Chapter 16

Nevertheless, divided tones and "screaming" palette do not always a picture make; mediocrity loves to mask itself behind artistic innovations. For the world at large impressionism spells improvisation--an easy-going, slatternly, down-at-the-heel process, facile as well as factitious. Albert Wolff must have thought these things when he sat for his portrait to Manet. His surprise was great when the artist demanded as many sittings as would have done the painstaking Bonnat. Whistler shocked Ruskin when he confessed to having painted a nocturne in two days, but with a lifetime experience in each stroke of the brush. Whistler was a swift worker, and while he claimed the honour of being the originator of impressionism--didn't he "originate" Velasquez?--he really belongs to the preceding generation. He was impressionistic, if you will, yet not an impressionist. He was Japanese and Spanish, never Watteau, Monticelli, Turner, or Monet.

MacColl has pointed out the weakness of the scientific side of impressionism. Its values are strictly æsthetic; attempts to paint on a purely scientific basis have proved both monotonous and ludicrous. The experiments of the neo-impressionists (the 1885 group), of Signac, Seurat, were not very convincing. Van Rhysselberge, one of the few painters to-day who practise _pointillisme_, or the system of dots, is a gifted artist; so is Anquetin. The feminine group is headed by the name of Berthe Morisot (the wife of Eugène Manet, a brother of Edouard and the great granddaughter of Fragonard), a pupil of Manet, the most individual woman painter that ever lived; and Mary Cassatt, a pupil of Degas, though more closely allied to the open-air school in her methods. Miss Cassatt possesses a distinguished talent. As a school impressionism has run down to a thin rill in a waste of sand. It is more technical than personal, and while it was lucky to have such an exponent as Claude Monet, there is every reason to believe that Monet's impressionism is largely the result of a peculiar penetrating vision. He has been imitated, and Maufra and Moret are carrying on his tradition--yet there is but one Monet.

We know that the spectral palette is a mild delusion and sometimes a dangerous snare, that impressionism is in the remotest analysis but a new convention supplanting an old. Painters will never go back to the muddy palette of the past. The trick has been turned. The egg of Columbus has been once more stood on end. Claude Monet has taught us the "innocence of the eye," has shown us how to paint air that circulates, water that sparkles. The sun was the centre of the impressionistic attack, the "splendid, silent sun." A higher pitch in key colour has been attained, shadows have been endowed with vital hues. (And Leonardo da Vinci, wonderful landscapist, centuries ago wrote learnedly of coloured shadows; every new discovery is only a rediscovery.) The "dim, religious light" of the studio has been banished; the average palette is lighter, is more brilliant. And Rembrandt is still worshipped; Raphael is still on his pedestal, and the millionaire on the street continues to buy Bouguereau. The amateur who honestly wishes to purge his vision of encrusted painted prejudices we warn not to go too close to an impressionistic canvas--any more than he would go near a red-hot stove or a keg of gunpowder. And let him forget those toothsome critical terms, decomposition, recomposition. His eyes, if permitted, will act for themselves; there is no denying that the principles of impressionism soundly applied, especially to landscape, catch the fleeting, many-hued charm of nature. It is a system of coloured stenography--in the hands of a master. Woe betide the fumbler!

II - RENOIR

The secret of success is never to be satisfied; that is, never to be satisfied with your work or your success. And this idea seems to have animated Auguste Renoir during his long, honourable career of painter. In common with several members of the impressionistic group to which he belonged, he suffered from hunger, neglect, obloquy; but when prosperity did at last appear he did not succumb to the most dangerous enemy that besets the artist. He fought success as he conquered failure, and his continual dissatisfaction with himself, the true critical spirit, has led him to many fields--he has been portraitist, genre painter, landscapist, delineator of nudes, a marine painter and a master of still-life. This versatility, amazing and incontrovertible, has perhaps clouded the real worth of Renoir for the public. Even after acknowledging his indubitable gifts, the usual critical doubting Thomas grudgingly remarks that if Renoir could not draw like Degas, paint land and water like Monet or figures like Manet, he was a naturally endowed colourist. How great a colourist he was may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum, where his big canvas, La Famille Charpentier, is now hung.

Charpentier was the publisher of Zola, Goncourt, Flaubert, and of the newer realists. He was a man of taste, who cultivated friendships with distinguished artists and writers. Some disappointment was experienced at the recent public sale of his collection in Paris. The _clou_ of the sale was undoubtedly the portrait of his wife and two children. It was sold for the surprising sum of 84,000 francs to M. Durand-Ruel, who acted in behalf of the Metropolitan Museum. Another canvas by Renoir fetched 14,050 francs. A _sanguine_ of Puvis de Chavannes brought 2,050 francs, and 4,700 francs was paid for a Cézanne picture.

The Charpentier Family, originally entitled Portrait de Madame Charpentier et Ses Filles, was painted in 1878, first exhibited at the Salon of 1879, and there we saw and admired it. The passage of the years has tempered the glistening brilliancies and audacious chromatic modulations to a suave harmony that is absolutely fascinating. The background is Japanese. Mme. Charpentier is seated on a canopy surrounded by furniture, flowers; under foot a carpet with arabesque designs. She throws one arm carelessly over some rich stuff; the hand is painted with masterly precision. The other arm has dropped in her lap. She is an interesting woman of that fine maternal type so often encountered in real France--though not in French fiction, alas! Her gaze is upon her children, two adorable little girls. A superb dog, a St. Bernard, with head resting on paws, looks at you with watchful eyes. One of the girls sits upon his shaggy hide. The mother is in black, a mellow reception robe, tulle and lace. White and blue are the contrasting tones of the girls--the blue is tender. A chair is at the side of a lacquer table, upon which are flowers. Renoir flowers, dewy, blushing. You exclaim: "How charming!" It is normal French painting, not the painting of the schools with their false ideal of pseudo-Greek beauty, but the intimate, clear, refined, and logical style of a man who does not possess the genius of Manet, Degas, or Monet, but is nevertheless an artist of copiousness, charm, and originality. Charm; yes, that is the word. There is a voluptuous magnetism in his colour that draws you to him whether you approve of his capricious designs or not. The museum paid $18,480 for the Charpentier portrait, and in 1877, after an exposition in the rue Le Peletier, sixteen of his paintings, many of them masterpieces, netted the mortifying sum of 2,005 francs.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born at Limoges, February 25, 1840. His father was a poor tailor with five children who went to Paris hoping to better his condition. At the age of twelve the boy was painting on porcelain--his father had picked up some rudiments of the art at Limoges. Auguste did so well, displayed such energy and taste, that he soon fell to decorating blinds, and saved, in the course of four years, enough money to enable him to enter the atelier of Gleyre. There he met Sisley, Bazille--afterward shot in the Franco-Prussian war--and Claude Monet. They became friends and later allies in the conflict with the Parisian picture public. Renoir made his first offering to the Salon in 1863. It was refused. It was a romantic bit--a nude lady reclining on a bed listening to the plucked music of a guitar. It seems that the guitarist, and not the lady, was the cause of offence. It is a convention that a thousand living beings may look at an undressed female in a picture, but no painted man may be allowed to occupy with her the same apartment. In 1864 Renoir tried again--after all, the Salon, like our own academy, is a market-place--and was admitted. He sent in an Esmeralda dancing. Both these canvases were destroyed by the painter when he began to use his eyes. In 1868 his Lise betrayed direct observation of nature, influenced by Courbet. Until 1873 he sent pictures to the Salon; that year he was shut out with considerable unanimity, for his offering happened to be an Algerian subject, a Parisian woman dressed in Oriental costume, and--horrors!--the shadows were coloured. He was become an impressionist. He had listened, or rather looked at the baleful pyrotechnics of Monet, and so he joined the secessionists, though not disdaining to contribute annually to the Salon. In 1874 his L'allee Cavalière au Bois de Boulogne was rejected, an act that was evidently inspired by a desire to sacrifice Renoir because of the artistic "crimes" of Edouard Manet. Otherwise how explain why this easily comprehended composition, with its attractive figures, daring hues, and brilliant technique, came to have the door of the Salon closed upon it?

The historic exposition at Nadar's photographic studio, on the Boulevard des Capucines, of the impressionists, saw Renoir in company with Monet, Sisley, and the others. His La Danseuse and La Loge were received with laughter by the discerning critics. Wasn't this the exhibition of which Albert Wolff wrote that some lunatics were showing their wares, which they called pictures, etc.? (No, it was in 1875.) From 1868 to 1877 Renoir closely studied nature and his landscapes took on those violet tones which gave him the nickname of Monsieur Violette. Previously he had employed the usual clear green with the yellow touches in the shadows of conventional _paysagistes_. But Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, and Renoir had discovered each for himself that the light and shade in the open air vary according to the hours, the seasons, the atmospheric conditions. Monet and Pissarro in painting snow and frost effects under the sun did not hesitate to put blue tones in the shadows. Sisley was fond of rose tones, Renoir saw violet in the shadows. He enraged his spectators quite as much as did Monet with his purple turkeys. His striking Avant le bain was sold for one hundred and forty francs in 1875. Any one who has been lucky enough to see it at Durand-Ruel's will cry out at the stupidity which did not recognise a masterly bit of painting with its glowing, nacreous flesh tints, its admirable modelling, its pervading air of vitality. Renoir was never a difficult painter; that is, in the sense of Monet or Manet or Gauguin. He offended the eyes of 1875, no doubt, but there was in him during his first period much of Boucher; his female nudes are, as Camille Mauclair writes, of the eighteenth century; his technique is Boucher-like: "fat and sleek paint of soft brilliancy laid on with the palette-knife with precise strokes around the principal values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues similar to those of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and almost excluding the opposition of the shadows; vivacious attitudes and decorative convention."

Vivacious, happy, lyrical, Renoir's work has thus far shown no hint of the bitter psychology of Edgar Degas. His nudes are pagan, child women full of life's joy, animal, sinuous, unreasoning. His _genre_ tableaux are personal enough, though in the most commonplace themes, such as Déjeuner and The Box--both have been exhibited in New York--the luminous envelope, the gorgeous riot of opposed tones, the delicious dissonances literally transfigure the themes. In his second manner his affinities to Claude Monet and impressionism are more marked. His landscapes are more atmospheric, division of tones inevitably practised. Everything swims in aerial tones. His portraits, once his only means of subsistence, are the personification of frankness. The touch is broad, flowing. Without doubt, as Theodore Duret asserts, Renoir is the first of the impressionistic portrait painters; the first to apply unflinchingly the methods of Manet and Monet to the human face--for Manet, while painting in clear tones (what magic there is in his gold!), in portraiture seldom employed the hatchings of colours, except in his landscapes, and only since 1870, when he had come under the influence of Monet's theories. Mauclair points out that fifteen years before _pointillisme_ (the system of dots, like eruptive small-pox, instead of the touches of Monet) was invented, Renoir in his portrait of Sisley used the stipplings. He painted Richard Wagner at Palermo in 1882. In his third manner--an arbitrary classification--he combines the two earlier techniques, painting with the palette-knife and in divided tones. Flowers, barbaric designs for rugs, the fantastic, vibrating waters, these appear among that long and varied series of canvases in which we see Paris enjoying itself at Bougival, dancing on the heights of Montmartre, strolling among the trees at Armenonville; Paris quivering with holiday joys, Paris in outdoor humour--and not a discordant or vicious note in all this psychology of love and sport. The lively man who in shirt sleeves dances with the jolly, plump salesgirl, the sunlight dripping through the vivid green of the tree leaves, lending dazzling edges to profiles, tips of noses, or fingers, is not the sullen _ouvrier_ of Zola or Toulouse-Lautrec--nor are the girls kin to Huysmans's Soeurs Vatard or the "human document" of Degas. Renoir's philosophy is not profound; for him life is not a curse or a kiss, as we used to say in the old Swinburne days. He is a painter of joyous surfaces and he is an incorrigible optimist. He is also a poet. The poet of air, sunshine, and beautiful women--can we ever forget his Jeanne Samary? A pantheist, withal a poet and a direct descendant in the line of Watteau, Boucher, Monticelli, with an individual touch of mundane grace and elegance.

Mme. Charpentier it was who cleverly engineered the portrait of herself and children and the portrait of Jeanne Samary into the 1879 Salon. The authorities did not dare to refuse two such distinguished women. Renoir's prospects became brighter. He married. He made money. Patrons began to appear, and in 1904, at the autumn Salon, he was given a special _salle_, and homage was done him by the young men. No sweeter gift can come to a French painter than the unbidden admiration of the rising artistic generation. Renoir appreciated his honours; he had worked laboriously, had known poverty and its attendant bedfellows, and had won the race run in the heat and dust of his younger years. In 1904, describing the autumn exhibition, I wrote: "In the Renoir _salle_ a few of the better things of this luscious brush were to be found, paintings of his middle period, that first won him favour. For example, Sur la Terrasse, with its audacious crimson, like the imperious challenge of a trumpet; La Loge and its gorgeous fabrics; a Baigneuse in a light-green scheme; the quaint head of Jeanne Samary--a rival portrait to Besnard's faun-like Réjane--and a lot of Renoir's later experimentings, as fugitive as music; exploding bouquets of iridescence; swirling panels, depicting scenes from Tannhäuser; a flower garden composed of buds and blossoms in colour scales that begin at a bass-emerald and ascend to an altitudinous green where green is no longer green but an opaline reverberation. We know how exquisitely Renoir moulds his female heads, building up, cell by cell, the entire mask. The simple gestures of daily life have been recorded by Renoir for the past forty years with a fidelity and a vitality that shames the anæmic imaginings and puling pessimisms of his younger contemporaries. What versatility, what undaunted desire to conquer new problems! He has in turn painted landscapes as full of distinction as Monet's. The nervous vivacity of his brush, his love of rendered surfaces, of melting Boucher-like heads, and of a dazzling Watteau colour synthesis have endeared him to the discriminating." He may be deficient in spiritual elevation--as were Manet, Monet, and the other Impressionists; but as they were primarily interested in problems of lighting, in painting the sun and driving the old mud gods of academic art from their thrones, it is not strange that the new men became so enamoured of the coloured appearances of life that they left out the ghosts of the ideal (that dusty, battered phrase) and proclaimed themselves rank sun-worshippers. The generation that succeeded them is endeavouring to restore the balance between unblushing pantheism and the earlier mysticism. But wherever a Renoir hangs there will be eyes to feast upon his opulent and sonorous colour music.

III - MANET

In the autumn of 1865 Théodore Duret, the Parisian critic, found himself in the city of Madrid after a tour of Portugal on horseback. A new hotel on the Puerta del Sol was, he wrote in his life of Manet, a veritable haven after roughing it in the adjacent kingdom. At the mid-day breakfast he ate as if he had never encountered good cooking in his life. Presently his attention was attracted by the behaviour of a stranger who sat next to him. The unknown was a Frenchman who abused the food, the service, and the country. He was so irritable when he noticed Duret enjoying the very _plats_ he had passed that he turned on him and demanded if insult was meant. The horrible cuisine, he explained, made him sick, and he could not understand the appetite of Duret. Good-naturedly Duret explained he had just arrived from Portugal and that the breakfast was a veritable feast. "And I have just arrived from Paris," he answered, and gave his name, Edouard Manet. He added that he had been so persecuted that he suspected his neighbour of some evil pleasantry. The pair became friends, and went to look at the pictures of Velasquez at the Prado. Fresh from Paris, Manet was still smarting from the attacks made on him after the hanging of his Olympia in the Salon of 1865. Little wonder his nerves were on edge. A dozen days later, after he had studied Velasquez, Goya, and El Greco, Manet, in company with Duret, returned to Paris. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

About eight years ago Duret's definitive biography of Manet appeared, Histoire de Edouard Manet et de Son Oeuvre. No one was better qualified to write of the dead painter than Théodore Duret. A critic of perspicacity, his enthusiasm was kindled during the birth throes of impressionism and has never been quenched. Only a few years ago, after a tribute to Whistler, he wrote of Manet in the introduction to his volume on Impressionism, and while no one may deny his estimate, yet through zeal for the name of his dead friend he attributed to him the discoveries of the impressionists. Manet was their leader; he would have been a leader of men in any art epoch; but he did not invent the fulminating palette of Monet, and, in reality, he joined the insurgents after they had waged their earlier battles. His "impressionistic" painting, so called, did not date until later; before that he had fought for his own independence, and his method was different from that of Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne and the rest. Nevertheless, because of his notoriety--fame is hardly the word--he may be fairly called the leader of the school.

As a rule he was not an irascible man, if the unpleasant nature of the attacks upon him is taken into consideration. With the exception of Richard Wagner and Ibsen, I know of no artist who was vilified during his lifetime as was Manet. A gentleman, he was the reverse of the bohemian. Duret writes of him that he was shocked at the attempt to make of him a monster. He did not desire to become _chef d'école_, nor did he set up as an eccentric. When he gave his special exhibition his catalogue contained a modest declaration of the right of the artist to his personal vision. He did not pretend to have created a new school, and he asked the public to judge his work as that of a sincere painter; but even that mild pronunciamento was received with jeers. The press, with a few exceptions, was against him, and so were nearly all the artists of influence. Zola's aggressive articles only made the situation worse. Who was this Zola but a writer of doubtful taste and sensational style! The whole crowd of realists, naturalists, and impressionists--the Batignolles school was the mocking title given the latter--were dumped into the common vat of infamy and critical vitriol poured over them.

The main facts of Manet's career may be soon disposed of. His mother was Eugénie Désirée Fournier; she was the goddaughter of Charles Bernadotte, King of Sweden. Her father, a prefect at Pau, had rendered services to Bernadotte which the latter did not forget. When she married, in 1831, Auguste Manet, a distinguished judge of the Seine tribunal, Bernadotte made her many valuable presents and a dowry. Her three sons were Edouard, Eugène, and Gustave. They inherited from their rich grandfather, Fournier. Edouard was born at Paris, Rue Bonaparte, January 23, 1832. His brother Eugène became a doctor of medicine and later married one of the most gifted of women painters, Berthe Morisot, who died in 1895, after winning the praise of the most critical pens in all Europe. Edouard was intended for the bar, but he threw up his studies and swore he would become a painter. Then he was sent abroad. He visited South America and other countries, and kept his eyes wide open, as his sea-pieces proved. After his mother became a widow he married, in 1863, Susanne Leenhoff, of Delft, Holland. She was one of the early admirers of Schumann in Paris and played the A minor piano concerto with orchestra there, and, it is said, with success. She was an admirer of her husband's genius, and during all the turmoil of his existence she was a friend and counsellor.

The young couple lived with the elder Mme. Manet in the Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, and their weekly reception became a rallying centre for not only _les Jeunes_, but also for such men as Gambetta, Emile Ollivier, Clemenceau, Antonin Proust, De Banville, Baudelaire, Duranty--with whom Manet fought a duel over a trifle--Zola, Mallarmé, Abbé Hurel, Monet, and the impressionistic group. Edouard entertained great devotion for his mother. She saw two of her sons die, Edouard in 1883 (April 30) and Gustave in 1884. (He was an advocate and took Clemenceau's place as municipal councillor when the latter was elected Deputy.) Mme. Manet died in 1885. The painter was stricken with locomotor ataxia, brought on by protracted toil, in 1881. For nearly three years he suffered, and after the amputation of a leg he succumbed. His obsequies were almost of national significance. His widow lived until 1906.