Part 14

He is more and more breaking himself of the habit of regarding living models, and allows himself to be hypnotised by the Præ-Raphaelite magic lantern. We might wish for an Orpheus to take this noble artist by the hand and lead him back to the light from the shades in which he has lost himself. Perhaps the adventure would be more successful than in the case of Eurydice.

Albert Besnard.—Contemporary painting knows no more harsh contrasts than Puvis de Chavannes and Albert Besnard. The former saw nothing in the world except spectres; the latter sees only fireworks. Puvis’s eyes perceived no living colour; Besnard’s eye is in a state as if it had received a violent blow from a fist, in consequence of which it saw the proverbial ten thousand candles. There is nothing objectionable about his delight in colour; on the contrary, any one who is not suffering from Daltonism would be delighted to be invited to his debauch of colours. If only Besnard only satisfied his taste in a somewhat nobler way! It pleases him to introduce his dazzling rockets into women’s faces, and there no man of healthy taste will care to follow him. Besnard has marvellously beautiful yellow, orange, green, blue, and red on his palette. He can attune them, too, to a beautifully sounding harmony; but why must he put yellow on the cheeks, green on the hair, and blue and orange on the shoulders in his portraits? Why must he so portray his model as if it were streaked with luminous paint or bathed in a stream of light that has flowed through a coloured glass window? His mastery of drawing and modelling certainly makes his colouring-run-mad somewhat more endurable, but it does not justify his not searching for the tumult of colour which he loves in actual life (where, after all, he might with some effort find them), but chasing them into actual life without any regard or thought.

In the _salons_ of late years, Albert Besnard pursues a curious policy. Near one or more aggressively stupid works, he exhibits a portrait or painting which is amazingly rational. In this there is method, unmistakably. It is a sort of self-defence. Besnard seems, from his canvasses, to address the visitors to the “Salon” in these words: “You see that I am in private life quite a sane individual and correct painter, who is as much the master of his art as anybody in the world. The other rubbish is for the fools of modernism. For those I am bound at times to play the Jack Pudding, but you need not, however, worry yourself about that.” Once, for instance, this painted plea was the life-sized portrait of Denys Cochin, the nationalist deputy for Paris—an excellent work, laborious, powerfully drawn, and irreproachable in colour, which reminds one of Herkomer’s best style. His clownery, on the other hand, was a huge picture which Besnard calls “The Isle of the Blessed.” A bushy shore in the foreground, then a wide expanse of water which looks partly like sand, partly like wine-soup, and only in the remotest degree like natural water. Finally, in the background, a flat shore with the outlines of a white town that stick, as if cut out of paper, on the blue horizon. Across the level sea where it is reddest, glides a skiff in which stands, in the attitude of the Saviour calming the tempest, an enigmatical figure in red, flowing garments, and with the countenance of an Indian chief, surrounded by a grass-green and wine-dreg-coloured woman and a monkey-like rower of sulphur-yellow hue. On the bank young maidens tarry for the new arrivals, their light raiment, blown bell-shaped by the breeze, reproducing a _motif_ of Botticelli. Between the trees groups of bright-coloured figures are camped, and on the steps of a hill sit or lounge flute-playing fauns, one of whom has the typical head of a retired French colonel. The women in the skiff are distinguished by distorted, acrobatic attitudes, which no model could sustain for ten minutes without supports and props. On principle, no two figures are placed side by side without being clad in the most opposite colours in the spectrum. This arrangement of colours suggests the thought that none of the figures must move away from the side of the others, and none could step into another group, as otherwise the harmonies intended by Besnard would be destroyed. That seems boldly and freely fanciful, but is soberly and painfully subtilised. It is a mechanical game with contrasts of colours, devoid of purpose and even of the charm of any sense of colour. Albert Besnard has, in his later days, evidently discovered Böcklin, or even has only heard him extolled and wants now to make his own Böcklin. The fauns—up to their heads—the maidens on the shore, the blue sea, the white town in the distance, are descended in the direct line from the pictures of the Bâle master. But Besnard has imitated the details as any one may copy a writing which he cannot read. “The link of the spirit is all that it lacks.”

Jean Boldini is one of the most remarkable painters of female portraits in our time. In these he makes himself most solicitous to unite together the screw lines of Alexander’s demoniacs twisting in hysterical convulsions, and Zorn’s bold, sunbeam dances. The faculty of tumult hardly any one among contemporaries possesses like this uncommonly skilful Italian. His pictures seem to fly up as from a bursting bomb. Every fibre in his women palpitates and throbs. One of his women sits half naked, just as if she had torn, in a rage, the clothes off her body, on a lion’s skin, and he has made the head and skin of this common floor-rug bristle with such an expression of cruel savageness, that you jump back in terror from the expected spring of the bloodthirsty monster. Another woman wears on her arm and shoulders a feather boa with wonderful convolutions, which seems to rustle from her in excitement like an eagle. A third lady stands in a door frame—she seems to be about to spring forward with the leap of a tiger. She wears one of those very modern, low-cut evening dresses, which are fastened over the shoulders only by a tiny chain; her bust looks as if it were laid bare because her dress was torn from her body in a brutal struggle with a satyr. There is an atmosphere about this woman of all hysterical convulsions, St Vitus’s dance, or defence with teeth and claws against lawless attempts. There is a story about sorcerers and witches who through a touch give another shape to men. This changing of skin is not practised only in fairy tales. Certain portrait painters also have it in their power. Old Cabanel transformed the rich, fat wives of wholesale merchants and owners of house property, whom he painted for 30,000 francs, into goddesses of the old Greek mythology. Boldini by a spell transforms the ladies who trust themselves to him into mænads, mad women, evil witches that ride of a night on broomsticks to their Sabbath. I do not believe that people pay him 30,000 francs for that; but if a lady even disburses a centime to be represented by Boldini as a Bacchante or a Vampire, she must be as much a victim to neurosity as Boldini makes her out to be.

William Bouguereau.—The contempt of Bouguereau is the beginning of wisdom in art. That everybody knows who has occupied himself with contemporary painting otherwise than as a picture-dealer. Among the long-haired ones who dwell on the mountain land of Montmartre, no name conveys a worse insult. He who wants to make an impression on the Botticelli ladies when visiting the “Salon,” must make a grimace of sudden, severe nausea when he comes across a painting by this “manufacturer of perfumery labels.” On the other hand, Bouguereau has managed to collect in his head in a coronet of all sorts all the honours that blossom for an artist in France. He is Commander of the Legion of Honour and Member of the Institute; he gained the _Prix de Rome_, and has pocketed all the medals that the Salons and Universal Exhibitions had to bestow. His works fetch the highest prices in the market, and if no Parisian artist finds purchasers, the big pork butcher of Chicago, that painters’ Providence, to whom in their prayers they turn their countenances, always has gold for Bouguereau. The deplorable Philistine, who would also very much like to have a little share in the æsthetic enjoyments of this world, tears his hair and groans: “Where is truth?” The _Chat Noir_ treats Bouguereau as a buffoon, but the Academy erects altars to him. Criticism scoffs, but America pays. And, however readily the Philistine yields to the appearance of daring modernity, if he listens to the voice of his own heart, he notices to his embarrassment that Bouguereau, as a matter of fact, pleases him. He gazes with secret delight at his “Cupid and Psyche,” his “Pearl,” and “Innocence,” his “Oblation to Cupid,” his “Wasps’ Nest,” his “Cupid _mouillé_,” his “Holy Women at the Tomb.” It is always the same: a sweet maiden, or even several, a well-built youth of rosy body and slender limbs, laughing little mouths with pearly teeth, blooming cheeks, snowy bosoms and rosy fingers—all lovely, all a delight to the eye. The Philistine wriggles under the decree of fashion, which forces him to find these charming things horrible, and his troubled look frames the question that his mouth dares not utter: “Why? Why?”

I think we are doing a good work when we answer him calmly and in a friendly manner, without exaggeration or cheap witticisms which neither explain nor prove anything, not even necessarily the sincerity of the witling. Bouguereau pleases the insufficiently trained eye, because he paints prettily; but in art prettiness is the direct opposite of the beautiful, for it is untruth, since a conscience originally delicate or happily trained only feels truth to be beautiful.

Prettiness is necessarily untruth, for it is that which is conceived without trouble, which excites no opposition, which compels no strain on the attention and no adaptation on the part of the spectator to the peculiarity of the artist. Its effect is merely the effect of what meets the spectator’s pre-existent thoughts or feelings completely. This pre-existing element is not, however, the result of collective observation and strong feeling, but the dissipated precipitate of the most fugitive, indifferent perception, which is totally unfitted to obtrude into the world of phenomena.

The artist whose goal is prettiness, does not glance at reality, but at the soul of the crowd which he wishes to please. He does not portray what he sees, and what makes an impression on him, but what suits the feeble, inexact concepts which the average man forms of things. He is a courtier of the crowd; he flatters their shallowness and incapacity. He wants them to say, with a self-satisfied smile: “This man is a great artist, for he has the same way of looking at things as ourselves.” Prettiness is, in lyric poetry, rhyming “love” with “dove,” “heart” and “part”; in drama, it is rewarding the good characters with advantageous marriages and lucrative posts, and making the wicked fall into the pit they have dug for others. For this is just what the public expects; such is the world-picture which the world has arranged for itself, and it is grateful to the poet that he does not force it to rectify its comfortable way of thinking.

In the plastic arts prettiness is the average or typical. Bouguereau paints a pattern, not a person. He has a canon to which he holds; and if he would only go so far as to look at real human beings, and had to admit that nature does not act according to his canon, he would certainly say: “So much the worse for nature.”

Superficiality always confuses prettiness with the ideal. One cannot fail to see that prettiness lacks exactness. This inexactness is, however, praised as an improvement on reality: the master of prettiness understands nature better than she understands herself. He guesses what she would, but cannot always, do, and comes with his superior creative power to help the poor incapable. The truth is that prettiness is the exact reverse of the ideal; for the ideal is the presentiment of future developments: prettiness the pompous repetition of what is commonplace. The idealist is impelled by a restless longing after novelty to represent; he seeks in invisible germs which the average soul does not perceive to detect the later glory of blossom. The painter of prettiness shows scant satisfaction in attainment, and his creation is nothing but a sleepy reminiscence of impressions he is accustomed to.

The chief harm done by prettiness in art is that it confirms the multitude in their dulness instead of arousing them from it. What the “man in the street” feels in presence of a work of Bouguereau’s is self-complacent pleasure at the artist agreeing with him. He will expect the same feeling also from real works of art, and be disappointed if he fails to find it. Pretty paintings deaden the mind of the average man for powerful works, which teach men to see, educate eyes, operate for cataract, and heal colour-blindness, are keys to the hidden sense of lines of movement, interpret the symbolism of form, and point the way to unknown beauty. The bloodthirsty backwoodsman of Montmartre is, therefore, right to think little or nothing of Bouguereau, and to scalp him; and the Philistine who expects to elevate and enrich his mind by art must make the sacrifice of renouncing the cheap pleasure which the engaging banality of prettiness procures him.

If Bouguereau has anything personal to say, he can say it no worse than many another. His “Portrait of Himself” in the velvet painting-jacket is sincere, and at any rate strives to be honest. It is true that here, too, he has not been quite able to overcome his habit of embellishing, and his cheeks are distressingly rosy. One could not expect from him the almost terrifying inexorableness with which a David has confessed the dreadful grimace of his face paralysed on one side, and a Rembrandt, in his old age, the puffiness of his features and the wateriness of his eyes. These men had such a pride in truthfulness that, in their anxiety not to be partial, they felt almost hostile to themselves, and tried, and judged themselves accordingly. Bouguereau does not understand why he should treat himself more ill-temperedly than his Cupids and nymphs, and smiles good-humouredly at himself.

Frank Brangwyn.—This young Englishman, born in Belgium, is a painter of the great class from which the kings of art spring. In his delight in colour, he reminds us of Delacroix in his _Sturm und Drang_ period; in the dauntlessness with which he wields the brush, of Franz Hals himself, the boldest fighter with this weapon that ever lived up to now. His two first works exhibited in the Paris Salon, “A Sailor’s Funeral” and “All Hands Aloft,” instantly called attention to him. His “Buccaneers” was a veritable revelation. In a boat, floating on the blue-black tide of the Carribean Sea, row some life-sized fellows clad in variegated material, their heads bound with bright red cloths. In the glowing, tropical sun that swelters down on them, everything is a blinding, bright flame: the foam, wet oars, the ship’s planks, the clothing and headgear of the people. The brown cut-throats get in this noonday glory an almost superhuman relief, and in their savage countenances a calm consciousness of their formidableness is revealed, which even in the picture has the effect of a challenge to mortal combat. A year later he exhibited “Goatherds,” likewise life-sized, and likewise plunged in the noonday glow of a southern sky, and, in addition, a reposefully coloured and marvellously deep night-piece, “The Three Holy Kings offering the Infant Jesus Gold, Incense, and Myrrh.” His ability was further enhanced by a “Market on the Shore” and a “Miraculous Draught of Fishes.”

The “Market on the Shore” is held in a Barbary harbour. Little bright-coloured carpets are spread on the yellow loamy sand, where negroes in brown and green-lined _haiks_ and _burnooses_ lie squatting. They are surrounded by poorer people in fantastic rags, with red _tarboosh_ on long, clean-shaven Hamitic skulls. Beyond, three ships extend their prows over the flat beach, and in the background, on the further side of a strip of water, we get a glance, through a gateway with three pointed arches, at the dim throng of a mysterious Mohammedan town.

The “Miraculous Draught of Fishes” takes place in the evening. The fishing-boat rocks softly on the almost oil-smooth, dark blue mirror of the Lake of Genesareth, on the shallow valleys and crests of whose waves the setting sun’s nearly horizontal beams strew leaves and strips of thin gold. Four fishermen are busy hauling in with powerful movements the net heavy with their catch. Behind their vessel, a green, flat-bottomed boat with sails, steered by a disciple, carries the Saviour, veiled in the gloaming, across the water.

Religious subjects have an especial attraction for Brangwyn. In his great picture, “The Scoffers,” he shows a man with the bearded curly head of an enthusiast, fastened to a pillory. The scene, as is usual with Brangwyn, is an Eastern town. A crowd, which is amusing by its negro and Moorish types and their charming garments and rags, presses on the prisoner, who is wearing the strange garb of a Western artisan, and reviles him with the words from their mouths opened in sneering laughter; with the glances of their stupid, malicious eyes; with the gesture of their forked and pointed fingers. Pity is mingled with curiosity only in the case of a handsome, brown, young maiden in the foreground, who, with a noble water-pot on her head, evidently returning home from the spring, remains standing in order to gaze at the scene. You may understand the story as you please. Perhaps it is a foreign socialist or anarchist, who tried to preach his doctrines there, and to whom the authorities are giving short shrift, and whose only reward now is the mockery of the stupid crowd to whom he intended to bring a message of salvation. Perhaps the incident has a deeper and more solemn sense, and is the subjective, half-touched-up, half-modernised representation of the mocking of Christ when He was bound to the pillar in order to undergo flagellation. Whether the drama is conceived from a sociological or theological standpoint, it is of supreme power. The great pain of the altruist who sacrifices himself for mankind, and sees his sacrifice despised; the great sin of the populace that is thoughtlessly guilty of the most horrible ingratitude, are strikingly expressed. And in what form is this rich spiritual and moral purport clothed? Such repose and nobility in varied colour; such witchery in the flat triad of dark yellow, reddish purple, and deep blue; such amazing sureness in modelling by means of mere patches of colour without outlines, it has not been my lot to meet with twice in contemporary painting.

Neither must I leave his “St Simon Stylites” unnoticed. The saint is sitting, with his back resting against a pole, on the platform of his lofty pillar. On the other edge of the platform, ascending by a ladder, appears a priest in mass vestments, accompanied by a deacon, in order to administer Holy Communion to the Stylite, who is apparently dying. The story, however, is a matter of indifference. It is the wonderful harmony of colours that makes this picture so expressive. It is late in the day; twilight is approaching; the last ray of sunlight is finely sprinkled through the air around the figures above the roofs of the Syrian town, from which arises a transparent cloud, so thin that it is rather a breath, an exhalation, than a vapour, and is more surmised than seen. A flight of swallows glides past the saint, and the birds, with their arrow-swift and pleasing motions, observed in the precise Japanese way, greatly help to produce an impression of height and airiness, which Brangwyn attains chiefly by his art of distributing light, and his eerie perspective.

Brangwyn fixes in his pictures all the magic of noon and midnight. He shows his figures either flushed by the quivering heat of the full burning sun, or covered with a veil of half-transparent darkness. Both illuminations have the peculiarity of suppressing all subsidiary work and letting only what is essential remain. The face or body of a man steeped in sun rays becomes almost transparent. Behind the skin and the connecting tissues which we perceive only as a covering, the muscles and bones come forth. The intense brightness prepares a body almost as the dissecting knife of anatomy. Darkness has a similar effect; it blots out the connections and transitions, and only accentuates the strong lines of construction. Only diffused light gives an equal value to all the parts of a surface; it shows all and explains nothing. Direct light, on the other hand, just like darkness, graduates phenomena, makes us recognise at the first glance what is external ornamentation and what are the supports and timber.

Brangwyn is an impressionist in the best sense of the word, a perfect representative of what Impressionism contains that is justifiable. He does not stop over trivialities and accessories. He sees only the essential in phenomena, but this he sees with infallible certainty and intensity. A feature which marks exhaustively the direction, purpose, and force of a movement; a spot of colour that challenges and fixes the eye, as a sudden stroke of a bell does the ear—these are the optical elements which he grasps, and with delightful simplicity, weight, and carelessness, and, as it were, in student fashion, throws on the canvas “straight from the wrist.” The spectator finds once more in the picture exactly the component parts of the phenomenon which in the actual thing would alone excite and fix his attention, and, corresponding to his psychological habit, he supplements the indications of the painting by pictures from his own memory, till it becomes a perfect copy of the real thing, which then includes also all the subsidiary matters either merely hinted at, or quite passed over by the painter.

Brangwyn is one of those rare gifted _virtuosi_ who does not need to draw. The line does not subsist for him, just as it does not subsist in nature. He models with light and colour. He puts spots irregularly near one another, little and big, long and short, angular and round, bright and dark, white and coloured; and from these spots, from this mosaic of correctly-felt effects of light, he builds up the phenomenon in space with incomparably genuine and intense corporeality. Our judgment adds the lines which the painter has never drawn, as it does when looking at the actual thing. We have here the optical elements themselves, which are perceived by the retina of the eye as mere gradations of light, but are apprehended and interpreted by the higher centres as coloured and plastic phenomena. Such a way of painting demands infallible certainty of sight and trustworthy obedience of the hand, else it leads to bankruptcy in art.

Paul Cézanne.—He was one of the protagonists and pioneers of Naturalism. He was with Claude Monet, Caillebotte, and the other Impressionists an interesting subverter; with Zola he was for a moment a victor, and is now vanquished, although, probably, he will not admit it. A barefooted Masaniello, whom a successful revolution of the rabble carries to the top and lodges in the king’s palace, but who has very soon to exchange his purple mantle for his hereditary rags. Fortunately, the lot of overthrown art-revolutionaries is not so horrible as Masaniello’s; they do not end under the executioner’s hand.