Part 15

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.

Cézanne has one thing in his favour which prepossesses us for him, _i.e._, his uprightness. It is his nature that ugliness has for him an attraction. He sees only what is abnormal, unpleasant, and repulsive in actual life. If he paints a house, it must be warped, and threaten to tumble down soon. If he portrays a human being, the latter has a distorted face, apparently paralysed on one side, and a deeply depressed or stupid expression. Every model that submits himself to him is put in some sort of convict’s dress. Here is a female portrait. A withered, dried-up face, mud-bedaubed clothes that look as if they had been trailed through the gutter. Doubtless a “professional” who at a raid was accommodated in “Black Maria,” and, after a night in the cells of the police station, discharged? Nothing of the sort. She is a respectable lady of the upper middle-class. This man with the trouble-distorted countenance and the greasy felt hat and overcoat is perhaps a starveling from Bohemia, a broken-down creature, ruined artist or writer? Most certainly not. He is a well-to-do person of independent means. It is curious to me how any one can allow himself of his own accord to be painted by Cézanne, unless it were done in a contrite, penitential mood as a penance. To be sure, one cannot be angry with him, for he does not treat himself any better than his other victims. He has painted portraits of himself which would be grossly libellous if another had painted them. In truth he is not vain, for he sees himself as he represents himself in these pictures. And his morose eye disfigures not only faces, heads, and raiment, but also the rest. Heine assures us that “A woman’s body is a poem.” He would not dare to sustain this statement if he were to see Cézanne’s “Three Naked Women before the Bath.” Such nudities are really immoral, and shriek, not for a discreet fig-leaf, but for a nine-fold covering of cloth and fur.

Blaise Desgoffes.—This painter, who died in 1902, was an incomparable copier of still life; for indeed there exists a still and secret life in the productions of the artist’s hand, as an eye lovingly steeped in form and beauty of colour sees them. Desgoffes was great in little pictures, which rendered splendid things of gold and enamel, of rock crystal, jasper and chalcedony, trinkets and precious stones, lace and embroidery on velvet and silk, carved and polished ebony in insurpassable perfection. There is a school which very contemptuously calls these pictures _bodegones_. That is the disdainful Spanish expression both for a cookshop and for daubed representations of vulgar eatables such as sausages, smoked herrings, and cheese made from whey. Copying the productions of human hands should be unworthy of an artist. Only what is living, nay, only human life, should be justifiable. But that is too narrow a conception. Certainly the highest mission of all human art is the portrayal of men and women; and what is not itself human becomes artistic in proportion as it gains relation to humanity by means of secret anthropomorphic animation and spiritualisation. But he who demands harshly and dogmatically that the human figure should be treated to the exclusion of everything else, relegates a Hondekoeter, a Landseer, a Rosa Bonheur to the second class, and denies a Desgoffes the title of artist, which is sheer nonsense. I do not know if there is a precedence in art, or any other precedence than that of the ability to express and transmit the life of emotion. Anyhow, a man stands very high who understood how to translate into painting the optical peculiarities of choice woods, metals, stones, and textures better than any painter before him.

Léon Frédéric amazes like an anachronism; in him lives the soul of a primitive. Thus the Van Eycks, Roger van der Weydens, and Hans Memlings regarded the world and man. That is, however, not a sort of affected, antique skill, as in the English Præ-Raphaelites, and their Continental imitators, but genuine, unconscious atavism, the purity of which is evident from the fact that Frédéric paints no masquerades, but only nude, human limbs, or contemporary types of the people in the miserable working garb of our days. If they appear like figures out of mediæval ballads or folk-stories, it is because Frédéric feels them so. He is an out and out Fleming: mystical like his countrymen Ruysbroek, Suyskens, etc.; and, besides, delighting in form, like the builders of the Belgian cathedrals and guildhalls; in love with life, like the feasters and dancers of the Flemish kermesses; honest and conscientious in his work, like an old guild-master of the time of the Spanish Netherlands; brooding and earnest, like a Beguine or a Lollard.

Frédéric does not actually copy, but he is curiously vivid in his recollection of what he has seen. The old Low-German and Flemish masters, whose outlook on the world he shares, hover before him. From the Low-German artists he has his _naïve_, brick-red flesh tone and the painfully conscientious kind of workmanship, which neglects no wrinkle in the skin or curl in the hair; from Memling, his loving accuracy in treating all accessory work—flowers, ground, clothes, and utensils. Sprinkling the whole canvas with equally finished details, chiefly luxuriant plants, is common to Frédéric and all the Præ-Raphaelites. The pictures of this school, even if they take their subjects chiefly from the fourth dimension, are optically of two dimensions. They are only surfaces. They do not understand perspective, and, therefore, cannot shade off a middle distance or background. Everything lies in one and the same plane and is treated with the same clearness and precision. In the accuracy with which they render every little stone, every texture, and plant, the Præ-Raphaelites have no equals. If, in addition to this, they could paint human beings also, they would deserve unstinted praise, at any rate, as draughtsmen, if not as colourists.

Frédéric feels the sacredness of his art profoundly, as do few other painters of the present day. He seems to himself a priest. It is an external, but a characteristic one: he paints hardly anything but triptychs, which he regards, to a certain extent, as altar-pieces of a philosophical religion; and what he portrays is always a sort of pathetic symbol, from which there comes a sound like verses from the Bible or Vedic hymns. His symbols are not always clear, but it is not his fault that painting is not a fit expression of brief syntheses of long trains of thought, or ethical and philosophical abstractions. At most it is his fault that he does not feel this. His triptych, the “Golden Age,” is, for instance, a view such as Ovid might have described if he had lived in a Belgian district among Flemish people. Frédéric relates the history of one day of his happy race: how human creatures of all gradations of age sleep peacefully in the gleaming night, clinging to one another; how they are awakened by rosy dawn and refresh themselves in a crystal brook; how, beneath a noonday sun, they play and dance and shout for joy, pluck blossoms and fruits, and sit before dainty dishes. It is a profusion of magnificently modelled nude women who are all very red of skin; a laughing exuberance of life such as an old-time worshipper of the obscene god of fruitfulness might have dreamt of amidst the reek of sacrifice. It is also a funnily cannibalistic debauch of delicious children’s flesh and blooming, well-nourished bodies. In other pictures Frédéric has occasionally tortured us by quite as perfectly painted, but, on account of their inexorable truth, fearfully painful representations of radiant nudities torn by thorns, and whole heaps of children’s corpses. Here, however, he is all joy and peace, and his picture is a delight to the eye.

In another of Frédéric’s triptychs, “The Ages of the Workman,” we can measure the whole emptiness of such concepts as “Realism” and “Idealism.” Compare Frédéric with the Bastien Lepage of the Luxembourg. Bastien Lepage passes for the most perfect didactic type of realistic painting. His brutalised, ape-like, feeble-minded, staring Reaper is supposed to be genuine, unrouged nature. Possibly the painter has, on some occasion, seen a disgusting idiot of this sort. I do not know, but I will believe it, for I should like to assume that he had not discovered in his own imagination so perversely distorted an image of the human form. But as such repulsively bestial young women are, in any case, rare exceptions among the white races, Bastien Lepage has unmistakably taken the trouble to choose out of thousands the most hideous model he could hunt up, out of a base, corrupt delight in ugliness, with the malicious intention of defaming nature. Frédéric tells a story in his triptych, “The Ages of the Workman.” Who can deny that he, too, has held with absolute accuracy to reality? On the right, early childhood: workmen’s wives, young and fair mothers are suckling their babies, sweet, fat little creatures with firm little limbs and skins like rose leaves; little maidens, who can hardly stand on their feet, take in tow and act the mother to still smaller brothers and sisters; old grandmothers, who can no longer take part in the labours of the household, keep an eye on the children crawling and swarming about. In the middle, youth: neglected yet happy scapegraces are playing cards in the street, sitting or squatting on the curb-stone; undisciplined lads are venturing the experiment of their first cigarette; grown-up youths go out with young girls of their class on their arm; what they whisper in the ears of their blushing sweethearts would scarcely delight severe guardians of morals; but, at that period of life, in that human environment, their feelings are so natural and healthy that, in spite of all crabbed affectation, they are felt to be pleasant and touching. Finally, on the left, men in their prime are at work: they are erecting toilsomely, with heavy pieces, a scaffold, and a little youngster looks at them; what he has before his eyes is his own future lot, but in his careless, boyish curiosity he notices only the amusing side of the growth of a skilful and intricate work of man, not the hard seriousness of the ill-paid, dangerous, and severe exertion. Thus the life of the poor artisan lies exposed to our gaze. Frédéric does not conceal from us either its hardships or the scantiness of its material condition. He shows us how poorly the people are clad, how ugly their streets and houses are, how narrow is the circle that includes their petty joys and sorrows, and how serious, now and then, is their pastime. But he makes us see also the sunshine resting golden over their years of childhood and youth, and feel the satisfactions with which their families also animate and delight their monotonous existence. He brings these poor, humble people humanly near us, and gives us a great lesson in brotherhood. Every feature in his picture is true; but from this truth a noble and consoling thought proceeds, revealing to us its full extent of beauty and moral motives. Frédéric is a Realist quite as much as Bastien Lepage, so far as he deals with the painfully exact reproduction of sights he has actually observed. But in Frédéric’s presentment the commonplace appears ennobled, and that a superficial æstheticism dubs Idealism. The fact of the matter is that the words Realism and Idealism mean simply nothing. There is no art, there is no artistic tendency, which could be so designated. There are only artists’ temperaments, which are themselves bilious, and, for that reason, dwell with malicious joy on the unpleasant sides of reality, and others which delight in all that is bright, and have a presentiment of a deeper redeeming meaning even behind the unpleasing external. The Realism of a Bastien Lepage is calumny; that of a Frédéric, a speech for the defence.

Jean Paul Laurens has reached all the heights of artistic success. He is a professor, an Academician, and he receives the most honourable commissions from the State and great cities. He has been graciously permitted to satisfy his ambition as a monumental painter with enormous wall- and ceiling-paintings, like those of the Capitol of Toulouse. He was often more happy, often less happy, always powerful, always pathetic, now and then, I will admit, declamatory. But he has also once forsaken his visions of history and turned a glance at the present; and what he saw there, he fixed in a great painting which he calls “Mining Folk,” which stands above all his far-famed frescoes.

It is evening. Between a high, steep-sloping heap of coal and slack and a low line of distant hills closing the horizon, a big town is painted in a wide trough of country. Over the crowded roofs of this town numerous chimneys rise up. No church towers or palace gables, only chimneys which belch aggressively, one might say, white vapour or dense black smoke in the face of the twilight sky. From the middle distance a procession of weary, toil-worn men, whose legs drag and heads hang down, is moving forward along a causeway. From the depths on both sides of the causeway ascend clouds of sulphurous yellow and blue smoke.

Any one engrossed in the details may see how the workmen wandering homewards are clad in the garb of the modern proletariat, and how a manufacturing town of the present day with typical factory buildings lies stretched before us. But the first rapid, comprehensive glance conveys quite a different impression. The town looks like a Sodom and Gomorrha in rebellion against God, and is on the point of being chastised by fire from heaven. The procession of men appears to be a band of the damned which a hidden, mysterious abyss of hell, behind the bend in the road, has vomited. Near the causeway, uncanny depths seem to yawn, from which tongues of hell-flames leap up. It is a prophet’s vision, and the atmosphere of a saga. You fancy you have an illustration of the Inferno before you, but also a note from the formula according to which the painters and sculptors of the Middle Ages were wont to depict the Last Judgment.