Chapter 7

In spite of the assiduous study of Dutch and Italian masters, Fantin's work is characteristically French in both its fantasy and its realism. Not only the grace of the forms and the elegance of the gestures, but the sentiment of the composition and the quality of the color, are undisguisedly Gallic. He is closer to Watteau than to any other painter but his firmer technic and more patient temperament give him an advantage over the feverish master of eighteenth-century idyls. His art throbs with a fuller life and in his airiest dreams his world is made of a more solid substance. For melancholy he offers serenity, for daintiness he offers delicacy.

His technique, especially in his later work, is quite individual in its character. He models with short swift strokes of the brush--not unlike the brush work in some of Manet's pictures. His pigment is rather dry and often almost crumbly in texture, but his values are so carefully considered that this delicately ruffled surface has the effect of casting a penumbra about the individual forms, of causing them to swim in a thickened but fluent atmosphere, instead of suggesting the rugosity of an ill-managed medium.

In his paintings of flowers he found the best possible expression for his subtle color sense. The letters written to him by Whistler in the sixties show how fervently these paintings were admired by the American master of harmony, and also how much good criticism came to him from his comrade whose enthusiasm for Japanese art already was fully awakened.

As a portraitist, Fantin was peculiarly fortunate. His exquisitely painted flower studies, his pearly-toned beautifully drawn nudes, his lithographs with their soft darks and tender manipulations of line, his ambitious imaginative compositions, are none of them so eloquent of his personality as his portraits with their absolute integrity, their fine divination, and their fluent technique. The portrait which we reproduce is of Madam Maître, was painted in 1882, and was acquired by the Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1906. It represents a woman of middle years with a sincere and thoughtful face and a quiet bearing. The felicities of Fantin's brush are seen in the way in which the silk sleeve follows the curve of the round firm arm, and the soft lace of the bodice rests against the throat and is relieved almost without contrast of color against the white skin. The touches of pure pale blue in the fan and the delicate tints of the rose are manifestations of the artist's restrained and subtle management of color, but above all there is a perfectly unassuming yet uncompromising rendering of character. There is nothing in the plain refined features that cries out for recognition of a temperament astutely divined. They have the calm repose that indicates entire lack of self-consciousness, no quality is unduly insisted upon, there is neither sentimentality nor brutal realism in the handling, the sitter simply lives as naturally upon the canvas as we feel that she must have lived in the world. It is for such sweet and logical truth-telling, such mild and strict interpretation, that we must pay our debt of appreciation to Fantin, the painter of ideal realities and of actual ideals.

CARL LARSSON

IX

CARL LARSSON

The accomplished Swedish critic, Georg Nordensvan, opens his monograph on Carl Larsson with the statement that the latter is unquestionably the most popular artist of the present day in his own country, and that he is equally popular as a man. It is not often that the personality of an artist seems so essentially connected with his work as in Larsson's case. His gay, pugnacious, independent, yet amiable temper of mind is so directly reflected in the character of his various production as to make a consideration of the two together an almost necessary prelude to any account of him. He has insisted upon expressing his individuality at whatever cost of traditional and conventional technique and he has at the same time unconsciously represented the frankest, most wholesome, and, on the whole, most characteristic side of the Swedish character. A rather daring and flippant humor enters into his paintings. One of his portraits of himself shows him standing, his happy reddish face aglow, against a yellowish-brown wall. He is dressed in a long, yellowish-brown smoking frock, and holds in his raised hand a pencil from which appears to spring a little feminine figure supposed to represent his genius. "This figure carries what looks like a quantity of small round cookies," says his critic, "possibly to symbolize the adequacy with which his genius provides for his nourishment."

Another shows him with his little girl sitting on his head, maintaining her equilibrium by planting stout feet on his shoulders. The painter wears a house-jacket, loose slippers and baggy trousers, his face beams with good-humor; the child is brimming with laughter; the little scene is instinctive with the spirit of intimate domesticity, and the drawing, free and easy, without apparent effort in the direction of elegant arrangement or expressiveness of line, is nevertheless singularly nervous and vigorous.

In still another portrait, he is sitting before his easel, his little girl on one knee, his canvas on the other with the easel serving only as a prop. His eyes are turned toward a mirror which is outside the picture and the reflection in which he is using as a model; the child's eyes are fixed on the canvas watching the growth of the design. These are "self-portraits" in more than the usual sense. It is the rarest thing in art to find a painter representing his own aspect with such complete lack of self-consciousness. No characteristics seem especially to be emphasized, none betray exaggeration, there apparently is neither distortion nor idealization, nor is there any attempt to select a mood that shall preserve a favorable impression of the sitter. Nothing could, however, more favorably present a character to the critical scrutiny of strangers than this superb good faith. The least sentimental of us must recognize with frank delight the wholesome sweetness of the world these kindly faithful records open to us.

Larsson was born at Stockholm in 1853. From the age of thirteen he depended upon his own labors for support; retouching photographs at first. Later he entered the elementary school of the academy where he received honors. He drew from the antique and from the model and began to make drawings for illustration when he was about eighteen. The public knew him first through his drawings for the comic paper called _Kasper_, and he shortly became a much sought after illustrator for papers and books. The first book illustrated by him was a collection of stories by Richard Gustafsson, the editor of _Kasper_, the next was Anderson's "Tales." In the latter he succeeded Isidor Törnblom, who died in 1876 after having executed only a few drawings for the first part. He became bold and rapid in improvisation, and light and easy in execution--qualities that he never lost. He was obliged to make of his academic studies a side issue, bread-winning taking necessarily the first place with him. No doubt it is to this necessity that he owes that prompt adaptation of his facility to various uses, that practical application of his freshly acquired knowledge which give to the simple compositions of his earlier period an especial spontaneity. He had no time to fix himself in ruts of practice. To draw from the Antinous one day and the next to press one's Greek outline into service for the representation of little dancing girls and happy babies is to effect that union between art and life which makes the first moving and the second beautiful; the union in which Daumier found the source of his prodigious strength. In his early years Larsson was anything but a realist. His fancy turned to unusual and vast subjects, and his natural impatience caused him to launch himself upon them with very inadequate preliminary study. The first canvas attempted by him during the study-time in Paris (time which he won at the Academy) was nearly ten feet high and represented a scene from the deluge with figures double life size. Naturally, he found himself unable to cope with the difficulties that promptly arose and was obliged to give it up. In 1877, when he was twenty-four years old, he painted a three-quarter length portrait of a woman standing, which was his best work of that period. The genre pictures which he sent home to Stockholm at about the same time awakened little enthusiasm and spread the impression that he had no future as a painter and would be obliged to content himself with illustration. As an illustrator he became thoroughly successful, turning out a large amount of work and gaining for himself in Stockholm the very inappropriate name of "the Swedish Doré." He made enough money in this branch of art to try painting again in Paris, but with almost no success until the Spring of 1883, when he exhibited at the Salon a couple of small water-colors, the subjects taken from the field and garden life of Grez, a little painting village that lies south of the Fontainebleau forest. These pictures won a medal and were bought in Gothenburg. Other similar subjects followed, all distinguished, Nordensvan affirms, by the same pleasing delicacy of handling, the same glow and splendor of sunlight, and the same glad color-harmony. He now was in a position to marry, and pictures of family life presently appeared in great numbers. These are altogether charming--spirited, vivid, original, and full of an indescribable freshness and heartiness. Sometimes he painted his young wife holding her baby, sometimes he painted his two boys parading as mimic soldiers; sometimes it was his little girl hiding under the great, handsome dining-table; or a young people's party in the characteristic dining-room, all the furniture and decorations of which are reproduced with crisp naturalism.

Not the least charm of his paintings lies in the beauty of these handsome interiors in which detail has the precise definition found in the work of the old Dutch artists. While Larsson's technique lacks the exquisite finish of a Terborch or Vermeer of Delft he tells almost as many truths about a house and its occupants as they do. If we consider, for example, the charming composition which he calls "The Sluggard's Melancholy Breakfast" ("Sjusofverskans dystra frukost") we find worthy of note not only the pensive and rather cross little girl sitting alone at the table with her loaf of bread and cup of milk, but also the long tablecloth with its handsome conventional design, obviously a bit of artistic handicraft since it is signed and dated above the fringe at one end, the decoration on the wall, possibly the lower part of a painted window, with its significant motto "Arte et Probitate"; the graceful pattern of the chairs, the big pitcher full of flowers and fruits, the plain ample dishes, the polished floor of the passage-way at the end of which a door opens on the green fields with a child's figure half-seen standing on the threshold, the fine rich color harmony of greens and reds and blues and browns held together by a subtlety of tone that involves no loss of strength.

His outdoor scenes are hardly less personal in their portraiture. There is the one called "Apple-Bloom" with a Larsson child in a pink sunbonnet clinging to the slim stem of a young apple-tree; in the distance some long low red buildings behind a board fence, in the foreground the pale green of spring grass; there is the one in which the larger part of the picture is filled with delicate field growth, thin sprays of pink, blue and white blossoms, and long slender leaves, at the top of the canvas a little thicket of trees with a small bright head peering between the branches; there is the one in which a baby lies on the greensward under the trees; each has an indescribable charm of individuality. Doubtless resembling a hundred other groves or meadows, these have an expression of their own distinguishing them from their kind. It is the genius of the close observer for discrimination between like things.

Whatever the subject, the treatment is always brilliant, frank and joyous. Larsson's brushwork is light and flowing; he has, indeed, a certain French vivacity of technique, but his motives and his personal point of view are so purely Scandinavian as to leave no other impression on the mind. Nor is he merely the painter of the Swedish type. He is the painter of intimate home life and character as found within his own walls. Hardly any other family in Sweden is known so well as his, and the variety and enthusiasm of his mind lend spontaneity to these domestic pictures, so that one does not easily tire of the strong smiling creatures naturally and effectively presented to our vision.

In the field of mural decoration also he has shown marked originality. Under the encouragement of Mr. Pontus Furstenberg, one of the foremost patrons of art in Sweden, he tested himself on a series of paintings for a girl's school in Gothenburg. He accomplished his task in a manner entirely his own, taking for his subjects typical figures of women in Sweden at different periods of history--a Viking's widow; the holy Brigitta; a noble house mother of the time of the Vasas, etc.--but although his manner of painting was free and blithe it hardly satisfied the most severe critics on account of its lack of architectonic qualities and the absence in it of anything like monumental simplicity. He has continued, however, to go his own way in mural decoration and holds to the principle that the walls should look flat and that the harmony of color and line should be balanced and proportioned with regard to decorative and not to realistic effect. His subjects are apt to be fanciful and are executed in a semi-playful spirit not in the least familiar to an uninventive age, as where the spirit of the Renaissance is represented by a young woman seated high on a step-ladder, looking toward the sky, with Popes and Cardinals seated on the rungs below gazing in adoration, while underneath them all yawns the grave filled with skeletons, from which the Renaissance has risen.

On the subject of home arts and handicrafts Larsson has emphatic ideas and urges on his compatriots the desirability of preserving their national types. "Take care of your true self while time is," he says, "again become a plain and worthy people. Be clumsy rather than elegant: dress yourselves in furs, skins, and woolens, make yourselves things that are in harmony with your heavy bodies, and make everything in bright strong colors; yes, in the so-called gaudy peasant colors which are needed contrasts to your deep green pine forests and cold white snow." He has made designs for haute-lisse weaving which were executed by the Handicraft Guild and which were practically open air painting translated into the Gobelin weave. In all that he does he is free from the trammels of convention; but his chief triumphs are in a field that is sadly neglected in modern art. As a painter of family life he is surpassed by none of his contemporaries.

JAN STEEN

X

JAN STEEN

Jan Steen was born in Leyden about 1626, which would make him nineteen years younger than Rembrandt. He is said to have studied first under Nicolas Knüpfer and then possibly under Adriaen van Ostade in Harlem, and finally under Jan van Goyen at the Hague. In 1648 he was enrolled in the Painter's Guild at Leyden, and the following year he married Margaretha van Goyen, the daughter of his latest master. His father was a well-to-do merchant and beer-brewer and Steen himself at one time ran a brewery, though apparently not with great success. He incontestably was familiar with the life of drinking places and houses in which rough merrymaking was the chief business. Many of his subjects are drawn from such sources and his brush brings them before us with their characteristic features sharply observed and emphasized. He has been accused of a moralizing tendency and it may at least be said that he permits us to draw our own moral from perverted and unpolished facts. In his least restrained moments he is a kind of Dutch Jordaens, less exuberant, less sturdy and florid and gesticulatory; but with the same zest for living, the same union of old and young in any festival that includes good meat and good drink with song and dance and horse-play. If we compare "_Die Lustige Familie_" at Amsterdam with that ebullient rendering of the same subject by Jordaens entitled "_Zoo de ouden zongen: Zoo pypen de jongen_" that hangs in the Antwerp Museum, we have no difficulty in perceiving the points of similarity. There even are likenesses in the color-schemes of the two painters, Jordaen's silvery yellows for once meeting their match; but we find in Steen's picture a more subtle discrimination in the characters and temperaments lying beneath the physical features of the gay company.

Oftentimes Steen indulges in a gay and harmless badinage as different as possible from the bold and keen irony of his wilder themes. In "_Die Katzentanz Stunde_" of the Rijks museum at Amsterdam the laughing children putting the wretched little cat through a course of unwelcome instruction, the excited pose of the dog, the concentration of the girl upon her dance-music, are rendered with joyous freedom and animation, and suggest a childlike mood. The lovely _Menagerie_ of the Hague is conceived in a still milder and gentler temper, the demure child among her pets, feeding her lamb, with her doves flying about her head and the faithful little Steen dog in the background, is an idyllic figure. Indeed the entire composition has a tenderness and almost a religious depth of sentiment that make it unique among the painter's achievements. Another charming composition in which homely pleasures enjoyed with moderation and in a mood of simple merriment are delicately depicted is "_Der Wirtshausgarten_" in Berlin, in which the young people and their elders together with the happy dog are having a quiet meal under a green arbor. Family pets play an important part in all these scenes of domestic life; apparently Jan Steen even more than other Dutch painters was interested in the idiosyncrasies of the animals about him and was amused by incidents including them. His pictures gain by this a certain suggestion of kindliness and community of good feeling that is refreshing in the midst of the frequent vulgarity of theme and sentiment. Reminiscences of the exquisite feeling shown in "_Die Menagerie_" continually occur in such incidents as a girl feeding her parrot, the play of children with the friendly dogs and cats of the noisy inn, and especially in the importance given to the expressions and attitudes of the dumb creatures. The dog is nearly always in the foreground, invariably characterized with the utmost vivacity and clearness, and usually playing his cheerful part in whatever of lively occupation his masters are engaged in. In "_Die Lustige Familie_" he joins his voice to the family concert with an expression of canine agony.

Frequently the subjects are obviously drawn from the life of his own family circle and the portraits of his children in these canvases are always sympathetic and delightful, giving a peculiarly intimate character to the artist's works in this kind. In "_Das Nikolausfest_" at Amsterdam the little girl in the foreground--apparently the little Elisabeth born in 1662, who figures in so many of the later paintings--is a particularly engaging figure.

These simpler "feasts" and family gatherings in which gay laughter reigns in place of brawling, constitute a delightful phase of Steen's art, yet curiously they are seldom as beautiful in their esthetic qualities as the tavern scenes and incidents of low and vicious life. The picture in the Louvre, however, "_Das Familien Mahl_," contradicts this generalization in the sheer loveliness of color, in the light that streams through the window hung with vines, and in the delicately discriminated textures of the gowns and furnishings. In this picture the figure of the woman nursing her child in the background has an amplitude of line and graciousness of pose that places it on a plane with Millet's renderings of similar subjects, while the painting in itself is of a quality never achieved by the poetic Frenchman.

Occasionally we find compositions by Steen in which only two or three figures are introduced, although as a rule he crowds every inch of his canvas with human beings and still-life. A very beautiful example of these compositions is seen in "_Die Musikstunde_" of the National Gallery, London. The daintiness and innocence of the young girl's profile, the refinement of the man's face, and the enchanting tones of the yellow bodice and blue skirt make of this picture a worthy sequel to "_Die Menagerie_."

Another composition of two figures is "_Das Trinkerpaar_" in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. A woman is drinking from a glass, and a man standing at one side holds a jug and looks at her with an expression of concern. The painting of the woman's right hand which she holds to her breast is delightful and so is the clear half-tone of her face. An attractive one-figure composition, also in the Rijks Museum, is "_Die Scheuermagd_," a scullery maid scouring a metal pitcher on the top of a cask. The discriminations of texture in this picture, the wood and metal surfaces, the cotton of the woman's blouse, the rather coarse skin of her bared arms and the more delicate texture of her full throat, are especially noteworthy. Several compositions in which two or three figures are grouped are variations of one theme, an invalid visited by her physician. In several instances the title, the rather lackadaisical expression of the lady, and the significant glances of her companions, indicate that love-sickness is the malady. The color in these pictures is usually beautiful and the types are cleverly differentiated, the entire story becoming apparent to the spectator by particularities of gesture and feature, neither exaggerated nor emphasized unduly, but acutely observed and rendered at their precise value in the expressiveness of the whole. A very fine example of these "_Doktorbilder_" is in the collection of the New York Historical Society. The doctor is bleeding his patient, and there are several people in the room. The rich costumes are distinguished by the indescribable blond yellows and silvery blues that make Steen's color harmonies at their best singularly delicate and blithe.