Part 14

be the keystone of the arch that holds the composition together, seems to be a gap. Christ’s dead body may be made the centre of a picture. This dead Saviour will always be, in the beholder’s imagination, the most living, the only living thing in the picture. So, too, the dead Lazarus and Jairus’s little daughter are suitable for the main figures in a composition, because these dead persons are virtually living, and what makes them interesting is not death, but returning life. But the innumerable “Lessons in Anatomy,” which were a favourite subject with the Dutch painters (Aart Pietersen, M. van Mirevelt, Rembrandt, Adrian Backer, Van Neck, Cornelis Troost, etc.) show how unsuitable a corpse, to which no suggestions beyond its visible condition are united, is for arresting the attention. Even a master such as Rembrandt is unable, in what is, I suppose, the most famous of all “Lessons in Anatomy,” to direct attention to the dead body. In spite of the large space occupied by the corpse, we do not see it, but only Dr Tulp and his audience. Cottet’s picture is the most convincing proof of the impossibility, in a composition containing living persons also, of laying the chief stress on a dead one. The psychic element, _i.e._, the mourners’ pain, Cottet has, however, expressed with gripping force and truth. It is his strength and glory that the inward, emotional life preponderates with him so far beyond all externals.

At the first glance his “Breton Festival” is even more repellent than the “Dead Baby.” The line of hills on the horizon, the stern heath, the church, the breakfast laid on the white tablecloth in the foreground, are certainly masterly achievements; but the Breton women grouped in the open air round this still life wound us with their silk bodices of the crudest blue, green, and violet! It is said that Breton women actually dress in such shrill colours. This may be so; but that does not really justify the crude reproduction of such brutalities. It is asserted that time will subdue the overloud tones of these violent colours and effect a reconciliation of them. On this subject our children or grandchildren will have an opinion. What we see now is, anyhow, unpleasant. Has Cottet wished to show that he is able to deal with something besides asphalt and umber? If so, let him be told that his dark harmonies of brown, grey, and black are more agreeable than all these shrill penny-trumpet tones.

Cottet stands at the zenith of his life and artistic capacity. It would be rash to predict his further development. Whether he keeps to the dark style of painting, to which he owes his reputation, or lets himself be led away by the strong, bright, full colours; whether he remains faithful to Brittany, which seems with the young race of artists to take the place of the classic Italy of their predecessors, or seeks another soil and another landscape to serve as frames for his men and women of deep emotions—in any case, Cottet has already secured himself a place in the History of Art; deservedly, too, but chiefly because the change in the valuation of tones is bound up with his name. It was day; it became night. Manet and Monet had denoted dawn; Cottet introduced evening twilight.

XII

PHYSIOGNOMIES IN PAINTING

John W. Alexander, an American, possesses an enviable skill and certainty. He is master of the means of expression belonging to his art, and has a trustworthy feeling for the harmony of those light, subdued colours called in Fiance “Liberty” shades, after the name of an American tradesman in the Avenue de l’Opéra who first brought into vogue clothing, furniture, and wall stuffs in such peculiarly anæmic and almost chlorotic colours. With his dexterous draughtsmanship and charming harmony of cool, diluted blue, soft green, faint pale yellow and delicate rose, he might possibly have pleased connoisseurs, but could hardly have attained world-wide fame. He, therefore, hit upon painting women’s portraits in amazing positions. He was the inventor of acrobatics in portraiture. His women lie about, in orgiastic contortions, on the ground or on sofas, with their legs up and heads hanging over the edge, or with forms twisted twice round, like a screw, or curled round like a sleeping dog, astonishing the inoffensive spectator, and suggesting to him of corrupt imagination certain lustful ideas. The means were effectual. Alexander became a first-class firm, and the _crétins_ of criticism did not fail to praise his special knowledge of, and feeling for, the “modern women of high-strung nerves and Satanic caprices.” Now Alexander seems to find that he has acquired sufficient fame, and is abandoning his follies. Among his later pictures there very rarely occurs one of which the model betrays his earlier leaning to gymnastics. The ladies he now paints are quite decent in their attitudes, and only, perhaps, a serpentine movement in their long, flowing garments reminds us still of the old gutta-percha or snakelike contortions of his bodies. Alexander has slipped through the fingers of his modernistic critics. Whilst they still keep on raving about his “modern women with high-strung nerves and Satanic caprices,” he is painting prosperously, peacefully, and intelligently, and can now be recommended to the most respectable _bourgeois_ families to immortalise their matrons.

Aman-Jean is a melancholy painter, whose palette has been tuned in a minor key. He is the guitarist of the falling leaf, twilight, tapestry-hung ancestral halls, sombre Gobelins. His pictures result from the mood in which a man catches himself humming the _King of Thule_. I do not say that this tone of colour does not possess its charm. He who does not live his life like a thoughtless, devouring, and digesting animal has, I suppose, on every blessed day of his existence, an hour in which he finds his own soul in the subdued and faded palette of Aman-Jean. It is, however, morbid to see the phenomena of the universe merely as old Gobelins in the hue of twilight hours. And morbid, too, is the way in which Aman-Jean transforms his impressions of poems into a painter’s view. I know, for instance, a “Beatrice” of his which affords the maximum of involuntary comicality. Before an artificial-looking orange-tree, which she overtowers in height, Dante’s beloved, with the upper part of her body thrown back, and her stomach pushed forward, performs a sort of _danse du ventre_. To her girdle she has a golden laurel garland hanging, which, as a note of illumination in the dull night-hues, has an excellent effect as _valeur_ (as the French say), but as an object or requisite is very comic. Aman-Jean himself, with that misappreciation of subordination in his pictures, which is so common among artists, lays far greater value on such ridiculous whims than on his portraits. And yet it is only in these that he shows with what sureness and intensity he is able to seize and lay bare the most inaccessible and most mysteriously elusive thing that reality has to exhibit, viz., living man. His “Jules Caze” and his “Dampt the Sculptor” belong to the most delicate portrayals of men, just as his “Paul Verlaine” and “Madame Henri Martin” must also remain unforgettable by every one who has beheld them.

His portraits, to be sure, are not by any means of the same value. There is, for instance, a portrait by him of a “Cossack Colonel” that must fully mislead in regard to him. Materiality is entirely lacking in the full-length figure he has painted of the Russian officer; it is clapped flat on the canvas like a pancake. A laurel bush climbs from the bottom to the top of the picture—one cannot say in the background, as the picture has no depth, but, apparently, behind the man. The shrub seems painted on the wall to the height of the head. It suddenly grows plastic before our eyes, and shoots its leaves in front of the colonel’s nose and forehead. By this symbolism which scoffs at all the laws of perspective, the painter evidently wants to suggest relations between the warrior and fame. One can only shrug one’s shoulders at such puerility.

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.