Part 16

And the most remarkable thing is that this epic extension and enhancement of so banal an incident as the exodus of a shift of pitmen knocking off their work is by no means intended. The painter nowhere consciously works with a view to melodrama. He keeps, in all details, strictly to facts. It is only his perception that has made a canto of Dante out of a true copy of an everyday incident. At the sight of the flaming forges, smoking chimneys, and exhausted slaves working for hire, there came to him an inkling of the mighty forces of nature and society which are at work in the man- and horse-powers of a modern wholesale business, which fixed the choice and arrangement of elements in his picture, imprinted on it the demoniac feature, and rendered it a profound symbol of the history of a part of humanity.

Jef Leempoels is one of the most interesting of contemporary Flemings in whom the exquisite artistic qualities of their mediæval forefathers and masters live again. Leempoels has the sturdy, homely truthfulness of these ancestors, their profound feeling, and speculative mind, which easily goes astray into the fantastic. He has their masterly draughtsmanship, and he only lacks their delight in colour and their gift of free, clear composition to rise entirely to their greatness.

He does not rely on his capability or right to distinguish between the essential and the non-essential. He does not dominate his subject with sovereignly subjective perception, but makes himself the humble slave of the phenomena and all their most capricious and lowest details. He does not span the world with the eye of a creative artist, but glances at it as though he were a photographic apparatus for taking authentic negatives. To this intellectual dependence is joined an insufficient development of the sense of what is picturesque. Leempoels is dry in his accuracy and sober in his colouring. He does not seem to think it is his vocation to harmonise tones and to please the eye by a well-arranged palette. And in spite of all this I can never forget his chief pictures. He revealed his nature in _naïve_ little features. For instance, on the wall of the room where the father and mother, old and worn out by life, are sitting together, hang faded photographs representing them, as a young married couple, in a strikingly comic dress according to the latest fashion of five-and-twenty years ago, yet young and full of joyous hope. This discreet contrast, which must be sought for to be noticed, contains the whole melancholy poetry of their life from blooming youth to withered age. And the pictures of his sisters. The good girls are not particularly favoured by nature; they are true daughters of the homely Flemish race, in whom beauty is rare. When Leempoels painted them, there was a struggle in him between the conscientiousness of a sworn witness to reality and brotherly love; but the former gained the victory, and the latter was allowed to reveal itself only in the delicate, almost caressing, perfection of their hands, necks, hair, and clothes.

His picture “Friendship”—an old and somewhat younger man are sitting boldly before us, hand in hand, with their honest, ugly faces turned full towards us. They are figures from the people, the one wearing a green, the other a dark red knitted waistcoat. They are evidently neither rich nor educated, and no particularly developed intellectual life speaks from their clear, reposeful eyes, or their heavy, vulgar features. And yet they are noble creatures. It is their feeling which ennobles them. Only lofty souls are capable of such loyalty and attachment as these two workmen, who so affectionately clasp each other’s hands and lean shoulder to shoulder—let come what come may!—and he who comprehends character without declamation says to himself involuntarily before this picture: “It is well for him who in his path through life meets with such friendship.” Here Leempoels has performed the highest mission of the artist—he has recognised and indicated convincingly what is grand and beautiful in the insignificant and commonplace. That is healthy idealism, for which it is my pride to fight—a consoling and uplifting moral purport in an exact and true form.

I am less agreed in respect of another picture. Leempoels calls it “Fate and Humanity,” and in this he has gone beyond his natural vocal register. From the lower rim of the picture there grows a marvellous flora of hands stretched forth on high, either folded in supplication or clenched in threatening fists, embracing many symbols of faith of various kinds, such as crosses, communion chalices, fetishes and offerings; over them appears, in violet light and filling two-thirds of the picture, a huge, bearded face that, indifferent and unmoved, gazes forward without noticing the hands of supplication and blasphemy raised towards it. It is plain enough what Leempoels wants to express; but it is not apparent what the effect will be of this violet face as inexorable destiny. Its feeble, vacant gaze and stiff nimbus infuse no particular horror, and nothing else which might be imposing is discernible in it. On the other hand, Leempoels imparts to the hands the full measure of his amazing capacity. These hundreds of hands, which are painted with a patience that is almost painful, have all their individual physiognomy. They are all individual hands of men and women, young and old, industrious and idle, Caucasian, Nubian, and Indian. The hands of all races, callings, ages and temperaments are so perfect in their characterisation that error is impossible. If among the hands were to be found those of a friend, I should certainly recognise them at the first glance. As a study of human hands, the piece is a museum-picture which has not its peer in all the collections with which I am acquainted. As a work of art it saddens through want of taste. Leempoels would sin against himself if he strayed into unlimited symbolism. His talent points him in the direction of the clearly circumscribed. He need not trouble himself about being implicated with Philistinism through his devotion to actuality. His sincerity of feeling, too, in the treatment of Philistine subjects, will always raise him above Philistinism.

Henri Martin has always aimed at lofty ends, but the paths he has followed to gain them were crooked and wrong. He was, when he began, and still is, in moments of relapse, a dabbing stumper, _i.e._, he laid on a thick dab of colour the size of a hazel-nut and extended it somewhat. With this method, his famous “Vibrations” was, indeed, successful, especially at a certain distance; but he broke up all form, and this allowed him to draw quite superficially. If any one reproached him with not rendering a single outline with exactness and certainty, he could use the excuse: “One cannot at the same time flood a picture with flickering light and model precisely.” Stumping was with Martin as with his imitators the cloak to cover up artistically dishonest forms. His idealism—the main feature in his physiognomy as an artist—was revealed, in his first period chiefly, by his feeble figures being dressed in the garb peculiar to no time or country, the garb in which the Primitives were wont to make their angels appear, and by their moving in an artificial stage, which one can call neither earth, nor air, nor heaven; for, as a rule, it was painted a single iridescent, mixed colour, mostly a sort of pale lilac, into which some darker, smooth tree trunks, placed regularly like a lattice, were introduced.

Typical of his first period are his symbolical pictures “Towards the Abyss,” and “Every One has his own Chimæra.” We are almost ashamed to linger over describing this confused rubbish.

“Towards the Abyss.”—A hussy unclad after the fashion in vogue at a Paris artists’ pot-house—her cunning nudity is emphasised by ball-shoes, long black gloves, and by a black veil, thrown back at the right place, but transparent throughout—is hurrying down the gentle slope of a hill. Bats’ wings wide outspread sprout from her shoulders. A crowd of people, in which men and women of all ages and ranks are mixed up, rush after her with the attitudes and gestures of epidemic madness. Some run, others drag themselves along on their knees, others, again, on all fours, after her, and scuffle for flowers which she strews in her wake. Every meaning can be imported into this picture, but nothing can be gleaned from it, or, at most, that the frenzied attitudes of the slaves and victims of this creature, wallowing in the dust, kissing and licking the hussy’s footsteps, betray an unconscious masochistic trait in Henri Martin’s soul.

“Every One has his own Chimæra” is even more futile than this perverse illustration of the pious admonition: “Keep from sin, for the lust of the flesh leads to destruction.” A number of daubed, shadowy figures crawl painfully along in a clay-coloured mass; each is bent under a burden which represents in bodily form his ruling passion. Thus the sensualist carries a naked strumpet; the miser a sack full of gold; the ambitious man laurels and the spoils of war, etc.—a lamentable attempt to represent a literary commonplace in an artist’s vision, in a living and concrete form.

Luckily, Henri Martin showed development. After his first period of crudely affected stippling and streaking, of bold neglect of drawing, amidst the shapeless daubing of coloured _confetti_, serpentines, and pomposities, with a would-be profound yet absolutely vacant symbolism, he returned to nature and life, treated warmly human subjects from an ideal standpoint, and toned down the crudeness of his execution without, I admit, giving it up altogether.

Commissioned by a rich banker, he painted for the Marseilles Savings Bank a monumental triptych which he called “Labour.” He assigns views of Marseilles—certainly treated with great freedom—to the three backgrounds. The manifest meaning of the three panels is morning, noon, and evening. In the first panel, the children are on their way to school, reading their books; the women are going to market, the labourers to their place of work. In the second, dockers, under the glowing sun of Provence, are unloading a ship’s cargo, which consists of baskets full of golden oranges. In the third, the waterside is almost deserted; an old couple, with a child carrying a doll in its arm walking in front of them, stroll in the cool of the day; some artisan families are also enjoying some fresh air after leaving off work, and

_Jam majores cadunt altis a montibus umbrae._

But the times of day are, as I have said, only the plain meaning of the picture. Beside or behind it, it has also a deeper, veiled meaning. It would illustrate also an actual state of things in the future. Valiantly take full advantage of school in the morning of life, learn and prepare yourself by that means for working and daring later on. Labour in your prime until your ribs crack: you can do so, and it is lucrative. In return, in the evening of life you will be at ease, and, as a comfortable man of means, enjoy refreshing leisure.

We must be allowed to laugh at this optimistic aspect of industrial life. If Henri Martin has known a docker—of Marseilles or any other place—who was able to end his life as a man of independent means, I should like to ask him for that man’s photograph. Nevertheless, a painter need not be a political economist, and the picture is, you know, intended for a Savings Bank, and the people who will see it there may actually find themselves on the way to the independency that makes blessed, though hardly after noonday unloading of orange boats. We might be able to pass lightly over the poverty of thought in the work, if its artistic qualities were satisfactory. But there’s the rub. It was indeed a questionable thought to put in juxtaposition three pictures separated only by slender pillars, which had to exhibit three absolutely different lights; for either the lights of morning, noon, and evening were properly kept apart, and we had a discord in three notes, or the tones were pitched in one key in order not to shriek at each other, in which case they were untrue. Such is indeed the case. There is a somewhat more silvery breath about “Morning,” a somewhat redder one about “Noon,” a paler violet about “Evening”; but the lights and shadows are about equally powerful, whatever be the position of the sun. The forest of masts in the middle panel is of such exaggerated density that the eye is confused in the maze of shrouds and yards. And the entire picture is executed in the crudest stippling, with dabs of colour thickly plastered on, so that it looks almost scaly. If Henri Martin could give up his vagaries and lack of good taste, he would be a monumental artist of lofty vocation; for, though the fairies have refused him sundry things, they have given him one precious gift when he was in his cradle, viz., that of light. There is sun in his pictures, and they brighten up the space they occupy.

His best work up to now is a huge wall-painting for the Capitol of Toulouse.

A landscape of big, restful lines with a background of dark-shadowed mountain forests, against which all I have to object is that they wall in the whole horizon. From this range of darkening blue heights the country sinks in undulating tiers of hills to the plain of the foreground. Here the idyll of the seasons and men’s lives is developed in three pictures. First, amidst the laughing spring, a strapping maiden, intoxicated with love, on the breast of the young lad who is embracing her. Next, a number of stalwart country folk in the summer work of haymaking, on whom, beyond the cut grass, their wives and children at play are gazing. Lastly, under melancholy autumn trees, a lonely old woman preoccupied with recollections. The people are homely, of course, without crude realism, poetic without the shepherd-insipidity of Gessner. The parallelism between the aging of the men and women and the progress of the year is unforced; the symbolism clear and free from morbid, perverse mysticism. Turf, trees, and bushes are decorative in form, delicate, and at the same time sufficient in colour, and the whole is flooded by a wonderfully joyous sunshine, which is more reminiscent of the glories of May in Provence than even Montenard’s symphonies of light. Henri Martin has, I admit, here, too, indulged in stippling, but he has given his people and trees strong, free outlines, and scarred only the outer skin very lightly with pock-marks. He has not abandoned that ill habit, but he seems to practise it with remorse. Perhaps he thinks gradual transition is due to his conversion to better insight. In any case, this picture was conceived and executed in a happy moment.

Henri Martin’s career teaches a moral. Let him who would honour an artist continually bear in mind an appropriately modified reading of Solon’s warning to Crœsus: “Do not pronounce on any artist before his death.”

Jean Raffaelli.—Like Henri Martin, Sisley, and the other stipplers who painted with little dots, Jean François Raffaelli at first painted with thin, slightly serpentine strokes. And we have had to get accustomed to this manner. Raffaelli has been able to succeed, because he long favoured subjects for which his ripple lines were the suitable style. He painted poor people in poor landscapes, emaciated bodies in slatternly clothes under trees as dry as brooms. Like a raindrop on a window-pane, and like a tear on a furrowed cheek, the slender traces of colour flowed down these pitiable figures, arousing twilight imaginations of weeping, plaintive trickling, and dissolving. Later on he caught cheerful, coloured views of Paris streets—The Invalides, Notre Dame, and the Place St Michel. In these his streaky way of painting was somewhat inadequate; but his amazing feeling for a crowd in the hurried, nervous movement which is peculiar to the Parisian lower orders, saved him. I know no painter who feels as Raffaelli the bustle of the world’s metropolis. I think that any one who suffers from dread of the market-place, must get a feeling of fear at seeing his pictures.

In a third period of his production, Raffaelli gave a rare example of complete change in his maturity. He who had grown famous as a painter of the poor and miserable, of vices and sicknesses, turned, at the zenith of his success, from the aspects that he had hitherto cherished, and opened his heart to the joys of existence. In his mind a process occurred, such as the ninth symphony describes in eternal strains. In his despair a voice suddenly cries out: “Brothers, let us sing other strains,” and roars out exultingly: “Joy, fair brightness of the gods.” Formerly, he knew only abandoned tramps, tattered beggars and thieves, broken-down hospital brothers. His plant-world consisted of the leprous turf in front of the Paris forts, decayed flowers, the half-withered, suburban street trees, broomlike and leafless as in autumn. And he painted this misery in miserable colours and in his own peculiar, streaky manner, especially appropriate to the subject. Now he caresses with a broad, full brush bloomingly beautiful maidens in white raiment, sunny, ornamental gardens with rich _parterres_, fresh nosegays or living flowers. He has also changed his style with his subject. It is all renovated—palette, execution, and story. I have a feeling of a secret happiness having blossomed in this artist’s soul, and I rejoice in the cheerful unconcern with which, by his altered work, he makes all men privy to his _Vita Nuova_.

Odilon Redon is a completed artist. His development is ended. It came from Gustave Moreau, and it never deviated from him. He is a delightful harmonist of colours, who handles the sharp and flat notes with equal mastery, and if he condescends to paint flowers, fruits, unpretentious still life, and landscapes every one can understand, he displays naturalness, taste, and winning homeliness. But when he strives for higher expression he gets beyond his master’s range of vision, and becomes purely hallucinatory. Fabulous creatures, at once Pegasus and Centaur, stagger about amongst rare flowers, which gape like bleeding wounds or grin like vampires’ mouths. Monsters without recognisable organic shape, bastard combinations of parts of dragons, beetles, birds and Ashes hover or swim in an uncertain medium, which may be water, air, or ether. Dreadful human heads, bound in clusters, grow bushlike out of the ground. All this is in colour pleasing; in form, enigmatical. Gustave Moreau is always intelligible; we know the myths he clothes in forms of extrahuman and superhuman splendour. No one can make head or tail of Odilon Redon. He himself does not think at all in his unearthly representations, and they awaken no definite thoughts either, but affect us like wild faces in a fever.

Pierre Auguste Renoir is also counted among the Impressionists and Naturalists. When we see that the same designation is applied to him as, for example, to Cézanne, we can, as it were, clutch with our hand the misuse of the words, and convince ourselves how senseless classification in art is. Renoir is certainly no painter of prettiness. He does not paint nature white and rosy, or stick beauty-patches on her face. He does not go out of his way even for pronounced ugliness. You have only to look at his two Megæras on the garden bench to be convinced of this; but beside these witches he has so much refreshing, individualised beauty, that one fails to understand how he could have been classed with Cézanne and, what is more, the routine Naturalists. His naked young woman with the mother-of-pearl flesh; his lady in a cashmere dressing-gown on the tapestry sofa; his girl in blue with the red cap, and the little sister in white; his two ladies with the roses, are simply charming. And love speaks no less from his chrysanthemums and his sunny meadows than from his men and women. He who has the same feeling as Renoir for roses and children, is not only a great painter, but also a good and noble man.

Alfred Roll is one of the most amiable figures in the art world of to-day. No one has such feeling as he for the exquisitely delicate silvery vapour of a May morning atmosphere, quivering with sunlight and saturated with dew. No one knows how to model out with such creative genius as he a human body from the daylight that flows around it in gushing torrents. In his free-light painting one breathes free from all oppression. Besides qualities which, in all ages, make a great artist, he has the little trace of corruption which makes him a legitimate son of our age. One of his masterpieces—the naked young woman who clings caressingly to the bull—awakes Pasiphaistic ideas of old classic aberration. To procure pardon for this picture, he had to do no less than paint the splendidly healthy peasant girl with the brimming milk-pail and the cow—certainly a worthy penance.

Roll is, to be sure, not always the charming, luminous painter of the milk-maid and the girl with the bull. He very often strikes other notes. Thus, for instance, in his picture inspired by socialism, which he calls “The Martyr’s Road,” he shows an old tramp who, with his back leaning against a tree, has collapsed by the wayside, has let his wallet fall beside him, and appears to be about to give up the ghost. The misery of his worn countenance already overshadowed by death, of his emaciated figure and tattered clothes are convincing. On the other hand, it is open to question whether it was good taste to paint the dying man in front view, with bold foreshortening of the outstretched legs, and with boot-soles of a terrific size, that rear up before us, in the extreme foreground, like two præ-historic _menhirs_. Roll intended to pay his homage to Maxim Gorki also. Was it from sincere feeling, or to show that he is _dans le mouvement_, and is keeping step with the most advanced of his time?