Part 2

After the Barbizon school with its romantic representation of nature, there came inevitably the realistic painters, headed by Courbet, later by Manet--men who painted things not romantically but realistically, pitilessly, brutally. There was the same rage against these men as against the Cubists today. Both Whistler and Manet were in the Salon des Refuses of 1864.

Along with the men who painted _things_ as they saw them, came naturally men like Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Seurat, Signac, who tried endless experiments in the effort to paint _light_ as they saw it.

So that the final twenty-five years of the last century were given up in France to attempts to paint _things_ and _light_ as they really are.

After the painting of _things_ and _light_ one would say the art of painting had touched its limits, that there was nothing more to do. But, no, there is the painting of _neither_ things nor light--the painting of _emotions_--the painting of pure line and color compositions for the sake of the pleasure such harmonies afford--_the expression of one’s inner self_.

It was while Manet was painting _things_ as they are, and Monet was painting _light_ as it is, that Whistler was painting both things and light but with an entirely different object in view, namely, the production of _color harmonies_ superior to either thing-effects or light-effects.

To the following résumé it is obvious another paragraph must be added to bring the record down to date.

* * * * *

Painting in France in the nineteenth century followed a course parallel with that of the intellectual life of the country, it adapted itself to the various changes in modes of thought, it took upon itself a succession of forms corresponding to those which were evolved in literature.

At the beginning of the century, under the Empire, painting was classical. It was primarily engaged in rendering scenes borrowed from the antique world of Greece and Rome, subjects derived from fable and mythology. Historical painting formed the essence of high art. It was based upon the nude, treated according to the classical model. Two masters--David and Ingress--were its loftiest expression. After them classical art was continued in an enfeebled condition by painters of only secondary importance.

The new spirit of romanticism, however, which had arisen in literature, also made its appearance in painting. Delacroix was the master in whom it found its most complete expression. The tones of classical art, sober, restrained, and often cold, gave place in his work to warm and brilliant coloration. For the nicely balanced scenes of classical antiquity, he substituted compositions tumultuous with movement. Romanticism developed freedom of action and expressiveness of pose to their utmost limits.

Painting was then conquered by realism, which had also invaded literature. Courbet was its great initiator. He painted the life he saw around him in a direct, robust manner. He also painted landscape with a truthfulness that was informed by a powerful emotion. At the same time, Rousseau and Corot had also brought landscape painting into close touch with nature. They had rediscovered its soul and its charm. Finally, crowning, as it were, the work of their predecessors, came Manet and the Impressionists.[4]

Turner was the forerunner of Impressionism, the father of attempts to paint brilliant _light_ effects, Whistler was the forerunner of Post-Impressionism, the father of attempts to paint _line and color_ compositions.

Turner did not carry his theories to the scientific extremes of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists; Whistler did not carry his attempts to the abstract extremes of the Compositionalists and the Cubists; but in their work are found the seeds of all there is in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

* * * * *

“Do you say that this is a correct representation of Battersea Bridge?”

“I did not intend it to be a ‘correct’ portrait of the bridge. It is only a moonlight scene, and the pier in the center of the bridge may or may not be like the piers at Battersea Bridge as you know them in broad daylight. As to what the picture represents, that depends upon who looks at it. To some persons it may represent all that is intended; to others it may represent nothing.”

“The prevailing color is blue?”

“Perhaps.”

“Are those figures on the top of the bridge intended for people?”

“They are just what you like.”

“Is that a barge beneath?”

“Yes. I am very much encouraged at your perceiving that. My whole scheme was only to bring about a certain harmony of color.”[5]

* * * * *

Most painters are so intent upon the _subjects_ of their work they give little thought to color harmonies. Whistler was the one great modern exception; his first thought was to produce _beautiful effects_ in line and color, hence his titles, “Nocturnes,” “Symphonies,” “Arrangements,” and so on. He did not like to give his portraits the names of his sitters. Where other painters emphasize the “subjects” and the “stories” of their pictures he tried to suppress both and direct the attention of the beholder to the painting. He was the forerunner of recent attempts to do with line and color what the musician does with sound. He was the leader of the revolt against the “story-telling” picture.

* * * * *

Millet is a good illustration of the painter to whom “subject” was everything, and technic of quite secondary importance. I think it is generally conceded that as a painter, a master of technic, he did not rank very high, but he had a faculty for painting subjects, scenes from life, that grip. As a painter Whistler was incomparably superior to Millet, but just because he was a great master of technic and quite indifferent to the story-telling side of his pictures he did not become so popular.[6]

* * * * *

There are many actions and reactions in art, many evolutions and involutions, but the great rhythmical sweep of the pendulum is from, let us say, _studio_-art to _nature_-art, and back from _nature_-art to _studio_-art.

From works of _observation_ to works of _imagination_, and back from the use of the _imagination_ to the use of _observation_.

For a time men work feverishly in the seclusion of their closets painting, writing, modelling, composing beautiful things, pure products of their imaginations, then comes the reaction and they feel the need of renewing their vigor by touching heel to earth. They draw aside their curtains, throw open their doors and go out into the sunlight to breathe the fresh air and gain new inspirations from contact with nature.

That is what happens in art once in so often.

The Barbizon school was a studio school. It walked the streets and the fields; it looked at men and women at work and at play, but when it came to paint it did not paint outdoors with object and easel in close contact; it retired within its doors and transformed life and nature as great romantic story-tellers translate their impressions into fairy-tales and romances.

* * * * *

It seems a far cry from Millet to Chabaud but in some aspects of their attitude toward art they are nearly akin. Between the two there intervened Impressionism, that is all. Millet painted _labor_. And what is the painting by Chabaud, “The Laborer,” but a more elemental Millet? It lacks the romantic, the poetic qualities of Millet’s “Labor,” for instance, or his “Sower”--paintings famous in prints and reproductions, but it is none the less a vivid representation of labor.

To the admirers of Millet it may seem sacrilegious to even mention Chabaud in comparison, but, confining our attention to the one painting reproduced herein, there is no question that in its elemental strength, its simplicity, it possesses a quality, a certain bald dramatic quality that Millet lacks, though Millet’s “Sower” may possess qualities you like more.

However it is with no intention to make a comparison between two men so very different, that I mention them, but rather for the purpose of pointing out that the attitude of both to their art is fundamentally the same--they use art to _express themselves_ and not to imitate what they see.

This is the way Millet worked. “He himself went about Barbizon like a peasant. And he might have been seen wandering over the woods and fields with an old, red cloak, wooden shoes, and a weather-beaten straw hat. He rose at sunrise, and wandered about the country as his parents had done. He guarded no flocks, drove no cows, and no yokes of oxen or horses; he carried neither mattock nor spade but rested on his stick; he was equipped with only the _faculty_ of _observation_ and _poetic intention_ ... he leant on the garden wall with his arms crossed on his breast, and looked into the setting sun as it threw a rosy veil over field and forest. He heard the chime of vesper bells, watched the people pray and then return home. And he returned also, and read the Bible by lamplight, while his wife sewed and the children slept. When all was quiet he closed the book and began _to dream_.... _On the morrow he painted._”[7]

This is the method of all the very great art the world has ever known--first _to see_; and then _to dream_ and then _on the morrow to paint_.

Impressionism cut out the _dreams_--it painted what it _saw_.

There were never in the world peasants such as Millet painted, or woods such as Daubigny painted. People thought there were until the Impressionists came and turned on the light.

Corot’s silvery glades have a closer relationship to nature. He felt the reaction that was in the air. He was almost an

Impressionist but not quite. One feels the _poetic_, the _imaginative_--that is, the _studio_ quality in his work. He sought nature but not in the spirit displayed by the Impressionists.

* * * * *

The reaction began with Courbet and was given a powerful impetus by Manet who painted things not as he _imagined_ them but as he _saw_ them, and he did not try to see interesting people and things, he did not look for the _picturesque_ but he painted anything he happened to see upon the theory that the value of a work of art depends not upon its subject but upon its technic; that the worth of a painting is to be found in the painting and not in the object that happens to be painted.

* * * * *

Manet painted very few pictures outdoors. In the literal sense he did not belong to the _plein air_ school. Almost all his work was done indoors. But it was in no sense studio-art as we have used the term. He painted in his studio as directly as Monet painted outdoors. He painted a sitter with the same realism that Monet painted a haystack; and if he painted a bull fight from memory or from a sketch, he did it with the _intention_ to reproduce the scene literally.

Whistler had his literal moods, so to speak; his moments when with clear eye and vision unaffected by any conscious play of the imagination he would make marvellously faithful transcripts from life and nature, transcripts so faithful that Monet’s at their best pale in comparison. I recall three exquisite marines which were painted in a boat, the canvases propped against a seat.

But for the most part he painted indoors and with the one end in view--the composition of line and color harmonies more beautiful than anything found in nature, just as the musician seeks to compose harmonies more beautiful than any sounds found in nature.

In the clearness of his vision and the faithfulness with which he painted the things and people with which he came in contact Whistler was an Impressionist--an Impressionist long before Monet, but in his search after color and line music, in his attempts to do things beyond and above nature, he was a _Post_-Impressionist.

* * * * *

From a psychological point of view it is not difficult to see how these movements come about.

Given exhibitions year after year filled with paintings of the imagination, with idealized peasants such as Millet’s, and idealized landscapes such as Rousseau’s, it is morally certain the younger painters will feel a restless longing to return to the realities of life, just as the reading or theater going public after being fed too long on fairy-tales and romances demand more realistic representations of life.

Every man who reads much has his fairy-tale period and his romantic period followed by a strong taste for realism, which in turn is followed by a new and finer appreciation of purely imaginative literature.

In his beliefs the normal man passes through a similar series of reactions from the acceptance of the marvellous in his childhood and youth to the sceptical rejection of the miraculous and the acceptance of only the literal and material in his buoyant manhood, thence to the profounder philosophy and mystical speculations of riper age.

The old, old conflict between _materialism_ and _idealism_, between _seeing-knowing_ and _thinking-feeling_, between the cruder actualities of the senses and the finer actualities of the imagination!

It is not that all men at a given time are idealists and at another realists, any more than all painters in one decade are Impressionists, in another Post-Impressionists. Life does not move that way.

* * * * *

Between 1874 and 1900 Impressionism forged to the front and monopolized the attention of the art world, yet during that period there were painted more pictures of the Pre-Impressionist schools than ever before. The Impressionists made all the noise, the Pre-Impressionists did most of the work.

The net result was a large amount of absorption by the older schools of the good things in Impressionism, and a noticeable improvement in painting generally.

Just now the Post-Impressionists occupy the center of the stage and are making themselves so conspicuous the public is almost led to believe that both Impressionists and Pre-Impressionists no longer exist, that everything once considered good in art is being relegated to the storehouse.

Again, as a matter of fact, with all the noise made by the Post-Impressionists, it is beyond question true that never before were so many Impressionist and Pre-Impressionist pictures painted as now.

The stream of Pre-Impressionist and Impressionist pictures goes right on and in time history will repeat itself, the good in Post-Impressionism will be absorbed and the main current that supplies the great public with art will be _Pre_-impressionist + _Impressionist_ + _Post_-impressionist, with as many more prefixes as the ingenuity of the artist can devise to describe his vagaries.

* * * * *

Painters are a good deal like inventors, each of whom thinks his invention sure to revolutionize the world, to find in the end that his supposed invention is either not new or if new not valuable.

Now and then a painter like an inventor does do something that is revolutionary, but these geniuses are not common, and with even them critical research invariably finds they have simply built upon the labors of others. An Edison, a Bell, a Marconi appears only when electrical science has reached a stage where the inventions rather than the men are inevitable. All this is statistically demonstrated in the records of patent offices.

* * * * *

We talk of this and that “period” in the work of a painter, a poet, a sculptor. Often the changes in mood and technic are marked and the transitions sharply defined. For the most part they are the turning from the imagination to observation and _vice versa_.

The brain is not unlike a factory; when filled to overflowing with raw material it must close its doors and work up its stock; when it has exhausted its store of impressions it must open its five senses to receive new.

* * * * *

According to Hegel, the great German philosopher, there are three movements of the historical pendulum; for example, we have an age of materialism followed by an age whose sole interest is in psychical phenomena; this followed by an age which extracts the truth from both of these opposite hypotheses, the golden mean. Thus, in art, we have the classical spirit for the thesis, the modern art movement, its antithesis, and we may confidently expect and hope for an age which shall select the bold, fresh spirit of the modern movement and infuse it into the proportion of classical art, which shall be the great synthesis of the artistic future. Thus the extravagant and apparently insane movement of the Futurist and Cubist will be of the greatest value in reviving art, putting red blood into art again.[8]

A man can understand what is going on about him only by a knowledge of what has happened in the past--the wider his knowledge of past events, the clearer his understanding of present.

Space does not permit the printing in detail the ridicule that greeted Turner, Millet, Corot, Courbet, but it is important to open the eyes of the reader to the _fact_ that men whose pictures are considered masterpieces today, and command fabulous sums, were met with the _same_ scorn and derision that the new men of today meet.

History repeats itself--we accept as fine what our fathers laughed at; our sons will accept as fine what we laugh at, and so on to the end of time.

You readers and especially you museums, who are paying tens of thousands for pictures by Manet, Monet, Renoir and a host of other innovators, take to heart what follows.

* * * * *

In 1874 the Impressionists held their first exhibition in a room rented from a photographer, 35 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris. They called themselves, _Société anonyme, des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs_.

There were about thirty exhibitors in all; among them, Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Cézanne, Guillaumin, who might be called the extremists; Degas, Bracquemond de Nittis, Brandon, Boudin, Cals, Gustave Collin, Labouche, Lépine, Rouart, and others were invited to take the edge off the novelties of the first named.[9]

Monet exhibited a picture named “_Impression; soleil levant_.” In derision Louis Leroy called an article on the exhibition in “Charivari”[10] “_Exposition des Impressionists_,” and in spite of the protests of the painters themselves the name stuck--just as the name _Cubists_, derisively applied by Matisse, has stuck.

* * * * *

This exhibition, which marked an epoch in French art, was a failure so far as immediate results went. The ridicule was such that the better known artists, ashamed of being caught in the company of the new men, “took good care not to run the risk a second time.”

The pictures were subjected to all sorts of petty insults, “such as the placing of small coins upon the frames in derision, and jokes and jibes.”

* * * * *

The next year the Impressionists held no exhibition, but under dire need had a sale at the Hotel Drouot.

Claude Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Cals, Cézanne, Degas, Guillaumin, de Nittis, and Pissarro were represented. There were some seventy pictures. The pictures were disliked and for some unknown reason the artists were considered as hardened members of the community. They only received laughable prices. Even the attempt to carry out the auction-room trick of having friends bid up the prices was not carried out successfully and many of the pictures were bid in by the penniless friends in this way, and withdrawn. Including these mistakes and the real sales they realized not much more than $2,000. In this sale of 1875, Renoir’s “Avant le bain” brought $28; “La Source,” $22 (afterwards sold for $14,000); “Une vue du Pont neuf” brought all of $60; Claude Monet’s twenty pictures averaged from $40 to $60 each.

The writer was offered “Avant le bain” in 1894 for $1,200; it has since sold for $25,000. In a recent letter from M. George Durand-Ruel he says:

All the fine works of the Masters of the Modern French School have advanced very much in value. The “Portrait of the Charpentier Family,” which is now in the Metropolitan Museum, was ordered from Renoir for three hundred francs; “La Source,” also by Renoir, was sold in a sale in 1878 for 110 francs. It has been since bought by the Prince de Wagram for 75,000 francs, and would be worth today double the amount. The “Port de Boulogne,” by Manet, was bought from Manet by my father for 800 francs and sold to Faure, who later on sold it to Comte de Camondo for 70,000 francs. It would be worth today about 250,000 francs. “Le Déjeuner dans l’Atelier,” which my father bought from Manet and which we had on exhibition at 389 Fifth Avenue in 1895, asking price at that time $7,000, was sold afterwards to M. Pellerin and bought two years ago for the Munich Museum for $60,000.

Daubigny was one of the few men who appreciated Monet; he bought his pictures and urged others to buy.

When he died in 1878 a sale of his effects was held. Duret says:

I knew the “Canal à Saardam,” which seemed to me one of the most beautiful things Monet had painted; I made up my mind to go to the auction and try to buy it. The sale took place but the picture was not put up. I supposed that the heirs had decided to keep it as a work they understood and appreciated. One Sunday, fifteen days later, happening by chance in L’Hôtel Drouot I went into a room filled with unfinished works, old and grimy canvases, and a mass of stuff--in a word, all the worthless debris of a studio--and there at one side the “Canal à Saardam” of Claude Monet.... I inquired and learned that the room contained the scourings of Daubigny’s studio, sent in for sale anonymously. It was there the heirs had sent the picture of Monet, excluding it from the regular sale because they thought it would bring discredit. It was knocked down to me at the auction for $16. In 1894, when my collection was sold, the picture was bought by M. Durand-Ruel for $1,100. In 1901 it was withdrawn from a sale at the price of $6,000.

* * * * *

The second exhibition was held in 1876 in the galleries of Durand-Ruel. In passing, tribute should be paid to this great dealer and remarkable man who backed his belief in the new men with all he possessed, to the jeopardizing of his business, and who, happily, still lives to enjoy the confirmation of his judgment.

Of this exhibition Albert Wolff, in “Figaro,” said: