — a clever little picture of two gentlemen

Al'TKH CULLODEN — RUHEL HUNTING.

(Cltanlny Bfquesl, 18S4.)

in eighteenth-century costume at dinner — and " A Whip for Van Tromp." The
labter is one of the painter's most successful works. It shows a group at the
Admiralty in 1652, after the visit of the Dutch to English waters. The lords are
consulting over the model of the ship that was to be a " whip " to encounter the
defiant broom of the Dutch admiral. The seated figures in their dignified dress
are exceedingly well posed, and the whole picture has thorough animation in spite
of its general repose. Next year came " After Culloden." A French officer, brought
over by the Pretender, is trying, after the disaster of Culloden, to make his way
to the coast. On the road his horse has cast a shoe, and he stops at a village
smithy, where the farrier is a sturdy Jacobite. The Hanoverian troops have tracked

106

140 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

the Frenchman to the forge, and appear on the scene just as the horse and the
overcoat are there to bear witness to the hiding of the fugitive. Never, perhaps,
has Mr. Seymour Lucas's square and solid draughtsmanship appeared to more
advantage than in the excellent figures in this picture. " From the Field of
Sedgmoor " —shows another fugitive — a poor agricultural labourer, who in his haste
to escape from " Kirk's Lambs " has taken refuge in the wayside cottage of his
sweetheart. He is exhausted with his flight, but the girl is alert at the bolted door.
Outside there is furious work as the sabres of the cavalry are mowing down combatants
and non-combatants alike by the roads and ditches. "During the day," says
Macaulay, " the conquerors continued to chase the fugitives. The neighbouring
villages long remembered with what a clatter of horse-hoofs and what a storm of
curses the whirlwind of cavalry swept by." Here once more is a female figure,
and a very sympathetic one, and the picture altogether has far more human emotion
than the painter often allows himself. With it w7ere two portraits. In the following
3^ear (188G) came " Peter the Great at Deptford." The terrible Czar who created
the Kussian navy is studying the Lion (of which there is now a model at Greenwich),
and which was at Deptford at the time of Peter's visit. The artist has made
most careful researches into the construction of the model. Our last illustration
is of the eighteenth century genre picture that contains the painter's most brilliant,
and indeed splendid, execution. Among Mr. Lucas's drawings in black-and-white
are spirited designs for an equally spirited poem, published in the Magazine of Art,
by Mr. Edmund Gosse, in which the story is told how some English buccaneers
of Elizabethan times — better versed in the Protestant religion than in respect for
international property — held their own against Spanish friars.

Mr. Seymour Lucas has his home at West Hampstead. His studio is reached
down a wide flight of steps from the entrance-hall. Immediately within the outer
door is a wind-porch, ingeniously constructed out of fine old panelling ; the wood-
work has the bloom upon it which age gives to chosen oak that has been uudefiled
by varnish or paint. The room itself is simple in design, and well proportioned ; its
decoration consists in clever adaptations of old woodwork to the requirements of
the studio. A. gallery made in this manner, which serves as a dressing-room for
models, is both picturesque and useful. Its front is ornamented with a mask, carved
by Mr. Lucas himself ; the over-mantel is from an old inn at Oxford. The chief
glory, however, of the studio, is the collection of armour, swords, and curios of the
fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. A pilgrim's staff, crowned with a
mediaeval head, and worn near the top by the constant pressure of the palmer's
hand, must be unique. Two large wooden coffers contain a collection of costumes
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both beautiful and curious ; some of
them have the rents and blood-stains that vouch a tragic story. The whole place
is in admirable keeping with the phase of art which Mr. Seymour Lucas has taken
for his own, and reflects much credit on its designer, Mr. Sydney Lee.

JOSEPH ISRAELS.

[ANY imitators have failed to rob the work of this Dutch painter of its
originality and freshness. He retains the initiative which belongs to
him, and the fact that no one who lias followed has rivalled him
leaves him master of an art, most beautiful in conception, most pic-
torial in execution, of the true depths of which he himself keeps the key.
The painter of the pathos of peasant life, Israels is, of course, one of
those great artists (whether in letters or in line and colour) who show a special
aspect of the world as it is interpreted by a special temperament. He has never
professed to touch the whole range of human experience, but he proves himself
great in as much as within the narrow part of the world's life to which he has
devoted his studies he has found more variety and power, more significance and

148 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

humanity, than a less penetrating hand and heart would evoke from the whole
various world of the happiness and sorrow of mankind, in the heights and glories
of fortune and in the depths and simplicities of lowly life. With these heights
and glories he has had no dealing. He has touched the notes of poverty and
humility only, presenting the incidents of peasant life in which large tragedies
are played out with little dramatic expression.

It is principally his perfect understanding of this reticence in the actions of
the poor which has made M. Israels a true and great artist. He knows pro-
foundly the curious habit of forbearing to appeal for sympathy which the poor
acquire from the fact (a fact we have the courage to assert in contradiction to a
very great deal of conventional assertion to the contrary) that there is extremely
little interchange of sensibility in that class of mankind. That the poor give one
another help and succour under the most difficult conditions is a happy and noble
truth ; but it is a misunderstanding of all their character and traditions to affirm
that they have even a touch of the sympathy which comes with high education,
and which makes the sorrows of others sink poignantly into the heart. Every one
who knows the poor at all, and knows how to see with true eyes, has remarked
the common kind of cheerfulness with which the most heartrending sicknesses,
deaths, bereavements, and all sufferings are treated by them ; how they seem to
find a vulgar, but doubtless wholesome, comfort in funerals and in their more
ghastly preliminaries, and how they are able to eat and drink and to make what
mental cheer they ever enjoy in the immediate presence of frightful bodily agony.
Now, the poor know each other quite well, and recognise these habits and tradi-
tions in each other. They will expect and accept difficult personal service, but
they will not look for tenderness and a partaking of sorrows. And not looking for
these things, they cease to make that natural unconscious appeal for them which
consists in tears, pathos, and self-abandonment and all the indeliberate spontaneous
drama of sorrow. The poor, as a class, have very little expression in their faces
and very little expressiveness of voice or action. Their vocabulary is extremely
limited, not only because of ignorance, but because of reluctance to use expressive
or emotional words which will find no echo in the hearts about them. They
describe their sorrows in a phraseology of almost grotesque conventionality. Their
manifestation of feeling is inarticulate, and the feeling itself seems to be inarticu-
late too ; it is formless, a passive endurance which has not learned the habit, so
rooted in the nature of the literary classes, of formulating itself in mental sentences.

M. Israels is one of the few men living or dead who have shown us the
labouring man and the labouring woman as they really are in labour, hope, and
endurance. Their unconsciousness, their involuntary heroism, their abstention from
that universal drama of the educated and the literary — the articulate — classes,
have penetrated his mind and guided his hand throughout his long and varied
presentment of the lives of the poor. For instance, in one of the most terrible
and beautiful of his pictures — " Alone " —the absence of what is usually considered

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

expression and expressiveness is very remarkable. It is the interior of some lowly
Dutch homestead, where, stretched very peacefully, in a kind of undemonstrative
repose, lies a thin and pale old woman. She has this moment died. By her
bed-side stand the poor and prosaic accompaniments of illness, and her old husband,
who has been sitting up with her in the pathetic helplessness of his sex and state,
turns in his chair with his two hands on his knees. He turns his back to her,
and sits so with his inexpressive eyes fixed and his uneloquent body and limbs in an
every-day attitude. Nothing of the wrung hands and the abandonment to grief of
the educated and the "gentle." The old man has his sorrow full in the middle
of his heart, but it is not formulated into the poignant thoughts of the rich man.
Neither thought nor feeling has the acute dart which education and literary tradi-
tion give to the thought and feeling of their subjects and victims, though we know
that much sentimentality will cry out at our averment. But, nevertheless, the old
man is full of grief — to his whole capacity. And long after some neighbouring
housewife has left her good man and her children to do charitably, but with a kind
of prosaic excitement and pleasure, the last dreadful offices for the dead woman—
ay, and for many and many a year to come — the widower will mourn sombrely and
silently ; he will go down into the grave mourning, but without any pathetic or tender
habits of body or soul.

And this simple truthfulness— stronger to move us than the utmost effort of less
sincere and observant sentiment could be — appears in everything that Israels has
painted. It is, of course, more striking in sad than in happy subjects ; and, in
painting the lives of the poor witli their utter lack of the chief happiness and
pleasures of the world, he has quite rightly chosen sad incidents as a general
practice. But it is present with equal power, though with less emphasis, in brighter
motives. Take, for instance, his picture "Expectation." Here is again a peasant
Dutch interior. A young woman, not beautiful, modest, dressed with the austere
absence of charm or grace which in most countries characterises the young matron
of the peasant classes, sits at work alone. Close at her side is the still empty
cradle ; the hopeful industrious hands that have sewn its sheets and its covers are
hastening to finish the swaddling clothes and the little coats. There is not a touch
of drama, conscious or unconscious, in the picture. There is no upturning of joyful
tearful eyes in prayer for safety and in thanksgiving for the coming gift. The yoiing
expectant mother makes no appeal for sympathy from men or angels or — a common
form of appeal among the less simple — from herself. She is mentally and morally,
as well as physically, alone with her rather austere happiness, and is not sparing a
moment from her work to formulate her feelings. We will not say, for we do not
hold, that this is the fullest, highest, or largest mind that -a woman may be in;
whatever may be thought of it, it is truly and simply the mind of a peasant
woman. And the picture gives a strong impression of chaste and serious happiness.
The spectator feels that he has been admitted into a quiet sanctuary of Natiire,
where her great process of reproduction is going forward with the gravity that

JOSEPH ISRAELS. 151

befits ifc, far from any hint of profane levities or more profane shame. It is a
curious comment, by the way, on the frigid purity of the work and on the — well,
the other kind of feeling on the part of the public — that after "Expectation" had
been exhibited at Messrs. Goupil's gallery, the title was abruptly changed in a
manner that disguised the subject. People were given to understand that the
picture represented a mother sewing by the side of a cradle bereft of — not awaiting
—its little sleeper. The j'oung peasant had lost her child, and as the death of a
child is always popular and pleasing, especially to people who have never realised
it, and who like ready-made feeling, doubtless M. Israels' popularity gained by the
alteration of the name.

Nevertheless, as we have said, this master has studied almost without inter-
mission the sadness and mourufulness of lowly life. In his great picture of the
"Wreck," where the dead are being carried across the sands, amid the wind and
wave, there is more than usual effectiveness and demonstrativeness of action ; for
a sudden violent catastrophe startles even the poor out of their habits of reserve ;
but here, as everywhere, the modesty of nature — of peasant nature — is not violated.
And in innumerable scenes of sorrow, death, and pain, it is respected by the most
delicate and consummate art. And now and then, as in the "Orphans of Katwijk"
and the "Evening," it is a theme neither sad nor happy of which Israels treats.
He shows us the children of a Dutch charity sewing in their simplicity in a room
where the very accessories speak seclusion and peace ; and labourers faring home-
ward after their patient day in the patient fields — most hackneyed of motives,
indeed, but one which has all possible freshness and directness under the master's
touch.

M. Israels is so great an artist that in writing of his work we reserve all
mention of his technique to the last; but he is far too great an artist to allow us
to omit a mention of it altogether. As a colourist his power is very wonderful,
wielded as it is within limitations of grey and sombre tones. Variety, loveliness,
and all qualities of distinction in colour are his, and there is a quite exquisite
pleasure to be found in the tones and tints of his grey walls, smoke-embrowned,
and the dim blues of some stuffs of the peasant's weaving. His execution is alto-
gether charming — impressionary in his slighter work, complete in his more deliberate;
but, whether impressionary or complete, true and right, and therefore in a manner
finished, from the first stroke. He has acquired a mastery over technique to which
we should do no justice if we called it facile. Mastery should not look too easy.
The execution of a picture should, as Mr. Coventry Patmore has cleverly said of
verse, feel but not suffer from difficulties. In M. Israels' work there is never
any triumph of ease or dexterity, or rather there is no advertisement of the triumph.
None the less is his power manifested, in composure, perfection, and accomplish-
ment. And moreover, his manner is the converse of that of artists — whether in
line or letters — who have a tight and tense form and expression, and only loose
thinking and slovenly feeling behind it. His matter is solid and strong, and his

JOSEPH ISRAELS.

153

manner light and full of " touch." Needless to say that though inheriting much
from the Dutch masters of the past, he is an intensely modern Dutchman ; his
pathos has modern profundity, and his technique a modern relaxation and mystery,
quite unlike the explicit completeness of the older national school. He belongs to
his time in all that is worthiest in the feeling and art of the age.

107

A FLOOD IN THE FENS.

(In the Collection of the late Captain Hill.)

R. W. MACBETH, A.R.A.

JR. MACBETH is equally eminent in colour and in that most sugges-
tive of all black-and-white arts, etching — the one pure art of line that
is left since engraving has become somewhat adulterated, as it were,
with all kinds of effects not peculiar to line. He has achieved his
most popular fame as the broad and brilliant painter of the " Sacrifice,"
bitt perhaps his finest genius is shown in the exquisite Tightness and
delicacy of his etched work. Perhaps other etchers have more mastery of this
art as a kind of shorthand, to be interpreted by those who know the signs ;
and doubtless many among the French etchers of the quite opposite, or deliberate,
school, have a more explicit completeness of execution ; but for sensitive and poetic
touch, for luminosity and harmony, no one living has a higher place than Mr.
Macbeth. And this rare and beautiful sensibility, with an almost equally rare
understanding of the limitations, and therefore of the powers, of the etched line,
he has devoted to interpreting the most poetic works of modern English art.

But etching is not yet altogether popular, and Mr. Macbeth had already estab-
lished himself as a painter before his etchings became famous. Perhaps the
earliest very conspicuous picture by him was the " Lincolnshire Gang," a work
which made the singular attempt to combine pictorial presentation with a kind of
blue-book report on the conditions of agricultural labour in the Fen country. Mr.
Macbeth intended to make a beautiful realistic picture, and also to appeal to public
feeling as to the equivalent of slavery which exists in the land of the free. It is

R. W. MACBETH, A.It.A.

155

scarcely necessary to say that, despite all the fine qualities of the painter and all
the good intentions of the philanthropist, the " Lincolnshire Gang" was neither a
good picture nor an explicit text of social science. The presence of the slave-
driver with his dogs and his whip needs a catalogue explanation, and the whole
thing is part literature, part art. The painter shows us a yard with some straw-
thatched sheds, under which men, women, and children, are just waking to the
harsh blast of a horn. It is summer daybreak, and the field-hands, the homeless
labourers, who are without rights as well as without homes, are to be driven afield
with crack of whip and barking of dogs to their work until the evening. The
short uneasy slumbers of people who rest in the chill dews upon straw and earth
are brought to a rude close,
and the sleepy children
lean wearily against their
mother's knees in a man-
ner that brings reminis-
cences of Mrs. Browning's
verses, applicable to these
children of the fields, though
written for tlie still sadder
children of the factory and
the streets :—

" They are leaning their young heads

against their mothers,
But that cannot stop their tears."

LANDING 8AUWNES AT LOW TIDK.

The central group of women and girls standing up ready for departure is a very
noble one, so grave, patient, and upright are the attitudes ; but here, as in the
figure of the driver, with his two fierce dogs and his whip, and in that of a man
running on the left, the imitation of Frederick Walker passes the limits of mere
discipleship and derivation.

The next picture was far more legitimately a picture, seeking to point no
moral, except the implicit moral of all labour. " Potato Harvest in the Fens " is
the title, and women and children, as before, bear the chief part, being grouped
high in the middle of the composition, in all attitudes of gathering, from the full
standing position of the girl who has raised herself to fasten up her hair, to
the kneeling and croxiching of the pickers at her feet. The action of this girl,
by the way, with her two arms uplifted, has as strong suggestions of Mason as
the other picture showed of Walker. The time is late afternoon, and the baskets
are being filled with the potatoes ploughed up in the furrows. In the background
the ploughman sends his long lash curving against the sky to reach the leader of
his team. The sky is windy, and holds a dark rain-cloud throughout ; the figures
are perfectly realistic in occupation and dress, but Greek in line — a combination
invented by the genius of Mason. In the following year (1878) appeared " Sedge-

150 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

cutting in Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire." In this beautiful picture Mr. Macbeth
has more than ever caught the spirit of the country which nurtured the magical
side of Lord Tennyson's landscape genius. The Fens inspired an altogether new
note in English poetry, a note which all who have an ear for such spiritual notes
recognise in such passages as —

" The long grey fields at night ;

When from the dry dark wold the summer airs blow cool
On the oat-grass and the sword-grass and the bulrush in the pool."

And with a singular phase of poetry that sad English country has inspired a
singular phase of art. Mr. Macbeth's feeling for sedge and fen and low sky is
almost as admirable, fine, and sensitive as Lord Tennyson's. In this picture he
has fewer figures, all having the dignity peculiar to the school. The sky is the
grey characteristic sky of the place. In the catalogue he tells us " Sedge-cutting
is one of the remnants of a feu industry, and Wicken Fen is the only remaining
portion of a great fen district on which the sedge lias free growth. This fen is
now reduced to a small acreage by man and his agricultural improvements."

The artist lingered in the same regions to paint " The Flood in the Fens,"
taking a strong but gentle delight in the levels, the large horizons, the spaces
of water, and the incidents of the local industries. But he was obviously obliged
to go on with his peculiar kind of idealisation. In so far as concerns Nature
only, the artist at work in England may still follow the facts to his heart's content.
The national manner of money-making has not yet so changed the face of the
country that art could not deal with it until such time as vanished prosperity
should restore the blue, the gold, the green, and the crystal, to sky, sunshine,
sward, and brook. Not that a true artist would wish — patriotism apart — to see
that time ; he would not wish to separate humanity from Nature, and he knows
that the sights and sounds and scents of labour — the husbandman at toil, the
sound of a pickaxe in some distant quarry of the hills, the odour of the smoulder-
ing weeds and leaves — should add to a landscape almost all its meaning and
pathos. A true artist would not push on the work of banishing the peasant from
the land, but, on the contrary, would send him back thither from the courts and
alleys and factories of the town. Few people know — even now that Mr. Macbeth
and many other artists have shown them — how beautiful ploughing and all other
direct agricultural industries really are. That they are most beautiful and most
various is, however, true, and the painter need not seek for a wild natural world
for his picture. He may, as we have said, be as true to facts as he likes while
he is dealing with the water, the meadows, and the hills' of modern England.
But it is otherwise when he comes to figures for his interest. Man's rural
labour does not disfigure the land, but man himself — English man, at least —
undoubtedly requires idealising, unless our national sentiment will allow us to
reach some French painters' point of stoical indifference to the beautiful. Mr.

R. W. MACBETH, A.R.A.

157

Macbeth is, of course, a figure-painter, and lie deals with the British peasant in a
manner which would fain be naturalistic but cannot ; the subject is too unmanage-
ably unpicturesque. In his studies of working gangs aroused from rest for the
day's toil, of men and women at work ingathering the potato-harvest, and of
people, cattle, and pigs, taking refuge from a flood, he has striven hard for realism
of subject, and has succeeded with very pleasant effect ; but in the figures them-

" She's ta'cn her mantle her about,

And sat down by the shore."— THE MILLER'S Sox.

(from "British AiHotlf.")

selves, in the types of feature and the character of expression, in the mould of
limb and the turn of gesture, he has assuredly relied on other memories or other
models than those of the Fen country. Heroic aspirations are evident in his work ;
and although he avoids, with an artist's tact, any absurdity of false refinement or
prettiness, he has not been able to deny himself a certain refinement of his own,
no less unreal, if more judicious. One of the great charms of his picture of " A
Flood in the Fens " is its pleasing harmony of colours and its extreme brightness
of tone ; in the latter respect it is pushed up to a high point, the colours and
tones striking a chord like that of an orchestra where the instruments are tuned
up above concert-pitch.

Forsaking England for a time, Mr. Macbeth painted in 1879 his " Sardine
Fishery," in which the illumination is particularly decorative. Women are mend-
ing nets upon the shore, and the sardine boats arc setting sail from the Breton

158

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

harbour. Next year appeared " In Clover," girls visiting a horse in his stable, of
which the floor is strewn with the honey-sweet homely flower ; and in 1881 the
artist had three pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery, and at Burlington House "The
Ferry." This bright scene of smooth water and smooth sky has a graceful com-
position of country people of the early century making their transit from bank to
bank. To 1883 belong " The Sacrifice " and " The Signal." That year the artist
first exhibited as an Associate of the Academy, and his work justified his new
honours. "The Sacrifice" shows a girl in the shop of an eighteenth-century
perruquier. She has sold her magnificent red-gold hair, and sits patiently to be
shorn, cheered doubtless by the thought that though she may sell the growth she

keeps the seed, and that before long her charming cropped
head will again flow with her tresses. The picture is
exceedingly brilliant.- " Waiting " followed — a girl on a
bank, in an antique dress, with two dogs at her side ; also
"The Ferry Inn" and "Betrothed," a study of a female
figure in white. At the Grosvenor in 1883 Mr. Macbeth
had " Sheep-shearing," men hard at work in the interior
of a shed, watched by some seated figures. The principal
fiction is that of the man who rests himself by rising to
his full height, with the fleece in one hand, and draws
the other arm, with the shears grasped in the fingers,
across his forehead. In 1885 both this artist's contribu-
tions to the
Academy — "The
Miller and the
Maid" and "Eipe
October " — were
criticised for a
certain slovenli-
ness of execu-
tion. The next
year he had no-
thing at the
Academy ; and
in 1887 he was
represented by
" Ambrosia," an
exuberant Hebe
of the tavern,
red - haired and

"They've ta'en a weapon long and sharp UTOad - armed,

And cut him by the knee."— JOHN BARLEYCORN*. • • n

(From "British Ballads.") SGrVing, With

R. W. MACBETH, A.R.A.

159

smiles, some hungry traveller with a tray of oysters and the condiments that fit
them so well.

Mr. Macbeth's work in black-and-white is too abundant to be noticed here
in detail. Every Academy for many a year has had examples of his admirably
beautiful work with the point. His interpretations of Mason, Pinwell, and Walker,
are most famous, but his original designs have a grace all their own. Both his

" Smile, lady, smile ! I will not set
Upon my brow the coronet,
Till thou wilt gather roses white
To wear around its gems of light."— THE RED FISHERMAN.

(From "British Balladt.")

" Lady Bountiful " and the pretty interior to which he gave the title " Here it
is " inspired lines worthy of the painter's best qualities. To the former — the lovely
and radiant lady in her furs going over the snow to succour her poor — Mr. Austin
Dobson wrote : —

" St. Charity ! In classic time
They would have carved her large, sublime,

Less mind than matter;
Lifting a horn that overflows
To men whose need (like Figaro's)

But makes them fatter.

1GO THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

" Or, in the neo-Dtirer style,
They would have made her grimly smile

From wrecks symbolic ;
Symbol herself of grinding want,
Hard, introspective, haggard, gaunt,
And melancholic.

" Now, we have changed all that. To-day
We treat her in a different way;

We make her pretty ;
We send her tripping through the snow,
To pour her pity on the woe
Of some huge city.

" God speed ! Kind heart, kind hand, kind eyes,
Life to too many a one denies

The joy of laughter,

That we should grudge, when you go by,
To wish your errand well, and cry

Our blessing after ! "

"Here it is!" presents a breakfast - tabl.-, with its graceful adornments and
fresh Spring flowers, at which sits the slender lady of the house opening out the
Times, with that happy interest which means that a woman's vicarious amhition
is on the alert for something to be found in its columns. The anonymous poem
has rare grace and feeling :—

" With fans and china, flowers and kits,
Lo ! in that room alone she sits
Where now they tread through shining lands
The life of wedded hearts and hands ;
And, still the lover, still the bride,
Wonder with each new morning tide
To share each other's days, and find
Her growing first of womankind,
And him the chief of men. Read on !
The light that late so languid shone
Now broadens trembling into day ;
For lo ! among the quaint array
In the long gallery's radiant rows
Your picture by your lover glows !
Read on, 0 bride, with happy eyes,
And bind your love with lighter ties,
Silk over gold, a human twine
To wreath and decorate the divine !
Not singly of itself shall grow
Your love, nor unattended go :
Henceforward pride shall bear a part
To bind that love about your heart;
And you shall hear the note of praise
Tuned to the song of married days."

Other original etchings are " Coming from St. Ives' Market " and " Study of
a Classic Figure." Mr. Macbeth has also interpreted with the point Titian's

Ill
K

R. W. MACBETH, A.E.A.

1(51

"Bacchus and Ariadne." To the "British Ballads" he contrihuted a number of
illustrations. The suhject of the first, here reproduced, is a ballad from Buchan's
collection, in which are sung the fortunes of a young maiden supposed to have been
forsaken by her lover. She sings a sweet enough lamentation, averring that—

"Some do mourn for oxen, .

And others mourn for kye,
And some do mourn for dowie death,
But none for love hut I."

And the refrain is ever —

And cauld and shrill the wind blaws still
Between my love and me."

Her love left her with the fondest vows, but since he sailed away in the
she has had no letters.

Next is Mr. Macbeth's design for the weird ballad in which Pracd
the Abbot's vision of
"The lied Fisher-
man." This Fisher-
man is no other than
the Evil One, who
casts baits into the
abominable pool and
catches souls with
the things they love.
With dainties and
the jests and jolli-
ties of a feast he
fishes up the Abbot's
brother, the Mayor
of St. Edmund's
Bury ; with the wea-
pons and sights and
sounds of battle he
catches a knight
whom the Abbot
finds to be the cruel
Duke of Gloucester;
with a " bundle ol
beautiful things," a peacock's tail, silk and pearl, scarlet slippers, perfumes
letters, and a passionate song, the evil fisherman makes a cast for a lady's

the song Was:- ««Smile, lady, smile! I will not set

TJjxm iny brow the coronet
Till thou gather roses white
To wear around its gems of light

108

Goldspink

describes

• They rowed HIT in across the rolling foam.
The cruel, crawling fouin." -THE SANDS o' I)EK.

and love-
soul, and

162

TUB MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

'Smile, lady, smile ! I will not see
Rivers and Hastings bend the knee
Till those bewitching eyes of thine
Will bid me rise in bliss from mine.

'Smile, lady, smile ! for who would win
A loveless throne through guilt and sin 1
Or who would reign o'er vale and hill,
If woman's heart were rebel still 1 '

' He's ta'cn his niithcr by the hand. His six brothers also.
And they are on through Elmond's wood As fast as they could Kt> "— YOUNG AlKIN.

"One jerk, and there a lady lay,

A lady wondrous fair ;
But the rose of her lip had faded away,
And her cheek was as white and as cold as clay,

And torn was her raven hair.

" ' Ah ha ! ' said the Fisher, in merry guise,

' Her gallant was hooked before ; '
And the Abbot heaved some piteous sighs,
For oft he had blessed those deep blue eyes —
The eyes of Mistress Shore ! "

Next the trembling Abbot finds that new baits are being sought for ; but one after
another the Fisherman tosses them aside, looking for something which proves to

R. W. MACBKTIf, AM. A.

1C3

be a bishop's mitre. In mortal terror the Abbot, knowing for whom this is des-
tined, falls on his knees and makes the sign of the Cross, just in time ! The cock
crows, and the red Fisherman is obliged to lock up his box of bait and fly. Mr.
Macbeth has chosen the one sentimental passage from this most grisly story. His
next two drawings are for Burns's "John Barleycorn" and for Kingsley's "Sands
o' Dee;" and afterwards comes the illustration of "Young Aikin." In the words
of Buchan, who lias it in his collection, this fine ballad is, " to all appearance,
very old, and agrees with the romantic history and times of Fergus II. It will be
considered by all lovers of Scottish song as a great acquisition to their store of
traditionary poetry. The heroine, Lady Margaret, a king's daughter, was stolen by
her father's cup-
bearer, who built for
her a bower in which
she was so artfully
confined that no one
could have dis-
covered the place of
her residence. In
this bower she bare
to her adopted hus-
band seven sons, the
oldest of whom was
the means of releas-
ing her from her
dreary abode. On his
arrival at the Court
of his grandfather,
whither he had gone

to reconnoitre, the old man at once perceived such a family likeness in the face of
this woodland boy as made him inquire after the fate of his long-lost daughter.
She, with the rest of her sons, arrived at her father's palace, and like the prodigal,
or long-lost son, was welcomed with joy and gladness." This same " little wee boy,"
whom Mr. Macbeth has made extremely robust in accordance with his energetic cha-
racter, obtains his father's pardon also, and winds up by asking for " Christeudoun "
for himself and his brothers. The mother is ashamed to go within the church :—

" Then out it speaks tlic parish priest

And a sweet smile ga'e he :

' Come ben, come ben, my lily flower ;

Present your babes to me."

"Charles, Vincent, Sam, and Dick,

And likewise John and James ;
They called the eldest young Aikin,
Which was his father's name."

" ' GKXTl.K IIKK1ISMAN, TELL TO MK.'

164. THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

The last illustration is from an old ballad, placed by Dr. Percy in his col-
lection, which takes the form of a dialogue between a pilgrim and a herdsman.
The scene is laid near Walsingham, in Norfolk, where there was formerly a shrine
of the Blessed Virgin Mary, famous all over Europe, to which many pilgrimages
were made. The wealthy brought rich offerings, and among the annual donors
were the Earls of Northumberland. The shrine wras connected with a priory of
Augustinian Canons, founded about the middle of the twelfth century. Several English
kings visited this spot. In 1538, when the monasteries were destroyed, the figure
•which had stood within the shrine was conveyed to Chelsea and burnt there before
the Commissioners. The ballad opens with the courteous inquiry of the pilgrim
as to the " right and ready way " to the town of Walsingham. The herdsman
replies that the way is "hard for to be gon," to which the pilgrim urges that his
sin is so grievous and ill that, if the way were thrice as long, it would not be
enough for his offence. But, says the herdsman :—

" ' Tliy y pares are young, thy face is faire,

Thy witts are weake, thy thoughts are grene ;
Time hath not given thee leave, as yett,
For to commit so great a sinne.'

" ' Yes, herdsman, yes, soe wouldst thoti s:iy,

If thou knewest soe much as I ;
My witts, my thoughts, and all the rest
Have well deserved for to die.

" ' I am not what I seem to bee,

My clothes and sexe do differ farr;
I am a woman, woe is me !

P>orn to greeffe and irksome care.'"

Then she tells him how she had a sincere and noble lover who tenderly loved

her, so that growing proud and coy with the devotion of this " flower of noble

knights," she wearied him with delays until he got to a secret place, and died with-
out relief.

" ' Thus every day I fast and pray,
And ever will do till I die ;
And gett me to some secrett place,
For soe did he, and soe will I.' "

The dialogue docs not end in the sentimental and banal manner of the last
century. The herdsman does not turn out to be the injured lover who, instead
of dying, had taken to agricultural pursuits to distract his mind. Having heard the
pilgrim's story he is evidently inclined to think that her sin does indeed merit
the hardest penance she can do, and he directs her 011 the weary way to Our
Lady of Walsingham.

" ' Now goe thy wayes, and God before !

For Hee must ever guide thee still ;
Turne down that dale, the right-hand path,
And soe, faire pilgrim, fare thee well.'"

(Bronze hy Auguste Rodin.)

JEAN-PAUL LAURENS.

HE list of the works of Jean-Paul Laurcus is, like that of the works of
Paul Delaroche, a series of catastrophes, a kind of martyrology. It is a
perpetual ' fifth act.' ' Thus spoke M. Charles Blanc, as lie passed in
review M. Laurens' contributions to the International Exhibition of
1878, and every one was forced to admit, at least, the apparent truth of
his statement ; hut when he went on to suggest that the painter's choice
of subject was a proof of coldness of heart, and to see in the frequency of tragic
themes an artifice by which the artist worked up his own emotions and those of
others, he hazarded an opinion which M. Laurens' fine series of illustrations of
the " Imitation " (1876) were by themselves sufficient to refute.

Executed in sepia very broadly washed, these drawings presented the same

16(J THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

interesting character of touch as marked the master's work with the brush. The
head of Christ intended as a frontispiece had a genuine and mystical character,
noticeable in all the designs. In two of the series — " The Meeting of Hildebrand
and Bruno, Bishop of Toul," and " The Ghost of Mariamne appearing to Herod
the Great" — this mystical element was conjoined with a simplicity and soundness
of style and a reality in the rendering which gave sobriety to an otherwise fan-
tastic conception. The figure of Mariamne, swathed and bound in graveclothes,
was floating forwards — only her awful face exposed : Herod, at the sight of the
terrible image, falling on his knees in anguish and terror. The pressure of the
bands on the shroud which enveloped the figure was made to tell in a way which
added to the fearful truth of the movement— the solemn and inevitable advance
which M. Laurens had contrived to impress on the shade of the injured woman.
In the "Meeting of Hildebraud and Bruno," another spirit prevailed; the profound
peace of a saintly calm replaced the hideous nightmares of death and remorse, the
silent shadows were lit with the beauty of holiness, its sacred influence spoke alike
in the measured greeting of Hildebrand and in the absorbed quiet of St. Bruno.
Throughout it was indeed plain that M. Laurens had not only read his text, but
had caught and translated the peculiar spiritual accent of the " Imitation." Yet
his interpretation did not show signs of long brooding and meditation ; rather it
was marked by an extraordinary air of spontaneity. It was as if the artist, being
himself of a nature eminently susceptible to the moral influences of the " Imita-
tion," had read the volume for the first time, with fervent admiration and surprise.

The longer one looked at this series of designs the more plainly did two
questions present themselves : first, what was the explanation of the peculiar fresh-
ness and naivete of impression which, rare enough in all classes of work, is espe-
cially rare in that which treats themes sufficiently elevated to have been worthy
the mould of timeworn conventions ? secondly, how came it that a man, whose
every line and touch were laid with healthy skill, could dwell morbidly on visions
of tragic death ? Further, on examining the picture which M. Laurens had con-
tributed to the Salon of 1876, the second question put itself even more imperatively.
He had taken for his subject one of the designs suggested by the " Imitation " —
"Francis Borgia before the Open Coffin of Queen Isabella." He showed the gifts
of a colourist — gifts the character of which denoted, as plainly as his drawing and
design, that he was of a temperament sane, healthy, robust, and full of that joy
in his work which a healthy workman must feel. He manifested, in short, in the
treatment of a morbid theme a character which, however grave and serious, could
not be morbid. Two years later M. Ferdinand Fabre's " Bom an d'un Peintre "
gave the answers to our questions.

Jean-Paul Laurens was born in 1838, at Forquevaux, in the Lauraguais. A
peasant by birth, having lost his mother at an early age, he was left much to
himself, and, feeling little love for books, barely learnt to read and write at the
village school. On her death-bed his mother had let fall a "Book of Hours,"

JEAN-PAUL LAURENS. 167

which the child seized on and secreted. Turning over the leaves he one day
found an engraving of the " Nativity " of Carle Vanloo. This discovery excited
him strangely. The sight of the design, wretched as it was, disturhed him. He
shut up his book, and tried to forget what he had seen, hut in vain. Next day,
after having eagerly examined the engraving, he, though hardly able to trace a
letter of the alphabet, began to draw. Then he tried to reproduce Nature, but a
group of acacias in bloom baffled his utmost efforts, and, irritated by his failure,
he returned in despair to the sports he had forsaken. But his vocation was too
strong to bo thus diverted, and in 18/51 he quitted Forquevaux with a band of
itinerant Italians who had been employed to decorate the parish church. At the
first halt, in the little inn of Hte. Anne du Salat, an incident occurred which left
indelible traces on his imagination. The room in which he slept with Buccaferata,
his Italian master, opened into the chamber where the landlord's wife lay dead ;
disturbed by the misconduct of the servants, who should have kept watch by the
corpse, the Italian drove them away and took their task upon himself. Struck by
the strange beauty of the dead, Buccaferata set himself to reproduce her features,
bidding his terrified pupil hold aloft the candle which should light his labours.
Thus Laurens stood in agony till morning broke, and the experiences of that night
continue to exercise their strange fascination on the mind of the grown man, who
has become " le peintre des morts " —the painter of the dead.

Not only were Laurens' chances of professional instruction from his Italian
companions infinitely small, but, for long years, instruction of any other kind was
equally out of the question. They employed him as a servant, and it was not
until he had passed two years in this bondage that he made his escape, and suc-
ceeded, after heroic efforts, in getting into the art-school of Toulouse. There he
came in contact with the influences which were to shape his life. M. Willemsens,
the director of the Toulouse school — who has left an honourable name as an artist
— soon distinguished his merit. From him he received the teaching and encourage-
ment of which he stood in need ; and when, at last, Laureus was introduced into
his family, he found in the intelligent interest and kindly counsels of Mme.
Willemsens the stimulus needed for the development of his moral and intellectual
nature.

In I860 he left Toulouse for Paris. He had obtained from the town a yearly
pension of sixty pounds, and, with his daily bread thus assured, was enabled to
enter the atelier of Cogniet. As was the case with Millet, and in spite of the
undoubted promise given by his studies, Laurens failed to obtain the honours of
the Prix de Home. His first success was obtained by his painting " The Death
of Cato " (1803), which procured him the award of Honourable Mention from the
jury of the Salon. His pension from the town of Toulouse was but of three years'
duration ; and thrown on his own resources, Laurens had recourse to all the shifts
by which a man without name or fortune is reduced in order to live. But he
never lost his hold on the class of work which alone would satisfy his secret

168 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

ambitions. In 1864 he exhibited " The Death of Tiberius," a work which passed
without notice, and in which his remarkable personal qualities indeed were scarcely
perceptible. His ill success, though, stimulated him to fresh efforts. About two
years later, when M. Fabre made his acquaintance, he was living alone in two
little garrets in the Eue de Chabrol. His picture of "Christ Crowned with
Thorns " was in progress upon the easel ; and in his portfolio he had a set of

CATHOLIC SOVEREIGNS BEFORE THE GRAND INQUISITOR.

illustrations of the Bible, one of which, a "Vision of Ezekiel," excited in his
visitor an enthusiasm of honest admiration which brought him, once and for all,
into friendly relations with the painter.

At this time Laurens' favourite books were, says M. Fabre, the Bible, ^Eschylus,
and Shakespeare ; but he also possessed an old edition of St. Augustine's " Con-
fessions," Montesquieu's " Decadence des Eomains," a Tacitus, and some odd
volumes of a dictionary of history, which he had picked up about the quays. " One
could scarcely believe," says M. Fabre, "with what force a work of genius would

JEAN-PAUL LAURENS. 169

tell on this young man of twenty-five . . . who came from his native village
to the dazzling poetry of the Psalms, to the burning denunciations of the prophets,
to the bitter disillusions of St. Augustine, to the ' Annals,' to the ' Prometheus
Bound,' to the work of Shakespeare, immense as the ocean." In illustration of
his extraordinary sensibility, M. Fabre relates that one night he read to him Cor-
neille's " China." In the middle of the monologue of Augustus he was interrupted
by Laurens, who said, "Enough, enough; my head reels." M. Fabre saw that he
was pale, and anxiously asked what ailed him. "Nothing," answered Laurens;
and then touching the volume which the other held in his hand, he continued,
" Too many things there have moved me. ... It makes me ill.
Happy you who can admire so calmly. ... I am not accustomed to it, and
you know . . ! "

This anecdote furnishes the clue to the extraordinary vivacity and originality
which stamp M. Laurens' treatment of those historical themes which seem out-
worn in other hands ; even as the episode of Ste. Anne du Salat — the story of
the drear night passed in holding aloft the torch which lighted the chamber of
death — affords the explanation of the constant recurrence of similar themes in his
work. An extraordinary persistency of impression and tenacity of purpose are domi-
nant traits in M. Laurens' character : every incident of his career bears their
stamp. Ill and discouraged in 1808, he sought restoration to health, not in foreign
travel, but in a return to his native village. The constancy he has displayed in
his family ties has marked his relations with friends. The last hours of Mine.
Willemsens were tended by him witli the devotion of a sou ; and in 1869 his
marriage with her daughter but realised a hope cherished from boyhood.

The modest post of Professor of Drawing in a municipal school had enabled
Laurens to take this step by assuring him a certain, if small, income. Each of
the works which he produced in succession after the break occasioned by the
terrible year of 1870 proved the steady growth of strength and skill. First came
"St. Ambrose Instructing Honorius," "The Death of the Due d'Enghien," "Pope
Formosus and Stephen VII." (1872); then "The Pool of Bethesda " (1873) and
" The Cardinal and St. Bruno " (1874) — two works which revealed the influence
of a recent journey to Italy, and which brought their author the Cross of the
Legion of Honour; then "The Excommunication" and "The Interdict" (1875),
"Francis Borgia Before the Coffin of Queen Isabella" (1875), and "The Austrian
Staff Before the Body of Marceau." At first, in the presentment of tragic situa-
tions7 M. Laurens confined himself to their dramatic aspect. In "Before the In-
quisitors" we see a monk arraigned before his theological judges, and showing very
little sign of submission on the point in contest. The painter's admirably forcible
rendering of the scene in which Stephen VII. anathematises the dead body of his
predecessor is another work of the same class. "The Interdict," as regarded
sense of drama, was a work even more complete in itself; and finally, in the
" Marceau," M. Laurens displayed, in addition to the qualities which had

109

170 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

previously distinguished him, a capacity for analysing various shades of emotion, only
suspected to be his by those who had studied his illustrations of " The Imitation."
In this work M. Laurens proved himself a painter, an artist, and a man ; his
mastership could no longer be questioned, and he won the Prix du Salon.

In the following year the artist departed from his usual practice of dwelling
on the most gloomy aspects of life, and painted " The Release of the Prisoners of
Carcassonne," now in the Salon Triennial. " In the month of August, 1303," says
the livrct, "the people of Carcassonne and Albi, stirred by the preaching of Brother
Bernard Delicieux, broke into the dungeons of the Inquisition, under the eyes of
Jean de Pecquigny, the reformer of Languedoc." The picture did not and could
not have the same measure of popular success as attended the exhibition of the
"Marceai:," because it could not appeal, as that work did, to the imagination even
of the wholly untrained. But an extraordinary force of hue was obtained in the
scarlet and crimson clothes of the Inquisitor's figure, which occupied the centre
of the picture, by the juxtaposition of touches of green, such as Veronese loved,
and of the yellow draperies of one of the Consuls. This yellow, again, found its
full value in relief against the sombre brown of Bernard's garments ; and thus the
painter, by strengthening the blood reds and vermilions of the immediate foreground,
put the red-brick walls of the background, which would otherwise have been over-
powering, into their proper place. In " Catholic Sovereigns before the Grand
Inquisitor "—the dramatic group that illustrates the ghostly supremacy in days
when there was little nattering of kings — fine use is made of white in several
tones and varioiis illuminations.

It will be seen that as M. Laiirens gained in power, his personal tendencies, as
a colourist, asserted themselves more and more distinctly. Red, the hue which is sus-
ceptible of the greatest variety of modifications, took the leading place in his scheme
of colour, contrasted usually, as in the "Marceau" and the "Prisoners," with bril-
liant yellows and flashes of white. In his "Honoring — Lower Empire" (1880) the
child-emperor is draped in folds of scarlet, beneath which shows embroidered under-
clothing of gold and black on fawn-colour ; the scarlet of the mantle is spread by
the dull red of the pillow; and over the throne, of ebony inlaid with gold and
crimson and silver ornament, is thrown a cloth of silver, which plays the part of
white in the general scheme. His portrait of a lady exhibited in the following
year is also a study of reds, but of a different quality, and differently treated.

But M. Laurens had yet to feel the peculiar value and beauty of black, as a
colour, in schemes in which primitives play a conspicuous part ; and this seems to
have been first brought home to him when carrying out, in 1882, his large canvas
of " The Last Moments of the Emperor Maximilian," the original of our illustra-
tion. Black was, necessarily, the garb of his principal personage ; and shortly after-
wards we find him selecting black, employed in juxtaposition with white, as the
point of departure in his last and greatest achievement — the mural paintings in the
Pantheon. The earlier work was considered a failure. The death of Maximilian

JEAN-PAUL LAURENS.

171

was, it is true, acknowledged to be a page of history, but tragedy in a frockcoat
shocked the popular taste so deeply that few would look a second time. The
artist's materials did not, certainly, lend themselves readily to pictorial treatment :
the emperor stands between his valet and his priest, the one kneeling and kissing
his master's hand in the agony of farewell ; to the right stands the priest — he
would bid courage, but cannot for very anguish ; the door is opened, the glare of

LAST MOMENTS OF THE EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN.

tropical sunlight floods the little room and brings out the three black-robed figures
in startling contrast; the messenger of death is on the threshold, the orange and
red of his uniform add to the savage character and bilious hue of the typical
features seen beneath the broad shadow of the Mexican hat. In his face and the
emperor's the whole story is told : the one is worn and channelled with lines of
bitter experience, but resolute and nerved by the high courage which is one of
the noblest products of civilisation ; the other is unmoved, every muscle cast in a
mould of stolid savagery. The sunlight effect was rendered with admirable force
and truth ; and it was on this effect that M. Laurens had to rely, so as to give,

172 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

by skilful massing of light and shade, somewhat of a pictorial aspect to the scene,
over and above the incontestable merit which it acquired in virtue of his dramatic
insight and powers of vigorous delineation. To look attentively at this presentment
of the unfortunate victim of the Third Napoleon is never to forget something
which M. Laurens alone has the gift to show.

And this is, after all, a thing to notice specially in respect of M. Laurens'
•work — it is impossible to forget it. Go to the Pantheon and look at the four com-
partments in which he has depicted the death of St. Genevieve and the miracles
wrought at her tomb ; put away accepted theories as to mural decoration ; look
only at the pictures on the wall before you ; and you will bring something of it
away. In a hall which occupies the first three divisions, on a bed raised ahove
the crowd pressing from right and left to receive her blessing, lies the dying saint.
The white linen which drapes her emaciated form is isolated by full tones of black
and crimson. Here and there are passages in which — as in the figures of the
woman and children leaning forward on the left of the central compartment — M.
Laurens shows that his knowledge and skill in treating the nude equal the science
and art which he displays in the construction and disposition of his draperies.
The fourth compartment treats, as has been said, of the miracles wrought by the
saint after death. A sick woman in her bed has been laid upon her tomb. On
the left, priests stand and pray ; on the right are kneeling friends. From above
descends an angel, who lifts with his right hand the white coverings of the bed,
whilst, with an authoritative gesture of his left, he bids "Believe and be healed."
The illumination of the two subjects is skilfully contrasted by the introduction of
the lamps burning at the foot of the tornb in the second ; and the quality of the
whites — always beaiitiful with M. Laurens — is in this way finely varied under the
changing play and character of the light. Nor can we detect, from end to end of
this powerful work, a single figure or face which recalls a type of convention. The
various shades of emotion which find a point of departure in the exalted mysticism
of the dying saint are finely distinguished : the somewhat conventional solemnity of
the ecclesiastics is contrasted with the bitter grief and awe of a few ; the anxious
faith of the aged, with the charming reverence of childhood ; the elegant piety of
noble dames, with the martial conviction of their cavaliers. There is no suspicion
of masquerading in romantic garb : these people are not shadows, but belong to the
world which exists not now only, but always.

In these noble designs, as in the long series of M. Laurens' previous work,
every line he lays is a challenge to those who would restrict the artist in his choice
of subject to the manners and customs of to-day. For those whom his pencil touches
exist and live. Life, whose path he has persistently touched to within the very
gates of the tomb, has become the servant of a magician who can now confer its
gifts at will.

THE FfXF.HAI..

BASIL PEROFF.

ROBABLY the realistic, or naturalistic, school in art and literature began
earlier in Russia than in any other country. Even in the first half of the
present century Griboiedoff the dramatist, Kryloff the fabulist, the poets
Poushkine and Lermontoff, the novelist Gogol, and others, had depicted
entirely different phases of life from those attempted by their contemporaries.
After a long period of imitation and pseudo-classicism, a longing to give
expression to national feeling and reality was manifested almost simultaneously in
literature and painting. In painting, this aspiration was first betrayed purely in
externals, and not, as in literature, in any revelation of their inner significance.
Hence the pictures were at first quite as conventional as their predecessors, inas-
much as they did not attempt to portray any of the varied aspects of real life.
They are even less known, out of Russia, than the literature of the same period.
Venetzianoff, who flourished at the beginning of the present century and is the

174 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

father of national painting, confesses in his memoirs "that his long experience of
convention prevented him from following Nature." The real criminal was the St.
Petersburg Academy; it corrupted not only Venetzianoff and his pupils, hut every
other painter who worked under its auspices. Other conditions were needed to
develop a really national school ; and they revealed themselves in the second
quarter of the present century in the Academy of Sculpture and Architecture
originally established in Moscow by private enterprise. Just as the St. Petersburg
Academy only sought to imitate Western examples, nor dreamed of creating any-
thing individual and original, the Moscow foundation at once began to tend in the
direction of personal and national creation. It was therefore not its fault if its pupils
did not afterwards achieve anything remarkable.

The true representatives of latter-day realism are Fedotoff in St. Petersburg,
and Peroff in Moscow, both belonging to the middle of the century, and only
separated by an interval of some ten years. Fedotoff was a pupil of the famous
Bruloff, the last able representative of the pseudo-classical tendency ; and he was
indebted for his realism, not to his master, but to the influence of the fabulist
Kryloff. But Fedotoff was already a man grown when he began his studies, and
attained to great skill neither in drawing nor in colouring. His work includes, with
many drawings, a few pictures only ; and these, their realism notwithstanding, contain
a certain element of caricature.

Peroff far surpassed his predecessors. It was only now and then that he strayed
from the paths of realism, nor was he inducted into them by a single influence —
realistic expression became the object of his life. Moreover, he was better gifted
and more skilful and accomplished than Fedotoff. He was born, educated, and
brought up in the midst of every possible disadvantage. A son of Baron Kriidener,
he was unable to bear his father's name, the Eussian law forbidding the nobles to
legitimise children born out of legal wedlock. The name of Peroff (pero is Eussian
for "pen") was bestowed upon him by his first teacher for progress in writing, and
to distinguish him from another pupil who fidgeted his feet in class time, and who
was nicknamed Boltoff (from the verb boltat — " to shake "). His father, on account
of ill-health or the requirements of his office, or for other causes, was obliged to
keep moving from one town to another : from Tobolsk, in Siberia (where Peroff was
born in December, 1833), to Archangel ; from thence to St. Petersburg ; from St.
Petersburg to the Baltic provinces, and finally to Samara and Nijni-Novgorod. Here
he obtained the position of steward to an estate, and young Peroff found himself
in that environment he afterwards painted, not once, but constantly. Like his
father, he became a true friend to the peasants ; the last years of his career are
one long manifestation of love for them.

His first original work was religious. At seventeen, impressed by the Lenten
services, he painted a " Crucifixion " from a living model hung to a wooden cross with
ropes and rings. This picture to the contrary notwithstanding, his vocation from child-
hood had been genre, especially with reference to the lives of the poor and oppressed ;

BASIL PEROFF. 175

and soon after the " Crucifixion " he painted a " Beggar Asking Alms." He had
then only just left Stoupiu's studio in Arsamass, where, after finishing his course
at the village school, he had studied drawing and painting. Seeing his decided
talent for art, his parents resolved to send him to Moscow. There he entered the
Academy, and lived for some time in the house of the superintendent of a girl's
school. He was three years a student, and went away to be a drawing-master ;
but he was saved from this fate by his teacher, Vasilieff, who took him to his own
house. As the professors were constantly quarrelling among themselves, they had
no influence for good either on Peroff or on any of their other pupils. One would
recommend a servile imitation of a great master, meaning himself; another would
advise a deep and conscientious study of Nature ; while nothing satisfied a third
but literal and lifeless bodies. Though Peroff acquired from his teacher neither
science of drawing nor feeling for colour, his own native observation supplied him
with material, and unwearying labour enabled him to carry out his ideas. Thanks
to these qualities, the pictures he sent to St. Petersburg were always medalled.
Between 1850 and I860 the intellectual world was awakening to a strong impulse
towards nationalism after the period of stagnation and subordination under Nicholas-
Even the Academy had begun to shake off the pseudo-classic, and to admit genre
with other styles ; and Peroff was medalled for " A Boy's Head " (1856), the
"Village Magistrate," "His First Uniform," and the "Village Church" (1861).
They were not without mistakes of drawing and perspective, they were mannered
in the details, and the colouring was generally dry. But no other Russian, Fedotoff
excepted, had painted such realistic stuff, and it is not astonishing that they were
loudly praised and heartily admired. Many writers of distinction — more particularly
those who treated the negative side of Russian life — hailed the young painter as
the Gogol of Russian painting, or compared him with the dramatist Ostrovski and
Pissemski the novelist. And, indeed, his characters were all studied from living
people. They were there for any one to paint, though they had never been painted
before.

Another set of motives he derived from the seamy side of peasant life, and the
gross and sordid habits of the clergy (especially the monks), the bureaucracy, and
the upper class in general. Amongst these are " An Easter Procession " (1861), and
" En route for the Troiski" (1862). In the first he represents the start of a party
of priests, with crosses and icones, from the house of a rich peasant, after a good,
fat mid-day meal ; in the second, a gang of monks tea-drinking at an inn, with a
rnaid-servant hounding a lame soldier away from their table. Both were taken
directly from life ; but as the servants of the altar were displayed, not as angels,
but as common clay, they were not long allowed to be exhibited. With these and
kindred themes, however, he did more than sustain his reputation ; he won the gold
medal, and was sent to study abroad at the expense of the Academy.

He was consigned to Paris, where he at once set to work to paint the lives
of the common people — the beggars, the ragmen, the street musicians. But ho

176

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

soon saw " that lie could do nothing without a profound study of local conditions."
Then he began haunting the taverns, and sketching types wherever he found them ;

THE DRAWING-MASTER.

but this did not help him either. He writes thus to the Academy -— « Bein* un-
acquainted with the character and moral life of the people, I am unable to complete
a single picture. It seems to me less useful to devote a certain number of years

BASIL PEROFF. 177

to the study of a foreign country than to study and work out the immense wealth
that is hoarded in the villages and cities of my own." After a sufficient study of
the technique of his art, he asked leave to return. The Academy agreed with him
entirely ; and he was allowed to retrace his steps sooner than is customary. He
settled permanently in Moscow, devoted himself to painting Russian life, and hegan
to produce such scenes as " The Dinner " (1806) ; " A Holy-day Feast," to which
he afterwards added the figures of a general and his parvenu wife ; an " Old Beggar"
(1875) ; " The Funeral " (1865), which shows with inimitable truth a mother and
her two children seated on the same sledge with the father's coffin; "The Last
Wine Shop " (1868) ; " The Young Apprentice and the Parrot " (1866) ; and the
" Scene on a Railway " (1868). At other times he painted episodes in city life, as
"The Fountain" and "The Sledge;" or subjects from the life of poor ladies and
unfortunates, as "The New Governess" (1866) and "Drowned" (1867); or from
the life of poor clerks and teachers, as the "Post Office" (1866), and "The
Drawing Master " patiently awaiting his high-born pupils in a richly-furnished room.
For some of these he was elected Academician ; with others he took first prizes
both at St. Petersburg and Moscow.

In 1867, however, Peroff, under the influence of a dream, suddenly painted a
picture called " Christ and His Mother by the Sea of Life." He is not the only
one in whom we do find this abrupt transition from realism to mysticism ; it is
also the case with Gogol and Leo Tolstoi. Both began by painting every-day life
with extreme truthfulness, and afterwards threw themselves into religious thought
to the point of denying their former work. Peroff never reached such a pass as
this ; but he lingered long by the way, and busied himself almost exclusively with
portraiture, save for his "Autumn," his "Eavesdropper," and "The Bridal Eve."
The portraits painted at this time (1870-72) are remarkable. They will always
survive as striking examples of Russian portraiture, not merely for their resemblance
and naturalness, but especially as the presentments of famous men : of Pissemski,
Ostrovsky, Pogodin, Dostoievsky, Maikoff, Dahl, Turgenieff, the brothers Rubinstein,
and Stepanoff the artist. They were the first works in which Peroff attempted
life-size figures : before them he had painted on a small scale, like Meissonier.
But, however fine his portraits, they are in no sense creations, but simply excellent
studies from Nature.

His next departure was as a painter of peculiarities, when , lie produced "A
Fowler," "A Fisherman," "The Shooting Party," "A Pigeon Fancier," and "The
Botanist ; " these, like his portraits, rank with his best achievements in expression
and technical execution. But he still continued to paint the life of peasants and
the poor in general, though not, it must be allowed, with the old success ; and all
the while he was engrossed in what was then the burning questions of the relations
between the old and the new generations. This conflict of thought resulted, among
others, in " The Students and the Monk " (1871) ; " Bazaroff s Grave," from
Turgenieff's "Peres et Enfants" (1874), and others, many of them merely unfinished
no

178 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

sketches. From 1876 he ceased to exhibit, and devoted himself to the preparation
of a set of sketches on motives from the revolt of Pugatcheff. He was constantly
engrossed in the conflict between the new and old orders of things, not in the
present only, but also in the past ; and in its latest phase he recognised that the
strength lay with the innovators. Speaking generally, his historical work is ex-
cellent in detail, but the ensemble says nothing, and leaves the spectator indifferent.
Dissatisfied with his results, he again began to paint religion, allegory, and folk-lore :
the "Garden of Gethsemane," a "Descent from the Cross," "Spring," "The Snow
Maiden " (from a Russian story), and " The Czarevitch Ivan and the Grey Wolf."
A simpler, a less ambitious historical essay was " The False Demetrius and the
Monk Pynien." But he was never satisfied with anything he did. Art-critics
explained the alteration in his taste in various ways. Some thought it caused by
one or other of his external circumstances — the death of his first wife, his appoint-
ment to a chair in the Moscow Academy, the progress of phthisis. Others attri-
buted it to more occult causes : as, for instance, the change in the mental attitude
of society itself, which, after being on fire for great reforms, was entering upon a
time of moral lassitude, and even stagnation. And, again, it was said that, though
all his life he had denied the ideal, in the end his nature had overcome him
and obliged him to yield.

But he had not really changed; he had only been diverted by various
causes and circumstances to the consideration of other questions. The posthumous
exhibition demonstrated that the statement as to the decay of his talent was
premature. No Russian painter has rendered three different aspects of the national
life with such perfection, and none has better expressed the hidden significance and
the characteristics of Russian society in the past reigns. Should the time ever come
to illustrate the secret life of the nation in the third quarter of the century,
there can be no better illustrations than Peroffs sketches and pictures. Whatever
the question agitating society, it Avas always reflected in his work. If he often
painted the dark side of life, it was not that he went out of his way to look for
it, but because it confronted him at every step. That he was no servile copyist
of Nature is the reason his pictures are so natural and produce so powerful an
impression. This cannot be said of certain of his pupils, who have often something
unnatural in their conceptions and ideas. The one who has approached him
nearest is Vladimir Makovski.

The question frequently arose in criticism, why Peroff did not paint this or
that other aspect of Russian life ? It is surely enough that he painted what no
other Russian had ever touched before. He was right to avoid what he neither
knew nor understood; and had he not done so, there can be no doubt that his
naturalistic work would have been still more frigid than his essays in history,
allegory,' and pietism.

ALEXANDRE CABANEL.

[IS master of what we may call the penultimate French manner is the
companion in painting of M. Gerome, a disciple in the same school and
a teacher of the same technical principles. His work holds a position
between the elevated art of Ingres and Delacroix and the painter-like
savoir-faire of the younger generation : between the grave achievements, on
the one hand, of men who considered subject in painting — thought, emotion,
and incident — as altogether worthy of an artist's research, who aimed at lofty
things, and who were learned rather than dexterous in execution, and, on the other
hand, the successes, the triumphs, the manipulative victories of those contemporary
artists in whose eyes painting is self-complete, and not only independent of the
interest of subject, but even better without it. M. Cabanel, and those like him,
carry dexterity to a point which has never been surpassed in its own qualities. If
many artists may be divided into two classes — those who aim at reproducing

180 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

Nature literally for Nature's sake, and those whose ohject is to make a picture for
a picture's sake, M. Cahanel may be said to take the middle place of one who
seeks to produce a nature idealised, and a picture with its art at once consum-
mated and effaced. Those of our readers who are not familiar with his art can
best represent it to themselves by imagining it as that of a Leighton translated into
French, and pushed a little further — refinement refined upon. Lucid faces of women
with waves of impalpable hair flickering upon the white brows, the breeding, the
bearing, and the dress of a Parisian monclaine— these are among the graceful visions
which his name evokes ; for M. Cabanel has done much work in portraiture. But
whether in historical incidents, or in picturesque groups, or in portraits, one quality
is manifest, and this is completeness. His art is complete in its beauty and in
its science.

M. Cabanel was born at Montpellier, in the department of L'Herault, in 1823.
At sixteen years of age he was victor in the local art competition at his native
place, a success which gained him a scholarship for the pursuit of his studies in
Paris. From the moment this first step was taken his devotion to his art never
abated for a day ; he never faltered in his confidence, or flagged in his aspirations
and his labour. From such whole-hearted devotion have resulted two things— his
own work and his teaching. The sum of his labours is very considerable, and the
extent of his influence is to be marked throughout the world of French art. He
has had, perhaps, a larger number of pupils, and pupils of higher talent, and of
more distinguished position, than any other living master can boast. In 1875 he
won the f/rttn/l Pri.r <lc Eome by his picture of "Christ in the Pra?torium." From
the Villa Mediois, whither this studentship took him, his principal works sent home
were " The Preaching of St. John the Baptist," now at the Museum of Montpellier,
the artist's native place ; " The Death of Moses," which was received with accla-
mation at the Salon of 1852, and a " Velleda " (also at Montpellier). To the same
early part of his career belong also a series of twelve compositions representing the
months of the year ; these were placed in the Hall of Caryatides in the ancient
Hotel de Ville, destroyed by the fires of the Commune, and established him as an
historical painter, at the same time that a fine portrait of a lady and her child
fixed his position among the foremost portrait-painters of his time.

The gravest subjects still occupied M. Cabanel's exquisitely graceful pencil. At
the Universal Exhibition of 1855 he chose to be represented by " The Glorification
of St. Louis," which is now at the Luxembourg, and by " Christians Discovering
the Body of a Martyr on the Banks of the Tiber," which latter gained for the
artist a medal of the first class and the cross of the Legion of Honour. To a
less solemn class of subjects belong a picture painted in illustration of that poet
whom artists of all nations have delighted to honour — " Othello Kelating his Ad-
ventures to Desdemona," "Michelangelo Visited in his Studio by Pope Julius II.,"
and " Agla,e and Boniface." These were M. Cabanel's contribution to the Salon of
1857 ; and the two following years were absorbed by the production of some of those

A LEX ANDRE CAB AN EL.

181

mural paintings to which the luxurious and brilliant elegance of his work seems
specially adapted. In all times beauty has been considered the first requisite for
the success and fitness of such adornments to secular architecture at least ; the great

DKHDEXONA.

Venetians, for instance, who are the masters for all time of this branch of art,
were above all painters beautiful, their work being a banquet of colour, of noble
harmonies of tone, and of lovely form. Severity would especially be out of place

182

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

on the walls of a Parisian hotel, though science is always appropriate, and in science
this master's work never fails. Two magnificent houses were thus decorated by him

at ahout this time, one of them having a large ceiling painted with a beautiful
allegorical composition, "The Dream of Life," and types of the four elements over
four doorways. In 1861 M. Cabauel combined the religious, the mythological, and

ALEXANDEE CABANEL. 183

the mediaeval in his choice of subjects, his three principal pictures being " St Mary
Magdalen," "A Nymph Carried off by a Faun," and "A Florentine Poet." The
second of these works is remarkable as containing one of the prettiest female faces
in modern art, while the third is a fascinating composition of Florentines sitting or
lying on long garden seats listening to the improvisation of a poet ; a refined and
delicate happiness is expressed by this charming group. Two portraits of ladies —
Mme. Pereire (for whose house were executed some of the mural paintings of which
we have spoken) and Mrs. Ridgway — attracted at the same time great attention by
their distinction of style ; but perhaps M. Cabanel's greatest success in this way
was reached in 1863, when he exhibited the portrait of Mme. de Clermont-Tounerre.
In the same year appeared " The Florentine," a female study in costume, and one
of the artist's most celebrated works, " The Birth of Venus." The goddess is repre-
sented, not as rising erect from the sea, but as rolled upon the beach by the long
wave which is just retreating from her hair ; the picture is full of grace, and, it
need scarcely be said, much more French than Greek in feeling, the attitude being
conscious and the face arch in expression.

In 1864 M. Cabanel was appointed Member of the Institute and raised to
officer's rank in the Legion of Honour, and in the following year he exhibited his
portrait of the Emperor Napoleon III. It is said that Hippolyte Flandriu had pro-
duced a noble portrait of the Emperor, but that the work fell out of favour on
account of the sombre and brooding expression which the painter had given his
model. In the system of the Second Empire the expression of a portrait was an
important matter ; to look happy was a point of some moment. Poor Flandrin's
picture was suppressed ; it was placed in several public institutions, but banished
from each successively, and the artist's last days were saddened by the failure of
a work which the best critics of his time had pronounced to be superb ; its ultimate
fate is matter of conjecture — it has disappeared. To M. Cabanel thereupon was
entrusted the production of a portrait which should be more expressive of the
stability, suavity, and prosperity of the Empire, and he not only succeeded in this,
but produced a work which was in many solid qualities the finest example of his
talent. A brilliant female portrait — that of Mme. de Ganay — being exhibited at the
same time, the two successes won for the artist the medal of honour. "Ruth and
Boaz " was painted in 1866, and this, though one of M. Cabanel's most interesting
and expressive works, has never appeared in any public gallery; in the same year
the artist completed his decoration of Mme. Pereire's hoxise by painting six panels
of " The Hours," in the large drawing-room. Needless to say that at the Inter-
national Exhibitions M. Cabanel has carried off considerable honours ; that of 1867
gave him its medal of honour for " Paradise Lost," a work which was executed for
the Museum Maximilianeum at Munich, and the same distinction was awarded him
in Paris some years ago. "The Death of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta"
is the only figure-subject which occurs for some years among a large number of
portraits ; but in 1873 the artist accomplished one of his most important works in

184

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

decorative design, the "Triumph of Flora," which was painted on the ceiling of the
great staircase of the Pavilion de Flore. A remarkable Scriptural work followed ;
this was "The First Ecstasy of St. John the Baptist." The saint is represented as
a child, thin, brown, and ascetic, rapt in a kind of trance, the hollow eyes being
fixed, and the hair erect, and the effect of the whole being rather terrible than
happy. The same Salon contained portraits as usual, that of Mine. Welles de
Lavalette being especially admired. In this picture a slight affectation of attitude

CLEOPATRE.

—two fingers of the right hand playing with the ring-finger of the left — is in keep-
ing with the character of the attractive and unusual face.

"Tamar and Absalom" marked another of the artist's returns to Biblical
themes. It differs from the artist's usual work, inasmuch as the colour is strong
and positive, and full of sudden contrasts and combinations. He paints habitually
with so limited, moderate, and subdued a palette that the change was the more
remarkable. It was received by contemporary critics as evincing the artist's
sympathy with the movement begun by Fortuny and followed by Eegnault and
others, and his readiness to renounce upon occasion the academic or official grey
with which every one who knows French art is familiar. In the same Salon ap-
peared " The Triumph of Venus," an ethereal study from the nude which was
probably intended for a protest against a fashion for which M. Cabanel had less
tolerance than for that of rainbow colour — excessive realism. His Venus, surrounded
by doves, is going up towards a temple of which the marble whiteness appears

ALEXAXDRE CABANEL. 183

against a pale blue sky. The goddess, holding a rose-coloured drapery, looks round
with a languid smile ; her head with its long fair hair is full of the beauty of
which M. Cabanel is so complete a master. Of more vigorous quality was the
portrait (that of Mine, de Gargan) contributed by him to the same exhibition.
"The Shulamite," from the "Song of Songs," was his Salon picture in 187(3, and
" Lucretia and Sextus Tarquinius " in 1877

In the latter year M. Cabanel completed his great works for the left transept
of the Pantheon at Paris. These must be considered the most truly national of
all his paintings, being inspired by a religious veneration for the canonised king of
ancient France, Louis IX. They consist of four largo compositions, the last being
a frieze of immense length which surmounts the three great pictures. The subjects
are the principal events of the king's life : in the first he is a child receiving his
instruction from his mother, Blanche of Castillo, who is surrounded by her counsellors
in the work of her son's education — the savants and prelates of her court; in the
second Louis is dispensing justice and directing the foundation of the national
institutions which rendered his name glorious ; in the third he is in his tent, on
crusade ; some Saracens enter in the hopes of propitiating the king by presenting
him with the spoils of their own sovereign whom they have murdered. The frieze
is a processional composition showing Louis walking barefoot carrying the relics of
the Saviour. With these are a number of portraits — those of Mr. W. Mackay and
of Mme. Louis Adam being among the number — and at least one important com-
position, " The Sleeplessness of Phaedra." M. Cabanel, like Sarah Bernhardt, has
inevitably imbued his Racine with modern sentiment. The time, we take it, has
gone by when either actor or painter can give form to the massive and monu-
mental emotions of classic literature. Genius may do much, as with Rachel and
Ingres ; but Poussin and the Champmesle are of necessity the contemporaries of
Corneille and Racine.

In his " Clcopatre," exhibited in the Salon of 1887, he portrays the Egyptian
queen after the battle of Actiutn, intently watching in a chamber of her palace
the effects of potent poisons administered to condemned slaves, so that she may
choose for herself that which kills with least suffering.

Our list of the master's works has been a long one, nevertheless it comprises
barely half of his achievements; for besides the pictures we have mentioned, all of
which have been publicly exhibited, his untiring pencil has produced a mass of
work which has been taken straight from the painter's studio to the rooms of its
possessors. Nor is there any sign of failing in the productive power of an artist
who has BO long pleased and nattered the world, and whose studio has been one
of the most important schools in Paris.

ill

A ZUCCA-SELLKK.

LUDWIG PASSINI.

JLTHOUGH his surname is Italian, M. Ludwig Passini is an Austrian
subject. He was born in Vienna on the 9th of July, 1832. Both as
painter and engraver, his father's talents obtained wide recognition in
that city. And doubtless from the father came those first influences
that directed the son to choose an artistic career. It was the habit of
Passini pere always to carry a sketch-book, which daily walks in town or
country enabled him to replenish. Some object picturesqiie and fresh — a face, a
figure, or perhaps the charming details of a landscape — noted and portrayed upon
the spot, were constantly brought home as the best game from such excursions, in
which the boy joined. Deeper things, however, than mere lessons in speed and pre-
cision of draughtsmanship were learnt by young Passini when, in company with his
father, he took these walks. He was then taught the significance of that supreme
rule in art which commands painter and poet to draw their inspiration direct from
Nature, to look at the core of things, to look searchingly and with the eyes of the
soul. How well Passiui profited by this teaching all his pictures prove.

But if he learnt these lessons, it was by chance ; they were not imparted to
him with intention. For his father wished him to become an architect. In Vienna

LUDWIG PA 88 INI. 187

architects throve, while painters went hungry. To he a rich Oberbaurath was surely
hetter than to he a breadless Michelangelo. This conviction caused Passim prre
to place his son at a first-rate technical school where he should get a sound mathe-
matical training. It was a mistake. The hoy detested figures ; he made advance
in nothing but in drawing. He was an artist horn : an artist he needs must he.
And when Passini saw the futility of forcing his son to walk in a wrong road, he
yielded and sent him to study at the Academy, under Fiihrich.

Not long, however, could young Passini enjoy this great advantage. The year
1848 brought with it trouble and the calamities of war ; the bayonet, not the
brush, had to be handled then. Passini's father, dismayed by the general blight
that had fallen upon art and commerce, moved, in 1850, with his family to Trieste.
Coming thither, his son bravely started upon his artistic career, and then first
knew the pleasures, hazards, and excitements of an independent life. A year's
practice in painting portraits and scenery gave him at least greater skill and a
firmer trust in his powers. Yet he must soon have felt that not in such an atmosphere
could they ripen or expand. Trieste must have appeared to him a dry field for
an artist who aimed high, or he would not so soon have left it, against his father's
wish, for the loveliest of all lovely cities, Venice. What a great moment in his
life irmst this have been ! Walking alone, wide-eyed, through silent church and
palace, face to face with those radiant treasures on their walls, may not the boy of
nineteen have aspired to join the glorious company of Venetian painters, those
mighty ones who have made eternal day for Venice, to keep touch with them, not
as disciple, but as colleague ?

In our estimate of Passini we should attach importance to this visit to Venice,
and to the time when it occurred. It is pleasant to think that Venice made
him what he is, to think that she put his spirit into action, that she drew out,
directed his powers. At all events, in a very critical period of his life, the
young painter could have had no finer nor more potent stimulus than by being
placed amid the lights and colours of Venice, and near her playful, friendly, naif
people. Work in the studio of a fellow-countryman kept him at first constantly
employed. Werner just then was doing much profitable hackwork — painting florid
views of Venice for the dealers, or even for the shop windows, to catch forestieri.
He soon saw Passini's talent, and commissioned him to put figures into these scenes.
They worked together for a while with fair success; and this employment first led
Passini to watch and study Venetian folk. Now he could very closely remark
picturesque types and detect what was charming, characteristic, and significant in
the people's life and ways. Werner took him thence to Dalmatia, where they met
Karl Haag, from whose influence Passini drew great profit. In 1855 he left
Werner and went to Rome, finding there not only friends but fortune. No doubt
he had his full share of checks and disappointments in his combat to come out
from the crowd and get a footing upon the golden path to success. An artist's life
in its beginning has always more cloud than sunlight in it ; and surely Passini's

K
H
Q

03
03

LUDWIG PASSINl. 189

time of early endeavour cannot have been without gloom. That can scarcely have
been a red-letter day for him when some smart American put his nose round the
studio-door and made this query: "Oil-colour or water-colour?" "Water-colour."
"Oh! good-morning!" And the visitor vanished.

But before many years were over Passini obtained fortune and a place among
notable painters in Rome. The picture of "Boys Playing Poggi " achieved great
success in 18G3, and in that same year the artist made the acquaintance of the lady
who afterwards became his wife, Mile. Warschauer, the daughter of a wealthy Berlin
banker. This marriage brought him to the Prussian capital and into contact with
many distinguished men there ; with Liszt among others. The great pianist became
his friend ; and to him Passim may partly owe his highly cultivated taste in music.
Nine years elapsed before he made Venice his permanent home. Of that time the
greater portion was spent in Borne in the production of several remarkable pictures,
mostly of Roman clerical life. These all showed the artist's singular faculty for
individualisation, for giving to each face on his canvas a character of its own, for
making his work charm by its truthfulness, humour, tin'/cefe. Now the subject
would be some naughty young novice arraigned before his stern abbot for tbe
awful crime of having lit a cigar in the sacristy ; or, again, the painter exhibited
portly prelates sitting in their cathedral stalls, wrapped in a mist of incense ; or
boys on the rack before their grim ghostly adviser, whose question in Bible history
not the cleverest of them all could answer. With such scenes Passini steadily
increased his reputation as a line i/enre painter. One of his larger pictures, when
exhibited in Paris, obtained the grande vn':daille d'or, while another won for him
a like distinction in Berlin.

Before he grew weary of Rome, and before deciding to settle in peaceful
Venice, he had made brief visits to the City on the Lagoons ; and there, in
1871, he produced his masterpiece, the " Tasso Reader." Twenty years previously,
when once at Chioggia with Werner and others, this scene had stamped itself
upon his memory, and he had longed to paint it. Now the opportunity had arrived.
Learning from a brother artist that the reader he remembered having seen at
Chioggia had not yet become a figure in history, but still entertained fisher-folk
there with daily outdoor lectures from Italian poets, Passini hastily started for
the island, and took lodging at a carpenter's, just opposite the scene which he
rapidly transferred to his canvas. Each day, unobserved at first, he watched and
worked with feverish zeal. The good-humoured popolani were won over by his
own singular charm and kindness of manner to do their part in making his
picture a success by willingly remaining stationary, as if under a photographer's
lens. And thus it has something of almost photographic accuracy and realism.
Every detail of the scene is closely reproduced. All Chioggian types are here :
types of youth and age ; the athletic young fisherman, with jacket hung, hussar-
fashion, on his shoulder, wooden clogs, and coarse brown socks pulled over his
trousers ; the grey-beards in their red caps ; even a restless baby, reduced to silence

190 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

by the melodies in this reader's rough-edged volume. He declaims well, and has
now reached a glorious passage. Not a lew of the listeners know hy heart the
lines he is reading — the tale of Erminia among the shepherds, of Armida's palace,
of Clorinda's death; they have sung them to a strange, plaintive melody years ago,
while waiting on the lagoons in moonlight for wind to fill their sails. What a
revelation we get here of a people's life ; what an evidence of its culture, of its
intelligence, of its innate sensibility for the finer pleasures, is afforded by this
group of bronzed seafarers, eagerly listening to poetry in their humble market,
fanned by Adriatic breezes and lulled by the surge of breakers ! The picture con-
tains all the poetry of Venetian popular life. Nor is it a disparagement of England
to say that such a poem could never be suggested by Billingsgate or l>y Yarmouth.
Who there would suffer any enthusiast to read passages aloud from "Hamlet" or
from the "Faery Queen"? Perhaps General Booth, or a sub-lieutenant in the
Skeleton Army might more readily be heard. The Chioggian reader and General
Booth are each of them ministrants to popular emotion, but with very different
instruments they touch their public and achieve their effects.

Settled at last in the city of his heart — for not Koine or Berlin could ever
satisfy him after Venice — Passini continued to produce truthful and vivid studies of
Venetian folk life. He set the example that has since been so successfully followed
by others. His remarkable faculty for the arrangement and the individualisation of
his figures which was evident in the " Tasso Reader" is again discernible in such
pictures as "At Mass" and the "Procession of the Host." The last-named shows
the interior of the Frari church, where a priest is leaving the sacristy tq take the
holy wafer to some dying person. It was painted for a certain exalted personage,
whose critical eye was hurt by the figure on the left. The old woman's face is
there turned from the spectator ; and the exalted personage wished to see it.
But Passini could not alter this, even though the suggestion came from so
distinguished a quarter ; and after a final ineffectual attempt on the part of the
exalted personage to secure it, notwithstanding its one offending figure, the picture
passed into a dealer's hands.

Of the smaller outdoor scenes which Passini has hitherto painted none can
surpass his admirable " Zucca- Seller." It is a very delicate piece of genre work.
Who that has ever watched life in any rio of Venice does not remember just
such an old fruit merchant as this one who is bargaining from his boat, full
of gourds, with a group of garrulous women ?

Passini is an indefatigable worker. None of that Epicurean languor of spirit
which Venice begets and fosters can ever touch him. Hindered at times by ill-
health, he spends all the bright days of winter and spring in his large studio at
the Palazzo Vendramin. Many visitors in Venice have delightful memories of a
visit to him there, when he shows them some of his numerous studies for other
pictures that will surely be as successful as "Die Neugierige," which at the Berlin
Exhibition recently found such signal favour. Nor will they forget one childish

E-
01
O

O
S!

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THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

face to be seen upon liis easel, a hasty sketch, done for a friend's album, of a
little girl, into whose eyes the artist had infused some of the glory of Venetian
sunlight. And the remembrance abides for ever of pleasant talk with him in a
cool, green garden near his home upon the Grand Canal.

Were it not that he uses water-colour, Englishmen might probably be as
familiar with his work as they are with the vivid Venetian scenes of Van Haanen
and of Henry Woods. It is Englishmen alone who are the losers. Passini cares

little for favour with the crowd ; nor is he ever likely to believe that immortality
for the artist hangs from a nail in the walls of Burlington House. Austria, at
any rate, is proud to number him with her most famous artists, while, among
European painters of genre, his position is certainly with the first.

Space just permits us to close with a comparison. It is clear that the serious
art-critic delights in comparisons. One lately told the ingenuous public that "beauty
was in some way like jam." Those who are far from aspiring to the halo of sweet-
ness and light that crowns any serious art-critic want their simile nevertheless. And
though comparisons are odious, perhaps Passini will not resent it if we liken him to
a forerunner, to Carpaccio. Diversity of methods, if you will ; but the same spirit.
Both are examples of spirits finely touched to fine issues. Carpaccio worked in oil ;
Passini uses water-colour. Carpaccio dealt with fantastic legends, with dragons and
basilisks, with whatever he felt inclined to treat in his own quaint, individual
fashion. And Passini portrays calm scenes of Venetian popular life which reveal

LUDWIG PASSINI.

193

the manners and customs of an irresistibly charming race. But in all Carpaccio's
work you feel the man ; his friendship for humanity, his joy in his work, the resolve
to make his own bright, kindly spirit influence all. There Passini resembles him
— in spirit, in his perception of what should be seized and shown if a picture is to
move human sympathy. Only to the best painters and poets is given this power
to look deep, and to rouse in us by one magical touch fresh pity and goodwill for
mankind. Kindliness and a certain radiant sincerity mark the manner of Carpaccio.
These qualities may with equal truth be attributed to Ludwig Passini, for they are
eminent in his work. And those who have the privilege of his friendship will know
that they are equally eminent in the man.

FRONTISPIECE TO THE FABLES OF LA FONTAINE I THE GENIUS OF FABLE.

(By kinrl Permission of Messrs. Boitssod, Valadon, and Co.)

GUSTAVE MOREAU.

|HEEE is in the personality as well as in the works of Gustave Moreau
something of the attraction of the enigma. Living the Life of a recluse,
refusing to communicate even to his most intimate friends anything
more than the most meagre details of his early life and training, he has
yet occupied the French public, and raised the hottest discussions during
the last twenty years on the value of his art. For from time to time he
has disappeared from the gaze of the profanum vulgus, shunning, like some other
artists of kindred temperament, the rough and searching criticism of the un-

OUHTAVK MOREAU. 195

sympathetic, and, from his point of view, the uninitiated. Yet few, even among his
severest critics, refuse to accord him a high place among the most original, the
most earnest, creative artists of modern France.

It was known that he was born about the year 1828, and that, at the age of
twenty-one years, he competed in vain for the prix de Rome. His early manner
was founded on that of Eugene Delacroix, and still more on the style of an imitator
of that master, Chasseriau, for whom Moreau has always professed high admiration.
His art was to a great extent metamorphosed — or rather it first developed its true
tendencies — after a sojourn in Italy, where he devoted himself with enthusiasm to
the study of the early Florentines and Venetians, and of the later Lombard school
developed under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci. After the masters of these
schools he made a number of inspired and highly-wrought copies, and from their
influence he has never shaken, or indeed sought to shake, himself loose. Andrea
Mantegna, and perhaps even in a higher degree Leonardo, in that which appertains
to the essence of his art and his mode of conception, have been his chief ideals ;
though others among the great Quattroceutists and Cinquecentists have also left
their traces, and among them the Florentine Antonio Pollajuolo, and even the
fantastic Ferrarese painter Dosso Dossi. The extent of the influence exercised by
the Old Masters on Moreau, and the question whether their fascination has crushed
him or he has succeeded in absorbing and reproducing their great qualities, has
always been the main point of dispute which has divided the French critics.

It was the famous " CEdipe et le Sphinx," exhibited at the Salon of 18C4,
which first exposed the painter to the fierce light of criticism, and at the same
time established his reputation as a distinct and interesting personality in modern
art. The conception of the subject is an original one. (Edipus has penetrated into
the lair of the Sphinx, a cave walled in by high perpendicular rocks, and on the
floor of which still palpitate the limbs of the victims. Here he stands motionless,
as if all life, save thought only, were arrested ; for the Sphinx has leapt on to his
breast, and remains — motionless too — clinging to his draperies, and gazing with fierce
intentness full into his eyes. The monster is conceived on somewhat too small a
scale, and her form suggests rather the wild cat than the lioness ; it is crowned,
however, with a head whose faultless classical beauty enhances the contrast of its
terrible hungry glance. CEdipus, whose semi-nude form suggests rather the study
of Mantegna and Pollajuolo than the influence of the Grc k ideal, returns her gaze
with a resolute yet half-dreamy expression, revealing the consciousness, yet not the
fear, of the destruction which may be impending. He sees and weighs the danger,
though the terrible fixed gaze of the Sphinx, like that of a snake, has cast over
him a weird fascination. In the remarkable subtlety with which the mortal duel
is thus realised in its very essence, the sharp contrast between the unnatural calm
of (Edipus — face to face with death — and the questioning eagerness and menace of
the monster, rather than in the somewhat archaic style and the curious detail, lies
the real charm of this strange picture. It contains, however, some exquisite if

196 TtlK MODERN SCHOOL OF AKT.

fantastic passages of colour, such as those shown in the wings of the Sphinx ; but
the pallid silvery tones of the carnations, and the want of suppleness in their
rendering — here, as elsewhere in the painter's works, a noticeable mannerism — detract
from the pictorial qualities of the design, though they may perhaps be held to
enhance its mysterious aspect. The flood-gates of criticism were let loose on this
work; some accused the artist of having composed a mere pastiche of Mantegna,
Pollajuolo, Vinci, and Lniui ; while others, with perhaps equal though more generous
exaggeration, professed to recognise in him the legitimate successor of the great
Italian Quattrocentists. The more discriminating recognised its penetrating and
subtle charm, the originality and genuineness of its inspiration.

The " (Edipe " was followed by " Jasoii et Medee " and the " Jeune Homme et
la Mort" (1805), and by an " Enlevement d'Europe " and a " Promethee " (1869);
the last a strange conception — mystic, raffinee, and not, it must be owned, easily
intelligible, or at any rate open to many interpretations. A work full of the subtlest
fascination, if iu some respects technically incomplete, is the " Jeune Fille avec la
Tete d'Orphee." It illustrates the legend that, after the death of Orpheus at the
hands of Thracian Msenads, his severed head and lyre were wafted to the shores
of Lesbos, and there piously interred. A young girl, clad in richly embroidered
draperies of a fashion half-classical, half-Oriental, and combining exquisitely harmon-
ised tints of blue and green, stands, holding on a lyre of ivory, elaborately painted
and wrought, the head of Orpheus — of godlike beauty even in its bloodless and
deathly pallor. She gazes down on it with an expression of boundless though
subdued pity. The landscape, in its strange, unreal beauty, suggests more than ever
Leonardo, whose influence is also revealed in the subtle and pathetic conception
of the maiden, with its enigmatical charm stimulating the gazer to seek the in-
terpretation of the fascinating riddle.

Moreau became subsequently very intermittent in his contributions to the annual
Salons ; despairing, perhaps, of success in convincing the public, and arousing a
real sympathy for his refined and penetrating if fantastic and cherche art. Among
his later productions, the " Hercule avec 1'Hydre de Lerne " (1876), the "Salome"
(187G), the " Helene," and the " Galathee " were perhaps better understood and
more widely appreciated than his earlier works. The " Helene," though it would
be vain to attempt to judge the picture by the ordinary standards of criticism, and
fault might be found with both drawing and arrangement, is yet a conception
of extraordinary power. The fair Helen stands out— a lovely vision rather than
a reality — against the dark heaven: pale, calm, and unconscious of the exterior
world, she gazes fixedly into vacancy. Beneath her, grovelling as it were at her
feet, are seen the Greeks and Trojans — an indistinct bloodstained mass, the agitated
lines of which are in strong contrast with her statuesque attitude and impressive
loveliness. Never, perhaps, in modern art has the true conception of Helen of Troy
—the passive nature of the terribly gifted being whom fate makes the unresisting
instrument of its decrees — been so absolutely realised. To attain this end all else

THE HEAD OF OUPI1KU&

198 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

has been sacrificed, and in this case rightly sacrificed. The " Galathee," too, is
charming as a conception of the bright sea-nymph, joying in her ever-fresh youth
and free from the burdening thoughts and woes of mortality; though the picture
is somewhat marred by the accessories — coral and seaweed — which are treated in
somewhat childishly emphatic fashion.

Another work, the "David," has more recently attracted renewed attention,
which it owes to the supremely beautiful etching after it executed by M. Felix
Bracquemond, for whom it earned the only " Medaille d'Honneur " accorded in
any branch of the fine arts at the Salon of 1884. The aged king, wearing a high
tiara, robed with great splendour in a fashion approaching the Assyrian mode, and
holding a lily-crowned sceptre, appears seated on a magnificent throne of fantastic
shape. At his feet is an angel, harp in hand, with bright-plumed wings and long
flowing hair, round which plays an effulgence of rays — an embodiment, perhaps, of
the divinely inspired genius of the Psalmist. The accessories show the same almost
barbaric profusion and splendour as the adornment of the figures ; to such a degree,
indeed, as to produce at first a dazzling and confusing effect. A penetrating and
subtle power is shown in the conception and delineation of David, who, though the
light of his being burns low, appears yet possessed with the divine spirit, and is
about, in one supreme outburst, to prophesy the advent of a new era, of a new law,
then to awake the strings of his harp no more. Such would appear to be the true
interpretation of this strange composition, which, however, defies strict analysis or,
indeed, an absolutely certain exposition of its motive : yet it rivets the gazer by
the extraordinary intensity and pathos of the rendering. The essential elements
of the subject have been seized, as it were, by intuition, and stand forth vividly
through all the weird, over-wrought surroundings, leaving us in doubt how far these
have aided the painter as symbols or modes of expression, or whether a subject so
pathetically conceived would not have gained by simpler treatment.

A quite distinct side of Moreau's genius is shown in the way in which he
treats subjects of an Oriental as apart from a merely Biblical character. It is
not the marvellous impressionisme of Japan — whose great influence on modern art
in its latest phases has not been altogether for good — which has fascinated him,
but the more subtle and less-understood art of Persia in its bloom. Almost alone,
among Europeans, he has succeeded in reproducing the vein of melancholy yet
sensuous poetry, the subtle character, of an art which is as absolutely distinct in
spirit and sentiment from anything European, as is the poetic art of the East
from that of the West. By this it is not so much meant that Moreau has
merely imitated the outward manner of the art of Persia, as that he has rather
absorbed and reproduced its true spirit and essence. A notable example of this
power, among others, was a water-colour drawing — " Une Peri "—a fantastic half-
conventional figure of exquisite beauty, floating in the air, and framed in a con-
ventional border of Oriental design. This appeared with a number of the artist's
works at the Universal Exhibition of 1878. More recently still, at an exhibition

GUSTAVE MOEEAU. 199

of water-colours illustrating the Fables of La Fontaine, executed by the most
renowned artists of France for M. Roux, of Marseilles, Moreau triumphed with a
series of upwards of thirty designs, magnificent in colour, and of remarkable though
not highly-laboured technique : showing, indeed, over this medium a greater tech-
nical mastery than he had exhibited as an oil painter. Many of these drawings are
conceived in the same rare spirit of true Orientality already indicated, which
appeared in such subjects in nowise out of place — strange and daring as the notion
of giving to the fables an Eastern garb may at first seem — but rather lent to them
a unique charm. Indeed, more than any previous works, these designs contributed
to enhance Moreau's reputation with the French public. A whole series of remark-
able works in various stages remain in the studio of the painter, who purposes,
at some future period, to submit them to public criticism, but apparently seeks to
postpone the ordeal as long as possible. Among them is one canvas of special
importance — " Ulysses and the Suitors."

With Edward Burne Jones Gustave Moreau has been most often compared,
and those in France who occupy themselves with the developments of English art
are fond of styling the former " le Gustave Moreau Anglais." Though many striking
points of contact between the two artists no doubt exist, there are, nevertheless,
between the spirit and mode of conception of their works the most radical differ-
ences. Both have studiously shunned all subjects dealing with the everyday realities
of modern life ; though the art of both is in a sense pre-eminently modern, and is
tinged with that peculiar melancholy which seems an inseparable characteristic of
all the higher art of the century. Both have begun by seeking to clothe their
ideas in the forms of the early Italian Renaissance, and both have sought a part
of their effects in the strange and fantastic character of the accessories in which
they revel, and with which they seek to stimulate the imagination ; in the exquisite
and subtly combined passages of local colour with which they seek to adorn their
works. But here the parallel, which, it will be seen, is one rather of outward
resemblance than of real similarity of temperament, ceases. Moreau conceives vividly
and with intense energy, though not precisely dramatically in the accepted signifi-
cance of the term : he may, no doubt, be designated a painter of unsubstantial
visions rather than of realities ; but he is at least strongly possessed and convinced
by those which he seeks to evoke, and makes everything — drawing, style, and
technique — subservient to his efforts to render his conceptions concrete and visible.
In this quality, though in this alone, he perhaps resembles Blake more closely than
any other creative artist, though his art remains essentially that of the painter, and
does not, like that of the Englishman, become a symbol only— a kind of hiero-
glyphic language devoted to the pictorial expression of ideas and beliefs, rather
than to the representation of actions and things. Moreau not so much merely
imitates the outward characteristics and mannerisms of his prototypes the Quattro-
centists, as he seeks to transfuse them into himself, and possess himself of the
spirit with which they conceived and painted. His art cannot be termed either

DAVID.

<J3y Permission of M. Georges Petit.)

GU8TAVK MOREAU. 201

purely decorative or monumental in character, but must be said to occupy a place
apart: its defects being such as are sufficiently evident to all, while its higher
significance and unique charm require for their comprehension an intuition and
sympathy which belong to few. Hence his creations will perhaps never command
general appreciation, notwithstanding their many exquisite qualities; and, indeed,
while his temperament is too ardent and aspiring to permit him to bid for the
popular approval by the usual means, he lacks undoubtedly some of the nobler and
more robust qualities which enable art of the highest class finally to break down
all temporary obstacles and compel universal respect and admiration. To dwell
further on his technical deficiencies — many of which are deliberately adopted, and
are inherent to his method — would be an ungrateful, and perhaps, in his case, an
unnecessary task. It has been said — and in some respects with justice — that his
drawing and rendering of the nude are sometimes deficient in accuracy, power, and
suppleness ; that, notwithstanding the many exquisite passages of local colour with
which his works abound, they are often wanting in general tone and breadth of
effect. That is, no doubt, a grave indictment to bring against a painter ; but,
even if we are compelled to admit its partial truth, it should weigh less heavily
against Moreaii's success than that of most artists, seeing what is the aim and
scope of his art, and the peculiar and exceptional position he has taken up. It
has been sought to show what he is at his best : even at his worst he may be
sometimes unsuccessful, and fantastic to the verge of grotesqueness, but he is never
conscious, affected, or insincere ; and it may be truly said that the higher he soars,
the more truly and surely does his inspiration support him.

It is to be regretted that his art is little known and less understood in
England, where, it is believed, few or none of his typical works have appeared.
At one of the first exhibitions held at the Grosvenor Gallery was shown " L'Appari-
tion," a large water-colour design representing Herod enthroned, to whom appears
floating in the air a terrible vision — the transfigured head of St. John the Baptist.
This is not to be confounded with the oil-painting " Salome," though the general
conception is somewhat similar. It is in all respects one of Moreau's most fantastic
and least successful works, one, indeed, on which it would not be fair to found any
appreciation of his powers.

113

(from a. Pliotorinipli by i[. Fd. Muln'ur, of Paris.)

JEAN LEON GEROME.

HE French school is, in respect to its outward and striking characteristics,
definitely divided into the rough painters and the smooth, the impres-
sionary and the deliberate, the dexterous and the careful. Completeness
and finish are comprised in the method and aims of hoth, but they
are attained by different ways ; the smooth painters try for that finish
which Mr. Buskin has described as an added truth, while the rough
painters desire to master that which is implied in the first and freest touch
upon the virgin canvas — the completeness of truth of relation and tone, which

JEAN LEON GEROME. 203

makes painting finished from the heginniug. The very leader and king of the
class first mentioned is M. Gerome, who paints with the evenness of minia-
ture work upon ivory. Tight, close, clean, are his forms and his colour --the
latter never offending by inharmoniousness, hut never, on the other hand, delighting
by special harmony ; never ugly, it is also hardly ever beautiful, and certainly
never mysterious. To pass from manner to matter — from the mere technical to the
more general interest of his pictures, we are compelled to allude to the consideration
which suggests itself at once to all who know this master's works — the consideration
as to their questionable signification and effect. In our opinion, the difference
between innocent art and immoral is exactly the difference between Nature and
vice. If an artist merely paints Nature unveiled, he works singly and simply in
the cause of natural truth ; but if he paints the same Nature in a vicious relation
or with evil allusion, his pictures come under dramatic laws. There is infinite
difficulty in applying these laws logically to any kind of art. If the world of
human passion and crime is to be closed to the art of painting, it can scarcely be
allowed to remain open to that of letters, while to close it to these would be to
destroy at a blow all the great literatures of the world. But if it is difficult to
judge by logic, it is not so difficult to judge by feeling ; and we believe that the
feeling of few will altogether exculpate the painter of " Pbryne before her Judges,"
and of several scenes of Eastern life. Upon this subject Mr. Hamerton has said :
" If he is immoral, it is not from irresistible impulses, but consciously and coldly.
So with his love of the horrible — there is no violence, no expression of repulsion."
This is undeniably true ; M. Gerome paints death and vice coolly, and with the
same polish and deliberation ; and it is one of the most revolting secrets of the
human heart that somewhere in its depths the kind of vice which is usually called
immorality is found allied, not to love, but to cruelty — a noble and generous
affectionateness being the opposite and the contradiction of both equally. When
M. Gerome paints death it is not in the dignity and solemnity of suffering, but
almost invariably in its abject humiliations. In Shakespeare's tragedy Caesar dies
in modesty and silence ; in Gerome's picture he lies in a heap of indefinable
ignominy. In his pictures, too, a sentinel smokes his pipe before the severed heads
of the Beys at the Cairo mosque ; Ney lies riddled with shot by a dreary wall,
while his tall hat has rolled off grotesquely, and the firing party retires with
swinging step ; the gladiators at the point of death, yet in the vigour of life, shout
their last servile salutation to the huge luxurious Emperor sitting in the shade ; at
the door of the masked ball the duellist dies for a word ; and so forth. And not
human death only, but human life, he treats with a disrespect more cynical than
Swift's. He has, for instance, painted a row of beautiful women for sale in
an Oriental slave-market ; a merchant is examining the soundness of their teeth.
His Phryne does not stand in the simplicity of her times before judges to whom
beauty was a solemn religion ; she casts up her arms to hide her face with an
action which the word pudeur alone can express — and pudeur is not Greek, but

204

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

Parisian. Of the expressions of the judges and bystanders in this picture we
altogether decline to speak. But such remarks as we have here made on this
master's subjects could scarcely be avoided, unless we had confined ourselves to
technicalities.

Jean Leon Gerome was born at Vesoul, Haute- Saone, in 1824. After a course
of study in his native place, he went to Paris in 1841 and became the pupil of
Paul Delaroche, with whom he travelled to Rome three years later. We need
scarcely say that in a country where art owes so much to discipline and tradition
the choice of a master is of almost equal importance with the pupil's individuality.

The disciple is for a time unmistakably marked with
the teacher's sign ; he has chosen to be so, and
would not exchange the manner which shows him
to be a legitimate learner for the wildest of the
freaks of originality which gain notoriety so quickly
in England. The state of pupilage over, individual
character is not slow to assert itself under the
French system, but it almost always does so within
certain limits — limits which are not observed under
the impersonal teaching supplied by Government
art-schools. The fact, too, of the comparatively
early success achieved by artists brought up in Con-
tinental studios is certainly owing to the fact that
an immense quantity of time is saved by that single
supervision and training — directed to one end and fol-
lowed in one manner — which a succession of "visi-
tors " cannot supply. M. Gerome would certainly not have developed so quickly or
so completely into one of the most perfect painters of his country had he not been
taught by Delaroche. M. Gcrome's choice of a master had been determined by one
of those happy incidents which have saved more than one undeveloped artist from
the obscurity which seemed to await them. It is said that the young Gerome's
love of drawing and his success in the local school had been rewarded by his father
with the present of a supply of colours from Paris. The child immediately set to
work on a copy of one of Decamp's pictures which chanced to have strayed to the
remote provincial town ; a friend of Delaroche was struck with the goodness of
the young beginner's copy, and resolved that the budding talent should be fostered
and trained in Paris, and in the studio of the foremost painter of the time. This,
as we have said, was ultimately effected. Even when Delaroche, horrified at the
death of one of his young students in a duel which had resulted from a studio quarrel,
resolved to have no more pupils, there was no parting between him and the greatest
of them all. After the return from Italy, M. Gerome is said to have assisted his
master in designing the celebrated "Passage of the Alps by Charlemagne," now at
Versailles. In 1847 appeared the new painter's first picture — "The Cock-Fight,"

THE TVUKISH HATH.

JEAN LEON GEROME.

205

•which won the third medal at the Salon; " Anacfeon " followed soon, and the
"Age of Augustus," purchased by the Government. It was at about this time
that a Government commission induced him to enter into competition, in the
decoration of the Church of St. Severin, with the pious painter Hippolyte Flandrin,
whose pure enthusiasm had led him to offer his heart wholly to the service of religion.
Side by side with this artist's dedicated work M. Gerome's " Last Communion of

THE PltlRONER.

St. Jerome " appeared wanting in the sentiment necessary for the subject. It was
after this comparative failure that he entered upon that course of Oriental life which
has had so marked an influence upon his art. In 1803 he was made Professor at
the £cole des Beaux Arts, and among his other honours may be mentioned two
second-class medals, one gained in 1848 and the other in 1855, the decoration of
the Legion of Honour, obtained in 1855, and the commandership in 1878. Besides
these distinctions, he obtained by one of the most noteworthy of all his works the
supreme award of the Medal of Honour — not one of the medals granted at each
Salon, but a special prize which is not given every year, nor necessarily for many
years, but only from time to time, as occasion may arise, and as an altogether

206 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

exceptional mark of merit. Strange to say, the picture — "Frederick the Great" —
by which M. Gerome won the Medal of Honour is not to be found in any of the
published lists of the artist's works to which we have referred ; it has, nevertheless,
we believe, been more than once in England. The artist here has shown the great
and trivial King Hying to his flute at the instant of his return from hunting —
his dusty dress, his dusty dogs forgotten in the absorbing passion of fluting ; his
intentness is expressed with most intelligent humour ; the human figure and the
tired dogs are drawn with exquisiteness of precision and the grasp of solid power ;
while the execution throughout is of that perfect kind which is impalpable. It is
allowable to prefer a manner which betrays the impulses of the mind by the strokes
of the brush ; but this is not M. Gerome's manner ; and in his own way he is
supreme. Never has his execution appeared at such a point of faultlessness as in
every passage and detail of the "Frederick." A much less celebrated and a slighter
masterpiece of his is the " Santou at the Door of a Mosque "—a wonder of imitative
skill and of illuminative effect, and the model of those pictures of Oriental shoes
and slippers which have become rather common of late. Among the artist's other
works not already alluded to here are " The Wife of Candaules," " The Seventh of
December, 1815," "Promenade of the Harem," " L'Eminence Grise " (which may
be translated "The Cardinal in Grey " —a scene at the court of the all-powerful
Franciscan or grey friar who bore that name), " Women Bathing," " The Turkish
Bath," " A Bashi-Bazouk," " The Bull-Fighter," " A Portrait of the Tragedian
Eachel," "A Lioness meeting a Jaguar" (which was painted for the author and
art-critic The*ophile Gautier), and a number of Oriental landscapes. " The Prisoner,"
which we engrave, is one of his best known and most brilliant works. On the lucid
water and in the limpid light of the Bosphorus a boat with dark figures goes on
its way with a captive upon his back, bound hand and foot. One of his captors
mocks him with some shrill Oriental song, to the sound of a lute. These are in
oils; in fresco he has executed the "Death of St. Jerome," already referred to, and
the " Plague at Marseilles " in the Church of St. Severin, and other mural paintings
in the ancient refectory of St. Martin-des-Champs ; in sculpture he has- produced
"The Gladiators," and " Anacreon, Bacchus, and Love." Though he has done so
many good things, however, he is distinctively a painter of figures and interiors, his
landscapes being of inferior merit.

o
o

z
<

o
o

(From a

^rlisf.)

EMILE WAUTERS.

T is a curious fact that, priding ourselves as we do on our non-insularity
in the matter of art and art knowledge, we in England should know
little more of one of the greatest of living history painters than his
name. Though still a young man — for he has hardly yet reached the
middle age — Emile Wauters has for nearly twenty years enjoyed a European
reputation. Yet we here have heard hut little more than the faint inter-
mittent echo of that name, and that only when his work at the Salons of Paris or
Brussels has challenged the attention of the whole art-world, and laid the critic's
vocabulary of praise under heavy contribution. Under these circumstances we have
deemed it more useful to devote the present article to a biographical rather than
a critical notice of the man and his principal works, leaving in some other
hand an analytical inquiry into his school, his style, and his methods ; thus
placing for the first time before the English reader the simple history of his
achievement, his long record of continuous success. We shall thus be enabled to
form at least a second-hand estimate of the powers of the artist who has now,
with the gradual retirement of Gallait, won for himself the premier place in the

208

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

modern Flemish school, and who, judging by the ever-increasing virility of his
handling and the subtlety of his technique, has not yet reached the highest point
to which he is destined to attain.

Born in Brussels in 18-18, Emile Wauters early evinced his passion for art,
and while still a boy determined to become a painter. He entered the studio of
M. Portaels, and for three years associated with the brilliant group who were his
fellow-students. At the end of that time M. Godecharle, son of the famous

sculptor and a friend of the
family, struck with young
Wauters' remarkable progress,
sent him to Paris to receive
the benefit of M. Gerome's
counsel and instruction. Here
the picture of " The Battle
of Hastings : the Finding of
Harold by Edith "—a work
of precocious talent — was be-
gun. In 1868 M. Wauters
was sent to study in Italy,
again by the kindness of M.
Godecharle, but although he
visited all the chief cities in
succession, returning by way
of Bnvaria, and brought back
a va t number of sketches
and -.cudies as the result of
his journey, his sojourn
amongst the Italian masters
happily exerted no undue in-
fluence upon his purely na-
tional feelings and methods.
The following year he ex-
hibited at the Brussels Salon his "Great Nave of St. Mark's" and "The Battle
of Hastings," both of singular merit. The former was purchased by the King of
the Belgians, and the latter by Mr. Lowenstein, of whose collection it is still an
important feature. The artist's youth was the only disqualification for the medal
that the general verdict declared should be his ; but his claims were not allowed
to go unrecognised, for the Minister of the Fine Arts summoned him to his chamber
and officially offered him as compensation the Government invitation to attend the
opening of the Suez Canal. Alexandria, Port Said, Ismailia, and Cairo, were
visited in turn, and three weeks were spent in the latter town amid fetes and
rejoicings of all kinds ; a brilliant experience, one fraught with consequences for

A VILLAGER OF EUNZEN.

(From the Artist's Sketch-book.)

EMILE WAUTERS.

209

an impressionable and enthusiastic young painter. But just as the party were
starting up the Nile as the guests of the Viceroy, the sad news reached him of
Mine. Wauters' dangerous illness, and, hastening home, he only arrived in time
to close her eyes.

In 1870, when he was only twenty-two years of age, his great historical pic-
ture of " Mary of Burgundy entreating the Sheriffs of Ghent to pardon her Coun-

MARY OF BURGUNDY ENTHEATINO THE SHERIFFS OF GHENT TO I'AKDON HER COUNCILLORS
HUOONET AND 11UM1IE11COURT. (Lltft Mvseam.)

cillors Hugonet and Humbercourt " was finished, and, being exhibited, created a
perfect furore. Equal success attended it when it was shown at the London
International Exhibition in the following year. It was regarded as the most
important work of the Belgian school, and called forth the following criticism
from a contemporary : — " There is much to be learnt from this remarkable picture.
Few things in its way are more masterly than the grouping, lighting, and
character of the citizens. . . . It is a work of great power, wherein the
artist dismisses all the paraphernalia of false effect — indeed, a conception which
few men would venture to realise, without a well-grounded consciousness of
power to carry it out in its full force." The picture was bought by the Belgian

114

210 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

Government for the Liege Museum, where it now is. Great as was this
achievement, M. Wauters succeeded in eclipsing his former efforts with " The
Madness of Hugo Van der Goes," which became the sensation of the Brussels
Salon of 1872. This life-size picture, which was etched hy M. Monzies, is
perhaps the best-known of all his works. We are shown with extraordinary
pathos and power Van Eyck's unfortunate pupil, who for love's sake, lost his
reason and took refuge in a monastery. Here all remedies and restoratives
were applied, but none with good or sedative effect save the singing of the
choristers. All the heads in this admirable composition are fine, especially — as
it should be — -that of the madman himself. The livid but noble face, bearing
eloquent witness to that poignant grief which unhinged his reason ; the eyes,
looking without seeing, no longer " the windows of the mind ; " the beautifully-
drawn hands, with their nervous, convulsive grasp ; and the grey robe, with many
a trace of the wearer's recent paroxysm — these first arrest the attention of the
beholder. Then are arrayed, with consummate skill, the "brother" who, with
excellent action and with but half attention, directs the singing ; another, who
closely watches its effects ; the choristers, and finally the players and the prayers,
who complete a composition which, considered either artistically or psychologically,
is nothing less than a triumph. The picture was immediately purchased by the
State for the Brussels Museum, and the gold medal that was awarded to it was
replaced at the king's command by the Grand Cross of the Order of Leopold.
On the strength of this success M. Wauters was commissioned by the town
to decorate the Lions' Staircase in the Hotel de Ville with two large works re-
presenting respectively " Mary of Burgundy swearing to respect the Communal
Eights of Brussels, 1477 ': — M. AVauters is evidently fond of long, resounding titles
— and " The Armed Citizens of Brussels demanding the Charter from Duke John
IV. of Brabant," a commission which was not completed till 1877. Then
followed three distinctions in rapid succession. Contributing to the Vienna In-
ternational Exhibition in 1873, he was elected a member of the Imperial Academy
in that city; in 1875 he gained a ''second-class" medal at the Paris- Salon;
and the following year his portrait of the son of M. Somzee, leaning on a hoop,
won him a "rappel" of the same order. At the Paris International Exhibition of
1878 the jury awarded him the third of the medals of honour by twenty-three
votes out of thirty-one, a distinction which carried with it the nomination of
Chevalier of the Legion of Honour ; but it is said that the friends of Alfred
Stevens, offended at what they considered a slight to the older man, prevailed
upon M. Eolin Jacquemy, the Minister, to withhold his consent to the award.
M. Wauters thereupon marked his sense of the injustice- he suffered by refusing
the great commissions that had been offered him to decorate with frescoes the
Palais des Beaux-Arts and the Palais de Justice in Brussels. In the meantime
balm to a limited extent was applied to his wounded pride by his election to
the Academy of Madrid.

MAHY OF BURUUNDY SWEARING TO RKSI'KCT THE COMMUNAL RIG1ITS OF HRUSSELS, H77.

(HAM <U yiUt, Brunei..)

212 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

For the next two years M. Wanters devoted himself to the painting of full-
length portraits, and in 1879 received a medal of honour from the Munich In-
ternational Exhibition. In 1880, the jubilee of Belgian Independence, he held
aloof from the national exhibition, and, gathering a collection of some fifty of his
works into his studio, he threw it open to the public, receiving some ten thousand
of his countrymen and many foreign visitors — prominent among whom was M.
Munkaczy, who came from Paris to "render homage to the young artist's genius."
Of the portraits then exhibited, the most admirable were "Mine. Judic as Niniche;"
" Mine. Somzee," leaning on the keyboard of her piano ; and " Master Somzee "
on horseback by the sea-shore. The two latter, being again exhibited at the
Berlin Salon in 1883, gained the medal of honour. The next year M. Wauters
was again an exhibitor at the Paris Salon, and OH this occasion was created an
Officer of the Legion of Honour.

Four years previously, in 1880, the artist had been commissioned by a
specially formed company to paint a panorama for Vienna of the Austrian
victory at the battle of Custozza ; but, partly for fear of wounding Italian
susceptibilities, and partly impatient of the conventionality which somehow
inevitably selects battle-scenes for the subjects of panoramas, Wauters cast
about for some less hackneyed matter. At that time Prince Rudolph was on
the eve of departure for Egypt, and AVauters, stirred by a lively recollection of
the delights of his former visit to the East, decided to travel in his train,
hoping, by welding habits and customs, architecture and costumes, flora and vege-
tation, into a comprehensive, harmonious whole, to produce a work entirely original
in design and interesting in subject. May and June, amidst the torrid heat, wrere
passed in Cairo in company with his brother, Professor A. J. Wauters, and during
that time some seventy studies were made. In six months from that time, having
been assisted only by a couple of pupils, he produced in Brussels the vast work,
" Cairo and the Banks of the Nile," a canvas 380 feet long by 49 feet high ! It
was exhibited in Brussels for a month, after being "opened" by the king and
queen, and then was transferred to Vienna, where the emperor performed for it
the same good offices. It was afterwards exhibited at Munich, and again at
Brussels, and then was transported to the Hague. In 1882 another large work,
but this time only 26 feet long, for the same company, proceeded from his brush.
It represented " Sobieski and his Staff before Besieged Vienna," and whilst it
was in progress the Academy of Belgium conferred upon the painter the chair
rendered vacant by the death of Verboeckhoven.

Placing his house in an agent's hands for disposal — for ne had determined to
settle down in one of the great art centres, Paris or London — M. Wauters set
out for Spain. There he stood entranced before the mighty work of Velasquez,
who for him — Fleming that he is — forms, together with Van Dyck and Franz
Hals, the great trinity of his artistic worship and belief. Then he passed over to
Tangiers, spending five mouths in making studies, and producing among other

EMILE WAVTERS.

213

work, " The Morocco Fisherman," " The Great Mosque," and, best known of all,
" Serpent-Charmers of Sokko." After a long tour in Austria and Germany he
returned to his native city — forgetting apparently his former intention of quitting
it; and, sending to the Antwerp International Exhibition eight portraits and his
large " Cairo, from the Bridge of Kasr-el-Nil," a work immediately purchased by
the city, he carried off the medal of honour. This same picture was sent to our
Royal Academy in 1884, when the
artist experienced the novel sensation
of finding himself skied, and his work,
in consequence of its multitude of
tiny figures, entirely invisible to either
critic or public !

Returning once more to Brussels,
he completed the portrait of his father,
in the uniform of captain of the
" Chasseurs Eclaireurs," and his two
masterpieces of portraiture, the late
Baron and Baroness Goffinet, the
last-named being probably the finest
work the artist has produced. Not
many months later M. Wauters for
the second time held an exhibition
of some twenty-five of his works in
his splendid studio, which the king
opened in person, creating the artist
on the occasion Commander of his
Order ; and immediately afterwards
he received a commission from the
Chamber of Deputies to decorate the
staircase of the Palais des Beaux-Arts and to paint full-length portraits of the
king and queen. This was followed by an intimation from Munich that he had
been elected an honorary member of the Academy of that city — au event which
closes, for the present, one of the most brilliant records of which living artists can
boast. It is not easy to imagine what further honour the still youthful painter
can look for, save that recognition and justice in London, which even the ordinary
second-rate "outsider" is justified in claiming, and generally obtains.

M. Wauters is an inveterate sketcher, and one of consummate skill, whether
with chalk or pencil-point ; and from some of his sketch-books, which he has
kindly placed at our disposal, have been drawn the accompanying facsimile studies.
His rapidity at this work is extraordinary — the portrait of himself having been
drawn before a mirror in the course of a few minutes. To his figures of the
Arabs, and of Flemish peasants, as well as to his drawings of hands and draperies

ACIIMED: A STVDY IN TAXGIF.HS.

(from Hie Artist's Sketch -bmik.)

214

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

—all of tliem, in spite of appearances, impressions of the moment rapidly recorded
—special attention may profitably be paid, for few things from the hands of
modern masters are more instructive or -will more worthily repay study than these
entirely correct sketches, whether regarded for their precision or character, or
as examples of facility in the use of the crayon or pencil.

LUDWIG KNAUS.

|T was in Berlin, at the Exhibition of 1852, that the name of Ludwig
Knaus first became conspicuous in the world of art by a picture which
occupied the place of honour in the large room of the gallery. Its
salient characteristics were an originality contemptuous of all tradition,
and a remorseless energy of characterisation, in beauty and in ugliness
alike. These qualities are the test of the master ; so that it is easy to
recognise his work, and to comprehend and define the scope and function of
his art.

216

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

Knaus, like his rivals, Vautier and Defregger, was a rebel against convention.
Like Vautier, he studied at Diisseldorf, under the somewhat jejune and monotonous
influence of Sohn and Schadow ; and, like Vautier, he separated himself from his
masters, and joined the younger members, who, under Lessing and Webber, were
protesting against the academic influence. The school which at one time repre-
sented, somewhat tamely and sentimentally, the art of Germany, had sunk into a
weakly and mannered decadence whose expression was composed of stereotyped
figures and situations or of a cheap and shallow morality. Knaus was by nature

a " naturalist," and he strove to paint what he
saw, for a time even exaggerating ugliness to
escape from the finicking prettiness that dis-
tinguished his school. His first picture was
painted in defiance of all the dogmas of Diissel-
dorf, and moved one critic to call the painter
" a sans-culotte genius." The nickname is un-
just. Knaus is no sans-culotte ; he is a true
homely German who hates the artificial as most
Germans do. He may now be regarded as the
head of the Diisseldorf school in its second
phase of development. He may also be regarded
as having done for German art what Fritz
Renter did for its literature : set forth, that is,
with good-humoured satire, simple methods, and
amiable frankness of expression, the peculiarities
of the solid, stolid, slow-witted, but by no means
stupid or wholly humourless German peasant.
Thanks to Auerbach, peasant tales had come
into fashion when Knaus began to paint ; and
it is more than probable that the artist was
not quite unaffected by an influence so much in

harmony with his own mental characteristics. But it is an important point, and one
that must never be lost sight of, that while he is a thoroughly German painter in
his choice of theme and mode of mental treatment, he is indebted to a very con-
siderable degree to France for his technical practice and accomplishment. For many
years he resided in the French capital studying under the best masters, a fact his
countrymen would gladly ignore. To this training he owes it that his fame is not
merely German but cosmopolitan. As a French critic has well said: "If it be at
all possible for a man to have two fatherlands, Knaus is 'the man : he is French
with his mind, German with his heart." 'When a Frenchman after 1870 speaks
thus of a German, we may be pretty sure that he is not guilty of exaggeration.
All the same it must not be forgotten that before going to Paris Knaus had
already struck the keynote of his individual talent, and that so strongly that he

A PEASANT BOY.

•VKNTUK AFFAMtf N'A POINT D'OUEILLKS."

(/rim Ike Etching by .(. Gill

115

218 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

was obliged to go forth from Germany, which in those days looked with even
greater suspicion than now on any person departing out of the established track,
and measured whatever is personal and original by a standard at once pedantic
and conventional.

The story of Ludwig Kuaus's life is altogether tranquil and fortunate. Nature
and circumstances were at one to caress him. He had no obstacles to overcome,
nothing to do but paint his best and think his pleasantest within the limitations
peculiar to his talent. The son of an artisan, he was born at Wiesbaden (October 10,
1829), and grew up in poverty and a petty and paltry environment. His artistic
sense was nourished only in the natural world about him and the prints in the
booksellers' windows. From babyhood upwards he delighted in drawing, and his
parents always seem to have encouraged bis liking, and to have resolved that art
should be his line of life. AVhile yet a mere lad he was sent to the Academy of
Diisseldorf. Here his inclination and ability gained him friends and won him
acceptance from the first. He wasted no time in tentative efforts. His first
picture, painted at Diisseldorf, was an anticipation of those since painted in Paris
and Berlin.

There is always a theme or story in Knaus's work's, and this, the secret of his
popularity, has placed him among the first of living genre-painters. His material is
the life of men, and especially of those of the humbler classes, their joy and sorrow,
their work and play, their vices and virtues. Like most delineators of the peasant
in art and literature alike, he considers them from an optimistic, slightly idealised
point of view : with none of the solemn earnestness that distinguishes the work of
J.-F. Millet, but with some comprehension of the reverse of the medal.

It was in 1803 that Kuans quitted Diisseldorf for Paris. Before leaving, how-
ever, he had finished some pictures which in tone and treatment still rank among
his best. These include " The Fire in the Village," " The Funeral Procession
through the Wood," and " The Thief at Market." A tendency to exaggerate, to
lay on his effects too heavily (a very German fault), was modified by Knaus's
residence in Paris. It lasted seven years, and was followed by a year-long stay
in Italy, which produced no impression upon him at all.

In Imperial Paris, with its cosmopolitan tone in all artistic matters, Knaus's
talents found generous recognition, and his " Jugglers " was one of the features of
the Salon of 1855. In Paris, too, were painted his "Day after the Feast in a
Village Tavern," his "Shoemaker's Apprentices," his " Ventre Affame n'a Point
d'Oreilles," his "Golden Wedding," his "Christening," and "Child Gathering
Flowers" — the three last familiar in endless reproductions of every kind. A less
important picture, "A Scene in the Tuileries Gardens," is the work that repre-
sents him in the gallery of contemporary painters at the Luxembourg.

After a while Knaus began to find— or fancy he found — his inspiration thin-
ning and his material running out. His peasant maids, he thought, were getting
touched with Parisine — the subtle essence which Nestor Eoqueplau discovered and

LUDWIG KNAUS.

219

analysed; and with this fear upon him he struck his tents and decamped. After
some hesitation as to site, he settled in Berlin. His first years there were marked
by a curious decadence in his art. It was as if the Prussian atmosphere had
proved noxious to its primary qualities of simplicity and directness. Happily he
was aware of this, and in 1865 he once more struck his tents and returned to
Diisseldorf. From that moment his art assumed new vigour. Here he painted,
besides other well-known works, his three capilavori,
which emphasise what may be regarded as the three
sides of his genius, his love for children, his humor-
ous portrayal of peasant life, his rare power of dra-
matic presentation. These are " The Children's Fes-
tival," " His Serene Excellency en Voy<i<je." and
"The Funeral."

" The Children's Festival " was painted twice,
once realistically, and again with rococo properties
as a sort of pictorial jest. It is a charming picture,
breathing physical gaiety and satisfaction, instinct
with the happy easy spirit of country life. " His
Serene Excellency en Vuyaya " is a bit of humour
that would not have disgraced Hogarth, so shrewd
are its insight into character and its expression of
national peculiarities. The scene is somewhere in
pre-Bismarckian Germany. His Serene Excellency,
making the round of his minute dominions, has
come upon a certain village whose chief men, headed
by the schoolmaster and his flock, come forth to
welcome the father of his people. His Serenity is
accompanied by two flippant adjutants ; but we can
see that the villagers consider their sovereign, as one
of another and a better race, with almost religious
reverence. The burgomaster is nearly expiring with

fear of the dread moment when he must open his mouth in the set speech
that has been so anxiously prepared. The schoolmaster at the head of his
charges, who will presently burst into a nasal rendering of the national hymn,
is a type of modesty and servility, of moral excellence and .mental limpness,
from the bald crown of his head to the tips of his country-made boots; but
while we laugh at him we pity and like. The children, some twenty in number,
are delightful in variety and naturalness of expression. One boy displays his
reverence in a fit of nervous weeping, while another approves his loyalty by
administering a harangue to the first, and a third is moved to even greater lout-
ishness than is his wont. The girls are better equal to the occasion. They
gape in mild wonder, but they do their staring more gracefully and less

NVR8E AND HUU8ELINO.

220

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

obtrusively, and their nervousness is not without a certain charm. The only
villager not awestruck and dumhfoundcred by the honour of the visit is a dog, who

runs across the road, barking loudly. In this picture can be studied Knaus's
excellence in composition. The eye turns naturally to the principal figure, his

LUDWIG KNAUS. 221

Serenity, towards whom all heads are directed, and who is the centre of every-
body's thoughts. There is no division or diversion of interest to side scenes and
secondary incidents, a peculiarity distinctive of all Knuus's work, which is always
well composed and well balanced. In his " Funeral " there is a touching note of
tragedy. It is cast in a winter landscape under an ashen sky. In the court-
yard of the house of death the snow lies deep ; and here are assembled the
funeral train. The chief mourner, an old man whose dearest has been taken from
him, broken in spirit, crushed with sorrow, totters down the steps of his desolate
home. The school children are singing a chorale ; it is evident he does not hear
it. A young woman looks up at him with a face of true pity ; some of the
bystanders are indifferent, some are merely curious. But the artist does not suffer
the eye to be distracted from the main motif. It falls first upon the gruesome
black coffin, and is carried thence to the chief mourner, and so to the vital point
of the scene. There is no element of relief, no suggestion of the ideal, no touch
of the hope beyond the grave.

But it is not often that Knaus is thus dark of mood. Another example,
"Behind the Scenes," is perhaps more characteristic of his achievement than " The
Funeral." It is a picture of strollers which has few equals in modern art. The
clown, his face painted into comic lines, is feeding the baby; in front the perform-
ance goes on ; to the right a country gallant is dallying with the player queen ;
the whole an admirable confusion of squalor and seriousness and gaiety. It is
seldom, I should note, that Knaus paints pictures so crowded and so full as this.
By preference he deals with groups of not more than two or three figures, and it is
perhaps in these that his peculiar genius for focusing a passing psychological
moment is best expressed. His children are always inimitable, so amiably droll,
so deliciously ingenuous, so absolutely unconventional. Such, for instance, the beggar
boy who has stolen some carrots and laughs with glee over his booty ; such the
elder sister nursing her younger brother, and like the good little housewife she is,
knitting gravely the while, to her nurseling's immense despite ; such the two shoe-
maker apprentices, one airing his master's baby, the other sent on an errand, and
both preferring to kill time by playing cards. These scenes and their like are all
so natural they seem familiar ; you cannot refrain from an impression that you
have seen them somewhere before.

Denaturalised Nature and sophisticated man have no place in Kuans' pictorial
cosmos. Neither has he evolved (like his artistic rivals Defregger and Vautier) a
conventional type of face for use at certain moments and in certain connections
and situations. He is always novel and fresh. He has a retentive memory for
form and expression, and his object is to catch au vif the varying shades of human
emotion. Strength and depth of individualisation is the corner-stone of his art ;
the interest of his work is an interest apart from that of paint. Indeed, his
colour, as with most Germans, is his weak point. It is heavy, wanting in sparkle
and richness alike, often meagre, sometimes crude. As a French critic has well

222 TIIK MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

remarked in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Knaus will never be numbered 'with " les
virtuoses de la touche. Yet all the same he will always take rank with artists of
the first class by reason of his merits as a painter of expression." If he had
painted nothing but his early " Jugglers in a Barn " and his recent " Peasants in
Council," he would still have proved himself a master of accurate, shrewd, and
delicate observation. As our specimens will show, ho is, within certain limits, an
admirable draughtsman, but his drawing is at times careless ; his forms are often
angular ; too frequently his costume seem bodiless if not empty. All his attention
is devoted to facial expression.

Long years ago, to Prussianise the arts and make the Prussian capital an
artistic centre, it was proposed that a number of ateliers on the French system
should be opened in Berlin. In 1874 two such studios were established, and the
direction of one was confided to Knaus. It has not been popular or useful : the
master's art is too individual to be communicable ; it lias settled him, too, once
more in an environment not wholly congenial. Still, what he now is, that he will
remain all his life long, an admirable delineator of elementary human emotions, a
kindly satirist of human weakness, a sympathetic spectator of human griefs.

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(bniu-n ill 1'iuUla by t'raiu Lenlach. From a SieWi by /Tc/yar £arc<ay.)

FRANZ LENBACH.

IMONG the portrait- painters of modern Germany the first place belongs
incontestably to Franz Leubach ; and, indeed, in the grave and noble
style which he affects, and which is that which in former days raised
the art of portraiture to the very first rank, it would be difficult, at the
present moment, to find his superior in Europe. In saying this, no disrespect

224 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

is meant to the really great portrait-painters of modern Prance : men for the
most part either little known, or exciting but a languid interest in England
— such, for instance, as the mighty Bonnat ; Paul Baudry, hardly surpassed even in
this branch of his art; the grave and pathetic painter-sculptor, Paul Dubois ; the
exquisitely subtle Elie Uelaumiy ; or Bastien-Lepage, unrivalled in the delineation in
a small space of the essence of a personality, no less than of its material envelope.
Each of these is pre-eminent in its own way, and has certain qualities of technical
power, grace, and refinement to which the German does not lay claim, or which
he rather purposely relegates to the background. Perhaps his mode of looking at
humanity, and his endeavour, above all things, to evolve the main outlines of a
human personality, are nearer to those of our own Watts than to the aim of any
other modern; though the technique of the two painters is widely different. Both,
however, are distinguished for largeness of view, and for a power which amounts
to genius, of expressing the more permanent and essential side of a personality dis-
tinguished in politics, art, or letters.

Herr Lenbach has never willingly undertaken the delineation of feminine love-
liness, either scorning a task which is rather that of the painter par excellence than
that of the psychologist and the diviner, or justly judging his powers to be unsuited
to the undertaking. In such portraits of women as he has produced, though they
arc not lacking in his usual qualities of breadth and dignity, we find just a shade
of that conventionality, that cmpliasc, which are so conspicuously absent from his
greater works in the category of male portraiture. To a somewhat celebrated friend
of liis, noted for her commanding beauty and her fanatical worship of Wagner, he
is said to have replied, when she expressed a wish to sit to him: "Your beauty
has in it nothing which inspires my art ; if you were an old man, upon whom
time and suffering had set their mark, how much more willingly would I have
undertaken the task ! " Although Herr Lenbach has attained the first rank in one
branch only of his profession, and is in so far inferior to the great French and
English painters with whom we have paralleled him — all of whom have attained
very high rank in other branches of their art — he has essayed other styles also,
with fair, though not transcendent, success. Some early specimens of his excursions
into landscape and genre are contained in the gallery of Count Schack, of Munich,
who also numbers among his treasures many portraits, as well as an unrivalled series
of copies by the artist after works of the Old Masters.

If we take into consideration his original works only, it is not to the category
of the splendid painters of portraits cCappardt that Franz Lenbach belongs. He has
little kinship in point of view with the majesty and outward magnificence of Titian,
with the exuberance and cheerful brilliancy of Kubens, or with the aristocratic
charm and gentle melancholy of Van Dyck : that is to say, with the more usual
moods of these great men; for they, too, have shown how fully capable they were,
on occasion, of sacrificing everything to a due understanding and expression of tho
idiosyncrasy of the model. Neither does Herr Lenbach altogether belong to that

FRANZ LENJiACH. 225

class of portraitists whose aim it is, above all things, to seize upon salient outward
characteristics, and infuse into their creations the suggestion of life and movement;
who strive especially to show us human beings through whose veins the blood yet
seems to course, upon whose lips the breath yet seems to linger. Such was the
incomparable realist, Velasquez, to whom the moderns and especially those of the
Latin schools, have vowed an almost fanatical adoration ; such, too, that supreme
master of the brush, Fran/ Hals; such our own Gainsborough; and such also, in
his own way, was the great pastelliste, Quentin de la Tour. Rather should we
place Franz Lenbach in a category which might be made to include such various
painters as Jan Van Kyck, Antonello da Messina, Giovanni Bellini, the younger
Holbein, Lorenzo Lotto, II Moretto, and especially Moroni and Rembrandt; to which
class, as portrait-painters, even Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael may be said to
belong. These have, each in his different way and with the widely-varying
technique of their age and school, sought, above all things, to penetrate the outer
mask of the personality which they attempt to present, and to attain, besides a
reproduction of the purely physical type and character, such a suggestion of the
mental characteristics and general idiosyncrasy as almost to open a window into
the soul, and to lure on the gazer to an attempt at unravelling the life and destiny
of the being portrayed. Tbe first and greatest aim of such painters is, not so
much to produce such an image as will cause the beholder to exclaim, " It lives
and breathes, it will step down from the canvas and walk," as we arc tempted to
do before a sombre cavalier of Velasquez, or a Dutch clr'rjtiiif of Franz Hals. It is
rather to guide us in divining the very workings of the mind, as in the marvellous
"Leonardo Loredano " of G. Bellini — that unrivalled picture of unsubdued mental
force, galvanising into vigour a worn, emaciated body ; to enable us to study both
the individuals and types of a period, as in the Windsor series of nobles and
worthies by Hans Holbein ; to inspire us with an irresistible sympathy, such as a
Giambattista Moroni commands for his " Tailor " or " Schoolmaster." There can
be little doubt which is the higher, the subtler achievement, the one to attain which
the most triumphant technical skill is insufficient without the intuition of genius.
Though we have ventured, in order to illustrate our meaning, to cast the great
protagonists of portraiture roughly into the divisions above indicated, it must not
be understood that we would deny to the greatest among them a measure of each
distinctive quality which has served to mark out the attempted division ; but only
that their most distinguishing characteristics are such as we have .sought to indi-
cate. It is, then, under the last division that we must class Franz Lenbach. In
his determination, above all things, to set before us the man, not only as a living
being, but chiefly as a personality, distinctive no less for its mental than its
physical characteristics, and having its place as a factor of the humanity of the
time, he has, with almost undue severity, sought to subdue and eliminate the
charms of colour which his copies of well-nigh magic power would lead us to believe
that he must possess; deeming, rightly or wrongly, that the grave subjects chiefly

116

HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIII.

FRANZ LENBACH. 227

affected by him would lose dignity and character by a richer treatment. His
rendering of the carnations is certainly open to the charge of a want of freshness
and charm ; the tones being often unduly brown and muddy, and the general
handling, although remarkable for breadth and freedom, being distinguished by a
certain looseness which detracts from the power and certainty of the effect. lu
this respect, however, his latest pictures show a marked improvement.

Among the earlier of his works which excited general notice and admiration
was his own portrait, exhibited in Paris in 1867, and now in the Schack Gallery.
Although it is low in tone, and almost achromatic — so much so, indeed, as to have
exposed the painter to the reproach of aiming at a wilful pastiche of certain Old
Masters — it has an irresistible truth and charm ; the homely features are illumined
by the penetrating, kindly glance, while over the whole is thrown a vein of gentle,
contemplative melancholy which recalls, though without any suggestion of imitation,
the sympathetic creations of Moroni and his master II Moretto, to which we have
more than once referred. Less completely satisfactory, though admirable in con-
ception and insight, are the two presentments in the same gallery of its owner,
Count Schack, though these are the definite outcome of the very numerous efforts
of the painter to satisfy himself by the production of an adequate portrait of his
earliest patron.

The Wagner villa at Bayreuth contains, among other works from his hand, a
bold and striking sketch of the Abbe Liszt (re-drawn, and here engraved), in which
has been suggested rather the power than the rare refinement and charm which
characterised the features of the great virtuoso. But it is by his portraits of German
statesmen, warriors, and intellectual leaders that Herr Laubach has won his chief
renown. Lysippus was not more exalted above his compeers as the portrait-sculptor
in ordinary of Alexander the Great, than is Franz Lenbach as the painter par
excellence of the great diplomatic conqueror, Prince Bismarck. Among the earlier
of the series of well-known portraits, one of the best known is the admirable half-
length of the Prince, in a civilian costume, and holding a felt hat, to which the
equally remarkable portrait of Count Moltke forms a pendant. Both appeared at
the Munich Exhibition of 1879, and after having been shown in many places, have
found a final and highly appropriate resting-place in the National Gallery of Berlin.
Most recent, and perhaps most remarkable of all, are some portraits of the great
soldier-diplomatist, executed from sketches made at a number of sittings which
the Prince, conquering for the nonce his pronounced aversion to such inflictions,
vouchsafed to accord to his favourite painter at Varzin. Apart from the noble vigour
and simplicity of these works and their unsurpassable characterisation, they acquire
an added interest from the fact that they had their origin, it is said, in a desire
expressed by Pope Leo XIII. to possess a portrait of his great opponent in the
" Kulturkampf " commenced with his predecessor. No incident more piquant or
appropriate could mark the close of this strange contest, the only one from which
the founder of German unity has not issued absolutely triumphant. The Prince, in

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

the most important of these last portraits (which we reproduce), is represented
standing at ease in the civilian costume of a Prussian country gentleman, loose,
capacious, and convenient. Though his features show unmistakahle evidence of
the wear and tear resulting from hard work, advancing years, and acute suffering,
the expression is still one of indomitahle energy, tempered hy calm self-reliance;
and it is conveyed without an approach to over-emphasis or conventionality.
Another portrait of the same series represents the Prince with his features seen
in the half-shadow of a huge overhanging hat. Still later in date is the admirable
portrait of Pope Leo XIII., of which an engraving accompanies the present article.
It is in a manner the artist's official portrait of the Pope, diplomatic, patient, the
courteous listener to many phrases of longer construction than belongs to the
communications of ordinary life. Even more interesting is the drawing which Herr
Lenbach made of the same sitter— just the head in profile, the face being uplifted
with a beautiful look of life, and of the watchfulness which is implied in the name
and function of a Bishop. Leo XIII. does not photograph well, nor is his variable
face easy for the painter ; but the drawing in question in itself supplies everything
that is wanting to all the portraits of the Pope yet attempted.

At the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878, although one whole class of the
painter's works was necessarily excluded, he was represented by four canvases,
among which was one of his masterpieces, the admirable presentment of Dr.
Dollinger. This is unsurpassed for subtlety among the artist's productions, and may
take rank among the great achievements in portraiture of modern times, though its
attractions lie entirely in the pathos and keen psychological power of the delinea-
tion, and are not in any degree due to charm of colour or virtuosity of execution.
To the mind of Englishmen Lenbach has done no more interesting work than his
portraits of Mr. Gladstone. The chief of these, which shows the statesman seated
at a writing-table, in three-quarters, with one hand pointed downwards with a
curious action, the Bavarian has painted in competition with our chief English
artists — Sir John Millais, Mr. Watts, and Mr. Frank Holl. The difference of inter-
pretation among these many portraits is striking, but none of the English three differ
from one another as they differ from the portrait by the South German. Their varia-
tions are such as arise from a mere difference of mental mood, whereas Herr Lenbach
approaches the subject with the impulse of altogether a different mental tempera-
ment. His portrait is almost startling from the emphasis with which it renders
points in Mr. Gladstone's personality which have impressed the artist — have almost
taken him by siirprise. These are the pre-occupied and excitable expression, due
chiefly to the enormous dilatation of the pupils, which leave nothing of the iris
but a rim, and a straightness of downward lines in the forms of the figure, in the
hair, and in the long tapering hand. That slightly cgarc look, which arises from
ceaseless and various activity of rapid thought, both Sir John Millais and Mr.
Frank Holl have recorded with the moderate interest which perhaps they took in
it ; Herr Lenbach has obviously been profoundly interested in it, and his picture

OTTO VON U1SMAUUK.

230 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

shows us more of it perhaps than we should have seen for ourselves. Hence the
effect of exaggeration which will, at all events, strike all persons of Liberal politics
who look at his portrait of the great statesman. But besides this picture there
is a very curious study made by He IT Lenbach when Mr. Gladstone and Dr. Dollinger
were together in his studio at Munich. A certain look of caricature, which we
must confess is apparent in this sketch at first sight, is in fact no more than the
impression produced upon us by his vivid and emphatic habit and power of vision.
Most interesting is this combination of two portraits so strong with character.
Moreover, it marks for theologians a curious passage in the history of the time —
the conjunction of the author of " Vaticanism " with the leader of the now dis-
appearing " Old Catholics." At the moment that period or phase seemed full of
significance and augury for the future.

Something more must be said in conclusion as to Herr Lenbach's unique powers
as a copyist. It was Count Scliack who, astonished at the technical perfection and
intuitive sympathy evidenced by the then very youthful painter in a copy made
after the "Helena Forman with her Child" in the Alte Pinacothek of Munich,
specially employed Herr Lenbach to make for him, first in Kome and Florence,
and afterwards in Madrid, a whole series of copies of representative masterpieces.
Thus were executed reproductions of the exquisite " Concert " of the Pitti ; of
Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love" and the "Venus" of the Tribune; and, above
all, the astounding copy of the same master's " Charles V. after the Battle of Miihl-
berg," in the Madrid Gallery. Rarely, if ever, lias a copyist so absolutely succeeded
as in the last-named instance in imparting to his work the very flame of inspiration,
the clan, of an original masterpiece of the very first rank ; all the lurid splendour
of the colour, all the intense pathos of the conception, are here, and exercise a
spell scarcely inferior to that worked by the picture itself. In like manner, and
witli the same intuition, the melancholy charm and sober, profound harmonies of
the Pitti "Concert" are given. Again, in the portraits after Rubens — notably in
that of the master himself, the original of which is in the Pitti— the .clear brilliancy
of the carnations, the self-reliant ease and firmness of the handling, are imitated
to perfection. Less supremely successful — though only, perhaps, by comparison — is
the "Philip IV. in Hunting Costume" by Velasquez, at Madrid.

It is not hyperbolic praise to say that Herr Lenbach's success as a copyist is
without parallel in modern times ; and, in expressing such an opinion, we bear
in mind the magnificent reproductions executed by Paul Baudry after portions of
Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and of Raphael's Stanze and Cartoons
(Fjcole des Beaux- Arts, Paris). The secret of this unique success is, first, his re-
markable intuition and sympathy with the aim and inner meaning of the masters
whose works it has been a labour of love for him to reproduce, and next, his
successful endeavour in each case to adopt the very school and technique of the
painter to whom he is for the time being devoting himself. This tour de force
could be accomplished only by a born painter and a true colourist ; so that we are

FRANZ LENBACIT. 231

left to guess at tlio reasons which impel Herr Lenbach to be so chary in impart-
ing to his own works the charms of colour and brilliant execution which he knows
how to render again with such unrivalled success. This same power of absolutely
truthful, yet bold and free, reproduction, combined with the retention of so much
of the subtle essence of the work copied, cannot be paralleled with the exuberant
power and individuality of a llubens, which, whether he sought to render even
the "Prophets" of a Michelangelo, the "Battle of Anghiari " of a Leonardo, or
the " Triumphs " of a Mantegna, could not bo repressed, but burst forth and un-
mistakably revealed itself. Neither can it be more fitly compared with the peculiar
powers of another Northern artist, David Tcniers, who lias been, perhaps, somewhat
overpraised as a mere copyist ; for in his quaint miriature reproductions, especially
of the works of Italian painters, his own grotesque Flemish types slily peep forth
amid their strange surroundings, and not seldom lend to the works so reproduced
a certain amusing air of travesty. One work of the best period of the Renaissance
shows pre-eminently the peculiar power of which Herr Lenbach possesses so large
a measure, and that is the famous copy which was executed by Andrea del Sarto
after the "Leo X. with Two Cardinals" of Raphael (in the Pitti Palace), and
which finally came, with the Farnese Collection, into the Museo of Naples — a
copy so marvellous that it deceived Giulio Romano himself, when it was shown
to him at Mantua.

Herr Lenbach was born on the l.'ith December, 1830, at Schrobenhauscn, in
Upper Bavaria, and is the son of a master-mason. In the conditions of a rather
remote village life, the art with which his father's calling and his own first journeys
in the neighbourhood suggested to his earliest ambition was that of architecture.
The sight of the noble Gothic churches of more than one of the thoroughly
Teutonic towns of his own country filled him with his first enthusiasm. At an
early age he began his studies, which brought him into new surroundings. Here
the portrait-painting instinct declared itself unmistakably. His work was remarked
for its promise ; and he made a short sojourn in Rome, where he studied the
Italian schools, and painted a scene in the Forum of his own. It is a sign of
Herr Leubach's vigour of national character and temperament that far less vestige
of his study of Roman and Florentine art is to be found in his own work than
of his discipleship of other schools. He took almost all the precedent and instruction
that he needed among the masters of the Low Countries : Rembrandt, and Jordaens,
and Frank Holl, were pre-eminently his inspirers. Later, when he went into the
galleries of Madrid, he found in the Spanish school matter that his own art could
well assimilate — dignity and nobility beyond the reach of all of another race, except
Rembrandt. Indeed, Lenbach would never have been the Lenbach the world knows
but for the various but harmonious and great influences of Spain and of the
Netherlands. These he claimed and obeyed ; those of Umbria, Tuscany, Rome,
and Venice — if we may believe the speaking testimony of his art at its maturity —
he but partially accepted. None the less did study in Rome bear an important

232 THE MODERN SCHOOL OF ART.

part in the education of his genius. We believe that he made a second stay in
Madrid in later years, and in Rome he has made his second home. At Munich
he began his whole student-career, and how rapid was his progress, and how ready
the recognition given to this power by Piloty and the other masters of the Bavarian
capital, may be judged from the fact that, at the age of twenty-two, when few
painters have began to feel their feet, lie occupied an important position at the
new art-school of Weimar. But perhaps no capital in the world has done Herr
Lenbach more honour than Berlin, which treasures his masterly portraits of the
late Emperor William, the present Emperor, Bismarck, Moltke, and the Empress,
as the most serious artistic record she possesses of the present history of the
Prussian State and the German race. Of late years he has divided his time between
Munich — where he possesses a studio rich in works of the Italian and German
Renaissance — and Rome, where he occupies a noble suite of apartments in the
Palazzo Borghese, above the gallery where in former years he laboured so assiduously
and with such supreme success.

FEINTED BY CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAOE, LONDON, E.G.

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Meynell, Wilfrid (ed.)
The modern school of art

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