Part 4

honour in his own country. Besnard is a child of fortune; success came to him early, and he has no stories to relate of struggle and despair. Of the rough way to Fame he is ignorant, of the tortures which stimulated and deepened the experience of Rodin, of the long and painful route of Puvis de Chavannes to recognition Besnard knows nothing! He has no hardships to recount: one of the happy ones in the world of art, he is singularly devoid of history. He takes a calm and cheerful satisfaction in the facts of his successes, and is delighted to have no complaint to make of public or critics. “I began with success” (he says) “and it has never left me.”

Besnard was born of a painting family, his father a pupil of Ingres and his mother a clever miniaturist. The boy was destined for Diplomacy, but with his talent for art his distaste for any other career rapidly declared itself. His parents acknowledged his predilection, and he entered the Beaux Arts. His master was the celebrated Brémond; and although Besnard claims never to have been an ardent student, and to have painted with freedom, following out his individual tastes and original inclinations, the strict academic influence of the schools, the system of Brémond, himself a pupil of Ingres, is markedly evident in Besnard’s technique. His _métier_ has been thoroughly formed, his manner of painting arrived at through the close and laborious study in the school of that greatest master of modern painting--Ingres.

His _début_ before the public was with a portrait called “La Femme Rose” about the year ’68. This picture created an immediate effect upon the critic and public, and the artist, scarcely more than a boy, found himself the success of the moment. The following year he took the Prix de Rome, which recognition instead of coming to him--as it did to most of the student world--a stimulus and a reward, broke in--as it were--success upon success! In order to avail himself of the privilege, the prize offered, he was obliged to leave behind him the opening of a career already promising and to journey to Italy. The period of his Italian sojourn was neither productive nor important; and he afterwards made a stay in London, where he found himself sympathetic with English people and their art. He painted several portraits whilst in England, and amongst them those of Admiral Sir Redmond Cameron and Sir Bartle Frere.

The pictures exhibited at the Salons following his

success with “La Femme Rose” were “L’homme qui court après la Fortune” and “Procession des Seigneurs de Voilans,” a decorative bit of painting done, as is evident, in his extreme youth, full of movement and sincerity and novelty, and indicative of his power as future decorator. This picture is to-day on the walls of his studio in Paris.

Then followed “Une Source,” “St. Benoit et Enfant,” and a large canvas “Après la Défaite.”

In 1883 a portrait called “La Femme jaune et bleue” caused an artistic furore and recalled the enthusiasm with which his _début_ had been received a few years before. The picture was not a portrait, it was a study of lights. Besnard is not, strictly speaking, a portrait painter, and this production, “La Femme jaune et bleue,” rather than the faithful transcription of a likeness, is the skilful, masterly treatment of a scheme. Never was Besnard able to reproduce for the people--who at once flocked to give him orders for portraits--the effects which had so strikingly won their notice. In the portrait of “La Femme jaune et bleue” he has insisted upon the effects of _deux rayons_--the light of an interior and the delicate illumination of the twilight entering from without. In this blending of tones, the azure luminescence of twilight and the yellow lamplight, stands the woman’s figure. The public to whom the picture was enthralling did not perhaps comprehend it was the rendering of an idea, the peculiar vision of Besnard, or understand that therein lay its distinction and that it was not a study of portraiture.

Then may be mentioned Besnard’s celebrated “Poneys harcellés par les mouches.” No one who has seen the two young horses in their stalls forgets this live and graceful picture, with its animation and _verve_, its interesting anatomical study and the treatment of colour and tone. The animals are admirably drawn and the blue and crimson and violet of the scheme are Besnard’s own. This bold and eccentric production added much to the reputation of the painter and was one of the most remarked pictures at the Chicago Exposition. It is now owned by the Count Rajinski (Russia) and is a veritable _chef d’œuvre_.

Besnard has also another equine group called “Le Marché des chevaux en Algérie,” now in the possession of the Baron Franchetti.

A list of the most celebrated of Besnard’s pictures is more or less complete as follows:

The frescoes in the Sorbonne.

“La Vie renaissante et la Mort.”

Fresco in the Hôtel de Ville, “l’Apothéose de la Lumière.”

Fresco in the Ecole de Pharmacie.

Frescoes in the Hospital for Poor Children at Berck.

Portrait of Réjane.

Portrait of the Princess Mathilde.

Portrait of his family.

Portrait of his wife.

The last four are in his own possession.

“Couché du soleil sur le bord d’Algérie.” Luxembourg.

“La Mort.” Luxembourg.

“Femme qui se chauffe.” Luxembourg.

“Entre deux rayons.” Luxembourg.

“La Féerie Intime.” Russia.

“L’Ile heureuse”--in the possession of Mr. Henschel.

At the present date Monsieur Martignac, Paris, possesses several splendid canvases of Besnard’s, notably “l’Espagnole,” “Le Regard,” “l’Automne” and “La Femme de Biarritz.”

In America the purchasers of Besnard have been few. One of the most interesting of his paintings is at Baltimore, in Mr. George Vanderbilt’s collection.

Paris, appreciative of her distinguished son, has confided to him the most important of the decorations now under the city’s consideration--the ceiling of the Théâtre Français and the cupola of the Petit Palais. Let the amateur of art, whose list is already long, add these mural decorations which are now in process of construction, and it will be seen that the art of interior painting is not extinct in France, and that these tasks have been happily consigned to the man best fitted at present to perform them.

Besnard is at present engaged upon the ceiling of the Théâtre Français. Its dimensions are vast, covering a surface of 273 metres. His subject, already composed in miniature, is as follows:

The god Apollo, in his chariot, draws his horses back on their haunches whilst he salutes the great masters of drama--Corneille, Racine, Molière, Victor Hugo, all of whom are seated at the top of a flight of temple steps. Behind the god are a group of the Hours, and in front, the Muses. On the last step of the temple is a charming group and distinctive of Besnard. The female figure of Time reposes against

another figure representing Truth--a most subtle and agreeable image.

The cupola of the Petit Palais is divided into four panels, and Besnard’s intention is to represent in his paintings the city of Paris in four different conceptions--“Paris Hospitalière,” “Paris dans son Art,” “Paris dans le Commerce,” and “Paris dans les Industries.”

For the St. Louis Exposition in the United States Besnard has sent a frieze covering 760 metres, entirely surrounding the walls of the Exposition Française. In this building will also be seen by the tourists there “l’Ile heureuse.”

For the more minute consideration of Besnard’s works it is well to begin with the decorations in the Ecole de Pharmacie where the walls of the corridor entrance to this School are entirely covered with his decorations. The order was given in 1883 and fulfilled in 1888. Here Besnard has given a series of fresh and delicate _plein air_ frescoes done upon the walls themselves. As they are without protection--regrettably--they are being marked by the vandal pencils of the sightseer and the students. To the right, the first panel represents the open fields where peasants and women gather the medical herbs. In another panel follows the sorting of the herbs in the laboratory; the third is the laboratory itself with the distillation of the medicines. Then comes a line of landscapes just above over the woodwork of the wall like a dado. The first is the serious, meditative scientist in the balcony of his house, overlooking the river and the city. Alongside this are several landscapes of a peculiarly gentle and attractive charm. At the end of the hall are again four large frescoes, the forest where the chemists and the botanists are engaged in their researches--the lecture room and the geologist amongst the rocks. On the opposite wall is the companion series of oblong panels whose subjects have become so well known to the connoisseur: Dawn on a primæval sea where up from the waves prehistoric creatures rise weird and appalling; a group of sea-horses emerging from the waters; a troop of mastodons, and lastly primitive man and woman disporting on the shores of an ancient sea whose waves to-day are confined in some strata of rock to be found by the geologist’s tool.

On the left, at the entrance door, are the most beautiful of the series of decorations. These are life size. One is “La Malade,” a sick girl in her bed, surrounded by the mother, the nurse and the physician.

The companion piece is “The Convalescence,” and is undoubtedly one of Besnard’s _chefs d’œuvre_. The invalid, after her long and weary confinement, is being supported by tender arms into the sunlight; and it would be difficult to imagine a more expressive and suggestive subject for these walls. The picture is full of sunlight and mysterious half-tones, and is expressive of tenderness and sympathy and encouragement. In fact, these frescoes possess in a large degree the essentials of good decoration--simplicity of line--bold and correct drawing--impressive human sentiment and impressive subject.

Again and notably, in the decorations of the Salle des Mariages in the Mairie du Louvre the subtlety of Besnard’s treatment of his task, the upleading and inspiring effect he has produced makes well worth a special description of these pictures. It will appear impossible to the dogmatic mind that a secular room, in a Republican Mayor’s office, can suggest an atmosphere of sacred beauty. This, however, has been rendered the case by the decorations with which Besnard has beautified this square, dark, conservative apartment. As one enters the apartment where civil marriages are performed in this particular quarter of Paris the eyes find on the wall opposite the door a graceful and agreeable picture of youthful love. The girl--an exquisite figure--is surrounded by flying birds and young doves. She is seated on a bank of flowers and above her a youth of age as tender as her own waves a branch of spring flowers. From this, one seeks the side wall and a large panel of bright and glowing colour. The subject is harvest time, and the fields are heavy with their burden of grain. On a sheaf of golden wheat is the figure of a woman, mature now although still young, and at her breast a child. Two other children play about her, and alongside the husband’s strong, vigorous figure wrestles with his refractory horse. This decoration, purely pastellic in impression, is so soft and plastic that the clear colour seems ready to come off at the touch. It is peculiarly velvet-like in quality and very high in tone. Already this square, unbeautiful room with its green-covered benches has altered in character. The greatest forces of the world, the greatest beauty of the world, have penetrated it through these interpretations of a master. But it is not to the exuberant and lovely expressions of life that the man and woman who come here to the Maire’s office

to be joined in wedlock, turn, or on which--from the very position of the picture--their eyes are forced to rest. Directly over the official desk--directly over the entrance door--is the third decoration of the suite. In the frailest tone, if this word may be employed, in the most mysterious medium, he has painted a winter scene. To the left a little row of skeleton trees range in nude, chaste bareness; in the far distance is the lonely outline of a ruined tower. Close together--at the top of a long line of stone steps--are seated a man and woman. Age has claimed them; they are old. But the woman still leans upon the man. What this fresco portrays of union, of inseparableness, of devotion, is not easy to express in words. There is no hint of melancholy in this winter scene, in this study of old age which Besnard has seen fit to accentuate, which he has chosen for his principal panel, and on which the newly married couple must meditate. It is the beautiful apotheosis of wedded love daringly looking beyond youth to the serene beauty of life’s decline. The frescoes were done in 1898. They are drawn at once with freedom and precision, and are excellent examples of the best modern mural art.

The subject painted on the arch of the Amphithéatre de Chimie, La Sorbonne, is highly imaginative. Besnard has called it “La Vie renaissante de la Mort.” It consists of three large panels. In the centre panel, thrown on a bank of yellow herbage, is the body of a woman, at her breast a nursing infant. From the other breast a stream of milk flows forth, gaining in dimensions until it swells to a river of life. Around her mouth cluster a horde of butterflies, the disseminators of germs. A serpent, symbolising generation, makes his way slowly toward the woman. The right panel represents figures of Adam and Eve. Adam carries the young and lovely figure of the mother of life downward toward a river flowing past the portals of Eden. Her hand is outstretched toward the golden apples of an overhanging tree. Together the couple descend toward the river which supposedly carries on its breast the _débris_ of plants and offscum of the earth, and loses itself in the earth again. At the left a mighty chasm charged with fire represents a crucible purifying and revivifying and reconstructing. Thus Besnard has chosen to symbolise the forces of nature--Water, Air, Earth, Fire. The principles of organic chemistry--creatures of flora, fauna and animal life under the solar influence.

It is a singular and bold conception, magnificently drawn and pastel-like in treatment.

The Musée du Luxembourg is especially rich in the artist’s works, and the buyers for the State have shown wisdom and penetration in their choice. In one of the rooms is a small canvas not over 18 by 6 inches. It recalls in character and distinction the little picture of Gambetta’s room done by Cazin, and it is only the great masters who thus wonderfully fill small bits of canvas with whole histories of life. Besnard has called his study “La Mort”--a miserable little mansard room _au sixième_ in a third-class hotel--the meagre furnishings are a chair, table, and iron bed on which lies the dead figure of a woman. At the door the voluble _concierge_, half curious and half touched, ushers in a young man, no doubt the lover of the wretched creature beyond all the questions of life; the man is in evening dress, hat in his hand. Here we have poverty, misery, debauch, disgrace and despair in a medallion, as it were. The composition and the treatment recall no one but Besnard himself, but the literary quality of the picture suggests Hogarth series, and Tolstoi and Balzac. This affinity with a sister art is now and then interestingly observed in the narrative pictures of the great masters.

“Entre Deux Rayons” is the so-called portrait of a woman. Again the effect of two lights is here accentuated. The canvas is full of light and seems positively to radiate. The tones are red and yellow, warm and iridescent, and the flesh of the arms and neck melt into the scheme of the drapery. The picture is a marvel of delicate beauty and technique. (1893.)

But surpassing all the pictures in this Museum, in the same room, on a considerably larger canvas, is “La Femme qui se chauffe,” the nude figure of a woman crouching before a fire whose existence is only evinced by the play of its reflections upon her flesh. From a little cup of blue and white china she is drinking a draught, evidently warm and delicious, to judge from her attitude, which is expressive of entire comfort and _bien être_. The work, in point of view of modelling and drawing, is absolute perfection. This treatment of the nude has the strength and power of marble with the addition of colour. In none of Besnard’s paintings is the luminous quality more striking. There is in it an opalescence and vibration, it possesses the softness of old paintings, and alone in a gallery of masterpieces would give Besnard the right to first rank. The scheme of “La Femme qui se chauffe” is blue and yellow, the

background a penumbra of azure, from which the brilliant figure of the woman comes dazzlingly forth.

The pictures in the possession of Monsieur Martignac deserve note. “Le Sourire,” painted in 1895, is a portrait of merit and perhaps particularly interesting because uncharacteristic of Besnard. It is successful as a study of dark, more sombre tones, and has many of the characteristics of Dutch painting.

“L’Automne,” again, is a study low in tone, and Besnard has left his type (distinctly the blonde woman) to paint a dark creature through whose loosened hair fall a shower of autumn leaves. This picture is a veritable phantom of a season past. There is an Algerienne in this collection, interesting because it is yet another treatment of Besnard’s famous “Deux Rayons.” The Eastern woman is seated in the window of the booth, and blending with the room’s light is that light from the long Eastern street which seems actually to enter her room at the threshold of her booth.

In 1893, Mr. James Sutton, of New York, ordered from Martignac forty Besnards to be sent to America. His name was then scarcely known in the United States. Many of the canvases found instant appreciation. One beautiful portrait called “La Pensive,” in the possession of Monsieur Martignac, is especially worthy of mention. Here Besnard is faithful to his type--a blonde woman with brilliant head of copper-coloured hair. She leans a little forward with her chin on her clasped hands. Her dress is of yellow satin and old lace, in her hands two great pink roses. The scheme of the picture is yellow with a single delicate pink note. The hair, the flesh, and the texture of the satin and the lace are all repetitions and repetitions, all insistences of the yellow tone.

“La Femme de Biarritz”--Martignac--one of Besnard’s late paintings, is very beautiful indeed. The model is a woman of warm, voluptuous type, revealing the characteristics of the Basque. This picture was painted when Besnard was in Biarritz, where he had gone for the health of one of his children.

Monsieur Martignac has several examples of Besnard’s pastels, and curiously enough the more delicate treatment that his canvases in oil display is absent in these pastels, whose colours are so vivid as to be almost blatant; but they are splendid achievements, and Besnard is the first pastellist in France. Some of his most successful works in this medium are in the possession of Dr. Delbet, of Paris.

Besnard’s personality recalls that of his distinguished countryman, Rodin. He has the same strong, vigorous physique, the same air of power, but these two great masters in temperament and in life and experience are the antipodes. Besnard is not a recluse; he is, on the contrary, a man of the world, very domestic too, and absorbed in his family and his home. His hotel and studios are a little removed from the centre of Parisian turmoil. He entertains and receives a great deal and has a large circle of acquaintances and friends. In order to control as much land as possible and to construct larger workshops, he has bought extensively around his house. In one studio are the projected designs for the Théâtre Français, in another the new portrait of his wife, a full-sized figure of a woman of middle age, her hair is snow white, her dress sumptuous black velvet, and she holds a yellow-covered novel in her hands. This was exhibited at last year’s Salon and is the most realistic of all Besnard’s paintings.

There is an interesting portrait in this same studio of the Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, who died this winter, and whose salons have been famous for the last half-century. The Princess is seated at a table by a green lamp, in the position and environment so well known to men and women of letters.

On these walls also hang the celebrated picture of the painter’s family, painted about twenty years ago, a group of red-cheeked children and their mother.

In this large, agreeable room, Besnard paints from models and statues, makes his designs and drawings, his etchings, his sketches and his pastels. But upstairs at the top of his house (whose walls are rich with their friezes of designs) is an elaborate studio particularly designed for posers for portraits. This sumptuous apartment--furnished in the most luxurious manner--suggests a drawing-room and not a studio at all. Rich screens of Chinese and Japanese workmanship, paintings by the old masters (none of his work is here), objects and _bibelots_ and treasures of art adorn the apartment. The chimney-piece is interesting as an example of Besnard’s taste for plastic art. It is set in panels of stained glass, and around the fender are coiled a pair of gigantic boa-constrictors made in plaster and afterwards painted. The effect is picturesque, terrifying and peculiar, and is the work of the artist himself.

This room boasts the black-and-gold cabinet which

figured in “La Féerie intime.” The picture, as will be remembered, is the nude figure of a young woman ensconced in a great armchair. The garments she has just quitted softly surround her. The brilliant and dazzling effect of the painting is in the meshes of her spangled dress blazing with reflected light, and from the gold that gleams and glitters is the lacquer of the Chinese cabinet. The whole picture is a glow of gold and fire, and in this luscent envelope the woman muses and dreams. This picture is in Russia, as are many of Besnard’s canvases. Many critics and painters class this picture as the finest example of modern art.

It would not be complete to close the study of Besnard without mention of his etchings. Here and there a dealer may have a complete set of the few produced, but they are few indeed, and difficult to obtain. The most celebrated is known as “La Femme.” In this series Besnard has drawn woman in every stage of her existence. We have the flirt, the mistress, the wife, the happy mother with her children, the miserable mother, who to cover the form of her freezing child denudes herself, and at length casts her body over her son; the woman of the ball-room, the woman of the streets, and, in short, he has seen fit to display every state and condition of femininity in this study of black and white.