Part 7

Monet, however, soon tired of figure pieces. His true penchant lay toward landscape. In this field he found an infinity of colour possibilities, innumerable subtleties of light gradation, and ready-to-paint arrangements as appealing as the ones he had formerly had to pose in his interiors. At first his technique was broad and radiant, much like a dispersed Manet. The large flat planes of unified colour which later were to disintegrate into a thousand touches, were laid on silhouetted forms. His boat pieces in the Caillebotte collection in the Luxembourg gallery, appear, in their simplicity and breadth of treatment, like the unfinished underpainting of a Turner or a Rembrandt. Much of the bare canvas is visible; and in them one feels the presence of the experimenter. At this time the war drove Monet to London, and his exile proved a salutary one. On his return his pictures bloomed with a new brilliance, and his flat surfaces became fragmentised. Racial characteristics no doubt establish a bond between Sisley and the English landscapists, but nothing less than an active influence could have made so typical a Frenchman as Monet paint a canvas like L'Eglise a Varengeville in which Turner is so much in evidence. Turner is also unmistakably present in Pissarro at times, as witness Sydenham Road, but never to any great extent.

Despite his great debt to Turner, Manet and Pissarro, Monet owed even more to the Japanese. They influenced his style and his selection of subjects. From them he lifted the idea of painting a single object many times in its varied atmospheric manifestations. But where the Japanese shifted their vantage-ground with each successive picture, Monet's observation point remained stationary. His composition too, superficial as it is, is frankly Japanese. It is generally represented by a straight line which runs near the lower frame from one side to the other of the canvas, and which supports the principal objects of the work. This line slants, now up to the left, now up to the right; but seldom is it curved as in the more advanced drawings of Hiroshige or Hokusai. His kinship to the Japanese is, after all, a natural one, for the temperaments of France and Japan are as similar as is possible between east and west. The Japanese artists presented atmospheric conditions by means of gradating large colour planes into white or dark. The consequent effects of rain, snow, wind and sun are as vivid as Monet's, but they differ from the Frenchman's in that they are concerned principally with nature's decorative possibilities. Monet adheres to graphic transcription for the purpose of presenting the dynamics of a mood-producing phase of nature. But though differing as to aims, they both reach very similar visual results. Compare, for instance, Monet's suite of Les Peupliers with Hiroshige's series of the Tokaido or with Hokusai's Views of Fuji. Many of the pictures are alike in composition and choice of subject; but the European has achieved a living light, while the Oriental has presented a more lucid and intensive vision. These differences of purposes and similarities of appearance are again discernible in Monet's Coins de Riviere and Shiubun's Setting Sun. A further proof of this Impressionist's affinities with the Japanese will be found by collating Monet's figure pieces with those of Utamaro.

There is one important point of divergence, however, between the arts of Japan and Monet's canvases. Whereas the Japanese ignored texture, Monet at all times devoted himself more or less sedulously to its portrayal. The Falaise a Etretat and The Houses of Parliament--London are examples of his freedom from a rigid system of scientific application. In both pictures the sky is drawn with broad intersecting strokes in order to achieve transparency and vastness. The water, in the former, is painted with long curved strippings to give the wave effect, as in Courbet's La Vague; and, in the latter, ripples are formed by minute touches. Monet's architecture is often built up with colour-spots as a man lays bricks; and the cliffs in the Falaise a Etretat are corrugated in exactly the same way the strata lie in nature. Later this preciosity of style disappeared, except in his treatment of slightly ruffled water. His brushing became irregular and elongated, and he applied his stroke so that it would merge into the other innumerable touches of diverse colour. His eyesight was highly trained, and after years of labour in the conscious analysis of colour planes, he was able to divide these planes unconsciously.

Monet was artistic in that he felt deeply what was before him. Henri Martin, on the other hand, who painted with independent touches in the hope of obtaining flickering sunlight, and who knew his palette fully as well as Monet, laboured mechanically. His work is more optical than emotional. He is a realist in the same sense that Roll is a realist; but both these men present only the husk of reality. Monet, to the contrary, experienced and expressed nature's ecstasy. He is like a string which vibrates to any harmony: Martin is little more than an eye. Both finished their work in the open; and both stippled. But here the parallelism ends, for where Monet completed the effects of the Japanese, Martin only took light into the academies. Perhaps this is why Martin was at once acclaimed by the public, and why Monet, during those first dark years of struggle and poverty, was compelled to sell his canvases for practically nothing. Duret confesses to having obtained one for eighty francs. Martin was early accorded academic honours, and received numerous government orders.

Monet found himself at home wherever there was light and water. His canvases describe scenes from all over Europe. But his most famous pictures are his two series, Les Meules and Les Nympheas. In the first, a single haystack is set forth in a diversity of illuminations and seasons; and the second repeats a small pond of water-lilies, in shade and in sun, ruffled and calm. His La Cathedrale, Venice and London series are also widely known. These represent acute observation and an implacable inspiration to work, for they had to be finished simultaneously. Their accomplishment was a stupendous _tour de force_. At sunrise Monet would go forth with twenty blank canvases so that the changes of sunlight and mist might be caught from hour to hour. They seem infantile to us today--these imitations of the subtleties of light, these meteorological histories of haystacks and lilies, these atmospheric personalities of cathedrals and canals. Yet it is by just such self-burials in data that one exhausts the aesthetic possibilities of nature's actualities. And not until this probing to the bottom has been accomplished does the artist possess that complete knowledge which impels him to push forward to something newer and more vital.

Sisley was the last of the original five to adopt Impressionistic methods. He had long had an admiration for the exploits of the more revolutionary painters, but a comfortable income had acted as a sedative on his ambitions. He did not feel the necessity for difficult endeavour. But when, at the death of his father, he found himself penniless and with a family to care for, he joined the ranks of Pissarro, Monet, Guillaumin and Bazille. He had talent and an accurate eye, and his earlier academic work, done in the sixties, served as a practical foundation. After he had adopted the more modern technique of Pissarro and Monet, he was prepared for the achievement of new art. If we had no other proof that Impressionism at its inception was a shallow craft, Sisley's immediate mastery of it would be conclusive, for his appropriation of its means was not an aesthetic impulse but a financial expedient. But more extensive corroboration can be found in a score of academies where Impressionism is taught and taught conclusively.

There is no more or less actual composition in Sisley than in other of the Impressionists. He supplied no innovations, and he differed from his fellows only in so far as his temperament indicated variation. In Monet and Guillaumin there is a concentration and precision which the Englishman fell short of. His nature was less akin to these Impressionists than to the Turner of wide and open skies, of the softness and dreaminess of summer, of that perfect satisfaction which is content with inaction. Sisley's very colour preference for which the public reproached him--light lilac--indicates his penchant for prettiness and repose. His choice of theme was invariably dictated by a poetical and sentimental need for the intimate.

In Guillaumin we have a man who gave promise of good work but who, up to the last, failed in its fulfilment. Indubitably talented, he never succeeded in reaching that point where talent is only a means to an end. But nevertheless there was in him a solidity of modelling, a real feeling for the ponderous hardness of hills and plains. He was a friend of Cezanne, and undoubtedly learned much from that master of form. At first he had painted in sombre tones, but later, after meeting Cezanne and Pissarro in the _Academie Suisse_, he adopted their lighter and more joyous colour schemes. There is a canvas in the Caillebotte Collection in the Luxembourg which, in its broadness of treatment and extensive planes, suggests Gauguin both as to gamut and conception. Guillaumin was the most masculine talent of the early Impressionist group. He cared less for the transient views of nature than for its eternal aspect. His colour, by its liberality of application, counts more forcibly than that of Pissarro, Monet or Sisley. His contributions to the new idea, however, were comparatively small. He was not an explorer, but followed diligently in the path others had marked out. Only after he had won a fortune in a lottery did he break away from his environment. But this release came to him too late. His formative period of development had passed, and his work, from that time on, did not alter in technique. Only in his picturesque and bizarre subject-matter is noticeable any deviation from his habitual routine.

The individual achievements of the Impressionists, however, no matter how competent, are of minor importance. Impressionism was a new weapon in the hands of art's anarchists. It has come to be regarded as a faultless faith whose devotees can do no wrong. There has been little or no adequate literature devoted to its exposition, its causes and influence; and the exaggeration of its attainments are as grotesque as the calumny with which it was at first received. It was not an ultimate and isolated movement, but a simple and wholly natural offshoot in the evolution of new means. The artists who fathered it were, except in one instance, men whose enthusiasm outstripped their abilities as composers. Their greatest good lay in that they turned the thoughts of painters toward colour, and outlined, summarily to be sure, the uses to which this new and highly intense element might be put. They expressed just what their desires permitted them:--nature in all its visible changes. Those exquisite moments of full sunlight on land and water, of cloud shadows over the hills, of the warm brilliancy of a blue sky on the upturned faces of flowers; the stillness of summer amid the woods; the cold serenity of snow-clad fields--all were seen and captured and immortalised by these men. They were the greatest painters of effects the world has ever known. They never strove to evoke the sensation of weight in the objects they painted; and that organisation of parts, which is a replica of the cosmos, they were too busy to attempt. Their very deficiencies were what permitted them so complete a vision of the only side of realism which still remained for painting to investigate.

The Impressionists did not embody concretely the teachings of their forerunners, but used them all in the abstract. Delacroix had sacrificed photographic truth in drawing in order to present a more intense impression of truth. Daumier had built form as nature builds it, colour aside. Courbet had turned painters from the poetic contemplation of a great past to the life about them. Manet had made images of whatever was at hand for the pure love of painting. The Impressionists turned to the things nearest them, paid scant heed to scholastic drawing, translated Daumier's doctrine of form into light, and like Manet painted for the joy of the work. As experimenters they were valuable; but their pictures, to those unsentimental persons whose appreciations of art are wholly aesthetic, mean little more than records of how a cabbage patch appears at sunrise, a lily pond at midday, or a country lane at twilight. The Impressionists did not amalgamate and express the dreams of their forerunners. They were one of those transitional generations whose vitality is spent in a stupendous endeavour to conceive before the time is ripe. The need for a great birth had not yet made itself felt; for only when the period of embryo is complete can great art be born. Renoir brought forth that issue; and with him evolution seems to halt a moment before plunging onward. The meagre aesthetics of the early Impressionists could not lead to the highest artistic results. Indeed, their animating aims had to be abandoned before Renoir could attain to true significance.

V

AUGUSTE RENOIR

The entire past progress of painting is condensed and expressed in each of its great men. The creation of new art cannot be accomplished overnight, any more than that of a new organism; it must stem from first impulses and be formed on the differentiations of the past. Those men who declare themselves primitives and seek to acquire the eyes and minds of the Phoenicians or Aztecs are as conscious of their inability to create new art forms as are those visionaries who live in a mythical future and try to prophesy the forms that are to come. No man is born too soon or too late. There are those who strive toward classic intellectual ideals, toward Utopian economic states, toward new orders of society: but such reformers are only the malcontents. The truly great and practical men quickly assimilate the impulses of their own epochs and push the frontiers of the mind's possibilities further into the unknown. These latter comprise the maligned vanguard of heroic thinkers who fight the battles for their weaker followers. Often, however, these followers rise to great heights, for in the world of endeavour two conspicuous types exist--the man who experiments and the man who achieves. Delacroix, Manet and the Impressionists belong to the first; Courbet and Renoir are of the second.

In Renoir's life story, as in that of Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt, we see in miniature the evolution of all the painting that preceded him--the bitter struggles with the chimeras of convention, and each slow change that came over drawing, style, colour and composition. In the end, after a life full of near defeats, strife, yearning and anxiety, we behold the great man emerge triumphantly from his broken fetters and take his place beside the masters of the past. Some painters have more arduous fights than others, for the odds against them are greater. Rubens and Delacroix seemed the pampered favourites of a high destiny: Courbet and Renoir had to cleave and chisel each step of the way through the adamant of public suspicion. The world appears incapable of recognising either an intensification or a modification of an old and accepted formula. Hence Courtois and Puget were preferred to Delacroix; Ribera and Rembrandt to Courbet; the Avignon painters to Manet; Corot, Diaz and Rousseau to the Impressionists; and Rubens and Ingres to Renoir. In all of these parallelisms, the latter had their roots in the former. They were complications and variations of their forerunners--dissimilar only in method and manner.

Renoir began to paint at an early age. The poverty of his family necessitated him to make his own living, and at the age of thirteen he was in a factory painting porcelains. Five years later he applied for work at a place given over to the decoration of transparent screens. Here his unusual facility permitted him to paint ten times as fast as his fellow decorators, and since he was paid by the piece, he soon saved enough money to give himself an education in the art which had now become with him a conscious instinct--painting. From his earliest youth he had evinced a discontent with the slow-moving minds about him, and it was natural that he should first look upon art through the eyes of his great revolutionary contemporary, Courbet. His earliest work, of which Le Cabaret de la Mere Anthony and Diane Chasseresse are the best-known examples, reflected Courbet in both palette and conception. Even later, when Manet claimed him, he clung to his first influence. For while his work now reached out toward the substance of light to be found in La Musique aux Tuileries, it revealed at the same time all the form of the Ornans master. Le Menage Sisley and Lise strikingly combine these two early influences.

Since humanity has emerged from the darkness of unconsciousness and the individual from the darkness of the womb, it is consistent with nature that in a man's creative development--the route of which lies between dark and dark--the use of black should be his first instinct. Renoir, like all painters of great promise, started with this negation of colour. But wherein his intellectual distinction manifested itself was his innate proclivity for the rhythm of surface lines which he alone of all his contemporaries recognised in Courbet. In Lise, painted in 1867, a year after his Diane Chasseresse, both of these early penchants are evident. Black is the keynote of his sunlight; and while in conception the canvas is akin to Manet, it is a Manet made dexterous and masterly. It contains a balance and a linear rhythm of which that painter was ignorant. Lise is one of the few Renoirs into which the influence of Velazquez and Goya can be imagined. Even in its pyramidal form, which when used by most painters becomes a static figure, there is a movement at its apex which opens into a shape like a lily. This is brought about by the tilt of the sunshade and the continuation of the line of the sash outward in the tree trunk. By just such obvious and simple signs as these in early works, can we foretell an artist's later developments.

The next year, 1868, Renoir's work is more net, more able in its balance, more sure in its effect. Le Menage Sisley is one of his finest early examples of how this rhythmic continuity of line obsesses a mind avid for form, colour, vitality. At first glance we see only an irregular pyramid formed by the outline of the two figures; but after a minute's study we notice that on the right the line of the skirt curves gracefully inward to the waist-line, sweeps up to the woman's neck, then begins an outward flexure, and finally disperses itself amid the tree's slanting branches in the right-hand upper corner. On the left, the outline of the man's right leg and arm and hair forms another curve which bends back the line of the opposing curve of the woman's dress, and completes the figure of the pyramid. But the first curve, the force of which is seemingly ended at the woman's waist, is continued in the outline of the light tonality which begins at the man's right elbow, curves outward to the frame, then inward, and ends on the upper frame a little to the left of the man's head. Furthermore, the volume made by the light tonality in the upper left-hand corner serves as a balance to the form of the woman's tunic. This composition is, in all essentials, the same as in Lise, and embraces that rhythm in two dimensions which Manet did not know, and that balance of tonal form of which Manet was never capable. Manet's mind was that of the lesser Dutch and Spaniards. Renoir's was the plastic and flowing mind of the Latin races, never satisfied with angularity and immobility, but needful of the smooth progression of sequence and movement.

The recognition of the artistic necessity for linear rhythm led Renoir to search for it in others than Courbet. Among the painters by whom he might profit, Delacroix stood nearest his own time. To him Renoir turned; and it was out of him that Renoir's greatness was to grow. Delacroix's organisations appealed to him--especially the triangular one which opens at the top. His admiration for this artist's talent led him to paint in 1872 a canvas called Parisiennes Habillees en Algeriennes, an ambitious essay to compete with Les Femmes d'Alger dans Leur Appartement. Intrinsically the picture was a failure, but it taught its creator more than he had heretofore learned concerning colour and drawing. In it are discernible indications of the formal unconventionalities and the chromatic brilliancies which later were to be such dominant qualities in Renoir's work. Although for two years he had used Impressionistic methods, it was through this picture that Delacroix introduced him to the Impressionists' colour. Manet had already introduced him to Ingres: and these two incidents went far toward laying the foundation for his greatness. On neither the Impressionists nor Ingres did he build a style; but from both he learned something of far more value:--freedom from the dictates of style. Here again Delacroix had a hand, for by studying this artist's uses of Ingres's simplifications, Renoir was able to make these simplifications plastic.

Renoir's colour up to this time had been restrained by the dictates of his epoch. But with the inspiration and encouragement given him by Les Femmes d'Alger dans Leur Appartement, it burst forth with all the force of long-imprisoned energy, and drove him out of doors. In this picture he found excuse to carry colour to any extreme he desired. At once the instincts of the porcelain painter, ever latent in him, came uppermost. Delacroix, in giving him the Impressionists' freedom of colour, had brought him back to those rich and full little designs he had painted on china between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. In this early training alone lies the explanation of his later _matiere_ which has for so long puzzled the critics. Many attribute his colour effects to Watteau. But Renoir had developed his technique before he knew the older master. Years previous he had been intensely interested in the very material of his models. In Le Menage Sisley, La Baigneuse au Griffon and La Femme a la Perruche is evinced the love of the connoisseur for rare and rich stuffs. Furthermore he had begun to turn his eyes toward Impressionist methods two years before he painted Les Parisiennes Habillees en Algeriennes. Up to that time his brushing had been broad like Manet's or Courbet's; immediately afterward it tended toward spotting, and Monet took the upper hand. Watteau's manner of application served only to substantiate Renoir in his choice of method.