Part 11

Eugène Carrière was born on 17th January 1849, in the village of Gournay (Seine-et-Marne). His father was a Fleming from the north of France; his mother an Alsatian. His appearance corresponds to this probably pure Germanic origin. He is a big, broad man with strong bones and portly stoutness; white-skinned, blue-eyed, and fair-haired; slow of speech, thoughtful and reserved in his movements; dreamy when listening, unintrusive when silent, raising his voice little when saying modest, sensible words about things which he understands. He was still a child when his parents settled in the mother’s home. He grew up in Strassburg, and was intended for an artisan. When he was eighteen he went to St Quentin, and had an opportunity of seeing the La Tours in the museum there. His talent was kindled by this unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled master. The beautiful crayon faces of La Tour taught him to feel the velvety splendour of youthful human skin, and meditate on the mystery of the artistic creation of plastic effects through merely intensifying or subduing the play of light. He began to draw and paint eagerly, and aroused sufficient belief in his vocation to be sent to Paris to the Academy of Art. What it offered him was practically nothing. Drawing copies of plaster models chilled him; even the professional life-model in the prescribed studied attitudes seemed to him futile and absurd. What meaning for him had this comedy of gladiatorial positions, ostentatious muscular development, clownish distortions expressive of no natural feeling or rational purpose, in which no human being would, if left to himself, indulge, and which, often enough, the body can assume and retain only by the artificial help of rests and props? What he longed for was life, warm life, such as pulsates in men of strong feelings, and is expressed by them in a straightforward, convincing way by looks and gestures.

The depression produced in him in the pupil-rooms in the _École des Beaux Arts_ made him doubt himself. Luckily for him, amidst his general ill-luck, this spiritual crisis of his coincided with the great crisis of his country. The war broke out, and Carrière hastened as a volunteer to the front. He did his duty bravely in several battles and engagements, was taken prisoner at Sedan, and, as such, reached Dresden. The months of his imprisonment proved decidedly fruitful to him, for he spent his days in the picture gallery, and was shown by the Rubens pictures there, the ways which, up to that time, he had not clearly seen.

After the war was over, he resumed his orthodox studies at the Academy, and became a pupil of Cabanel. It exhibits a good testimony of the power of resistance in his nature that this most inaccurate portrait-painter of the Empire could not influence him, although he had for five years his misleading example before his eyes. In 1876 Carrière competed for the _prix de Rome_. He did not get it. That might have been predicted to him; the prize is the reward of the meritorious industry of the pupil, which flatters the teacher’s _amour propre_. Carrière had then, however, emancipated himself from tutelage as an artist. He felt nowise humiliated or cast down by the failure of his purpose. With brave heart he drew from the occurrence the only true moral, viz., that not the approval of teachers, _i.e._, of those who have succeeded, but the satisfaction of his artistic conscience must henceforward be the goal of his efforts. He renounced official recognition, and that was wise, for it preserved him from the pain of disillusion. From 1877 he exhibited annually in the _Salon_, but it was not before 1884 that the prize judges awarded him an “honourable mention,” which can hardly, however, be called a reward. A year afterwards, he received the medal of the third class, which is “the last kindness,” but at the same time the Baschkirtsew prize of 500 francs, which is awarded, not by the prize-committee, but by the Society of Artists by universal suffrage. In 1887 the Jury rose to the medal of the second class, and, at the Universal Exhibition of 1889, to an insignificant silver medal. With this the series of distinctions vouchsafed to him by the masters of his guild closes. His later honours—the ribbon and rosette of the Legion of Honour, the room reserved for his works at the Universal Exhibition of 1900, the purchase of his “Maternal Love” for the Luxembourg Museum, the commission to paint twelve bays in the Banqueting Hall of the Paris Hotel de Ville—were forced for him from the public authorities by independent opinion. They were the scanty revenue of fame, which the lonely man found when he ceased to seek it. It is characteristic of Carrière that of all the nonsense of medals and decorations there is not a word to be found in the monumental work dedicated to him. They were formerly regarded in France as the great events in the life of an artist. Carrière’s proud independence does not admit that they have any meaning at all, or deserve the most casual mention. The book enumerates all his works, even rough drawings, unfinished sketches, attempts at lithography. These are the deeds and events of his life. There is no room in the book for official certificates of industry and his elevation in the _Tchin_.[3] Moreover, Carrière was one of the co-founders of the Salon of the Champ de Mars in 1890, which on principle repudiated the system of rewarding meritorious youths by testing and directing superior officers, and rebelled against turning artists into an hierarchy by means of conventional marks of rank.

Carrière has formed a manner of his own, which he discovered by himself, and asserted it victoriously despite of all kinds of opposition. Every layman sees at the first glance that his pictures are full of grey vapour. A sometimes transparent, at other times thick mist envelops his figures, and makes their different parts stand out with unequal distinctness. “A whim,” exclaims superficiality; “a dodge to astonish,” grumbles the _blasé_ man-of-the-world, who thinks himself cunning. It is neither the one nor the other. The origin of the curious exhalation hovering about his figures is to be sought in his own need for representing the æther in which all planetary life is displayed. His sense of truth took umbrage at the painting in vogue, even that of the masters, which sets beings and objects in space, without giving any suggestion that it is not empty, but filled with a gas possessing optical and kinetic qualities. It is all very well trying, by established toning of the local colours, and blurring of the contour lines, to make the fact perceptible that the figures are surrounded by air; but these customary means of expression failed to satisfy Carrière, and he is not the only one they left dissatisfied. A whole generation of painters, about 1870, had the annoying feeling that air did not get its rights in art, and made obstinate efforts to find a formula for announcing the presence of air with an emphasis that could not be neglected. Sisley, Monet, Pissarro, thought to solve the problem by refraction and iridescent radiation which would render apparent in the painting the visible motion of the air, its vibration under definite relations of illumination and heat. The object is only very imperfectly attained. The attempt is justified, and deserves respect. Carrière sets about the matter differently, in a more direct and _naïve_ way. The decomposition of white light into its spectrum, as the dotters and stipplers practise it, proves, I admit, that the rays of light move in a material medium, as they would otherwise have no reason for resolving themselves into their component parts; but, in order to infer air from the prismatic colours, a man must be a physicist, and it requires a labour of thought that has nothing in common with an immediate impression of the senses, such as must, first and foremost, proceed from an optical work of art. Carrière, then, found even the impressionist rule too learned. He preferred simply to exaggerate, and, as it were, to make palpable, the properties of air, which is neither absolutely colourless nor absolutely transparent. Thus arose the thin grey air in which his figures are bathed, ranging from the most delicate mist to the thickest smoke, but always transparent.

Directly he found his method or manner, it became alive in his hands. In that his peculiarity consists, and in that he shows himself a great artist by the grace of God. Smoke is to him a medium of expression of amazing range. He employs it almost as the engraver on copper of mezzotint does the “burr.” It is a layer of veils which he diminishes or increases as the effect proposed demands. Here he withdraws the covering. There he suffers it partly or entirely to remain, and by such means obtains, by the most natural and, apparently, the least troublesome way, a recession of the non-essential, an amazing relief of the essential, a clearness in the expression of his thought, such as not one of his contemporary painters possesses. At the first glance at a picture of Carrière, one is very forcibly directed to what was important to the painter. One positively cannot wander into what is unimportant, or be diverted from the main thing. It sounds paradoxical, but is literally true: Carrière understood how to make vapour the medium of the highest clearness, to make mystery the gate of an unreserved revelation. That, I admit, his imitators cannot discern in him. It is easy to daub smoke in a picture, but that is not all. Vapour must not be an excuse for bungling draughtsmanship; it must not mercifully cover defects in form. In order not to favour any fraud, it makes a masterly accuracy in modelling a primary condition. To permit oneself such noble economies and condensations one must be as accurate a draughtsman as Carrière. The veiling of the greater part is only, then, admissible, when the lesser left unveiled is perfect.

The subject of Carrière’s portrayal is always life of deep feeling—self-forgetting maternal love, childhood’s gracious innocence, pathetic tenderness of father, brothers, or sisters. He has never worked from the peddling model who can be hired at five francs an hour, and who poses only with the body, not the soul. His model is his own family, with the whole range of idiosyncrasies which their existence by night and day comprises. What the tender husband and father observed with delighted eyes at all hours, that the painter has uniquely fixed on canvas: the mother resting in bed with her baby at her breast; that sweet, shapeless little lump of human flesh which is a wee boy that the elder sister fondles; the children eating or being fed at table; the washing and dressing of the little one, which the mother and elder sister carry out as a pleasant game with a doll; the mother’s anxiety as she cradles the fever-stricken child in her arms, and tries to quiet it; dressing the eldest girl for her confirmation—a prelude to that affecting moment when the mother, with trembling hands and streaming tears, will place the bridal wreath on her head; the pride of the parents when marshalling all their five children in a row; the gloomy seriousness of the tiny school-girl puzzling at the work-table over her first task. Carrière, when painting his family life, painted the life of mankind. His large, epic style of feeling preserved him from falling into _genre_. He remained monumental even when painting details. He is as little sentimental as Goethe in “Hermann und Dorothea”; nevertheless, tears rise when we gaze on his pictures. The incident disappears, and we stand before the Eternal, which it comprises; before Love, which keeps the world together.

The same feature is distinguishable also in his portraits; they ennoble the model by spiritualising it. He gives only just enough of the anatomy to reveal the soul. And when he sets himself greater and more highly differentiated tasks (“The Gallery of the Belleville Theatre,” the “Holy Women at the Foot of the Cross”), he accomplishes them by bringing forth the feelings and thoughts which have brought together the persons concerned, and determine their bearings and movements.

What individual works scattered in exhibitions and museums have not proved to every one is made indisputably clear by the 150 reproductions in the Piazza book, viz., that Carrière is one of the noblest, chastest, most deeply-feeling artists of to-day, who has created for himself a peculiar technique, particularly dangerous for imitators, but natural to himself, and, therefore, in his hand, justified.

SOME OF CARRIÈRE’S PICTURES

“The Belleville Theatre.”—The light, mystic vapour which fills and exhales through Carrière’s pictures, like delicate bluish-white clouds of incense, does not, as a rule, exert a disturbing influence. In this picture, quite one of his most important ones, his brush seems to have betrayed him. He has grown more material than is usual with him. The “Belleville Theatre” is so densely enveloped in smoke that hardly anything can be distinguished amidst the clouds. Yet what splendid discoveries are to be made if you make a violent effort to penetrate the darkness, into which a venture may only be made with a diver’s helmet and an air-pipe! We see—or, rather, we surmise—the third and a part of the fourth gallery of the People’s Theatre. The suburban audience that fills these rows, gives itself unrestrainedly up to the magic of the spectacle. It lives not its own life, but that of the heroes in the piece. To this audience Hecuba is everything. The wide-opened eyes lost in reverie, the cheeks sunk sorrowfully in their hands, the shoulders contracted by fear, the bodies almost helplessly leaning on one another, betray the intensity with which these poor people have fled out of themselves into illusion. What is truth, what is deception, if a poetical word, and that, too, most likely the word of a wretched melodrama, can snatch away small trades-people and artisans—probably sore oppressed by the needs of existence and more than full of their own troubles—so far from all their griefs that they forget their misery and think they are vividly experiencing a new lot? That would be the Buddha philosophy of this amazing picture if we could but distinguish all it contains. Carrière has painted the profound doctrine of Maia and Nirvana. It is a pity he has covered it with so thick a veil that it remains impenetrable even to the eyes of the initiated.

“Christ on the Cross” will give to those capable of feeling the impression of a great, artistic experience. The mystical tragedy, from which a world-religion draws its emotion, is presented with the simplicity and suppressed pain with which a father reports to his son the tragic death of the mother. All subsidiary work that might prove distracting is avoided. No thieves, no Captain Longinus, no Roman legionaries, no fanatical spectators; not one of the aids in men or things with which the classics of painting are wont to complicate the event of Calvary, with the object of making it more impressive. Nothing save the life-sized figure of the Saviour, who has ended His sufferings, and Mary, who leans against the Cross so as not to break down altogether. On the face of the corpse the peace of consummation has sunk; unutterable grief wastes that of the Mother. The form floats in a soft, unearthly light; on the latter expressive shadows strive. The repose of the dead Christ, which would appear painless and almost cheerful were it not that a slight trait of suffering was fixed around the mouth, dawns like a consolation over the dark despair which fills the soul of the living mother. If she suffers humanly, as a mother, so that she would fain die of woe, still redemption and exaltation also arise for her from the act of salvation. If one has ever heard Palestrina’s “Stabat Mater,” it re-echoes in his soul at the sight of Carrière’s picture. It has issued from the same deep emotion as the tear-soaked _terzine_ of Jacopone da Todi and Palestrina’s sobbing hymn. Carrière abandons himself to his feelings with the same earnestness as the Franciscan friar and the choirmaster of St Peter’s. It is hard for me to admit that he shares their pious belief. I assume that the Mother’s grief has, in the main, inspired him. This strong feeling has, doubtless, made him susceptible of the sacredness of the symbolism in the death on the Cross; through the human he will have raised himself to an inkling of the superhuman. Let us not forget that Carrière is the painter of that “Motherhood,” the gem of the Luxembourg Museum, which depicts a young mother with a child on her lap and another beside her, revelling in the sight of her little ones—her treasures—with adorable tenderness in look and mien, in the pose of her body and the movement of her arms. Carrière has a wonderfully deep feeling for maternal love, in joy as in sorrow. Unconsciously and involuntarily, he has conceived his subject not with the spirit of a believing Christian, but with the broken heart of Mary. He might confidently have called his “Christ on the Cross,” too, “Maternity,” like his masterpiece in the Luxembourg; the one is a companion-picture of the other; the tragedy of maternal love, according to its idyl.[4]

There were cases in which the employment of Carrière’s plan of the delicate grey veil of enveloping mist was not successful. I have, for instance, been obliged to make reservations in respect of his “Theatre in Belleville.” In the “Christ on the Cross” it is organically developed from the subject. The veil of mist shrouds the incident in the weird twilight which is the prescribed atmosphere of miracle and the mysteries of faith. Beyond the figures in the foreground of the Crucified and the Blessed Virgin we divine, in the semi-dark distance, a great city, at the back of which, on the horizon, a twinkling white light, like the still uncertain brightness of a young dawning day, arises. Our powers of imagination may fill with life the whole of this profound space wherein dawn is at odds with night—with the life of a whole townsfolk enjoying their revenge or weeping for woe, oppressed with foreboding or hopefully confident.

Here is symbolism in that high sense in which every true work of art is symbolic. The picture is at the same time intellectual and transcendental; the rationalistic beholder, who neither seeks nor wishes to find a mystery, has before him the humanly affecting drama of the mother who bewails her son who has died unmistakably in a noble task. He sees sights he can understand—the peace of death and a mother’s deepest pain—presented with unsurpassable truth. He enjoys the charm of perfect form, marvellous warmth of colour, produced with the simple means of _gouache_ toning and a very faint heightening by touches of red, and an extremely interesting distribution of soft light glimmering from the dark background. The mystically minded beholder sees all this, and he sees, besides, the divine element in the Crucifixion and the sorrow-stricken Mother, the terribly threatening subversion of the natural order in the darkness brooding over the city and fields, and the promise in the light arising in the distance. What the rationalist sees in the work of art is sufficient to arouse his feeling and admiration. The mystic’s wonder and feeling will be powerfully strengthened by religious emotion.

“Portrait of my Wife.”—He who is guilty of the error of confounding gaudiness with coloration might find a guide in this work. A few bright tones in the spiritualised, almost transparent face; a fur collar of a warm, rich brown; a gay, red flower in the girdle, comprise all that Carrière employs as colour media, in order to conjure up a harmony of lulling melody and, at the same time, of all but hypnotising intensity. That is precisely the whole mystery; it is not a question of the noise, but of the harmony. Three colour values, chosen with exquisite taste, placed on the right spot in the floating white and pearl-grey cloud which constitutes Carrière’s manner, and the impression of the colour mystery is produced with greater success and depth than by a palette on which all the seven colours of the rainbow are keeping a witch’s festival.

“The Kiss before Going to Sleep.”—A painting of marvellous range of feeling. A mother with her daughters, from the grown-up one to the suckling infant at her breast. The big girl bends over her mother’s shoulder, as the latter is sitting, and takes her good-night kiss from the lips of the head turned to her. The baby has fallen asleep whilst feeding at the maternal bosom. The third, half-grown-up, has likewise been overcome by sleep, as she leans helplessly, with her whole weight, on her mother. The last twines her fondling fingers in her mother’s hand outstretched to her. The mother is the central point of the picture. From her gushes the force that penetrates, encompasses, attracts, and holds together the rest of the figures. Love it is which collects these beings and unites them in a marvellous circle. Thus they become a symbol of the force that has built up the universe itself, and keeps it in its eternal order. And this self-same love, which knits these hands in each other, bends these bodies to each other, brings these lips together, which is visibly the motive and attractive force, in all these simple but incomparably eloquent lines of movement, has also guided the magic brush capable of expressing so great a theme. He who at the sight of this lofty work does not feel all the hardness in him melting in joy stands outside humanity. Moreover, there is not a trace of declamation, or purpose, or _tremolo_ in its execution; no prettily pietistic rhetoric. Not a single adjective, but only neuter substantives, as in Roman inscriptions. That is precisely the receipt, which holds good in all times and in all places, for monumental works: eternal feelings expressed in eternal forms.