Chapter 1

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ARTISTS PAST AND PRESENT

By the Same Author

=The Works of James McNeill Whistler.= Illustrated with Many Reproductions of Etchings, Lithographs, Pastels and Paintings, 6-3/4 × 9-1/4 Inches. Boxed, $4.00 Net. (Postage 32 cents.)

A study of Whistler and his works, including etchings, lithographs, pastels, water-colors, paintings, landscapes. Also a chapter on Whistler's "Theory of Art."

=The Same.--Limited Edition de Luxe.= The Limited Edition of the Above Work, Illustrated with Additional Examples on Japan and India Paper. Printed on Van Gelder Hand-made Paper, with Wide Margins. Limited to 250 Numbered and Signed Copies, of which a few are left unsold. Boxed, $15.00 Net. (Postage Extra.)

=The Art of William Blake.= Uniquely and Elaborately Illustrated. Size 7-1/2 × 10-1/2 Inches. Wide Margins. Boxed, $3.50 Net. (Postage 25 cents.)

A volume of great distinction, discussing the art of Blake in several unusual phases, and dwelling importantly upon his Manuscript Sketch Book, to which the author has had free access, and from which the publishers have drawn freely for illustrations, many of which have never been published before.

Artists Past and Present

RANDOM STUDIES

BY

ELISABETH LUTHER CARY

Author of "_The Art of William Blake_," "_Whistler_," Etc.

_ILLUSTRATED_

NEW YORK

MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 1909

_Copyright_,1909, _by_

MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY

NEW YORK

PUBLISHED, SEPTEMBER, 1909

_The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A._

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE 1

II. THE ART OF MARY CASSATT 25

III. MAX KLINGER 37

IV. ALFRED STEVENS 49

V. A SKETCH IN OUTLINE OF JACQUES CALLOT 61

VI. CARLO CRIVELLI 81

VII. THE CASSEL GALLERY 95

VIII. FANTIN-LATOUR 109

IX. CARL LARSSON 119

X. JAN STEEN 131

XI. ONE SIDE OF MODERN GERMAN PAINTING 143

XII. TWO SPANISH PAINTERS 165

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

DANS LA LOGE _Frontispiece_ _From a painting by Mary Cassatt_ Facing Page

PORTRAIT OF ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE 2 _From a painting by J. F. Millet_

LION DEVOURING A DOE 6

BULL THROWN TO EARTH BY A BEAR 6 _From a bronze by Barye_

A LIONESS 8 _From a bronze by Barye_

THE PRANCING BULL 10 _From a bronze by Barye_

PANTHER SEIZING A DEER 12 _From a bronze by Barye_

THE LION AND THE SERPENT 16 _From a bronze by Barye_

ASIAN ELEPHANT CRUSHING TIGER 20 _From a bronze by Barye_

CHILD RESTING 28 _From an etching by Mary Cassatt_

ON THE BALCONY 32 _From a painting by Mary Cassatt_

WOMAN WITH A FAN 34 _From a painting by Mary Cassatt_

BEETHOVEN 38 _From a statue in colored marble by Max Klinger_

CASSANDRA 44 _From a statue in colored marble by Max Klinger_

L'ATELIER 52 _From a painting by Alfred Stevens_

PORTRAIT OF JACQUES CALLOT 68 _Engraved by Vosterman after the painting of Van Dyck_

ST. DOMINIC 84 _From a panel by Carlo Crivelli_

ST. GEORGE 86 _From a panel by Carlo Crivelli_

PIETÀ 88 _From a panel by Carlo Crivelli_

A PANEL BY CARLO CRIVELLI (_a_) 90

A PANEL BY CARLO CRIVELLI (_b_) 92

SASKIA 98 _From a portrait by Rembrandt_

NICHOLAS BRUYNINGH 102 _From a portrait by Rembrandt_

PORTRAIT OF MME. MAÎTRE 112 _From a painting by Fantin-Latour_

MY FAMILY 120 _From a painting by Carl Larsson_

A PAINTING BY CARL LARSSON 126

PEASANT WOMEN OF DACHAUER 148 _From a painting by Leibl_

FIDDLING DEATH 154 _From a portrait by Arnold Boecklin_

THE SWIMMERS 166 _From a painting by Sorolla_

THE BATH--JÁVEA 168 _From a painting by Sorolla_

THE SORCERESSES OF SAN MILAN 170 _From a painting by Zuloaga_

THE OLD BOULEVARDIER 172 _From a painting by Zuloaga_

MERCEDÈS 174 _From a painting by Zuloaga_

ARTISTS PAST AND PRESENT

I

ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art are two pictures by the Florentine painter of the fifteenth century called Piero di Cosimo. They represent hunting scenes, and the figures are those of men, women, fauns, satyrs, centaurs, and beasts of the forests, fiercely struggling together. As we observe the lion fastening his teeth in the flesh of the boar, the bear grappling with his human slayer, and the energy and determination of the creatures at bay, our thought involuntarily bridges a chasm of four centuries and calls up the image of the Barye bronzes in which are displayed the same detachment of vision, the same absence of sentimentality, the same vigor and intensity if not quite the same strangeness of imagination. It is manifestly unwise to carry the parallel very far, yet there is still another touch of similarity in the beautiful surfaces. Piero's fine, delicate handling of pigment is in the same manner of expression as Barye's exquisite manipulation of his metal after the casting, his beautiful thin patines that do not suppress but reveal sensitive line and subtle modulation. We know little enough of Piero beyond what his canvases tell us. Of Barye we naturally know more, although everything save what his work confides of his character and temperament is of secondary importance, and he is interesting to moderns, especially as the father of modern animal sculpture, and not for the events of his quiet life.

Antoine Louis Barye, born at Paris September 15, 1796, died June 25, 1875, in the same year with Corot and at the same age. The circumstances under which he began his career have been told in detail by more than one biographer, but it would be difficult rightly to estimate the importance and singularity of his work without some review of them. His father was a jeweler of Lyons, who settled in Paris before Antoine was born, and whose idea of education for his son was to place him at less than fourteen with an engraver of military equipments from whom he learned to engrave on steel and other metals, and later with a jeweler from whom he learned to make steel matrixes for molding reliefs from thin metals. A certain stress has been laid on this lack of schooling in the conventional sense of the word, but it is difficult to see that it did much harm, since Barye, though he was not a correct writer of French, was a great reader, keenly intelligent in his analysis of the knowledge he gained from books, and with extraordinary power of turning it to his own uses. Such a mind does not seriously miss the advantages offered by a formal training, and it might fairly be argued that the manual skill developed at the work-bench was in the long run more valuable to him than the abstract knowledge which he might have acquired in school could possibly have been. Be that as it may, up to the time of his marriage in 1823 he had a varied apprenticeship. At sixteen he was drawn as a conscript and was first assigned to the department where maps in relief are modeled. Before he was twenty-one he was working with a sculptor called Bosio, and also in the studio of the painter, Baron Gros. He studied Lamarck, Cuvier and Buffon. He competed five times for the _Prix de Rome_ at the Salon, once in the section of medals and four times in the section of sculpture, succeeding once (in the first competition) in gaining a second prize. He then went back to the jeweler's bench for eight years, varying the monotony of his work by modeling independently small reliefs of _Eagle and Serpent_, _Eagle and Antelope_, _Leopard_, _Panther_, and other animals.

In 1831 he sent to the Salon of that year the _Tiger Devouring a Gavial of the Ganges_, a beautiful little bronze, seven and a half inches high, which won a Second Medal and was bought by the Government for the Luxembourg. This was the beginning of his true career. In the same Salon was exhibited his _Martyrdom of St. Sebastian_, but the powerful realism and energy of the animal group represented what henceforth was to be Barye's characteristic achievement, the realization, that is, of what the Chinese call the "movement of life;" the strange reality of appearance that is never produced by imitation of nature and that makes the greatness of art. The tiger clutches its victim with great gaunt paws, its eyes are fixed upon the prey, its body is drawn together with tense muscles, its tail is curled, the serpent is coiled about the massive neck of its destroyer with large undulating curves. The touch is everywhere certain, the composition is dignified, and the group as an exhibition of extraordinary knowledge is noteworthy.

A lithograph portrait of Barye by Gigoux, made at about this time, shows a fine head, interested eyes, a firm mouth and a determined chin. His chief qualities were perseverance, scientific curiosity, modesty and pride, and that indomitable desire for perfection so rarely encountered and so precious an element in the artist's equipment. He was little of a talker, little of a writer, infinitely studious, somewhat reserved and cold in manner, yet fond of good company and not averse to good dinners. Guillaume said of him that he had the genius of great science and of high morality, which is the best possible definition in a single phrase of his artistic faculty. He had the kind of sensitiveness, or self-esteem, if you will, that frequently goes with a mind confident of its merits, but not indifferent to criticism or sufficiently elevated and aloof to dispense with resentment. In 1832 he sent to the Salon his _Lion Crushing a Serpent_, and in 1833 he sent a dozen animal sculptures, a group of medallions and six water-colors. That year he was made chevalier of the Legion of Honour, but the following year nine groups made for the Duke of Orleans were rejected by the Salon jury, and again in 1836 several small pieces were rejected, although the _Seated Lion_, later bought by the government, was accepted. The reasons for the rejections are not entirely clear, but Barye was an innovator, and in the field of art the way of the innovator is far harder than that of the transgressor. Charges of commercialism were among those made against him, and he--the least commercial of men--took them deeply to heart. His bitterness assumed a self-respecting but an inconvenient and unprofitable form, as he made up his mind to exhibit thereafter only in his own workshop, a resolution to which he held for thirteen years. After the rejection of his groups in 1834 he happened to meet Jules Dupré, who expressed his disgust with the decision. "It is quite easy to understand," Barye replied, "I have too many friends on the jury." This touch of cynicism indicates the ease with which he was wounded, but it was equally characteristic of him that in planning his simple revenge he hurt only himself. He did indeed refrain from sending his bronzes to the Salon and he did act as his own salesman, and the result was the incurrence of a heavy debt. To meet this he was obliged to sell all his wares to a founder who wanted them for the purpose of repeating them in debased reproductions. His own care in obtaining the best possible results in each article that he produced, his reluctance to sell anything of the second class, and his perfectly natural dislike to parting with an especially beautiful piece under any circumstances, did not, of course, work to his business advantage, although the amateurs who have bought the bronzes that came from his own refining hand have profited by it immensely. It would be a mistake, however, to think of him as a crushed or even a deeply misfortunate man. He simply was poor and not appreciated by the general public according to his merits. After 1850, however, he had enough orders from connoisseurs, many of them Americans, and also from the French government to make it plain that his importance as an artist was firmly established at least in the minds of a few. He sold his work at low prices which since his death have been trebled and quadrupled, in fact, some of his proofs have increased fifty-fold, but the fact that he was not overwhelmed with orders gave him that precious leisure to spend upon the perfecting of his work which, we may fairly assume, was worth more to him than money.

Nor was he entirely without honor in his own country. At the Universal Exposition of 1855 he received the Grand Medal of Honour in the section of artistic bronzes, and in the same year the Officer's Cross of Legion of Honour--a dignity that is said to have reached poor Rousseau only when he was too near death to receive the messengers. In 1868 Barye was made Member of the Institute, although two years earlier he had been humiliated by having his application refused. And from America, in addition to numerous proofs of the esteem in which he was held there by private amateurs, he received through Mr. Walters in 1875 an order to supply the Corcoran Gallery at Washington with an example of every bronze he had made. This last tribute moved him to tears, and he replied, "Ah! Monsieur Walters, my own country has never done anything like that for me!" These certainly were far from being trivial satisfactions, and Barye had also reaped a harvest of even subtler joys. One likes to think of him in Barbizon, living in cordial intimacy with Diaz and Rousseau and Millet and the great Daumier. Here he had sympathy, excellent talk of excellent things, the company of artists working as he did, with profound sincerity and intelligence, and he had a chance himself to paint in the vast loneliness of the woods where he could let his imagination roam, and could find a home for his tigers and lions and bears studied in menageries and in the _Jardin des Plantes_. It is pleasant also to think of him among the five and twenty _Amis du Vendredi_ dining together at little wineshops on mutton and cheese and wine with an occasional pâté given as a treat by some member in funds for the moment. He was not above enthusiasm for "_un certain pâté de maquereau de Calais_" and he was fond of the theater and of all shows where animals were to be seen. It is pleasantest of all to think of him at his work, the beauty of which he knew and the ultimate success of which he could hardly have doubted.

In what does the extraordinary quality of this work consist? The question is not difficult to answer, since, like most of the truly great artists, Barye had clear-cut characteristics among which may be found those that separate him from and raise him above his contemporaries. Scientific grasp of detail and artistic generalization are to be found in all his work where an animal is the subject, and this combination is in itself a mark of greatness. If we should examine the exceptionally fine collection of Barye bronzes belonging to the late Mr. Cyrus J. Lawrence, and consisting of more than a hundred beautiful examples, or the fine group in the Corcoran Gallery at Washington, we should soon learn his manner and the type established by him in his animal subjects. In the presence of so large a number of the works of a single artist, certain features common to the whole accomplishment may easily be traced. One dominating characteristic in this case is the ease with which the anatomical knowledge of the artist is worn. Even in the early bronzes the execution is free, large, and quite without the dry particularity that might have been expected from a method the most exacting and specific possible. Barye from the first went very deeply into the study of anatomy, examining skeletons, and dissecting animals after death to gain the utmost familiarity with all the bones and muscles, the articulations, the fur and skin and minor details. His reading of Cuvier and Lamarck indicates his interest in theories of animal life and organism. He took, also, great numbers of comparative measurements that enabled him to represent not merely an individual specimen of a certain kind of animal, but a type which should be true in general as well as in particular. He would measure, for example, the bones of a deer six months old and those of a deer six weeks old, carefully noting all differences in order to form a definite impression of the normal measurements of the animal at different ages. He made comparative drawings of the skulls of cats, tigers, leopards, panthers, the whole feline species, in short, seeking out the principles of structure and noting the dissimilarities due to differences in size. He made innumerable drawings of shoulders, heads, paws, nostrils, ears, carefully recording the dimensions on each sketch. Among his notes was found a minute description of the characteristic features of a blooded horse.

He was never content with merely an external observation of a subject when he had it in his power to penetrate the secrets of animal mechanism. He first made sketches of his subjects, of course, but frequently he also modeled parts of the animal in wax on the spot to catch the characteristic movement. His indefatigable patience in thus laying the groundwork of exact knowledge suggests the thoroughness of the old Dutch artists. He followed, too, the recommendation of Leonardo--so dangerous to any but the strongest mind--to draw the parts before drawing the whole, to "learn exactitude before facility."

A story is told of a visit paid him by the sculptor Jacquemart: "I will show you what I have under way, just now," said he to his friend, and looking about his studio for a moment, drew out a couple of legs and stood them erect. After a few seconds of puzzled thought he remembered the whereabouts of the other members, and finally drew out the head from under a heap in a corner. And the statue once in place was conspicuous for its fine sense of unity. It was not, of course, this meticulous method, but the use he made of it, that led Barye to his great results. His mind was strengthened and enriched by every fragment of knowledge with which he fed it. It all went wholesomely and naturally to the growth of his artistic ideas, and he does not appear to have been interested in acquiring knowledge that did not directly connect itself with these ideas. By his perfect familiarity with the facts upon which he built his conceptions he was fitted to use them intelligently, omit them where he chose, exaggerate them where he chose, minimize them where he chose. They did not fetter him; they freed him; and he could work with them blithely, unhampered by doubts and inabilities. It is most significant both of his accuracy and his freedom that in constructing his models he dispensed with the rigid iron skeleton on which the clay commonly is built. Having modeled the different parts of his composition, he brought them together and supported them from the outside by means of crutches and tringles, after the fashion of the boat builders, thus enabling himself to make alterations, corrections and revisions to the very end of his task. The definitive braces were put in place only at the moment of the molding in plaster.

For small models he preferred to use wax which does not dry and crack like the clay. He also sometimes covered his plaster model with a layer, more or less thick, of wax, upon which he could make a more perfect rendering of superficial subtleties. Occasionally, as in the instance of _The Lion Crushing the Serpent_, cast by Honoré Gonon, he employed the process called _à cire perdue_, in which the model is first made in wax, then over it is formed a mold from which the wax is melted out by heat. The liquid bronze is poured into the matrix thus formed, and when this has become cold the mold is broken off, leaving an almost accurate reproduction of the original model, which is also, of course, unique, the wax model and the mold both having been destroyed in the process. Upon his _patines_ he lavished infinite care. Theodore Child has given an excellent description of the difference between this final enrichment of a bronze as applied by a master and the _patine_ of commerce. "The ideal _patine_," he says, "is an oxydation and a polish, without thickness, as it were, a delicate varnish or glaze, giving depth and tone to the metal. Barye's green _patine_ as produced by himself has these qualities of lightness and richness of tone, whereas the green _patine_ of the modern proofs is not a _patine_, not an oxydation, but an absolute application of green color in powder, a _mise en couleur_, as the technical phrase is. In places this _patine_ will be nearly a millimeter thick and will consequently choke up all delicate modeling, soften all that is sharp, and render the bronze dull, _mou_, heavy. To produce Barye's fine green _patine_, requires time and patience, and for commercial bronze is impracticable. Barye, however, was never a commercial man. When a bronze was ordered he would never promise it at any fixed date; he would ask for one or two or three months; 'he did not know exactly, it would depend on how his _patine_ came.'"