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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44082 ***
+
+THE HISTORY OF MODERN PAINTING
+
+[Illustration: ADOLF VON MENZEL. RESTAURANT AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION 1867.]
+
+ THE HISTORY OF
+ MODERN PAINTING
+
+
+ BY RICHARD MUTHER
+ PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY
+ AT THE UNIVERSITY
+ OF BRESLAU
+
+
+ IN FOUR
+ VOLUMES
+
+ [Illustration]
+
+ VOLUME
+ THREE
+
+
+
+
+ REVISED EDITION
+ CONTINUED BY THE AUTHOR
+ TO THE END OF THE XIX CENTURY
+
+ LONDON: PUBLISHED BY J. M. DENT & CO.
+ NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. MCMVII
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ PAGE
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
+
+BOOK IV (_continued_)
+
+ THE REALISTIC PAINTERS AND MODERN IDEALISTS (_continued_)
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+ REALISM IN ENGLAND
+
+ The mannerism of English historical painting: F. C. Horsley, J.
+ R. Herbert, J. Tenniel, E. M. Ward, Eastlake, Edward Armitage,
+ and others.--The importance of Ruskin.--Beginning of the efforts
+ at reform with William Dyce and Joseph Noël Paton.--The
+ pre-Raphaelites.--The battle against "beautiful form" and
+ "beautiful tone."--Holman Hunt.--Ford Madox Brown.--John Everett
+ Millais and Velasquez.--Their pictures from modern life opposed
+ to the anecdotic pictures of the elder _genre_ painters.--The
+ Scotch painter John Phillip 1
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+ REALISM IN GERMANY
+
+ Why historical painting and the anecdotic picture could no longer
+ take the central place in the life of German art after the
+ changes of 1870.--Berlin: Adolf Menzel, A. v. Werner, Carl
+ Güssow, Max Michael.--Vienna: August v. Pettenkofen.--Munich
+ becomes once more a formative influence.--Importance of the
+ impetus given in the seventies to the artistic crafts, and how it
+ afforded an incentive to an exhaustive study of the old
+ colourists.--Lorenz Gedon, W. Diez, E. Harburger, W. Loefftz,
+ Claus Meyer, A. Holmberg, Fritz August Kaulbach.--Good painting
+ takes the place of the well-told anecdote.--Transition from the
+ costume picture to the pure treatment of modern life.--Franz
+ Lenbach.--The Ramberg school.--Victor Müller brings into Germany
+ the knowledge of Courbet.--Wilhelm Leibl 39
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+ THE INFLUENCE OF THE JAPANESE
+
+ The Paris International Exhibition of 1867 communicated to Europe
+ a knowledge of the Japanese.--A sketch of the history of Japanese
+ painting.--The "Society of the Jinglar," and the influence of the
+ Japanese on the founders of Impressionism 81
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+ THE IMPRESSIONISTS
+
+ Impressionism is Realism widened by the study of the
+ _milieu_.--Edouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred
+ Sisley, Claude Monet.--The Impressionist movement the final phase
+ in the great battle of liberation for modern art 105
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+ THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND
+
+ Rossetti and the New pre-Raphaelites: Edward Burne-Jones, R.
+ Spencer Stanhope, William Morris, J. M. Strudwick, Henry
+ Holliday, Marie Spartali-Stillman.--W. B. Richmond, Walter Crane,
+ G. F. Watts 151
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+ THE NEW IDEALISM IN FRANCE AND GERMANY
+
+ Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Arnold Boecklin, Hans von
+ Marées.--The resuscitation of biblical painting.--Review of
+ previous efforts from the Nazarenes to Munkacsy, E. von Gebhardt,
+ Menzel, and Leibermann.--Fritz von Uhde.--Other attempts: W.
+ Dürr, W. Volz.--L. von Hofmann, Julius Exter, Franz Stuck, Max
+ Klinger 210
+
+
+BOOK V
+
+ A SURVEY OF EUROPEAN ART AT THE PRESENT TIME
+
+ INTRODUCTION 251
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+ FRANCE
+
+ Bastien-Lepage, L'hermitte, Roll, Raffaelli, De Nittis, Ferdinand
+ Heilbuth, Albert Aublet, Jean Béraud, Ulysse Butin, Édouard
+ Dantan, Henri Gervex, Duez, Friant, Goeneutte,
+ Dagnan-Bouveret.--The landscape painters: Seurat, Signac,
+ Anquetin, Angrand, Lucien Pissarro, Pointelin, Jan Monchablon,
+ Montenard, Dauphin, Rosset-Granget, Émile Barau, Damoye, Boudin,
+ Dumoulin, Lebourg, Victor Binet, Réné Billotte.--The portrait
+ painters: Fantin-Latour, Jacques Émile Blanche, Boldini.--The
+ Draughtsmen: Chéret, Willette, Forain, Paul Renouard, Daniel
+ Vierge, Cazin, Eugène Carrière, P. A. Besnard, Agache, Aman-Jean,
+ M. Denis, Gandara, Henri Martin, Louis Picard, Ary Renan, Odilon
+ Redon, Carlos Schwabe 255
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+ SPAIN
+
+ From Goya to Fortuny.--Mariano Fortuny.--Official efforts for the
+ cultivation of historical painting.--Influence of Manet
+ inconsiderable.--Even in their pictures from modern life the
+ Spaniards remain followers of Fortuny: Francisco Pradilla Casado,
+ Vera, Manuel Ramirez, Moreno Carbonero, Ricardo Villodas, Antonio
+ Casanova y Estorach, Benliure y Gil, Checa, Francisco Amerigo,
+ Viniegra y Lasso, Mas y Fondevilla, Alcazar Tejeder, José
+ Villegas, Luis Jimenez, Martin Rico, Zamacois, Raimundo de
+ Madrazo, Francisco Domingo, Emilio Sala y Francés, Antonio Fabrés 307
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+ ITALY
+
+ Fortuny's influence on the Italians, especially on the school of
+ Naples.--Domenico Morelli and his followers: F. P. Michetti,
+ Edoardo Dalbono, Alceste Campriani, Giacomo di Chirico, Rubens
+ Santoro, Edoardo Toffano, Giuseppe de Nigris.--Prominence of the
+ costume picture.--Venice: Favretto, Lonza.--Florence: Andreotti,
+ Conti, Gelli, Vinea.--The peculiar position of
+ Segantini.--Otherwise anecdotic painting still
+ preponderates.--Chierici, Rotta, Vannuttelli, Monteverde,
+ Tito.--Reasons why the further development of modern art was
+ generally completed not so much on Latin as on Germanic soil 326
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+ ENGLAND
+
+ General characteristic of English painting.--The offshoots of
+ Classicism: Lord Leighton, Val Prinsep, Poynter, Alma
+ Tadema.--Japanese tendencies: Albert Moore.--The animal picture
+ with antique surroundings: Briton-Rivière.--The old _genre_
+ painting remodelled in a naturalistic sense by George Mason and
+ Frederick Walker.--George H. Boughton, Philip H. Calderon, Marcus
+ Stone, G. D. Leslie, P. G. Morris, J. R. Reid, Frank Holl.--The
+ portrait painters: Ouless, J. J. Shannon, James Sant, Charles W.
+ Furse, Hubert Herkomer.--Landscape painters.--Zigzag development
+ of English landscape painting.--The school of Fontainebleau and
+ French Impressionism rose on the shoulders of Constable and
+ Turner, whereas England, under the guidance of the
+ pre-Raphaelites, deviated in the opposite direction until
+ prompted by France to return to the old path.--Cecil Lawson,
+ James Clarke Hook, Vicat Cole, Colin Hunter, John Brett,
+ Inchbold, Leader, Corbett, Ernest Parton, Mark Fisher, John
+ White, Alfred East, J. Aumonier.--The sea painters: Henry Moore,
+ W. L. Wyllie.--The importance of Venice to English painting:
+ Clara Montalba, Luke Fildes, W. Logsdail, Henry Woods.--French
+ influences: Dudley Hardy, Stott of Oldham, Stanhope Forbes, J. W.
+ Waterhouse, Byam Shaw, G. E. Moira, R. Anning Bell, Maurice
+ Greiffenhagen, F. Cayley Robinson, Eleanor Brickdale 341
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY 405
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+PLATES IN COLOUR
+
+
+ ADOLF VON MENZEL: Restaurant at the Paris Exhibition,
+ 1867 _Frontispiece_
+ MILLAIS: The Vale of Rest _Facing_ p. 28
+ DEGAS: The Ballet Scene from _Robert the Devil_ " 118
+ MONET: A Study " 138
+ ROSSETTI: The Day-Dream " 160
+ BURNE-JONES: The Mill " 176
+ L'HERMITTE: The Pardon of Plourin " 266
+ RAFFAELLI: The Highroad to Argenteuil " 274
+ CARRIÈRE: School-Work " 304
+ SEGANTINI: Maternity " 338
+ ALMA-TADEMA: The Visit " 354
+ COLIN HUNTER: Their only Harvest " 394
+
+
+IN BLACK AND WHITE
+
+ PAGE
+ ALMA TADEMA, LAURENS.
+ Sappho 354
+
+ AMAN-JEAN, EDMOND.
+ Sous la Guerlanda 303
+
+ AN UNKNOWN MASTER.
+ Harvesters resting 97
+
+ ANSDELL, RICHARD.
+ A Setter and Grouse 37
+
+ AUMONIER, M. J.
+ The Silver Lining to the Cloud 394
+
+ BASTIEN-LEPAGE, JULES.
+ Portrait of Jules Bastien-Lepage 256
+ Portrait of his Grandfather 257
+ The Flower Girl 258
+ Sarah Bernhardt 259
+ Mme. Drouet 260
+ The Hay Harvest 261
+ Le Père Jacques 262
+ Joan of Arc 263
+ The Beggar 264
+ The Pond at Damvillers 265
+ The Haymaker 266
+
+ BELL, R. ANNING.
+ Oberon and Titania with their Train 398, 399
+
+ BENLIURE Y GIL.
+ A Vision in the Colosseum 321
+
+ BESNARD, PAUL ALBERT.
+ Evening 299
+ Portrait of Mlles. D. 301
+
+ BOECKLIN, ARNOLD.
+ Portrait of Himself 227
+ A Villa by the Sea 229
+ A Rocky Chasm 231
+ The Penitent 232
+ Pan startling a Goat-Herd 234
+ The Herd 235
+ Venus despatching Cupid 237
+ Flora 241
+ In the Trough of the Waves 242
+ The Shepherd's Plaint 243
+ An Idyll of the Sea 244
+ Vita Somnium Breve 245
+ The Isle of the Dead 246
+
+ BOLDINI, GIOVANNI.
+ Giuseppe Verdi 290
+
+ BOUDIN, EUGÈNE LOUIS.
+ The Port of Trouville 289
+
+ BOUGHTON, GEORGE.
+ Green Leaves among the Sere 367
+ Snow in Spring 368
+ A Breath of Wind 369
+ The Bearers of the Burden 370
+
+ BRANGWYN.
+ Illustration to the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 401
+
+ BROWN, FORD MADOX.
+ Portrait of Himself 10
+ Lear and Cordelia 11
+ Romeo and Juliet 13
+ Christ washing Peter's Feet 15
+ The Last of England 29
+ Work 31
+
+ BURNE-JONES, SIR EDWARD.
+ Chant d'Amour 169
+ The Days of Creation 170, 171
+ Circe 172
+ Pygmalion (the Soul attains) 173
+ Perseus and Andromeda 175
+ The Annunciation 176
+ The Enchantment of Merlin 177
+ The Sea Nymph 178
+ The Golden Stairs 179
+ The Wood Nymph 181
+
+ BUTIN, ULYSSE.
+ Portrait of Ulysse Butin 278
+ The Departure 279
+
+ CALDECOTT, RANDOLPH.
+ The Girl I left behind Me 363
+
+ CARRIÈRE, EUGÈNE.
+ Motherhood 297
+
+ CASADO DEL ALISAL.
+ The Bells of Huesca 323
+
+ CAZIN, JEAN CHARLES.
+ Judith 295
+ Hagar and Ishmael 296
+
+ CRANE, WALTER.
+ The Chariots of the Fleeting Hours 193
+ From _The Tempest_ 194
+ From _The Tempest_ 195
+
+ DAGNAN-BOUVERET, PASCAL ADOLPHE JEAN.
+ Consecrated Bread 284
+ Bretonnes au Pardon 285
+ The Nuptial Benediction 286
+
+ DANTAN, EDOUARD.
+ A Plaster Cast from Nature 280
+
+ DEGAS, HILAIRE GERMAIN EDGARD.
+ The Ballet in _Don Juan_ 119
+ A Ballet-Dancer 121
+ Horses in a Meadow 122
+ Dancing Girl fastening her Shoe 123
+
+ DIEZ, WILHELM.
+ Returning from Market 61
+
+ DUEZ, ERNEST.
+ On the Cliff 282
+ The End of October 283
+
+ DYCE, WILLIAM.
+ Jacob and Rachel 5
+
+ EASTLAKE, SIR CHARLES LOCK.
+ Christ blessing little Children 3
+
+ FAVRETTO, GIACOMO.
+ On the Piazzetta 331
+ Susanna and the Elders 333
+
+ FILDES, LUKE.
+ Venetian Women 396
+
+ FORAIN, J. L.
+ At the Folies-Bergères 293
+
+ FORBES, STANHOPE.
+ The Lighthouse 397
+
+ FORTUNY, MARIANO.
+ Portrait of Mariano Fortuny 309
+ The Spanish Marriage (La Vicaria) 310
+ The Trial of the Model 311
+ The Snake Charmers 312
+ Moors playing with a Vulture 313
+ The China Vase 314
+ At the Gate of the Seraglio 315
+
+ FURSE, CHARLES W.
+ Frontispiece to "Stories and Interludes" 381
+
+ GERVEX.
+ Dr. Péan at La Salpétrière 281
+
+ GÜSSOW, KARL.
+ The Architect 53
+
+ HARUNOBU.
+ A Pair of Lovers 101
+
+ HEILBUTH, FERDINAND.
+ Fine Weather 277
+
+ HERKOMER, HUBERT.
+ John Ruskin 382
+ Charterhouse Chapel 383
+ Portrait of his Father 384
+ Hard Times 385
+ The Last Muster 387
+ Found 389
+
+ HIROSHIGE.
+ The Bridge at Yeddo 93
+ A High Road 94
+ A Landscape 95
+ Snowy Weather 96
+
+ HIRTH, RUDOLF DU FRÉNES.
+ The Hop Harvest 70
+
+ HOKUSAI.
+ Hokusai in the Costume of a Japanese Warrior 82
+ Women Bathing 83
+ Fusiyama seen through a Sail 84
+ Fusiyama seen through Reeds 85
+ An Apparition 86
+ Hokusai sketching the Peerless Mountain 87
+
+ HOLL, FRANK.
+ "The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; Blessed be
+ the Name of the Lord" 373
+ Leaving Home 374
+ Ordered to the Front 375
+
+ HUNT, WILLIAM HOLMAN.
+ The Scapegoat 8
+ The Light of the World 9
+
+ HUNTER, COLIN.
+ The Herring Market at Sea 393
+
+ KAULBACH, FRITZ AUGUST.
+ The Lute Player 64
+
+ KIYONAGA.
+ Ladies Boating 99
+
+ KORIN.
+ Landscape 89
+ Rabbits 91
+
+ LAWSON, CECIL.
+ The Minister's Garden 391
+
+ LEIBL, WILHELM.
+ Portrait of Wilhelm Leibl 71
+ In the Studio 72
+ The Village Politicians 73
+ The New Paper 74
+ In Church 75
+ A Peasant drinking 76
+ In the Peasant's Cottage 77
+ A Tailor's Workshop 79
+
+ LEIGHTON, LORD.
+ Portrait of Lord Leighton, P.R.A. 343
+ Captive Andromache 345
+ Sir Richard Burton 347
+ The Last Watch of Hero 348
+ The Bath of Psyche 349
+
+ LENBACH, FRANZ.
+ Portrait of Franz Lenbach 65
+ Portrait of Wilhelm I. 66
+ Portrait of Prince Bismarck 67
+ The Shepherd Boy 68
+
+ L'HERMITTE, LÉON.
+ Pay time in Harvest 267
+ Portrait of Léon L'Hermitte 268
+
+ MANET, ÉDOUARD.
+ Portrait of Édouard Manet 107
+ The Fifer 108
+ The Guitarero 109
+ Le Bon Bock 110
+ A Garden in Rueil 111
+ The Fight between the "Kearsarge" and "Alabama" 114
+ Boating 115
+ A Bar at the Folies Bergères 116
+ Spring: Jeanne 117
+
+ MASON, GEORGE HEMMING.
+ The End of the Day 365
+
+ MENZEL, ADOLF.
+ Portrait of Adolf Menze 40
+ From Kugler's _History of Friedrich the Great_ 41
+ The Coronation of King Wilhelm I. 43
+ From Kugler's _History of Friedrich the Great_ 45
+ The Damenstiftskirche at Munich 46
+ King Wilhelm setting out to join the Army 47
+ The Iron Mill 49
+ Sunday in the Tuileries Gardens 51
+ A Levee 52
+
+ MEYER, CLAUS.
+ The Smoking Party 63
+
+ MICHETTI, FRANCESCO PAOLO.
+ Going to Church 329
+ The Corpus Domini Procession at Chieti 330
+
+ MILLAIS, SIR JOHN EVERETT.
+ Portrait of Sir John Everett Millais 16
+ Lorenzo and Isabella 17
+ The North-West Passage 19
+ The Huguenot 20
+ Autumn Leaves 21
+ The Yeoman of the Guard 22
+ The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone 23
+ Yes or No 25
+ Mrs. Bischoffsheim 26
+ Thomas Carlyle 27
+
+ MONET, CLAUDE.
+ Portrait of Claude Monet 139
+ Monet's Home at Giverny 140
+ Morning on the Seine 141
+ A Walk in Grey Weather 143
+ The Church at Varangéville 144
+ River Scene 145
+ The Rocks at Bell-Isle 147
+ Hay-Ricks 148
+ A View of Rouen 149
+
+ MOORE, ALBERT.
+ Portrait of Albert Moore 355
+ Midsummer 356
+ Companions 357
+ Yellow Marguerites 359
+ Waiting to Cross 360
+ Reading Aloud 361
+
+ MOORE, HENRY.
+ Mount's Bay 395
+
+ MOREAU, GUSTAVE.
+ The Young Man and Death 213
+ Orpheus 214
+ Design for Enamel 215
+ The Plaint of the Poet 216
+ The Apparition 217
+
+ MORELLI, DOMENICO.
+ The Temptation of St. Anthony 327
+
+ NITTIS, GIUSEPPE DE.
+ Paris Races 276
+
+ OKIO.
+ A Carp 92
+
+ OULESS, WALTER WILLIAM.
+ Lord Kelvin 377
+
+ OUTAMARO.
+ Mother's Love 98
+
+ PATON, SIR JOSEPH NOËL.
+ The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania 7
+
+ PETTENKOFEN, AUGUST VON.
+ Portrait of August von Pettenkofen 56
+ A Woman Spinning 57
+ In the Convent Yard 59
+
+ PHILLIP, JOHN.
+ The Letter-Writer, Seville 33
+ Spanish Sisters 35
+
+ PISSARRO, CAMILLE.
+ Sitting up 133
+ Rouen 135
+ Sydenham Church 136
+
+ PISSARRO, LUCIEN.
+ Solitude 287
+ Ruth 288
+
+ POYNTER, EDWARD.
+ Idle Fear 350
+ The Ides of March 351
+ A Visit to Æsculapius 353
+
+ PRADILLA, FRANCISCO.
+ The Surrender of Granada 317
+ On the Beach 319
+
+ PUVIS DE CHAVANNES, PIERRE.
+ Portrait of Pierre de Chavannes 218
+ A Vision of Antiquity 219
+ The Beheading of John the Baptist 220
+ The Threadspinner 221
+ The Poor Fisherman 223
+ Summer 224
+ Autumn 225
+
+ RAFFAËLLI, FRANCISQUE JEAN.
+ Place St. Sulpice 271
+ The Midday Soup 272
+ The Carrier's Cart 273
+ Paris, 4K. 1 274
+ Le Chiffonier 275
+
+ RAMBERG, ARTHUR VON.
+ The Meeting on the Lake 69
+
+ REID, JOHN ROBERTSON.
+ Toil and Pleasure 371
+
+ RENOIR, FIRMIN AUGUSTE.
+ Supper at Bougival 125
+ The Woman with the Fan 126
+ Fisher Children by the Sea 127
+ The Woman with the Cat 129
+ A Private Box 130
+ The Terrace 131
+
+ ROBINSON, F. CAYLEY.
+ A Winter Evening 403
+
+ ROLL, ALFRED.
+ The Woman with a Bull 269
+ Manda Lamétrie, Fermière 270
+
+ ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL.
+ Portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 153
+ Beata Beatrix 154
+ Monna Rosa 155
+ Ecce Ancilla Domini 157
+ Sancta Lilias 158
+ Astarte Syriaca 159
+ Study for Astarte Syriaca 161
+ Dante's Dream 163
+ Rosa Triplex 165
+ Sir Galahad 166
+ Mary Magdalene at the House of Simon the Pharisee 167
+
+ SANT, JAMES.
+ The Music Lesson 379
+
+ SISLEY, ALFRED.
+ Outskirts of a Wood 137
+
+ STANHOPE, R. SPENCER.
+ The Waters of Lethe 183
+
+ STRUDWICK, J. M.
+ Elaine 185
+ Thy Tuneful Strings wake Memories 186
+ Gentle Music of a bygone Day 187
+ The Ramparts of God's House 189
+ The Ten Virgins 191
+
+ TANYU.
+ The God Hoteï on a Journey 88
+
+ TITO, ETTORE.
+ The Slipper Seller 335
+
+ TOYOKUMI.
+ Nocturnal Reverie 103
+
+ VILLEGAS, JOSÉ.
+ Death of the Matador 320
+
+ WALKER, FREDERICK.
+ The Bathers 366
+
+ WATTS, GEORGE FREDERICK.
+ G. F. Watts in his Garden 196
+ Lady Lindsay 197
+ Hope 198
+ Paolo and Francesca 199
+ Love and Death 201
+ Ariadne 203
+ Orpheus and Eurydice 205
+ Artemis and Endymion 207
+
+ WILLETTE, ADOLFE.
+ The Golden Age 291
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+REALISM IN ENGLAND
+
+
+The year 1849 was made famous by a momentous interruption in the quiet
+course of English art brought about by the pre-Raphaelites. A movement,
+recalling the Renaissance, laid hold of the spirit of painters. In all
+studios artists spoke a language which had never been heard there
+before; all great reputations were overthrown; the most celebrated
+Cinquecentisti, whose names had hitherto been mentioned with respectful
+awe, were referred to with a shrug as bunglers. A miracle seemed to have
+taken place in the world, for the muse of painting was removed from the
+pedestal on which she had stood for three centuries and set up in
+triumph upon another.
+
+To understand fully the aims of pre-Raphaelitism it is necessary to
+recall the character of the age which gave it birth.
+
+After English art had had its beginning with the great national masters
+and enjoyed a prime of real splendour, it became, about the middle of
+the nineteenth century, the prey to a tedious disease. A series of crude
+historical painters endeavoured to fathom the noble style of the Italian
+Cinquecento, without rising above the level of intelligent plagiarism.
+As brilliant decorative artists possessed of pomp and majesty, and
+sensuously affected by plastic beauty, as worshippers of the nude human
+form, and as modern Greeks, the Italian classic painters were the worst
+conceivable guides for a people who in every artistic achievement have
+pursued spiritual expression in preference to plastic beauty. But in
+spite of the experiences gained since the time of Hogarth, they all went
+on the pilgrimage to Rome, as to a sacred spring, drank their fill in
+long draughts, and came back poisoned. Even Wilkie, that charming
+"little master," who did the work of a pioneer so long as he followed
+the congenial Flemish painters and the Dutch, even Wilkie lost every
+trace of individuality after seeing Spain and Italy. As this imitation
+of the high Renaissance period led to forced and affected sentiment, it
+also developed an empty academical technique. In accordance with the
+precepts of the Cinquecento, artists proceeded with an affected ease to
+make brief work of everything, contenting themselves with a superficial
+_façade_ effect. A painting based on dexterity of hand took the place of
+the religious study of nature, and a banal arrangement after celebrated
+models took the place of inward absorption.
+
+It was to no purpose that certain painters, such as _F. C. Horsley_, _J.
+R. Herbert_, _J. Tenniel_, _Edwin Long_, _E. M. Ward_, and _Eastlake_,
+the English Piloty, by imitation of the Flemish and Venetian masters,
+made more of a return from idealism of form to colour, and that _Edwin
+Armitage_, who had studied in Paris and Munich, introduced Continental
+influences. They are the Delaroche, Gallait, and Bièfve of England.
+Their art was an imposing scene painting, their programme always that of
+the school of Bologna--the mother of all academies, great and
+small--borrowing drawing from Michael Angelo and colour from Titian;
+taking the best from every one, putting it all into a pot, and shaking
+it together. Thus English art lost the peculiar national stamp which it
+had had under Reynolds and Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. It became
+an insignificant tributary of the false art which then held sway over
+the Continent, insincere towards nature, full of empty rhetorical
+passion, and bound to the most vacant routine. And as the grand painting
+became hollow and mannered, _genre_ painting grew Philistine and
+decrepit. Its innocent childishness and conventional optimism had led to
+a tedious anecdotic painting. It repeated, like a talkative old man, the
+most insipid tales, and did so with a complacency that never wavered and
+with an unpleasant motley of colour. The English school still existed in
+landscape, but for everything else it was dead.
+
+A need for reform became urgent all the sooner because literature too
+had diverged into new lines. In poetry there was the influence of the
+Lake poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, who had simplicity, direct feeling
+for nature, and a Rousseau-like pantheism inscribed as a device upon
+their banner, and it came as a reaction against the dazzling imaginative
+fervour of those great and forceful men of genius Byron and Shelley.
+Keats had again uttered the phrase which had before been Shaftesbury's
+gospel: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." In the year 1843 John Ruskin
+published the first volume of his _Modern Painters_, the æsthetic creed
+of which culminated in the tenet that nature alone could be the source
+of all true art.
+
+This transitional spirit, which strove for liberty from the academical
+yoke, though diffidently at first, is represented in painting by the
+Scotch artist _William Dyce_. In England he pursued, though undoubtedly
+with greater ability, a course parallel to that of the German Nazarenes,
+whose faith he championed. Born in 1806, he had in Italy, in the year
+1826, made the acquaintance of Overbeck, who won him over to Perugino
+and Raphael. Protesting against the histrionic emptiness of English
+historical painting, he took refuge with the Quattrocentisti and the
+young Raphael. His masterpiece, the Westminster frescoes, with the
+Arthurian legends as their subject, goes to some extent on parallel
+lines with Schnorr's frescoes on the Nibelungen myths. The
+representation of vigorous manhood and tempestuous heroism has been here
+attempted without sentimentality or theatrical heroics. In his oil
+pictures--Madonnas, "Bacchus nursed by the Nymphs," "The Woman of
+Samaria," "Christ in Gethsemane," "St. John leading Home the Virgin,"
+etc.--he makes a surprising effect by the graceful, sensuous charm of
+his women, by his exquisite landscapes and his tender idyllic
+characters. The charming work "Jacob and Rachel," which represents
+him in the Hamburg Kunsthalle, might be ascribed to Führich, except that
+the developed feeling for colour bears witness to its English origin.
+With yearning the youth hastens to the maiden, who stands, leaning
+against the edge of the well, with her eyes cast down, half repulsing
+him in her austere chastity.
+
+[Illustration: EASTLAKE. CHRIST BLESSING LITTLE CHILDREN.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
+
+ DYCE. JACOB AND RACHEL.]
+
+Where the Nazarenes obtain a pallid, corpse-like effect, a deep and
+luminous quality of colour delights one in his pictures. He is
+essentially graceful, and with this grace he combines the pure and quiet
+simplicity of the Umbrian masters. There is something touching in
+certain of his Madonnas, who, in long, clinging raiment, appeal to the
+Godhead with arms half lifted, devout lips parted in prayer, and mild
+glances lost in infinity. A dreamy loveliness brings the heavenly
+figures nearer to us. Dyce expresses the magic of downcast lids with
+long, dark lashes. Like the Umbrians, he delights in the elasticity of
+slender limbs and the chaste grace of blossoming maiden beauty. Many
+German fresco painters have become celebrated who never achieved
+anything equal in artistic merit to the Westminster pictures of Dyce.
+Yet he is to be reckoned with the Flandrin-Overbeck family, since he
+gives a repetition of the young Raphael, though he certainly does it
+well; but he only imitates and has not improved upon him.
+
+The pictures of another Scotchman, _Sir Joseph Noël Paton_, born in
+1821, appear at a rather later date. Most of them--"The Quarrel of
+Oberon and Titania," "The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania" in the
+Edinburgh Gallery, and his masterpiece, "The Fairy Queen"--have, from
+the æsthetic standpoint, little enjoyment to offer. The drawing is hard,
+the composition overladen, the colour scattered and motley. As in Ary
+Scheffer, all the figures have vapid, widely opened eyes. Elves, gnomes,
+women, knights, and fantastic rocks are crowded so tightly together that
+the frame scarcely holds them. But the loving study of nature in the
+separate parts is extraordinary. It is possible to give a botanical
+definition of each plant and each flower in the foreground, with so much
+character and such care has Paton executed every leaf and every blossom,
+even the tiny creeping things amid the meadow grass. Here and there a
+fresh ray of morning sun breaks through the light green and leaps from
+blade to blade. The landscapes of Albrecht Altdorfer are recalled to
+mind. Emancipation from empty, heroically impassioned emphasis,
+pantheistic adoration of nature, even a certain effort--unsuccessful
+indeed--after an independent sentiment for colour, are what his pictures
+seem to preach in their naïve angularity, their loving execution of
+detail, and their bright green motley.
+
+This was the mood of the young artists who united to form the
+pre-Raphaelite group of 1848. They were students at the Royal Academy of
+from twenty to four-and-twenty years of age. The first of the group,
+Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had already written some of his poems. The
+second, Holman Hunt, had still a difficulty in overcoming the opposition
+of his father, who was not pleased to see him giving up a commercial
+career. John Everett Millais, the youngest, had made most progress as a
+painter, and was one of the best pupils at the Academy. But they were
+contented neither by the artistic achievement of their teachers nor by
+the method of instruction. Etty, the most valued of them all, according
+to the account of Holman Hunt, painted mythological pictures, full of
+empty affectation; Mulready drew in a diluted fashion, and sacrificed
+everything to elegance; Maclise had fallen into patriotic banalities;
+Dyce had stopped short in his course and begun again when it was too
+late. Thus they had of necessity to provide their own training for
+themselves. All three worked in the same studio; and it so happened that
+one day--in 1847 or 1848--chance threw into their hands some engravings
+of Benozzo Gozzoli's Campo-Santo frescoes in Pisa. Nature and
+truth--everything which they had dimly surmised, and had missed in the
+productions of English art--here they were. Overcome with admiration for
+the sparkling life, the intensity of feeling, and the vigorous form of
+these works, which did not even shrink from the consequences of
+ugliness, they were agreed in recognising that art had always stood on
+the basis of nature until the end of the fifteenth century, or, more
+exactly, until the year 1508, when Raphael left Florence to paint in the
+Vatican in Rome. Since then everything had gone wrong; art had stripped
+off the simple garment of natural truthfulness and fallen into
+conventional phrases, which in the course of centuries had become more
+and more empty and repellent by vapid repetition. Was it necessary that
+the persons in pictures should, to the end of the world, stand and move
+just as they had done a thousand times in the works of the
+Cinquecentisti? Was it necessary that human emotions--love, boldness,
+remorse, and renunciation--should always be expressed by the same turn
+of the head, the same lift of the eyebrows, the same gesture of the
+arms, and the same folded hands, which came into vogue through the
+Cinquecentisti? Where in nature are the rounded forms which Raphael, the
+first Classicist, borrowed from the antique? And in the critical moments
+of life do people really form themselves into such carefully balanced
+groups, with the one who chances to have on the finest clothes in the
+centre?
+
+[Illustration: _Annan, photo._
+
+ PATON. THE RECONCILIATION OF OBERON AND TITANIA.]
+
+From this reaction against the Cinquecentisti and against the shallow
+imitation of them, the title pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the secret,
+masonic sign P.R.B., which they added to their signatures upon their
+pictures, are rendered comprehensible. But whilst Dyce, to avoid the
+Cinquecentisti, imitated the Quattrocentisti, the title here is only
+meant to signify that these artists, like the Quattrocentisti, had
+determined to go back to the original source of real life. The Academy
+pupils Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, together with the young
+sculptor Thomas Woolner, who had just left school, were at first the
+only members of the Brotherhood. Later the _genre_ painter James
+Collinson, the painter and critic F. G. Stephens, and Rossetti's
+brother, William Michael Rossetti, were admitted to the alliance.
+
+[Illustration: HOLMAN HUNT. THE SCAPEGOAT.
+
+ (_By Permission of Messrs. Henry Graves & Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+Boldly they declared war against all conventional rules, described
+themselves as beginners and their pictures as attempts, and announced
+themselves to be, at any rate, sincere. The programme of their school
+was truth; not imitation of the old masters, but strict and keen study
+of nature such as the old masters had practised themselves. They were in
+reaction against the superficial dexterity of technique and the beauty
+of form and intellectual emptiness to which the English historical
+picture had fallen victim; they were in reaction against the trivial
+banality which disfigured English _genre_ painting. In the
+representation of passion the true gestures of nature were to be
+rendered, without regard to grace and elegance, and without the stock
+properties of pantomime. The end for which they strove was to be true
+and not to create what was essentially untrue by a borrowed idealism
+which had an appearance of being sublime. In opposition to the negligent
+painting of the artists of their age, they demanded slavishly faithful
+imitation of the model by detail, carried out with microscopic
+exactness. Nothing was to be done without reverence for nature; every
+part of a picture down to the smallest blade or leaf was to be directly
+painted from the original. Even at the expense of total effect every
+picture was to be carried out in minutest detail. It was better to
+stammer than to make empty phrases. A young and vigorous art, such as
+had been in the fifteenth century, could win its way, as they believed,
+from this conception alone.
+
+In all these points, in the revolt against the emptiness of the _beauté
+suprême_ and the flowing lines of the accepted routine of composition,
+they were at one with Courbet and Millet. It was only in further
+developments that the French and English parted company; English realism
+received a specifically English tinge. Since every form of
+Classicism--for to this point they were led by the train of their
+ideas--declares the ideal completion of form, of physical presentment,
+to be its highest aim, the standard-bearers of realism were obliged to
+seek the highest aim of their art, founded exclusively on the study of
+nature, in the representation of moral and intellectual life, in a
+thoughtful form of spiritual creation. The blending of realism with
+profundity of ideas, of uncompromising truth to nature in form with
+philosophic and poetic substance, is of the very essence of the
+pre-Raphaelites. They are transcendental naturalists, equally widely
+removed from Classicism, which deals only with beautiful bodies, as from
+realism proper, which only proposes to represent a fragment of nature.
+From opposition to abstract beauty of form they insist upon what is
+characteristic, energetic, angular; but their figures painted faithfully
+from nature are the vehicles of a metaphysical idea. From the first they
+saturated themselves with poetry. Holman Hunt has an enthusiasm for
+Keats and the Bible, Rossetti for Dante, Millais for the mediæval poems
+of chivalry.
+
+[Illustration: HOLMAN HUNT. THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
+
+ FORD MADOX BROWN. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.
+
+ (_By permission of Theodore Watts Dunton, Esq., the owner of the
+ picture._)]
+
+All three appeared before the public for the first time in the year
+1849. John Millais and Holman Hunt exhibited in the Royal Academy, the
+one being represented by his "Lorenzo and Isabella," a subject drawn
+from Keats, the other by his "Rienzi." Rossetti had his picture, "The
+Girlhood of Mary Virgin," exhibited at the Free Exhibition, afterwards
+known as the Portland Gallery. All three works excited attention and
+also derision, and much shaking of heads. The three next works of
+1850--"A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary," by
+Holman Hunt; "The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter,"
+by Millais; and "The Annunciation" by Rossetti--were received with the
+same amused contempt. When they exhibited for the third time--Holman
+Hunt, a scene from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_; Millais, "The Return
+of the Dove to the Ark" and "The Woodman's Daughter"--such a storm of
+excitement broke forth that the pictures had to be removed from the
+exhibition. A furious article appeared in _The Art Journal_; the
+exhibitors, it was said, were certainly young, but they were too old to
+commit such sins of youth. Even Dickens turned against them in
+_Household Words_. The painters who had been assailed made their answer.
+William Michael Rossetti laid down the principles of the Brotherhood by
+an article in a periodical called _The Critic_, and smuggled a second
+article into _The Spectator_. In 1850 they founded a monthly magazine
+for the defence of their theories, _The Germ_, which on the third number
+took the title _Art and Poetry_, and was most charmingly embellished
+with drawings by Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, and others. Stephens
+published an essay in it, on the ways and aims of the early Italians,
+which gave him occasion to discuss the works recently produced in the
+spirit of simplicity known to these old masters. Madox Brown wrote a
+paper on historical painting, in which he asserted that the true basis
+of historical painting must be strict fidelity to the model, to the
+exclusion of all generalisation and beautifying, and exact antiquarian
+study of costumes and furniture in contradistinction to the fancy
+history of the elder painters. But all these articles were written to no
+purpose. After the fourth number the magazine was stopped, and in these
+days it has become a curiosity for bibliomaniacs. But support came from
+another side. Holman Hunt's picture dealing with a scene from
+Shakespeare's _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ received the most trenchant
+condemnation in _The Times_. John Ruskin came forward as his champion
+and replied on 13th May 1851. _The Times_ contained yet a second letter
+from him on 30th May. And soon afterwards both were issued as a
+pamphlet, with the title _Pre-Raphaelitism_, _its Principles, and
+Turner_. These works, he said, did not imitate old pictures, but nature;
+what alienated the public in them was their truth and rightness, which
+had broken abruptly and successfully with the conventional sweep of
+lines.
+
+[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
+
+ FORD MADOX BROWN. LEAR AND CORDELIA.
+
+ (_By permission of Albert Wood, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
+
+_Holman Hunt_ is the painter who has been most consistent in clinging
+throughout his life to these original principles of the Brotherhood. He
+is distinguished by a depth of thought which at last tends to become
+entirely elusive, and often a depth of spirit more profound than diver
+ever plumbed; but at the same time by an angular, gnarled realism which
+has scarcely its equal in all the European art of the century.
+
+"The Flight of Madeleine and Porphyro," from Keats' _Eve of St. Agnes_,
+was the first picture, the subject being borrowed in 1848 from his
+favourite poet. In the work through which he first acknowledged himself
+a member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood he has given a plain and
+simple rendering of the scene in the introductory chapter of Bulwer
+Lytton's _Rienzi_. He has chosen the moment when Rienzi, kneeling beside
+the corpse of his brother, takes a vow of vengeance against the murderer
+who is riding away. The composition avoids any kind of conventional
+pyramidal structure. In the foreground every flower is painted and every
+colour is frankly set beside its neighbour without the traditional
+gradation. His third picture, "A Converted British Family sheltering a
+Christian Missionary," is not to be reckoned amongst his best
+performances. It is forced naïveté, suggesting the old masters, to unite
+two entirely different scenes upon the same canvas: in the background
+there are fugitives and pursuers, and a Druid, merely visible by his
+outstretched arms, inciting the populace to the murder of a missionary;
+in the foreground a hut open on all sides, which could really offer no
+protection at all. Yet in this hut a priest is hiding, tended by
+converted Britons. However, the drawing of the nude bodies is an
+admirable piece of realism; admirable, also, is the way in which he has
+expressed the fear of the inmates, and the fanatical bloodthirsty rage
+of the pursuers, and this without any false heroics, without any
+rhetoric based upon the traditional language of gesture. The picture
+from Shakespeare's _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, with the motto, "Death is
+a fearful thing, and shamed life a hateful," is perhaps theatrical in
+its arrangement, though it is likewise earnest and convincing in
+psychological expression.
+
+Microscopic fidelity to nature, which formed the first principle in the
+programme of the Brotherhood, has been carried in Holman Hunt to the
+highest possible point. Every flower and every ear of corn, every
+feather and every blade of grass, every fragment of bark on the trees
+and every muscle, is painted with scrupulous accuracy. The joke made
+about the pre-Raphaelites has reference to Holman Hunt: it was said that
+when they had to paint a landscape they used to bring to their studio a
+blade of grass, a leaf, and a piece of bark, and they multiplied them
+microscopically so many thousand times until the landscape was finished.
+His works are a triumph of industry, and for that very reason they are
+not a pleasure to the eye. A petty, pedantic fidelity to nature injures
+the total effect, and the hard colours--pungent green, vivid yellow,
+glaring blue, and glowing red--which Holman Hunt places immediately
+beside each other, give his pictures something brusque, barbaric, and
+jarring. But as a reaction against a system of painting by routine,
+which had become mannered, such truth without all compromise, such
+painstaking effort at the utmost possible fidelity to nature, was, in
+its very harshness, of epoch-making significance.
+
+With regard, also, to the transcendental purport of his pictures Holman
+Hunt is perhaps the most genuine of the group. In the whole history of
+art there are no religious pictures in which uncompromising naturalism
+has made so remarkable an alliance with a pietistic depth of ideas. The
+first, which he sent to the exhibition of 1854, "The Light of the
+World," represents Christ wandering through the night in a
+gold-embroidered mantle, with a lantern in His hand, like a Divine
+Diogenes seeking men. Taine, who studied the picture impartially without
+the catalogue, describes it, without further addition, as "Christ by
+night with a lantern." But for Holman Hunt the meaning is Christianity
+illuminating the universe with the mystic light of Faith and seeking
+admission at the long-closed door of unbelief. It was because of this
+implicit suggestion that the work made an indescribable sensation in
+England; it had to go on pilgrimage from town to town, and hundreds of
+thousands of copies of the engraving were sold. The pietistic feeling
+of this ascetic preacher was so strong that he was able to venture on
+pictures like "The Scapegoat" of 1856 without becoming comical.
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ FORD MADOX BROWN. ROMEO AND JULIET.]
+
+[Illustration: FORD MADOX BROWN. CHRIST WASHING PETER'S FEET.]
+
+A striving to attain the greatest possible local truth had led Holman
+Hunt to the East when he began these biblical pictures. He spent several
+years in Palestine studying the topographical character of the land, its
+buildings and its people, and endeavoured with the help of these actual
+men and women and these landscape scenes to reconstruct the events of
+biblical history with antiquarian fidelity. To paint "The Shadow of
+Death" he searched in the East until he discovered a Jew who
+corresponded to his idea of Christ, and painted him, a strong, powerful
+man, the genuine son of a carpenter, with that astounding truth to
+nature with which Hubert van Eyck painted his Adam. Even the hairs of
+the breast and legs are as faithfully rendered as if one saw the model
+in a glass. Near this naked carpenter--for He is clothed only with a
+leather apron--there kneels a modern Eastern woman, bowed over a chest,
+in which various Oriental vessels are lying. The ground is covered with
+shavings of wood. Up to this point, therefore, it is a naturalistic
+picture from the modern East. But here Holman Hunt's pietistic sentiment
+is seen: it is the eve of a festival; the sun casts its last dying rays
+into the room; the journeyman carpenter wearily stretches out His arms,
+and the shadow of His body describes upon the wall the prophetic form of
+the Cross.
+
+Another picture represented the discovery of our Lord in the Temple, a
+third the flock which has been astray following the Good Shepherd into
+His Father's fold. On his picture of the flight into Egypt, or, as he
+has himself called it, "The Triumph of the Innocents," he published a
+pamphlet of twelve pages, in which he goes into all the historical
+events connected with the picture with the loyalty of an historian; he
+discusses everything--in what month the flight took place, and by what
+route, how old Christ was, to what race the ass belonged, and what
+clothes were worn by Saint Joseph and Mary. One might be forgiven for
+thinking such a production the absurd effusion of a whimsical pedant
+were it not that Hunt is so grimly in earnest in everything he does. In
+spite of all his peculiarities it must be admitted that he gave a deep
+and earnest religious character to English art, which before his time
+had been so paltry; and this explains the powerful impression which he
+made upon his contemporaries.
+
+The artist most closely allied to him in technique is _Ford Madox
+Brown_, who did not reckon himself officially with the pre-Raphaelites,
+though he followed the same principles in what concerned the treatment
+of detail. Only a little senior to the founders of the Brotherhood--he
+was nine-and-twenty at the time--he is to be regarded as their more
+mature ally and forerunner. Rossetti was under no illusion when, in the
+beginning of his studies, he turned to him directly. In those years
+Madox Brown was the only English painter who was not addicted to the
+trivialities of paltry _genre_ painting or the theatrical heroics of
+traditional history. He is a bold artist, with a gift of dramatic force
+and a very rare capacity of concentration, and these qualities hindered
+him from following the doctrine of the pre-Raphaelites in all its
+consequences. If he had, in accordance with their programme, exclusively
+confined himself to work from the living model, several of his most
+striking and powerful pictures would never have been painted.
+
+[Illustration: SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS.]
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ MILLAIS. LORENZO AND ISABELLA.]
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ MILLAIS. THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE.]
+
+Madox Brown passed his youth on the Continent--in Antwerp with Wappers,
+in Paris, and in Rome. The pictures which he painted there in the
+beginning of the forties were produced, as regards technique, under the
+influence of Wappers. The subjects were taken from Byron: "The Sleep of
+Parisina" and "Manfred on the Jungfrau." It is only in the latter that
+an independent initiative is perceptible. In contradistinction from the
+generalities of the school of Wappers he aimed at greater depth of
+psychology and accuracy of costume, while at the same time he
+endeavoured, though without success, to replace the conventional studio
+light by the carefully observed effect of free light. These three
+things--truth of colour, of spiritual expression, and of historical
+character--were from this time forth his principal care. And when his
+cartoon of "Harold," painted in Paris in the year 1844, was exhibited in
+Westminster Hall, it was chiefly this scrupulous effort at truth which
+made such a vivid impression upon the younger generation. In the first
+masterpiece which he painted after his return to London in 1848 he
+stands out already in all his rugged individuality. "Lear and Cordelia,"
+founded on a most tragic passage in the most tragic of the great dramas
+of Shakespeare, is here treated with impressive cogency. It stood in
+such abrupt opposition to the traditional historical painting that
+perhaps nothing was ever so sharply opposed to anything so universally
+accepted. The figures stand out stiff and parti-coloured like card
+kings, without fluency of line or rounded and generalised beauty. And
+the colouring is just as incoherent. The brown sauce, which every one
+had hitherto respected like a binding social law, had given way to a
+bright joy of colour, the half-barbaric motley which one finds in old
+miniatures. It is only when one studies the brilliant details, used
+merely in the service of a great psychological effect, that this
+outwardly repellent picture takes shape as a powerful work of art, a
+work of profound human truth. Nothing is sacrificed to pose, graceful
+show, or histrionic affectation. Like the German masters of the
+fifteenth century, Madox Brown makes no attempt to dilute what is ugly,
+nor did Holbein either when he painted the leprous beggars in his "Altar
+to St. Sebastian." Every figure, whether fair or foul, is, in bearing,
+expression, and gesture, a character of robust and rigorous hardihood,
+and has that intense fulness of life which is compressed in those carved
+wooden figures of mediæval altars: the aged Lear with his weather-beaten
+face and his waving beard; the envious Regan; the cold, cruel, ambitious
+Goneril; Albany, with his fair, inexpressive head; the gross, brutal
+Cornwall; Burgundy, biting his nails in indecision; and Cordelia, in her
+touching, bashful grace. And to this angular frankness of the primitive
+masters he unites the profound learning of the modern historian. All the
+archæological details, the old British costumes, jewels, modes of
+wearing the hair, weapons, furniture, and hangings, have been studied
+with the accuracy of Menzel. He knows nothing of the academic rules of
+composition, and his robes fall naturally without the petty appendage of
+fair folds and graceful motives.
+
+[Illustration: MILLAIS. THE HUGUENOT.]
+
+The picture in which he treated the balcony scene in Shakespeare's
+_Romeo and Juliet_ is outwardly repellent, like "Lear and Cordelia," but
+what a hollow effect is made by Makart's theatrical heroics beside this
+aboriginal sensuousness, this intensity of expression! Juliet's dress
+has fallen from her shoulders, and, devoid of will and thought, with
+closed lids, half-naked, and thrilling in every fibre with the lingering
+joy of the hours that have passed, she abandons herself to the last
+fiery embraces of Romeo, who in stormy haste is feeling with one foot
+for the ladder of ropes.
+
+He has solved a yet more difficult problem in the picture "Elijah and
+the Widow."
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ MILLAIS. AUTUMN LEAVES.]
+
+"See, thy son liveth," are the words in the Bible with which the hoary
+Elijah brings the boy, raised from death and still enveloped in his
+shroud, to the agonised mother kneeling at the foot of the sepulchre.
+The woman makes answer: "Now by this I know that thou art a man of God."
+In the embodiment of this scene likewise Madox Brown has aimed in
+costume and accessories at a complete harmony between the figures and
+the character of the epoch, and has set out with an entirely accurate
+study of Assyrian and Egyptian monuments. Even the inscription on the
+wall and the Egyptian antiquities correspond to ancient originals. At
+the same time the figures have been given the breath of new life. Elijah
+looks more like a wild aboriginal man than a saint of the Cinquecento.
+The ecstasy of the mother, the astonishment of the child whose great
+eyes, still unaccustomed to the light, gaze into the world again with a
+dreamy effort, after having beheld the mysteries of death--these are
+things depicted with an astonishing power. The downright but convincing
+method in which Hogarth paints the soul has dislodged the hollow,
+heroical ideal of beauty of the older historical painting. Madox Brown's
+confession of faith, which he formulated as an author, culminates in the
+tenet that truth is the means of art, its end being the quickening of
+the soul. This he expresses in two words: "emotional truth."
+
+While Holman Hunt and Madox Brown held fast throughout their lives to
+the pre-Raphaelite principles, pre-Raphaelitism was for _John Everett
+Millais_, the youngest of the three, merely a transitory phase, a stage
+in his artistic development.
+
+Sir John Millais was born 8th June 1829, in Southampton, where his
+family had come from Jersey. Thus he is half a Frenchman by descent.
+His childhood was passed in Dinant in Brittany, but when he was nine
+years old he went to a London school of drawing. He was then the little
+fair-haired boy in a holland blouse, a broad sash, and a large sailor's
+collar, whom John Phillip painted in those days. When eleven he entered
+the Royal Academy, probably being the youngest pupil there; at thirteen
+he won a prize medal for the best drawing from the antique; at fifteen
+he was already painting; and at seventeen he exhibited an historical
+picture, "Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru," which was praised by the
+critics as the best in the exhibition of 1846. With "Elgiva," a work
+exhibited in 1847, this first period, in which he followed the lines of
+the now forgotten painter Hilton, was brought to an end. His next work,
+"Lorenzo and Isabella," now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, bore
+the letters P.R.B., as a sign of his new confession of faith.
+Microscopically exact work in detail has taken the place of the large
+bravura and the empty imitation of the Cinquecentisti. The theme was
+borrowed from one of Boccaccio's tales, _The Pot of Basil_--the tale on
+which Keats founded _Isabella_. A company of Florentines in the costume
+of the thirteenth century are assembled at dinner. Lorenzo, pale and in
+suppressed excitement, sits beside the lovely Isabella, looking at her
+with a glance of deep, consuming passion. Isabella's brother, angered at
+it, gives a kick to her dog. All the persons at the table are
+likenesses. The critic F. G. Stephens sat for the beloved of Isabella,
+and Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the toper holding his glass to his lips
+at the far right of the table. Even the ornaments upon the damask cloth,
+the screen, and the tapestry in the background are painted, stroke after
+stroke, with the conscientious devotion of a primitive painter. Jan van
+Eyck's brilliancy of colour is united to Perugino's suavity of feeling,
+and the chivalrous spirit of the _Decameron_ seized with the sureness of
+a subtle literary scholar.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ MILLAIS. THE YEOMAN OF THE GUARD.]
+
+The work of 1850, "The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the
+Carpenter," illustrated a verse in the Bible (Zechariah xiii. 6): "And
+one shall say unto Him, What are these wounds in Thine hands? Then He
+shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of My
+friends." The Child Jesus, who is standing before the joiner's bench,
+has hurt Himself in the hand. St. Joseph is leaning over to look at the
+wound, and Mary is kneeling beside the Child, trying to console Him
+with her caresses, whilst the little St. John is bringing water in a
+wooden vessel. Upon the other side of the bench stands the aged Anna, in
+the act of drawing out of the wood the nail which has caused the injury.
+A workman is labouring busily at the joiner's bench. The floor of the
+workshop is littered with shavings, and tools hang round upon the walls.
+The Quattrocentisti were likewise the determining influence in the
+treatment of this subject. Ascetic austerity has taken the place of
+ideal draperies, and angularity that of the noble flow of line. The
+figure of Mary, who, with her yellow kerchief, resembled the wife of a
+London citizen, was the cause of special offence.
+
+[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
+
+ MILLAIS. THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE.
+
+ (_By permission of Messrs. Thomas Agnew & Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ MILLAIS. YES OR NO?]
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ MILLAIS. MRS. BISCHOFFSHEIM.
+
+ (_By permission of Mrs. Bischoffsheim, the owner of the picture._)]
+
+Up to the seventies Millais continued to paint such pictures out of the
+Bible, or from English and mediæval poets, with varying success. One of
+them, which in its brilliant colouring looked like an old picture upon
+glass, represented the return of the dove to Noah's ark. The central
+point was formed by two slender young women in mediæval costume, who
+received the exhausted bird in their delicate hands. The picture, "The
+Woodman's Daughter," was an illustration to a poem by Coventry Patmore,
+on the love of a young noble for a poor child of the wood. In a
+semicircular picture of 1852 he painted Ophelia as she floats singing in
+the green pool where the white water-lilies cover her like mortuary
+wreaths--floats with her parted lips flickering with a gentle smile of
+distraction. The other picture of this year, "The Huguenot," represented
+two lovers taking leave of each other in an old park upon the eve of St.
+Bartholomew. She is winding a white scarf round his arm to save him from
+death by this badge of the Catholics, whilst he is gently resisting. The
+mood of the man standing before the dark gate of death, the moral
+strength which vanquishes his fear, and all the solemnity of his
+farewell to life are expressed in his glance. A world of love rests in
+the eyes of the woman. Millais has often treated this problem of the
+loving woman with earnest and almost sombre realism, that knows no touch
+of swooning sentimentality. "The Order of Release" of 1853 shows a
+jailor in the scarlet uniform of the eighteenth century opening a heavy
+prison door to set at liberty a Highlander, whose release has been
+obtained by his wife. A scene from the seventeenth century is treated in
+"The Proscribed Royalist": a noble cavalier, hidden in a hollow tree, is
+kissing the hand of a graceful, trembling woman, who has been daily
+bringing him food at the risk of her life. "The Black Brunswicker" of
+1856 closed this series of silent and motionless dramas. In the picture
+of 1857, "Sir Isumbras at the Ford," an old knight is riding home
+through the twilight of a sultry day in June. The dust of the journey
+lies upon his golden armour. At a ford he has fallen in with two
+children, and has lifted them up to carry them over the water. And "The
+Vale of Rest," a picture deep and intense in its scheme of colour,
+earnest and melancholy as a requiem, revealed--with a sentiment a little
+like that of Lessing--a cloister garden where two nuns are silently
+preparing a grave in the evening light; while "The Eve of Saint Agnes"
+in 1863 illustrated the same poem of Keats to which ten years previously
+Holman Hunt had devoted his work of early years. Madeleine has heard the
+old legend, telling how girls receive the tender homage of their future
+husbands if they go through their evening prayer supperless at midnight.
+With her heart filled with the thoughts of love she quits the hall where
+the guests are seated at a merry feast, and mounts to her room so
+hastily that her thin taper is extinguished on the way. She enters her
+little chamber, kneels down, repeats the prayer, and rises to her feet,
+taking off her finery and loosening her hair. The clear moonlight
+streams through the window, throwing a ghostly illumination over the
+little images of saints in the room, falling like a caress upon the
+tender young breast of the girl, playing upon her folded hands, and
+touching her long, fair hair with a radiance like a vaporous glory. In
+the shadow of the bed she sees him whom she loves. Motionless, as in a
+dream, she stands, nor ventures to turn lest the fair vision should
+vanish. "The Deliverance of a Heretic condemned to the Stake," "Joan of
+Arc," "Cinderella," "The Last Rose," that dreamy picture of romantic
+grace, "The Childhood of Sir Walter Raleigh," and the picture of the
+hoary Moses, supported by Hur and Aaron, watching from the mountain-top
+the victory of Joshua, were the principal works achieved in the later
+years of the master. But when these pictures were executed England had
+become accustomed to honour Millais, not as a pre-Raphaelite, but as her
+greatest portrait painter.
+
+[Illustration: MILLAIS. THOMAS CARLYLE.]
+
+His portrait of himself explains this transformation. With his white
+linen jacket and his fresh sunburnt face Sir John Millais does not look
+in the least like a "Romanticist," scarcely like a painter; he has
+rather the air of being a wealthy landowner. He was a man of a sound and
+straightforward nature, a great and energetic master, conscious of his
+aim, but a poet in Ruskin's sense of the word is what he has never been.
+His pre-Raphaelitism was only a flirtation. His methods of thought were
+too concrete, his hand too powerful, for him to have lingered always in
+the world of the English poets, or endured the precise style of the
+pre-Raphaelites. "Millais will 'go far' if he will only change his
+boots," About had written on the occasion of the World Exhibition of
+1855; when that of 1867 was opened Millais appeared in absolutely new
+shoes. The great exhibition of 1857 in Manchester, which made known for
+the first time how many of the works of Velasquez were hidden in English
+private collections, had helped Millais to the knowledge of himself.
+From the naturalism of the Quattrocentisti he made a transition to the
+naturalism of Velasquez.
+
+Millais was a born portrait painter. His cool and yet finely sensitive
+nature, his simple, manly temperament, directed him to this department,
+which rather gravitates to the observant and imitative than to the
+creative pole of art. In his pictures he has the secret of enchanting
+and of repelling; he has arrived at really definite issues in portrait
+painting. His likenesses are all of them as convincing as they are
+actual. Together with the Venetians and with Velasquez, Millais belongs
+to the master spirits of the grand style, which relies upon the large
+movement of lines, in figure and in face, upon the broad foundation of
+surfaces, and the strict subordination of individual details. His
+figures are characteristic and recognisable even in outline. He makes no
+effort to render them interesting by picturesque attitudes, or to vivify
+them by placing them in any situation. There they stand calm, and
+sometimes stiff and cold; they make no attempt at conversation with the
+spectator, nor come out of themselves, as it were, but fix their eyes
+upon him with an air of well-bred composure and indifference. Even the
+hands are not made use of for characterisation.
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ MILLAIS. THE VALE OF REST.]
+
+The extraordinary intensity of life which sparkles in his great figures,
+so simply displayed, is almost exclusively concentrated in the heads.
+Millais is perhaps the first master of characterisation amongst the
+moderns. To bold and powerful exposition there is united a noble and
+psychical gaze. The eyes which he paints are like windows through which
+the soul is visible.
+
+[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
+
+ FORD MADOX BROWN. THE LAST OF ENGLAND.]
+
+Amongst his portraits of men, those of Gladstone and Hook stand in the
+first rank: as paintings perhaps they are not specially eminent; both
+have an opaque, sooty tone, from which Millais' works not unfrequently
+suffer, but as a definition of complex personalities they are comparable
+only with the best pictures of Lenbach. How firmly does the statesman
+hold himself, despite his age, the old tree-feller, the stern idealist,
+a genuine English figure chiselled out of hard wood. The play of light
+centres all the interest on the fine, earnest, and puckered features,
+the lofty forehead, the energetic chin, and the liquid, thoughtful eyes.
+All the biography of Gladstone lies in this picture, which is simpler
+and greater in intuition than that which Lenbach painted of him. Hook,
+with his broad face, furrowed with wrinkles, looks like an apostle or a
+fisher. Millais has looked into the heart of this man, who has in him
+something rugged and faithful, massive and tender; the painter of
+vigorous fishermen and vaporous sunbeams. Hook's landscapes have a
+forceful, earnest, and well-nigh religious effect, and something
+patriarchal and biblical lies in his gentle, reflective, and
+contemplative glance.
+
+In his portrait of the Duke of Westminster, painted in 1878, Millais
+depicts him in hunting dress, red coat, white corduroys, and high,
+flexible boots, as he stands and buttons on his glove. The same year
+"The Yeoman of the Guard" was exhibited in Paris--the old type of
+discipline and loyalty, who sits there in his deep red uniform, with
+features cast in bronze, like a Velasquez of 1878. Disraeli, Cardinal
+Newman, John Bright, Lord Salisbury, Charles Waring, Sir Henry Irving,
+the Marquis of Lorne, and Simon Fraser are all worthy descendants of the
+eminent men whom Reynolds painted a century before. The plastic effect
+of the figures is increased by the vacant, neutral ground of the
+picture. Like Velasquez, Millais has made use of every possible
+background, from the simplest, from the nullity of an almost black or
+bright surface, to richly furnished rooms and views of landscape.
+Sometimes it is only indicated by a plain chair or table that the figure
+is standing in a room, or a heavy crimson curtain falls to serve as a
+_repoussoir_ for the head. With a noble abstention he avoids prettiness
+of line and insipid motives, and remains true to this virile taste even
+in his portraits of women. His women have curiously little of the
+æsthetical trait which runs elsewhere through English portraits of
+ladies. Millais renders them--as in the picture "Dummy Whist"--neither
+sweet nor tender, gives them nothing arch, sprightly, nor triumphant.
+Severe and sculptural in their mien, and full of character rather than
+beauty, proud in bearing and upright in pose, their serious, energetic
+features betray decision of character; and the glance of their brown
+eyes--eyes like Juno's--is indifferent and almost hard. A straight and
+liberal forehead, a beautifully formed and very determined mouth, and a
+full, round chin complete this impression of earnest dignity, august
+majesty, and chilling pride. To this regular avoidance of every trace of
+available charm there is joined a strict taste in toilette. He prefers
+to work with dark or subdued contrasts of colour, and he is also fond of
+large-flowered silks--black with citron-yellow and black with dark red.
+
+[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
+
+ FORD MADOX BROWN. WORK.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+And this same stringent painter of character commands, as few others,
+the soft light brush of a painter of children. No one since Reynolds and
+Gainsborough has painted with so much character as Millais the dazzling
+freshness of English youth; the energetic pose of a boy's head or the
+beauty of an English girl--a thing which stands in the world alone: the
+soft, glancing, silken locks, rippling to a _blonde cendrée_, pale,
+delicate little faces, pouting little mouths, and great, shining blue,
+dreamy, childish eyes. Sometimes they stand in rose-coloured dresses
+embroidered with silver in front of a deep green curtain, or sit reading
+upon a dark red carpet flowered with black. At other times they are
+arrayed like the little Infantas of Velasquez, and play with a spaniel
+like the Doge's children of Titian, or hold out with both hands an apron
+full of flowers, which Millais paints with a high degree of finish. A
+spray of pale red roses, chrysanthemums, or lilies stands near. One must
+be a great master of characterisation to paint conscious, dignified, and
+earnest feminine beauty like that of Mrs. Bischoffsheim, and at the same
+time that fragrant perfume of the fresh and dewy spring of youth which
+breathes from Millais' pictures of children.
+
+[Illustration: PHILLIP. THE LETTER-WRITER, SEVILLE.]
+
+Millais is one of those men in the history of nineteenth-century
+painting who are as forcible and healthy as they are many-sided. I do
+not know one who could have developed so swiftly from a style of the
+most minute exactness to one of the most powerful breadth; not one who
+could have united such poetry of conception with such an enormous
+knowledge of human beings; not one who could have been so like Proteus
+in variety--at one moment charming, at another dreamy, at another
+entirely positive. In their firm structure and largeness of manner his
+landscapes sometimes recall Théodore Rousseau. And now the
+pre-Raphaelite is just a little evident in an excess of detail. He
+paints every blade of grass and every small plant, though there is at
+the same time a largeness in the midst of this scrupulous exactitude. He
+does not merely see the isolated fact through a magnifying lens, but has
+eyes that are sensitive to the poetry of the whole, and in spite of all
+study of detail he sometimes reaches a total effect which is altogether
+impressionist. His picture "Chill October" has an airy life, a grey,
+vibrating atmosphere, such as only John Constable painted elsewhere.
+
+Such a concrete study of nature as was made by the pre-Raphaelites of
+necessity led at last to entirely realistic pictures from modern life.
+In their biblical and poetic pictures they had started from the
+conviction that new life-blood could only be poured into the old
+conventional types, which had gradually become meaningless by tactfully
+drawing the models for them from popular life. They believed, as the
+masters of Florence and Bruges had done before them, that there could be
+no good painting without strict dependence on the model; that it was of
+the utmost importance to give a poetic or legendary figure the stamp of
+nature, the strong savour of individuality. All their creations are
+based upon the elements of portrait painting, even when they illustrate
+remote scenes from the New Testament or from mediæval poetry. And these
+elements at last led them altogether to give up transposing such figures
+into an alien _milieu_, and simply to paint what was offered by their
+own surroundings. In this way they reached the goal which was arrived at
+in French painting through Courbet and Ribot. It is due in the first
+place to the pre-Raphaelites that the well-meant and moderately painted
+_genre_ picture of the old style, which, with its wealth of pathetic
+stories, was once a prime source of supposed artistic pleasure, was
+finally vanquished in England, and made way for earnest and vigorous
+painting,--painting which sought to make its effect by purely artistic
+means, and proudly declined attempt to conceal intrinsic weakness in
+"interesting" subject drawn from external sources. As early as 1855
+Millais exhibited a picture in the Royal Academy which Ruskin called a
+truly great work containing the elements of immortality--"The Rescue."
+It represented a fireman who has carried three children from a burning
+house and laid them in the arms of their parents. Narrative purport was
+entirely renounced. The fireman was treated without sentimentality, and
+in a way that suggested the cool fulfilment of a duty, and the agitation
+of the parents was also rendered without any dash of melodrama. Then
+there followed that masterpiece of exquisite and soft colouring, tender
+and moving expression, and infinite grace, "The Gambler's Wife," sadly
+taking up the cards which have brought her misery upon her. In 1874 was
+painted "The North-West Passage," a sort of modern symbol of the
+forceful, enterprising English people who have populated and subdued
+half the world from their little island kingdom. "There is a passage to
+the Pole, and England will find it--must find it." These are more or
+less the words spoken by Trelawney, the old friend and comrade of Byron
+in Greece. With a chart before him he is brooding over the plan of the
+North-West Passage, and upon his own outstretched hand, which would fain
+hold the future in its grasp, the hand of a youthful woman is soothingly
+laid, as she sits at his feet reading to him the narrative of the last
+voyage of discovery. The figure of the seaman with his white beard has
+a strong, sinewy life, and the broad daylight streams through the room,
+filled with charts and atlases. The sea and clear, bright sky gleam
+through the open window. It is a powerful and moving picture, one of
+those modern creations in which the ideas of the nineteenth century are
+concentrated with simplicity and a renunciation of all hollow emphasis.
+
+[Illustration: PHILLIP. SPANISH SISTERS.]
+
+A few pictures of modern life which have nothing in common with the
+older _genre_ painting may even be found among the works of the
+devotionalist Holman Hunt. "Awakened Conscience," according to the
+explanation of the painter, tells the story of a young woman seduced by
+a cruel and light-minded man, and kept in a luxurious little
+country-house. They are together. Seated at the piano he is playing the
+old melody "Oft in the Stilly Night," and the strains of the song recall
+to the frail maiden her youth, and the years of purity and innocence.
+Thus even Hunt has not overcome the moralising tendencies of Hogarth,
+though his taste is more discreet and delicate. He has struck deeper
+chords of thought than the English public had heard before. And in
+particular the painting is not a mere substratum for the story; it has
+become the principal thing, and the story subsidiary. In another
+picture, "May Morning on Magdalen Tower," he renounced all deeper
+purpose altogether, and merely painted a number of Oxford dons and
+students, who, in accordance with the old custom, usher in the May with
+a hymn from the college tower.
+
+But the most remarkable work of this description has been executed by
+Madox Brown, the English Menzel, who has not merely reconstructed the
+environment of past ages with the accuracy of an eye-witness, but has
+looked upon the drama of modern life as an attentive observer. His first
+picture, "The Last of England," was executed in the June of 1852, at a
+time when emigration to America began to take serious proportions. A
+married couple, humble, middle-class people, are sitting on the deck of
+a ship. The man, in his thick cloth overcoat, with a soft felt hat on
+his head, a pale face, and sunken eyes with dark rings underneath, casts
+one more look upon his native-land, which vanishes in the hazy distance,
+as he thinks bitterly of lost hopes and vain struggles. But the young
+wife, in a light-coloured cloak and a pretty round bonnet with wide
+strings, gazes before her with gentle resignation, from underneath a
+great umbrella protecting her from the boisterous sea-wind.
+
+In "Work," begun at the same period, and finished, after various
+interruptions, in 1865, he has produced the first modern picture of
+artisans after Courbet's "Stone-breakers." The painter, who was then
+living in Hampstead, where extensive cuttings were being made for the
+laying down of gas-pipes, daily saw the English artisan at labour in all
+his thick-set strength. This gave him the theme for his picture. In
+bright daylight on a glaring summer afternoon artisans are digging a
+trench for gas-pipes in a busy street. Women and poor children are
+standing near. Even the older _genre_ artists had painted men in their
+working blouses, but only joking and making merry, never at work. Like
+stage-managers who are sure of their public, they always set the same
+troop of puppets dancing. Madox Brown's artisans are robust and
+raw-boned figures; where the older artists affected to be witty with
+their _genre_ painting, Madox Brown painted straightforwardly, without
+humour and without making his figures beautiful. The composition of his
+pictures is just as plain. No one poses, no one makes impassioned
+gestures, no one thinks of grouping himself with his neighbour in fine
+flowing lines. It is pleasant to think that this powerful symbol of work
+has passed by presentation into the possession of one of the greatest
+manufacturing towns in England, into the gallery of Manchester.
+
+[Illustration: R. ANSDELL. A SETTER AND GROUSE.]
+
+A Scotchman, born in Aberdeen, _John Phillip_ was the vigorous abettor
+of the pre-Raphaelites in these realistic endeavours. He, too, was a
+painter in the full meaning of the word, and he has therefore left works
+with which the future will have to reckon. Velasquez had opened his eyes
+as he had opened those of Millais. When Phillip went to Spain in 1851,
+he was not the first who had trod the Museo del Prado. Wilkie had
+painted in Spain before him, and Ansdell had been busy there at the same
+time. But no one had been able to grasp in any degree the impressive
+majesty of the old Spanish painters. John Phillip alone gained something
+of the _verve_ of Velasquez, a broad, virile technique which
+distinguishes him from all his English contemporaries. The impression
+received from his pictures is one of opulence, depth, and weight; they
+unite something of the strength of Velasquez to a more Venetian
+splendour of colour. The streets of Seville, the Spanish port on the
+Guadalquivir, the town where Velasquez and Murillo were born, were his
+chief field of study. Here he saw those market-women, black as mulattoes
+and sturdy as grenadiers, who sit in front of their fruit-baskets under
+a great umbrella, and those water-carriers with sunburnt visages,
+strongly built chests, and athletic arms.
+
+After he had returned to Scotland he occasionally painted pictures of
+ceremonies, "The House of Commons," "The Wedding of the Princess
+Royal," and so forth, but he soon returned to subjects from Spanish
+life. Gipsy-looking, cigarette-smoking women, with sparkling eyes and
+jet-black hair, young folks dancing to the castanets, bull-fighters with
+glittering silver-grey costume and flashing glances, dark-brown peasants
+in citron-yellow petticoats, hollow-eyed manufactory girls, potters, and
+glass-blowers.--such are the materials of Phillip's pictures. They give
+no scope to anecdote; but they always reveal a fragment of reality which
+emits a world of impressions and an opulence of artistic ability. As
+painter _par excellence_, John Phillip stands in opposition to older
+English _genre_ painters. Whilst they were, in the first place, at pains
+to tell a story intelligibly, Phillip was a colourist, a _maître
+peintre_, whose figures were developed from the colours, and whose
+creations are so full of character that they will always assert their
+place with the best that has ever been painted. Even in England, the
+country of literary and narrative painting, art was no longer an
+instrument for expressing ideas; it had become an end in itself, and had
+discovered colour as its prime and most essential medium of expression.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+REALISM IN GERMANY
+
+
+In Germany the realistic movement was carried out in much the same way
+as in France, though it came into action two decades after its French
+original. Here also it was recognised that the well-meant but badly
+painted anecdote must give way to the well-painted picture: and if we
+inquire who it was that gave to Germany the first serious paintings
+inspired by the modern spirit the reply, without hesitation, must be
+Adolf Menzel. The pioneering work of this great little man, who for
+fifty years had embodied in their typical perfection all phases of
+German art, is something fabulous: the greatest and, one might almost
+say, the only historical painter of bygone epochs, the only one who knew
+a previous period so intimately that he could venture on painting it,
+was also the leader of the great movement which, in the seventies, aimed
+at the representation of our own life. His first appearance was in the
+time when the proud Titan Cornelius sought to take heaven by storm.
+Little Menzel was no Titan in those days; he seems in that generation
+like one bound to the earth, yet he belonged to the Cyclopean race. He
+was a mighty architect with the powers of a giant; and this uncouth
+Cyclops rough-hewed and chiselled the blocks, and, fitting each in its
+place, raised an edifice to as lofty a height as the Romanticists had
+reached on the perilous wings of Icarus. Having been first the
+draughtsman and then the painter of Frederick the Great, he gave up
+history after finishing the picture of the Battle of Hochkirch: his
+talent was too modern, too much set upon what was concrete, to admit of
+its being given full scope to the end by constructive work from a
+_milieu_ that was not his own. Until his fortieth year he had celebrated
+the glorious past of his country. When, with the death of Friedrich
+Wilhelm IV, a great and decisive turn was given to the politics of the
+Prussian state--one which put an end to the stagnation of civil life in
+Prussia and Germany, and ushered in a new and brilliant period for the
+realm and the heirs of Friedrich--the painter of Friedrich the Great
+became the painter of the new realm. After he had already, in the first
+half of the century, placed reality on the throne of art in the place of
+rhetoric and a vague ideal, he went one step further in the direction of
+keen and direct observation, and now painted what he saw around him--the
+stream of palpitating life.
+
+"The Coronation of King Wilhelm at Königsberg" is the great and
+triumphant title-page to this section of his art. The effects of light,
+the red tones of the uniforms, the shimmering white silk dresses, the
+surging of the mass of people, the perfect ease with which all the
+personages are individualised, the princes, the ministers, the
+ambassadors, the men of learning, the instantaneousness in the movement
+of the figures, the absolutely unforced and yet subtle and pictorial
+composition, render this painting no picture of ceremonies, in the
+traditional sense of the phrase, but a work of art at once intimate and
+august in the impression which it makes. In the picture "King Wilhelm
+setting out to join the Army"--the representation of the thrilling
+moment, on the afternoon of 31st July 1870, when the King drove along
+the linden avenue to the railway station--this phase, which he began
+with the Coronation picture, was brought to a close. Everything surges
+and moves, speaks and breathes, and glows with the palpitating life
+which vibrates through all in this moment of patriotic excitement. But
+the painter's course led him further.
+
+[Illustration: ADOLF MENZEL.]
+
+He first became entirely Menzel when he made the discovery of toiling
+humanity. In 1867, in the year of the World Exhibition, he came to Paris
+and became acquainted with Meissonier and Stevens. With Meissonier in
+particular--whose portrait he painted--he entered into a close
+friendship, and it was curious afterwards to see the two together at
+exhibitions--the little figure of Menzel with his gigantic bald forehead
+and the little figure of Meissonier with his gigantic beard, a Cyclops
+and a Gnome, two kings in the realm of Liliput, of whom one was unable
+to speak a word of German and the other unable to speak a word of
+French, although they had need merely of a look, a shrug, or a movement
+of the hand to understand each other entirely. He also came into the
+society of Courbet, who had just made the famous separate exhibition of
+his works, at the Café Lamartine, in the company of Heilbuth, Meyerheim,
+Knaus, and others. Here in Paris he produced his first pictures of
+popular contemporary life, and if as an historical painter he had
+already been a leader in the struggle against theatrical art, he became
+a pioneer in these works also. Everywhere he let in air and made free
+movement possible for those who pressed forward in his steps. In the
+course of years he painted and drew everything which excited in him
+artistic impulse upon any ground whatever, and not one of these
+endeavours was work thrown away. A universal genius amongst the painters
+of real life, he combined all the qualities of which other men of
+excellent talent merely possessed fragments separately apportioned
+amongst them: the sharpest eye for every detail of form, the most
+penetrative discrimination for the life of the spirit, and at times a
+glistening play of colour possessed by none of his German predecessors.
+
+[Illustration: MENZEL. FROM KUGLER'S "HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH THE GREAT."]
+
+Catholic churches seem always to have had a great attraction for him, as
+well as the people moving in them, and in this an echo of his _rococo_
+enthusiasm is still perceptible. The quaint, _rococo_ churches in the
+ornate style favoured by the Jesuits, which are still preserved intact
+in Munich and the Tyrol, were those for which he had a peculiar
+preference. He lost himself voluptuously in the thousand details of
+sculpture, framework, organs, balustrades, and carved pulpits, dimly
+outlined in the subdued light from stained-glass windows. In the gloom
+it was all transformed into a forest of ornaments, expanding their
+traceries like trees in a wood. Sick and infirm people, women in prayer
+burying their faces in their hands, and lame men with crutches, kneel or
+move amid the luxuriant efflorescence of stone and wood and gold, of
+angels' heads and shrines, garlands of flowers, consoles, and fonts of
+holy water. Twisted marble pillars, church banners, lamps and lustres
+mount in a confusion of capricious outlines at once tasteful and piquant
+to the vaulted dome, where the painted skies, blackened by the
+ascending mist of incense, seem waywardly fantastic.
+
+After the churches the salons appealed to him. There came his pictures
+of modern society: ladies and cavaliers of the Court upon ballroom
+balconies, the conversation of Privy Councillors in the salon, the
+marvellous ball supper, where a mass of beautiful shoulders, splendid
+uniforms, and rustling silken trains move amid mirrors, lustres,
+colonnades, and gilded frames. "The Ball Supper" of 1870 is a vivid
+picture, bathed in glistening light. The music has stopped. And from a
+door of the brilliantly lighted ballroom the company is streaming into
+the neighbouring apartment, where the supper-table has been laid, and
+groups of ladies and men in animated conversation are beginning to
+occupy the chairs and sofas. In 1879 there followed the famous "Levee":
+the Emperor Wilhelm in the red Court uniform of the _Gardes du Corps_ is
+talking with a lady, surrounded by a sea of heads, uniforms, and naked
+bowing shoulders. Though it was always necessary in earlier
+representations of the kind to have a _genre_ episode to compensate the
+insufficient artistic interest of the work, in Menzel's pictures the
+pictorial situation is grasped as a whole. They have the value of a
+book; they neither falsify nor beautify anything, and they will hand
+down to the future an encyclopædia of types of the nineteenth century.
+
+From the salon he went to the street, from exclusive aristocratic
+circles into the midst of the eddying crowd. For many years in
+succession Menzel was a constant visitor at the small watering-places in
+the Austrian and Bavarian Alps. The multitude of people at the concerts,
+in the garden of the restaurant, on the promenade, at the open-air
+services, were precisely the things to occupy his brush. The light
+rippled through the leaves of the trees; women, children, and well-bred
+men of the world listened to the music or the words of the preacher. One
+person leaves a seat and another takes it; everything lives and moves.
+Huge and lofty trees stretch out their arms, protecting the company from
+the sun. Unusually striking was "The Procession in Gastein": in the
+centre was the priest bearing the Host, then the choristers in their red
+robes, in front the visitors and tourists who had hastened to see the
+spectacle, and in the background the mountain heights. The bustle of
+people gives Menzel the opportunity for a triumph. In Kissingen he
+painted the promenade at the waters; in Paris the Sunday gaiety in the
+garden of the Tuileries, the street life upon the boulevard, the famous
+scene in the _Jardin des Plantes_, with the great elephants and the
+vivid group of Zouaves and ladies; in Verona the Piazza d'Erbe, with the
+swarm of people crowding in between the open booths and shouting at the
+top of their voices. Many after him have represented such scenes,
+although few have had the secret of giving their figures such seething
+life, or painting them, like Menzel, as parts of one great, surging, and
+many-headed multitude.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ MENZEL. THE CORONATION OF KING WILHELM I.]
+
+People travelling have always been for him a source of much amusement:
+men sitting in the corner of a railway carriage with their legs crossed
+and their hats over their eyes, yawning or asleep; women looking out of
+the windows or counting their ready money. Alternating with such themes
+are those monotonous yet simple and therefore genial landscapes from the
+suburbs of the great city, poor, neglected regions with machines and men
+at their labour. Children bathing in a dirty stream bordered by little,
+stunted willows; small craft gliding over a river, sailors leaping from
+one vessel to another, men landing sacks or barrels, and great, heavy
+cart-horses dragging huge waggons loaded with beer-barrels along the
+dusty country road. Or the scaffolding of a house is being raised. Six
+masons are at work upon it, and they are working in earnest. A green
+bush waves (German fashion) above the scaffolding, and further off long
+rows of houses stretch away, and the aqueducts and gas-works which
+supply the huge crater of Berlin, and day-labourers are seen wheeling up
+barrow-loads of stones. For the first time a German painter sings the
+canticle of labour.
+
+[Illustration: MENZEL. FROM KUGLER'S "HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH THE GREAT."]
+
+From the streets he enters the work-places, and interprets the wild
+poetry of roaring machines in smoky manufactories. The masterpiece of
+this group is that bold and powerful picture, his "Iron Mill" of 1876.
+The workshop of the great rail-forge of Königshütte in Upper Silesia is
+full of heat and steam. The muscular, brawny figures of men with glowing
+faces stand at the furnace holding the tongs in their swollen hands.
+Their vigorous gestures recall Daumier. Upon the upper part of their
+bodies, which is naked, the light casts white, blue, and dark red
+reflections, and over the lower part it flickers in reddish, greenish,
+and violet tinges, on the creases in their clothing. The smoke rising in
+spirals is of a whitish-red, and the beams supporting the roof are lit
+up with a sombre glow. Heat, sweat, movement, and the glare of fire are
+everywhere. Dust and dirt, strong, raw-boned iron-workers washing
+themselves, or exhausted with hard toil, snatching a hasty meal, a
+confusion of belting and machinery, no pretty anecdote but sober
+earnest, no story but pure painting--these were the great and decisive
+achievements of this picture. Courbet's "Stone-breakers" of 1851, Madox
+Brown's "Work" of 1852, and Menzel's "Iron Mill" are the standard works
+in the art of the nineteenth century.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ MENZEL. THE DAMENSTIFTSKIRCHE AT MUNICH.]
+
+Within German art Menzel has won an _enclave_ for himself, a rock amid
+the sea. In France during the sixties he represented German art in
+general. France offered him celebrity, and after this recognition he had
+the fortune to be honoured in his native-land before he was overtaken by
+old age. His realism was permitted to him at a time when realistic aims
+were elsewhere reckoned altogether as æsthetic errors. This explains the
+remarkable fact that Menzel's toil of fifty years had scarcely any
+influence on the development of German painting; it would scarcely be
+different from what it is now if he had never existed. When he might
+have been an exemplar there was no one who dared to follow him. And
+later, when German art as a whole had entered upon naturalistic lines,
+the differences between him and the younger generation were more
+numerous than their points of sympathy, so that it was impossible for
+him to have a formative influence. He stood out in the new period merely
+as a power commanding respect, like a hero of ancient times. Even the
+isolated realistic onsets made in Berlin in the seventies are in no way
+to be connected with him.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ MENZEL. KING WILHELM SETTING OUT TO JOIN THE ARMY.]
+
+If realism consisted in the dry and sober illustration of selected
+fragments of reality, if upright feeling, loyalty, and honest patriotism
+were serviceable qualities in art, a lengthier consideration should
+certainly be accorded to _Anton von Werner_. In his _genre_ pictures of
+campaign life everything is spick and span, everything is in its right
+place and in soldierly order: it is all typically Prussian art. His
+portraits are casino pictures, and as such it is impossible to imagine
+how they could better serve their purpose. From the spurs to the
+cuirassier helmet everything is correct and in accordance with military
+regulation; even the likeness has something officially prescribed which
+would make any recruit form front if suddenly brought face to face with
+such a person. In his pictures of ceremonies his ability was just
+sufficient to chronicle the function in question with the
+conscientiousness of a clerk in a law court. The intellectual capacity
+for seeing more of a great man than his immaculately polished boots and
+the immaculately burnished buttons of his uniform was denied him, as was
+the artistic capacity of exalting a picture-sheet to the level of a
+picture.
+
+Equipped with a healthy though trivial feeling for reality, _Carl
+Güssow_ ventured to approach nature in a sturdy and robust fashion in
+some of his works, and exhibited in Berlin a few life-sized figures,
+"Pussy," "A Lover of Flowers," "Lost Happiness," "Welcome," "The Oyster
+Girl," and so forth. Through these he opened for a brief period in
+Berlin the era of yellow kerchiefs and black finger-nails, and on the
+strength of them was exalted by the critics as a pioneer of realism or
+else anathematised, according to their æsthetic creed. He had a robust
+method of painting muscles and flesh and clothes of many colours, and of
+setting green beside red and red beside yellow, yet even in these first
+works--his only works of artistic merit--he never got beyond the banal
+and barbaric transcript of a reality which was entirely without
+interest.
+
+_Max Michael_ seems to be somewhat influenced by Bonvin. Like the
+latter, he was attracted by the silent motions of nuns, juicy
+vegetables, dark-brown wainscoting, and the subdued light of interiors.
+He was, like Ribot in France, although with less artistic power, a good
+representative of that "school of cellar skylights" which imitated in a
+sound manner the tone of the old Spanish masters. One of his finest
+pictures, which hangs in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, represents a girls'
+school in Italy. A nun is presiding over the sewing-lesson; the
+background is brown; the light comes through the yellow glass of a high
+and small window (like that of an attic), and throws a brown dusky tone
+over the room, in which the gay costumes of the little Italian girls,
+with their white kerchiefs, make exceedingly pretty and harmonious spots
+of colour. No adventure is hinted at, no episode related, but the
+picturesque appearance of the little girls, and their tones in the
+space, are all the more delicately rendered. A refined scheme of colour
+recalling the old masters compensates for the want of incident.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ MENZEL. THE IRON MILL.
+
+ (_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ MENZEL. SUNDAY IN THE TUILERIES GARDENS.]
+
+In Vienna _August von Pettenkofen_ made a transition from the ossified,
+antediluvian _genre_ painting to painting which was artistically
+delicate. While the successors of Gauermann and Danhauser indulged in
+heart-breaking scenes or humorous episodes, Pettenkofen was the first to
+observe the world from a purely pictorial point of view. Alfred Stevens
+had opened his eyes in Paris in 1851. Troyon's pictures and Millet's
+confirmed him in his efforts. He was brought up on a property belonging
+to his father in Galicia, and had been a cavalry officer before he
+turned to painting: horses, peasants, and oxen are the simple figures of
+his pictures. In the place of episodic, ill-painted stories he set the
+meagre plains of lonely Pusta, sooty forges, gloomy cobblers' work
+shops, dirty courtyards with middens and rubbish-heaps, gipsy
+encampments, and desolate garrets. There is no pandering to
+sentimentality or the curiosity excited by _genre_ painting. There are
+delicate chords of colour, and that is enough. The artist was in the
+habit of spending the summer months in the little town of Spolnok on the
+Theiss, to the east of Pesth. Here he wandered about amongst the little
+whitewashed houses, the booths of general dealers, and the
+fruit-sellers' stalls. A lazily moving yoke of oxen with a lad asleep,
+dark-eyed girls fetching water, poor children playing on the ground, old
+men dreaming in the sun in a courtyard, are generally the only breathing
+beings in his pictures. Here is a sandy village-square with low,
+white-washed houses; there is a wain with oxen standing in the street,
+or a postilion trotting away on his tired nag. Like Menzel, Pettenkofen
+paints busy humanity absorbed in their toil, simple beings who do not
+dream of leaving off work for the sake of those who frequent picture
+galleries. What differentiates him from the Berlin painter is a more
+lyrical impulse, something tender, thoughtful, and contemplative. Menzel
+gives dramatic point to everything he touches; he sets masses in
+movement, depicts a busy, noisy crowd, pressing together and elbowing
+one another, forcing their way at the doors of theatres or the windows
+of cafés in a multifarious throng. Pettenkofen lingers with the petty
+artisan and the solitary sempstress. In Menzel's "Iron Mill" the sparks
+are flying and the machines whirring, but everything is peaceful and
+quiet in the cobblers' workshops and the sunny attics visited by
+Pettenkofen. Menzel delights in momentary impressions and quivering
+life; Pettenkofen in rest and solitude. In the former every one is
+thinking and talking and on the alert; in the latter every one is
+yawning or asleep. If Menzel paints a waggon, the driver cracks his whip
+and one hears the team rattling over the uneven pavement; in Pettenkofen
+the waggon stands quietly in a narrow lane, the driver enjoys a midday
+rest, and an enervating, sultry heat broods overhead. Menzel has a love
+for men and women with excitement written on their faces; Pettenkofen
+avoids painting character, contenting himself with the reproduction of
+simple actions at picturesque moments. The Berlin artist is
+epigrammatically sharp; the Viennese is elegiac and melancholy. Menzel's
+pictures have the changing glitter of rockets; those of Pettenkofen are
+harmonised in the tone of a refined amateur. They have only one thing in
+common: neither has found disciples; they are not culminating peaks in
+Berlin or Vienna art so much as boulders wedged into another system.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ MENZEL. A LEVEE.]
+
+Whilst the realistic movement in both towns was confined to particular
+masters, Munich had once again the mission of becoming a guiding
+influence. Here all the tendencies of modern art have left the most
+distinct traces, all movements were consummated with most consistency.
+The heroes of Piloty followed the divinities of Cornelius, and these
+were in turn succeeded by the Tyrolese peasants of Defregger, and amid
+all this difference of theme one bond connected these works: for
+interesting subject was the matter of chief importance in them, and the
+purely pictorial element was something subordinate. The efforts of the
+seventies had for their object the victory of this pictorial element. It
+was recognised that the talent for making humorous points and telling
+stories, which came in question as the determining quality in the
+pictures of monks and peasants of the school of Defregger and Grützner,
+was the expression of no real faculty for formative art--that it was
+merely technical incompleteness complacently supported by the lack of
+artistic sensibility in the public which had produced this narrative
+painting. It was felt that the task of formative art did not consist in
+narrative, but in representation, and in representation through the most
+sensuous and convincing means which stood at its disposal. A renewed
+study of the old masters made this recognition possible.
+
+[Illustration: GÜSSOW. THE ARCHITECT.
+
+ (_By permission of M. H. Salomonson, Esq., the owner of the
+ picture._)]
+
+Up to this time the most miserable desolation had also reigned over the
+province of the artistic crafts. But, borne up by the rekindled
+sentiment of nationality, and favoured by the high tide of the milliards
+paid by France, since 1870, that eventful movement bearing the words
+"Old German" and "Fine Style" on its programme had become an
+accomplished fact. The German Renaissance, which research had been
+hitherto neglected, was discovered afresh. Lübke explored it thoroughly
+and systematically; Woltmann wrote on Hans Holbein, Thausing on Dürer;
+Eitelberger founded the Austrian Industrial Museum; Georg Hirth brought
+out his _Deutsches Zimmer_, and began the publication of the
+_Formenschatz_. The national form of art of the German Renaissance was
+taken up everywhere with a proud consciousness of patriotism: here, it
+was thought, was a panacea. Those who followed the artistic crafts
+declared open war against everything pedestrian and tedious. _Lorenz
+Gedon_ in particular--in union with Franz and Rudolf Seitz--was the soul
+of the movement. With his black, curly hair, his little, fiery, dark
+eyes, his short beard, his negligent dress, and his two great hands
+expert in the exercise of every description of art, he had himself
+something of the character of an old German stone-cutter. His manner of
+expressing himself corresponded to this appearance. In every thing it
+was original, saturated with his own personal conception of the world.
+As the son of a dealer in old pictures and curiosities, he was familiar
+with the old masters from his childhood, and followed them in the method
+of his study. He was far from confining himself to one branch. The
+façades of houses, the architecture of interiors, tavern rooms and
+festal decorations, furniture and state carriages, statues and
+embellishments in stone, bronze, wood, and iron, portrait busts in wax,
+clay, and marble, models for ornaments, for iron lattices, for the
+adornment of ships and the fittings of cabins, all objects that were
+wayward, fantastic, quaint, and curious lay in his province; and for the
+execution of each in turn this remarkable man felt that he had in him an
+equal capacity. And, at the same time, the temperament of a collector
+was united in him with that of an artist in an entirely special way. In
+the bushy wilderness of a garden before his house in the Nymphenburger
+Strasse countless stone fragments of mediæval sculpture were strewn
+about, up to the very hedge dividing it from the street. Rusty old
+trellises of wrought iron slanted in front of the windows, and in the
+house itself the most precious objects, which artists ten years before
+had passed without heed, stood in masses together. As Gedon was taken
+from his work when he was forty his artistic endeavour never got beyond
+efforts of improvisation, but the impulse which he gave was very
+powerful. Through his initiative the whole province of the artistic
+crafts was brought under observation from a pictorial point of view. The
+bald Philistine style of decoration gave way and a blithe revel of
+colour was begun. The great carnival feasts arranged by him on the model
+of the Renaissance period are an important episode in the history of
+culture in Munich, and have contributed in no unessential manner to the
+refinement of taste in the toilette of women. The Munich Exhibition of
+the Arts and Crafts in 1876 (before the entrance of which he had erected
+that great portal made of old fragments of architecture, wood-carving,
+and splendid stuffs, and bearing the inscription "The Works of our
+Fathers") indicated the zenith of that movement in the handicrafts which
+was flooding all Germany in those days.
+
+The course which was run by this movement in the following years is well
+known, and it is well known how the imitation of the German Renaissance
+soon became as wearisome as in the beginning it had been attractive.
+After it had been a little overdone another step was taken, and from the
+Renaissance people went to the _baroque_ period, and soon afterwards the
+_rococo_ period followed. In these days sobriety has taken the place of
+this fever for ornamentation, and the mania for style has resulted in a
+surfeit, a weariness and a desire for simplicity and quietude.
+Nevertheless the beneficial influence of the movement on the general
+elevation of taste is undeniable, and indirectly it was of service to
+painting.
+
+[Illustration: _Seeman, Leipzig._ AUGUST VON PETTENKOFEN.]
+
+In rooms where the owner was the only article of the inventory repugnant
+to the conception of style, only those pictures were admitted which had
+been executed in the exact manner of the old masters. Works of art were
+regarded as tasteful furniture, and were obliged to harmonise correctly
+with the other appointments of the room; they had, moreover, to be
+themselves legitimate "imitations of the Works of our Fathers." And, in
+this way, the movement in the handicrafts gave an impulse to a renewed
+study of the old masters, carried out with far more refinement than had
+hitherto been the case. Amongst the costume painters spread over all
+Germany, the experts in costume, working in Munich during the seventies,
+form a really artistic race of able painters who were peculiarly
+sensitive to colour. They were the historians of art, the connoisseurs
+of colour in the ranks of the painters. Piloty did not satisfy them;
+they buried themselves in the study of old masters with a delicately
+sensitive appreciation of them; they began to mix soft, luxuriant, and
+melting colours upon their palettes, and to feel the peculiar joy of
+painting. Whilst they imitated the exquisite "little masters" of former
+ages, in dimly lighted studios hung with Gobelins, imitating at the same
+time the beautifying rust of centuries, they gradually abandoned all
+their own tricks of art; and whilst they devoted themselves to detail
+they brought about the Renaissance of oil-painting. Compared with
+earlier works, their pictures are like rare dainties. They no longer
+recognised the end of their calling, as the _genre_ painters had done,
+in a one-sided talent for characterisation, but tried once more to lay
+chief weight upon the pictorial and artistic appearance of their
+pictures. They were conscious of a presentiment that there were higher
+spheres of art than the commonplace humour of _genre_ painting, and this
+recognition had a very wide bearing. Pictorial point took the place of
+narrative humour. If artists had previously painted thoughts they now
+began to paint things, and even if the things were bundles of straw,
+mediæval hose, and the old robes of cardinals, they were no longer
+"invented," but something which had been seen as a whole. It was a
+transition towards ultimately painting what had actually taken place
+before the artist's eyes.
+
+[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
+
+ PETTENKOFEN. A WOMAN SPINNING.]
+
+[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
+
+ PETTENKOFEN. IN THE CONVENT YARD.]
+
+That sumptuous, healthy artist of such pictorial ability, _Diez_, the
+Victor Scheffel of painting, stands at the head of the group. From his
+youth upwards his chief place of resort had been the cabinet of
+engravings where he studied Schongauer, Dürer, and Rembrandt, and all
+the boon-companions and vagabonds etched or cut in copper or wood, and
+on the model of these he painted his own marauders, robber-barons,
+peasants in revolt, old German weddings and fairs. His picture "To the
+Church Consecration" recalls Beham, his "Merry Riding" Schongauer, and
+his "Ambuscade" Dürer, whilst Teniers served as model for his fairs.
+Diez knows the period from Dürer and Holbein to Rubens, Rembrandt,
+Wouwerman, and Brouwer as thoroughly as an historian of art, and
+sometimes--for instance in his "Picnic in the Forest"--he has even drawn
+the eighteenth century into the circle of his studies. His pictures had
+an unrivalled delicacy of tone, and could certainly hang beside their
+Dutch models in the Pinakothek without losing anything by such
+proximity.
+
+Something of Brouwer or Ostade revived once more in _Harburger_, the
+talented draughtsman of _Fliegende Blätter_, the undisputed monarch
+of the kingdom of slouching hats, old mugs, and Delft pipes. Pictures
+like "The Peasants' Doctor," "The Card-players," "The Grandmother," "By
+the Quiet Fireside," "In the Armchair," and "Easy-going Folk" were
+masterpieces of delicate Dutch painting: the tone of his pictures shows
+distinction and temperament; they have deep and fine _chiaroscuro_, and
+are soft and fluent in execution. _Loefftz_ with his picture "Love and
+Avarice" appeared as Quentin Matsys _redivivus_, and then attached
+himself in turn to Holbein and Van Dyck; and exercised, like Diez, a
+great influence on the younger generation by his activity as a teacher.
+
+_Claus Meyer_, who became one of the best known amongst the young Munich
+painters by his "Sewing School in the Nunnery" of 1883, is worthy of
+remark inasmuch as he acquired a method of painting which was full of
+_nuances_, through modelling himself upon Pieter de Hoogh and Van der
+Meer of Delft. Through the windows hung with thin curtains the warm,
+quiet daylight falls into the room, glancing on the clean boards of the
+floor, on the polished tops of the tables, the white pages of the books,
+and the blond and brown hair of the children, playing round it like a
+golden nimbus. Another sunbeam streams through the door, which is not
+entirely closed, and quivers over the floor in a bright and narrow strip
+of light. The intimate representation of peaceful scenes of modest life,
+the entirely pictorial representation of peaceful and congenial events,
+has taken the place of the adventures dear to _genre_ painting. Old
+gentlemen with a glass of beer and a clay pipe, servant-girls peeling
+potatoes in the kitchen, pupils at the cloister sitting over their books
+in the library, drinkers, smokers, and dicers--such were the quiet,
+passive, and silent figures of his later pictures. The mild sunshine
+breaks in and plays over them. Light clouds of tobacco smoke float in
+the air. Everything is homely and pleasant, touched with a breath of
+pictorial charm, comfortable warmth, and poetic fragrance. A hundred
+years hence his works will be sold as flawlessly delicate and genuine
+old Dutch pictures. _Holmberg_ became the historian of cardinals. A
+window, consisting of rounded, clumpy panes, with little glass pictures
+let in, forms the background of the room, and in the subdued oil-light
+which beams over splendid vessels and ornaments, chests and Gobelins,
+the white satin dresses of ladies in the mode of 1640, or the lilac and
+purple robes of cardinals from the artist's rich wardrobe, are
+displayed, together with the appropriate models.
+
+In _Fritz August Kaulbach_, the most versatile of the group in his
+adoption of various manners, the essence of this whole tendency is to be
+found. He did not belong to the specialists who restricted themselves,
+in a one-sided fashion, to the imitation of the Flemish or the Dutch
+masters, but appeared like old Diterici, Proteus-like, now in one and
+now in another mask; and, whether he assumed the features of Holbein,
+Carlo Dolci, Van Dyck, or Watteau, he had the secret of being invariably
+graceful and _chic_.
+
+[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
+
+ DIEZ. RETURNING FROM MARKET.]
+
+[Illustration: CLAUS MEYER. THE SMOKING PARTY.]
+
+When the German Renaissance was at its zenith he painted in the
+Renaissance style: harmless _genre_ pictures _à la_ Beyschlag--the joys
+of love and of the family circle--but not being so banal as the latter
+he painted them with more delicate colouring and finer poetic charm.
+Certain single figures were found specially acceptable--for instance,
+the daughters of Nuremberg patricians, and noble ladies in the old
+German caps, dark velvet gowns, and long plaits like Gretchen's, with
+their eyes sometimes uplifted and sometimes lowered, and their hands at
+one moment folded and at another carrying a shining covered goblet.
+Occasionally these single figures were portraits, but none the less were
+they transformed into "ladies in old German costume"; and Kaulbach
+understood how to paint, to the utmost satisfaction of his patrons, the
+black caps, no less well than the little veil and the net of pearls, and
+the greenish-yellow silk of the puffed sleeves, no less well than the
+plush border of the dark gown and the antique red Gretchen pocket. Many
+of them held a lute and stood amid a spring landscape, before a
+streamlet, or a silver-birch, such as Stevens delighted in painting ten
+years previously. At that time Fritz August Kaulbach, with greater
+softness in his treatment, occupied in Germany the place which Florent
+Willems had occupied in Belgium. Since then he has brought nearer to the
+public the most various old and modern masters, and he has done so with
+fine artistic feeling: in his "May Day" he has revived the pastoral
+scenes of Watteau with a felicitous cleverness; in his "St. Cecilia" he
+created a total effect of great grace by going arm in arm with Carlo
+Dolci and Gabriel Max; his "Pietà" he composed with "the best figures of
+Michael Angelo, Fra Bartolommeo, and Titian," just as Gerard de Lairesse
+had once recommended to painters. Intermediately he painted frail
+flower-like girls _à la_ Gabriel Max, charming little angels _à la_
+Thoma, children in Pierrot costume _à la_ Vollon, and little landscapes
+_à la_ Gainsborough. He did not find in himself the plan for a new
+edifice in erecting his palace of art, but built according to any plans
+that came in his way; he simply chose from all existing forms the most
+graceful, the most elegant, the most precious, culled from their
+beauties only the flowers, and bound them into a tasteful bouquet. In
+his modern portraits of women, which in recent years have been his chief
+successes, he placed himself between Van Dyck and the English. Of
+course, a really _chic_ painter of women, like Sargent, is not to be
+thought of in this connection; but for Germany these portraits were in
+exceedingly fine taste, had an interesting Kaulbachian trace of
+indifferent health, and breathed an _odeur de femme_ which found very
+wide approval. In his "Lieschen, the Waitress of the Shooting Festival"
+he risked a fresh attempt at treating popular life, and made of it such
+a graceful picture that it might almost have been painted by Piglhein;
+while in a series of spirited caricatures he even succeeded in
+being--Kaulbach. The history of art is wide, and since Fritz August
+Kaulbach knows it extremely well, he will certainly find much to paint
+that is pleasing and attractive, "_s'il continue à laisser errer son
+imagination à travers les formes diverses créées par l'art de tous les
+temps_," as the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ said of him on the occasion of
+the Vienna World Exhibition of 1878.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ KAULBACH. THE LUTE PLAYER.]
+
+After all, these pictures will have little that is novel for an
+historian of the next century. "_Être maître_," says W. Bürger, "_c'est
+ne ressembler à personne._" But these were the works of painters who
+merely announced the dogma of the infallibility of universal
+eclecticism, as the Caracci had done in their familiar sonnets: they
+were spirited imitators, whose connection with the nineteenth century
+will be known in after years only by the dates of their pictures. As
+old masters called back to life, they have enriched the history of art,
+as such, by nothing novel. Yet, in replacing superficial imitations by
+imitations which were excellent and congenial, they have nevertheless
+advanced the history of art in the nineteenth century in another way.
+
+[Illustration: FRANZ LENBACH.]
+
+By the labour of his life each one of them helped to make a place in
+Germany for the art of oil-painting, which had been forgotten under the
+influence of Winckelmann and Carstens, and in this sense their works
+were very important stations, as one might say, on the great
+thoroughfare of art. Through systematic imitation of the finest old
+masters, the Munich school had in a comparatively short time regained
+the appreciation of colour and treatment which had so long been lost. At
+a hazy distance lay those times when the distinctive peculiarity of
+German painting lay in its wealth of ideas, its want of any sense for
+colour, and its clumsy technique, whilst the æsthetic spokesmen praised
+these qualities as though they were national virtues. These views had
+been altogether renounced, and a decade of strenuous work had been
+devoted to the extirpation of all such defects. Such an achievement was
+sufficiently great, and sufficiently important and gratifying. This last
+resuscitation of the old masters was capable of being turned into a
+bridge leading to new regions.
+
+A feeling arose that the limit had been reached, and it arose in those
+very men who had advanced furthest in pictorial accomplishment, adapting
+and making their own all the ability of the old masters. Painters
+believed that they had learnt enough of technique to be able to treat
+subjects from modern life in the spirit of these old masters, not
+handling them any longer as laboriously composed _genre_ pictures, but
+as real works of art. And a group of realists came forward as they had
+done in France, and began to seek truth with scientific rigour and an
+avoidance of any kind of anecdotic by-play.
+
+The greatest pupil of the old masters, _Franz Lenbach_, stands in a
+close and most important relationship with these endeavours of modern
+art, through some of his youthful works.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ LENBACH. PORTRAIT OF WILHELM I.]
+
+The public has accustomed itself to think of him only as a portrait
+painter, and he is justly honoured as the greatest German portraitist of
+the century. But posterity may one day regard it as a special favour of
+the gods that Lenbach should have been born at the right time, and that
+his progress to maturity fell in the greatest epoch of the century. His
+gallery of portraits has been called an epic in paint upon the heroes of
+our age. The greatest historical figures of the century have sat to him,
+the greatest conquerors and masters in the kingdom of science and art.
+Nevertheless this gallery would be worthless to posterity if Lenbach had
+not had at his disposal one quality possessed by none of his immediate
+predecessors, a sacred respect for nature. At a time when rosy tints,
+suave smiles, and idealised drawing were the requirements necessary in
+every likeness, at a time when Winterhalter painted great men, not as
+they were, but as, in his opinion, they ought to have been--without
+reflecting that God Almighty knows best what heads are appropriate for
+great men--Lenbach appeared with his brusque veracity of portraiture.
+That alone was an achievement in which only a man of original
+temperament could have succeeded. If a portrait painter is to prevail
+with society a peculiar combination of faculties is necessary, apart
+from his individual capacity for art. Lenbach had not only an eye and a
+hand, but likewise elbows and a tongue which placed him _hors concours_.
+He could be as rude as he was amiable, and as deferential as he was
+proud; half boor and half courtier, at once a great artist and an
+accomplished _faiseur_, he succeeded in doing a thing which has brought
+thousands to ruin--he succeeded in forcing upon society his own taste,
+and setting genuine human beings of strong character in the place of the
+smiling automatons of fashionable painters. In comparison with the works
+of earlier portrait painters it might be said that a touch of pantheism
+and nature-worship goes through Lenbach's pictures.
+
+[Illustration: _Seeman, Leipzig._
+
+ LENBACH. PRINCE BISMARK.]
+
+And what makes this so invaluable is that his greatness depends really
+less upon artistic qualities than upon his being a highly gifted man who
+understands the spirit of others. It is not merely artistic technique
+that is essential in a portrait, but before everything a psychical grasp
+of the subject. No artist, says Lessing, is able to interpret a power
+more highly spiritual than that which he possesses himself. And this is
+precisely the weak side in so many portrait painters, since a man's art
+is by no means always in any direct relationship with the development of
+his spiritual powers. In this respect a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach
+stands to one by Anton von Werner, as an interpretation of Goethe by
+Hehn stands to one by Düntzer. To speak of the congenial conception in
+Lenbach's pictures of Bismarck is a safe phrase. There will always
+remain something wanting, but since Lenbach's works are in existence one
+knows, at any rate, that this something can be reduced to a far lower
+measure than it has been by the other Bismarck portraits. "_Bien
+comprendre son homme_," says Bürger-Thoré, "_est la première qualité du
+portraitiste_," and this faculty of the gifted psychologist has made
+Lenbach the historian elect of a great period, the active recorder of a
+mighty era. It even makes him seem greater than most foreign portrait
+painters. How solid, but at the same time how matter-of-fact, does
+Bonnat seem by Lenbach's side! One should not look at a dozen Bonnats
+together; a single one arrests attention by the plastic treatment of the
+person, but if you see several at the same time all the figures have
+this same plastic character, all of them have the same pose, and they
+all seem to have employed the same tailor. Lenbach has no need of all
+that characterisation by means of accessories in which Bonnat delights.
+He only paints the eyes with thoroughness, and possibly the head; but
+these he renders with a psychological absorption which is only to be
+found amongst modern artists, perhaps in Watts. In a head by Lenbach
+there glows a pair of eyes which burn themselves into you. The
+countenance, which is the first zone around them, is more or
+less--generally less--amplified; the second zone, the dress and hands,
+is either still less amplified, or scarcely amplified at all. The
+portrait is then harmonised in a neutral tone which renders the lack of
+finish less obvious. In this sketchy treatment and in his striking
+subjectivity Lenbach is the very opposite of the old masters. Holbein,
+and even Rubens--who otherwise sets upon everything the stamp of his own
+personality--characterised their figures by a reverent imitation of
+every trait given in nature. They produced, as it were, real documents,
+and left it to the spectator to interpret them in his own way.
+
+[Illustration: LENBACH. THE SHEPHERD BOY.]
+
+Lenbach, less objective, and surrendering himself less absolutely to his
+subject, emphasises one point, disregards another, and in this way
+conjures up the spirit by his faces, just as he sees it. It may be open
+to dispute which kind of portraiture is the more desirable; but Lenbach,
+at any rate, has now forced the world to behold its great men through
+his eyes. He has given them the form in which they will survive. No one
+has the same secret of seizing a fleeting moment; no one turned more
+decisively away from every attempt at idealising glorification or at
+watering down an individual to a type. He takes counsel of photography,
+but only as Molière took counsel of his housekeeper: he uses it merely
+as a medium for arriving at the startling directness, the instantaneous
+impression of life, in his pictures. Works like the portraits of King
+Ludwig I, Gladstone, Minghetti, Bishop Strossmayer, Prince Lichtenstein,
+Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Paul Heyse, Wilhelm Busch, Schwind,
+Semper, Liphart, Morelli, and many others have no parallel as analyses
+of the character of complex personalities. Some of his Bismarck
+portraits, as well as his last pictures of the old Emperor Wilhelm, will
+always stand amongst the greatest achievements of the century in
+portraiture. In the one portrait is indestructible power, as it were the
+shrine built for itself by the mightiest spirit of the century; in the
+other the majesty of the old man, already half alienated from the earth,
+and glorified by a trace of still melancholy, as by the last radiance of
+the evening sun. In these works Lenbach appears as a wizard calling up
+spirits, an _évocateur d'âmes_, as a French critic has named him.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ RAMBERG. THE MEETING ON THE LAKE.]
+
+But what the history of art has forgotten in estimating the fame of the
+portrait painter Lenbach is, that in the beginning of his career this
+very man paved the way for the "Realistic" movement in German painting
+which later he confronted so haughtily and with so much reserve. The
+first of these works of his, which have for Germany much the same
+significance as the early works of Courbet have for France, is the
+well-known "Shepherd Boy" in the Schack Gallery. Stretched on his back,
+he lies in the high grass where flowers grow thickly, and looks up while
+butterflies and dragon-flies flutter through the dusty air of a Roman
+summer day. Such a frank, an audacious, naked realism, breaking away
+from everything traditional in its representation of fact, was something
+entirely novel and surprising in Germany in the year 1856. Up to this
+time no one had seen a fragment of nature depicted with such unqualified
+veracity. The tanned shepherd lad, with his naked sunburnt feet, covered
+by a dark crust of mire from the damp earth, seemed to be lying there in
+the flesh, plastically thrown into relief by the glowing midday sun. The
+next of these pictures, "Peasants taking Refuge from the Weather," which
+appeared in the exhibition of 1858, called down a storm of indignation
+on account of its "trivial realism." Every figure was painted after
+nature with blunt and rigorous sincerity, and no anecdotic incident was
+devised in it.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ HIRTH. THE HOP HARVEST.]
+
+After the sixties the influence of Courbet began to be directly felt. In
+the days when he worked in Couture's studio _Victor Müller_ had taken up
+some of the ideas of the master of Ornans, and when he settled in 1863
+in Munich, Müller communicated to the painters there the first knowledge
+of the works of the great Frenchman. He did not follow Courbet, however,
+in his subjects. "The Man in the Heart of the Night lulled to Sleep by
+the Music of a Violin," "Venus and Adonis," "Hero and Leander," "Hamlet
+in the Churchyard," "Venus and Tannhäuser," "Faust on the Promenade,"
+"Romeo and Juliet," "Ophelia by the Stream"--such are the titles of his
+principal works. But how far they are removed from the anæmic, empty
+painting of beauty which reigned in the school of Couture! Though a
+Romanticist of the purest water in his subjects, Müller appears, in the
+manner in which he handles them, as a Realist on whom there is no speck
+of the academical dust of the schools. The dominant features of Victor
+Müller's pictures are the thirst for life and colour, full-blooded
+strength, haughty contempt for every species of hollow exaggeration and
+all outward pose, genuine human countenances and living human forms
+inspired with tameless passion, an audacious rejection of all the
+traditional rules of composition, and, even in colour, a veracity which
+in that age, given up to an ostentatious painting of material, must have
+had an effect that was absolutely novel. In 1863 the blooming flesh of
+his "Wood Nymph" excited the Munich public to indignation, just as the
+nude female figures of Courbet had roused indignation about the same
+time in Paris. Pictures painted with singular sureness of hand were
+executed by him during the few years that he yet had to live--portraits
+of dogs, landscapes of a flaming glow of colour, single figures of
+red-haired Bacchantes and laughing flower-girls, old men dying, and
+charming fairy pictures. The nearer he came to his death the more his
+powers of work seemed to increase. The most remarkable ideas came into
+his head. He drew, and painted without intermission designs which had
+occupied him for years. "I feel," he said, "like an architect who has
+been commissioned to carry out a great building, and I cannot do it: I
+must die."
+
+But the impulse which he had given in more than one direction had
+further issues. As Hans Thoma in later years continued the work of the
+great Frankfort master in the province of fairy-tale, _Wilhelm Leibl_
+realised Müller's realistic programme.
+
+[Illustration: WILHELM LEIBL. _Kunst für Alle._]
+
+Wilhelm Leibl, son of the conductor of music in the cathedral, was born
+at Cologne on 23rd October 1844. At Munich he entered the studio of
+_Arthur van Ramberg_, that unjustly forgotten master who, both by his
+own work and by his activity as a teacher, exercised upon the younger
+Munich school a far healthier influence than Piloty. Ramberg was a
+modern man, was always eager to come into immediate contact with life
+and break the fetters of tradition which hung everywhere upon that
+generation. He was an aristocrat and a dandy, and, having occupied
+himself in the beginning with romantic fairy subjects, he painted, soon
+after his migration to Munich, a series of pictures from modern
+life--"Dachau Girls on Sunday," "The Return from the Masked Ball," "A
+Walk with the Tutor," "The Meeting on the Lake," "The Invitation to
+Boat," and others, which rose above the mass of contemporary productions
+by their great distinction, fragrance, and grace. At a time when others
+held nothing but the smock-frock fit for representation, Ramberg painted
+the fashionable modern costume of women. And when others devoted
+themselves to clumsy _genre_ episodes, he created songs without words
+that were full of fine reserve, nobility, and delicate feeling.
+
+_Rudolf Hirth_, who made a stir with his "Hop Harvest"; _Albert Keller_,
+the tasteful painter of fashionable life; _Karl Haider_, the sincere and
+conscientious miniature painter whose energy of manner had a suggestion
+of the old masters, together with Wilhelm Leibl, all issued from
+Ramberg's school, not from Piloty's.
+
+The young student from Cologne was thus saved, in the beginning, from
+occupying himself with history, and he had no need to addict himself to
+narrative _genre_ painting, since his entire organisation preordained
+him to painting pure and simple. Wilhelm Leibl was in those days a
+handsome fellow, with powerful limbs and shining brown eyes. He was
+realism incarnate--rather short, but strongly made, and with a frame
+almost suggesting a beast of burden, broad in the chest,
+high-shouldered, and bull-necked. His arms were thick and his feet
+large. His gait was slow, heavy, and energetic, and he made with his
+arms liberal gestures which took up a good deal of room. He had not the
+fiery spirit of Courbet, being more prosaic, sober, and deliberate, but
+he resembled him both in appearance and in the artistic faculty of eye
+and hand. "He had," as a French critic wrote of him, "one of those
+organisations which are predestined for painting, as Courbet had amongst
+us Frenchmen. Such men extract the most remarkable things from
+painting."
+
+[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
+
+ LEIBL. IN THE STUDIO.]
+
+[Illustration: _American Art Review._
+
+ LEIBL. THE VILLAGE POLITICIANS.]
+
+Even his first picture, exhibited in 1869, and representing his two
+fellow-pupils Rudolf Hirth and Haider looking at an engraving, had a
+soft, full golden harmony, which left all the products of conventional
+_genre_ painting far behind it, and came into direct competition with
+the refined works of the Dutch painter Michael Swert. His second
+picture, a portrait of Frau Gedon, made an impression even in Paris by
+its Rembrandtesque beauty of tone, and was awarded there in 1870 the
+gold medal which the judges had not ventured to give him the year before
+at Munich, because he was still an Academy pupil. Yet 1869 was the
+decisive year in Leibl's life. The Munich Exhibition gave at that time
+an opportunity for learning the importance of French art upon a scale
+previously unknown. Over four hundred and fifty pictures were
+accessible, and the works of the smooth, conventional historical
+painters were the minority. Troyon was to be seen there, and Millet and
+Corot. But Courbet, to whose works the committee had devoted an entire
+room, was chiefly the hero, and one over whom there was much conflict.
+Opinions were violently at odds about him in the painters' club. The
+official circle greeted the master of Ornans with the same hoot of
+indignation which had been accorded him in France. But for Leibl he
+became an adored and marvellous ideal. His eyes sparkled when he sat
+opposite him at the _Deutsches Haus_, and in default of any other means
+of making himself understood he assured Courbet of his veneration by
+sturdily drinking to him: "Prosit Courbet--Prosit Leibl." He stretched
+his powerful limbs, and threw himself into vigorous attitudes to evince
+in sanguinary quarrels, when necessary, his enthusiasm for the great
+Frenchman. How false and paltry seemed the whole school of Piloty, with
+its rose-coloured insipidity and its conventional bloom of the palette,
+when set against the downright veracity and the masterly painting of
+these works!
+
+[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
+
+ LEIBL. THE NEW PAPER.]
+
+In the same year he went to Paris, special occasion for the journey
+being given by a commission for a portrait which he received from the
+Duc Tascher de la Pagerie. There he painted "La Cocotte," the portrait
+of a fat Frenchwoman seated upon a sofa and watching the clouds of smoke
+from her clay pipe. In its massive realism, and in the exuberant power
+of its broad, liquid painting, it might have been signed "Courbet," and
+Leibl told afterwards with pride how Courbet slapped him on the shoulder
+when he was at his work, saying: "_Il faut que vous restez à Paris._"
+The breaking out of the war brought his residence in Paris to an end
+more quickly than he had foreseen, but though he was there only nine
+months that was long enough to give for ever a firm direction to the
+efforts of the painter. Leibl became the apostle of Courbet in Germany,
+and in his outward life the German Millet. Back once more in Bavaria, he
+migrated in 1872 to Grasolfingen, then to Schondorf on the Ammersee,
+then to Berbling near Aibling, and in 1884 to Aibling itself; he became
+a peasant, and, like Millet, he painted pictures of peasants.
+
+The poetic and biblical, the august and epical bias which characterises
+the works of Millet, is not to be expected in Leibl. A spirit bent upon
+what is great and heroic speaks out of Millet's pictures. A
+Rembrandtesque feeling for space, the great line, the simplification,
+the intellectual restraint from anecdotic triviality of form, are the
+things which constitute his style. Leibl is at his best when he buries
+himself with delight in the hundred little touches of nature. He
+triumphs when he has to paint the faces of old peasant women, full of
+wrinkles, and furrowed with care; the ruddy cheeks of girls, sparkling
+in all their natural rustic freshness; figured dresses, the material and
+texture of which are clearly recognisable; flowered silk kerchiefs worn
+round the neck, coarse woollen bodices, and heavy hobnail shoes. He is
+to Millet what Holbein is to Michael Angelo.
+
+[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
+
+ LEIBL. IN CHURCH.]
+
+Nor can he be called an artist of intimate feeling in the sense in which
+the Scandinavians are amongst the moderns. In Viggo Johansen the painter
+disappears; what he paints has not the effect of a picture, but of a
+moment of existence, a memory of something clear and familiar--something
+which has been lived and seen, but not fashioned with deliberate
+intention. His figures are like the sudden appearance of actual persons,
+spied upon, as if one were looking through the window into a strange
+room under cover of night. One feels that there is no occasion to pay
+the artist a compliment; but one would like to sit in such a warm, cosy
+room, impregnated with tobacco smoke, to inhale the fine cloud of steam
+issuing from the tea-kettle, to hear the water bubbling and humming upon
+the glimmering fire. But the painter is always seen in Leibl's pictures.
+A communicative spirit, something which touches the heart and sets one
+dreaming, is precisely what is not expressed in them. The spectator
+invariably thinks, in the first place, of the astonishing ability, the
+incredible patience, which went to the making of them. And with all
+their photographic fidelity he is, moreover, conscious that the painter
+himself was less concerned in seizing the poetry of a scene, the
+instantaneous charm of an impression of nature, than in forcing into the
+foreground particular evidences of his technical powers which he has
+reserved for display. For instance, newspapers in which, if it is
+possible, a fragment of the leading article may be deciphered, earthen
+vessels, bottles, and brandy glasses, play in his pictures a _rôle_
+similar to that assumed by the little caskets with brass covers that
+catch the flashing lights, the overturned settles, the tapestry, and
+the globe in works of the school of Piloty.
+
+Wilhelm Leibl is a good workman, like Courbet, a man of fresh, vigorous,
+and energetic nature and robust health, very material, and at times
+matter-of-fact and prosaic. Painting is as natural to him as breathing
+and walking are to the rest of us. He goes his way like an ox in the
+plough, steadily and without tiring, without vibration of the nerves,
+and without the touch of poetry. He goes where his instinct leads him
+and paints with a muscular flexibility of hand whatever appeals to his
+eye or suits his brush. Opposed to the neurotic and hurrying moderns, he
+has something of a mediæval monk who sits quietly in his cell, without
+counting the hours, the days, and the years, and embellishes the pages
+of his service-book with artistic miniatures, to depart in peace when he
+has set "Amen, Finis" at the bottom of the last page. But he has, too,
+all the capacity and all the boundless veneration for nature of these
+old artists. He is the greatest _maître peintre_ that Germany has had in
+the course of the century, and in this sense his advent was of
+epoch-making importance.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ LEIBL. A PEASANT DRINKING.]
+
+[Illustration: LEIBL. IN THE PEASANT'S COTTAGE.]
+
+Even Defregger had observed peasant life altogether from a narrative and
+anecdotic point of view. In Leibl this narrative _genre_ has been
+overcome. He had ability enough to give artistic attractions even to an
+"empty subject." To avoid exaggerated characterisation, to avoid the
+expression of anything divided into _rôles_, he consistently painted
+people employed in the least exciting occupations--peasants reading a
+newspaper, sitting in church, or examining a gun. Pains are taken to
+avoid the slightest movement of the figures. Whilst all his predecessors
+were romance writers, Leibl is a painter. His themes--simple scenes of
+daily life--are a matter of indifference; the beauty of his pictures
+lies in their technique. They are works of which it may be said that
+every attempt to give an impression of them in words is useless, for
+they have not proceeded from delight in anecdotic theme, but, as in the
+good periods of art, from the discipline of the sense for colour and
+from an eminent capacity for drawing: they are pictures in which mere
+interest in subject is lost in the consideration of their artistic
+value, while the matter of what is represented is entirely thrown into
+the background by the manner in which it is carried out. The chief aim
+of the historical as of the _genre_ painters had been to draw a fluent
+cartoon based upon single studies, to mix the colours nicely upon the
+palette, lay them upon the canvas according to the rules, blend them and
+let them dry, so as then to attain the proper harmony of colour by
+painting over again and finally glazing. Leibl's mastery, which of
+itself resulted in an astonishing truth to nature, lay in seizing an
+impression as quickly as possible, taking hold of the reality rightly at
+the first glance, and transferring the colours to his canvas with
+decision and sureness, in clear accord with the hues of the original.
+Lessing's maxim, "From the eyes straight to the arm and the brush," has
+been realised here for the first time in Germany.
+
+As yet no German had, in the same measure, what the painter calls
+qualities, and even in France two apparently heterogeneous faculties
+have seldom been united in one master in the same measure as they were
+in Leibl: a broad and large technique, a bold _alla prima_ painting,
+and, on the other hand, a joy in work of detail with a fine brush, such
+as was known by Quentin Matsys, the smith of Antwerp. "The Village
+Politicians" of 1879 was the chief work that he painted in Schondorf.
+What would Knaus, the king of illustration and the ruler over the
+province of vignettes, have made out of this theme! By a literary
+evasion he would have subordinated the interest of the picture to his
+ideas. One would have learnt what it is that peasants read, and received
+instruction as to their political allegiance to party and their offices
+and honours in the village: that would be the magistrate, that the
+smith, and that the tailor. In Leibl there are true and simple peasants,
+who, by way of relaxation from the toil of the week, listen stupidly and
+indifferently to the reading of a Sunday paper, in which one of them is
+endeavouring to discover the village news and the price of crops. They
+are harsh-featured and common, but they have been spared theatrical
+embellishment and impertinent satire; they are not artistically grouped,
+though they sit there in all the rusticity of their physiognomies, and
+all the angularity of their attitudes, without polish or Sunday state.
+Leibl renders the reality without altering it, but he renders it fully
+and entirely. The fidelity to nature held fast on the canvas surpassed
+everything that had hitherto been seen, and it was gained, moreover, by
+the soundest and the simplest means. Whereas Lenbach, in his effort to
+reproduce the colour-effects of the old masters, destroyed the
+durability of his pictures even while he worked upon them, Leibl seemed
+to have chosen as his motto the phrase which Dürer once used in writing
+to Jacob Heller: "I know that, if you preserve the picture well, it will
+be fresh and clean at the end of five hundred years, for it has not been
+painted as pictures usually are in these days."
+
+He took a further step in the direction of truth when he made a
+transition from the Dutch towards the old German masters. After he had,
+in his earlier productions, worked very delicately at the tone of his
+pictures, and, for a time, had particularly sought to attain specific
+effects of _chiaroscuro_, attaching himself to Rembrandt, he took up an
+independent position in his conception of colour, painting everything
+not as one of the old masters might have seen it, but as he had seen it
+himself. All the tricks of painting and sleights of virtuosity were
+despised, special emphasis being scarcely laid upon pictorial unity of
+effect. Everything was simple and true to nature, and had a sincerity
+which is not to be surpassed.
+
+The picture of the three peasant women, "In Church," is the masterpiece
+in this "second manner" of his, and when it appeared in the Munich
+International Exhibition of 1883 it was an event. From that date Leibl
+was established--at any rate in the artistic circles of Munich--as the
+greatest German _painter_ of his time. That Leibl painted the picture
+without sketching for himself an outline, that he began with the eye of
+the peasant girl and painted bit by bit, like fragments of a mosaic, was
+a feat of technique in which there were few to imitate him. The young
+generation in Munich studied the pages of the service-book and the
+squares of the gingham dress, the girl's jug and the carvings of the
+pew, with astonishment, as though they were the work of magic. They were
+beside themselves with delight over such unheard-of strength, power, and
+delicacy of modelling, the fusion of colour suggesting Holbein, and the
+intimate study of nature. They perpetually discovered new points that
+came upon them as a surprise, and many felt as Wilkie did when he sat in
+Madrid before the drinkers of Velasquez, and at last rose wearily with a
+sigh.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ LEIBL. A TAILOR'S WORKSHOP.]
+
+Leibl did for Germany what the pre-Raphaelites did for England. Men and
+women were represented with astonishing pains just as they sat and
+suffered themselves to be painted. He was determined to give the whole,
+pure truth, and he gave it; that, and nothing more and nothing less. He
+reproduced nature in her minutest traits and in her finest movements,
+bringing the imitative side of art to the highest perfection
+conceivable. In virtue of these qualities he was a born portrait
+painter; and although he never had "conception," as Lenbach had, his
+portraits belong, with those of Lenbach, to the best German
+performances of the century. Only Holbein when he painted his "Gysze"
+had this remorseless manner of analysing the human countenance in every
+wrinkle. Leibl once more taught the German painters to go into detail,
+and led them constantly to hold nature as the only source of art; and
+that has been the beginning of every renaissance.
+
+His works were pictorially the most complete expression of the aims of
+the Munich school in colour. As a representative of the efforts of the
+decade from 1870 he is as typical as Cornelius for the art of the
+thirties, Piloty for that of the fifties, and as Liebermann became later
+as a representative of the efforts of the eighties.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE INFLUENCE OF THE JAPANESE
+
+
+Courbet and Ribot for France, Holman Hunt and Madox Brown for England,
+Stevens for Belgium, Menzel, Lenbach, and Leibl for Germany, are the
+great names of modern Realism, the names of the men who subjected modern
+life to art, and subjected art to the nineteenth century.
+
+One point, however, the question of colour, still remained unsolved: as
+the preceding generation took their form, so these painters took their
+colour, not from nature, but from the treasury of old art.
+
+Courbet announced it as his programme to express the manners, ideas, and
+aspect of his age--in a word, to create living art. He described himself
+as the sincere lover of _la vérité vraie_: "_la véritable peinture doit
+appeler son spectateur par la force et par la grande vérité de son
+imitation_." But one may question how far his figures, and the
+environment of them, are true in colour? Where there is a delightful
+subtlety of fleeting _nuances_ in nature, an oppressive opaque heaviness
+is found in this modern Caravaggio of Franche-Comté. He certainly
+painted modern stone-breakers, but it was in the tone of saints of the
+Spanish school of the seventeenth century. His pictures of artisans have
+the odour of the museum. The home of his men and women is not the open
+field of Ornans, but that room in the Louvre where hang the pictures of
+Caravaggio.
+
+_Alfred Stevens_ made a great stride by painting modern _Parisiennes_.
+Whereas the costume picture had up to his time sought the truth of the
+old masters only in the matter of the skirts which the fashion of their
+age prescribed, Stevens was the first to dress his women in the garb of
+1860, just as Terborg painted his in the costume of 1660 and not of
+1460. But the very atmosphere in which the _Parisienne_ of the
+nineteenth century lived is no longer that in which the women of de
+Hoogh moved. The whole of life is brighter. The studios in which
+pictures are painted are brighter, and the rooms in which they are
+destined to hang. Van der Meer of Delft, the greatest painter of light
+amongst the Dutch, still worked behind little casements; and in dusky
+patrician dwellings, "where the very light of heaven breaks sad through
+painted window," his pictures were ultimately hung. The old masters paid
+special attention to these conditions of illumination. The golden
+harmony of the Italian Renaissance came into being from the character of
+the old cathedrals furnished with glass windows of divers colours; the
+half-light of the Dutch corresponded to the dusky studios in which
+painters laboured, and the gloomy, brown-wainscoted rooms for which
+their pictures were destined. The nineteenth century committed the
+mistake even here of regarding what was done to meet a special case as
+something absolute. Rooms had long become bright when studios were
+artificially darkened, and artists still sought, by means of coloured
+windows and heavy curtains, to subdue the light, so as to be able to
+paint in tones dictated by the old masters. Stevens shed over a modern
+woman, a _Parisienne_, sitting in a drawing-room in the Avenue de Jena,
+the light of Gerard Dow, without reflecting that this illumination,
+filtered through little lattice-windows, was quite correct in Holland
+during the seventeenth century, but no longer proper in the Paris of
+1860, in a salon where the windows had great cross-bars and clear white
+panes which were not leaded. It is chiefly this that makes his pictures
+untrue, lending them an old Flemish heaviness, something earthy,
+savouring of the clay, and not in keeping with the fresh fragrance of
+the modern _Parisienne_. Her modernity is seen through the yellowish
+glass which the old Flemish masters seemed to hold between Stevens and
+his model.
+
+[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
+
+ HOKUSAI IN THE COSTUME OF A JAPANESE WARRIOR.]
+
+Considered as a separate personality _Ribot_, too, is a great artist;
+his works are masterpieces. Yet when young men spoke of him as the last
+representative of the school of cellar-windows there was an atom of
+truth in what they said. Like Courbet, he continued the art of
+galleries. The master of a style and yet the servant of a manner, he
+marks the summit of a tendency in which the great traditions of Frans
+Hals and Ribera were once more embodied. When he paints subjects
+resembling the themes of these old masters he is as great as they are,
+as genuine and as much a master of style; but as soon as he turns to
+other subjects the imitative mannerist is revealed. Even things as
+tender and unsubstantial as the flowers of the field seem as if they
+were made of wax. His disdain for what is light, fluent, and fickle,
+like air and water, is evident in his sea-pieces. His steamers plough
+their way through a greyish-black sea beneath a thick black stormy sky,
+as though through grey deserts. Nature quivering in the air and bathed
+in light is not so heavy and compact, nor has it such plasticity of
+appearance. His women reading are the _ne plus ultra_ of painting; only
+it is astonishing that any human being can read in such a dark room.
+
+[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
+
+ HOKUSAI. WOMEN BATHING.]
+
+Ribot's parallel in Germany is _Lenbach_, who had less pictorial and
+greater intellectual power. As a painter of copies, particularly copies
+of the artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he formed and
+perfected a school for the understanding of the old masters, as none of
+his contemporaries had done. The copies which he made as a young man for
+Count Schack in Italy and Spain are probably the best translations by
+the brush that have ever been executed. He has reproduced Titian and
+Rubens, Velasquez and Giorgione, with equal magic; no other painter has
+entered into all the subtleties of their technique with such
+intelligence and keenness; and by the aid of these sleights of art,
+which he learnt as a copyist from classic masterpieces, he communicated
+to his own works that impress which qualifies them for the gallery and
+suggests the old masters with such refinement. His pictures mark the
+summit of ability reached in Germany in the pictorial style of the old
+artists.
+
+But, at the same time, his weakness lies in this very eminence. The man
+who had passed through the high-school of the old masters with the
+greatest success was entered as a student for life, and never took the
+professorial chair himself. Helferich has called him the impersonated
+spirit of the galleries, the spirit which is centuries old.
+
+This indicates the direction which must be taken by the further
+development of painting. A really new and independent art must finally
+emancipate itself from the Renaissance colouring, the tone of Church
+painting, and the _chiaroscuro_ of pictures painted behind the
+variegated panes of lattice-windows. It must be evident that the methods
+of the old Spanish and old Dutch schools, excellent in themselves, were
+fully in keeping with strange scenes of martyrdom or quiet interiors
+with peasants and fat matrons, but that they could not possibly be
+employed in pictures of artisans beneath the free sky, nor in those of
+elegant interiors of our own days, nor of pale and delicate
+_Parisiennes_ attired in silks, beings of a new epoch. A different
+period necessitates different methods. It is not merely that the
+subjects of art change, but the way in which they are handled must bear
+the marks of the period. Nature should no longer be studied through the
+prism of old pictures, and the phrase _beau par la vérité_ must be
+exalted to a principle applying to colour also.
+
+The pre-Raphaelites and Menzel were the first to become alive to the
+problem. They were never taken captive by the tones of the early
+masters, but placed themselves always in conscious opposition to the
+artists of older ages. The battle against "brown sauce" even formed an
+essential point in the programme of the Brotherhood. They protested
+against conventional colouring as violently as against the sweeping line
+taught by traditional rules of beauty.
+
+[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
+
+ HOKUSAI. FUSIYAMA SEEN THROUGH A SAIL.]
+
+But, as so often happens in the nineteenth century, though the English
+found the jewel, they did not understand how to cut it. The
+pre-Raphaelites had a quickening influence, in exciting a feeling for
+hue and tint, and rendering it keener by their own insistence on the
+elementary effects of colour. They sought to free themselves from brown
+sauce and to be just to local tones, through straightforward,
+independent observation. They painted the trees green, the earth grey,
+the sky blue, the sunbeams yellow, in sharply accentuated colours, as
+little blended as possible. But in most cases the result was not
+particularly pleasant; there was almost always a hard, motley colouring
+which produced a most unpleasant, glaring effect. Their audacity was
+somewhat barbaric. There was a want of warmth and softness, the
+atmosphere did not combine the whole by its mitigating and harmonising
+power. Even Madox Brown's "Work" is an offensive chaos of crying
+colours. The bright clothes, the blue blouses, the red uniforms have a
+gaudy and unquiet effect. The problem was attacked, but the solution was
+harsh and crude.
+
+[Illustration: HOKUSAI. FUSIYAMA SEEN THROUGH REEDS.]
+
+Of _Menzel's_ pictures the same is true, though not perhaps in the same
+degree. In pictorial conception he also has not quite reached the
+summit. His method of painting is sometimes sparkling and full of
+spirit, holding the mean, more or less, between the quiet and plain
+painting of Meissonier and the crisp, glittering style of Fortuny; he
+lets off a flickering, dazzling, rocket-like firework, but at bottom he
+has been cut from the block from which draughtsmen are made. Sometimes
+it is astonishing how his brush sweeps over costumes, ornaments, and
+buildings, but he does not think in colour; it is supplementary to the
+drawing, and not of earlier origin, nor even of equal birth. Much as he
+tried to paint smoke and steam in his "Iron Mill," he had no
+understanding for atmospheric life; for this reason harsh and glaring
+tones almost invariably make a disturbing effect in his works. His
+"Piazza d'Erbe" as well as his "King Wilhelm setting out to join the
+Army" have a motley and restless effect in the picture, and only in
+photography or black and white do they acquire something of the
+simplicity which is to be desired in the originals. The best of his
+drawings may stand beside the sketches of Dürer without detriment; to
+place his pictures on the same level is impossible, because quietude and
+pure harmony are wanting in them.
+
+So extremes meet. Courbet, Ribot, and Lenbach are greater connoisseurs
+of colour than Europe had seen previous to their appearance, but this
+they are at the expense of truth; they have identified themselves with
+the old masters, and not arrived at any personal conception of colour.
+Menzel and the pre-Raphaelites despised the old masters, but their
+conception of colour had something primitive, jarring, and
+undisciplined.
+
+The note of truth was still missing in the mighty orchestra. By what
+possible means could it be supplied? How bring to perfection that great
+harmony which is ever the end and aim of all true artistic effort. It
+was not until the art of the Far East was unfolded before the eyes of
+Western painters that this disquieting problem reached its solution.
+
+[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
+
+ HOKUSAI. AN APPARITION.]
+
+In the year in which Millet exhibited his "Winnower" and Courbet painted
+his "Stone-breakers" a man died in the Far East whose name was Hokusai.
+He was the last great representative of an art of painting more than a
+thousand years old--one which had no Raphael, Correggio, or Titian,
+though it was, nevertheless, art in the loftiest meaning of the word.
+Marco Polo, the great traveller of the Middle Ages, had told of a
+remarkable land "towards the sunrise," the soil of which it was not
+permitted to him to tread. And the artistic views of the eighteenth
+century were revolutionised when the first Japanese porcelain and
+lacquer-work arrived at the Courts of Dresden and Paris. The aged Louis
+XIV himself began to find pleasure in idols, pagodas, and "stuffs
+printed with flowers." In a short time these works formed an important
+part of superior collections, and led to the movement against the
+inflexible despotism of the pompous Lebrun style. For the Japanese gave
+Europe the unfettered principles of a freer intuition of beauty; they
+excited a preference for things which were unsymmetrical, capricious,
+full of movement, for everything by which the charming Louis XV style is
+to be distinguished from the tiresome academic art of Louis XIV. In the
+sixties of the nineteenth century Japan exerted, for the second time, a
+revolutionary influence on the development of European painting. If
+Japanese productions were in earlier days regarded as curiosities, for
+which place was to be found in cabinets of rarities, as trifles the
+artistic value of which was less prized than the dexterity of their
+construction, it was reserved for the present age to do justice to
+Japanese art as such.
+
+[Illustration: HOKUSAI. HOKUSAI SKETCHING THE PEERLESS MOUNTAIN.]
+
+As is well known, oil-painting exists neither in China nor Japan. Just
+as the Japanese choose the slightest material for building, so
+everything in their painting bears a trace of extreme lightness.
+Japanese pictures, _kakemonos_, are painted in water colour or Chinese
+ink upon framed silk or paper; but this paper has an advantage over the
+European article in its unsurpassed toughness, its remarkable softness
+and pliability, its surface which has either a dull, silky lustre, or
+may only be compared with the finest parchment. And the pictures
+themselves are kept rolled up, and only hung, as occasion offers, in
+the Tokonama, the little closet near the reception-room, and according
+to very refined rules. Only a few are hung at a time, and only such as
+harmonise. When a visit is expected the taste of the guest determines
+the selection. Fresh and variously coloured flowers and branches, placed
+near them in vases, are obliged to harmonise in colour with the
+pictures.
+
+[Illustration: TANYU. THE GOD HOTEÏ ON A JOURNEY.]
+
+As an instrument for painting use is only made of the pliant brush of
+hair, which executes everything with a free and fluent effect. Pen,
+crayon, or chalk, and all hard mediums which offer resistance, are
+consistently excluded. The subject-matter of these pictures is
+surprisingly rich, and assumes for their proper understanding some
+acquaintance with Japanese literature. An opulent folk-lore, in which
+cannibals and heroes like Tom Thumb live and move and have their being,
+just as in European fairy stories, stands at the disposal of the artist.
+Historical representations from the life of fabulous national heroes,
+ghosts, and apparitions half man and half bird, alternate with simple
+landscapes and scenes from daily life. And in all pictures, whether they
+are fanciful or plain renderings of fact, attention is riveted by the
+same keenness of observation, the same refinement of taste, in the
+highest sense of the word by pictorial charm. After the Japanese have
+been long recognised as the first decorative artists in the world, after
+the highest praise has been accorded to them in the industrial crafts
+taken jointly--in lacquer-work and bronze work, weaving, embroidery,
+and pottery--they are now likewise celebrated as the most spirited
+draughtsmen in existence.
+
+[Illustration: _Studio._
+
+ KORIN. LANDSCAPE.]
+
+[Illustration: _Studio._
+
+ KORIN. RABBITS.]
+
+The Japanese artist lives with nature and in her as no artist of any
+other country has ever done. Life in the open air creates a relation to
+nature suggestive of the doctrines of Rousseau; it makes earth, sky, and
+water as familiar to man as are the beings that move in them. Every
+house, even in the centre of towns, has a garden laid out with fine
+taste, and combining beautiful flowers, trees, and cascades, everything
+incidental to the soil. The form of trees, the shape and colour of
+flowers, the ripple of leaves, and the gleaming mail of insects are so
+imprinted in the memory of the painter that his fancy can summon them at
+pleasure without the need of fresh study. The most fleeting moment of
+the life of nature is held as firmly in his mind as the everlasting form
+of rocks and gigantic trees shadowing the temple groves of Nippon. Every
+one of these artists works with the unfettered falcon glance of the
+child of nature. His keen eye sees in the flight of birds turns and
+movements first revealed to us by instantaneous photography. This
+quickness of eye and this astonishing exercise of memory enable him to
+obtain the most striking effects with the slightest means. If a Japanese
+executes figures, race, station, age, business, personality are all
+seized with the keenest vision, and pregnantly rendered in their
+essential features. Robes and unclad forms, heads and limbs, animated
+and still nature, are all reproduced with the same reality. Yet little
+as the doctrine ever gained ground that to create works of art nature
+should be mastered upon a system, trivial realism was just as little at
+any time the vogue.
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ OKIO. A CARP.]
+
+The love of nature is born in the Japanese, but the photographic
+imitation, the servile reproduction of reality, is never his ultimate
+aim. Geoffroy has noted with much subtlety the resemblance which exists
+between Japanese poets and painters in this respect. Their poets never
+describe, but only endeavour to express a spiritual feeling, to hold a
+memory fast--the blitheness of smiling pleasure, the mournfulness of
+vanished joy. They sing of the mist passing over the mountain summits,
+the fishing boats, the reeds by the seashore, the plash of waves, the
+flying streaks of cloud, the sunset streaming purple over the weary
+world. The same economy of means, the same sureness in the choice of
+characteristic features, and a similar rapidity in striking the keynote
+are peculiar to the painters. They, too, express themselves by the
+scantiest means, shrink from saying too much, and aim only at a rapid
+and right expression of total effect, leaving to the imagination the
+task of supplementing and amplifying what is given. The heaviness of
+matter is overcome, the absurd pretence of reality not attempted. Like
+the French of the eighteenth century, the Japanese possess the sportive
+grace, the _esprit_ of the brush hovering over objects, extracting
+merely their bloom and essence, and using them as the basis for free and
+independent caprices of beauty. They have the remarkable faculty of
+being synthetic and discarding every ponderous and disturbing element,
+without losing the local accent in a landscape or a figure. They fasten
+upon the most vivid impression of things, but in great, comprehensive
+lines, subordinating every peculiarity to the light which shines upon
+them and the shadow in which they are muffled. Their handwriting is at
+once broad and precise, graceful and bizarre. What a nonchalant,
+fragile, piquant, or coquettish effect have their feminine figures! And
+but a few firm strokes sufficed to create the impression. A dexterous
+sweep of the brush was all that was necessary for the modelling, all
+that was wanted to summon the idea of the velvet softness of the flesh
+and the firmness of the bosom. Or surging waves have been painted, or
+foaming cataracts. But with what consummate mastery, with what peculiar
+knowledge, the swirl and eddying of the waters have been represented.
+And how slight are the means which have been employed! Everything has
+the freshness of life, and the sheer, intangible movement of objects has
+been caught by a simple and decisive line. A few dashes of Chinese ink
+are made, and the forcible strokes unite without effort in forming a
+mountain path or a hillside stream foaming over rocks and trees. Or the
+prow of a vessel is represented. Nothing is to be seen of the water, and
+yet it is as if the waves were rocking the ship. The billow swells,
+rises, and sinks, suggesting the wide sea, the rhythm in the universe.
+The lines in which the motives are executed render only what is
+essential. But combined with this striving after simplified form there
+is a sense of space which of itself, as it were, controls everything,
+producing the poetic illusion of distance.
+
+[Illustration: HIROSHIGE. THE BRIDGE AT YEDDO.]
+
+The Japanese are masters of the art of enlarging a narrow picture frame
+to a great expanse, and indicating by a few strokes the distance between
+foreground and horizon. There is often nothing, or next to nothing, in
+the wide space, but proximity and distance are so correctly related that
+all the geological structure is clear, whilst light air is pervasive,
+giving the eye a vision of boundless perspective. The spur of a
+headland, the bank of a river, or a cleft between two mountains enables
+the eye to measure far landscapes. In the presence of their works one
+dreams, one has the presentiment of infinite distances. They divest
+objects of their earthiness by bold simplifications, and transform
+reality into dreamland. It is the spirit of things, their smile, and
+their intangible perfume which live in these veiled masterpieces which
+are yet so precise.
+
+The bold irregularity of Japanese works, which know nothing of the
+stiffness of symmetrical composition, contributes much to this
+impression. Their pictures are never "composed" in our sense of the
+word, but rather resemble the instantaneous pictures of photographers.
+A bird is seen to dart past, only half visible, a cluster of trees is a
+chance slice from the forest, as it is seen out of the window of a
+railway train whizzing past. Or it is merely the bough of a tree with a
+bird upon it that stretches into the picture, which is otherwise filled
+with a fragment of blue sky. Without appearing to concern themselves
+about it, they compose little poems of grace and freshness, with a frog,
+a butterfly, and a blossoming apple-branch sprouting out of a vase. They
+play with beetles, grasshoppers, tortoises, crabs, and fish as did the
+artists of the Renaissance with Cupids and angels.
+
+[Illustration: HIROSHIGE. A HIGH ROAD.]
+
+And in everything, as regards colour too, the Japanese have a strain of
+refinement peculiar to themselves. It is as though they were controlled
+by the finest tact, as by a _force majeure_, even in their intuition of
+colour. That great harmony of which Théodore Rousseau spoke, and to
+which it was the aim of his life to attain, is reached by the Japanese
+artist almost instinctively. The most vivid effects of red and green
+trees, yellow roads, and blue sky are represented; the most refined
+effects of light are rendered--illuminated bridges, dark firmaments, the
+white sickle of the moon, glittering stars, the bright and rosy blossoms
+of spring, the dazzling snow as it falls upon trim gardens; and there
+are discords nowhere. How heavy and motley our colouring is compared
+with these delicious chords, set beside each other so boldly, and
+invariably so harmonious. Is it that our eyes are by nature less
+delicate? or is everything in the Japanese only the result of a more
+rational training? We have not the same intense force of perception,
+this instinctive and sensuous gift of colour. Their colouring is a
+delight to the eyes, a magic potion. Offence is nowhere given by a
+glaring or an entirely crude tone; everything is finely calculated,
+delicately indicated, and has that melting softness so enchanting in
+Japanese enamel. The simplest chords of colour are often the most
+effective; nothing can be more charming than the delicate duet of grey
+and gold. And the cheapest wood-cut has often all these refinements in
+common with the most costly _kakemono_. Even here, where they turn to
+lowly things, their art is never vulgar, but maintains itself at such an
+aristocratic height that we barbarians of the West, blessed with
+oleographs and Academies of Art, can only look up with envy to this
+nation of connoisseurs.
+
+[Illustration: HIROSHIGE. A LANDSCAPE.]
+
+The oldest of these Japanese artists working in wood-cut engraving was
+Matahei, who lived in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and
+executed scenes from the theatres and Japanese family and street life.
+Icho and Moronobu followed at the close of the seventeenth century, the
+one being a spirited caricaturist, the other a genuine _baroque_ artist
+of noble and classic reserve. Through the masters of the eighteenth
+century, as through Eisen, Fragonard, and Boucher, this reproductive art
+took fresh development. The soft girls of Soukénobu with their delicate
+round faces, the graceful beauties of Harunobu arrayed in costly
+toilettes, the tall feminine forms of the marvellous Outamaro in all
+their provocative charm, the vivid scenes from popular life of the great
+colourist Shunsho, are works pervaded with a delicate perfume of which
+Edmond de Goncourt alone could render any impression in words.
+
+Outamaro, the poet of women, was, in a special sense, the Watteau of
+aristocratic life in Japan. He knew the life of the Japanese woman as no
+other has ever done--her domestic occupations, her walks and her
+charming graces, her vanities and her love affairs. He knew also the
+scenes of nature which she contemplated, the streets through which she
+passed, and the banks along which she sauntered with an undulating step.
+His women are slender beings, isolated like idols, and standing
+motionless in poses hieratically august; æsthetic souls, who swoon and
+grow pale under the sway of disquieting visions; fading flowers, forms
+roaming wearily by the verge of a lonely sea or a sluggish stream, or
+flitting timidly, like bats, through the soft brilliancy of lights amid
+a festival by night. And in killing what is fleshly and physical he
+renders the faces visionary and dreamy, renders the hands and the
+gestures finer, and at the same time subdues and mitigates the colours
+and the splendour of the clothes, taking pleasure in dying chords, in
+deep black and tender white, in fine, pallid _nuances_ of rose-colour
+and lilac. Every one of his pupils became a fresh chronicler of
+aristocratic life. Toyohami painted night festivals; Toyoshiru, animated
+crowds; Toyokumi, scenes of the theatre; Kunisada, women upon their
+walks; Kunioshi, melodramatic representations full of pomp, with
+marvellous fantastic landscapes.
+
+[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
+
+ HIROSHIGE. SNOWY WEATHER.]
+
+The nineteenth century brought the widest popularisation of art,
+corresponding more or less to the "resort to popular national life," as
+the beginning of modern _genre_ painting and of the modern art of
+illustration was called in Germany. The refined son of Nippon shrugs his
+shoulders over these last creations of Japanese reproduction in colours;
+he prefers those earlier charming masters of grace, and misses the
+aristocratic _cachet_ in the new men, with as much justification as the
+refined European collector has when he does not care to place the plates
+of Granville or Doré in a portfolio with those of Eisen or Fragonard.
+Nevertheless amongst the draughtsmen who followed the popular tendency
+there was at any rate one great genius, one of the most important
+artists of his country, who became more familiar to Europe than any of
+his other compatriots: this was _Hokusai_.
+
+[Illustration: AN UNKNOWN MASTER. HARVESTERS RESTING.]
+
+All the qualities of Japanese art are united in him as in a focus. His
+work is the encyclopædia of a whole nation, and in his technical
+qualities he stands by the side of the greatest men in Europe. He is the
+most attentive observer, a painter of manners as no other has ever been;
+he takes strict measure of everything, analysing the slightest
+movements. He draws the solid things of earth, the immovable rocks, the
+everlasting primæval mountains, and yet follows the changing phenomena
+of light and shade upon its surface. He has, in the highest degree, that
+peculiarly Japanese quality of giving tangible expression to the
+movements of things and living creatures. His men and women gesticulate,
+his animals run, his birds fly, his reptiles crawl, his fish swim; the
+leaves on the trees, the water of the rivers, and the sea and the clouds
+of the sky move gently. He is a magnificent landscape painter,
+celebrating all the seasons, from blossoming spring to ice-bound winter.
+In his designs he maps out orchards, fields, and woods, follows the
+winding course of rivers, summons a fine mist from the sea, sends the
+waves surging forward, and the billows racing up against the rocks and
+losing themselves as murmuring rivulets in the sand. But he is also a
+philosopher and a poet of wide flight, who makes the boldest journeys
+into the land of dreams. His imagination rises above the work-a-day
+world, rides upon the chimera, bodies forth a new life, creates
+monsters, and tells visions of terrible poetry. The deep feeling of the
+primitive masters revives in him, and he appears as a strange mystic,
+when he paints his blithe ethereal goddesses, or that old Buddhist who,
+when banished, came every day across the sea, as the legend tells, to
+behold once more Fuji, the sacred mountain.
+
+[Illustration: _Studio._
+
+ OUTAMARO. MOTHER'S LOVE.]
+
+Hokusai was born in 1760, amid flowery gardens in a quiet corner of
+Yeddo, fourteen years after Goya and twelve years after David. His
+father was purveyor of metallic mirrors to the Court. Hokusai took
+lessons from an illustrator, but does not seem to have been much known
+until his fortieth or fiftieth year. In 1810 he first founded an
+industrial school of art, which attracted numbers of young people. To
+provide them with a compendium of instruction in drawing he published in
+1810 the first volume of his _Mangwa_. From that time he was recognised
+as the head of a school. When his fame began to spread he changed his
+residence almost every month to protect himself from troublesome
+visitors. And just as often did he alter his name. Even that under which
+he became famous in Europe is only a pseudonym, like "Gavarni": amongst
+various _noms de guerre_ it was that which he bore the longest and by
+which he was definitely recognised.
+
+As a painter he was only active in his youth. The achievement of his
+life is not his pictures, but a magnificent series of illustrated books,
+a life's work richer than that of any of his compatriots. Like Titian
+and Corot, fate had predestined him to reach a very great age without
+ever growing old.
+
+"From my sixth year," he writes in the preface to one of his books, "I
+had a perfect mania for drawing every object that I saw. When I had
+reached my fiftieth year I published a vast quantity of drawings; but I
+am unsatisfied with all that I have produced before my seventieth year.
+At seventy-three I had some understanding of the form and real nature of
+birds, fish, and plants. At eighty I hope to have made further progress,
+and at ninety to have discovered the ultimate foundation of things. In
+my hundredth year I shall rise to yet higher spheres unknown, and in my
+hundred and tenth, every stroke, every point, and in short everything
+that comes from my hand will be alive." Hokusai certainly did not reach
+so great an age as that. He died at eighty-nine, on 13th April 1849, and
+is buried in the temple at Yeddo. During the period between 1815 and
+1845 he published about eighty great works, altogether over five hundred
+volumes.
+
+"I rose from my seat at the window, where I had idled the whole day long
+... softly, softly.... Then I was up and away.... I saw the countless
+green leaves tremble in the densely embowered tops of the trees; I
+watched the flaky clouds in the blue sky, collecting fantastically into
+shapes torn and multiform.... I sauntered here and there carelessly,
+without aim or volition.... Now I crossed the Bridge of Apes and
+listened as the echo repeated the cry of the wild cranes.... Now I was
+in the cherry-grove of Owari.... Through the mists shifting along the
+coast of Miho I descried the famous pines of Suminoye.... Now I stood
+trembling upon the Bridge of Kameji and looked down in astonishment at
+the gigantic Fuki plants.... Then the roar of the dizzy waterfall of Ono
+resounded in my ear. A shudder ran through me.... It was only a dream
+which I dreamed, lying in bed near my window with this book of pictures
+by the master as a cushion beneath my head."
+
+[Illustration: KIYONAGA. LADIES BOATING.]
+
+In these words a learned Japanese has indicated the great range of
+subject, the unspeakably rich material of the works of the master. By
+preference he leads us to the work-places of artisans, to woodcarvers,
+smiths, workers in metal, dyers, weavers, and embroiderers. Then come
+the pleasures of the nobility, who are displayed in their refinement,
+reserve, and dignity; the country-folk at their daily avocations, or
+making merry upon holidays; the fantastic shapes of fabulous animals and
+demons, who figure in the life of Japanese national heroes, mighty with
+the sword; apparitions, drunken men, wrestlers, street figures of every
+conceivable description, mythical reptiles, snow-clad mountain tops,
+waving rice-fields lashed by the wind, woodland glens, strange gateways
+of rock, far views over waters with cliffs clothed with pine.
+
+The most celebrated of those works which contain landscapes exclusively
+are the views, published in three volumes in 1834-36, of the mountain of
+Fuji, the great volcano rising close by Yeddo, and from old time playing
+a part in the works of Japanese landscape painters. In Hokusai's book
+the cone of the mountain is sometimes seen rising clear in a cloudless
+sky, whilst it is sometimes shrouded by clouds of various shapes. Its
+beautiful outline glimmers through the meshes of a net, through the
+spindrift of snow falling in great flakes, or through a curtain of rain
+splashing vertically down. It rises from misty valleys coloured by the
+rays of the evening sun, or is reflected--itself out of sight--in the
+smooth surface of a lake, upon the reedy shores of which the wild geese
+cackle, or it stands in ghostly outlines against the night sky flooded
+with silver moonlight. Summer breezes and winter storms drive over it,
+rattling showers of hail, lashed by the wind, or light falls of snow
+descend round it. In spring the blossoms of peach and plum-trees flutter
+to the earth, like swarms of white and rosy butterflies. Only famished
+wolves or dragons, which popular superstition has located in the
+mountain of Fuji, occasionally animate the grandiose solitude of the
+landscape.
+
+"Never," says Gonse, "has a more dexterous hand rested upon paper. It is
+impossible to study his plates without an excited feeling of pleasure,
+for they are absolute perfection, the highest that Japanese art has
+produced in freshness, brilliancy, life, and originality. Hokusai's
+capacity of giving the impression of relief and colour with a stroke of
+the brush has nothing like it except in Rembrandt, Callot, and Goya.
+Men, animals, landscapes, and everything in his drawings are reduced to
+their simplest expression. Groups are seen in motion, priests in
+procession, soldiers on the march, and often a single stroke is
+sufficient to render an individual or create the impression of life and
+movement. Every plate is a masterpiece of coloured woodcut engraving, of
+singular flavour in colour, delightful in its gravely harmonised chord
+of golden yellow, faded green, and fiery red, to which are sometimes
+added golden, silvern, and other metallic tones."
+
+After the beginning of the sixties Paris came under the captivating
+influence of Japan. And there is no doubt that as the English influenced
+the landscape painters of Fontainebleau, the Venetians Delacroix, and
+the Neapolitan masters Courbet and Ribot, the newest phase of French
+art, which took its departure from Manet, was inaugurated by the
+enthusiasm for things Japanese. From the moment when the peculiar
+isolation of Japan was ended by the breaking up of the Japanese feudal
+state, Paris was flooded by splendid works of Japanese art. A painter
+discovered amongst the mass of articles newly arrived albums, colour
+prints, and pictures. Their drawing, colouring, and composition deviated
+from everything hitherto accounted as art, and yet the æsthetic
+character of these works was too artistic to permit of any one smiling
+over them as curiosities. Whether the discoverer was Alfred Stevens or
+Diaz, Fortuny, James Tissot, or Alphonse Legros, the enthusiasm for the
+Japanese swept over the studios like a storm. The artistic world never
+wearied of admiring the capricious ability of these compositions, the
+astonishing power of drawing, the fineness in tone, the originality of
+pictorial effect, nor of wondering at the refined simplicity of the
+means by which these results were achieved. Japanese art made itself
+felt by its fresh and tender charm, its creative opulence, its lightness
+and delicacy of observation; it arrested attention because directness,
+unfailing tact, and inherent distinction were of the essence of its
+conception; and it was recognised as the production of a nation of
+artists combining the subtilised taste of an originally refined
+civilisation with the freshness of feeling peculiar to primitive people.
+Colour prints, now to be had for a few francs at every bazaar, were
+bought at the highest figures. Every new consignment was awaited with
+feverish impatience. Old ivory, enamel, porcelain and embellished
+pottery, bronzes and wood and lacquer-work, ornamented stuffs,
+embroidered silks, albums, books of wood-cuts, and knick-knacks were
+scarcely unpacked in the shop before they found their way into the
+studios of artists and the libraries of scholars. In a short time great
+collections of the artistic productions of Japan passed into the hands
+of the painters Manet, James Tissot, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Degas,
+Carolus Duran, and Monet; of the engravers Bracquemond and Jules
+Jacquemart; of the authors Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Champfleury,
+Philippe Burty, and Zola; and of the manufacturers Barbedienne and
+Christofle.
+
+[Illustration: HARUNOBU. A PAIR OF LOVERS.]
+
+The International Exhibition of 1867 brought Japan still more into
+fashion, and from this year must be dated the peculiar influence of the
+West upon the East and the East upon the West. The Japanese came over to
+study at the European polytechnic institutes, universities, and military
+academies. On the other hand, we became the pupils of the Japanese in
+art. Even during the course of the Exhibition a group of artists and
+critics founded a Japanese society of the "Jinglar," which met every
+week in Sèvres at the house of Solon, the director of the manufactory.
+They used a Japanese dinner-service, designed by Bracquemond, and
+everything except the napkins, cigars, and ash-trays was Japanese. One
+of the members, Dr. Zacharias Astruc, published in _L'Étendard_ a series
+of articles upon "The Empire of the Rising Sun," which made a great
+sensation. Soon afterwards the Parisian theatres brought out Japanese
+ballets and fairy plays. Ernest d'Hervilly wrote his Japanese piece _La
+Belle Saïnara_, which Lemère printed for him in Japanese fashion and
+paged from right to left, giving it a yellow cover designed by
+Bracquemond. A Japanese ballet was performed at the opera, and a
+Japanese turn was given to the toilettes of women.
+
+For painters Japanese art was a revelation. Here was uttered the word
+that hovered on so many lips, and that no one had dared to pronounce.
+With what a fleeting touch, and yet with what precision, with what
+incomparable sureness, lightness, and grace, was everything carried out.
+How intuitive and spontaneous, how imaginative and how full of
+suggestion, how effortless and how rich in surprises, was this strange
+art. How happily was industry united with caprice, and nonchalance with
+endeavour at the highest finish. How suggestive was this disregard for
+symmetry, this piquant method of introducing a flower, an insect, a
+frog, or a bird here and there, merely as a pictorial spot in the
+picture. How the Japanese understood the art of expressing much with few
+means, where the Europeans toiled with a great expenditure of means to
+express little.
+
+It would certainly have been an exceedingly false move if a direct
+imitation of the Japanese had been thought of. Japanese art is the
+product of a sensuous people, and European art that of intellectual
+nations. The latter is greater and more serious; it is nobler, and it
+reaches heights of expression not attained by the grotesque and terrible
+distortions and the morbidly droll or melancholy outbursts of sentiment
+known to the Japanese. Our imagination is alien to that of these
+children of the sensuous world, who quake and tremble for joy, horrify
+themselves with their masks, and pass from convulsive laughter to sheer
+terror, and from the shudder of hallucination to ecstatic bliss. Had
+Japanese art been coarsely transposed by imitators it would have led to
+caricature.
+
+But if its poetics were little suitable for Europe in the specialised
+case, they nevertheless contained general laws better fitted for modern
+art than those which had been hitherto borrowed from Greece. All arts,
+music as well as poetry, were then striving for the dissolution of
+simple, tyrannical rhythms. The recurrence of unyielding measures beaten
+out with unwavering repetition no longer corresponded with the
+complicated, neurotic emotions of the new age. In painting, likewise,
+exertions were being made to burst the old shell, and a style was sought
+after for the treatment of modern life which had been violently handled
+in the effort to force it to fit the Procrustean bed of traditional
+rules. Then came the Japanese with their astonishing, rapid, and
+pictorial sketches, and revealed a new method for the interpretation of
+nature. At a time when the symmetrical balance of lines, borrowed from
+the works of the Renaissance masters, became wearisome in its monotony,
+they taught a much freer architecture of form, and one which was broken
+by charming caprices. Where there had been rhythm, tension, clarity,
+largeness, and quietude in the old European painting, there was in them
+a nervous freedom, an artful carelessness, and life and charm. Art was
+concealed beneath the fancy shown in their facile construction, which
+seemed to have been improvised by nature herself. An artistic method of
+deviating from geometrical arrangement, freedom of distribution,
+unforced and unsymmetrical structure, in the place of balance and
+construction according to rules, were learnt from the Japanese in the
+matter of composition.
+
+[Illustration: TOYOKUMI. NOCTURNAL REVERIE.]
+
+At the same time, they threw light upon what had been flat and trivial
+in Courbet's realism. These spirited narrators never told a story for
+the sake of telling it; they never painted to give a prosaic copy of
+some particle of reality. They liberated European painting from the
+heaviness of matter, and rendered it tender and delicate. They taught
+that art of not saying everything, which says so much, the method of
+compendious drawing, the secret of expanding distance by a special
+treatment of lines, the touch thrown rapidly in, the unforeseen, the
+surprise, the fleeting hint, the way of increasing effect by the
+incompletion of motive, the suggestion of the whole by a part. Artists
+learnt from them another manner of drawing and modelling, a manner of
+giving the impression of the object without the need for the whole of it
+being executed, so that one knows that it is there only through one's
+knowledge. They brought in the taste for pithy sketches dealing only
+with essentials, the consciousness of the endless catalogue of what may
+be contained--in life, reality, and fancy--by one fluent outline. They
+introduced the preference for perspective bird's-eye views, the
+disposition to throw groups, dense masses, and crowds more into the
+distance, and render them more animated and vivid by a relief of the
+foreground, which (though confirmed by photography) is apparently
+improbable.
+
+The influence of Japan on colouring is just as visible as upon
+composition and drawing. It had been clearly shown in Courbet's pictures
+of artisans that the rules of the Bolognese school, with their brown
+sauce and their red shadows, could not possibly be applied to objects in
+the open air. It was therefore necessary to discover a new principle of
+colour for modern subjects, a principle by which oil-painting would be
+divested of its oil, and light and air would come to their rights. It
+was seen from the works of the painters of Nippon that it was not
+absolutely necessary to paint brown to be a painter. They taught a new
+method of seeing things, opened the eyes to the changing play of the
+phenomena of light, the fugitive nature and constant mutability of which
+had up to this time seemed to mock at every rendering. The softness of
+their bright harmonies was studied and artistically transposed.
+
+These are the points in which Japanese art has had a revolutionary
+effect upon the development of European. Each one of those who at that
+time belonged to the Society of the Jinglar has had more or less
+experience of its influence. Alfred Stevens owes to it certain
+delicacies of colouring; Whistler, his exquisite refinement of tone and
+his capriciously artistic method in the treatment of landscape; Degas,
+his fantastic and free grouping, his unrivalled audacities of
+composition. Manet especially became now the artist to whom history does
+honour, and Louis Gonse tells a story with a very characteristic touch
+of the first exhibition of the _Maîtres impressionistes_. He went there,
+coming from the official Salon in the company of a Japanese, and, while
+the French public declared the fresh brightness of the pictures to be
+untrue and barbaric, the son of sacred Nippon, accustomed from youth to
+see nature in light, airy tones without a yellow coating of varnish,
+said: "Over there I was in an exhibition of oil-pictures, here I feel as
+if I were entering a flowery garden. What strikes me is the animation of
+these figures, and the feeling is one I have never had elsewhere in your
+picture exhibitions."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+THE IMPRESSIONISTS
+
+
+The name Impressionists dates from an exhibition in Paris which was got
+up at Nadar's in 1871. The catalogue contained a great deal about
+impressions--for instance, "_Impression de mon pot au feu_,"
+"_Impression d'un chat qui se promène_." In his criticism Claretie
+summed up the impressions and spoke of the _Salon des Impressionistes_.
+
+The beginning of the movement, however, came about the middle of the
+sixties, and Zola was the first to champion the new artists with his
+trenchant pen. Assuming the name of his later hero Claude, he
+contributed in 1866 to _L'Événement_, under the title _Mon Salon_, that
+article which swamped the office with such a flood of indignant letters
+and occasioned such a secession of subscribers that the proprietor of
+the paper, the sage and admirable M. de Villemessant, felt himself
+obliged to give the naturalist critic an anti-naturalistic colleague in
+the person of M. Théodore Pelloquet. In these reviews of the Salon,
+collected in 1879 in the volume _Mes Haines_, and in the essay upon
+_Courbet, the Painter of Realism_--Courbet, the already recognised
+"master of Ornans "--those theories are laid down which Lantier and his
+friends announced at a later date in _L'Oeuvre_. Then the architect
+Dubiche, one of the members of the young _Bohème_, dreamed in a spirit
+of presage of a new architecture. "With passionate gestures he demanded
+and insisted upon the formula for the architecture of this democracy,
+that work in stone which should give expression to it, a building in
+which it should feel itself at home, something strong and forcible,
+simple and great, something already proclaimed in our railway stations
+and our markets in the grace and power of their iron girders, but
+purified and made beautiful, declaring the largeness of our conquests."
+A few years went by, and then the Paris Centenary Exhibition provided
+that something, though it was not in monumental stone. The great
+edifices were fashioned of glass and iron, and the mighty railway
+buildings were their forerunners. The enormous engine-rooms which gave
+space for thousands and the Eiffel Tower announced this new
+architecture. And as Dubiche prophesied a new architecture, so did
+Claude prophesy a new painting. "Sun and open air and bright and
+youthful painting are what we need. Let the sun come in and render
+objects as they appear under the illumination of broad daylight." In
+Zola Claude Lantier is the martyr of this new style. He is scorned,
+derided, avoided, and cast out. His best picture is smuggled, through
+grace and mercy, into the Exhibition by a friend upon the hanging
+committee as a _charité_. But, ten years after, these new doctrines had
+penetrated all the studios of Paris and of Europe like germs borne in
+the air.
+
+The artistic ideas of Claude Lantier were given to Zola by his friend
+_Édouard Manet_, the father of Impressionism, and in that way the
+creator of the newest form of art. Manet appeared for the first time in
+1862. In 1865, when the Committee of the Salon gave up a few secondary
+rooms to the rejected, the first of his pictures which made any
+sensation were to be seen--a "Scourging of Christ" and a picture of a
+girl with a cat resting--both invariably surrounded by a dense circle of
+the scornful. Forty years before, the first works of the Romanticists,
+whose doctrine was likewise scoffed at in the formula _Le laid c'est le
+beau_, had called forth a similar outcry against the want of taste
+common to them all. A generation later people laughed at "The Funeral in
+Ornans," and now the same derision was directed against Manet, who
+completed Courbet's work. His pictures were held to be a practical joke
+which the painter was playing upon the public, the most unheard of farce
+that had ever been painted. If any one had declared that these works
+would give the impulse to a revolution in art, people would have turned
+their backs upon him or thought that he was jesting. "Criticism treated
+Manet," wrote Zola, "as a kind of buffoon who put out his tongue for the
+amusement of street boys." The rage against "The Scourging of Christ"
+went so far that the picture had to be protected by special precautions
+from the assaults of sticks and umbrellas.
+
+But the matter took a somewhat different aspect when, five years
+afterwards, from twenty to thirty more recent pictures were exhibited
+together in Manet's studio. Whether it was because the aims of the
+painter had become clearer in the meanwhile, or because his works
+suffered less from the proximity of others, they made an impression, and
+that although they represented nothing in the least adventurous and
+sensational. Life-size figures, light and almost without shadow, rowed
+over blue water, hung out white linen, watered green flower-pots, and
+leant against grey walls. The light colours placed immediately beside
+each other had a bizarre effect on the eye accustomed to chiaroscuro.
+The eye, which, like the human spirit, has its habitudes, and believes
+that it always sees nature as she is painted, was irritated by these
+delicately chosen tone-values which seemed to it arbitrary, by these
+novel harmonies which it took for discords. Nevertheless the clarity of
+the pictures made a striking effect, and something of "Manet's sun"
+lingered in the memory. People still laughed, only not so loud, and they
+gave Manet credit for having the courage of his convictions. "A
+remarkable circumstance has to be recorded. A young painter has followed
+his personal impressions quite ingenuously, and has painted a few things
+which are not altogether in accord with the principles taught in the
+schools. In this way he has executed pictures which have been a source
+of offence to eyes accustomed to other paintings. But now, instead of
+abusing the young artist through thick and thin, we must be first clear
+as to why our eyes have been offended, and whether they ought to have
+been." With these words criticism began to take Manet seriously. Charles
+Ephrussi and Duranty, besides Zola, came forward as his first literary
+champions in the press. "Manet is bold" was now the phrase used about
+him in public. The Impressionists took the salon by storm. And Manet's
+bright and radiant sun was seen to be a better thing than the brown
+sauce of the Bolognese. It was as if a strong power had suddenly
+deranged the focus of opinion in all the studios, and Manet's victory
+brought the same salvation to French art as that of Delacroix had done
+forty years before and that of Courbet ten years before. _Manet et
+manebit._ Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet are the three great names of
+modern French painting, the names of the men who gave it the most
+decisive impulses.
+
+[Illustration: ÉDOUARD MANET.]
+
+Édouard Manet, _le maître impressioniste_, was born in 1832, in the Rue
+Bonaparte, exactly opposite the École des Beaux-Arts, and his life was
+quietly and simply spent, without passion and excitement, unusual
+events, or sanguinary battles. At sixteen, having passed through the
+_Collège Rollin_, he entered the navy with the permission of his
+parents, and made a voyage to Rio de Janeiro, which was accomplished
+without any incident of interest, without shipwreck or any one being
+drowned. With his cheerful, even temperament he looked on the boundless
+sea and satiated his eyes with the marvellous spectacle of waves and
+horizon, never to forget it. The luminous sky was spread before him, the
+great ocean rocked and sported around, revealing colours other than he
+had seen in the Salon. On his return he gave himself up entirely to
+painting. He is said to have been a slight, pale, delicate, and refined
+young man when he became a pupil of Couture in 1851, almost at the same
+time as Feuerbach. Nearly six years he remained with the master of "The
+Decadent Romans," without a suspicion of how he was to find his way, and
+even after he had left the studio he was still pursued by the shade of
+Couture; he worked without knowing very well what he really wanted. Then
+he travelled, visiting Germany, Cassel, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and
+Munich, where he copied the portrait of Rembrandt in the Pinakothek; and
+then he saw Florence, Rome, and Venice. Under the influence of the
+Neapolitan and Flemish artists, to whom Ribot, Courbet, and Stevens
+pointed at the time, he gradually became a painter. His first picture,
+"The Child with Cherries," painted in 1859, reveals the influence of
+Brouwer. In 1861 he exhibited, for the first time, the "double portrait"
+of his parents, for which he received honourable mention, although--or
+because--the picture was entirely painted in the old Bolognese style.
+These works are only of interest because they make it possible to see
+the rapidity with which Manet learnt to understand his craft with the
+aid of the old masters, and the sureness and energy with which he
+followed, from the very beginning, the realistic tendency initiated by
+Courbet. "The Nymph Surprised," in 1862, was a medley of reminiscences
+from Jordaens, Tintoretto, and Delacroix. His "Old Musician," executed
+with diligence but trivial in its realism, had the appearance of being a
+tolerable Courbet. Then he made--not at first in Madrid, which he only
+knew later, but in the Louvre--the eventful discovery of another old
+master, not yet known in all his individuality to the master of Ornans.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ MANET. THE FIFER.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ MANET. THE GUITARERO.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture._)]
+
+At the great Manchester Exhibition of 1857 Velasquez had been revealed
+to the English; in the beginning of the sixties he was discovered by the
+French. William Stirling's biography of Velasquez was translated into
+French by G. Brunet, and provided with a _Catalogue raisonné_ by W.
+Bürger. The works of Charles Blanc, Théophile Gautier, and Paul Lefort
+appeared, and in a short time Velasquez, of whom the world outside
+Madrid had hitherto known little, was in artistic circles in Paris a
+familiar and frequently cited personality, who began not only to occupy
+the attention of the historians of art, but of artists also. Couture was
+in the habit of saying to his pupils that Velasquez had not understood
+the orchestration of tones, that he had an inclination to monochrome,
+and that he had never comprehended the nature of colour. From the
+beginning of the sixties France came under the sway of that serious
+feeling for colour known to the great Spaniard, and Manet was his first
+enthusiastic pupil. Certain of his single figures against a pearl-grey
+background--"The Fifer," "The Guitarero," "The Bull-fighter wounded to
+Death"--were the decisive works in which, with astonishing talent, he
+declared himself as the pupil of Velasquez. W. Bürger praised Velasquez
+as _le peintre le plus peintre qui fût jamais_. As regards the
+nineteenth century, the same may be said of Manet. Only Frans Hals and
+Velasquez had these eminent pictorial qualities. In the way in which the
+black velvet dress, the white silk band, and the red flag were painted
+in the toreador picture, there was a feeling for beauty which bore
+witness to the finest understanding of the great Spaniard. In his
+"Angels at the Tomb of Christ" he has sought, as little as did Velasquez
+in his picture of the Epiphany, to introduce any trace of heavenly
+expression into the faces, but as a piece of painting it takes its place
+amongst the best religious pictures of the century. His "Bon Bock"--a
+portrait of the engraver Belot, a stout jovial man smoking a pipe as he
+sits over a glass of beer--is one of those likenesses which stamp
+themselves upon the memory like the "Hille Bobbe" of Frans Hals. "Faure
+as Hamlet" stands out from the vacant light grey background like the
+"Truhan Pablillos" of Velasquez. The doublet and mantle are of black
+velvet, the mantle lined with rose-coloured silk; and the toilette is
+completed by a broad black hat with a large black feather. He seems as
+though he had just stepped to the footlights, and stands there with his
+legs apart, the mantle thrown over the left arm, and his right hand
+closing upon his sword. The cool harmony of black, white, grey, and
+rose-colour makes an uncommonly refined effect. Manet has the rich
+artistic methods of Velasquez in a measure elsewhere only attained by
+Raeburn, and as the last of these studies he has created in his "Enfant
+à l'Épée" a work which--speaking without profanity--might have been
+signed by the great Spaniard himself. In the beginning of the sixties,
+when he gave a separate exhibition of his works, Courbet is said to have
+exclaimed upon entering, "Nothing but Spaniards!"
+
+But even this following of the Spaniards indicated an advance upon
+Courbet; it meant the triumph over brown sauce and a closer
+approximation to truth. For, amongst all the old masters, Velasquez and
+Frans Hals--who greatly resemble each other in this respect--are the
+simplest and most natural in their colouring; they are not idealists in
+colour like Titian, Paul Veronese, and Rubens, nor do they labour upon
+the tone of their pictures like the Dutch "little masters" and Chardin.
+They paint their pictures in the broad and common light of day. Their
+flesh-tint is truer than the juicy tint of the Venetians, and the fiery
+red of Rubens, with his shining reflections. Beside Velasquez, as Justi
+says, the colouring of Titian seems conventional, that of Rembrandt
+fantastic, and that of Rubens is tinged with something which is not
+natural. Or, as a contemporary of Velasquez expressed himself:
+"Everything else, old and new, is painting; Velasquez alone is truth."
+
+[Illustration: MANET. LE BON BOCK.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture._)]
+
+Thus the difference between the youthful works of Manet and those of his
+predecessor Courbet is the difference between Velasquez and Caravaggio.
+Of course, in Manet's earliest pictures there were found the broad, dull
+red-brown surfaces which characterise the works of the Bolognese and the
+Neapolitans. A cool silver tone, a shadowless treatment gleaming in
+silver, has now taken the place of this warm brown sauce. He has the
+white of Velasquez, his cool subdued rose-colour, his delicate grey
+which has been so much admired and against which every touch of colour
+stands out clear and determined, and that celebrated black of the
+Spaniard which is never heavy and dull, but makes such a light and
+transparent effect. What is bright is contrasted with what is bright,
+and light colours are placed upon a silvery grey background. The most
+perfect modelling and plastic effect is attained without the aid of
+strong contrasts of shadow. Thus he closed his apprenticeship to the old
+masters by being able to see with the eyes of that old master whose
+vision was the truest.
+
+[Illustration: MANET. A GARDEN IN RUEIL.]
+
+This was the point of departure for Manet's further development. The
+study of Velasquez did not merely set him free from sauce; it also
+started the problem of painting light. He went through a course of
+development similar to that of the old Spaniard himself. When Velasquez
+painted his first picture with a popular turn, the "Bacchus," he still
+stood upon the ground of the tenebrous painters; he represented an
+open-air scene with the illumination of a closed room. Although the
+ceremony is taking place in broad daylight, the people seem to be
+sitting in a dingy tavern, receiving light from a studio window to the
+left. Ten years afterwards, when he painted "The Smithy of Vulcan," he
+had emancipated himself from this Bolognese tradition, which he spoke of
+henceforward as "a gloomy and horrible style." The deep and sharply
+contrasted shadows have vanished, and daylight has conquered the light
+of the cellar. The great equestrian portraits which followed gave Mengs
+occasion to remark, even a hundred years ago, that Velasquez was the
+first who understood how to paint what is "ambiant," the air filling the
+vacuum between objects. And at the end of his life he solved the final
+problem in "The Women Spinning." In the "Bacchus" might be found the
+treatment of an open-air scene in the key of sauce, but here was the
+glistening of light in an interior. The sun quivers over silken stuffs,
+falls upon the dazzling necks of women, plays through coal-black
+Castilian locks, renders one thing plastically distinct and another
+pictorially vague, dissolves corporeality, and lends surface the
+rounding of life. Contours touched with the brightness of light surround
+the heads of the girls at work. The shadows are not warm brown but cool
+grey, and the tints of reflected light play from one object to another.
+
+Two remarkable pictures of 1863 and 1865 show that Manet had grasped the
+problem and was endeavouring in a tentative way to give expression to
+his ideas.
+
+In one of these, "The Picnic," painted in 1863, there was a stretch of
+sward, a few trees, and in the background a river in which a woman was
+merrily splashing in her chemise; in the foreground were seated two
+young men in frock-coats opposite another woman, who has just come out
+of the water and been drying herself. Needless to say, this picture was
+rejected as something unprecedented, by the committee, which included
+Ingres, Léon Cogniet, Robert Fleury, and Hippolyte Flandrin. Eugène
+Delacroix was the only one in its favour. So Manet was relegated to the
+_Salon des Refusés_, where Bracquemond, Legros, Whistler, and Harpignies
+were hung beside him. This Exhibition was held in the Industrial Hall,
+and the public went through a narrow little door from one gallery to the
+other. Half Paris was bewildered and discomposed by these works of the
+rejected; even Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie ostentatiously
+turned their backs upon Manet's picture when they visited the Salon.
+This naked woman made a scandal. How shocking! A woman without the
+slightest stitch of clothes between two gentlemen in their frock-coats!
+In the Louvre, indeed, there were about fifty Venetian paintings with
+much the same purport. Every manual of art refers to "The Family," as it
+is called, and the "Ages of Life" of Giorgione, in which nude and
+clothed figures are moving in a landscape and placed ingenuously beside
+each other. But that a painter should claim for a modern artist the
+right of painting for the joy of what is purely pictorial was a
+phenomenon that had never been encountered before. The public searched
+for something obscene, and they found it; but for Manet the whole
+picture was only a technical experiment: the nude woman in front was
+only there because the painter wanted to observe the play of the sun and
+the reflections of the foliage upon naked flesh; the woman in her
+chemise merely owed her existence to the circumstance of her charming
+outline making such a delightful patch of white amid the green meadows.
+Manet for the first time touched the problem which Madox Brown had
+thrown out in his "Work" ten years before in England, though for the
+present he did so with no greater success: the sunbeams glanced no
+doubt, but they were heavy and opaque; the sky was bright, but without
+atmosphere. As yet there is nothing of the Manet who belongs to history.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ MANET. THE FIGHT BETWEEN THE "KEARSARGE" AND "ALABAMA."]
+
+The celebrated "Olympia" of 1865, now to be found in the Luxembourg, was
+painted during this stage in his development: it represents a neurotic,
+anæmic creature, who stretches out, pale and sickly, her meagre nudity
+upon white linen, with a purring cat at her feet; whilst a negress in a
+red dress draws back the curtain, offering her a bouquet. With this
+picture--no one can tell why--the definite battles over Impressionism
+began. The critics who talked about obscenity were not consistent,
+because Titian's pictures of Venus with her female attendant, the little
+dog, and the youth sitting upon the edge of the bed, are not usually
+held to be obscene. But it is nevertheless difficult to find in this
+flatly modelled body, with its hard black outlines, those artistic
+qualities which Zola discovered in it. The picture has nothing whatever
+of Titian in it, but it may almost be said to have something of Cranach.
+"The Picnic" and "Olympia" have both only an historical interest as the
+first works in which the artist trusted his own eyes, refusing to look
+through any one's spectacles. Feeling that he would come to nothing if
+he continued to study nature through the medium of an old master, he had
+to render some real thing just as it appeared to him when he was not
+looking into the mirror of old pictures. He tried to forget what he had
+studied in galleries, the tricks of art which he had learnt with
+Couture, and the famous pictures he had seen. In his earlier works there
+had been a far-fetched refinement and a delicacy taken from the old
+masters, but "The Picnic" and "Olympia" are simpler and more
+independent. In both he was already an "Impressionist," true to his
+personal vision, though he could not entirely express the new language
+that hovered upon his lips. He had tried both to rid himself of
+Courbet's brown sauce and of the ivory tone of Bouguereau, and to be
+just to local tones through simple and independent observation; in his
+"Picnic" he had painted the trees green, the earth yellow, and the sky
+grey, and in "Olympia" the bed white and the body of the woman
+flesh-colour. But he was as little successful as the pre-Raphaelites in
+bringing the local tones into full harmony. This is the step which Manet
+made in advance of the pre-Raphaelites: after he had emancipated himself
+from the conventional brown and ivory scheme of tone, and had been for a
+time, like the pre-Raphaelites, true although hard, he attained that
+harmony which hitherto had been either not reached by artistic means or
+not reached at all, by strict observation of the medium by which nature
+produces her harmonies--light. As the air, the pervasive atmosphere,
+renders nature everywhere harmonious and refined in colour, so it
+forthwith became for the artist the means of reaching that great harmony
+which is the object of all pictorial endeavour, and which had never
+previously been reached except through some mannerism.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ MANET. BOATING.]
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ MANET. A BAR AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRES.]
+
+This movement, so historically memorable, when Manet discovered the sun
+and the fine fluid of the atmosphere, was shortly before 1870. Not long
+before the declaration of war he was in the country, in the
+neighbourhood of Paris, staying with his friend de Nittis; but he
+continued to work as though he were at home, only his studio was here
+the pleasure-ground. Here one day he sat in full sunlight, placed his
+model amid the flowers of the turf, and began to paint. The result was
+"The Garden," now in the possession of Madame de Nittis. The young wife
+of the Italian painter is reclining in an easy-chair, between her
+husband, who is lying on the grass, and her child asleep in its cradle.
+Every flower is fresh and bright upon the fragrant sward. The green of
+the stretch of grass is luminous, and everything is bathed in soft,
+bright atmosphere; the leaves cast their blue shadows upon the yellow
+gravel path. "Plein-air" made its entry into painting.
+
+In 1870 his activity had to be interrupted. He entered a company of
+Volunteers consisting chiefly of artists and men of letters, and in
+December he became a lieutenant in the Garde Nationale, where he had
+Meissonier as his colonel. The pictures, therefore, in which he was
+entirely Manet belong exclusively to the period following 1870.
+
+From this time his great problem was the sun, the glow of daylight, the
+tremor of the air upon the earth basking in light. He became a natural
+philosopher who could never satisfy himself, studying the effect of
+light and determining with the observation of a man of science how the
+atmosphere alters the phenomena of colour.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ MANET. SPRING: JEANNE.]
+
+In tender, virginal, light grey tones, never seen before, he depicted,
+in fourteen pictures exhibited at a dealer's, the luxury and grace of
+Paris, the bright days of summer and _soirées_ flooded with gaslight,
+the faded features of the fallen maiden and the refined _chic_ of the
+woman of the world. There was to be seen "Nana," that marvel of
+audacious grace. Laced in a blue silk corset, and otherwise clad merely
+in a muslin smock with her feet in pearl-grey stockings, the blond woman
+stands at the mirror painting her lips, and carelessly replying to the
+words of a man who is watching her upon the sofa behind. Near it hung
+balcony scenes, fleeting sketches from the skating rink, the _café
+concert_, the _Bal de l'Opéra_, the _déjeuner_ scene at Père
+Lathuille's, and the "Bar at the Folies-Bergères." In one case he has
+made daylight the subject of searching study, in another the artificial
+illumination of the footlights. "Music in the Tuileries" reveals a crowd
+of people swarming in an open, sunny place. Every figure was introduced
+as a patch of colour, but these patches were alive and this multitude
+spoke. One of the best pictures was "Boating"--a craft boldly cut away
+in its frame, after the manner of the Japanese, and seated in it a
+young lady in light blue and a young man in white, their figures
+contrasting finely with the delicate grey of the water and the
+atmosphere impregnated with moisture. And scattered amongst these
+pictures there were to be found powerful sea-pieces and charming,
+piquant portraits.
+
+Manet had a passion for the world. He was a man with a slight and
+graceful figure, a beard of the colour known as _blond cendré_, deep
+blue eyes filled with the fire of youth, a refined, clever face,
+aristocratic hands, and a manner of great urbanity. With his wife, the
+highly cultured daughter of a Dutch musician, he went into the best
+circles of Parisian society, and was popular everywhere for his
+trenchant judgment and his sparkling intellect. His conversation was
+vivid and sarcastic. He was famous for his wit _à la_ Gavarni. He
+delighted in the delicate perfume of drawing-rooms, the shining
+candle-light at receptions; he worshipped modernity and the piquant
+_frou-frou_ of toilettes; he was the first who stood with both feet in
+the world which seemed so inartistic to others. Thus the progress made
+in the acquisition of subject and material may be seen even in the
+outward appearance of the three pioneers of modern art. Millet in his
+portrait stands in wooden shoes, Courbet in his shirt-sleeves; Manet
+wears a tall hat and a frock-coat. Millet, the peasant, painted
+peasants. Courbet, the democrat from the provinces, gave the rights of
+citizenship to the artisan, but without himself deserting the provinces
+and the _bourgeoisie_. He was repelled by everything either
+distinguished or refined. In such matters he could not find the force
+and vehemence which were all he sought. Manet, the Parisian and the man
+of refinement, gave art the elegance of modern life.
+
+In the year 1879 he made the Parisian magistracy the offer of painting
+in the session-room of the Town Hall the entire _Ventre de Paris_, the
+markets, railway stations, lading-places, and public gardens, and
+beneath the ceiling a gallery of the celebrated men of the present time.
+His letter was unanswered, and yet it gave the impulse to all those
+great pictures of contemporary life painted afterwards in Paris and the
+provinces for the walls of public buildings. In 1880 he received,
+through the exertions of his friend Antonin Proust, a medal of the
+second class, the only one ever awarded to him. And the dealer Duret
+began to buy pictures from him; Durand-Ruel followed suit, and so did M.
+Faure, the singer of the Grand Opera, who himself is the owner of
+five-and-thirty Manets. The poor artist did not long enjoy this
+recognition. On 30th April 1883, the varnishing day at the Salon, he
+died from blood-poisoning and the consequences of the amputation of a
+leg.
+
+But the seed which he had scattered had already thrown out roots. It had
+taken him years to force open the doors of the Salon, but to-day his
+name shines in letters of gold upon the façade of the École des
+Beaux-Arts as that of the man who has spoken the most decisive final
+utterance on behalf of the liberation of modern art. His achievement,
+which seems to have been an unimportant alteration in the method of
+painting, was in reality a renovation in the method of looking at the
+world and a renovation in the method of thinking.
+
+[Illustration: _Mansell Photo._
+
+ DEGAS. THE BALLET SCENE IN ROBERT THE DEVIL.]
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS. THE BALLET IN _DON JUAN_.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS. A BALLET DANCER.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+Up to this time it was only the landscape painters who had emancipated
+themselves from imitation of the gallery tone, and what was done by
+Corot in landscape had, logically enough, to be carried out in
+figure-painting likewise; for men and women are encompassed by the air
+as much as trees. After the landscape painters of Barbizon had made
+evident the vast difference between the light of day and that of a
+closed room in their pictures painted in the open air, the
+figure-painters, if they made any claim to truth of effect, could no
+longer venture to content themselves with the illumination falling upon
+their models in the studio, when they were painting incidents taking
+place out of doors. Yet even the boldest of the new artists did not set
+themselves free from tradition. Even after they had become independent
+in subject and composition they had remained the slaves of the old
+masters in their intuition of colour. Some imitated the Spaniards,
+without reflecting that Ribera painted his pictures in a small, dark
+studio, and that the cellar-light with which they were illuminated was
+therefore correct, whereas applied, in the present age, to the bright
+interiors of the nineteenth century it was utterly false. Others treated
+open-air scenes as if they were taking place in a ground-floor parlour,
+and endeavoured by curtains and shutters to create a light similar to
+that which may be found in old masters and pictures dimmed with age. Or
+the artist painted according to a general recipe and in complete
+defiance of what he saw with his eyes. For instance, an exceedingly
+characteristic episode is told of the student days of Puvis de
+Chavannes. Upon a grey, misty day the young artist had painted a nude
+figure. The model appeared enveloped in tender light as by a bright,
+silvery halo. "That's the way you see your model?" grumbled Couture
+indignantly when he came to correct the picture. Then he mixed together
+white, cobalt blue, Naples yellow, and vermilion, and turned Puvis de
+Chavannes' nude grey figure by a universal recipe into one that was
+highly coloured and warmly luminous--such a figure as an old master
+might perhaps have painted under different conditions of light. With his
+"Fiat Lux" Manet uttered a word of redemption that had hovered upon
+many lips. The jurisdiction of galleries was broken now also in regard
+to colour; the last remnant of servile dependence upon the mighty dead
+was cast aside; the aims attained by the landscape painters thirty years
+before were reached in figure-painting likewise.
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS. HORSES IN A MEADOW.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: DEGAS. DANCING GIRL FASTENING HER SHOE.]
+
+Perhaps a later age may even come to recognise that Manet made an
+advance upon the old masters in his delicacy and scrupulous analysis of
+light; in that case it will esteem the discovery of tone-values as the
+chief acquisition of the nineteenth century, as a conquest such as has
+never been made in painting since the Eycks and Masaccio, since the
+establishment of the theory of perspective. In a treatise commanding all
+respect Hugo Magnus has written of how the sense of colour increased in
+the various periods of the world's history; since the appearance of the
+Impressionists, verification may be made of yet another advance in this
+direction. The study of tone-values has never been carried on with such
+conscientious exactitude, and in regard to truth of atmosphere one is
+disposed to believe that our eyes to-day see and feel things which our
+ancestors had not yet noticed. The old masters have also touched the
+problem of "truth in painting." It is not merely that the character of
+their colours often led the Italian tempera and fresco painters to the
+most natural method of treating light. They even occupied themselves in
+a theoretical way with the question. An old Italian precept declares
+that the painter ought to work in a closed yard beneath an awning, but
+should place his model beneath the open sky. In the frescoes which he
+painted in Arezzo in 1480, Piero della Francesca, in particular, pursued
+the problem of _plein-air_ painting with a fine instinct. But love of
+the beautiful and luminous tints, such as the technique of oil-painting
+enabled artists to attain at a later date, quickly seduced them from
+carrying out the natural treatment of light in the gradation of colour.
+Under the influence of oil-painting the Italians of the great period,
+from Leonardo onwards, turned more and more to strong contrasts. And in
+spite of Albert Cuyp, even the Dutch landscape painters of the
+seventeenth century have seen objects rather in line and form,
+plastically, than pictorially in their environment of light and air. The
+nineteenth century was the first seriously to attack a problem
+which--except by Velasquez--had been merely touched upon by the old
+schools, but never solved.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR. SUPPER AT BOUGIVAL.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR. THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+What the masters of Barbizon had done through instinctive genius was
+made the object of scientific study by the Impressionists. The new
+school set up the principle that atmosphere changes the colour of
+objects; for instance, that the colour and outline of a tree painted in
+a room are completely different from those of the same tree painted upon
+the spot in the open air. As an unqualified rule they claimed that every
+incident was to be harmonised with time, place, and light; thus a scene
+taking place out of doors had of necessity to be painted, not within
+four walls, but under the actual illumination of morning, or noon, or
+evening, or night. In making this problem the object of detailed and
+careful inquiry the artist came to analyse life, throbbing beneath its
+veil of air and light, with more refinement and thoroughness than the
+old masters had done. The latter painted light deadened in its fall, not
+shining. Oils were treated as an opaque material, colour appeared to be
+a substance, and the radiance of tinted light was lost through this
+material heaviness. Courbet still represented merely the object apart
+from its environment; he saw things in a plastic way, and not as they
+were, bathed in the atmosphere; his men and women lived in oil, in brown
+sauce, and not where it was only possible for them to live--in the air.
+Everything he painted he isolated without a thought of atmospheric
+surroundings. Now a complete change of parts was effected: bodies and
+colours were no longer painted, but the shifting power of light under
+which everything changes form and colour at every moment of the day. The
+elder painters in essentials confined light to the surface of objects;
+the new painters believed in its universality, beholding in it the
+father of all life and of the manifold nature of the visible world, and
+therefore of colour also. They no longer painted colours and forms with
+lights and cast-shadows, but pellucid light, pouring over forms and
+colours and absorbed and refracted by them. They no longer looked merely
+to the particular, but to the whole, no longer saw nothing except
+deadened light and cast-shadows, but the harmony and pictorial charm of
+a moment of nature considered as such. With a zeal which at times seemed
+almost paradoxical, they proceeded to establish the importance of the
+phenomena of light. They discovered that, so far from being gilded,
+objects are silvered by sunlight, and they made every effort to analyse
+the multiplicity of these fine gradations down to their most delicate
+_nuances_. They learnt to paint the quiver of tremulous sunbeams
+radiating far and wide; they were the lyrical poets of light, which they
+often glorified at the expense of what it envelops and causes to live.
+At the service of art they placed a renovated treasury of refined,
+purified, and pictorial phases of expression, in which the history of
+art records an increase in the human eye of the sense of colour and the
+power of perception.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR. FISHER CHILDREN BY THE SEA.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR. THE WOMAN WITH THE CAT.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+That light is movement is here made obvious, and that all life is
+movement is just what their art reveals. Courbet was an admirable
+painter of plain surfaces. If he had to paint a wall he took it upon his
+strong shoulders and transferred it to his canvas in such a way that a
+stonemason might have been deceived. If it was a question of rocks, the
+body of a woman, or the waves of the sea, he began to mix his pigments
+thick, laid a firm mass of colour on the canvas, and spread it with a
+knife. This spade-work gave him unrivalled truth to nature in
+reproducing the surface of hard substances. Rocks, banks, and walls look
+as they do in nature, but in the case of moving, indeterminate things
+his power deserts him. His landscapes are painted in a rich, broad, and
+juicy style, but his earth has no pulsation. Courbet has forgotten the
+birds in his landscape. His seas have been seen with extraordinary
+largeness of feeling, and they are masterpieces of drawing; the only
+drawback is that they seem uninhabitable for fish. Under the steady hand
+of the master the sea came to a standstill and was changed into rock. If
+he has to paint human beings they stand as motionless as blocks of wood.
+The expression of their faces seems galvanised into life, like their
+bodies. Placing absolute directness in the rendering of impressions in
+their programme, as the chief aim of their artistic endeavours, the
+Impressionists were the first to discover the secret of seizing with the
+utmost freshness the _nuances_ of expression and movement, which
+remained petrified in the hands of their predecessors. Only the flash of
+the spokes is painted in the wheel of a carriage in motion, and never
+the appearance of the wheel when it is at rest; in the same way they
+allow the outlines of human figures to relax and become indistinct, to
+call up the impression of movement, the real vividness of the
+appearance. Colour has been established as the sole, unqualified medium
+of expression for the painter, and has so absorbed the drawing that the
+line receives, as it were, a pulsating life, and cannot be felt except
+in a pictorial way. In the painting of nude human figures the waxen
+look--which in the traditional painting from the nude had a pretence of
+being natural--has vanished from the skin, and thousands of delicately
+distinguished gradations give animation to the flesh. Moreover, a finer
+and deeper observation of temperament was made possible by lighter and
+more sensitive technique. In the works of the earlier _genre_ painters
+people never are what they are supposed to represent. The hired model,
+picked from the lower strata of life, and used by the painter in
+bringing his picture slowly to completion, was obvious even in the most
+elegant toilette; but now real human beings are represented, men and
+women whose carriage, gestures, and countenances tell at once what they
+are. Even in portrait painting people whom the painter has surprised
+before they have had time to put themselves in order, at the moment when
+they are still entirely natural, have taken the place of lay-figures
+fixed in position. The effort to seize the most unconstrained air and
+the most natural position, and to arrest the most transitory shade of
+expression, produces, in this field of art also, a directness and
+vivacity divided by a great gulf from the pose and the grand airs of the
+earlier drawing-room picture.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR. A PRIVATE BOX.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+From his very first appearance there gathered round Manet a number of
+young men who met twice a week at a café in Batignolles, formerly a
+suburb at the entrance of the Avenue de Clichy. After this
+trysting-place the society called itself _L'École des Batignolles_.
+Burty, Antonin Proust, Henner, and Stevens put in an occasional
+appearance, but Legros, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Duranty, and Zola were
+constant visitors. Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Monet, Gauguin, and
+Zandomeneghi were the leading spirits of the impressionistic staff, and,
+being excluded from the official Salon, they generally set up their tent
+at Nadar's, Reichshofen's, or some other dealer's. These are the names
+of the men who, following Manet, were the earliest to make the new
+problem the object of their studies.
+
+_Degas_, the subtle colourist and miraculous draughtsman, who celebrates
+dancers, gauze skirts, and the _foyers_ of the Opera, is the boldest and
+the most original of those who banded together from the very outset of
+the movement--the worst enemy of everything pretty and banal, the
+greatest dandy of modern France, the man whose works are caviare to the
+general and so refreshing to the _gourmet_, the painter who can find a
+joy in the sublime beauty of ugliness.
+
+[Illustration: RENOIR. THE TERRACE.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+Degas was older than Manet. He had run through all phases of French art
+since Ingres. His first pictures, "Spartan Youths" and "Semiramis
+building the Walls of Babylon," might indeed have been painted by
+Ingres, to whom he looks up even now as to the first star in the
+firmament of French art. Then for a time he was influenced by the
+suggestive and tender intimacy in feeling and the soft, quiet harmony of
+Chardin. He had also an enthusiasm for Delacroix: less for his
+exaggerated colouring than for the lofty mark of style in the gestures
+and movements painted by this great Romanticist, which Degas endeavoured
+to transfer to the pantomime of the ballet. From Manet he learnt
+softness and fluency of modelling. And finally the Japanese communicated
+to him the principle of their dispersed composition, the choice of
+standpoint, allowing the artist to look up from beneath or down from
+above, the taste for fantastic decoration, the suggestive method of
+emphasising this and suppressing that, the surprise of detail introduced
+here and there in a perfectly arbitrary fashion. From the original and
+bizarre union of all these elements he formed his exquisite,
+marvellously expressive, and entirely personal style, which is hard to
+describe with the pen, and would be defectively indicated by reference
+to Besnard, who is allied to him in the treatment of light. It is only
+in literature that Degas has a parallel. If a comparison between them be
+at all possible, it might be said that his style in many ways recalls
+that of the brothers de Goncourt. As these have enriched their language
+with a new vocabulary for the expression of new emotions, Degas has made
+for himself a new technique. Utterly despising everything pretty and
+anecdotic, he has the secret of gaining the effect intended by
+refinements of drawing and tone-values, just as the de Goncourts by the
+association of words; he has borrowed phrases from all the lexicons of
+painting; he has mixed oils, pastel, and water-colour together, and,
+such as he is to-day, he must, like the de Goncourts, be reckoned
+amongst the most delicate and refined artists of the century.
+
+His range of subjects finds its limit in one point: he has the greatest
+contempt for banality, for the repetition of others and of himself.
+Every subject has to give opportunity for the introduction of special
+models, not hitherto employed, of pictorial experiments and novel
+problems of light. He made his starting-point, the grace and charming
+movements of women. Trim Parisian laundresses in their spotless aprons,
+little shop-girls in their _boutiques_, the spare grace of racehorses
+with their elastic jockeys, marvellous portraits, like that of Duranty,
+women getting out of the bath, the movements of the workwoman, and the
+toilette and _négligé_ of the woman of the world, boudoir scenes, scenes
+in court, and scenes in boxes at the theatre--he has painted them all.
+And with what truth and life! How admirably his figures stand! how
+completely they are what they give themselves out to be! The Circus and
+the Opera soon became his favourite field of study. In his ballet-girls
+he found fresher artistic material than in the goddesses and nymphs of
+the antique.
+
+At the same time the highest conceivable demands were here made on the
+capacities of the painter and the draughtsman, and on his powers of
+characterisation. Of all modern artists Degas is the man who creates the
+greatest illusion as an interpreter of artificial light, of the glare of
+the footlights before which these _décolleté_ singers move in their
+gauze skirts. And these dancers are real dancers, vivid every one of
+them, every one of them individual. The nervous force of the born
+ballerina is sharply differentiated from the apathy of the others who
+merely earn their bread by their legs. How fine are his novices with
+tired, faded, pretty faces, when they have to sweep a curtsey, and pose
+so awkwardly in their delightful shyness. How marvellously he has
+grasped the fleeting charm of this moment. With what spirited
+nonchalance he groups his girls enveloped in white muslin and coloured
+sashes. Like the Japanese, he claims the right of rendering only what
+interests him and appears to make a striking effect--"the vivid points,"
+in Hokusai's phrase--and does not hold himself bound to add a lifeless
+piece of canvas for the sake of "rounded composition." In pictures,
+where it is his purpose to show the varied forms of the legs and feet of
+his dancers, he only paints the upper part of the orchestra and the
+lower part of the stage--that is to say, heads, hands, and instruments
+below, and dancing legs above. He is equally uncompromising in his
+street and racing scenes, so that often it is merely the hindquarters of
+the horses and the back of the jockey that are visible. His pictures,
+however, owe not a little of their life and piquancy to this brilliant
+method of cutting through the middle, and to these triumphant evasions
+of all the vulgar rules of composition. But, for the matter of that,
+surely Dürer knew what he was about when, in his pictures of apocalyptic
+riders, instead of completing the composition, he left it fragmentary,
+to create an impression of the wild gallop.
+
+[Illustration: C. PISSARRO. SITTING UP.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: C. PISSARRO. ROUEN.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+A special group amongst the artist's ballet pictures is that in which he
+represents the training of novices, the severe course through which the
+grub must pass before taking wing as a butterfly. Here is displayed a
+strange fantastic anatomy, only comparable to the acrobatic distortions
+to which the Japanese are so much addicted in their art. But it is
+precisely these pictures which were of determining importance for the
+development of Degas. In the quest of unstable lines and expressions,
+instead of feeling reality in all its charming grace, he came to behold
+it only in its degeneration. He was impelled to render the large outline
+of the modern woman--the female figure which has grown to be a product
+of art beneath the array of toilette--even in the most ungraceful
+moments. He painted the woman who does not suspect that she is being
+observed; he painted her seen, as it were, through the key-hole or the
+slit of a curtain, and making, to some extent, the most atrociously ugly
+movements. He was the merciless observer of creatures whom society turns
+into machines for its pleasure--dancing, racing, and erotic machines. He
+has depicted cruelly the sort of woman Zola has drawn in Nana--the woman
+who has no expression, no play in her eyes, the woman who is merely
+animal, motionless as a Hindu idol. His pictures of this class are a
+natural history of prostitution of terrible veracity, a great poem on
+the flesh, like the works of Titian and Rubens, except that in the
+latter blooming beauty is the substance of the brilliant strophes,
+while in Degas it is wrinkled skin, decaying youth, and the artificial
+brightness of enamelled faces. "_A vous autres il faut la vie naturelle,
+à moi la vie factice._"
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art française._
+
+ C. PISSARRO. SYDENHAM CHURCH.]
+
+This sense of having lived too much expressed itself also in the haughty
+contempt with which he withdrew himself from exhibitions, the public,
+and criticism. Any one who is not a constant visitor at Durand-Ruel's
+has little opportunity of seeing the pictures of Degas. The conception
+of fame is something which he does not seem to possess. Being a man of
+cool self-reliance, he paints to please himself, without caring how his
+pictures may suit the notions of the world or the usages of the schools.
+For years he has kept aloof from the Salon, and some people say that he
+has never exhibited at all. And he keeps at as great a distance from
+Parisian society. In earlier days, when Manet, Pissarro, and Duranty met
+at the Café Nouvelle Athènes, he sometimes appeared after ten o'clock--a
+little man with round shoulders and a shuffling walk, who only took part
+in the conversation by now and then breaking in with brief, sarcastic
+observations. After Manet's death he made the Café de la Rochefoucauld
+his place of resort. And young painters went on his account also to the
+Café de la Rochefoucauld and pointed him out to each other, saying,
+"That is Degas." When artists assemble together the conversation usually
+turns upon him, and he is accorded the highest honours by the younger
+generation. He is revered as the haughty _Independant_ who stands
+unapproachably above the _profanum vulgus_, the great unknown who never
+passed through the ordeal of a hanging committee, but whose spirit
+hovers invisibly over every exhibition.
+
+[Illustration: SISLEY. OUTSKIRTS OF A WOOD.]
+
+A refined _charmeur_, _Auguste Renoir_, has made important discoveries,
+in portrait painting especially. He is peculiarly the painter of women,
+whose elegance, delicate skin, and velvet flesh he interprets with
+extraordinary deftness. Léon Bonnat's portraits were great pieces of
+still-life. The persons sit as if they were nailed to their seats. Their
+flesh looks like zinc and their clothes like steel. In Carolus Duran's
+hands portrait painting degenerated into a painting of draperies. Most
+of his portraits merely betray the amount which the toilettes have cost;
+they are inspired by their rich array of silk and heavy curtains; often
+they are crude symphonies in velvet and satin. The rustle of robes, the
+dazzling--or loud--fulness of colour in glistening materials, gave him
+greater pleasure than the lustre of flesh-tints and any glance of
+inquiry into the moral temperament of his models. Renoir endeavours to
+arrest the scarcely perceptible and transitory movements of the features
+and the figure. Placing his persons boldly in the real light of day
+which streams around, he paints atmospheric influences in all their
+results, like a landscapist. Light is the sole and absolute thing. The
+fallen trunk of a tree upon which the broken sunlight plays in yellow
+and light green reflections, and the body or head of a girl, are subject
+to the same laws. Stippled with yellowish-green spots of light, the
+latter loses its contours and becomes a part of nature. With this study
+of the effects of light and reflection there is united an astonishing
+sureness in the analysis of sudden phases of expression. The way in
+which laughter begins and ends, the moment between laughter and weeping,
+the passing flash of an eye, a fleeting motion of the lips, all that
+comes like lightning and vanishes as swiftly, shades of expression which
+had hitherto seemed indefinable, are seized by Renoir in all their
+suddenness. In the portraits of Bonnat and Duran there are people who
+have "sat," but here are people from whom the painter has had the power
+of stealing and holding fast the secret of their being at a moment when
+they were not "sitting." Here are dreamy blond girls gazing out of their
+great blue eyes, ethereal fragrant flowers, like lilies leaning against
+a rose-bush through which the rays of the setting sun are shining. Here
+are coquettish young girls, now laughing, now pouting, now blithe and
+gay, now angry once more, and now betwixt both moods in a charming
+passion. And there are women of the world of consummate elegance,
+slender and slight-built figures, with small hands and feet, an even
+pallor, almond-shaped eyes catching every light, moist shining lips of a
+tender grace, bearing witness to a love of pleasure refined by artifice.
+And children especially there are, children of the sensitive and
+flexuous type: some as yet unconscious, dreamy, and free from thought;
+others already animated, correct in pose, graceful, and wise. The three
+girls, in his "Portrait of Mesdemoiselles M----," grouped around the
+piano, the eldest playing, the second accompanying upon the violin, and
+the youngest quietly attentive, with both hands resting upon the piano,
+are exquisite, painted with an entirely naïve and novel truth. All the
+poses are natural, all the colours bright and subtle--the furniture, the
+yellow bunches of flowers, the fresh spring dresses, the silk stockings.
+But such tender poems of childhood and blossoming girlhood form merely a
+part of Renoir's work. In his "Dinner at Chaton" a company of ladies and
+gentlemen are seated at table, laughing, talking, and listening; the
+champagne sparkles in the glasses, and the cheerful, easy mood which
+comes with dessert is in the ascendant. In his "Moulin de la Galette" he
+painted the excitement of the dance--whirling pairs, animated faces,
+languid poses, and everything enveloped in sunlight and dust. Renoir's
+peculiar field is the study of the various delicate emotions which
+colour the human countenance.
+
+[Illustration: _By permission of M. Durand-Ruel._
+
+ MONET. A STUDY.]
+
+The merit of _Camille Pissarro_ is to have once more set the painting of
+peasants, weakened by Breton, upon the virile lines of Millet, and to
+have supplemented them in those places where Millet was technically
+inadequate. When the Impressionist movement began Camille Pissarro had
+already a past: he was the recognised landscape painter of the Norman
+plains; the straightforward observer of peasants, the plain and simple
+painter of the vegetable gardens stretching round peasant dwellings.
+Since Millet, no artist had placed himself in closer relationship to the
+life of the earth and of cultivated nature. Though a delicate analyst,
+Pissarro had not the epic feeling nor the religious mysticism of Millet;
+but like Millet he was a rustic in spirit, like him a Norman, from the
+land of vineyards, of large farmyards, green meadows, soft avenues of
+poplars, and wide horizons reddened by the sun. He was healthy, tender,
+and intimate in feeling, rejoiced in the richness of the land and the
+voluptuous undulation of fields, and he could give a striking impression
+of a region in its work-a-day character. Celebrated in the press as the
+legitimate descendant of Millet, he might have contented himself with
+his regular successes. He had, indeed, arrived at an age when men
+usually leave off making experiments, and reap what they have sown in
+their youth, at an age when many conquerors occupy themselves with the
+mechanical reproduction of their own works. Nevertheless the
+Impressionistic movement became for Pissarro the starting-point of a new
+way.
+
+[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET. _The Century._]
+
+[Illustration: MONET'S HOME AT GIVERNY. _The Century._]
+
+He aimed at fresher, intenser, and more transparent light, at a more
+cogent observation of phenomena, at a more exact analysis of the
+encompassing atmosphere. He celebrated the eternal, immutable light in
+which the world is bathed. He loved it specially during clear
+afternoons, when it plays over bright green meadows fringed by soft
+trees, or at the foot of low hills. He has sought it on the slopes
+across which it ripples deliciously, on the plains from which it rises
+like a light veil of gauze. He studied the play of light upon the
+bronzed skin of labourers, on the coats of animals, on the foliage and
+fruit of trees. He characterised the seasons, the hour of day, the
+moment, with the conscientiousness of a peasant intent upon noting the
+direction of the wind and the position of the sun. The cold, chilly
+humour of autumn afternoons, the vivid clarity of sparkling wintry
+skies, the bloom and lightness of spring mornings, the oppressive
+brooding of summer, the luxuriance or the aridity of the earth, the
+young vigour of foliage or the fading of nature robbed of her
+adornment,--all these Pissarro has painted with largeness, plainness,
+and simplicity. He strays over the fields, watching the shepherd driving
+out his flock, the wains rumbling along the uneven roads, the quiet,
+rhythmical movement of the gleaners, the graceful gait of the women who
+have been reaping and now return home in the evening with a rake across
+their shoulders; he stations himself at the entrance of villages where
+the apple-pickers are at work, and the women minding geese stand by
+their drove; he notes the whole life of peasants, and gives truer and
+more direct intelligence of it than Millet did in his broad, synthetic
+manner. Where there is a classic quietude and an oily heaviness in
+Millet, there is in Pissarro palpitating life, transparence, and
+freshness. He sees the country in bright, laughing tones; and the pure
+white of the kerchiefs, the pale rose-colour or tender blue bodices of
+his peasant women, lend his pictures a blithe delicacy of colour. His
+girls are like fresh flowers of the field which the sun of June brings
+forth upon the meadows. There is something intense and yet soft, strong
+and delicate, true and rhythmical in Pissarro's tender poems of country
+life.
+
+[Illustration: MONET. MORNING ON THE SEINE.]
+
+[Illustration: MONET. A WALK IN GREY WEATHER.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+So long as any advance beyond Rousseau and Corot seemed impossible,
+pictures of talent but only moderate importance had increased in number
+in the province of landscape. The landscape painters who immediately
+followed the great pioneers loved nature on account of her comparative
+coolness in summer; upon sites where the classic artists of
+Fontainebleau dreamed and painted they built comfortable villas and
+settled down with the sentiments of a householder. The country was
+parcelled out, and each one undertook his part, and painted it
+conscientiously without arousing any novel sensations. Impressionism
+gave landscape painting, which showed signs of being split into
+specialties, once more a firm basis, a charming field of study. To
+communicate impressions without any of the studio combinations, just as
+they strike us suddenly, to preserve the vividness and cogency of the
+first imprint of nature upon the mind, was the great problem which
+Impressionism placed before the landscape painters. The artists of
+Fontainebleau painted neither the rawness and rigidity of winter nor the
+sultry atmosphere and scorching heat of summer; they painted artistic
+and dignified and exquisite works. The Impressionists did not approach
+their themes as poets, but as naturalists. In their hands landscape,
+which in Corot, Millet, Diaz, Rousseau, Daubigny, and Jongkind is an
+occasional poem, becomes a likeness of a region under special influences
+of light. With more delicate nerves, and a sensibility almost greater,
+they allowed nature to work upon them, and perceived in the symphonies
+of every hour strains never heard before, transparent shadows, the
+vibration of atoms of light. decomposing the lines of contour, that
+tremor of the atmosphere which is the breath of landscape. Here also
+England was not without influence. As Corot and Rousseau received an
+impulse from Constable and Bonington in 1830, Monet and Sisley returned
+from London with their eyes dazzled by the light of the great Turner.
+Laid hold upon, like Turner, by the miracles of the universe, by the
+golden haze which trembles in a sunbeam, they succeeded in painting
+light in spite of the defectiveness of our chemical mediums.
+
+[Illustration: MONET. THE CHURCH AT VARANGÉVILLE.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+_Alfred Sisley_ might be compared with Daubigny. He settled in the
+neighbourhood of Moret, upon the banks of the Loing, and is the most
+soft and tender amongst the Impressionists. Like Daubigny, he loves the
+germinating energy, the blossoming, and the growth of young and luminous
+spring; the moist banks of quiet streamlets, budding beeches, and the
+rye-fields growing green, the variegated flowering of the meadows, clear
+skies, ladies walking in bright spring dresses, and the play of light
+upon the vernal foliage. He has painted tender mornings breathed upon
+with rosy bloom, reeds with a bluish gleam, and moist duck-weed, grey
+clouds mirrored in lonely pools, alleys of poplar, peasants' houses, and
+hills and banks, melting softly in the warm atmosphere. His pictures,
+like those of the master of Oise, leave the impression of youth and
+freshness, of quiet happiness, or of smiling melancholy.
+
+[Illustration: MONET. RIVER SCENE.]
+
+[Illustration: MONET. THE ROCKS AT BELLE-ISLE.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: MONET. HAY-RICKS.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+On many of his pictures, saturated as they are with light, _Claude
+Monet_ could inscribe the name of Turner without inciting unbelief. In
+exceedingly unequal works, which are nevertheless full of audacity and
+genius, he has grasped what would seem to be intangible. Except Turner
+there is no one who has carried so far the study of the effects of
+light, of the gradations and reflections of sunbeams, of momentary
+phases of illumination, no one who has embodied more subtle and forcible
+impressions. For Monet man has no existence, but only the earth and the
+light. He delights in the rugged rocks of Belle-Isle, and the wild banks
+of the Creuse, when the oppressive sun of summer is brooding over them.
+He paints phenomena as transitory as the shades of expression in Renoir.
+The world appears in a glory of light, such as it only has in fleeting
+moments, and such as would be blinding were it always to be seen.
+Nature, in his version, is an inhospitable dwelling where it is
+impossible to dream and live. One hopes sometimes to hear a word of
+intimate association from Monet--but in vain; Claude Monet is only an
+eye. Carouses of sunshine and orgies in the open air are the exclusive
+materials of his pictures. Thus he has little to say for those who seek
+the soul of a human being in every landscape. Like Degas, he is _par
+excellence_ the master in technique whose highest endeavour is to
+enrich the art of painting with novel sensations and unedited effects,
+even if it has to be done by violence. There are sea-pieces filled with
+the spirit of evening, when the sea, red as a mirror of copper, merges
+into the glory of the sky, in a great radiant ocean of infinity; moods
+of evening storm, when gloomy clouds over the restless tree-tops race
+across the smoky red sky, losing tiny shreds in their flight, little
+thin strips of loosened cloud, saturated through and through with a
+wine-red glow by the splendour of the sun. Or there are spring meadows
+fragrant with bloom, and hills parched by the sun; rushing trains with
+their white smoke gleaming in the light; yellow sails scudding over
+glittering waters; waves shining blue, red, and golden; and burning
+ships, with shooting tongues of flame leaping upon the masts; and,
+behind, a jagged rim of the evening glow. Claude Monet has followed
+light everywhere--in Holland, Normandy, the South of France,
+Belle-Isle-en-Mer, the villages of the Seine, London, Algiers, Brittany.
+He became an enthusiast for nature as she is in Norway and Sweden, for
+French cathedrals rising into the sky, tall and fair, like the peaks of
+great promontories. He interpreted the surge of towns, the movement of
+the sea, the majestic solitude of the sky. But he knows too that the
+artist could pass his life in the same corner of the earth and work for
+years upon the same objects without the drama of nature played before
+him ever becoming exhausted. For the light which streams between things
+is for ever different. So he stood one evening two paces in front of his
+little house, in the garden, amid a flaming sea of flowers scarlet like
+poppies. White summer clouds shifted in the sky, and the beams of the
+setting sun fell upon two stacks, standing solitary in a solitary field.
+Claude Monet began to paint, and came again the next day, and the day
+after that, and every day throughout the autumn, and winter, and spring.
+In a series of fifteen pictures, "The Hay-ricks," he painted--as Hokusai
+did in his hundred views of the Fuji mountain--the endless variations
+produced by season, day, and hour upon the eternal countenance of
+nature. The lonely field is like a glass, catching the effects of
+atmosphere, the breeze, and the most fleeting light. The stacks gleam
+softly in the brightness of the beautiful afternoons, stand out sharp
+and clear against the cold sky of the forenoon, loom like phantoms in
+the mist of a November evening, or sparkle like glittering jewels
+beneath the caress of the rising sun. They shine like glowing ovens,
+absorbed by the light of the autumnal sunset; they are surrounded as by
+a rosy halo, when the early sun pierces like a wedge through the dense
+morning mist. They rise distinctly, covered with sparkling, rose-tinged
+snow, into the cloudless heaven, and cast their pure, blue shadows upon
+the silent, white, wintry landscape, or stand out in ghostly outlines
+against the night firmament, mantled with silver by the moonlight.
+Without moving his easel, Monet has interpreted the silence of winter,
+and autumn with her sad and splendid feasts of colour--dusk and rain,
+snow and frost and sun. He heard the voices of evening and the
+jubilation of morning; he painted the eternal undulation of light upon
+the same objects, the altered impression which the same particle of
+nature yields according to the changing light of the hour. He chanted
+the poetry of the universe in a single fragment of nature, and would be
+a pantheistic artist of world-wide compass had he merely painted these
+stacks of hay for the rest of his natural existence.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ MONET. A VIEW OF ROUEN.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+And here ends the battle for the liberation of modern art. _Libertas
+artibus restituta._ The painters of the nineteenth century are no longer
+imitators, but have become makers of a new thing, "enlargers of the
+empire." The prophetic words written in the beginning of the nineteenth
+century by the Hamburger, Philipp Otto Runge, "light, colour, and moving
+life," were to form the great problem, the great conquest of modern art;
+they were fulfilled after two generations. Through the Impressionists
+art was enriched by an opulence of new beauties. A new and independent
+style had been discovered for the representation of new things, and a
+new province--a province peculiar to herself--was won for painting.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND
+
+
+The flood of Impressionism was at the same time crossed by another
+current. Impressionism was a phase of progressive art of world-wide
+influence. It proclaimed that nature and life were the inexhaustible
+mine of beauty. Then after Naturalism had taught artists to work upon
+the impressions of external reality in an independent manner, a
+transition was made by some who embodied the impressions of their inward
+spirit in a free creative fashion, unborrowed from the old masters.
+
+We feel the need of living not merely in the world around us, but in an
+inner world that we build up ourselves, a world far more strange and
+fair, far more luminous than that in which our feet stumble so
+helplessly. We must needs mount upon the pinions of fancy into the wide
+land of vision, build castles in the clouds, watch their rise and their
+fall, and follow into misty distance the freaks of their changing
+architecture. The more grey and colourless the present may be, the more
+alluringly does the fairy splendour of vanished worlds of beauty flit
+before us. It is the very banality of everyday life that renders us more
+sensitive to the delicate charm of old myths, and we receive them in a
+more childlike, impressionable way than any earlier age, for we look
+upon them with fresh eyes that have been rendered keen by yearning.
+
+From all this it is evident that Impressionism could not remain the mode
+of expression for the whole world of the present day. The longing for
+old-world romance would brook no refusal. It was demanded from art not
+that she should mirror nature, nature could be seen without her aid, but
+that she should carry us away on dream-wings to a distant world more
+beautiful than our own; not that she should be merely modern, but that
+she should afford us even to-day some reflection of that beauty which
+sheds forth its lustre from the works of the old masters.
+
+This yearning after far-off worlds of beauty was combined with a demand
+for new delights of colour. The Impressionists had centred every effort
+in compassing the most difficult elements of the world of
+phenomena--light, air, and colour--ending in extreme imitation of
+reality. Then came a desire for colours, more radiant, more vivid than
+ever was seen on this poor world of ours; and since hardly any of the
+younger generation fulfilled the desire of the modern longing, the
+standard of a bygone age was raised aloft, and there set in the
+anti-naturalistic, anti-modern current that still survived from the age
+of romance in the work-a-day world of the present.
+
+How was it possible that England should have taken the lead upon this
+occasion also? Can an Englishman, a matter-of-fact being who finds his
+happiness in comfort and a practical sphere of action, be at the same
+time a Romanticist? Is not London the most modern town in Europe? Yet,
+without a question, this is the very reason why the New Romanticism
+found its earliest expression there, although it was the place where
+Naturalism had reigned longest and with the greatest strictness. There
+was a reaction against the prose of everyday life, just as, in the
+earlier part of the century, English landscape painting had been a
+reaction against town life. To escape the whistle of locomotives and the
+restless bustle of the struggle for existence, men take refuge in a
+far-off world, a world where everything is fair and graceful, and all
+emotions tender and noble, a world where no rudeness, no discord, and
+nothing fierce or brutal disturbs the harmony of ideal perfection. These
+artists become revellers in a land of fantasy, and flee from reality to
+an inner life which they have created for themselves, wander from
+London's railways and fogs to the sunny Italy of Botticelli, take their
+rest in the land of poetry, and come back with packing-cases full of
+lovely pictures and hearts full of happy emotions.
+
+Moreover, they find in the primitive artists that simplicity which is
+most refreshing of all to overstrained spirits. Having produced Byron,
+Shelley, and Turner, the English were artistic _gourmets_, sated with
+all enjoyments in the realms of the intellect, and they now meditated
+works through which yet a new thrill of beauty might pass through the
+imagination. In the primitive masters they discovered all the qualities
+which had vanished from art since the sixteenth century--inofficious
+purity, innocent and touching Naturalism, antiquated austerity, and an
+enchanting depth of feeling. Jaded with other experiences, they admired
+in those naïve spirits the capacity for ecstatic rapture and vision--in
+other words, for the highest gratification. If one could but have in
+this nineteenth century such feelings as were known to Dante, the gloomy
+Florentine; Botticelli, the great Jeremiah of the Renaissance; or the
+tender mystic Fra Angelico! Surfeited with modernity, and endowed with
+nerves of acute refinement, artists went back in their fancy to this
+luxuriously blissful condition, and finally came to the point at which
+modernity was transformed once more into childish babble and the
+unbelieving materialism of the present age into a mystical and romantic
+union with the old currents of emotion.
+
+Under the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti English pre-Raphaelitism
+now entered upon a new and entirely different phase.
+
+[Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. _Mag. of Art._]
+
+Although Rossetti was the soul of the earlier movement, he was a man
+whose temperament was even then essentially different from that of his
+comrades Millais and Hunt, who founded the Brotherhood with him in 1848.
+Even the two works which he exhibited with them in 1849 and 1850 make
+one feel the great gulf which lay between him and them. In the former
+year, when Hunt was represented by his "Rienzi," and Millais by his
+"Lorenzo and Isabella," Rossetti produced his "Girlhood of Mary Virgin."
+In the following, when Hunt painted "The Converted British Family
+sheltering a Christian Missionary" and Millais "The Child Jesus in the
+Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter," Rossetti came forward with his "Ecce
+Ancilla Domini." "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" was a little picture of
+austere simplicity and ascetic character; it was intentionally angular
+in drawing, and possessed a certain archaic bloom. The Virgin, clad in
+grey garments, sits at a curiously shaped frame embroidering a lily with
+gold threads upon a red ground. The flower she is copying stands before
+her in a vase, and a little angel, with roseate wings, is watering it
+with an air of abashed reverence. St. Anne is busy by the side of the
+Virgin--both being, respectively, portraits of the artist's mother and
+sister--and in the background St. Joachim is binding a vine to a
+trellis. And several Latin books are lying upon the floor. The second
+work, "Ecce Ancilla Domini," is the familiar picture which is now in the
+National Gallery--a harmony of white upon white of indescribable
+graciousness and delicacy. Mary, a bashful, meditative, and childlike
+maiden, in a white garment, is shown in a half-kneeling attitude upon a
+white bed. The walls of the chamber are white, and in front of her there
+stands a frame at which she has been working; and a piece of embroidery,
+with a lily which she has begun, hangs over it. Before her stands the
+angel with flame rising from his feet, in solemn, peaceful gravity, as
+he extends towards her the stalk of the lily which he holds. A dove
+flies gently in through the window. Now, in spite of their romantic
+subjects the work of Hunt and Millais is lucid and temperate, while
+Rossetti is dreamily mystical. The two former were straightforward,
+true, and natural, whereas the simplicity of the latter was subtilised
+and consciously affected. It was due to the vibrating delicacy of his
+distempered, seething imagination that he was able to give himself a
+deceptive appearance of being a primitive artist. The creative power of
+the two former is an earnest power of the understanding, whereas in the
+latter there is a vague dreaminess, a tendency to luxuriate in his own
+moods, an efflorescence of tones and colours. In the one case there is
+an angular but single-minded study of nature; in the other there is the
+demureness and embarrassment of the Quattrocento, a demureness breaking
+into blossom, and an embarrassment full of charm--a romanticism which
+cherished the yearning for repose in the childlike and innocent Middle
+Ages, and clothed it with all the attractions of mysticism. Holman Hunt,
+Madox Brown, and Millais were realists in their drawing, men who wanted
+to represent objects with all possible accuracy, to be faithful in
+rendering the finest fibre of a petal and every thread in a fabric.
+Rossetti's picture was a symphonic ode in pigments, and he himself was
+one of the earliest of the modern lyricists of colour. This distinction
+became wider and wider with the course of time, and as early as 1858 he
+found himself deserted by his earlier comrades. Madox Brown, Holman
+Hunt, and especially Millais, in their further development, tended more
+and more to become Naturalists, and were finally led to completely
+realistic subjects from the immediate present by the inviolable fidelity
+with which they studied nature. On the other hand, Rossetti became the
+centre of a new circle of artists, who directed the current of what was
+originally Naturalism more and more into mysticism and refined archaism.
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ ROSSETTI. BEATA BEATRIX.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+In 1856 _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_ was founded as a monthly
+periodical. There were several contributions by Rossetti, and in this
+way he became so well known in Oxford that the Union accepted an offer
+from him to execute a series of wall-paintings. Accordingly he painted
+several pictures from the Arthurian legends, making the sketches for
+them himself, and employing for their elaboration a number of young men,
+some of them amateur artists and students at the University. In this way
+he came into connection with Arthur Hughes, William Morris, and Edward
+Burne-Jones. These artists, afterwards joined by Spencer Stanhope and
+Walter Crane, both of them younger men, became--with George Frederick
+Watts at their flank--the leading members of the new brotherhood, the
+representatives of that New pre-Raphaelitism in which interest is still
+centred in England.
+
+[Illustration: _Pageant._
+
+ ROSSETTI. MONNA ROSA.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti._)]
+
+Their art is a kind of Italian Renaissance upon English soil. The
+romantic chord which vibrates in old English poetry is united to the
+grace and purity of Italian taste, the classical lucidity of the Pagan
+mythology with Catholic mysticism, and the most modern riot of emotion
+with the demure vesture of the primitive Florentines. Through this
+mixture of heterogeneous elements English New Idealism is probably the
+most remarkable form of art upon which the sun has ever shone: borrowed
+and yet in the highest degree personal, it is an art combining an almost
+childlike simplicity of feeling with a morbid _hautgoût_, the most
+attentive and intelligent study of the old masters with free, creative,
+modern imagination, the most graceful sureness of drawing and the most
+sparkling individuality of colour with a helpless, stammering accent
+introduced of set purpose. The old Quattrocentisti wander amongst the
+real Italian flowers; but with the New pre-Raphaelites one enters a
+hot-house: one is met by a soft damp heat, bright exotic flowers exhale
+an overpowering fragrance, juicy fruits catch the eye, and slender
+palms, through the branches of which no rough wind may bluster, gently
+sway their long, broad fans.
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ ROSSETTI. ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI.
+
+ (_By permission of Messrs. T. Agnew & Sons, the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+Professor Lombroso would certainly find the material for ingenious
+disquisition in Rossetti, who introduced this Italian phase, and himself
+came of an Italian stock. And it might almost seem as if a soul from
+those old times had found its reincarnation in the lonely painter who
+lived at Chelsea, though it was a soul who no longer bore heaven in his
+heart like Fra Angelico. In his whole being he seems like a phenomenon
+of atavism, like a citizen of that long-buried Italy who, after many
+transmigrations, had strayed into the misty North, to the bank of the
+Thames, and from thence looked in his home-sickness ever towards the
+South, enveloped in poetry and glowing in the sun.
+
+Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a Catholic and an Italian. Amid his English
+surroundings he kept the feelings of one of Latin race. His father, the
+patriot and commentator upon Dante, had originally lived in Naples, and
+inflamed the popular party there by his passionate writings. In
+consequence of the active part which he took in political agitation he
+lost his post at the Bourbon Museum, escaped from Italy upon a warship,
+disguised as an English officer, settled in London in 1824, and married
+Francesca Polidori, the daughter of a secretary of Count Alfieri. Here
+he became Professor of the Italian language at King's College, and
+published several works on Dante, the most important of which, _Dante's
+Beatrice_, written in 1852, once more supported the theory that Beatrice
+was not a real person. Dante Gabriel, the son of this Dante student
+Gabriele Rossetti, was born in London on 12th May 1828. The whole family
+actively contributed to scholarship and poetry. His elder sister, Maria
+Francesca, was the authoress of _A Shadow of Dante_, a work which gives
+a most valuable explanation of the scheme of _The Divine Comedy_; his
+younger sister, Christina, was one of the most eminent poetesses of
+England; and his brother, William Michael Rossetti, is well known as an
+art-critic and a student of Shelley. Even from early youth Dante Gabriel
+Rossetti was familiar with the world of Dante, and brought up in the
+worship of Dante's wonderful age and an enthusiasm for his mystic and
+transcendental poetry. He knew Dante by heart, and Guido Cavalcanti. The
+mystical poet became his guide through life, and led him to Fra
+Angelico, the mystic of painting. Indeed, the world of Dante and of the
+painters antecedent to Raphael is his spiritual home.
+
+[Illustration: _Portfolio._
+
+ ROSSETTI. SANCTA LILIAS.]
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ ROSSETTI. ASTARTE SYRIACA.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Mansell & Co._
+
+ ROSSETTI. THE DAY DREAM.]
+
+He was barely eighteen when he became a pupil at the Royal Academy,
+studying a couple of years later under Madox Brown, who was not many
+years older than himself. Even then Rossetti had an almost mesmeric
+influence upon his friends. He was a pale, tall, thin young man, who
+always walked with a slight stoop; reserved, dry in his manner, and
+careless in dress, there was nothing captivating about him at a
+transitory meeting. But his pale face was lit up by his unusually
+reflective, deeply clouded, contemplative eyes; and about his defiant
+mouth there played that contempt of the profane crowd which is natural
+to a superior mind, while the laurel of fame was already twined about
+his youthful forehead. In 1849, when he was exhibiting his earliest
+picture, he had published in _The Germ_, to say nothing of his numerous
+poems, a mystical, visionary, sketch in prose named _Hand and Soul_,
+which was much praised by men of the highest intellect in London. Soon
+afterwards he published a volume entitled _Dante and his Circle_, in
+which he translated a number of old Italian poems, and rendered Dante's
+_Vita Nuova_ into strictly archaic English prose. Reserved as he was
+towards strangers, he was irresistibly attractive to his friends, and
+his brilliant, genial conversation won him the goodwill of every one. A
+man of gifted and delicate nature, sensitive to an extreme degree, a
+sedentary student who had yet an enthusiasm for knightly deeds, a jaded
+spirit capable of morbidly heightened, exotic sensibility and soft,
+melting reverie, one whose overstrained nerves only vibrated if he slept
+in the daytime and worked at night, it seemed as though Rossetti was
+born to be the father of the _décadence_, of that state of spirit which
+every one now perceives to be flooding Europe.
+
+[Illustration: ROSSETTI. STUDY FOR ASTARTE SYRIACA.]
+
+His later career was as quiet as its opening had been brilliant. After
+that graciously sentimental little picture, "Ecce Ancilla Domini,"
+Rossetti exhibited in public only once again; this was in 1856. From
+that date the public saw no more of his painting. He worked only for his
+friends and the friends of his friends. He was famous only in private,
+and looked up to like a god within a narrow circle of admirers. One of
+his acquaintances, the painter Deverell, had introduced him in 1850 to
+the woman who became for him what Saskia Uylenburgh had been for
+Rembrandt and Helene Fourment for Rubens--his type of feminine beauty.
+She was a young dressmaker's assistant, Miss Eleanor Siddal. Her thick,
+heavy hair was fair, with that faint reddish tint in it which Titian
+painted; it grew in two tapering bands deep down into the neck, being
+there somewhat fairer than it was above, and it curled thickly. Her eyes
+had something indefinite in their expression; nothing, however, that was
+dreamy, mobile, and changeable, for they seemed rather to be
+insuperable, fathomless, and unnaturally vivid. All the play of her
+countenance lay in the lower part of her face, in the nostrils, mouth,
+and chin. The mouth, indeed, with its deep corners, sharply chiselled
+outlines, and lips triumphantly curved, was particularly expressive. And
+her tall, slender figure had a refined distinction of line. In 1860 they
+married. Some of his most beautiful works were painted during this
+epoch--the "Beata Beatrix," the "Sibylla Palmifera," "Monna Vanna,"
+"Venus Verticordia," "Lady Lilith," and "The Beloved"--pictures which he
+painted without a thought of exhibition or success. After a union of
+barely two years this passionately loved woman died, shortly after the
+birth of a still-born child. He laid a whole volume of manuscript
+poems--many of them inspired by her--in the coffin, and they were buried
+with her. From that time he lived solitary and secluded from the world,
+surrounded by mediæval antiques, in his old-fashioned house at Chelsea,
+entirely given up to his dreams, a stranger in a world without light. He
+suffered much from ill-health, and was sensitive and hypochondriacal,
+and, indeed, undermined his health by an immoderate use of chloral. His
+friends entreated him to bring out his poems, and all England was
+expectant when Rossetti at length yielded to pressure, opened the grave
+of his wife, and took out the manuscript. The poems appeared in the
+April of 1870. The first edition was bought up in ten days, and there
+followed six others. Wherever he appeared he was honoured like a god.
+But the attacks directed against the first pictures of the
+pre-Raphaelites were repeated, although now transferred to another
+region. A pseudonymous article by Robert Buchanan in the _Contemporary
+Review_, and published afterwards as a pamphlet, entitled _The Fleshly
+School of Poetry_, accused Rossetti of immorality and imitation of
+Baudelaire and the Marquis de Sade. Rossetti stepped once more into the
+arena, and replied by a letter in the _Athenæum_ headed _The Stealthy
+School of Criticism_. From that time he shut himself up completely,
+never went out, and led "the hole-and-cornerest existence."
+
+In 1881 he published a second volume of poems, chiefly composed of
+ballads and sonnets. A year afterwards, on 10th April 1882, he died,
+honoured, even in the academical circles in which he never mingled, as
+one of the greatest men in England. The exhibition of his works which
+was opened a couple of months after his death created an immense
+sensation. Those of his pictures which had not been already sold
+straight from the easel were paid for with their weight in gold, and are
+now scattered in great English country mansions and certain private
+galleries in Florence. The only very rich collection in London is that
+of an intimate friend of the artist, the late Mr. Leyland, who had
+gathered together, in his splendid house in the West End, probably the
+most beautiful work of which the East can boast in carpets and vases, or
+the early Renaissance in intaglios, small bronzes, and ornaments. Here,
+surrounded by the quaint and delicate pictures of Carlo Crivelli and
+Botticelli, Rossetti was in the society of his contemporaries.
+
+[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
+
+ ROSSETTI. DANTE'S DREAM.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Liverpool, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ ROSSETTI. ROSA TRIPLEX.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+His range of subject was not wide. In his earliest period he had a fancy
+for painting small biblical pictures, of which "Ecce Ancilla Domini" is
+the best known, and the delightfully archaic "Girlhood of Mary Virgin"
+one of the most beautiful. But this austerely biblical tendency was not
+of long continuance. It soon gave way to a brilliant, imaginative
+Romanticism, to which he was prompted by Dante. "Giotto painting the
+Portrait of Dante," "The Salutation of Beatrice on Earth and in Eden"
+(from the _Vita Nuova_), "La Pia" (from the _Purgatorio_), the "Beata
+Beatrix," and "Dante's Dream," in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool,
+are the leading works which arose under the influence of the great
+Italian. The head of his wife, with her heavily veiled eyes, and
+Giotto's well-known picture of Dante, sufficed him for the creation of
+the most tender, mystical poems, which, at the same time, show him in
+all the splendour of his wealth of colour. He revels in the most
+brilliant hues; his pictures have the appearance of being bathed in a
+glow; and there is something deeply sensuous in his vivid and lustrous
+green, red, and violet tones. In the picture "Dante on the Anniversary
+of Beatrice's Death" the poet kneels at the open window which looks out
+upon Florence; he has been drawing, and a tablet is in his hand. The
+room is quite simple, a frieze with angels' heads being its only
+ornament. Visitors of rank have come to see him--an elderly magnate and
+his daughter--and have stood long behind him without his noticing their
+presence; for he has been thinking of Beatrice, and it is only when his
+attention is attracted to them by a friend that he turns round at last.
+The "Beata Beatrix," in the National Gallery in London--a picture begun
+in 1863 and ended in the August of 1866--treats of the death of Beatrice
+"under the semblance of a trance, in which Beatrice, seated in a balcony
+overlooking the city, is suddenly rapt from earth to heaven." In
+accordance with the description in the _Vita Nuova_, Beatrice sits in
+the balcony of her father's palace in strange ecstasy. Across the
+parapet of the balcony there is a view of the Arno and of that other
+palace where Dante passed his youth close to his adored mistress, until
+the unforgotten 9th of June 1290, when death robbed him of her. A
+peaceful evening light is shed upon the bank of the Arno, and plays upon
+the parapet with warm silvery beams. Beatrice is dressed in a garment
+belonging to no definite epoch, of green and rosy red, the colours of
+Love and Hope. Her head rises against a little patch of yellow sky
+between the two palaces, and seems to be surrounded by it as by a halo.
+She is in a trance, has the foreknowledge of her approaching death, and
+already lives through the spirit in another world, whilst her body is
+still upon the earth. Her hands are touched by a heavenly light. A dove
+of deep rose-coloured plumage alights upon her knees, bringing her a
+white poppy; whilst opposite, before the palace of Dante, the figure of
+Love stands, holding a flaming heart, and announcing to the poet that
+Beatrice has passed to a life beyond the earth.
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ ROSSETTI. SIR GALAHAD.]
+
+[Illustration: _Pageant._
+
+ ROSSETTI. MARY MAGDALENE AT THE HOUSE OF SIMON THE PHARISEE.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti._)]
+
+"La Donna Finestra," painted in 1879, and to be counted amongst his
+ripest creations, has connection with that passage in the _Vita Nuova_
+where Dante sinks to the ground overcome with sorrow for Beatrice's
+death, and is regarded with sympathy by a lady looking down from a
+window, the Lady of Pity, the human embodiment of compassion. "Dante's
+Dream" is probably the work which shows the painter at his zenith. The
+expression of the heads is profound and lofty, the composition severely
+mediæval and admirably complete; and although the painting is laboured,
+the total impression is nevertheless so cogent that it is impossible to
+forget it. "The scene," in Rossetti's own description, "is a chamber of
+dreams, strewn with poppies, where Beatrice is seen lying on a couch, as
+if just fallen back in death; the winged figure of Love carries his
+arrow pointed at the dreamer's heart, and with it a branch of
+apple-blossom; as he reaches the bier, Love bends for a moment over
+Beatrice with the kiss which her lover has never given her; while the
+two green-clad dream-ladies hold the pall full of May-blossom suspended
+for an instant before it covers her face for ever." The expression of
+ecstasy in Dante's face, and the still, angelical sweetness of Beatrice,
+are rendered with astonishing intensity. She lies upon the bier, pale as
+a flower, wrapped in a white shroud, with her lips parted as though she
+were gently breathing, and seems not dead but fallen asleep. Her fair
+hair floats round her in golden waves. In its vague folds the covering
+of the couch displays the marble outlines of the body: and a look of
+bliss rests upon the pure and clear-cut features of her lovely face.
+
+[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. CHANT D'AMOUR.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. THE DAYS OF CREATION.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+This "painting of the soul" occupied Rossetti almost exclusively in the
+third and most fruitful period of his life, when he painted hardly any
+pictures upon the larger scale, but separate feminine figures furnished
+with various poetic attributes, the deeper meaning of which is
+interpreted in his poems. "The Sphinx," in which he busied himself with
+the great riddle of life, is the only one containing several figures.
+Three persons--a youth, a man of ripe years, and a grey-beard--visit the
+secret dwelling of the Sphinx to inquire their destiny of this
+omniscient being. It is only the man who really puts the question; the
+grey-beard stumbles painfully towards her cavern, while the young man,
+wearied with his journey, falls dying to the earth before the very
+object of his quest. The Sphinx remains in impenetrable silence, with
+her green, inscrutable, mysterious eyes coldly and pitilessly fixed upon
+infinity. "The Blessed Damozel," "Proserpina," "Fiammetta," "The
+Daydream," "La Bella Mano," "La Ghirlandata," "Veronica Veronese," "Dis
+Manibus," "Astarte Syriaca" are all separate figures dedicated to the
+memory of his wife. As Dante immortalised his Beatrice, Rossetti
+honoured his wife, who died so early, in his poems and his pictures. He
+painted her as "The Blessed Damozel," with her gentle, saint-like face,
+her quiet mouth, her flowing golden hair and peaceful lids. He
+represents her as an angel of God standing at the gate of Heaven,
+looking down upon the earth. She is thinking of her lover, and of the
+time when she will see him again in heaven, and of the sacred songs that
+will be sung to him. Lilies rest upon her arm, and lovers once more
+united hover around.
+
+There is no action or rhetoric of gesture in Rossetti. His tall Gothic
+figures are motionless and silent, having almost the floating appearance
+of visionary figures which stand long before the gaze of the dreamer
+without taking bodily form. They glide along like phantoms and shadows,
+like the undulations of a blossom-laden tree or a field of corn waving
+in the wind. They neither talk nor weep nor laugh, and are only eloquent
+through their quiet hands, the most sensuous and the most spiritual
+hands ever painted, or with their eyes, the most dreamy and fascinating
+eyes which have been rendered in art since Leonardo da Vinci. In the
+pictures which Rossetti devoted to her, Eleanor Siddal is a marvellously
+lofty woman, glorified in the mysticism of a rare beauty. Rossetti
+drapes his idol in Venetian fashion, with rich garments which recall
+Giorgione in the character of their colour, and, like Botticelli, he
+strews flowers of deep fragrance around her, especially roses, which he
+painted with wonderful perfection and hyacinths, for which he had a
+great love, and the intoxicating perfume of which affected him greatly.
+
+[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. CIRCE.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+This taste for beautiful and deeply lustrous colours and rich
+accessories is, indeed, the one purely pictorial quality which this
+painter-poet has, if one understands by pictorial qualities the capacity
+for intoxicating one's self with the beauty of the visible world. His
+drawing is often faulty; and his bodies, enveloped in rich and heavy
+garments, are, perhaps, not invariably in accordance with anatomy. What
+explains Rossetti's fabulous success is purely the condition of spirit
+which went to the making of his works--that nervous vibration, that
+ecstasy of opium, that combination of suffering and sensuousness, and
+that romanticism drunk with beauty, which pervade his paintings. When
+they appeared they seemed like a revelation of a beautiful land, only
+one could not say where it existed--a revelation, indeed, for it
+revealed for the first time a world of story which was in no sense
+fabulous: there came a romanticism which was something real; a style
+arose which seemed as though it were woven of tones and colours, a style
+rioting in an everlasting exhilaration of spirit, breaking out sometimes
+in a glow of flame and sometimes in delicate, tremulous longing. Even
+where he paints a Madonna she is merely a woman in his eyes, and he
+endows her with the glowing fire of passionate fervour, with a trace of
+the joy of the earth, which no painter has ever given her before; and
+through this union of refined modern sensuousness and Catholic mysticism
+he has created a new thrill of beauty. His painting was a drop of a
+most precious essence, in its hues enchanting and intoxicating, the
+strongest spiritual potion ever brewed in English art. The intensity of
+his overstrained sensibility, and the wonderful Southern mosaic of form
+into which he poured this sensibility with elaborate refinement, make
+him seem own brother to Baudelaire.
+
+[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. PYGMALION (THE SOUL ATTAINS).
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Pageant._
+
+ BURNE-JONES. PERSEUS AND ANDROMEDA.]
+
+This tendency of spirit was so novel, this plunge in the tide of
+mysticism so enchanting, this delicate, archaic fragrance so
+overwhelming, that a new stage in the culture of modern England dates
+from the appearance of Rossetti. He borrowed nothing from his
+contemporaries, and all borrowed from him. There came a time when
+budding girls in London attired themselves like early Italians from
+Dante's _Inferno_, when Jellaby Postlethwaite, in Du Maurier's mocking
+skit, entered a restaurant at luncheon-time, and ordered a glass of
+water and placed in it a lily which he had brought with him. "What else
+can I bring?" asked the waiter. "Nothing," he sighed; "that is all I
+need." There began that æstheticism, that yearning for the lily and that
+cult of the sunflower, which Gilbert and Sullivan parodied in
+_Patience_. Swinburne, who has tasted of emotions of the most various
+realms of spirit, and in his poems set them before the world as though
+in marvellously chiselled goblets, represents this æsthetic phase of
+English art in literature. As a painter, Edward Burne-Jones--the
+greatest of that Oxford circle which gathered round Rossetti in
+1856--began to work at the point where Rossetti left off.
+
+[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. THE ANNUNCIATION.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Mansell Photo._
+
+ BURNE-JONES. THE MILL.]
+
+_Sir Edward Burne-Jones_, who must now be spoken of, was born in
+Birmingham in August 1833, and was reading theology in Oxford when
+Rossetti was there painting the mural pictures for the Union. Rossetti
+attracted him as a flame attracts the moth. As yet he had not had any
+artistic training, but some of his drawings which were shown to Rossetti
+by a mutual friend revealed so much poetic force, in spite of their
+embarrassed method of expression, that the painter-poet entered into
+communication with him, and allowed him to paint in the Debating Room of
+the Union a subject from the Arthurian legends, "The Death of Merlin."
+The picture met with approval, and Burne-Jones abandoned theology,
+became an intimate friend of Rossetti and the companion of his studies,
+and went with him to London. There he designed a number of church
+windows for Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and in 1864 exhibited his
+first picture, "The Merciful Knight." Later there followed the triptych
+"Pyramus and Thisbe" and a picture called "The Evening Star," a
+glimmering landscape through which a gentle spirit in a bronze-green
+garment is seen to float. But none of these works excited much
+attention. The small picture exhibited in 1870, "Phyllis and Demophoön,"
+was even thought offensive on account of the "sensuous expression" of
+the nymph. So Burne-Jones withdrew it, and for many years from that time
+held aloof from all the exhibitions of the Royal Academy. For seven
+years his name was never seen in a catalogue. It was only on 1st May
+1877, at the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery--founded by Sir Coutts
+Lindsay, likewise a painter, to afford himself and his comrades a place
+of exhibition independent of the Academy--that Burne-Jones once more
+made his appearance before the eyes of the world. But his pictures, like
+those of Rossetti, had found their way in secrecy and by their own
+merit, and of a sudden he saw himself regarded as one of the most
+eminent painters in the country.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ BURNE-JONES. THE ENCHANTMENT OF MERLIN.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+His art is the flower of most potent fragrance in English æstheticism,
+and the admiration accorded to him in England is almost greater than
+that which had been previously paid to Rossetti. The Grosvenor Gallery,
+where he exhibited his pictures at this period, was for a long time a
+kind of temple for the æsthetes. On the opening day men and women of the
+greatest refinement crowded before his works. There was a cult of
+Burne-Jones at the Grosvenor Gallery, as there is a cult of Wagner at
+Bayreuth. One had to work one's way very gradually through the crowd to
+see his pictures, which always occupied the place of honour in the
+principal room of the gallery, and I remember how helplessly I stood in
+1884 before the first of his pictures which I saw there.
+
+In a kind of vestibule of early Gothic architecture there was seated in
+the foreground an armed man, who, in his dark, gleaming harness and his
+hard and bold profile, was like a Lombard warrior, say Mantegna's Duke
+of Mantua, and as he mused he held in his hand an iron crown studded
+with jewels; farther in the background, upon a high marble throne, a
+maiden was seated, a young girl with reddish hair and a pale worn face,
+looking with steadfast eyes far out into another world, as though in a
+hypnotic trance. Two youths, apparently pages, sang, leaning upon a
+balustrade; while all manner of costly accessories, brilliant stuffs,
+lustrous marble, grey granite, and mosaic pavement, shining in green and
+red tones, lent the whole picture an air of exquisite richness. The
+title in the catalogue was "King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid," and any
+one acquainted with Provençal poetry knew that King Cophetua, the hero
+of an old ballad, fell in love with a beggar-girl, offered her his
+crown, and married her. But this was not to be gathered from the picture
+itself, where all palpable illustration of the story was avoided.
+Nevertheless a vague sense of emotional disquietude was revealed in it.
+The two leading persons of the strange idyll, the earnest knight and the
+pallid maiden, are not yet able themselves to understand how all has
+come to pass--how she, the beggar-maid, should be upon the marble
+throne, and he, the king, kneeling on the steps before her whom he has
+exalted to be a queen. They remain motionless and profoundly silent, but
+their hearts are alive and throbbing. They have feeling which they
+cannot comprehend themselves, and the past and present surge through one
+another: life is a dream, and the dream is life.
+
+[Illustration: _Pageant._
+
+ BURNE-JONES. THE SEA NYMPH.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+Everything that Burne-Jones has created is at once fragrant, mystical,
+and austere, like this picture. His range of subject is most extensive.
+In his _Princess_ Alfred Tennyson had quickened into new life the
+legends of chivalry, and in his _Idylls of the King_ the tales of the
+Knights of the Holy Grail. Swinburne published his _Atalanta in
+Calydon_, in which he exercised once more the mysterious spell of the
+ancient drama, while he created in _Chastelard_, _Bothwell_, and _Mary
+Stuart_ a trilogy of the finest historical tragedies ever written, and
+showed in _Tristram of Lyonesse_ that even Tennyson had not exhausted
+all the beauty in old legends of the time of King Arthur; while, as
+early as 1866, he had given to the world his _Poems and Ballads_,
+dedicated to Burne-Jones. In these works lie the ideas to which the
+painter has given form and colour.
+
+[Illustration: _Portfolio._
+
+ BURNE-JONES. THE GOLDEN STAIRS.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, owner of the copyright._)]
+
+He paints Circe in a saffron robe, preparing the potion to enchant the
+companions of Ulysses, with a strange light in her orbs, while two
+panthers fawn at her feet. He represents the goddess of Discord at the
+marriage-feast of Thetis, a ghastly, pallid figure, entering amongst the
+gods who are celebrating the occasion, and holding the fateful apple in
+her hand. He depicts Pygmalion, the artist King of Cyprus, supplicating
+Aphrodite to breathe life into the sculptured image of a maiden, the
+work of his own hands.
+
+Apart from classical antiquity, he owes some of his inspiration to the
+Bible and Christian legends, the sublimity of their grave tragedies, and
+the troubled sadness of their yearning and exaltation. One of his
+leading works devotes six pictures to the days of creation. An
+angel--accompanied in every case by the angels of the previous
+days--carries a sphere, in which may be seen the stars, the waters, the
+trees, the animals, and the first man and woman, in their proper
+sequence. The scene of the "Adoration of the Kings" is a landscape where
+fragrant roses bloom in the shadow of the slender stems of trees, which
+rise straight as a bolt. The Virgin sits in their midst calm and
+unapproachable, and in her lap the Child, who is more slender than in
+the pictures of Cimabue. The three Wise Men--tall, gigantic figures,
+clad in rich mediæval garments--approach softly, whilst an angel floats
+perpendicularly in the air as a silent witness.
+
+In his picture "The Annunciation" Mary is standing motionless beside the
+great basin of a well-spring, at the portico of her house. To the left
+the messenger of God appears in the air. He has floated solemnly down,
+and it seems as if the folds of his robes, which fall straight from the
+body, had hardly been ruffled in his flight, as if his wings had
+scarcely moved; with the extremities of his feet he touches the branches
+of a laurel. Mary does not shrink, and makes no gesture. There they
+stand, gravely, and as still as statues. The robe of the angel is white,
+and white that of the Virgin, and white the marble floor and the
+wainscoting of the house; and it is only the pinions of the heavenly
+messenger that gleam in a golden brightness. A picture called "Sponsa
+die Libano" bore as a motto the words from _The Song of Solomon_:
+"Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that
+the spices thereof may flow out." The bride, in an ample blue robe,
+walks musing beside a stream, upon the bank of which white lilies grow,
+whilst the vehement figures of the North and South Winds rush through
+the air in grey, fluttering garments.
+
+In addition to his love for Homer and the Bible, Burne-Jones has a
+passion for the old Trouvères of the _Chansons de Geste_, the great and
+fanciful adventures of vanished chivalry, Provençal courts of love, and
+the legends of Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table. His
+"Chant d'Amour" is like a page torn out of an old English or Provençal
+tale. On the meadow before a mediæval town a lady is kneeling, a sort of
+St. Cecilia, in a white upper-garment and a gleaming skirt, playing upon
+an organ, the full chords of which echo softly through the evening
+landscape. To the left a young knight is sitting upon the ground, and
+silently listens, lost in the music, while a strange figure, clad in
+red, is pressing upon the bellows of the instrument. "The Enchantment of
+Merlin," with which he made his first appearance in 1877, illustrated
+the passage in the old legend of Merlin and Vivien, relating how it came
+to pass one day that she and Merlin entered a forest, which was called
+the forest of Broceliande, and found a glorious wood of whitethorn, very
+high and all in blossom, and seated themselves in the shadow: and Merlin
+fell asleep, and when she saw that he slept she raised herself softly,
+and began the spell, exactly according to the teaching of Merlin,
+drawing the magic circle nine times and uttering the spell nine times.
+And Merlin looked around him, and it seemed to him as though he were
+imprisoned in a tower, the highest in the world, and he felt his
+strength leave him as if the blood were streaming from his veins.
+
+In other pictures he abandons all attempt to introduce ideas, confining
+himself to the simple grouping of tender girlish figures, by means of
+which he makes a beautiful composition of the most subtle lines, forms,
+colours, and gestures. The "Golden Stairs" of 1878 was a picture of
+this description: a train of girls, beautiful as angels, descended the
+steps without aim or object, most of them with musical instruments, and
+all with the same delicate feet and the same robes falling in beautiful
+folds. In this year he also produced "Venus' Looking-glass": a number of
+nymphs assembled by the side of a clear pool at sunset, in the midst of
+a sad and solemn landscape, are kneeling by the water's edge together,
+reflected in its surface.
+
+[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. THE WOOD NYMPH.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+Besides these numerous canvases, mention must be made of the decorative
+works of the master. For the English church in Rome, Burne-Jones has
+designed decorations in a rich and grave Byzantine style, and in
+England, where mural decoration has little space accorded to it in
+churches, there is all the more comprehensive scope for painting upon
+glass. Until the sixties church windows of this kind were almost
+exclusively ordered from Germany. The court depôt of glass-painting in
+Munich provided for the adornment of Glasgow Cathedral from drawings by
+Schwind, Heinrich Hess, and Schraudolph, and for the windows of St.
+Paul's from designs by Schnorr, while Kaulbach was employed for a public
+building in Edinburgh. In these days Burne-Jones reigns over this whole
+province. Where the German masters handled glass-painting by modernising
+it like a Nazarene fresco, Burne-Jones, who has penetrated deeply into
+the mediæval treatment of form, created a new style in glass-painting,
+and one exquisitely in keeping with the Neo-Gothic architecture of
+England. His most important works of this description are probably the
+glass windows which he designed for St. Martin's Church and St. Philip's
+Church in Birmingham, his native town. These labours of his in the
+province of Gothic window-painting explain how he came to his style of
+painting at the easel: he habituated himself to compose his pictures
+with the architectonical sentiment of a Gothic artist. Forced to satisfy
+the requisitions of the slender, soaring Gothic style, he came to paint
+his tall, straight-lined figures, the composition of which is not
+triangular in the old fashion, but formed in long lines as in vertical
+church windows.
+
+It is not difficult to find prototypes for every one of these works of
+his. His sibyls recall Pompeii. His church decoration would never have
+arisen but for the mosaics of Ravenna. And those angels in golden
+drapery with grave, hieratical gestures in the pictures of the
+Trecentisti influenced him in his "Days of Creation." Other works of his
+suggest the Etruscan vases or the suavity of Duccio. "Laus Veneris" has
+the severe classicality of Mantegna saturated with Bellini's warmth of
+hue. The "Chant d'Amour," in its deep splendour of colour, is like an
+idyll by Giorgione. And often he heaps together costly work in gold and
+ivory like the Florentine goldsmith painters Pollajuolo and Verrochio.
+Many of his young girls are of lineal descent from those slender,
+flexible, feminine saints of Perugino, painted in sweeping lines and
+planted upon small flat feet. Often, too, when he exaggerates his Gothic
+principles and gives them eight-and-a-half or nine times the proportion
+of their heads, they seem, with their lengthy necks and slim hands fit
+for princesses, like younger sisters of Parmigianino's lithe-limbed
+women; while sometimes their movements have a more ample grace, a more
+majestic nobility, and their lips are moved by the mystical inward smile
+of Luini, so unfathomably subtle in its silent reserve. But it is
+Botticelli who is most often brought to mind. Burne-Jones has borrowed
+from him the fine transparent gauze draperies, clinging to the limbs and
+betraying clearly the girlish forms in his pictures; the splendid
+mantles, flowered and adorned with dainty patterns of gold; the taste
+for Southern vegetation, for flowers and fruits, and artificial bowers
+of thick palm leaves or delicate boughs of cypress, which he delights in
+using as a refined and significant embellishment; from Botticelli he has
+borrowed all the attributes with which he has endowed his
+angels--rose-garlands and vases, tapers and tall lilies; even his type
+of womanhood has an outward resemblance to that of the Florentine, with
+its long, delicate, oval face framed in wavy hair, its dreamy eyes and
+finely arched brows, its dainty and rather tip-tilted nose, and its
+ripe, delicately curving mouth slightly opened. Indeed, Burne-Jones's
+painting is like one of those gilded flower-tables where plants of all
+latitudes mingle their tendrils and their foliage, their bells and their
+clusters, their perfume and their marvellous glory of colour, in a
+harmony artificially arranged. In its strained archaism his art is an
+affected, artificial art, and would perish as swiftly as a luxuriant
+exotic plant, had not this pupil of the Italians been born a
+thoroughbred Englishman, and this Botticelli risen from the grave become
+a true Briton on the banks of the Thames.
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ STANHOPE. THE WATERS OF LETHE.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+[Illustration: STRUDWICK. ELAINE.
+
+ (_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+Burne-Jones stands to Botticelli as Botticelli himself stood to the
+antique, or as Swinburne to his literary models. As a graceful scholar,
+Swinburne has reproduced all styles: the language of the Old Testament,
+the forms of Greek literature, and the naïve lisp of the poets of
+chivalry. He decorates his verses with all manner of strange metaphors
+drawn from the literatures of all periods. His _Atalanta in Calydon_ is,
+down to the choruses, an imitation of the Sophoclean tragedies. In his
+_Ballad of Life_ he follows the model of the singers who made canzonets,
+the writers who followed Dante and the earliest lyric poets of Italy. In
+_Laus Veneris_ he tells the story of Tannhäuser and Dame Venus in the
+manner of the French romantic poets of the sixteenth century; _Saint
+Dorothy_ is a faithful echo of Chaucer's narrative style; and the
+_Christmas Carol_ is modelled upon the Provençal Ballades. Even the
+earliest lyrical mysteries are reproduced in some poems so precisely
+that, so far as form goes, they might be mistaken for originals. But the
+thought of Swinburne's verse is what no earlier poet would have ever
+expressed. It is inconceivable that a Greek chorus would have chanted
+any song of the weariness of man, and of the gifts of grief and tears
+brought to him at his creation; nor would a Greek have written that
+Hymn to Aphrodite, the deadly flower born of the foam of blood and the
+froth of the sea. And in _Hesperia_, where he describes a man who has
+loved beyond measure and suffered over-much amid the mad pleasures of
+Rome, and now sets out, pale and exhausted, to sail the golden sea of
+the West until he reach the "Fortunate Islands" and find peace before
+his death, the mood does not reflect the thoughts of the old world, but
+those of the close of the nineteenth century; and so it is, too, in his
+"Hendecasyllabics," where he complains in classically chiselled diction
+of the swift decay of beauty and the hidden ills which of a sudden
+consume the inward force of life. And Burne-Jones treats old myths with
+the same freedom and independence. He takes them up and recasts them,
+discovers modern passions lying in the very heart of them, enriches them
+with a wealth of delicate shades, borrowed without the smallest ceremony
+from a new conception of the world and from the life of his own time.
+The human soul grown old looks back, as it were, upon the path which it
+has travelled, and sees the spirit of its own ripe age latent in its
+infancy, recognising that "the child is father of the man." All the
+figures in his pictures are surrounded by a dusk which has nothing in
+common with the broad daylight in which the Renaissance artists placed
+the antique world. There remains what may be called a residue of modern
+feeling which has not been assimilated to the old myth, a breath of
+magic floating round these figures on their career, something
+mysterious, an elusive air of fable. This, indeed, is the pervasive
+temperament and sentiment of our own age. It is our own inward spirit
+that gazes upon us as though from an enchanted mirror with the mien of a
+phantom.
+
+[Illustration: _Dixon, photo._
+
+ STRUDWICK. THY TUNEFUL STRINGS WAKE MEMORIES.
+
+ (_By permission of W. Imrie, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
+
+And just as he remodels the entire spirit of old myths, he converts the
+figures which he has borrowed into an artistic form of his own, and,
+without hesitation, subordinates them in type and physical build and
+bearing to the new part they have to play.
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ STRUDWICK. GENTLE MUSIC OF A BYGONE DAY.
+
+ (_By permission of John Dixon, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Dixon, photo._
+
+ STRUDWICK. THE RAMPARTS OF GOD'S HOUSE.
+
+ (_By permission of Wm. Imrie, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
+
+His pictures differ in their whole character from those of the masters
+of the Quattrocento. In Botticelli, also, the young foliage grows green
+and flaunts in its exuberant abundance; but in Burne-Jones the
+vegetation suggests one of those immense forests in Sumatra or Java. All
+the plants are luxuriant and resplendent in colour, and seem to swoon in
+their own opulent, plethoric life. Every tree creates an impression of
+having shot up in swift and wanton growth under a tropical sun. Rank
+parasitic plants trail from stem to stem, and garlands of climbers grow
+in a luxuriant tangle round the branches.
+
+And in proportion as the vegetation is luxuriant and sensuous the human
+figures are wasted and languishing. The severe charm, rigidity, and
+demureness of the Quattrocento is weakened into lackadaisical
+melancholy. The dreamy bliss of Botticelli is transposed into sanctified
+solemnity, delicate fragility, a voluptuous lassitude, a gentle
+weariness of the world. When he paints ancient sibyls, they are touched
+at once by the unearthly asceticism of the Middle Ages seeking refuge
+from the world, and the melancholy, anæmic lassitude of the close of the
+nineteenth century. If he paints a Venus she does not stand out
+victorious in her nudity, but wears a heavy brocaded robe, and around
+her lie the symbols of Christian martyrdom, palms, and perhaps a lyre.
+It is not the fairness of her body that makes her goddess of love, but
+only the dim mystery of her radiant eyes. She is not the Olympian who
+entered into frolicsome adventure with the war-god Mars amid the
+laughter of the heavenly gods, for in her conventional humiliation she
+is rather like the beautiful dæmon of the Middle Ages who, upon her
+journey into exile, passed by the cross where the Son of Man was
+hanging, and tasted all the bitterness of the years. In their delicate
+features his Madonnas have a gentle sadness rarely found in the Italian
+masters. Even the angels, who were roguish and wayward in the
+Quattrocento, do their spiriting with ceremonious gravity, and a subdued
+melancholy underlies their devotional reverence. In Botticelli they are
+fresh, youthful figures, lightly girdled, and with fluttering locks and
+swelling robes and limber bodies, whether they float around the Madonna
+in blissful revelry or look up to the Child Christ in their rapt
+ecstasy. But in Burne-Jones they are devout, sombre, deeply earnest
+beings, gazing as thoughtfully and dreamily as though they had already
+known all the affliction of the world. Their limbs seem paralysed, and
+their gesture weary. It is not possible to look at one of his pictures
+without being reminded of the Florentines of the fifteenth century, and
+yet the spectator at once recognises that they are the work of
+Burne-Jones. He is even opposed to Rossetti, his lord and master,
+through this element of melancholy: the intoxication of opium is
+followed by the sober awakening.
+
+Rossetti's women are dazzling and glorious figures of a modern and
+deliberately cruel beauty--sisters of Messalina, Phædra, and Faustina.
+He delineates them as luxuriant beings with supple and splendid bodies,
+long white necks, and snowily gleaming breasts; with full and fragrant
+hair, ardent, yearning eyes, and demoniacally passionate lips. Their
+mother is the Venus Verticordia whom Rossetti so often painted. Cruel in
+their love as one of the blind forces of nature, they are like that
+water-sprite with her song and her red coral mouth dragged from the sea
+in a fishing-net, as an old French _fabliau_ tells, and so fair that
+every man who beheld her was seized by the love of her, but died when he
+clasped her in his arms. What they love in man is his physical strength,
+his face and sinews of bronze. Only the strong man who loves them with
+overpowering madness, like a stormy wind, can bend them to his will.
+Swinburne has sung of "the lips intertwisted and bitten, where the foam
+is as blood," of
+
+ "The heavy white limbs and the cruel
+ Red mouth like a venomous flower."
+
+[Illustration: _Dixon, photo._
+
+ STRUDWICK. THE TEN VIRGINS.
+
+ (_By permission of William Imrie, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
+
+But the women of Burne-Jones know that this fervour is no longer to be
+found upon the earth. The blood has been sapped, and the fire burns low,
+and the glorious, ancient might of love has disappeared. For these women
+life has lost its sunshine, and love its passion, and the world its
+hopes. The hue of their cheeks is pallid, their eyes are dim, their
+bodies sickly and without flesh and blood, and their hips are spare.
+With pale, quivering lips, and a melancholy smile or a strangely
+resigned, intensely grieved look flickering at the corners of their
+mouths, they live consumed by sterile longing, and pine in silent
+dejection, gazing into vacant space like imprisoned goldfish, or
+luxuriate in the vague Fata Morgana of an over-delicate, over-refined,
+and bashfully tremulous eroticism--
+
+ "And the chaplets of old are above us,
+ And the oyster-bed teems out of reach;
+ Old poets outsing and outlove us,
+ And Catullus makes mouths at our speech.
+ Who shall kiss in the father's own city,
+ With such lips as he sang with again?
+ Intercede with us all of thy pity,
+ Our Lady of Pain."
+
+[Illustration: _Portfolio._
+
+ CRANE. THE CHARIOTS OF THE FLEETING HOURS.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+Swinburne's first ardent and sensuous volume of lyrics contains a poem,
+_The Garden of Proserpine_: it tells how a man weary of all things human
+and divine, and no longer able to support the intoxicating fragrance of
+the roses of Aphrodite, draws near with wavering steps to the throne
+where calm Proserpine sits silent, crowned with cold white flowers. And
+in the same way Rossetti's flaming and quivering passion and his
+volcanic desire end in Burne-Jones with sad resignation.
+
+Whilst Christianity and Hellenism mingle in the figures of Burne-Jones,
+a division of labour is noticeable amongst the following artists: some
+addressed themselves exclusively to the treatment of ancient subjects,
+others to ecclesiastical romantic painting in the style of the
+Quattrocento, and others again recognised their chief vocation in
+initiating a reformation in kindred provinces of industrial art.
+
+_R. Spencer Stanhope_, who was at Oxford, like Burne-Jones, and, indeed,
+received his first artistic impulses while employed on the elaboration
+of Rossetti's mural pictures for the Union, worked even in later days
+chiefly in the field of decorative painting, and is, with Burne-Jones,
+the principal designer for the interior decoration of churches in
+England. His oil-paintings are few, and in their gracious Quattrocento
+build they are in outward appearance scarcely different from those of
+Burne-Jones. In a picture belonging to the Manchester Gallery there is a
+maiden seated amid a flowery meadow, while a small Cupid with red
+pinions draws near to her; the landscape has an air of peace and
+happiness. Another picture--probably inspired by Catullus' _Lament for
+Lesbia's Sparrow_--displays a girl sitting upon an old town wall with a
+little dead bird. "The Temptation of Eve" is like a brilliantly coloured
+mediæval miniature, painted with the greatest _finesse_. As in the
+woodcut in the Cologne Bible, Paradise is enclosed with a circular red
+wall. Eve is like a slim, twisted Gothic statue. Like Burne-Jones,
+Stanhope is always delicate and poetic, but he is less successful in
+setting upon old forms of art the stamp of his individuality, and thus
+giving them new life and a character of their own. In their severe,
+archæological character his pictures have little beyond the affectation
+of a style which has been arrived at through imitation.
+
+[Illustration: WALTER CRANE. FROM _THE TEMPEST_.]
+
+The third member of this Oxford Circle, the poet _William Morris_, has
+exercised great influence over English taste by the institution of an
+industrial establishment for embroidery, painting upon glass, and
+household decoration. Keeping in mind that close union which existed in
+the fifteenth century between art and the manual crafts, he and certain
+of his disciples did not hesitate to provide designs for decorative
+stuffs, wall-papers, furniture, and household embellishments of every
+description. They were largely indebted to the Japanese, to say nothing
+of the old Italians, though they succeeded in creating a thoroughly
+modern and independent style, in spite of all they borrowed. The whole
+range of industrial art in England received a new lease of life, and
+household decoration became blither and more cheerful in its
+appearance. Only light, delicate, and finely graduated colours were
+allowed to predominate, and they were combined with slender, graceful,
+and vivacious form. The heavy panelling which was popular in the sixties
+gave way to bright papers ornamented with flowers; narrow panes made way
+for large plate-glass windows with light curtains, in which long-stemmed
+flowers were entwined in the pattern. Slim pillars supported cabinets
+painted in exquisite hues or gleaming with lacquer-work and enamel.
+Seats were ornamented with soft cushions shining in all the delicate
+splendour of Indian silks. And the pre-Raphaelite style of ornamentation
+was even extended to the embellishment of books, so that England created
+the modern book, at a time when other nations adhered altogether to the
+imitation of old models.
+
+[Illustration: WALTER CRANE. FROM _THE TEMPEST_.]
+
+In his early years _Arthur Hughes_ attracted much attention by an
+Ophelia, a delicate, thoroughly English figure of soft pre-Raphaelite
+grace; but in later years he rarely got beyond sentimental Renaissance
+maidens suggestive of Julius Wolff, and humorous work in the style of
+_genre_.
+
+_J. N. Strudwick_, who worked first under Spencer Stanhope and then
+under Burne-Jones, was more consistent in his fidelity to the
+pre-Raphaelite principles. His pictures have the same delicate,
+enervated mysticism, and the same thoughtful, dreamy poetry, as those of
+his elders in the school. By preference he paints slender, pensive
+girlish figures, with the sentiment of Burne-Jones, taking his motive
+from some passage in a poet. In a picture called "Elaine" the heroine is
+mournfully seated in a lofty room of a mediæval palace. Another of his
+works reveals three girls occupied with music. Or a knight strewn with
+roses lies asleep in a maiden's lap. Or again, there is St. Cecilia
+standing with her Seraphina before a Roman building. Strudwick does not
+possess the spontaneity of his master. The childlike, angular effect at
+which he aims often seems slightly weak and mawkish; and occasionally
+his painting is somewhat diffident, especially when he paints in the
+architectural detail and rich artistic accessories, and stipples with a
+very fine brush. But his works are so exquisite and delicate, so
+precious and æsthetic, that they must be reckoned amongst the most
+characteristic performances of the New pre-Raphaelitism. One of his
+larger compositions he has named "Bygone Days." There is a man musing
+over the memories of his life, as he sits upon a white marble throne in
+front of a long white marble wall, amid an evening landscape. He
+stretches out his arms after the vanished years of his youth, the years
+when love smiled upon him; but Time, a winged figure like Orcagna's
+_Morte_, divides him from the goddess of love, swinging his scythe with
+a threatening gesture. "The Past," a slender matron in a black robe,
+covers her face lamenting. In Strudwick's most celebrated picture, "The
+Ramparts of God's House," there is a man standing at the threshold of
+heaven, naked as a Greek athlete. His earthly fetters lie shattered at
+his feet. Angels receive him, marvellously spiritual beings filled with
+a lovely simplicity and revealing ineffable profundity of soul, beings
+who partake of Fra Angelico almost as much as of Ellen Terry. Their
+expression is quiet and peaceful. Instead of marvelling at the
+new-comer, they gaze with their eyes green as a water-sprite's
+meditatively into illimitable space. The architecture in the background
+is entirely symbolical, as in the pictures of Giotto. A little house
+with a golden roof and gilded mediæval reliefs is inhabited by a dense
+throng of little angels, as if it were a Noah's-ark. The colour is rich
+and sonorous, as in the youthful works of Carlo Crivelli.
+
+[Illustration: G. F. WATTS IN HIS GARDEN.
+
+ (_By permission, from a photograph by A. Frazer-Tytler, Esq._)]
+
+_Henry Holliday_, who has of late devoted himself largely to decorative
+tasks, seems in these works to be the _juste-milieu_ between Burne-Jones
+and Leighton. And the youngest representative of this group tinged with
+religious and romantic feelings is _Marie Spartali-Stillman_, who lives
+in Rome and paints as a rule pictures from Dante, Boccaccio, and
+Petrarch, after the fashion of Rossetti.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ WATTS. LADY LINDSAY.
+
+ (_By permission of Lady Lindsay, the owner of the picture._)]
+
+Others, who turned to the treatment of antique subjects, were led by
+these themes more towards the Idealism of the Cinquecento as regards the
+form of their work; and in this way they lost the severe stamp of the
+pre-Raphaelites.
+
+In these days _William Blake Richmond_, in particular, no longer shows
+any trace of having once belonged to the mystic circle of Oxonians. The
+Ariadne which he painted in the old days was a lean and tall woman with
+fluttering black mantle, casting up her arms in lamentation and gazing
+out of those deep, gazelle-like eyes which Burne-Jones gave his Vivien.
+Even the scheme of colour was harmonised in the bronze, olive tone which
+marked the earliest works of Burne-Jones. But soon afterwards his views
+underwent a complete revolution in Italy. Influenced by Alma Tadema in
+form, and by the French in colour, he drew nearer to the academic
+manner, until he became, at length, a Classicist without any salient
+peculiarity. The allegory "Amor Vincit Omnia" is characteristic of this
+phase of his art. Aphrodite, risen from her bath, is standing naked in a
+Grecian portico, through which a purple sea is visible. Her maidens are
+busied in dressing her; and they are, one and all, chaste and noble
+figures of that classic grace and elegant fluency of line which Leighton
+usually lends to his ideal forms. In a picture which became known in
+Germany through the International Exhibition of 1891, Venus, a clear and
+white figure, floats down with stately motion towards Anchises. It is
+only in the delicate pictures of children which have been his chief
+successes of late years that he is still fresh and direct. Girls with
+thick hair of a _blonde cendrée_, finely moulded lips, and large
+gazelle-like eyes full of sensibility, are seen in these works dreamily
+seated in white or blue dresses against a red or a blue curtain. And the
+æsthetic method of painting, which almost suggests pastel work in its
+delicacy, is in keeping with the ethereal figures and the bloom of
+colour.
+
+_Walter Crane_ has been far more successful in uniting the
+pre-Raphaelite conception with a sentiment for beauty formed upon the
+antique, Burne-Jones's "paucity of flesh and plenitude of feeling" with
+a measured nobility of form. Born in Liverpool in 1845, he received his
+first impressions of art at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1857, where
+he saw Millais' "Sir Isumbras at the Ford." The chivalrous poetry of
+this master became the ideal of his youth, and it rings clearly
+throughout his first pictures, exhibited in 1862. One of these has as
+its subject "The Lady of Shalott" approaching the shore of her
+mysterious island in a boat, and the other St. George slaying the
+dragon. Meanwhile, however, he had come to know Walker, through W. J.
+Linton, the wood-engraver, for whom he worked from 1859 to 1862, and the
+former led him to admire the beauty of the sculptures of the Parthenon.
+After this he passed from romantic to antique subjects, and there is
+something notably youthful, a fresh bloom as of old legends, in these
+compositions, which recall the sculpture of Phidias. "The Bridge of
+Life," belonging to the year 1875, was like an antique gem or a Grecian
+bas-relief. At the Paris World Exhibition of 1878 he had a "Birth of
+Venus," noble and antique in composition, and of a severity of form
+which suggested Mantegna. The suave and poetic single figures which he
+delights in painting are at once Greek and English: girls, with branches
+of blossom, in white drapery falling into folds, and enveloping their
+whole form while indicating every line of the body. His "Pegasus" might
+have come straight from the frieze of the Parthenon. "The Fleeting
+Hours" at once recalls Guido Reni's "Aurora" and Dürer's apocalyptic
+riders.
+
+[Illustration: _Cameron, photo._
+
+ WATTS. HOPE.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Pageant._
+
+ WATTS. PAOLO AND FRANCESCA.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Cameron, photo._
+
+ WATTS. LOVE AND DEATH.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+Later he turned to decorative painting, like all the representatives of
+the pre-Raphaelite group. He is one of the most original designers for
+industrial work in tapestry, next to Morris the most influential leader
+of the English arts and crafts, and he has collaborated in founding that
+modern naturalistic tendency of style which will be the art of the
+future. His designs are always based upon naturalistic motives--the
+English type of womanhood and the English splendour of flowers. There
+always predominates a sensitive relationship between the æsthetic
+character of the forms and their symbolical significance. He always
+adapts an object of nature so that it may correspond in style with the
+material in which he works. The way in which he makes use of the noblest
+models of antiquity and of the Renaissance, and yet immediately
+transposes them into an English key of sentiment and into available
+modern forms, is entirely peculiar. And last, but not least, he is a
+marvellous illustrator. Every one went wild with delight at the close of
+the sixties over the appearance of his first children's books, _The
+Faerie Queene_, _The Little Pig who went to Market_, and _King
+Luckiboy_, the pictures of which were soon displayed upon all patterns
+for embroidery. And they were followed by others: after 1875 he
+published _Tell me a Story_, _The First of May--a Fairy Masque_, _The
+Sirens Three_, _Echoes of Hellas_, and so forth. The two albums _The
+Baby's Bouquet_ and _The Baby's Opera_ of 1879 are probably the finest
+of them all.
+
+In spite of their childish subjects, the drawings of Walter Crane have
+such a monumental air that they have the effect of "grand painting."
+Without imitation he reproduces spontaneously the grace and character of
+the primitive Florentines. Some of his plates recall "The Dream of
+Polifilo," and might bear the monogram of Giovanni Bellini. They owe
+their origin to a profound Germanic sentiment mingled with pagan
+reminiscences; they are an almost Grecian and yet English art, where
+fancy like a foolish, dreamy child plays with a brilliant skein of forms
+and colours.
+
+That great artist _George Frederick Watts_ stands quite apart as a
+personality in himself. In point of substance he is divided from others
+by not leaning upon poets, but by inventing independent allegories for
+himself; and in point of form by courting neither the Quattrocento nor
+the Roman Cinquecento, but rather following the Venice of the later
+Renaissance. Instead of the marble precision of Squarcione or Mantegna,
+what predominates in his work is something soft and melting, which might
+recall Correggio, Tintoretto, or Giorgione, were it not that there is a
+cooler grey, a subdued light fresco tone in Watts, in place of the
+Venetian glory of colour.
+
+As a man, Watts was one of those artists who are only to be found in
+England--an artist who, from his youth upwards, has been able to live
+for his art without regard to profit. Born in London in the year 1820,
+he left the Academy after being a pupil there for a brief period, and
+began to visit the Elgin Room in the British Museum. The impression made
+upon him by the sculptures of the Parthenon was decisive for his whole
+life. Not merely are numerous plastic works due to his study of them,
+but several of his finest paintings. When he was seventeen he exhibited
+his first pictures, which were painted very delicately and with
+scrupulous pains; and in 1843 he took part in the competition for the
+frescoes of the Houses of Parliament, amongst which the representation
+of St. George and the Dragon was from his hand. With the proceeds of the
+prize which he received at the competition he went to Italy, and there
+he came to regard the great Venetians Titian and Giorgione as his kin
+and his contemporaries. The pupil of Phidias became the worshipper of
+Tintoretto. In Italy he produced "Fata Morgana," a picture of a warrior
+vainly catching at the airy white veil of a nude female figure which
+floats past. This work already displays him as an accomplished artist,
+though it is wanting in the large, Classical tranquillity of his later
+paintings. He returned home with plans demanding more than human energy.
+Like the Frenchman Chenavard, he cherished the purpose of representing
+the history of the world in a series of frescoes, which were to adorn
+the walls of a building specially adapted for the purpose. "Chaos," "The
+Creation," "The Temptation of Man," "The Penitence," "The Death of
+Abel," and "The Death of Cain" were the earliest pictures which he
+designed for the series. It was through fresco painting alone, as he
+believed, that it was possible to school English art to monumental
+grandeur, nobleness, and simplicity. But it was not possible for him to
+remain long upon this path in England, where painting has but little
+space accorded to it upon the walls of churches, while in other public
+buildings decoration is not in demand. Moreover, it is doubtful whether
+Watts would have achieved anything great in this province of art. At any
+rate, a work which he executed for the dining-hall at Lincoln's Inn--an
+assembly of the lawgivers of all times from Moses down to Edward I--is
+scarcely more than a mixture of Raphael's "School of Athens" and the
+"Hemicycle" of Delaroche. In magnificent allegories in the form of
+oil-paintings he first found the expression of his individuality. Like
+Turner, Watts did not paint pictures for sale. Yet he has lent one or
+other of his pictures to almost every public exhibition. A whole room is
+devoted to him in the Tate Gallery. But to know his work thoroughly one
+had to go to his house. His studio in Little Holland House contained
+almost all his important creations, and was visited by the public upon
+Saturday and Sunday afternoons as freely as if it were a museum.
+
+[Illustration: _Pageant._
+
+ WATTS. ARIADNE.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ WATTS. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+As a landscape painter Watts is a visionary like Turner, though in
+addition to the purely artistic effect of his pictures he always
+endeavoured to awaken remoter feelings and ideas of some kind or
+another. His landscape "Corsica" reveals a grey expanse, with very
+slight vibrations of tone which suggest that out to sea a distant island
+is emerging from the mist. His "Mount Ararat," a picture entirely filled
+with the play of light blue tones, represents a number of barren rocky
+cones bathed in the intense blue of a pure transparent starry night.
+Above the highest peak there is one star sparkling more brilliantly than
+the others. In his "Deluge: the Forty-first Day," he attempted to
+depict, after an interpretation of his own, the power "with which light
+and heat, dissipating the darkness and dissolving the multitude of the
+waters into mist and vapour, give new life to perished nature." What is
+actually placed before the eye is a delicate symphony of colours which
+would have delighted Turner: wild, agitated sea, clouds gleaming like
+liquid gold, and mist behind which the sun rises in a magical glow, like
+a red ball of fire.
+
+In his portraits he is earnest and sincere. Just as fifty years ago
+David d'Angers devoted half a lifetime to getting together a portrait
+gallery of famous contemporaries, so to Watts belongs the glory of
+having really been the historian of his time. The collection of
+portraits, many of which are to be seen in the National Portrait
+Gallery, comprises about forty likenesses, all of them half-length
+pictures, all of them upon the same scale of size, all of them
+representing very famous men. Amongst the poets comprised in this
+gallery of genius are Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold,
+Swinburne, William Morris, and Sir Henry Taylor; amongst prose-writers,
+Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Lecky, Motley, and Leslie Stephen; amongst
+statesmen, Gladstone, Sir Charles Dilke, the Duke of Argyll, Lord
+Salisbury, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Lyndhurst, and Lord Sherbrooke;
+amongst the leaders of the clergy, Dean Stanley, Dean Milman, Cardinal
+Manning, and Dr. Martineau; amongst painters, Rossetti, Millais,
+Leighton, Burne-Jones, and Calderon; and amongst notable foreigners,
+Guizot, Thiers, Joachim the violinist, and many others. In the matter of
+technique Watts is excelled by many of the French. His portraits have
+something heavy, nor are they eminent either for softness of modelling,
+or for that momentary and animated effect peculiar to Lenbach. But few
+portraits belonging to the nineteenth century have the same force of
+expression, the same straightforward sureness of aim, the same grandeur
+and simplicity. Before each of the persons represented one is able to
+say, That is a painter, that a poet, and that a scholar. All the
+self-conscious dignity of a President of the Royal Academy is expressed
+in the picture of Leighton, and his look is as cold as marble; while the
+eyes of Burne-Jones seem mystically veiled, as though they were gazing
+into the past. Indeed, the way in which Watts grasps his characters is
+masterly beyond conception. Amongst the old painters Tintoretto and
+Moroni might be compared with him most readily, while Van Dyck is the
+least like him of all.
+
+In opposition to the poetic fantasy of Burne-Jones dallying with
+legendary lore, an element of brooding thought is characteristic of the
+large compositions of Watts, a meditative absorption in ideas which
+provoke the intellect to further activity by their mysterious
+allegorical suggestions. Just as he makes an approach to the old
+Venetians in external form, he is divided from them in the inward burden
+of his work by a severity and hardiness characteristic of the Northern
+spirit, a predominance of idea seldom met with amongst Southern masters,
+and a profoundly sad way of thought in which one sees the stamp of the
+nineteenth century. Apart from the purely artistic effect of his work,
+he tried to make his pictures serve as a stimulus to deeper thought and
+meditation: "The end of art," he writes, "must be the exposition of some
+weighty principle of spiritual significance, the illustration of a great
+truth."
+
+"The Spirit of Christianity," the only one of his works which has a
+religious tone, displays a youth throned upon the clouds, with children
+nestling at his feet. His powerful head is bent upwards, and his right
+hand opened wide. In "Orpheus and Eurydice" he has chosen the moment
+when Orpheus turns round to behold Eurydice turning pale and sinking to
+the earth, to be once more swallowed by Hades. The lyre drops from his
+hands, and with a gesture of despair he draws the form of his wife to
+his heart in a last, eternal embrace. "Artemis and Endymion" is a scene
+in which a tall female figure in silvery shining vesture bends over the
+sleeping shepherd, throwing herself into the curve of a sickle.
+
+But, as a rule, he neither makes use of Christian nor of ancient ideas,
+but embodies his own thoughts. In "The Illusions of Life," a picture
+belonging to the year 1847, beautiful, dreamy figures hover over a gulf,
+spreading at the verge of existence. At their feet lie the shattered
+emblems of greatness and power, and upon a small strip of the earth
+hanging over an abyss those illusions are visible which have not yet
+been destroyed: Glory, in the shape of a knight in harness, chases the
+bubble of resounding fame; Love is symbolised by a pair who are tenderly
+embracing; Learning, by an old man poring over manuscripts in the dusk;
+Innocence, by a child grasping at a butterfly. "The Angel of Death" is a
+picture of a winged and mighty woman throned at the entrance of a way
+which leads to eternity. Upon her knees there rests, covered with a
+white cloth, the corpse of a new-born child. Men and women of every
+station lay reverently down at the feet of the angel the symbols of
+their dignity and the implements of their earthly toil.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ WATTS. ARTEMIS AND ENDYMION.
+
+ (_By permission of Mr. Robert Dunthorne, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+"Love and Death" represents the two great sovereigns of the world
+wrestling together for a human life. With steps which have a mysterious
+majesty, pallid Death draws near, demanding entrance at the door of a
+house, whilst Love, a slight, boyish figure with bright wings, places
+himself in the way; but with one great, irresistible gesture the mighty
+genius of Death sweeps the shrinking child to one side. In another
+picture, "Love and Life," the genius of Love, in the form of a slim,
+powerful youth, helps poor, weak, clinging Life, a half-grown, timid,
+faltering girl, to clamber up the stony path of a mountain, over which
+the sun rises golden. "Hope" is a picture in which a tender spirit,
+bathed in the blue mist, sits upon the globe, blindfold, listening in
+bliss to the low sound vibrating from the last string of her harp.
+"Mammon" is embodied by Watts in a coarse and bloated satyr brutally
+setting his heel upon a youth and a young girl, as upon a footstool.
+
+In 1893, when the committee of the Munich Exhibition were moved by the
+writings of Cornelius Gurlitt to have some of these works sent over to
+Germany, a certain disappointment was felt in artistic circles. And any
+one who is accustomed to gauge pictures by their technique is justified
+in missing the genuine pictorial temperament in Watts. The sobriety of
+his scheme of colour, his preference for subdued tones, his distaste for
+all "dexterity" and freedom from all calculated refinement, are not in
+accord with the desires of our time. Even his sentiment is altogether
+opposed to that which predominates in the other New Idealists.
+Burne-Jones and Rossetti found sympathy because their repining lyricism,
+their psychopathic subtlety, their wonderful mixture of archaic
+simplicity and _décadent hautgoût_, stand in direct touch with the
+present. Watts' pictures seem cold and wanting in temperament because he
+made no appeal to the vibrating life of the nerves.
+
+But the same sort of criticism was written by the younger generation in
+Germany, seventy years ago, on the works of Goethe, which have, none the
+less, remained fresher than those of Schlegel and Tieck. What is modern
+is not always the same as what is eternally young. And if one
+endeavours, disregarding the current of the age, to approach Watts as
+though he were an old master, one feels an increasing sense of the
+probability that amongst all the New Idealists of the present he has,
+next to Boecklin, the best prospect of becoming one. In spite of all its
+independence of spirit, the art of Burne-Jones has an affected mannerism
+in its outward garb. The sentiment of it is free, but the form is
+confined in the old limits. And it is not impossible that later
+generations, to whom his specifically modern sentiment will appeal more
+and more faintly, may one day rank him, on account of his archaism in
+drawing, as much amongst the eclectics as Overbeck and Führich are held
+to be at the present time. But that can never happen to Watts. His works
+are the expression of an artist who is as little dependent upon the past
+as upon the momentary tendencies of the present. His articulation of
+form has nothing in common with the lines of beauty of the antique, or
+the Quattrocento, or the Cinquecento. It is a thing created by himself
+and to himself peculiar. He needs no erudition, and no attributes and
+symbols borrowed from the Renaissance, to body forth his allegories.
+With him there begins a new power of creating types; and his figure of
+Death--that tall woman, clad in white, with hollow cheeks, livid face,
+and lifeless sunken eyes--is no less cogent than the genius with the
+torch reversed or the burlesque skeleton of the Middle Ages. Moreover,
+there is in his works a trace of profundity and simple grandeur which
+stands alone in our own period. It is precisely our more sensitive
+nervous system which divides us from the old painters, and has generally
+given the artistic productions of our day a disturbed, capricious,
+restless, and overstrained character, making them inferior to those of
+the old masters.
+
+Watts is, perhaps, the only painter who can bear comparison with them in
+every respect. Here is a man who has been able to live in himself far
+away from the bustle of exhibitions, a man who worked when he was old as
+soundly and freshly as when he was young, a man, also, who is always
+simple in his art, lucid, earnest, grandiose, impressive, and of
+monumental sublimity. Though he shows no trace of imitation he might
+have come straight from the Renaissance, so deep is his sense of beauty,
+so direct and so condensed his power of giving form to his ideas. And
+amongst living painters I should find it impossible to name a single one
+who could embody such a scene as that of "Love and Death" so calmly, so
+entirely without rhetorical gestures and all the tricks of theatrical
+management. There is the mark of style about everything in Watts, and it
+is no external and borrowed style, but one which is his own, a style
+which a notable man, a thinker and a poet, has fashioned for the
+expression of his own ideas. That is what makes him a master of
+contemporary painting and of the painting of all times. And that is what
+will, perhaps, render him, in the eyes of later generations, one of the
+greatest men of our time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+THE NEW IDEALISM IN FRANCE AND GERMANY
+
+
+A similar change of taste occurred in France. Just as the Impressionists
+had held modernity alone in high honour, so now awoke the longing after
+the faded lustre of a bygone age of beauty. The younger generation in
+literature began to do homage to their spiritual ancestors not in Zola
+but in Charles Baudelaire, that abstracter of the quintessence; and
+similarly in the province of art there came to the fore two of the older
+masters who until then had been relegated to the background.
+
+In pictorial art _Gustave Moreau_ is equivalent to Charles Baudelaire.
+Certain of the strange and fascinating poems in the _Fleurs du Mal_
+strike alone the same note of sentiment as the tortured, subtilised,
+morbid, but mysterious and captivating creations of Moreau; and his
+figures, like those of Baudelaire, live in a mysterious world, and
+stimulate the spirit like eternal riddles. Every one of his works stands
+in need of a commentary; every one of them bears witness to a profound
+and peculiar activity of mind, and every one of them is full of intimate
+reveries. Every agitation of his inward spirit takes shape in myths of
+hieratical strangeness, in mysterious hallucinations, which he sets in
+his pictures like jewels. He gives ear to dying strains, rising faintly,
+inaudible to the majority of men. Marvellous beings pass before him,
+fantastic and yet earnest; forms of legendary story hover through space
+upon strange animals; a fabulous hippogriff bears him far away to Greece
+and the East, to vanished worlds of beauty. Upon the journey he beholds
+Utopias, beholds the Fortunate Islands, and visits all lands, borne upon
+the pinions of a dream. An age which went wild over Cabanel and
+Bouguereau could not possibly be in sympathy with him. The Naturalists,
+also, looked upon him as a singular being; it was much as if an Indian
+magician whose robe shone in all the hues of the rainbow had suddenly
+made his appearance at a ball, amongst men in black evening dress. It is
+only since the mysterious smile of Leonardo's feminine figures has once
+more drawn the world beneath its spell that the spirit of Moreau's
+pictures has become a familiar thing. Even his schooling was different
+from that of his contemporaries. He was the only pupil of that strange
+artist Théodore Chassériau, and Chassériau had directed him to the study
+of Bellini, Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, and all those enchanting
+primitive artists whose enchanting female figures are seen to move
+through mysterious black and blue landscapes. He was then seized with an
+enthusiasm for the hieratical art of India. And he was also affected by
+old German copper-engraving, old Venetian pottery, painting upon vases
+and enamel, mosaics and niello work, tapestries and old Oriental
+miniatures. His exquisite and expressive style, which, at a time when
+the flowing Cinquecento manner was in vogue, made an unpleasant effect
+by its archaic angularity, was the result of the fusion of these
+elements.
+
+When he appeared, the special characteristic of French art was its
+seeking after violent agitations of the spirit, _émotions fortes_. The
+spirit was to be roused by stormy vehemence, as a relaxed system is
+braced by massage. But the generation at the close of the nineteenth
+century wanted to be soothed rather than stirred by painting. It could
+not endure shrill cries, loud, emphatic speech, or vehement gestures. It
+desired subdued and refined emotions, and Moreau's distinction is that
+he was the first to give expression to this weary _décadent_ humour. In
+his work a complete absence of motion has taken the place of the
+striding legs, the attitudes of the fencing-master, the arms
+everlastingly raised to heaven, and the passionately distorted faces
+which had reigned in French painting since David. He makes spiritual
+expression his starting-point, and not scenic effect; he keeps, as it
+were, within the laws which rule over classical sculpture, where
+vehemence was only permitted to intrude from the period of decline, from
+the Pergamene reliefs, the Laocoön, and the Farnese Bull. Everything
+bears the seal of sublime peace; everything is inspired by inward life
+and suppressed passion. Even when the gods fight there are no mighty
+gestures; with a mere frown they can shake the earth like Zeus.
+
+His spiritual conception of the old myths is just as peculiar as his
+grave articulation of form; it is a conception such as earlier
+generations could not have, one which alone befits the spiritual
+condition of the close of the nineteenth century. During the most recent
+decades archæological excavations and scientific researches have widened
+and deepened our conceptions of the old mythology in a most unexpected
+manner. Beside the laughter of the Grecian Pan we hear the sighs and
+behold the convulsions of Asia, in her anguish bearing gods, who perish
+young like spring flowers, in the loving arms of Oriental goddesses. We
+have heard of chryselephantine statues covered with precious stones from
+top to bottom; and we know the graceful terra-cotta figures of Tanagra.
+Before there was a knowledge of the Tanagra statuettes no archæologist
+could have believed that the Eros of Hesiod was such a charming, wayward
+little rascal. Before the discovery of the Cyprus statues no artist
+would have ventured to adorn a Grecian goddess with flowers, pins for
+the head, and a heavy tiara. Prompted by these discoveries, Moreau has
+been swayed by strangely rich inspirations. He is said to have worked in
+his studio as in a tower opulent with ivory and jewels. He has a delight
+in arraying the figures of his legends in the most costly materials, as
+the discoveries at Cyprus give him warrant for doing, in painting their
+robes in the deepest and most lustrous hues, and in being almost too
+lavish in his manner of adorning their arms and breasts. Every figure
+of his is a glittering idol, enveloped in a dress of gold brocade
+embroidered with precious stones. His love of ornamentation is even
+extended to his landscapes. They are improbable, far too fair, far too
+rich, far too strange to exist in the actual world, but they are in
+close harmony with the character of these sumptuously clad figures which
+wander in them like the mystic and melancholy shapes of a dream. The
+capricious generation that lived in the Renaissance occasionally handled
+classical subjects in this manner, but there is the same difference
+between Filippino Lippi and Gustave Moreau as there is between
+Botticelli and Burne-Jones: the former, like Shakespeare in the
+_Midsummer Night's Dream_, transformed the antique into a blithe and
+fantastic fairy world, whereas that fire of yearning romance which once
+flamed from poor Hölderlin's poet heart burns in the pictures of Moreau.
+
+His "Orpheus" is one of his most characteristic and beautiful works. He
+has not borrowed the composition from antique tragedy. The drama is
+over. Orpheus has been torn asunder by the Mænads, and the limbs of the
+poet lie scattered over the icy fields of the hyperborean lands. His
+head, borne upon his lyre now for ever mute, has been cast upon the
+shore of Erebus. Nature seems to sleep in mysterious peace. Around there
+is nothing to be seen but still waters and pallid light, nothing to be
+heard but the tone of a small shrill flute, played by a barbarian
+shepherd sitting on the cliff. A Thracian girl, whose hair is adorned
+with a garland, and whose look is earnest, has taken up the head of the
+singer and regards it long and quietly. Is it merely pity that is in her
+eyes? A romantic Hellenism, a profound melancholy underlies the picture,
+and the old story closes with a cry of love. In his "Oedipus and the
+Sphinx" of 1864, and his "Heracles" of 1878, he treated battle scenes,
+the heroic struggle between man and beast, and in these pictures, also,
+there is no violence, no vehemence, no movement. In a terrible silence
+the two antagonists exchange looks in his "Oedipus and the Sphinx,"
+while their breath mingles. Like a living riddle, the winged creature
+gazes upon the stranger, but the youth with his long locks stands so
+composedly before her that the spectator feels that he must know the
+decisive word.
+
+In "Helen upon the Walls of Troy" the figure of the enchantress, as she
+stands there motionless, clad in a robe glittering with brilliant stones
+and diamonds like a shrine, is seen to rise against the blood-red
+horizon as though it were a statue of gold and ivory. Like a queen of
+spades, she holds in her hand a large flower. Heaps of bodies pierced
+with arrows lie at her feet. But she has no glance of pity for the dying
+whose death-rattle greets her. Her wide, apathetic eyes are fixed upon
+vacancy. She sees in the gold of the sunset the smoke ascending from the
+Grecian camp. She will embark in the fair ship of Menelaus, and return
+in triumph to Hellas, where new love shall be her portion. And the looks
+of the old men fasten upon her in admiration. "It is fitting that the
+Trojans and the Achæans fight for such a woman." Helen in her blond
+voluptuous beauty is transformed beneath the hands of Moreau into
+Destiny stalking over ground saturated with blood, into the Divinity of
+Mischief--a divinity that, without knowing it, poisons everything that
+comes near her, or that she sees or touches.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ MOREAU. THE YOUNG MAN AND DEATH.]
+
+In his "Galatea" Moreau's love of jewels and enamel finds its highest
+triumph. Galatea's grotto is one large, glittering casket. Flowers made
+from the sun, and leaves from the stars, and branches of coral stretch
+forth their boughs and open their cups. And as the most brilliant jewel
+of all, there rests in the holy of holies the radiant form of the
+sleeping Galatea, a kind of Greek Susanna, watched by the staring,
+adamantine eye of Polyphemus.
+
+And just as he bathes these Grecian forms in the dusk of a profound
+romantic melancholy, so in Moreau's pictures the figures of the Bible
+are tinged with a shade of Indian Buddhism, a pantheistic mysticism
+which places them in a strange modern light. In his "David" he
+represents in a quiet and peaceful way the entry of a human soul into
+Nirvana. The aged king sits dreaming upon his gorgeous throne, and an
+angel watches in shining beauty beside this phantom, the flame of whose
+life is slowly sinking. A curious light falls upon him from the sky. The
+light of the evening horizon shines faint between the pillars, and the
+spectator feels that it is the end of a long day. His pictures of 1878
+dealing with Salome, in their strange sentiment--suggestive of an opium
+vision--are like a paraphrase of Heine's poem in _Atta Troll_. In a
+sombre hall supported by mighty pillars, through which coloured lamps
+and stupefying pastil-burners shed a blue and red light, sits Herod the
+king, half asleep with hasheesh, wrapped in silk, and motionless as a
+Hindu idol. His face is pale and gloomy, and his throne is like a
+crystal confessional chair, fashioned with all the riches of the world.
+Two women lean at the foot of a pillar. One of them touches the strings
+of a lute, and a small panther yawns near a vessel of incense. Upon the
+floor of variegated mosaics flowers lie strewn. Salome advances.
+Tripping upon her toes as lightly as a figure in a dream, she begins to
+dance, holding a tremulous lotus-flower in her hand. A shining tiara is
+upon her head; her body is adorned with all the jewels which the dragons
+guard in the veins of the earth. Faster and faster and with a more
+voluptuous grace she twists and stretches her splendid limbs; but of a
+sudden she starts and presses her hand to her heart: she has seen the
+executioner as he smote the head of John from the body.--In the midst of
+an Oriental paradise, the body of the Baptist lies in the grass; the
+head has been set upon a charger, and Salome, like a bloodthirsty
+tigress, watches it with looks of ardent, famished love.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ MOREAU. ORPHEUS.]
+
+Different as they seem in technique, there are many points of contact
+between the visionary Gustave Moreau and _Puvis de Chavannes_, the
+original and fascinating creator of the decorative painting of the
+nineteenth century. Where one indulges in detail, the other resorts to
+simplification; where the former is opulent the latter is ascetic; and
+yet they are associated through inward sympathy.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ MOREAU. DESIGN FOR ENAMEL.]
+
+Puvis de Chavannes is the Domenico Ghirlandajo of the nineteenth
+century. The most eminent mural works which have been achieved in France
+owe their existence to him. Wall-paintings from his hand may be found
+above the staircase of the museums of Amiens, Marseilles, and Lyons, in
+the Paris Panthéon and the new Sorbonne, in the town-halls of Poitiers
+and many other French towns--pictures which it is difficult to describe
+in detail, through the medium of pedestrian prose. The two works with
+which he opened the decorative series in the museum of Amiens in 1861
+are entitled "Bellum" and "Concordia." In the former warriors are riding
+over a monotonous plain. Two smoking pillars, the gloomy witnesses to
+sorrow and devastation, cast their dark shadows over the still fields,
+whilst here and there burning mills rise into the sombre sky like
+torches. In "Concordia," the counterpart to this work, there are women
+plucking flowers, and naked youths urging on their horses amid a
+luxuriant grove of laurel. In the Paris Panthéon he painted, between
+1876 and 1878, "The Girlhood of St. Geneviève." A laughing spring
+landscape, filled with the blitheness of May, spreads beneath the bright
+sky of the Isle de France. Calm figures move in it, men and women,
+children and greybeards. A bishop lays his hand upon the head of a young
+shepherdess; sailors are coming ashore from their barks. "The Grove
+sacred to the Arts and Muses" comes first in the decoration of the Lyons
+Museum. Upon one side is a thick forest, dark and profound, and upon the
+other the horizon is fringed by violet-blue hills and a large lake
+reflecting the bluish atmosphere; in the foreground are green meadows,
+where the flowers gleam like stars, and trees standing apart, oaks and
+firs, their strong, straight stems rising stiffly into the sky. At the
+foot of a pillared porch strange figures lie by the shore or stand erect
+amid the pale grass, one with her arm pointing upwards, another musing
+with her hand resting upon her chin, a third unrolling a parchment.
+Athletic youths are bringing flowers and winding garlands. The "Vision
+of Antiquity" and "Christian Inspiration" complete the series. The
+former of these pictures brings the spectator into Attica. Locked by a
+simple landscape of hills the blue sea is rippling, and bright islands
+rise from its bosom, while a clear sky sheds its full light from above.
+Trees and shrubs are growing here and there. A shepherd is playing upon
+the pan-pipes, goats are grazing, and five female figures, some of them
+nude, the others clothed, caress tame peacocks in the tall grass or lean
+against a parapet, breathing in the fresh, cool air. Farther back, at
+the foot of a height, is a young woman, holding herself erect like a
+statue, as she talks with a youth, whilst in the distance at the verge
+of the sea a spectral cavalcade, like that in Phidias' frieze of the
+Parthenon, gallops swiftly by. In the counterpart, "Christian
+Inspiration," a number of friars who are devoted to art are gathered
+together in the portico of an abbey church. The walls are embellished
+with naïve frescoes in the style of the Siennese school. One of the
+monks who is working on the pictures has alighted from the ladder and
+regards the result of his toil with a critical air. Lilies are blooming
+in a vase upon the ground. Outside, beyond the cloister wall, the flush
+of evening sheds its parting light over a lonely landscape, whence dark
+cypresses rise into the air, straight as a lance. In the decoration of
+the Sorbonne the object was to suggest all the lofty purposes to which
+the place has been dedicated upon the wall of the great amphitheatre
+used for the solemn sessions of the faculty, and facing the statues of
+the founders. Puvis de Chavannes did this by displaying a throne in a
+sacred grove, a throne upon which a grave matron arrayed in sombre
+garments is sitting in meditation. This is the old Sorbonne. Two genii
+at her side bring palm-branches and crowns as offerings in honour of the
+famous minds of the past. Around are standing manifold figures arrayed
+in the costumes which were assigned to the arts and sciences in Florence
+at the time of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi. From the rock upon which
+they are set there bursts the living spring from which youth derives
+knowledge and new power. A thick wood divides this quiet haunt,
+consecrated to the Muses, from the rush and the petty trifles of life.
+In a painting entitled "Inter Artes et Naturam," over the staircase of
+the museum of Rouen, artists musing over the ruins of mediæval buildings
+are seen lying in the midst of a Norman landscape, beneath apple-trees
+whose branches are weighed down by their burden of fruit; upon the other
+side of the picture there is a woman holding a child upon her knees,
+whilst another woman is trying to reach a bough laden with fruit, and a
+group of painters look on enchanted with the grace of her simple,
+harmonious movement.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ MOREAU. THE PLAINT OF THE POET.]
+
+Puvis de Chavannes is not a virtuoso in technique; for a Frenchman,
+indeed, he is almost clumsy, and is sure in very little of the work of
+his hand,--in fact, it is quite possible that a later age will not
+reckon him among the great painters. But what it can never forget is
+that after a period of lengthy aberrations he restored decorative art
+in general to its proper vocation.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ MOREAU. THE APPARITION.]
+
+Before his time what was good in the so-called monumental painting of
+the nineteenth century was usually not new, but borrowed from more
+fortunate ages, and what was new in it, the narrative element, was not
+good, or at least not in good taste. When Paolo Veronese produced his
+pictures in the Doge's Palace or Giulio Romano his frescoes in the Sala
+dei Giganti in Mantua, neither of them thought of the great mission of
+instructing the people or of patriotic sentiments; they wanted to
+achieve an effect which should be pictorial, festal, and harmonious in
+feeling. The task of painters who were entrusted with the embellishment
+of the walls of a building was to waken dreams and strike chords of
+feeling, to summon a mood of solemnity, to delight the eye, to uplift
+the spirit. What they created was decorative music, filling the mansion
+with its august sound as the solemn notes of an organ roll through a
+church. Their pictures stood in need of no commentary, no exertion of
+the mind, no historical learning. But the painting which in the
+nineteenth century did duty upon official occasions and was encouraged
+by governments for the sake of its pedagogical efficiency was not
+permitted to content itself with this general range of sentiment; it had
+to lay on the colours more thickly, and to appeal to the understanding
+rather than to sentiment. Descriptive prose took the place of lyricism.
+
+Puvis de Chavannes went back to the true principle of the old painters
+by renouncing any kind of didactic intention in his art. In the Panthéon
+of Paris, when the eye turns to the works of Puvis de Chavannes after
+beholding all the admirable panels with which the recognised masters of
+the flowing line have illustrated the temple of St. Geneviève, when it
+turns from St. Louis, Clovis, Jeanne d'Arc, and Dionysius Sanctus to
+"The Girlhood of St. Geneviève," it is as if one laid aside a prosy
+history of the world to read the _Eclogues_ of Virgil.
+
+[Illustration: _Graphische Künste._ PIERRE PUVIS DE CHAVANNES.]
+
+In the one case there are archæological lectures, stage scenery, and
+histrionic art; in the other, simple poetry and lyrical magic, a
+marvellous evocation from the distant past of that atmosphere of legend
+which banishes the commonplace. His art would express nothing, would
+represent nothing; it would only charm and attune the spirit, like music
+heard faintly from the distance. His figures perform no significant
+actions; nor are any learned attributes employed in their
+characterisation, such as were introduced in Greece and at the
+Renaissance. He does not paint Mars, Vulcan, and Minerva, but war, work,
+and peace. In translating the word _bellum_ into the language of
+painting in the Museum of Amiens he did not need academical Bellonas,
+nor sword-cuts, nor knightly suits of armour, nor fluttering standards.
+A group of mourning and stricken women, warlike horsemen, and a simple
+landscape sufficed him to conjure up the drama of war in all its
+terrible majesty. And he is as far from gross material heaviness as from
+academical sterility. The reapers toiling in his painting entitled
+"Summer" are modern in their movements and in their whole appearance,
+and yet they belong to no special time and seem to have been wafted into
+a world beyond; they are beings who might have lived yesterday, or, for
+the matter of that, a thousand years ago. The whole of existence seems
+in Puvis de Chavannes like a day without beginning or end, a day of
+Paradise, unchangeable and eternal. And very simple means sufficed him
+to attain this transcendental effect: like Millet, he generalises what
+is individual, and tempers what is presented in nature; antique nudity
+is associated in an unforced manner with modern costume; a designed
+simplicity, which has nothing of the academical painting of the nude,
+is expressed in the handling of form. Even his landscape he constructs
+upon its elementary forms, and by means of its essential, expressive
+features. But by a certain concordance of lines, by a distinct rhythm of
+form, he compasses a sentiment which is grave and solemn or idyllic.
+
+[Illustration: PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. A VISION OF ANTIQUITY.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+The Quattrocentisti, especially Ghirlandajo, were his models in this
+epical simplicity, and beside Baudry, the deft and spirited decorator of
+the most modernised High Renaissance style, he has the effect of a
+primitive artist risen from the grave. His pictures have an archaic
+bloom--something sacerdotal, if you will, something seraphic and holy.
+Often one fancies that one recognises the influence of old tapestries,
+to say nothing of Fra Angelico, but one is at a loss to give the model
+copied. And what places him like Moreau in sharp opposition to the old
+masters is that, instead of their sunny, smiling blitheness, he too is
+under the sway of that heavy melancholy spirit which the close of the
+nineteenth century first brought into the world.
+
+When he, a countryman of Flandrin and Chenavard, began his career under
+Couture over half a century ago, the world did not understand his
+pictures. People blamed the poverty of his palette, asserted that he was
+too simple and restricted in his methods of colouring, and he was called
+a Lenten painter, _un peintre de carême_, whose dull eye noted nothing
+in nature except ungainly lines and uniformly grey tones. Women were
+especially unfavourable to him, taking his lean figures as a personal
+insult to themselves. Moreover, the calm and immobility of his figures
+were censured, and when he exhibited his earliest pictures in 1854, at
+the same time as those of Courbet, he was called _un fou tranquille_,
+just as the latter was christened _un fou furieux_. In later years it
+was precisely through these two qualities, his grandiose quietude and
+his "anæmic" painting, that he brought the world beneath his spell, and
+diverted French art into a new course.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. THE BEHEADING OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+As his landscapes know nothing of agitated clouds, nor abruptness nor
+the strife of the elements, so his figures avoid all oratorical
+vehemence. They are eternally young, free from brutal passions, lost in
+oblivion. Let him conjure up old Hellas or the quiet life of the
+cloister, over figures and landscapes there always rests a tender
+sentiment of consecration and dreamy peace; no violent gesture and no
+loud tone disturb that harmony of feeling by any vehement action.
+
+[Illustration: PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. THE THREADSPINNER.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the picture._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Neurdein frères, photo._
+
+ PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. THE POOR FISHERMAN.]
+
+Nor does the colour admit any discord in the large harmony. It is
+exceedingly soft and light, although subdued; it has that faint,
+deadened indecisiveness to be seen in faded tapestries or vanishing
+frescoes. Tender and delicate in its chalky grey unity, which banishes
+reality and creates a world of dreams, it is spread around the shadowy
+figures. It is impossible to imagine his pictures without this light so
+pure and yet veiled, this silvery, transparent air, impregnated with the
+breath of the Divine, as Plato would say; it is impossible to imagine
+them without the delicate tones of these pale green, pale rose-coloured,
+and pale violet dresses, which are as delicate as fading flowers, and
+without this flesh-tint, which lends a phantomlike and unearthly
+appearance to his figures. It is all like a melody pitched in the high,
+finely touched, and tremulous tones of a violin; it invites a mood which
+is at once blithe and sentimental, happy and sad, banishes all earthly
+things into oblivion, and carries one into a distant, peaceful, and holy
+world.
+
+ "Mon coeur est en repos, mon âme est en silence,
+ Le bruit lointain du monde expire en arrivant,
+ Comme un son éloigné qu'affaiblit la distance,
+ À l'oreille incertaine apporté par le vent.
+
+ J'ai trop vu, trop senti, trop aimé dans ma vie;
+ Je viens chercher vivant le calme du Léthé:
+ Beaux lieux, soyez pour moi ces bords où l'on oublie;
+ L'oubli seul désormais est ma félicité.
+
+ D'ici je vois la vie, à travers un nuage,
+ S'évanouir pour moi dans l'ombre du passé...
+
+ L'amitié me trahit, la pitié m'abandonne,
+ Et, seul, je descends le sentier de tombeaux.
+
+ Mais la nature est là qui t'invite et qui t'aime;
+ Plonge-toi dans son sein qu'elle t'ouvre toujours;
+ Quand tout change pour toi, la nature est la même,
+ Est le même soleil se lève sur tes jours."
+
+[Illustration: _Levy et ses Fils, photo._
+
+ PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. SUMMER.]
+
+It was not long before the doctrine of the two souls in _Faust_ was
+exemplified in Germany also: from the fertile manure of Naturalism there
+sprang the blue flower of a new Romanticism. In Germany there had once
+lived Albrecht Dürer, the greatest and most profound painter-poet of all
+time; and there, too, even in an unpropitious age that genial visionary
+Moritz Schwind succeeded in flourishing. When the period of eclectic
+imitation had been overcome by Naturalism, was it not fitting that
+artists should once more attempt to embody the world of dreams beside
+that of actual existence, and beside tangible reality to give shape to
+the unearthly foreboding which fills the human heart with the visions
+and the cravings of fancy? In that age of hope arose the cult of
+_Boecklin_, and Germany began to honour in him who had been so long
+blasphemed the founder of a new and ardently desired art.
+
+Burne-Jones, Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Arnold Boecklin
+make up the four-leaved clover of modern Idealism. To future generations
+they will bear witness to the sentiment of Europe at the close of the
+nineteenth century. All four are more or less of the same age; they all
+four began their work in the beginning of the fifties; and they were all
+different from their contemporaries and from those who had gone before
+them. They embodied the spirit of the future. Boecklin had gone through
+a process of change as little as the others. His spirit was so rich that
+it comprised a century in itself, and leads us now towards the century
+to come. He was the contemporary of Schwind, he is our own contemporary,
+and he will be the contemporary of those who come after us. And it were
+as impossible to derive his art from that of any previous movement as to
+explain how he, our greatest visionary, came to be born in Basle, the
+most prosaic town in Europe.
+
+[Illustration: _Levy et ses Fils, photo._
+
+ PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. AUTUMN.]
+
+His father was a merchant there, and he was born in the year 1827. In
+1846 he went to Schirmer in Düsseldorf, and upon Schirmer's advice
+repaired to Brussels, where he copied the old Dutch masters in the
+gallery. By the sale of some of his works he acquired the means of
+travelling to Paris. He passed through the days of the Revolution of
+June in 1848, studied the pictures in the Louvre, and returned home
+after a brief stay to perform his military duties. In the March of 1850,
+when he was three-and-twenty, he went to Rome, where he entered the
+circle of Anselm Feuerbach; and in 1853 he married a Roman lady. In the
+following year he produced the decorative pictures in which he
+represented the relations of man to fire; these had been ordered for the
+house of a certain Consul Wedekind in Hanover, but were sent back as
+being "bizarre." In 1856 he betook himself--rather hard up for money--to
+Munich, where he exhibited in the Art Union "The Great Pan," which was
+bought by the Pinakothek. Paul Heyse was the medium of his making the
+acquaintance of Schack. And in 1858 he was appointed a teacher at the
+Academy of Weimar, by the influence of Lenbach and Begas. During this
+time he produced "Pan startling a Goat-herd" in the Schack Gallery, and
+"Diana Hunting." After three years he was again in Rome, and painted
+there "The Old Roman Tavern," "The Shepherd's Plaint of Love," and "The
+Villa by the Sea." In 1866 he went to Basle to complete the frescoes
+over the staircase of the museum, and in 1871 he was in Munich, where
+"The Idyll of the Sea" was exhibited amongst other things. In 1876 he
+settled in Florence, in 1886 at Zürich. From 1895 until the day of his
+death, January 16, 1901, he lived like a patriarch of art in his country
+house on the ridge of Fiesole.
+
+Any one who would interpret a theory based upon the idea that an artist
+is the result of influences might, while he is about it, speak of
+Boecklin's apprentice period in Düsseldorf and Schirmer's biblical
+landscapes. That "harmonious blending of figures with landscape," which
+is the leading note in Boecklin's work, was of course from the days of
+Claude Lorraine and Poussin the essence of the so-called historical
+landscape which found its principal representatives at a later period in
+Koch, Preller, Rottmann, Lessing, and Schirmer. Yet Boecklin is not the
+disciple of these masters, but stands at the very opposite pole of art.
+The art of all these men was merely a species of historical painting.
+Old Koch read the Bible, Æschylus, Ossian, Dante, and Shakespeare; found
+in them such scenes as Noah's thank-offering, Macbeth and the witches,
+or Fingal's battle with the spirit of Loda; and sought amid the Sabine
+hills, in Olevano and Subiaco, for sites where these incidents might
+have taken place. Preller made the _Odyssey_ the basis of his artistic
+creation, chose out of it moments where the scene might be laid in some
+landscape, and found in Rügen, Norway, Sorrento, and the coast of Capri
+the elements of nature necessary to his epic. Rottmann worked upon
+hexameters composed by King Ludwig, and adhered in the views he painted
+to the historical memories attached to the towns of Italy. Lessing
+sought inspiration in Sir Walter Scott, for whose monks and nuns he
+devised an appropriately sombre and mysterious background. Schirmer
+illustrated the Books of Moses by placing the figures in Schnorr's
+Picture Bible in Preller's Odyssean landscape. Whether they were
+Classicists appealing to the eye by the architecture of form, or
+Romanticists addressing the spirit by the "mood" in their landscapes, it
+was common to all these painters that they set out from a literary or
+historical subject. They gave an exact interpretation of the actions
+prescribed by their authors, surrounding the figures with fictitious
+landscapes, corresponding in general conception to one's notion of the
+surroundings of heroes, patriarchs, or hermits. Their pictures are
+historical incidents with a stage-setting of landscape.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ ARNOLD BOECKLIN. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]
+
+In Boecklin all this is reversed. Landscape painter he is in his very
+essence, and he is, moreover, the greatest landscape painter of the
+nineteenth century, at whose side even the Fontainebleau group seem
+one-sided specialists. Every one of the latter had a peculiar type of
+landscape, and a special hour in the day which appealed to his feelings
+more distinctly than any other. One loved spring and dewy morning,
+another the clear, cold day, another the threatening majesty of the
+storm, the flashing effects of sportive sunbeams, or the evening after
+sunset, when colours fade from view. But Boecklin is as inexhaustible as
+infinite nature herself. In one place he celebrates the festival of
+spring with its burden of beauty: it is ushered in by snowdrops, and
+greeted with joy by the veined cups of the crocus; yellow primroses and
+blue violets merrily nod their heads, and a hundred tiny mountain
+streams leap precipitately into the valley to announce the coming of
+spring. In another, nature shines and blooms and chimes, and breathes
+her balm in all the colours of summer. Tulips freaked with purple rise
+at the side of paths; flowers in rows of blue, white, and
+yellow--hyacinths, daisies, gentians, anemones, and snapdragon--fill the
+sward in hordes; and down in the valley blow the narcissus in dazzling
+myriads, loading the air with an overpowering perfume. But, beside such
+lovely idylls, he has painted with puissant sublimity as many
+complaining elegies and tempestuous tragedies. Here, the sombre autumnal
+landscapes, with their tall black cypresses, are lashed by the rain and
+the howling storm. There, lonely islands or grave, half-ruined towers,
+tangled with creepers, rise dreamily from a lake, mournfully hearkening
+to the repining murmur of the waves; and there, in the midst of a narrow
+rocky glen, a rotten bridge hangs over a fearful abyss. Or a raging
+storm, beneath the might of which the forests bow, blusters round a wild
+mountain land which rises from a blue-black lake. Boecklin has painted
+everything: the graceful and heroic, the solitude and the waste, the
+solemnly sublime and the darkly tragic, passionate agitation and
+demoniacal fancy, the strife of foaming waves and the eternal rest of
+rigid masses of rock, the wild uproar of the sky and the still peace of
+flowery fields. The compass of his moods is as much greater than that of
+the French Classicists as Italy is greater than Fontainebleau.
+
+For Italy is Boecklin's home as a landscape painter, and the moods of
+nature there are more in number than Poussin ever painted. Grave and sad
+and grandiose is the Roman Campagna, with the ruins of the street of
+sepulchres, and the grey and black herds of cattle looking mournfully
+over the brown pastures. Hidden like the Sleeping Beauty lie the Roman
+villas in his pictures, in their sad combination of splendour and decay,
+of life and death, of youth and age. Behind weather-beaten grotto-wells
+and dark green nooks of yew, white busts and statues gleam like
+phantoms. From lofty terraces the water in decaying aqueducts trickles
+down with a monotonous murmur into still pools, where bracken and
+withered shrubs overgrown with ivy are reflected. Huge cypresses of the
+growth of centuries stand gravely in the air, tossing their heads
+mournfully when the wind blows. Then at a bound we are at Tivoli, and
+the whole scenery is changed. Great fantastic rocks rise straight into
+the air, luxuriantly mantled by ivy and parasitic growths; trees and
+shrubs take root in the clefts; the floods of the Anio plunge
+headforemost into the depths with a roar of sound, like a legion of
+demons thunder-stricken by some higher power. Then comes Naples, with
+its glory of flowers and its moods of evening glowing in deep ruby. Blue
+creepers twine round the balustrades of castles; hedges of monthly roses
+veil the roads, and oranges grow large amid the dark foliage. Farther
+away he paints the Homeric world of Sicily, with its crags caressed or
+storm-beaten by the wave, its blue grottoes, and its deep glowing
+splendours of changing colour. Or he represents the inland landscape of
+Florence with its soft graceful lines of hill, its fields and flowers,
+buds and blossoms, and its numbers of white dreaming villas hidden amid
+rosy oleanders and standing against the blue sky with a brightness
+almost dazzling.
+
+[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._
+
+ BOECKLIN. A VILLA BY THE SEA.]
+
+[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
+
+ BOECKLIN. A ROCKY CHASM.]
+
+Boecklin has no more rendered an exact portrait of the scenery of Italy
+than the Classic masters of France sought to represent in a photographic
+way districts in the forest of Fontainebleau. His whole life, like
+theirs, was a renewed and perpetual wooing of nature. As a boy he looked
+down from his attic in Basle upon the heaving waters of the Rhine. When
+he was in Rome, in 1850, he wandered daily in the Campagna to feast his
+eyes upon its grave lines and colours. After a few years in Weimar he
+gave up his post to gather fresh impressions in Italy. And the moods
+with which he was inspired by nature and the phenomena he observed were
+stored in his mind as though in a great emporium. Then his imagination
+went through another stage. That "organic union of figures and
+landscape" which the representatives of "heroic landscape" had surmised
+and endeavoured to attain by a reasoned method through the illustration
+of passages in poetry took place in Boecklin by the force of intuitive
+conception. The mood excited in him by a landscape is translated into an
+intuition of life.
+
+In many pictures, particularly those of his earlier period, the
+ground-tone given by the landscape finds merely a faint echo in small
+accessory figures. In such pictures he stands more or less on a level
+with _Dreber_, that master who died in Rome in 1875, and was forgotten
+in the history of German art more swiftly than ought to have been the
+case. Franz Dreber was not one of those Classicists dispersed over the
+face of Europe, men who were content with setting heroic actions in the
+midst of noble landscapes in the fashion of Preller; on the contrary, he
+was the lyricist of this movement, the first man who did not touch the
+epical material of old myths in a manner that was merely scholarly and
+illustrative, but developed his picture from the original note of
+landscape. In his pictures nature laughs with those who are glad, mourns
+with those who weep, sheds her light upon the joyful, and envelops
+tortured spirits in storm and the terror of thunder. If the golden age
+is to be represented, the scene is a soft summer landscape, where
+everything breathes peace and innocence and bliss. And the life of those
+who inhabit this happy region runs by in blissful peace also. Fair women
+and children rest upon the meadow, and gather fruits and pluck roses. If
+he paints Ulysses upon the shore of the sea, looking with yearning
+towards his distant home, a dull, sultry haze of noon broods over the
+district, wide and grey like the hero's yearning. A spring landscape of
+sunny blitheness, with butterflies sipping at the blossoms of the trees
+and sunbeams sportively dallying on the sea, are the surroundings of the
+picture where Psyche is crowned by Eros. And if Prometheus is
+represented chained to the rock and striving to burst his fetters, all
+nature fights the fight of the Titan. Lurid clouds move swiftly through
+the sky, ghostly flashes of lightning quiver, and a wild tempest rakes
+the mountains.
+
+[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
+
+ BOECKLIN. THE PENITENT.]
+
+In Boecklin's earlier pictures the accessory figures are placed in close
+relation with the landscape in a manner entirely similar. The mysterious
+keynote of sentiment in nature gives the theme of the scene represented.
+In the picture called "The Penitent," in the Schack Gallery, a hermit is
+kneeling half-naked before the cross of the Saviour upon the slope of a
+steep mountain. Troops of ravens fly screaming above his head, and a
+strip of blue sky shines with an unearthly aspect between the trees,
+which are bent into wild shapes. The character of the scene is terribly
+severe, and severe and heavy is the misery in the heart of the man
+chastising himself with the scourge in his hand as he kneels there in
+prayer. A deep melancholy rests over the picture named "The Villa by the
+Sea." The failing waves break gently on the shore with a mournful
+whisper, the wind utters its complaint blowing through the cypresses,
+and a few sunbeams wander coyly over the deep grey of the sky. At the
+socle of a niche a young woman dressed in black stands, and, with her
+head resting upon her hand, looks out of deeply veiled eyes over the
+moving tide. In "The Spring of Love" the landscape vibrates in lyrically
+soft and flattering chords. The budding splendour of blossoms covers the
+trees luxuriantly, and a rivulet ripples over the laughing grassy balk.
+A young man touches the strings of a lyre and sings; and, joining in his
+song, a maiden stands beside him leaning against a bush laden with
+blossom. In "The Walk to Emmaus" the ground-tone is given by a grave
+evening landscape. The storm ruffles the tops of the great trees, and
+chases across the sky the heavy clouds, over which strange evening
+lights are flitting. All nature trembles in shivering apprehension.
+"Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent."
+
+But Boecklin's great creations reach a higher level. Having begun by
+extending the lyrical mood of a landscape to his figures, he finally
+succeeded in peopling nature with beings which seem the final
+condensation of the life of nature itself, the tangible embodiment of
+that spirit of nature whose cosmic action in the water, the earth, and
+the air, he had glorified in one of his youthful works, the frescoes of
+the Basle Museum. In such pictures he has no forerunners whatever in the
+more recent history of art. His principle of creation rests, it might be
+said, upon the same overwhelming feeling for nature which brought forth
+the figures of Greek myth. When the ancient Greek stood before a
+waterfall he gave human form to what he saw. His eye beheld the outlines
+of beautiful nude women, nymphs of the spot, in the descending volume of
+the cascade; its foam was their fluttering hair, and in the rippling of
+the water and spattering froth he heard their bold splashing and their
+laughter. The elemental sway of nature, the secret interweaving of her
+forces took shape in plastic forms--
+
+ "Alles wies den eingeweihten Blicken,
+ Alles eines Gottes Spur ...
+ Diese Höhen füllten Oreaden,
+ Eine Dryas lebt in jedem Baum,
+ Aus dem Urnen lieblicher Najaden
+ Sprang der Ströme Silberschaum.
+ Jener Lorbeer wand sich einst um Hilfe,
+ Tantals Tochter schweigt in diesem Stein,
+ Syrinx Klage tönt aus jenem Schilfe,
+ Philomelas Schmerz aus diesem Hain."
+
+The beings which live in Boecklin's pictures owe their origin to a
+similar action of the spirit. He hears trees, rivers, mountains, and
+universal nature whisper as with human speech. Every flower, every bush,
+every flame, the rocks, the waves, and the meadows, dead and without
+feeling as they are to the ordinary eye, have to his mind a vivid
+existence of their own; and in the same way the old poet conceived the
+lightning as a fiery bird and the clouds as the flocks of heaven. The
+stones have a voice, white walls lengthen like huge phantoms, the bright
+lights of the houses upon a mountain declivity at night change into the
+great eyes with which the spirit of the fell glares fixedly down;
+legions of strange beings circle and whir round in the fantastic region.
+In his imagination every impression of nature condenses itself into
+figures that may be seen. As a dragon issues from his lair to terrify
+travellers in the gloom of a mountain ravine, and as the avenging Furies
+rise in the waste before a murderer, so in the still brooding noon, when
+a shrill tone is heard suddenly and without a cause, the Grecian Pan
+lives once again for Boecklin--Pan, who startles the goat-herd from his
+dream by an eerie shout, and then whinnies in mockery at the terrified
+fugitive. The cool, wayward splashing element of water takes shape as a
+graceful nymph, shrouded in a transparent water-blue veil, leaning upon
+her welling urn as she listens dreamily to the song of a bird. The fine
+mists which rise from the fountain-head become embodied as a row of
+merry children, whose vaporous figures float hazily through the shining
+clouds of spring. The secret voices that live amid the silence of the
+wood press round him, and the phantom born of the excited senses becomes
+a ghostly unicorn advancing with noiseless step, and bearing upon his
+back a maiden of legendary story dressed in a white garment. In the
+thundercloud lying over the broad summit of a mountain and abundant in
+blessing rain he sees the huge body of the giant Prometheus, who brought
+fire from heaven and lies fettered to the mountain top, spreading over
+the landscape like a cloud. The form of Death stumbling past cloven
+trees in rain and tempest, as he rides his pale horse, appears to him in
+a waste and chill autumnal region, where stands a ruined castle in lurid
+illumination. A sacred grove, lying in insular seclusion and fringed
+with venerable old trees that rise straight into the air, rustling as
+they bend their heads towards each other, is peopled, as at a word of
+enchantment, with grave priestly figures robed in white, which approach
+in solemn procession and fling themselves down in prayer before the
+sacrificial fire. The lonely waste of the sea is not brought home to him
+with sufficient force by a wide floor of waves, with gulls indolently
+flying beneath a low and leaden sky; so he paints a flat crag emerging
+from the waves, and upon its crest, over which the billows sweep, the
+shy dwellers of the sea bathe in the light. Naiads and Tritons assembled
+for a gamesome ride over the sea typify the sportive hide-and-seek of
+the waves. Yet there is nothing forced, nothing merely ingenious,
+nothing literary in these inventions. The figures are not placed in
+nature with deliberate calculation: they are an embodied mood of nature;
+they are children of the landscape, and no mere accessories.
+
+[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
+
+ BOECKLIN. PAN STARTLING A GOAT-HERD.]
+
+Boecklin's power of creating types in embodying these beings of his
+imagination is a thing unheard of in the whole history of art. He has
+represented his Centaurs and Satyrs, and Fauns and Sirens and Cupids, so
+vividly and impressively that they have become ideas as currently
+acceptable as if they were simple incomposite beings. He has seen the
+awfulness of the sea at moments when the secret beings of the deep
+emerge, and he allows a glimpse into the fabulous reality of their
+heretofore unexplored existence. For all beings which hover swarming in
+the atmosphere around have their dwelling in the trees or their haunts
+in rocky deserts, he has found new and convincing figures. Everything
+which was created in this field before his time--the works of Dürer,
+Mantegna, and Salvator Rosa not excepted--was an adroit sport with forms
+already established by the Greeks, and a transposition of Greek statues
+into a pictorial medium. With Boecklin, who instead of illustrating
+mythology himself creates it, a new power of inventing myths was
+introduced. His creations are not the distant issue of nature, but
+corporeal beings, full of ebullient energy, individualised through and
+through, and stout, lusty, and natural; and in creating them he has been
+even more consistent than the Greeks. In their work there is something
+inorganic in the combination of a horse's body with the head of Zeus or
+Laocoön grafted upon it. But in the presence of Boecklin's Centaurs
+heaving great boulders around them and biting and worrying each other's
+manes, the spectator has really the feeling which prompts him to
+exclaim, "Every inch a steed!" In him the nature of the sea is expressed
+through his cold, slimy women with the dripping hair clinging to their
+heads far more powerfully than it was by the sea-gods of Greece. How
+merciless is the look in their cold, black, soulless eyes! They are as
+terrible as the destroying sea that yesterday in its bellowing fury
+engulfed a hundred human creatures despairing in the anguish of death,
+and to-day stretches still and joyous in its blue infinity and its
+callous oblivion of all the evils it has wrought.
+
+[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
+
+ BOECKLIN. THE HERD.]
+
+And only a slight alteration in the truths of nature has sufficed him
+for the creation of such chimerical beings. As a landscape painter he
+stands with all his fibres rooted in the earth, although he seems quite
+alienated from this world of ours, and his fabulous creatures make the
+same convincing impression because they have been created with all the
+inner logical congruity of nature, and delineated under close
+relationship to actual fact with the same numerous details as the real
+animals of the earth. For his Tritons, Sirens, and Mermaids, with their
+awkward bodies covered with bristly hair and their prominent eyes, he
+may have made studies from seals and walruses. As they stretch
+themselves upon a rocky coast, fondling and playing with their young,
+they have the look of sea-cows in human form, though, like men, they
+have around them all manner of beasts of prey and domestic pets which
+they caress,--in one place a sea-serpent, in another a seal. His obese
+and short-winded Tritons, with shining red faces and flaxen hair
+dripping with moisture, are good-humoured old gentlemen with a quantity
+of warm blood in their veins, who love and laugh and drink new wine. His
+Fauns may be met with amongst the shepherds of the Campagna, swarthy
+strapping fellows dressed in goat-skins after the fashion of Pan--lads
+with glowing eyes and two rows of white teeth gleaming like ivory. It is
+chiefly the colour lavished upon them which turns them into children of
+an unearthly world, where other suns are shining and other stars.
+
+In the matter of colour also the endeavours of Romanticists of the
+nineteenth century reach a climax in Boecklin. When Schwind and his
+comrades set themselves to represent the romantic world of fairyland an
+interdict was still laid upon colour, and it was lightly washed over the
+drawing, which counted as the thing of prime importance. But Boecklin
+was the first Romanticist in Germany to reveal the marvellous power in
+colour for rendering moods of feeling and its inner depth of musical
+sentiment. Even in those years when the brown tone of the galleries
+prevailed everywhere, colour was allowed in his pictures to have its own
+independent existence, apart from its office of being a merely
+subordinate characteristic of form. For him green was thoroughly green,
+blue was divinely blue, and red was jubilantly red. At the very time
+when Richard Wagner lured the colours of sound from music, with a glow
+and light such as no master had kindled before, Boecklin's symphonies of
+colour streamed forth like a crashing orchestra. The whole scale, from
+the most sombre depth to the most chromatic light, was at his command.
+In his pictures of spring the colour laughs, rejoices, and exults. In
+"The Isle of the Dead" it seems as though a veil of crape were spread
+over the sea, the sky, and the trees. And since that time Boecklin has
+grown even greater. His splendid sea-green, his transparent blue sky,
+his sunset flush tinged with violet haze, his yellow-brown rocks, his
+gleaming red sea-mosses, and the white bodies of his girls are always
+arranged in new glowing, sensuous harmonies. Many of his pictures have
+such an ensnaring brilliancy that the eye is never weary of feasting
+upon their floating splendour.
+
+A master who died in Rome some nineteen years ago might have been in the
+province of mural painting for German art what Puvis de Chavannes has
+become for French. In the earlier histories of art his name is not
+mentioned. Seldom alluded to in life, dead as a German painter ten years
+before his death, he was summoned from the grave by the enthusiasm of a
+friend who was a refined connoisseur four years after the earth had
+closed over him. Such was _Hans von Marées'_ destiny as an artist.
+
+[Illustration: BOECKLIN. VENUS DESPATCHING CUPID.]
+
+Marées was born in Elberfeld in 1837. In beginning his studies he had
+first betaken himself to Berlin, and then went for eight years to
+Munich, where he paid his tribute to the historical tendency by a "Death
+of Schill." But in 1864 he migrated to Rome, where he secluded himself
+with a few pupils, and passed his time in working and teaching. Only
+once did he receive an order. He was entrusted in 1873 with the
+execution of some mural paintings in the library of the Zoological
+Museum in Naples, and lamented afterwards that he had not received the
+commission in riper years. When he had sufficient confidence in himself
+to execute such tasks he had no similar opportunity, and thus he lost
+the capacity for the rapid completion of a work. He began to doubt his
+own powers, sent no more pictures to any exhibition, and when he died in
+the summer of 1887, at the age of fifty, his funeral was that of a man
+almost unknown. It was only when his best works were brought together at
+the annual exhibition of 1891 at Munich that he became known in wider
+circles, and these pictures, now preserved in the Castle of
+Schleissheim, will show to future years who Hans von Marées was, and
+what he aimed at.
+
+"An artist rarely confines himself to what he has the power of doing,"
+said Goethe once to Eckermann; "most artists want to do more than they
+can, and are only too ready to go beyond the limits which nature has set
+to their talent." Setting out from this tenet, there would be little
+cause for rescuing Marées from oblivion. Some portraits and a few
+drawings are his only performances which satisfy the demands of the
+studio--the portraits being large in conception and fine in taste, the
+drawings sketched with a swifter and surer hand. His large works have
+neither in drawing nor colour any one of those advantages which are
+expected in a good picture; they are sometimes incomplete, sometimes
+tortured, and sometimes positively childish. "He is ambitious, but he
+achieves nothing," was the verdict passed upon him in Rome. Upon
+principle Marées was an opponent of all painting from the model. He
+scoffed at those who would only reproduce existing fact, and thus, in a
+certain sense, reduplicate nature, according to Goethe's saying: "If I
+paint my mistress's pug true to nature, I have two pugs, but never a
+work of art." For this reason he never used models for the purpose of
+detailed pictorial studies; and just as little was he at pains to fix
+situations in his mind by pencil sketches to serve as notes; for,
+according to his view, the direct use of motives, as they are called, is
+only a hindrance to free artistic creation. And, of course, creation of
+this kind is only possible to a man who can always command a rich store
+of vivid memories of what he has seen and studied and profoundly grasped
+in earlier days. This treasury of artistic forms was not large enough in
+Marées. If one buries oneself in Marées' works--and there are some of
+them in which the trace of great genius has altogether vanished beneath
+the unsteady hand of a restless brooder--it seems as if there thrilled
+within them the cry of a human heart. Sometimes through his method of
+painting them over and over again he produced spectral beings with
+grimacing faces. Their bodies have been so painted and repainted that
+whole layers of colour lie upon separate parts, and ruin the impression
+in a ghastly fashion. Only too often his high purpose was wrecked by the
+inadequacy of his technical ability; and his poetic dream of beauty
+almost always evaporated because his hand was too weak to give it shape.
+
+If his pictures, in spite of all this, made a great effect in the Munich
+exhibition, it was because they formulated a principle. It was felt that
+notes had been touched of which the echo would be long in dying. When
+Marées appeared there was no "grand painting" for painting's sake in
+Germany, but mural decoration after the fashion of the historical
+picture--works in which the aim of decorative art was completely
+misunderstood, since they merely gave a rendering of arid and
+instructive stories, where they should have simply aimed at expressing
+"a mood." Like his contemporary Puvis de Chavannes in France, Marées
+restored to this "grand painting" the principle of its life, its joyous
+impulse, and did so not by painting anecdote, but because he aimed at
+nothing but pictorial decorative effect. A sumptuous festal impression
+might be gained from his pictures; it was as though beautiful and
+subdued music filled the air; they made the appeal of quiet hymns to the
+beauty of nature, and were, at the same time, grave and monumental in
+effect.
+
+In one, St. Martin rides through a desolate wintry landscape upon a
+slow-trotting nag, and holds his outspread mantle towards the half-naked
+beggar, shivering with the cold. In another, St. Hubert has alighted
+from his horse, and kneels in adoration before the cross which he sees
+between the antlers of the stag. In another, St. George, upon a powerful
+rearing horse, thrusts his lance through the body of the dragon with
+solemn and earnest mien. But as a rule even the relationship with
+antique, mythological, and mediæval legendary ideas is wanting in his
+art. Landscapes which seem to have been studied in another world he
+peoples with beings who pass their lives lost in contemplation of the
+divine. Women and children, men and grey-beards live, and love, and
+labour as though in an age that knows nothing of the stroke of the
+clock, and which might be yesterday or a hundred thousand years ago.
+They repose upon the luxuriant sward shadowed by apple-trees laden with
+fruit, abandoning themselves to a thousand reveries and meditations.
+They do not pose, and they aim at being nothing except children of
+nature, nature in her innocence and simplicity. Nude women stand
+motionless under the trees, or youths are seen reflected in the pools.
+The motive of gathering oranges is several times repeated: a youth
+snatches at the fruit, an old man bends to pick up those which have
+dropped, and a child searches for those which have rolled away in the
+grass. Sometimes the steed, the Homeric comrade of man, is introduced:
+the nude youth rides his steed in the training-school, or the commander
+of an army gallops upon his splendid warhorse. Everything that Marées
+painted belongs to the golden age. And when it was borne in mind that
+these pictures had been produced twenty years back or more, they came to
+have the significance of works that opened out a new path; there was
+poetry in the place of didactic formula; in the place of historical
+anecdote the joy of plastic beauty; in the place of theatrical vehemence
+an absence of gesticulation and a perfect simplicity of line. At a time
+when others rendered dramas and historical episodes by colours and
+gestures, Marées composed idylls. He came as a man of great and austere
+talent, Virgilian in his sense of infinite repose on the breast of
+nature, monastic in his abnegation of petty superficial allurements,
+despite special attempts which he made at chromatic effect. Something
+dreamy and architectonic, lofty and yet familiar, intimate in feeling
+and yet monumental holds sway in his works. Intimacy of effect he
+achieved by the stress he laid upon landscape; monumental dignity by his
+grandiose and earnest art, and his calm and sense of style in line. All
+abrupt turns and movements were avoided in his work. And he displayed a
+refinement entirely peculiar to himself through the manner in which he
+brought into accord the leading lines of landscape and the leading lines
+in his figures. A feeling for style, in the sense in which it was
+understood by the old painters, is everywhere dominant in his work, and
+a handling of line and composition in the grand manner which placed him
+upon a level with the masters of art. A new and simple beauty was
+revealed. And if it is true that it is only in the field of plastic art
+that he has had, up to the present, any pupil of importance--and he had
+one in Adolf Hildebrandt--it is, nevertheless, beyond question that the
+monumental painting of the future is alone capable of being developed
+upon the ground prepared by Marées.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ BOECKLIN. FLORA.]
+
+In this more than anything, it seems to me, lies the significance of all
+these masters. We must not lay too much stress upon the fact that they
+dealt with ideal and universal themes; a healthy art cannot be nourished
+on bloodless ideals, but only on the living essence of its own epoch.
+We must bear in mind, however, that a sound artistic principle has been
+formulated. A glance at the productions of classic art shows us that the
+old masters carefully considered the relation of a picture to its
+environment. Take, for instance, the Ravenna mosaics or Giotto's
+frescoes. They must needs resound in solemn harmony the whole church
+through; looked at from any point of view they must make their presence
+felt right away in the farthest distance: so both Giotto and the mosaic
+artists worked only in broad expressive lines, their forcible
+colour-schemes were fitted together in accordance with strict decorative
+laws. All naturalistic effects are avoided, all petty detail is left out
+in the flow of the drapery as well as in the structure of the landscape.
+Then the clear outlines tell out. The pictures must, when viewed from a
+distance, simultaneously, in all their lines, carry on the lines of the
+building.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ BOECKLIN. IN THE TROUGH OF THE WAVES.]
+
+Later on, in the Netherlands, there arose another style of painting. In
+abrupt contrast to the monumental works of the Italian school we have
+Jan van Eyck's tiny little pictures painted with a fine point, stroke by
+stroke, with the most minute exactitude. Every hair in the head, every
+vein in the hands, every ornament in the costume is drawn true to life.
+Jan van Eyck knew what he was about with this fine-point style of art,
+for his pictures did not lay claim to any effect from a distance; they
+were meant to be looked at, like miniatures in the prayer-books, from
+the closest point of view possible. They were little domestic
+altar-pieces: when anyone wanted to look at them, he drew the curtain
+aside and knelt or stood just in front of them. The style of painting of
+the later Dutch cabinet pictures is accounted for in the same way. These
+paintings were generally placed on an easel, as if to give the spectator
+a gentle hint, "If you wish to fully appreciate the beauties of this
+little picture, please stand right in front." Even when the pictures
+were meant to adorn the walls, the minute and dainty style of a Don or a
+Mieris was appropriate, for the narrowness of the old Dutch rooms
+precluded all possibility of the spectator's being able to stand far
+away from the picture.
+
+[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
+
+ BOECKLIN. THE SHEPHERD'S PLAINT.]
+
+If by chance one of these Dutch artists, Weenix for instance, had to do
+work for a Flemish palace, he changed his style forthwith. He recognised
+the fact that a picture, to be effective in a large state-room, must
+differ not only in size, but in composition and style of painting from
+one that is meant for a small parlour. It is undoubtedly this lack of
+appreciation of the fact that a picture must be suitable to its
+surroundings that has robbed the nineteenth century of any claim to
+style. What abominable daubs mural painters have foisted upon us in our
+public buildings! The literary trend of the time drew away people's
+attention from the beauty of form and colour, and centred it upon the
+didactic value of the works. Instead of starting from the idea that a
+picture should "adorn," they covered the walls with historical genre
+painting, never troubling themselves about decorative effect, and
+offered the beholder instructive stories in picture cards. As to art in
+the home, well, we can all of us remember the time when small
+photographs and etchings, instead of being kept in an album or a
+portfolio, were put on the wall, where they looked like mere spots of
+dead black and white. It was the same sort of thing in galleries and
+exhibitions, confusion worse confounded. On one and the same wall you
+got the most heterogeneous collection, cabinet pictures by Brouwer or
+Ostade next to an enormous altar-piece by Rubens, a gigantic Delacroix
+flanked by neat little Meissoniers. In this way the power of
+appreciating the significance of a work of art as part of the
+decoration of a room was totally lost. Surely it is not to be wondered
+at that a picture seen close to in an exhibition, bought, taken home,
+hung on the wall and looked at from a distance, turns out a meaningless
+chaos of dirty-brown.
+
+[Illustration: _Albert, Munich._
+
+ BOECKLIN. AN IDYLL OF THE SEA.]
+
+In the province of mural painting the tendency towards an improvement
+set in earliest. In England, France, and Germany, almost simultaneously
+efforts began to be made with the object of restoring to mural painting
+once more its decorative element. In England Burne-Jones was the first
+to pay attention to harmony of style between picture and building.
+Before his time English churches were provided with stained-glass
+windows in a spurious sort of Cinquecento style that was absolutely
+unsuited to the building, but Burne-Jones satisfied the most exacting
+demands of the English Neo-Gothic architecture. All his subjects are
+brought into style with the slender pillars, the curves of the landscape
+as well as of the figures harmonise with the pointed arches of the
+building. Everything, colour as well as line, is so simplified that the
+pictures retain the clearness of their composition when seen from the
+farthest possible standpoint. In France, Puvis de Chavannes travelled by
+another road to the same goal. The decoration of the Pantheon was placed
+in his hands. Before him many artists had done work there, but the
+policy of all of them had been to adopt the old style of oil-painting to
+mural decoration, and so they adorned the Pantheon as well, though it
+was called a Grecian temple, with oil-paintings founded on Raphael or
+Caravaggio, mural pictures that would have been far better suited to a
+church of the Cinquecento or the _baroque_ period. Puvis was the first
+to realise that in the decoration of a building the artist must be
+strictly controlled by the style of the architecture; so in his frescoes
+he avoided all projections, all roundness, all wavy lines, bends, and
+curves, and dealt exclusively with groups of vertical and horizontal
+lines, that followed the characteristic lines of pillar and architrave.
+Similarly in the colours as well as the lines he excluded all detail
+that would distract the attention, all confusion of colours that would
+disturb the eye, and thereby gave his works the stately and dominant
+effect that they produce. Had Fate been kind, poor Hans von Marées might
+have won the same significance for Germany as Puvis did for France.
+Though individually his works are faulty, they are all informed with a
+marvellous feeling for style; one observes how beautifully the lines of
+the landscape are made to harmonise with the lines of the figures, and
+with what a finely decorative quality the colours are combined.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ BOECKLIN. VITA SOMNIUM BREVE.]
+
+In a similar manner we must bring our minds to bear upon the problem of
+the framed picture in connection with the decoration of a room. Our
+rooms are not only lighter but more spacious than the old-fashioned
+Dutch parlours, with their leaded panes; so it was merely a hereditary
+taint in our painters that made them cling so long to the ancestral
+style of painting, in spite of the altered conditions of the lighting
+and size of modern rooms. Impressionism did at any rate bring colour
+more into harmony with the improved lighting of our rooms; yet in every
+art the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children. The
+Impressionists discovered atmosphere, and so they denied the existence
+of lines, and the outlines vanished into thin air; they discovered
+light, and therefore they likewise denied the existence of colours. Then
+by means of light the colours were analysed, and patches of colour were
+decomposed into a heterogeneous conglomeration of luminous points. The
+Impressionists simply revelled in the most delicate nuances of vague
+tones of indefinite colour, and as they eliminated from their work all
+significant lines and all strong and frank colours, they spoilt to a
+great extent the decorative effect of their pictures when viewed at a
+distance: their paintings from that standpoint are often nothing more
+than a daub of violet and yellow, without form and void.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ BOECKLIN. THE ISLE OF THE DEAD.]
+
+Thus towards the close of the nineteenth century there came under
+discussion a new problem again in the matter of picture painting. The
+question arose as to how decorative qualities might be arrived at in
+painting pure and simple. The way seems to be pointed out in the works
+of Moreau and Boecklin; the way in which they placed side by side
+beautiful strong colours in broad masses, and invariably so as to avoid
+all discord, and combined the most conflicting tones into a harmonious
+whole in a manner which words fail one to describe. It was delightful,
+after having looked so long at nothing but the subtle, delicate nuances
+of the Impressionists, to turn again to these full-toned colours ringing
+out their deep and mighty harmonies.
+
+It is scarcely to be wondered at that the younger generation of the
+present day refused to be bound by the principles of art laid down by
+their predecessors, notwithstanding the fact that Moreau, as well as
+Boecklin, was indebted to the Quattrocento for the mosaic-like
+brilliancy of his colours. Impressionism has discovered a whole range of
+new colour values by careful and intelligent study of the influence of
+light upon colour, and where formerly we saw ten we now find a hundred.
+Red, green, blue have lost their meaning in the category of complex and
+infinitely differentiated tones. So, as we advance from a realistic
+transcript of impressions taken direct from nature to free, symphonic
+compositions of the colours to which Impressionism has opened our eyes,
+we shall evolve harmonies richer than were ever imagined before, more
+melting than we ever dreamed of. This is the goal to which the efforts
+of the younger generation are primarily tending. Building upon the
+foundations laid by the Impressionists, they seek to ensure for their
+pictures both clearness and harmony, by simplification of form, by
+beauty of technique, and by subordination of colour to the decorative
+scheme. Their confession of faith is comprised in the words of Paterson:
+"A picture must be something more than garbled Nature: it must please
+the educated eye; and only so far as nature gives the painter his
+material can he or dare he follow her."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V
+
+A SURVEY OF EUROPEAN ART AT THE PRESENT TIME
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+By what means was the further development of painting in Europe brought
+about under the influence of the principles of the two schools, the
+Impressionists and the Decorative-Stylists? The following may supply the
+answer.
+
+"Realism" having led painting from the past to the present, and
+"Impressionism" having broken the jurisdiction of the galleries by
+establishing an independent conception of colour for a new class of
+subjects, the flood of modern life, which had been artificially dammed,
+began to pour into art in all its volume. A whole series of new problems
+emerged, and a vigorous band of modern spirits were ready to lay hold
+upon them and give them artistic shape, each according to his nature,
+his ability, and his individual knowledge and power. After
+nineteenth-century painting had found its proper field of activity they
+were no longer under the necessity of seeking remote subjects. The fresh
+conquest of a personal impression of nature took the place of that
+retrospective taste which employed the ready-made language of form and
+colour belonging to the old masters, as a vocabulary for the preparation
+of fresh works of art. Nature herself had become a gallery of splendid
+pictures. Artists were dazzled as if by a new light, overcome as though
+by a revelation of tones and strains from which the painter was to
+compose his symphonies. They learnt how to find what was pictorial and
+poetic in the narrowest family circle and amongst the beds of the
+simplest vegetable garden; and for the first time they felt more wonder
+in the presence of reality, the joy of gradual discovery and of a
+leisurely conquest of the world.
+
+Of course, _plein-air_ painting was at first the chief object of their
+endeavours. Having painted so long only in brown tones, the radiant
+magic world of free and flowing light was something so ravishingly novel
+that for several years all their efforts were exclusively directed to
+possessing themselves once more of the sun, and substituting the clear
+daylight for the clare-obscure which had reigned alone, void of
+atmosphere. In this sunny brightness, flooded with light and air, they
+found a crowd of problems, and turned to the perpetual discovery of new
+chords of colour. Sunbeams sparkling as they rippled through the leaves,
+and greyish-green meadows flecked with dust and basking under light,
+were the first and most simple themes.
+
+The complete programme, however, did not consist of painting in bright
+hues, but, generally speaking, in seizing truth of colour and altogether
+renouncing artificial harmony in a generally accepted tone. Thus, after
+the painting of daylight and sunlight was learnt, a further claim had
+still to be asserted: the ideal of truth in painting had to be made the
+keynote in every other task. For in the sun, light is no doubt white,
+but in the recesses of the forest, in the moonshine, or in a dim place,
+it shines and is at the same time charged with colour. Night, or mist,
+with its hovering and pervasive secrets, is quite as rich in beauties as
+the radiant world of glistening sunshine. After seeing the summer sun on
+wood and water, it was a relief for the eye to behold the subdued, soft,
+and quiet light of a room. Upon the older and rougher painting of free
+light there followed a preference for dusk, which has a softness more
+picturesque, a more tender harmony of colours, and more geniality than
+the broad light of day. Artists studied clare-obscure, and sought for an
+enhancement of colour in it; they looked into the veil of night, and
+addressed themselves to a painting of darkness such as could only have
+proceeded from the _plein-air_ school. For this darkness of theirs is
+likewise full of atmosphere, a darkness in which there is life and
+breath and palpitation. In earlier days, when a night was painted,
+everything was thick and opaque, covered with black verging into yellow;
+to this latter error artists were seduced by the crusts of varnish upon
+old pictures. Now they learnt to interpret the mysterious life of the
+night, and to render the bluish-grey atmosphere of twilight. Or if
+figures were to be painted in a room, artists rendered the circulation
+of the air amid groups of people, which Correggio called "the ambient"
+and Velasquez "respiration." And there came also the study of artificial
+illumination--of the delicate coloured charm of many-coloured lanterns,
+of the flaring gas or lamp-light which streams through the glass windows
+of shops, flaring and radiating through the night and reflected in a
+blazing glow upon the faces of men and women. Under these purely
+pictorial points of view the gradual widening of the range of subject
+was completed.
+
+So long as the acquisition of sunlight was the point in question,
+representations from the life of artisans in town and country stood at
+the centre itself of artistic efforts, because the conception and
+technical methods of the new art could be tested upon them with peculiar
+success. And through these pictures painting came into closer sympathy
+with the heart-beat of the age. At an epoch when the labouring man as
+such, and the political and social movement in civilisation, had become
+matters of absorbing interest, the picture of artisans necessarily
+claimed an important place in art; and one of the best sides of the
+moral value of modern painting lies in its no longer holding itself in
+indifference aloof from these themes. When the century began, Hector and
+Agamemnon alone were qualified for artistic treatment, but in the
+natural course of development the disinherited, the weary and
+heavy-laden likewise acquired rights of citizenship. In the passage
+where Vasari speaks of the Madonnas of Cimabue, comparing them with the
+older Byzantine Virgins, he says finely that the Florentine master
+brought more "goodness of heart" into painting. And perhaps the
+historians of the future will say the same about the art of the present.
+
+The predilection for the disinherited was in the beginning to such an
+extent identified with the plain, straightforward painting of the
+proletariat that Naturalism could not be conceived at all except in so
+far as it dealt with poverty: in making its first great successes it had
+sought after the miserable and the outcast, and serious critics
+recognised its chief importance in the discovery of the fourth estate.
+Of course, the painting of paupers, as a sole field of activity for the
+new art, would have been an exceedingly one-sided acquisition. It is not
+merely the working-man who should be painted, because the age must
+strive to compass in a large and full spirit the purport of its own
+complicated conditions of life. So there began, in general, the
+representation, so long needed, of the man of to-day and of society
+agitated, as it is, by the stream of existence. As Zola wrote in the
+very beginning of the movement: "Naturalism does not depend upon the
+choice of subject. The whole of society is its domain, from the
+drawing-room to the drinking-booth. It is only idiots who would make
+Naturalism the rhetoric of the gutter. We claim for ourselves the whole
+world." Everything is to be painted,--forges, railway-stations,
+machine-rooms, the workrooms of manual labourers, the glowing ovens of
+smelting-works, official fêtes, drawing-rooms, scenes of domestic life,
+_cafés_, storehouses and markets, the races and the Exchange, the clubs
+and the watering-places, the expensive restaurants and the dismal
+eating-houses for the people, the _cabinets particuliers_ and _chic des
+premières_, the return from the Bois and the promenades on the seashore,
+the banks and the gambling-halls, casinos, boudoirs, studios, and
+sleeping-cars, overcoats, eyeglasses and red dress-coats, balls,
+_soirées_, sport, Monte Carlo and Trouville, the lecture-rooms of
+universities and the fascination of the crowded streets in the evening,
+the whole of humanity in all classes of society and following every
+occupation, at home and in the hospitals, at the theatre, upon the
+squares, in poverty-stricken slums and upon the broad boulevards lit
+with electric light. Thus the new art flung aside the blouse, and soon
+displayed itself in the most various costumes, down to the frock-coat
+and the smoking-jacket. The rude and remorseless traits which it had at
+first, and which found expression in numbers of peasant, artisan, and
+hospital pictures, were subdued and softened until they even became
+idyllic. Moreover, the scale of painting over life-size, favoured in the
+early years of the movement, could be abandoned, since it arose
+essentially from competition with the works of the historical school. So
+long as those huge pictures covered the walls at exhibitions, artists
+who obeyed a new tendency were forced from the beginning--if they wished
+to prevail--to produce pictures of the same size. But since historical
+painting was finally dead and buried, there was no need to set up such a
+standard any longer, and a transition could be made to a smaller scale,
+better fitted for works of an intimate character. The dazzling tones in
+which the Impressionists revelled were replaced by those which were dim
+and soft, energy and force by subdued and tender treatment, largeness of
+size by a scale which was small and intimate.
+
+That was more or less the course of evolution run through in all
+European countries in a similar way between the years 1875 and 1885.
+Just in the same way from this time onwards the Decorative-Stylists'
+tendency set in universally. Hitherto everything was focused on the
+"picture as such." Tasteless novelty or methodless imitation held sway
+over the applied arts. The endeavours of the next decade aimed at
+freeing the picture from its isolation and making the room itself a
+harmonious work of art. A long line of eminent artists took in hand the
+hitherto neglected subject of art in decoration; and as thereby new
+blood was infused into the applied arts, so on the other hand pictorial
+art in one way renounced its freedom to fit itself into its new frame.
+Colour, which formerly was determined principally by the lighting, now
+became subordinate to a decorative scheme. Truth is no longer the end
+and aim of art, but fitness, harmony of form and colour values. It is,
+however, obviously impossible to give verse and chapter to the history
+of this development, just as it would be impossible to fix a boundary
+line between the two roads, the Impressionistic on the one hand and the
+Decorative on the other. We will wander free from one country to
+another, and try to assign to each its proper place in the general chart
+of modern painting.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+FRANCE
+
+
+Paris, which for a hundred years had given the signal for all novel
+tactics in European art, still remained at the head of the movement; the
+artistic temperament of the French people themselves, and the
+superlatively excellent training which the painter enjoys in Paris,
+enable him at once to follow every change of taste with confidence and
+ease. In 1883 Manet died, on the varnishing day of the Salon, and in the
+preface which Zola wrote to the catalogue of the exhibition held after
+the death of the master he was well able to say: "His influence is an
+accomplished fact, undeniable, and making itself more deeply felt with
+every fresh Salon. Look back for twenty years, recall those black
+Salons, in which even studies from the nude seemed as dark as if they
+had been covered with mouldering dust. In huge frames history and
+mythology were smothered in layers of bitumen; never was there an
+excursion into the province of the real world, into life and into
+perfect light; scarcely here or there a tiny landscape, where a patch of
+blue sky ventured bashfully to shine down. But little by little the
+Salons were seen to brighten, and the Romans and Greeks of mahogany to
+vanish in company with the nymphs of porcelain, whilst the stream of
+modern representations taken from ordinary life increased year by year,
+and flooded the walls, bathing them with vivid tones in the fullest
+sunlight. It was not merely a new period; it was a new painting bent
+upon reaching the perfect light, respecting the law of colour values,
+setting every figure in full light and in its proper place, instead of
+adapting it in an ideal fashion according to established tradition."
+
+When the way had been paved for this change, when the new principles had
+been transferred from the chamber of experiments to full publicity, from
+the _Salon des Refusés_ to the Salon which was official, it was chiefly
+_Bastien-Lepage_ who gained the first adherents to them amongst the
+public. But because he does not belong to the pioneers of art, and
+merely adapted for the great public elements that had been won by Manet,
+the immoderate praise which was accorded him in earlier days has been
+recently brought within more legitimate limits. It has been urged, by
+way of restriction, that he stands in relation to Manet as Breton to
+Millet, and that, admitting all differences, he has nevertheless a
+certain resemblance to his teacher, Cabanel. As the latter rendered
+Classicism elegant, Bastien-Lepage, it has been said, softened the
+ruggedness of Naturalism, cut and polished the nails of his peasants,
+and made their rusticity a pretty thing, qualifying it for the
+drawing-room. Degas was in the habit of calling him the Bouguereau of
+Naturalism. As a matter of fact, Naturalism was bound to make certain
+concessions if it were ever to prevail, and such critics forget that it
+was just these amiable concessions which helped the principles of Manet
+to prevail more swiftly than would have been otherwise possible. All the
+forms and ideas of the Impressionists, with which no one, outside the
+circle of artists, had been able to reconcile himself, were to be found
+in Bastien-Lepage, purified, mitigated, and set in a golden style. He
+followed the _eclaireurs_, as the leader of the main body of the army
+which has gained the decisive battle, and in this way he has fulfilled
+an important mission in the history of art.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._ JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE.]
+
+Bastien-Lepage was born in ancient Damvillers--once a small stronghold
+of Lorraine--in a pleasant, roomy house that told a tale of even
+prosperity rather than of wealth. As a boy he played amongst the
+venerable moats which had been converted into orchards. Thus in his
+youth he received the freshest impressions, being brought up in the
+heart of nature. His father drew a good deal himself, and kept his son
+at work with the pencil, without any æsthetic theories, without any
+vague ideal, and without ever uttering the word "academy" or "museum."
+Having left school in Verdun, Bastien-Lepage went to Paris to become an
+official in the post-office. Of an afternoon, however, he drew and
+painted with Cabanel. But he was Cabanel's pupil much as Voltaire was a
+pupil of the Jesuits. "My handicraft," as he said afterwards, "I learnt
+at the Academy, but not my art. You want to paint what exists, and you
+are invited to represent the unknown ideal, and to dish up the pictures
+of the old masters. In old days I scrawled drawings of gods and
+goddesses, Greeks and Romans, beings I didn't know, and didn't
+understand, and regarded with supreme indifference. To keep up my
+courage, I repeated to myself that this was possibly 'grand art,' and I
+ask myself sometimes whether anything academical still remains in my
+composition. I do not say that one should only paint everyday life; but
+I do assert that when one paints the past it should, at any rate, be
+made to look like something human, and correspond with what one sees
+around one. It would be so easy to teach the mere craft of painting at
+the academies, without incessantly talking about Michael Angelo, and
+Raphael, and Murillo, and Domenichino. Then one would go home afterwards
+to Brittany, Gascony, Lorraine, or Normandy, and paint what lies around;
+and any morning, after reading, if one had a fancy to represent the
+Prodigal Son, or Priam at the feet of Achilles, or anything of the kind,
+one would paint such scenes in one's own fashion, without reminiscences
+of the galleries--paint them in the surroundings of the country, with
+the models that one has at hand, just as if the old drama had taken
+place yesterday evening. It is only in that way that art can be living
+and beautiful."
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. PORTRAIT OF HIS GRANDFATHER.
+
+ (_By permission of M. E. Bastien-Lepage, the owner of the picture._)]
+
+The outbreak of the war fortunately prevented him from remaining long at
+the Academy. He entered a company of Franc-Tireurs, took part in the
+defence of Paris, and returned ill to Damvillers. Here he came to know
+himself and his peculiar talent. At once a poet and a realist, he looked
+at nature with that simple frankness which those alone possess who have
+learnt from youth upwards to see with their own eyes instead of trusting
+to other people's. His friends called him "primitive," and there was
+some truth in what they said, for Bastien-Lepage came to art free from
+all trace of mannerism; he knew nothing of academical rules, and merely
+relied upon his eyes, which were always open and trustworthy.
+
+Looking back as far as he could, he was able to remember nothing except
+gleaners bowed over the stubble-fields, vintagers scattered amid the
+furrows of the vineyards, mowers whose robust figures rose brightly from
+the green meadows, shepherdesses seeking shelter beneath tall trees
+from the blazing rays of the midday sun, shepherds shivering in their
+ragged cloaks in winter, pedlars hurrying with great strides across the
+plain raked by a storm, laundresses laughing as they stood at their tubs
+beneath the blossoming apple-trees. He was impressionable to everything:
+the dangerous-looking tramp who hung about one day near his father's
+house; the wood-cutter groaning beneath the weight of his burden; the
+passer-by trampling the fresh grass of the meadows and leaving his trace
+behind him; the little sickly girl minding her lean cow upon a wretched
+field; the fire which broke out in the night and set the whole village
+in commotion. That was what he wanted to paint, and that is what he has
+painted. The life of the peasants of Lorraine is the theme of all his
+pictures, the landscape of Lorraine is their setting. He painted what he
+loved, and he loved what he painted.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE FLOWER GIRL.]
+
+It was in Damvillers that he felt at home as an artist. He had his
+studio in the second storey of his father's house, though he usually
+painted in the open air, either in the field or the orchard, whilst his
+grandfather, an old man of eighty, was near him clipping the trees,
+watering the flowers, and weeding the grass. His mother, a genuine
+peasant, was always busy with the thousand cares of housekeeping. Of an
+evening the whole family sat together round the lamp, his mother sewing,
+his father reading the paper, his grandfather with the great cat on his
+lap, and Jules working. It was at this time that he produced those
+familiar domestic scenes, thrown off with a few strokes, which were to
+be seen at the exhibition of the works which he left behind him. He knew
+no greater pleasure than that of drawing again and again the portraits
+of his father and mother, the old lamp, or the velvet cap of his
+grandfather. At ten o'clock sharp his father gave the signal for going
+to bed.
+
+In Paris, indeed, other demands were made. In 1872 he painted, with the
+object of being represented in the Salon, that remarkable picture "In
+the Spring," the only one of his works which is slightly hampered by
+conventionality in conception. The pupil of Cabanel is making an effort
+at truth, and has not yet the courage to be true altogether. Here, as in
+the "Spring Song" which followed, there is a mixture of borrowed
+sentiment, work in the old style and fresh Naturalism. The landscape is
+painted from nature, and the peasant woman is real, but the Cupids are
+taken from the old masters.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. SARAH BERNHARDT.]
+
+The next years were devoted to competitive labours. To please his father
+and mother Bastien-Lepage twice contested the _Prix de Rome_. In 1873 he
+painted as a prize exercise a "Priam before Achilles," and in 1875 an
+"Annunciation of the Angel to the Shepherds," that now famous picture
+which received the medal at the World Exhibition of 1878. And he who
+afterwards revelled in the clearest _plein-air_ painting here celebrates
+the secret wonders of the night, though the influences of Impressionism
+are here already visible. In his picture the night is as dark as in
+Rembrandt's visions; yet the colours are not harmonised in gold-brown,
+but in a cool grey silver tone. And how simple the effect of the
+heavenly appearance upon the shepherds lying round the fire of coals!
+The place of the curly ideal heads of the old sacred painting has been
+taken by those of bristly, unwashed men who, nurtured amid the wind and
+the weather, know nothing of those arts of toilette so much in favour
+with the imitators of Raphael, and who receive the miracle with the
+simplicity of elemental natures. Fear and abashed astonishment at the
+angelic appearance are reflected in their faces, and the plain and
+homely gestures of their hands are in correspondence with their inward
+excitement. Even the angel turning towards the shepherds was conceived
+in an entirely human and simple way. In spite of this, or just because
+of it, Bastien failed with his "Annunciation to the Shepherds," as he
+had done previously with his "Priam." Once the prize was taken by Léon
+Comerre, a pupil of Cabanel, and on the other occasion by Josef Wencker,
+the pupil of Gérôme. It was written in the stars that Bastien-Lepage was
+not to go to Rome, and it did him as little harm as it had done to
+Watteau a hundred and sixty years before. In Italy Bastien-Lepage would
+only have been spoilt for art. The model for him was not one of the old
+Classic painters, but nature as she is in Damvillers,--Nature, the great
+mother. When the works sent in for the competition were exhibited a
+sensation was made when one day a branch of laurel was laid on the frame
+of Bastien-Lepage's "Annunciation to the Shepherds" by Sarah Bernhardt.
+And Sarah Bernhardt's portrait became the most celebrated of the small
+likenesses which soon laid the foundation of the painter's fame.
+
+The portrait of his grandfather, that marvellous work of a young man of
+five-and-twenty, is the first picture in which he was completely
+himself. The old man sits in a corner of the garden, just as usual, in a
+brown cap, his spectacles upon his nose, his arms crossed upon his lap,
+with a horn snuff-box and a check handkerchief lying upon his knees. How
+perfectly easy and natural is the pose, how thoughtful the physiognomy,
+what a personal note there is in the dress! Nor are there in that
+garden, bathed in light, any of those black shadows which only fall in
+the studio. Everything bore witness to a simplicity and sincerity which
+justified the greatest hopes. After that first work the world knew that
+Bastien-Lepage was a preeminent portrait painter, and he did not betray
+the promise of his youth. His succeeding pictures showed that he had not
+merely rusticity and nature to rely upon, but that he was a _charmeur_
+in the best sense of the word.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. MME. DROUET.]
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE HAY HARVEST.]
+
+This ingenuous artist, who knew nothing of the history of painting, and
+felt more at home in the open air than in museums, was not ignorant, at
+any rate, of the portraits of the sixteenth century, and had chosen for
+his likenesses a scale as small as that which Clouet and his school
+preferred. The representation here reaches a depth of characterisation
+which recalls Jan van Eyck's little pearls of portrait painting. In
+these works also he mostly confined himself to bright lights. Portraits
+of this type are those of his brother, of Madame Drouet, the aged
+friend of Victor Hugo, with her weary, gentle, benevolent face--a
+masterpiece of intimate feeling and refinement; of his friend and
+biographer André Theuriet, of Andrieux the prefect of the police, and,
+above all, the famous and signal work of inexorable truth and marvellous
+delicacy, Sarah Bernhardt in profile, with her tangled chestnut hair,
+sitting upon a white fur, arrayed in a white China-silk dress with
+yellowish lights in it, and carefully examining a Japanese bronze. The
+bizarre grace of the tragic actress, her slender figure, fashioned, as
+it were, for Donatello, the nervous intensity with which she sits there,
+her weird Chinese method of wearing the hair, and the profile of which
+she is so proud, have been rendered in none of her many likenesses with
+such an irresistible force of attraction as in this little masterpiece.
+In some of his other portraits Bastien-Lepage has not disdained the
+charm of obscure light; he has not done so, for example, in the little
+portrait of Albert Wolff, the art-critic, as he sits at his writing-desk
+amongst his artistic treasures, with a cigarette in his hand. Only
+Clouet and Holbein painted miniature portraits of such refinement.
+Amongst moderns, probably Ingres alone has reached such a depth of
+characterisation upon the smallest scale, and in general he is the most
+closely allied to Bastien-Lepage as a portrait painter in profound study
+of physiognomy, and in the broad and, one might say, chased technique of
+his little drawings. Comparison with Gaillard would be greatly to the
+disadvantage of this great engraver, for Bastien-Lepage is at once more
+seductive and many-sided. It is curious how seldom his portraits have
+that family likeness which is elsewhere to be found amongst almost all
+portrait painters. In his effort at penetrative characterisation he
+alters, on every occasion, his entire method of painting according to
+the personality, so that it leaves at one time an effect that is
+bizarre, coquettish, and full of intellectual power and spirit, at
+another one which is plain and large, at another one which is bashful,
+sparing, and _bourgeois_.
+
+As a painter of peasant life he made his first appearance in 1878.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. LE PÈRE JACQUES.]
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. JOAN OF ARC.]
+
+In the Salon of this year a sensation was made by a work of such truth
+and poetry as had not been seen since Millet; this was the "Hay
+Harvest." It is noon. The June sun throws its sultry beams over the mown
+meadows. The ground rises slowly to a boundless horizon, where a tree
+emerges here and there, standing motionless against the brilliant sky.
+The grey and the green of these great plains--it is as if the weariness
+of many toilsome miles rose out of them--weighed heavily upon one, and
+created a sense of forsaken loneliness. Only two beings, a pair of
+day-labourers, break the wide level scorched by a quivering, continuous
+blaze of light. They have had their midday meal, and their basket is
+lying near them upon the ground. The man has now lain down to sleep upon
+a heap of hay, with his hat tilted over his eyes. But the woman sits
+dreaming, tired with the long hours of work, dazzled with the glare of
+the sun, and overpowered by the odour of the hay and the sultriness of
+noon. She does not know the drift of her thoughts; nature is working
+upon her, and she has feelings which she scarcely understands herself.
+She is sunburnt and ugly, and her head is square and heavy, and yet
+there lies a world of sublime and mystical poetry in her dull, dreamy
+eyes gazing into a mysterious horizon. By this picture and "The Potato
+Harvest," which succeeded it in 1879, Bastien-Lepage, the splendid,
+placed himself in the first line of modern French painters. This time he
+renders the sentiment of October. The sandy fields, impregnated with
+dust, rest in a white, subdued light of noon; pale brown are the potato
+stalks, pale brown the blades of grass, and the roads are bright with
+dust; and through this landscape, with its wide horizon, where the
+tree-tops, half despoiled already, shiver in the wind, there blows _le
+grand air_, a breeze strong as only Millet in his water-colours had the
+secret of painting. With Millet he shares likewise the breath of tender
+melancholy which broods so sadly over his pictures. "The Girl with the
+Cow," the little Fauvette, that child of social misery--misery that lies
+sorrowful and despairing in the gaze of her eyes--is perhaps the most
+touching example of his brooding devotion to truth. Her brown dress is
+torn and dirty, while a grey kerchief borders her famished, sickly face.
+A waste, disconsolate landscape, with a frozen tree and withered
+thistles, stretches round like a boundless Nirvana. Above there is a
+whitish, clear, tremulous sky, making everything paler, more arid and
+wearily bright; there is no gleam of rich luxuriant tints, but only dry,
+stinted colours; and not a sound is there in the air, not a scythe
+driving through the grass, not a cart clattering over the road. There is
+something overwhelming in this union between man and nature. One thinks
+of the famous words of Taine: "Man is as little to be divided from the
+earth as an animal or a plant. Body and soul are influenced in the same
+way by the environment of nature, and from this influence the destinies
+of men arise." As an insect draws its entire nature, even its form and
+colour, from the plant on which it lives, so is the child the natural
+product of the earth upon which it stands, and all the impulses of its
+spirit are reflected in the landscape.
+
+In 1879 Bastien-Lepage went a step further. In that year appeared "Joan
+of Arc," his masterpiece in point of spiritual expression. Here he has
+realised the method of treating historical pictures which floated before
+him as an idea at the Academy, and has, at the same time, solved a
+problem which beset him from his youth--the penetration of mysticism and
+the world of dreams into the reality of life. "The Annunciation to the
+Shepherds," "In Spring," and "The Spring Song" were merely stages on a
+course of which he reached the destination in "Joan of Arc." His ideal
+was "to paint historical themes without reminiscences of the
+galleries--paint them in the surroundings of the country, with the
+models that one has at hand, just as if the old drama had taken place
+yesterday evening."
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE BEGGAR.]
+
+The scene of the picture is a garden of Damvillers painted exactly from
+nature, with its grey soil, its apple and pear-trees clothed with small
+leaves, its vegetable beds, and its flowers growing wild. Joan herself
+is a pious, careworn, dreamy country girl. Every Sunday she has been to
+church, lost herself in long mystic reveries before the old sacred
+pictures, heard the misery of France spoken of; and the painted statues
+of the parish church and its tutelary saints pursue her thoughts. And
+just to-day, as she sat winding yarn in the shadow of the apple-trees,
+murmuring a prayer, she heard of a sudden the heavenly voices speaking.
+The spirits of St. Michael, St. Margaret, and St. Catharine, before
+whose statues she has prayed so often, have freed themselves from the
+wooden images and float as light phantoms, as pallid shapes of mist,
+which will as suddenly vanish into air before the eyes of the dreaming
+girl. Joan rises trembling, throwing her stool over, and steps forward.
+She stands in motionless ecstasy stretching out her left arm, and gazing
+into vacancy with her pupils morbidly dilated. Of all human phases of
+expression which painting can approach, such mystical delirium is
+perhaps the hardest to render; and probably it was only by the aid of
+hypnotism, to which the attention of the painter was directed just then
+by the experiments of Charcot, that Bastien-Lepage was enabled to
+produce in his model that look of religious rapture, oblivious to the
+whole world, which is expressed in the vague glance of her eyes, blue as
+the sea.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE POND AT DAMVILLERS.]
+
+"Joan of Arc" was succeeded by "The Beggar," that life-size figure of
+the haggard old tramp who, with a thick stick under his arm--of which he
+would make use upon any suitable occasion--picks up what he can in the
+villages, saying a paternoster before the doors while he begs. This time
+he has been ringing at the porch of an ordinary middle-class dwelling,
+and he is sulkily thrusting into the wallet slung round his shoulders a
+great hunch of bread which a little girl has just given to him. There is
+a mixture of spite and contempt in his eyes as he shuffles off in his
+heavy wooden shoes. And behind the doorpost the little girl, who, in her
+pretty blue frock, has such a trim air of wearing her Sunday best, looks
+rather alarmed and glances timidly at the mysterious old man.
+
+"Un brave Homme," or "Le Père Jacques," as the master afterwards called
+the picture, was to some extent a pendant to "The Beggar." He comes out
+of the wood wheezing, with a pointed cap upon his head and a heavy
+bundle of wood upon his shoulders, whilst at his side his little
+grandchild is plucking the last flowers. It is November; the leaves have
+turned yellow and cover the ground. Père Jacques is providing against
+the Winter. And the Winter is drawing near--death.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE HAYMAKER.]
+
+[Illustration: _Mansell Photo._
+
+ L'HERMITTE. THE PARDON OF PLOURIN.]
+
+Bastien-Lepage's health had never been good, nor was Parisian life
+calculated to make it better. Slender and delicate, blond with blue eyes
+and a sharply chiselled profile--_tout petit, tout blond, les cheveux à
+la bretonne, le nez retroussé et une barbe d'adolescent_, as Marie
+Baskirtscheff describes him--he was just the type which _Parisiennes_
+adore. His studio was besieged; there was no entertainment to which he
+was not invited, no committee, no meeting to hold judgment over pictures
+at which he was not present. Amateurs fought for his works and asked for
+his advice when they made purchases. Pupils flocked to him in numbers.
+He was intoxicated with the Parisian world, enchanted with its modern
+elegance; he loved the vibration of life, and rejoiced in masked balls
+like a child. Consumptive people are invariably sensuous, drinking in
+the pleasures of life with more swift and hasty draughts. He then left
+Paris and plunged into the whirlpool of other great cities. From
+Switzerland, Venice, and London he came back with pictures and
+landscapes. In London, indeed, he painted that beautiful picture "The
+Flower-Girl," the pale, delicate child upon whose faded countenance the
+tragedy of life has so early left its traces. Through the whole summer
+of 1882 he worked incessantly in Damvillers. Once more he painted his
+native place in a landscape of the utmost refinement. Here, as in his
+portraits, everything has been rendered with a positive trenchancy, with
+a severe, scientific effort after truth, in which there lies what is
+almost a touch of aridness. And yet an indescribable magic is thrown
+over the fragrant green of the meadows, the young, quivering trees, and
+the still pond which lies rippling in the cloudless summer day.
+
+[Illustration: _Portfolio._
+
+ L'HERMITTE. PAY TIME IN HARVEST.]
+
+In 1883 there appeared in the Salon that wonderful picture "Love in the
+Village." The girl has hung up her washing on the paling, and the
+neighbour's son has run down with a flower in his hand; she has taken
+the flower, and in confusion they have suddenly turned their backs upon
+each other, and stand there without saying a word. They love each other,
+and wish to marry, but how hard is the first confession. Note how the
+lad is turning his fingers about in his embarrassment; note the
+confusion of the girl, which may be seen, although she is looking
+towards the background of the picture; note the spring landscape, which
+is as fair as the figures it surrounds.
+
+It is a tender dreamer who gives himself expression here--and love came
+to him also.
+
+Enthusiastically adored by the women in his school of painting, he had
+found a dear friend in _Marie Baskirtscheff_, the distinguished young
+Russian girl who had become his pupil just as his fame began to rise. It
+is charming to see the enthusiasm with which Marie speaks of him in her
+diary. "_Je peins sur la propre palette du vrai Bastien, avec des
+couleurs à lui, son pinceau, son atelier, et son frère pour modèle._"
+And how the others envy her because of it! "_La petite Suédoise voulait
+toucher à sa palette._" With Marie he sketched his plans for the future,
+and in the midst of this restless activity he was summoned hence
+together with her, for she also died young, at the age of twenty-four,
+just as her pictures began to create a sensation. A touching idyll in
+her diary tells how the girl learnt, when she was dying of consumption,
+that young Bastien had also fallen ill, and been given up as hopeless.
+So long as Marie could go out of doors she went with her mother and her
+aunt to visit her sick friend; and when she was no longer allowed to
+leave the house he had himself carried up the steps to her drawing-room
+by his brother, and there they both sat beside each other in armchairs,
+and saw the end draw near, merciless and inevitable, the end of their
+young lives, their talents, their ambition, and their hopes. "At last!
+Here it is then, the end of all my sufferings! So many efforts, so many
+wishes, so many plans, so many ---- ----, and then to die at
+four-and-twenty upon the threshold of them all!"
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._ LÉON L'HERMITTE.]
+
+Her last picture was one of six schoolboys, sons of the people, who are
+standing at a street corner chattering; and it makes a curiously virile
+impression, when one considers that it was painted by a blond young
+girl, who slept under dull blue silken bed-curtains, dressed almost
+entirely in white, was rubbed with perfumes after a walk in hard
+weather, and wore on her shoulders furs which cost two thousand francs.
+It hangs in the Luxembourg, and for a long time a lady dressed in
+mourning used to come there every week and cry before the picture
+painted by the daughter whom she had lost so early. Marie died on 31st
+October 1884, and Bastien barely a month afterwards. "The Funeral of a
+Young Girl," in which he wished to immortalise the funeral of Marie, was
+his last sketch, his farewell to the world, to the living, alluring,
+ever splendid nature which he loved so much, grasped and comprehended so
+intimately, and to the hopes which built up their deceptive castles in
+the air before his dying gaze. He died before he reached Raphael's age,
+for he was barely thirty-six. The final collapse came on 10th December
+1884, upon a sad, rainy evening, after he had lain several months upon a
+bed of sickness. His frame was emaciated, and as light as that of a
+child; his face was shrivelled--the eyes alone had their old brilliancy.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ ROLL. THE WOMAN WITH A BULL.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+On 14th December his body was brought up to the Eastern railway station.
+The coffin was covered with roses, white elder blossoms, and
+immortelles. And now he lies buried in Lorraine, in the little
+churchyard of Damvillers, where his father and grandfather rest beneath
+an old apple-tree. Red apple-blossoms he too loved so dearly. His
+importance Marie Baskirtscheff has summarised simply and gracefully in
+the words: "_C'est un artiste puissant, originel, c'est un poète, c'est
+un philosophe; les autres ne sont que des fabricants de n'importe quoi à
+côté de lui.... On ne peut plus rien regarder quand on voit sa
+peinture, parce que c'est beau comme la nature, comme la vie...._"
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ ROLL. MANDA LAMÉTRIE, FERMIÈRE.]
+
+This tender poetic trait which runs through his works is what
+principally distinguishes him from _L'hermitte_, the most sterling
+representative of the picture of peasant life at the present time.
+L'hermitte, also, like most of these painters of peasants, was himself
+the son of a peasant. He came from Mont-Saint-Père, near
+Château-Thierry, a quiet old town, where from the great "Hill of
+Calvary" one sees a dilapidated Gothic church and the moss-grown roofs
+of thatched houses. His grandfather was a vine-grower and his father a
+schoolmaster. He worked in the field himself, and, like Millet, he
+painted afterwards the things which he had done himself in youth. His
+principal works were pictures of reapers in the field, peasant women in
+church, young wives nursing their children, rustics at work, here and
+there masterly water-colours, pastels and charcoal drawings, in 1888 the
+pretty illustrations to André Theuriet's _Vie Rustique_, the decoration
+of a hall at the Sorbonne with representations of rustic life, in his
+later period occasionally pictures from other circles of life, such as
+"The Fish-market of St. Malo," "The Lecture in the Sorbonne," "The
+Musical Soirée," and finally, as a concession to the religious tendency
+of recent years, a "Christ visiting the House of a Peasant." He has his
+studio in the Rue Vaquelin in Paris, though he spends most of his time
+in the village where he was born, and where he now lives quietly and
+simply with the peasants. Most of his works, which are to be ranked
+throughout amongst the most robust productions of modern Naturalism, are
+painted in the great glass studio which he built in the garden of his
+father's house. Whilst Bastien-Lepage, through a certain softness of
+temperament, was moved to paint the weak rather than the strong, and
+less often men in the prime of life than patriarchs, women, and
+children, L'hermitte displays the peasant in all his rusticity. He knows
+the country and the labours of the field which make the hands horny and
+the face brown, and he has rendered them in a strictly objective manner,
+in a great sculptural style. Bastien-Lepage is inclined to refinement
+and poetic tenderness; in L'hermitte everything is clear, precise, and
+sober as pale, bright daylight.
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ RAFFAELLI. PLACE ST. SULPICE.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+_Alfred Roll_ was born in Paris, and the artisan of the Parisian streets
+is the chief hero of his pictures. Like Zola in his Rougon-Macquart
+series, he set before himself the aim of depicting the social life of
+the present age in a great sequence of pictures--the workmen's strike,
+war, and toil. His pictures give one the impression that one is looking
+down from the window upon an agitated scene in the street. And his
+broad, plebeian workmanship is in keeping with his rough and democratic
+subjects. He made a beginning in 1875 with the colossal picture of the
+"Flood at Toulouse." The roofs of little peasants' houses rise out of
+the expanse of water. Upon one of them a group of country people have
+taken refuge, and are awaiting a boat which is coming from the
+distance. A young mother summons her last remnant of strength to save
+her trembling child. Beside her an old woman is sitting, sunk in the
+stupor of indifference, while in front a bull is swimming, bellowing
+wildly in the water. The influence of Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa"
+is indeed obvious; but how much more plainly and actually has the
+struggle for existence been represented here, than by the great
+Romanticist still hampered by Classicism. The devastating effect of the
+masses of water in all their elemental force could not have been more
+impressively rendered than has been done through this bull struggling
+for life with all its enormous strength.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ RAFFAELLI. THE MIDDAY SOUP.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+In technique this picture belongs to the painter's earlier phase. Even
+in the colouring of the naked figures it has still the dirty heaviness
+of the Bolognese. This bond which united him to the school of Courbet
+was broken when--probably under the influence of Zola's _Germinal_--he
+painted "The Strike," in 1880. The stern reality which goes through
+Zola's accounts of the life of pit-men is likewise to be found in these
+ragged and starving figures, clotted with coal dust, assembling in
+savage desperation before the manufactory walls, prepared for a rising.
+The dull grey of a rainy November morning spreads above. In 1887 he
+painted war, war in the new age, in which one man is not pitted against
+another, but great masses of men, who kill without seeing one another,
+are made to manoeuvre with scientific accuracy--war in which the
+balloon, distant signalling, and all the discoveries of science are
+turned to account. "Work" was the last picture of the series. There are
+men toiling in the hot, dusty air of Paris with sandstones of all sizes.
+Life-size, upon life-size figures, the drops of sweat were seen upon the
+apathetic faces, and the patches upon the blouses and breeches. Any one
+who only reckons as art what is fine and delicate will necessarily find
+these pictures brutal; but whoever delights in seeing art in close
+connection with the age, as it really is, cannot deny to Alfred Roll's
+great epics of labour the value of artistic documents of the first rank.
+
+[Illustration: _Studio._
+
+ RAFFAELLI. THE CARRIER'S CART.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+He devoted himself to the more delicate problems of light, especially in
+certain idyllic summer scenes, in which he delighted in painting
+life-size bulls and cows upon the meadow, and beside them a girl,
+sometimes intended as a milkmaid and sometimes as a nymph. Of this type
+was the picture of 1888, A Woman returning from Milking, "Manda
+Lamétrie, Fermière." With a full pail she is going home across the sunny
+meadow. Around there is a gentle play of light, a soft atmosphere
+transmitting faint reflections, lightly resting upon all forms, and
+mildly shed around them. A yet more subtle study of light in 1889 was
+named "The Woman with a Bull." Pale sunbeams are rippling through the
+fluttering leaves, causing a delicious play of fine tones upon the nude
+body of the young woman and the shining hide of the bull.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ RAFFAELLI. PARIS 4K. 1.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+On a strip of ground in the suburbs of Paris, where the town has come to
+an end and the country has not yet begun, _Raffaelli_, perhaps the most
+spirited of the Naturalists, has taken up his abode. He has painted the
+workman, the vagabond, the restlessness of the man who does not know
+where he is going to eat and sleep; the small householder, who has all
+he wants; the ruined man, overtaken by misfortune, whose only remaining
+passion is the brandy-bottle,--he has painted them all amid the
+melancholy landscape around Paris, with its meagre region still in
+embryo, and its great straight roads losing themselves disconsolately in
+the horizon. Théophile Gautier has written somewhere that the
+geometricians are the ruination of landscapes. If he lived in these days
+he would find, on the contrary, that those monotonous roads running
+straight as a die give landscape a strange and melancholy grandeur. One
+thinks of the passage in Zola's _Germinal_, where the two socialists,
+Étienne and Suwarin, walk in the evening silently along the edge of a
+canal, which, with the perpendicular stems of trees at its side,
+stretches for miles, as if measured with a pair of compasses, through a
+monotonous flat landscape. Only a few low houses standing apart break
+the straight line of the horizon; only here and there, in the distance,
+does there emerge a human being, whose diminished figure is scarcely
+perceptible above the ground. Raffaelli was the first to understand the
+virginal beauty of these localities, the dumb complaining language of
+poverty-stricken regions spreading languidly beneath a dreary sky. He is
+the painter of poor people and of wide horizons, the poet and historian
+of humanity living in the neighbourhood of great cities. There sits a
+house-owner, or the proprietor of a shop, in front of his own door;
+there a pedlar, or a man delivering parcels, hurries across the field;
+there a rag-picker's dog strays hungry about a lonely farmyard.
+Sometimes the wide landscapes are relieved by the manufactories, water
+and gas-works which feed the huge crater of Paris. At other times the
+snow lies on the ground, the skeletons of trees stand along the
+high-road, and a driver shouts to his team; the heavy cart-horses
+covered with worsted cloths, shiver, and an impression of intense cold
+strikes through you to your very bones. Indeed, Raffaelli's austerity
+was first subdued a little when he came to make a lengthy residence in
+England. Then he acquired a preference for the light-coloured atmosphere
+and the gracious verdure of nature in England. He began to take pleasure
+in tender spring landscapes, in place of rigid scenes of snow. The poor
+soil no longer seems so hard and inhospitable, but becomes attractive
+beneath the soft, peaceful, bluish atmosphere. Even the uncivilised
+beings, with famine in their eyes, who wandered about in his earliest
+pictures, become milder and more resigned. The grandfather, in his
+blouse and wooden shoes, leads his grandchild by the hand amid the first
+shyly budding verdure. Old men sit quietly in the grounds of the
+alms-house, with the sun shining upon them. People no longer stand in
+the mist of November evenings with their teeth chattering from the
+frost, but breathe with delight the soft air of bright spring mornings.
+
+[Illustration: RAFFAELLI. THE HIGHROAD TO ARGENTEUIL.]
+
+[Illustration: _Studio._
+
+ RAFFAELLI. LE CHIFFONIER.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+Raffaelli, for fifteen years the master of this narrowly circumscribed
+region, has recorded his impressions of it in an entirely personal
+manner, in a style which in one of his _brochures_ he has himself
+designated "caractérisme." And by comparing the costumed models in the
+pictures of the previous generation with the figures of Raffaelli, the
+happiness of this phrase is at once understood. In fact, Raffaelli is a
+great master of characterisation, and perhaps nowhere more trenchant
+than in the illustrations which he drew for the _Revue Illustrée_.
+Spirited caricatures of theatrical representations alternate with the
+grotesque figures of the Salvation Army. Yet he feels most in his
+element when he dives into the horrors of Paris by night. The types
+which he has created live; they meet you at every step, wander about
+the boulevards in the cafés and outside the barriers, and they haunt you
+with their looks of misery, vice, and menace.
+
+_Giuseppe de Nittis_, an Italian turned a Parisian, a bold, searching,
+nervously excitable spirit, was the first _gentilhomme_ of
+Impressionism, the first who made a transition from the rugged painting
+of the proletariat to coquettish pictures from the fashionable quarters
+of the city, and reconciled even the wider public to the principles of
+Impressionism by the delicate flavouring of his works.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ DE NITTIS. PARIS RACES.]
+
+"It was a cold November morning. Cold it was certainly, but in
+compensation the morning vapour was as fine as snow turned into mist.
+Yonder in the crowded, populous, sooty quarters of the city, in Paris
+busy with trade and industry, this early vapour which settles in the
+broad streets is not to be found; the hurry of awakening life, and the
+confused movement of country carts, omnibuses, and heavy, rattling
+freight-waggons, have scattered, divided, and dispersed it too quickly.
+Every passer-by bears it away on his shabby overcoat, on his threadbare
+comforter, or disperses it with his baggy gloves. It dribbles down the
+shivering blouses and the waterproofs of toiling poverty, it dissolves
+before the hot breath of the many who have passed a sleepless or
+dissipated night, it is absorbed by the hungry, it penetrates into shops
+which have just been opened, into gloomy backyards, and it floats up the
+staircases, dripping on the walls and banisters, right up to the frozen
+attics. And that is the reason why so little of it remains outside. But
+in the spacious and stately quarter of Paris, upon the broad boulevards
+planted with trees and the empty quays the mist lay undisturbed, section
+over section, like an undulating mass of transparent wool in which one
+felt isolated, hidden, almost imbedded in splendour, for the sun rising
+lazily on the distant horizon already shed a mild purple glow, and in
+this light the mist level with the tops of the houses shone like a piece
+of muslin spread over scarlet."
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ HEILBUTH. FINE WEATHER.]
+
+This opening passage in Daudet's _Le Nabab_ most readily gives the mood
+awakened by Giuseppe do Nittis' Parisian landscapes. De Nittis was born
+in 1846 at Barletta, near Naples, in poor circumstances. In 1868, when
+he was two-and-twenty years of age, he came to Paris, where Gérôme and
+Meissonier interested themselves in him. Intercourse with Manet led him
+to his range of subject. He became the painter of Parisian street-life
+as it is to be seen in the neighbourhood of the quays, the painter of
+mist, smoke, and air. The Salons of 1875 and 1876 contained his first
+pictures, the "Place des Pyramides" and the view of the Pont Royal, fine
+studies of mist with a tremulous grey atmosphere, out of which graceful
+little figures raise their faint, vanishing outlines. From that time he
+has stood at the centre of artistic life in Paris. He observed
+everything, saw everything, painted everything--a strip of the
+boulevards, the Place du Carrousel, the Bois de Boulogne, the races, the
+Champs Elysées, in the daytime with the budding chestnuts, the
+flower-beds blooming in all colours, the playing fountains, the women of
+grace and beauty, and the light carriages which crowd between the Arc de
+Triomphe, the Obelisk, and the Gardens of the Tuileries, and in the
+evening when chains of white and coloured lights flash among the dark
+trees. De Nittis has interpreted all atmospheric phases. He seized the
+intangible, the vibration of vapour, the dust of summer, and the rains
+of December days. He breathed the atmosphere, as it were, with his eyes,
+and felt with accuracy its greater or its diminished density. The great
+public he gained by his exquisite sense of feminine elegance. Of
+marvellous charm are the figures which give animation to the Place des
+Pyramides, the Place du Carrousel, the Quai du Pont Neuf--women in the
+most coquettish toilettes, men chatting together as they lean against a
+newspaper kiosk, flower-girls offering bouquets, loiterers carelessly
+turning over the books exposed for sale upon a stall, _bonnes_ with
+short petticoats and broad ribbons, smart-looking boys with hoops, and
+little girls with the air of great ladies. Since Gabriel de Saint
+Aubin, Paris has had no more faithful observer. "De Nittis," said
+Claretie in 1876, "paints modern French life for us as that brilliant
+Italian, the Abbé Galliani, spoke the French language--that is to say,
+better than we do it ourselves."
+
+The summit of his ability was reached in his last pictures from England.
+One knows the London fogs of November, which hover over the town as
+black as night, so that the gas has to be lit at noon, fogs which are
+suffocating and shroud the nearest houses in a veil of crape. Scenes
+like this were made for de Nittis' brush. He roamed about in the smoke
+of the city, observed the fashion of the season, the confusion of cabs
+and drays upon London Bridge, the surge and hurry of the human stream in
+Cannon Street, the vast panorama of the port of London veiled with smoke
+and fog, the fashionable West End with its magnificent clubs, the green,
+quiet squares and great, plainly built mansions; he studied the dense
+smoky atmosphere of fog compressed into floating phantom shapes, the
+remarkable effects of light seen when a fresh breeze suddenly drives the
+black clouds away. And again his eye adapted itself at once to the novel
+environment. It was not merely the blithe splendour of Paris that found
+an incomparable painter in Giuseppe de Nittis, but London also with its
+thick atmosphere and that mixture of damp, tawny fog and grey smoke.
+Piccadilly, the National Gallery, the railway bridge at Charing Cross,
+the Green Park, the Bank, and Trafalgar Square are varied samples of
+these English studies, which showed British painters themselves that not
+one of them had understood the foggy atmosphere of London as this
+tourist who was merely travelling through the town. "Westminster" and
+"Cannon Street," a pair of dreary, sombre symphonies in ash-grey,
+perhaps display the highest of what De Nittis has achieved in the
+painting of air.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._ ULYSSE BUTIN.]
+
+Born in Hamburg, though a naturalised Frenchman, _Ferdinand Heilbuth_
+took up again the _cult_ of the _Parisienne_ in the wake of Stevens, and
+as he turned the acquisitions of Impressionism to account in an
+exceedingly pleasing manner he seems, in comparison with Stevens,
+lighter and more vaporous and gracious. He painted water-scenes, scenes
+on the greensward or in the entrance squares of châteaux, placing in
+these landscapes girls in fashionable summer toilette. He was
+particularly fond of representing them in a white hat, a white or
+pearl-grey dress with a black belt and long black gloves, in front of a
+bright grey stream, seated upon a fallen trunk, with a parasol resting
+against it. The bloom of the atmosphere is harmonised in the very finest
+chords with the virginal white of their dresses and the fresh verdure of
+the landscapes. His pictures are little Watteaus of the nineteenth
+century, as discreet in effect as they are piquant.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ BUTIN. THE DEPARTURE.]
+
+After Heilbuth's death _Albert Aublet_, who in earlier days depicted
+sanguinary historical pieces, became the popular painter of girls, whose
+beauties are gracefully interpreted in his pictures. When he paints the
+composer Massenet, sitting at the piano surrounded by flowers and
+beautiful women,--when he represents the doings of the fashionable world
+on the shore at a popular watering-place, or young ladies plucking
+roses, or wandering meditatively in bright dresses amid green shrubs and
+yellow flowers, or going into the sea in white bathing-gowns, there may
+be nothing profound or particularly artistic in it all, but it is none
+the less charming, attractive, bright, joyous, and fresh.
+
+_Jean Béraud_, another interpreter of Parisian elegance, has found
+material for numerous pictures in the blaze of the theatres, the naked
+shoulders of ballet-girls, the dress-coats of old gentlemen, the
+evening humour of the boulevards, the mysteries of the Café Anglais, the
+bustle of Monte Carlo, and the footlights of the Café-Concert. But
+absolute painter he is not. One would prefer to have a less oily
+heaviness in his works, a bolder and freer execution more in keeping
+with the lightness of the subject, and for this one would willingly
+surrender the touches of _genre_ which Béraud cannot let alone even in
+these days. But his illustrations are exceedingly spirited.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ DANTAN. A PLASTER CAST FROM NATURE.]
+
+It would be impossible to classify painters according to further
+specialties. In fact, it is as little possible to bring individuals into
+categories as it was at the time of the Renaissance, when the painter
+busied himself at the same time with sculpture, architecture, and the
+artistic crafts. Great artists do not wall themselves up in a narrow
+space to be studied. Liberated from the studio and restored to nature,
+they endeavour, as in the best periods of art, to encompass life as
+widely as possible. A mere enumeration, such as chance offers, and such
+as will preserve a sense for the individuality of every man's talent
+without attempting comparisons, seems therefore a better method to
+pursue than a systematic grouping which could only be attained
+artificially and by ambiguities.
+
+The late _Ulysse Butin_ settled down on the shore of the Channel and
+painted the life of the fishermen of Villerville, a little spot upon the
+coast near Honfleur. Sturdy, large-boned fellows drag their nets across
+the strand, carry heavy anchors ashore, or lie smoking upon the dunes.
+The rays of the evening sun play upon their clothes; the night falls,
+and a profound silence rests upon the landscape.
+
+By preference _Édouard Dantan_ has painted the interiors of sculptors'
+studios--men turning pots, casting plaster, or working on marble, with
+grey blouses, contrasting delicately with the light grey walls of
+workrooms which are themselves flooded with bright and tender light.
+Very charming was "A Plaster Cast from Nature," painted in 1887: in the
+centre was a nude female figure most naturally posed, whilst a fine,
+even atmosphere, which lay softly upon the girl's form, streaming gently
+over it, was shed around.
+
+Having cultivated in the beginning the province of feminine nudity with
+little success, in such pictures as "The Bacchante" of the Luxembourg,
+"The Woman with the Mask," and "Rolla," _Henri Gervex_, the spoilt child
+of contemporary French painting, turned to the lecture-rooms of the
+universities, and by his picture of Dr. Péan at La Salpétrière gave the
+impulse to the many hospital pictures, surgical operations, and so forth
+which have since inundated the Salon. With the upper part of her body
+laid bare and her lips half opened, the patient lies under the influence
+of narcotics, whilst Péan's assistant is counting her pulse. His
+audience have gathered round. The light falls clear and peacefully into
+the room. Everything is rendered simply, without diffidence, and with
+confidence and quietude.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ GERVEX. DR. PÉAN AT LA SALPÉTRIÈRE.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+_Duez_, when he had had his first success in 1879 with a large religious
+picture--the triptych of Saint Cuthbert in the Luxembourg--appeared with
+animal pictures, landscapes, portraits, or fashionable representations
+of life in the streets and cafés. In the hands of such mild and
+complacent spirits as _Friant_ and _Goeneutte_, Naturalism fell into a
+mincing, lachrymose condition; but in a series of quiet, unpretentious
+pictures _Dagnan-Bouveret_ was more successful in meeting the growing
+inclination of recent years for contemplative repose, just as in the
+province of literature Ohnet, Malot, and Claretie, with their spirit of
+compromise, came after those stern naturalists Flaubert and Zola.
+According to the drawing of Paul Renouard, Dagnan-Bouveret is a little,
+black-haired man with a dark complexion and deep-set eyes, a short blunt
+nose, and a black pointed beard. There is nothing in him which betrays
+spirit, caprice, and audacity, but everything which is an indication of
+patience and endurance; and, as a matter of fact, such are the qualities
+by which he has gained his high position. He is a man of poetic talent,
+though rather tame, and stands to Bastien-Lepage and Roll as Breton to
+Millet. One often fancies that it is possible to observe in him that
+German _Gemüth_, that genial temper, for the satisfaction of which Frau
+Marlitt provided in fiction. A pupil of Gérôme, he made his first great
+success in the Salon of 1879 with the picture "A Wedding at the
+Photographer's." This was succeeded in 1882 by "The Nuptial
+Benediction"; in 1883 by "The Vaccination"; in 1884 by "The Horse-pond"
+of the Musée Luxembourg; in 1885 by a "Blessed Virgin," a homely,
+thoughtful, and delicately coloured picture which gained him many
+admirers in Germany; and in 1886 by "The Consecrated Bread," in which he
+was one of the first to take up the study of light in interiors. In a
+Catholic church there are sitting devout women--most of them old, but
+also one who is young--and children, while an acolyte is handing them
+consecrated bread. This simple scene in the damp village church, filled
+with a tender gloom, is rendered with a winning homely plainness, and
+with that touch of compassionate sentimentality which is the peculiar
+note of Dagnan-Bouveret. The "Bretonnes au Pardon" of 1889 thoroughly
+displayed this definitive Dagnan: a soft, peaceful picture, full of
+simple and cordial poetry. In the grass behind the church, the plain
+spire of which rises at the end of a wall, women are sitting, both young
+and old, in black dresses and white caps. One of them is reading a
+prayer from a devotional book. The rest are listening. Two men stand at
+the side. Everything is at peace; the scheme of colour is soft and
+quiet, while in the execution there is something recalling Holbein, and
+the effect is idyllically moving like the chime of a village bell when
+the sun is going down.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ DUEZ. ON THE CLIFF.]
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art_
+
+ DUEZ. THE END OF OCTOBER.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+The zeal with which painters took up the study of contemporary life, so
+long neglected, did not, however, prevent the quality of French
+landscape painting from being exceedingly high. New parts of the world
+were no longer to be conquered. For fifteen years none of the nobler,
+nor of the less noble, landscapes of France had been neglected, nor any
+strip of field; there were no flowers that were not plucked, whether
+they were cultivated in forcing-houses or had sprung pallid in a dark
+garden of old Paris. It was only the joy in brightness and the newly
+discovered beauty of sunshine that brought with them any change of
+material. Following the Impressionists, the landscape painters deserted
+their forests. Those "woodland depths," such as Diaz and Rousseau
+painted, seldom appear in the works of the most modern artists. In the
+severest opposition to such once popular scenes there lies the plain,
+the wide expanse stretching forth like a carpet in bright, shining tones
+under the play of tremulous sunbeams, and scarcely do a few trees break
+the quiet line of the distant horizon. At first the poorest and most
+humble corners were preferred. The painting of the poor brought even the
+most forlorn regions into fashion. Later, in landscape also, a bent
+towards the most tender lyricism corresponded with that inclination to
+idyllic sentiment which was on the increase in figure painting. These
+painters have a peculiar joy in the fresh mood of morning, when a light
+vapour hovers over the meadows and the waters, before it is dissolved
+into shining dew. They love the bloom of fruit-trees and the first smile
+of spring, or revel in the gradations of the dusk, rich as they are in
+shades of tint, mistily wan and grey, pale lilac, delicate green, and
+milky blue. The perspective is broad and fine; objects are entirely
+absorbed by the harmony of colour, and the older and coarser treatment
+of free light heightened to the most refined play by the most delicate
+shades of hue. And these colourists deriving from Corot, with their soft
+grey enveloping all, are opposed by others who strike novel and higher
+chords upon the keyboard of Manet--landscape painters whom such simple
+and intimate things do not satisfy, but who search after unexpected,
+fleeting, and extraordinary impressions, analysing fantastically
+combined effects of light.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ DAGNAN-BOUVERET. CONSECRATED BREAD.]
+
+A group of New-Impressionists, who might be called prismatic painters,
+stand in this respect at the extreme left. Starting from the conviction
+that the traditional mixing of colours upon the palette results after
+all only in palette tones, and can never fully express the intensity and
+pulsating vividness of tone-values, they founded the theory of the
+resolution of tones,--in other words, they break up all compound colours
+into their primary hues, set these directly upon the canvas, and leave
+it to the eye of the spectator to undertake the mixture for itself. In
+particular _George Seurat_ was an energetic disseminator of this
+painting in points which excited new discussions amongst artists and new
+polemics in the newspapers. His pictures were entirely composed of
+flaming, glowing, and shining patches. Close to these pictures nothing
+was to be seen but a confusion of blotches, but at the proper distance
+they took shape as wild sea-studies in the brilliant hues of noon, with
+rocks and stones standing out in relief, orgies of blue, red, and
+violet. Such was Seurat's manner of seeing nature. That such a course
+brings with it a good deal of monotony, that it will hardly ever be
+possible to quicken art to this extent with science, is incontestable.
+But it is just as certain that Seurat was a painter of distinction who
+shows in many of his pictures a fine sense for delicate, pale
+atmosphere. Many of his landscapes, which at close quarters look like
+mosaics of small, smooth, variously coloured stones, acquire a vibrating
+light, such as Monet himself did not attain, when looked at from a
+proper distance. _Signac_, _Anquetin_, _Angrand_, _Lucien Pissarro_,
+_Coss_, _Luèc_, _Rysselberghe_, and _Valtat_ are the names of the other
+representatives of this scientific painting, and their method has not
+seldom enabled them to give expression in an overpowering manner to the
+quiet of water and sky, the green of the meadows, and the softness of
+tender light shifting over the sea.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ DAGNAN-BOUVERET. BRETONNES AU PARDON.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+When these "spotted" pictures hang in a room where they are fewer in
+number than ordinary paintings they are difficult to understand. Only
+the disadvantages of such a method of painting are noticed; the
+disagreeable spottiness of the little points of colour ranged
+unpleasantly side by side, and putting one in mind of a piece of
+embroidery work, does not exactly appeal to the artist who looks for
+beautiful lines and _belle pâte_ in a picture. Nevertheless, the method
+would scarcely have found so many exponents did it not afford an
+opportunity to get certain effects which are scarcely obtainable in any
+other way. As a matter of fact, one finds in these pictures a sense of
+life, such shimmering, glimmering effects, such tremulous, vibrating
+light, as could not be arrived at without this disintegration of colour
+into separate points. Moreover, they have at a distance a decorative
+effect that leaves other pictures far behind.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ DAGNAN-BOUVERET. THE NUPTIAL BENEDICTION.
+
+ (_By permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+The importance of Neo-Impressionism, therefore, depends on two
+particulars. First, in the analysis of light it has carried the
+principles of Impressionism to their furthest limit; secondly, in the
+matter of decorative effect it has laid aside one great fault of
+Impressionism, and has given us pictures which, seen from a distance,
+take on a definite form instead of a blur of indistinct tones.
+
+Amongst the younger painters exhibiting in the Salon,
+_Pointelin_--without any trace of imitation--perhaps comes nearest to
+the tender poetry of Corot, and has with most subtlety interpreted the
+delicate charm of cold moods of morning, the deep feeling of still
+solitude in a wide expanse. _Jan Monchablon_ views the meadow and the
+grass, the blades and variegated flowers of the field, with the eyes of
+a primitive artist. Wide stretches of rolling ground upon radiant spring
+days are usually to be seen in his pictures. The sun shines, the grass
+sparkles, and the horizon spreads boundless around. In the background
+cows are grazing, or there move small figures bathed in air, whilst a
+dreamy rivulet murmurs in the foreground. The bright, soft light of
+Provence is the delight of _Montenard_, and he depicts with delicacy
+this landscape with its bright, rosy hills, its azure sky, and its pale
+underwood. Light, as he sees it, has neither motes nor shadows; its
+vibration is so intense and fine that it fills the air with liquid gold,
+and absorbs the tints of objects, wrapping them in a soft and mystic
+golden veil.
+
+_Dauphin_, who is nearly allied with him, always remains a colourist.
+His painting is more animated, provocative, and blooming, especially in
+those sea-pieces with their bright harbours, glittering waves, and
+rocking ships with their sails shimmering and coquetting in the
+sunshine. The name of _Rosset-Granget_ recalls festal evenings, houses
+all aglow with lights and fireworks, or red lanterns shedding forth
+their gleam into the dark blue firmament, and reflected with a thousand
+fine tints in the sea.
+
+[Illustration: _Dial._
+
+ LUCIEN PISSARRO. SOLITUDE (WOODCUT).]
+
+The melancholy art of _Émile Barau_, a thoroughly rustic painter, who
+renders picturesque corners of little villages with an extremely
+personal accent, stands in contrast with the blithe painting of the
+devotees of light; it is not the splendour of colour that attracts him,
+but the dun hues of dying nature. He has come to a halt immediately in
+front of Paris, in the square before the church of Creile. He knows the
+loneliness of village streets when the people are at work in the fields,
+and the houses give a feeling that their inhabitants are not far off and
+may return at any moment. His pictures are harmonies in grey. The
+leading elements in his works are the pale light lying upon colourless
+autumn sward, the mournful outlines of leafless trees stretching their
+naked boughs into the air as though complaining, small still ponds where
+ducks are paddling, the scanty green of meagre gardens, the muddy waters
+of old canals, reddish-grey roofs and narrow little streets amid
+moss-covered hills, tall poplars and willows by the side of swampy
+ditches, and in the background the old village steeple, which is
+scarcely ever absent. _Damoye_, likewise, is fond of twilight, and
+autumn and winter evenings. He is the poet of the great plains and dunes
+and the sombre heaven, where isolated sunbeams break shyly from behind
+white clouds. A fine sea-painter, _Boudin_, studies in Etretat,
+Trouville, Saint Valery, Crotoy, and Berck the dunes and the misty sky,
+spreading in cold northern grey across the silent sea. _Dumoulin_ paints
+night landscapes with deep blue shadows and bright blue lights, while
+_Albert Lebourg_ has a passion for the grey of rain and the glittering
+snow which gleams in the light, blue in one place, violet and rosy in
+another. _Victor Binet_ and _Réné Billotte_ have devoted themselves to
+the study of that poor region, still in embryo, which lies around Paris,
+a region where a delicate observer finds so much that is pictorial and
+so much hidden poetry. Binet is so delicate that everything grows nobler
+beneath his brush. He specially loves to paint the poetry of twilight,
+which softens forms and tinges the trees with a greyish-green, the
+quiet, monotonous plains where tiny footpaths lose themselves in
+mysterious horizons, the expiring light of the autumn sun playing with
+the fallen yellow leaves upon dusty highways. Réné Billotte's life is
+exceedingly many-sided. In the forenoon he is an important ministerial
+official, in the evening the polished man of society in dress-clothes
+and white tie whom Carolus Duran painted. Of an afternoon, in the hours
+of dusk and moonrise, he roams as a landscape painter in the suburbs of
+Paris; he is an exceedingly accomplished man of the world, who only
+speaks in a low tone, and what he specially loves in nature, too, is the
+hour when moonlight lies gently and delicately over all forms. The
+scenes he usually chooses are a quarry with light mist settling over it,
+a light-coloured cornfield in a bluish dusk, a meadow bathed in pale
+light, or a strip of the seashore where the delicate air is impregnated
+with moisture.
+
+[Illustration: LUCIEN PISSARRO. RUTH (WOODCUT).
+
+ (_By permission of Messrs. Hacon & Ricketts, the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+To be at once refined and true is the goal which portrait painting in
+recent years has also specially set itself to reach. In the years of
+_chic_ it started with the endeavour to win from every personality its
+beauties, to paint men and women "to advantage"; but later, when the
+Naturalism of Bastien-Lepage stood at its zenith, it strove at all costs
+to seize the actual human being, to catch, as it were, the work-a-day
+character of the personality as it is in involuntary moments when people
+believe themselves to be unobserved and give up posing. The place of
+those pompous arrangements of the painters of material was taken by a
+soul, and temperament interpreted by an intelligence. And corresponding
+with the universal principle of conceiving man and nature as an
+indivisible whole, it became imperative in portrait painting no longer
+to place persons before an arbitrary background, but in their real
+surroundings--to paint the man of science in his laboratory, the
+painter in his studio, the author at his work-table--and to observe with
+accuracy the atmospheric influences of this environment.
+
+[Illustration: BOUDIN. THE PORT OF TROUVILLE.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+The ready master-worker of this plain and sincere naturalism in portrait
+painting was peculiarly _Fantin-Latour_, who ought not merely to be
+judged by his latest paintings, which have something petrified, rigid,
+gloomy, and professorial. In his younger days he was a solid and
+powerful artist, one of the soundest and simplest of whom France could
+boast. His pictures were dark in tone and harmonious, and had a
+puritanic charm. The portrait of Manet, and that of the engraver Edwin
+Edwards and his wife, in particular, will always preserve their
+historical value.
+
+Later, when the whole bias of art tended away from the poorer classes,
+and once more approached this fashionable world, portrait painting also
+showed a tendency to become exquisite and over-refined, and to exhibit a
+preference for symphonic arrangements of colour and subtilised effects
+of light. White, light yellow, and light blue silks were harmonised upon
+very delicate scales with pearly-grey backgrounds. Ladies in mantles of
+light grey fur and rosy dresses stand amid dark-green shrubs, in which
+rose-coloured lanterns are burning, or they sit in a ball-dress near a
+lamp which produces manifold and tender transformations of light upon
+the white of the silk.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ BOLDINI. GIUSEPPE VERDI.]
+
+The work of _Jacques Émile Blanche_, the son of the celebrated
+mad-doctor, is peculiarly characteristic of these tendencies of French
+portrait painting. It is well known that English fashion was at this
+time regarded in Paris as the height of elegance, while Anglicisms were
+entering more and more into the French language; and this tendency of
+taste gave Blanche the occasion for most æsthetic pictures. The English
+Miss, in her attractive mixture of affectation and naïveté, in all her
+slim and long-footed grace, has found a delicate interpreter in him.
+Tall ladies clad in white, bitten with the Anglomania, drink tea most
+æsthetically, and sit there bored, or are grouped round the piano;
+_gommeux_, neat, straight, _chic_, from their tall hats to their
+patent-leather boots, look wearily about the world, with an eyeglass
+fixed, a yellow rose in their buttonhole, and a thick stick in the
+gloved hand. Amongst his portraits of well-known personalities, much
+notice was attracted by that of his father in 1890--a modern Bertin the
+Elder, and in 1891 by that of Maurice Barrès, a portrait in which he has
+analysed the author of _Le Jardin de Bérénice_ in a very simple and
+convincing fashion.
+
+[Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._
+
+ WILLETTE. THE GOLDEN AGE.]
+
+The brilliant Italian _Boldini_ brought to this English _chic_ the
+manual volubility of a Southerner: sometimes he was microscopic _à la_
+Meissonier, sometimes a juggler of the brush _à la_ Fortuny, and
+sometimes he gave the most seductive mannerism and the most diverting
+elegance to his portraits of ladies. Born in 1845, the son of a painter
+of saints, Boldini had begun as a Romanticist with pictures for Scott's
+_Ivanhoe_. From Ferrara he went to Florence, where he remained six
+years. At the end of the sixties he emerged in London, and, after he had
+painted Lady Holland and the Duchess of Westminster there, he soon
+became a popular portrait painter. But since 1872 his home has been
+Paris, where the fine Anglo-Saxon aroma, the "æsthetic" originality of
+his pictures, soon became an object of universal admiration. In his
+portraits of women Boldini always renders what is most novel. It is as
+if he knew in advance the new fashion which the coming season would
+bring. His trenchantly cut figures of ladies in white dresses and with
+black gloves have a defiant and insolent effect, and yet one which is
+captivating through their ultra-modern _chic_. The portraits of Carolus
+Duran have nothing of that charm which makes such an appeal to the
+nerves, nothing of that discomposing indefinable quality which lies in
+the expression and gestures of a fashionable woman, whose eccentricity
+reveals every day fresh _nuances_ of beauty. He had not the faculty of
+seizing movement, the most difficult element in the world. But Boldini's
+pictures seem like bold and sudden sketches which clinch the conception
+with spirit and swiftness in liberal, pointed crayon strokes controlled
+by keen observation. There is no ornament, no bracelet, no pillars and
+drapery. One hears the silken bodice rustle over the tightly laced
+corset, sees the mobile foot, and the long train swept to the side with
+a bold movement. Sometimes his creations are full and luxuriant, nude
+even in their clothes, excited and full of movement; sometimes they are
+bodiless, as if compact of the air, pallid and half-dead with the strain
+of nights of festivity, "living with hardly any blood in their veins, in
+which the pulse beats almost entirely out of complaisance."
+
+[Illustration: FORAIN. AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRES.
+
+ (_By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright._)]
+
+His pictures of children are just as subtle: there is an elasticity in
+these little girls with their widely opened velvet eyes, their rosy
+young lips, and their poses calculated with so much coquetry. Boldini
+has an indescribable method of seizing a motion of the head, a mien, or
+a passing flash of the eyes, of arranging the hair, of indicating
+coquettish lace underclothing beneath bright silk dresses, or of showing
+the grace and fineness of the slender leg of a girl, encased in a black
+silk stocking, and dangling in delicate lines from a light grey sofa.
+There is French _esprit_, something piquant and with a double meaning in
+his art, which borders on the indecorous and is yet charming. These
+portraits of ladies, however, form but a small portion of his work. He
+paints in oils, in water-colour, and pastel, and is equally marvellous
+in handling the portraits of men, the street picture and the landscape.
+His portrait of the painter John Lewis Brown, crossing the street with
+his wife and daughter, looked as though it had been painted in one jet.
+In his little pictures of horses there is an astonishing animation and
+nervous energy. M. Faure, the singer, possesses some small _rococo_
+pictures from his brush, scenes in the Garden of the Tuileries, which
+might have come from Fortuny. His pictures from the street life of
+Paris--the Place Pigalle, the Place Clichy--recall De Nittis, and some
+illustrations--scenes from the great Paris races--might have been drawn
+by Caran D'Ache.
+
+There is no need to treat illustration in greater detail, because,
+naturally, it could no longer play the initiative part which fell to it
+in earlier days, now that the whole of life had been drawn within the
+compass of pictorial representation. Besides, in an epoch like our own,
+which is determined to know and see and feel everything, illustration
+has been so extended that it would be quite impossible even to select
+the most important work. Entirely apart from the many painters who
+occasionally illustrated novels or other books, such as Bastien-Lepage,
+Gervex, Dantan, Détaille, Dagnan-Bouveret, Ribot, Benjamin Constant,
+Jean Paul Laurens, and others, there are a number of professional
+draughtsmen in Paris, most of whom are really distinguished artists.
+
+In particular, _Chéret_, one of the most original artists of our
+time--Chéret, the great king of posters, the monarch of a fabulously
+charming world, in which everything gleams in blue and red and orange,
+cannot be passed over in a history of painting. The flowers which he
+carelessly strews on all sides with his spendthrift hand are not
+destined for preservation in an historical herbarium; his works are
+transient flashes of spirit, brilliantly shining, ephemera, but a bold
+and subtle Parisian art is concealed amid this improvisation. Settled
+for many years in London, Jules Chéret had there already drawn admirable
+placards, which are now much sought after by collectors.
+
+In 1866 he introduced this novel branch of industry into France, and
+gave it--thanks to the invention of machines which admit of the
+employment of the largest lithographic stones--an artistic development
+which could not have been anticipated. He has created many thousands of
+posters. The book-trade, the great shops, and almost all branches of
+industry owe their success to him. His theatrical posters alone are
+amongst the most graceful products of modern art: La Fête des Mitrons,
+La Salle de Frascati, Les Mongolis, Le Chat Botté, L'Athénée Comique,
+Fantaisies Music-Hall, La Fée Cocotte, Les Tsiganes, Les Folies-Bergères
+en Voyage, Spectacle Concert de l'Horloge, Skating Rink, Les Pillules du
+Diable, La Chatte Blanche, Le Petit Faust, La Vie Parisienne, Le Droit
+du Seigneur, Cendrillon, Orphée aux Enfers, Éden Théâtre, etc. These are
+mere posters, destined to hang for a few days at the street corners, and
+yet in graceful ease, sparkling life, and coquettish bloom of colour
+they surpass many oil paintings which flaunt upon the walls of the Musée
+Luxembourg.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ CAZIN. JUDITH.]
+
+Amongst the illustrators _Willette_ is perhaps the most charming, the
+most brilliant in grace, fancy, and spirit. A drawing by him is
+something living, light, and fresh. Only amongst the Japanese, or the
+great draughtsmen of the _rococo_ period, does one find plates of a
+charm similar to Willette's tender poems of the "Chevalier Printemps" or
+the "Baiser de la Rose." At the same time there is something curiously
+innocent, something primitive, naïve, something like the song of a bird,
+in his charming art. No one can laugh with such youthful freshness. No
+one has such a childlike fancy. Willette possesses the curious gift of
+looking at the world like a boy of sixteen with eyes that are not jaded
+for all the beauty of things, with the eyes of a schoolboy in love for
+the first time. He has drawn angels for Gothic windows, battles, and
+everything imaginable; nevertheless, woman is supreme over his whole
+work, ruined and pure as an angel, cursed and adored, and yet always
+enchanting. She is Manon Lescaut, with her soft eyes and angelically
+pure sins. She has something of the lovely piquancy of the woman of
+Brantôme, when she disdainfully laughs out of countenance poor Pierrot,
+who sings his serenades to her plaintively in the moonlight. One might
+say that Willette is himself his Pierrot, dazzled with the young bosoms
+and rosy lips: at one time graceful and laughing, wild as a young fellow
+who has just escaped from school; at another earnest and angry, like an
+archangel driving away the sinful; to-day fiery, and to-morrow
+melancholy; now in love, teasing, blithe, and tender, now gloomy and in
+mortal trouble. He laughs amid tears and weeps amid laughter, singing
+the _Dies Iræ_ after a couplet of Offenbach; himself wears a
+black-and-white garment, and is, at the same time, mystic and sensuous.
+His plates are as exhilarating as sparkling champagne, and breathe the
+soft, plaintive spirit of old ballads.
+
+[Illustration: _Baschet._
+
+ CAZIN. HAGAR AND ISHMAEL.]
+
+Beside this amiable Pierrot _Forain_ is like the modern Satyr, the true
+outcome of the Goncourts and Gavarni, the product of the most modern
+decadence. All the vice and grace of Paris, all the luxury of the world,
+and all the _chic_ of the _demi-monde_ he has drawn with spirit, with
+bold stenographical execution, and the elegance of a sure-handed expert.
+Every stroke is made with trenchant energy and ultimate grace. Adultery,
+gambling, _chambres séparées_, carriages, horses, villas in the Bois de
+Boulogne; and then the reverse side--degradation, theft, hunger, the
+filth of the streets, pistols, suicide,--such are the principal stages
+of the modern epic which Forain composed; and over all the _Parisienne_,
+the dancing-girl, floats with smiling grace like a breath of beauty. His
+chief field of study is the promenade of the Folies-Bergères--the
+delicate profiles of anæmic girls singing, the heavy masses of flesh of
+gluttonising _gourmets_, the impudent laughter and lifeless eyes of
+prostitutes, the thin waists, lean arms, and demon hips of fading bodies
+laced in silk. Little dancing-girls and fat _roués_, snobs with short,
+wide overcoats, huge collars, and long, pointed shoes--they all move,
+live, and exhale the odour of their own peculiar atmosphere. There is
+spirit in the line of an overcoat which Forain draws, in the furniture
+of a room, in the hang of a fur or a silk dress. He is the master of the
+light, fleeting seizure of the definitive line. Every one of his plates
+is like a spirited _causerie_, which is to be understood through nods
+and winks.
+
+[Illustration: CARRIÈRE. MOTHERHOOD.]
+
+The name of _Paul Renouard_ is inseparable from the opera. Degas had
+already painted the opera and the ballet-dancers with wonderful reality,
+fine irony, or in the weird humour of a dance of death. But Renouard did
+not imitate Degas. As a pupil of Pils he was one of the many who, in
+1871, were occupied with the decoration of the staircase of the new
+opera house, and through this opportunity he obtained his first glance
+into this capricious and mysterious world made up of contrasts,--a world
+which henceforward became his domain. All his ballet-dancers are
+accurately drawn at their rehearsals, but the charm of their smile, of
+their figures, their silk tights, their gracious movements, has
+something which almost goes beyond nature. Renouard is a realist with
+very great taste. Girls practising at standing on the tips of their
+toes, dancing, curtseying, and throwing kisses to the audience are
+broadly and surely drawn with a few strokes. The opera is for him a
+universe in a nutshell--a _résumé_ of Paris, where all the oddities, all
+the wildness, and all the sadness of modern life are to be found.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ BESNARD. EVENING.]
+
+Mention must also be made of _Daniel Vierge_, torn prematurely from his
+art by a cruel disease, but not before he had been able to complete his
+masterpiece, the edition of Don Pablo de Segovia. _Henri de
+Toulouse-Lautrec_ too must be named, the grim historian of absinthe
+dens, music halls and dancing saloons; and we must give a passing glance
+to _Léandre_ and _Steinlen_, in whose drawings also the whole of
+Parisian life breathes and pulsates, with all the glitter of
+over-civilisation, with all its ultra-refinement of pleasure. But a
+detailed appreciation of these draughtsmen is obviously out of place in
+a history of painting.
+
+If we turn back to those who have done good work in the province of
+painting pure and simple, we must tarry for a while with that refined
+painter of elegiac landscape, _Charles Cazin_. He awaits us as the
+evening gathers, and tells with a vibrating voice of things which induce
+a mood of gentle melancholy. He has his own hour, his own world, his own
+men and women. His hour is that secret and mystic time when the sun has
+gone down and the moon is rising, when soft shadows repose upon the
+earth and bring forgetfulness. The land he enters is a damp, misty land
+with dunes and pale foliage, one that lies beneath a heavy sky and is
+seldom irradiated by a beam of hope, a land of Lethe and oblivion of
+self, a land created to yield to the tender colour of infinite
+weariness. The motives of his landscapes are always exceedingly simple,
+though they have a simplicity which is perhaps forced, instead of being
+entirely naïve. He represents, it may be, the entrance into a village
+with a few cottages, a few thin poplars, and reddish tiled roofs, bathed
+in the pale shadows of evening. Upon the broad street lined with
+irregular houses, in a provincial town, the rain comes splashing down.
+Or it is night, and in the sky there are black clouds, with the moon
+softly peering between them. Lamps are gleaming in the windows of the
+houses, and an old post-chaise rolling heavily over the slippery
+pavement. Or dun-green shadows repose upon a solitary green field with a
+windmill and a sluggish stream. The earth is wrapt in mysterious
+silence, and there is movement only in the sky, where a flash of
+lightning quivers--not one that blazes into intensely vivid light, but
+rather a silvery white electric spark lambent in the dark firmament.
+Corot alone has painted such things, but where he is joyous Cazin is
+elegiac. The little solitary houses are of a ghostly grey. The trees
+sway towards each other as if in tremulous fear. And the mist hangs damp
+in the brown boughs. Faint evening shadows flit around. A Northern
+malaria seems to prevail. At times a sea-bird utters a wailing
+complaint. One thinks of Russian novels, Nihilism, and Raskolnikoff,
+though I know not through what association of ideas. One is disposed to
+sit by the wayside and dream, as Verlaine sings:--
+
+ "La lune blanche
+ Luit dans les bois;
+ De chaque branche
+ Part une voix.
+ L'étang reflète,
+ Profond miroir,
+ La silhouette
+ Du saule noir
+ Où le vent pleure:
+ Rêvons c'est l'heure.
+ Un vaste et tendre
+ Apaisement
+ Semble descendre
+ Du firmament
+ Que l'astre irise:
+ C'est l'heure exquise."
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ BESNARD. PORTRAIT OF MLLES. D.]
+
+Sometimes the humour of the landscape is associated with the memory of
+kindred feelings which passages in the Bible or in old legends have
+awakened in him. In such cases he creates the biblical or mythological
+pictures which have principally occupied him in recent years. Grey-green
+dusk rests upon the earth; the shadows of evening drive away the last
+rays of the sun. A mother with her child is sitting upon a bundle of
+straw in front of a thatched cottage with a ladder leaning against its
+roof, and a poverty-stricken yard bordered by an old paling, while a man
+in a brown mantle stands beside her, leaning upon a stick: this picture
+is "The Birth of Christ." Two solitary people, a man and a woman, are
+walking through a soft, undulating country. The sun is sinking. No house
+will give the weary wanderers shelter in the night, but the shade of
+evening, which is gradually descending, envelops them with its
+melancholy peace: this is "The Flight into Egypt." An arid waste of
+sand, with a meagre bush rising here and there, and the parching summer
+sun brooding sultry overhead, forms the landscape of the picture "Hagar
+and Ishmael." Or the fortifications of a mediæval town are represented.
+Night is drawing on, watch-fires are burning, brawny figures stand at
+the anvil fashioning weapons, and the sentinels pace gravely along the
+moat. The besieged town is Bethulia, and the woman who issues with a
+wild glance from the town gateway is Judith, going forth followed by her
+handmaid to slay Holofernes. Through such works Cazin has become the
+creator of the landscape of religious sentiment, which has since
+occupied so much space in French and German painting. The costume
+belongs to no time in particular, though it is almost more appropriate
+to the present than to bygone ages; but something so biblical, so
+patriarchal, such a remote and mystical poetry is expressed in the great
+lines of the landscape that the figures seem like visions from a far-off
+past.
+
+The continuation of this movement is marked by that charming artist who
+delighted in mystery, _Eugène Carrière_, "the modern painter of
+Madonnas," as he has been called by Edmond de Goncourt. Probably no one
+before him has painted the unconscious spiritual life of children with
+the same tender, absorbed feeling: little hands grasping at something,
+stammering lips of little ones who would kiss their mother, dreamy eyes
+gazing into infinity. But although young children at the beginning of
+life, whose eyes open wide as they turn towards the future, look out of
+his pictures, a profound sadness rests over them. His figures move
+gravely and silently in a soft, mysterious dusk, as though divided from
+the world of realities by a veil of gauze. All forms seem to melt, and
+fading flowers shed a sleepy fragrance around; it is as though there
+were bats flitting invisible through the air. Even as a portrait painter
+he is still a poet dreaming in eternal haze and a twilight of mystery.
+In his portraits, Alphonse Daudet, Geffroy, Dolent, and Edmond de
+Goncourt looked as though they had been resolved into vapour, although
+the delineation of character was of astonishing power, and marked firmly
+with a penetrative insight into spiritual life such as was shared by
+Ribot alone.
+
+At the very opposite pole of art stands _Paul Albert Besnard_: amongst
+the worshippers of light he is, perhaps, the most subtle and forcible
+poet, a luminist who cannot find tones high enough when he would play
+upon the fibres of the spirit. Having issued from the École des
+Beaux-Arts, and gained the _Prix de Rome_ with a work which attracted
+much notice, he had long moved upon strictly official lines; and he only
+broke from his academical strait-waistcoat about a dozen years ago, to
+become the refined artist to whom the younger generation do honour in
+these days, a seeker whose works vary widely in point of merit, though
+they always strike one afresh from the bold confidence with which he
+attacks and solves the most difficult problems of light. In Puvis de
+Chavannes, Cazin, and Carrière a reaction towards sombre effect and
+pale, vaporous beauty of tone followed the brightness of Manet; but
+Besnard, pushing forward upon Manet's course, revels in the most subtle
+effects of illumination--effects not ventured upon even by the boldest
+Impressionists--endeavours to arrest the most unexpected and unforeseen
+phases of light, and the most hazardous combinations of colour. The
+ruddy glow of the fire glances upon faded flowers. Chandeliers and
+tapers outshine the soft radiance of the lamp; artificial light
+struggles with the sudden burst of daylight; and lanterns, standing out
+against the night sky like golden lights with a purple border, send
+their glistening rays into the blue gloom. It is only in the field of
+literature that a parallel may be found in Jens Pieter Jacobsen, who in
+his novels occasionally describes with a similar finesse of perception
+the reflection of fire upon gold and silver, upon silk and satin, upon
+red and yellow and blue, or enumerates the hundred tints in which the
+September sun pours into a room.
+
+The portrait group of his children is a harmony in red. A boy and two
+girls are standing, with the most delightful absence of all constraint,
+in a country room, which looks out upon a mountainous landscape. The
+wall of the background is red, and red the costume of the little ones,
+yet all these conflicting _nuances_ of red tones are brought into
+harmonious unity with inherent taste. Rubens would have rejoiced over a
+second landscape exhibited in the same year. A nude woman is seated upon
+a divan drinking tea, with her feet tucked under her and her back to the
+spectator. Upon her back are cast the warm and the more subdued
+reflections of a fire which lies out of sight and of the daylight
+quivering in yellowish stripes, like a glowing aureole upon her soft
+skin.
+
+[Illustration: _Studio._
+
+ AMAN-JEAN. SOUS LA GUERLANDA.]
+
+In a third picture, called "Vision de Femme," a young woman with the
+upper part of her form unclothed appears upon a terrace, surrounded by
+red blooming flowers and the glowing yellow light of the moon. Under
+this symbol Besnard imagined Lutetia, the eternally young, hovering over
+the rhododendrons of the Champs Elysées and looking down upon the blaze
+of lights in the Café des Ambassadeurs. In 1889 he produced "The Siren,"
+a symphony in red. A _petite femme_ of Montmartre stands wearily in a
+half-antique morning toilette before a billowing lake, which glows
+beneath the rays of the setting sun in fiery red and dull mallow colour.
+In his "Autumn" of 1890 he made the same experiment in green. The moon
+casts its silvery light upon the changeful greenish mirror of a lake,
+and at the same time plays in a thousand reflections upon the green silk
+dress of a lady sitting upon the shore; while, in a picture of 1891, a
+young lady in an elegant _négligé_ is seated at the piano, with her
+husband beside her turning over the music. The light of the candles is
+shed over hands, faces, and clothes. Another picture, called "Clouds of
+Evening," represented a woman with delicate profile amid a violet
+landscape over which the clouds were lightly hovering, touched with
+orange-red by the setting sun. The double portrait, executed in 1892, of
+the "Mlles. D----," one of whom is leisurely placing a scarf over her
+shoulders with a movement almost recalling Leighton, while the other
+stoops to pick a blossom from a rhododendron bush, is exceedingly soft
+in its green, red, and blue harmony.
+
+The French Government recognised the eminent decorative talent displayed
+in these pictures, and gave Besnard the opportunity of achieving further
+triumphs as a mural painter. Here, too, he is modern to his fingertips,
+knowing nothing of stately gestures, nothing of old-world naïveté; but
+merely through his appetising and sparkling play of colour he has the
+art of converting great blank spaces into a marvellous storied realm.
+
+In 1890 he had to represent "Astronomy" as a ceiling-piece for the Salon
+des Sciences in the Hôtel de Ville. Ten years before there would have
+been no artist who would not have executed this task by the introduction
+of nude figures provided with instructive attributes. One would have
+held a globe, the second a pair of compasses, and the third a telescope
+in one hand, and in the other branches of laurel wherewith to crown
+Galileo, Columbus, or Kepler. Besnard made a clean sweep of all this. He
+did not forget that a ceiling is a kind of sky, and accordingly he
+painted the planets themselves, the stars which run their course through
+the firmament of blue. The figures of the constellations are arranged in
+a gracious interplay of light bodies floating softly past. Amongst the
+pictures of the École de Pharmacie a like effect is produced by
+Besnard's great composition "Evening," a work treated with august
+simplicity. The atmosphere is of a grey-bluish white: stars are
+glittering here and there, and two very ancient beings, a man and a
+woman, sit upon the threshold of their house, grave, weather-beaten
+forms of quiet grandeur, executed with expressive lines. The old man
+casts a searching glance at the stars, as if yearning after immortality,
+while the woman leans weary and yet contented upon his shoulder. In the
+room behind a kettle hangs bubbling over the fire, and a young woman
+with a child upon her arm steps through the door: man and the starry
+world, the finite and the infinite, presented under plain symbols.
+
+[Illustration: CARRIÈRE. SCHOOLWORK.]
+
+Such are, more or less, the representative minds of contemporary France,
+the centres from which other minds issue like rays. _Alfred Agache_
+devotes himself with great dexterity to an allegorical style after the
+fashion of Barroccio. Inspired by the pre-Raphaelites, _Aman-Jean_ has
+found the model for his allegorical compositions in Botticelli, and is a
+neurasthenic in colour, which is exceptionally striking, in his delicate
+portraits of women. _Maurice Denis_, who drew the illustrations to
+Verlaine's _Sagesse_ in a style full of archaic bloom, as a painter
+takes delight in the intoxicating fragrance of incense, the gliding
+steps and slow, quiet movements of nuns, in men and women kneeling
+before the altar in prayer, and priests crossing themselves before the
+golden statue of the Virgin. The Spaniard _Gandara_, who lives in Paris,
+displays in his grey and melting portraits much feeling for the
+decorative swing of lines. That spirited "pointillist" _Henri Martin_
+seems for the present to have reached a climax in his "Cain and Abel,"
+one of the most powerful creations of the younger generation in France.
+_Louis Picard's_ work has a tincture of literature, and he delights in
+Edgar Allan Poe, mysticism and psychology. _Ary Renan_, the son of
+Ernest Renan and the grandson of Ary Scheffer, has given the soft
+subdued tones of Puvis de Chavannes a tender Anglo-Saxon fragrance in
+the manner of Walter Crane. And that spirited artist in lithograph,
+_Odilon Redon_, has visions of distorted faces, flowers that no mortal
+eye has seen, and huge white sea-birds screaming as they fly across a
+black world. Forebodings like those we read of in the verse of Poe take
+shape in his works, ghosts roam in the broad daylight, and the sea-green
+eyes of Medusa-heads dripping with blood shine in the darkness of night
+with a mesmeric effect. _Carlos Schwabe_ drew the illustrations for the
+_Évangile de l'Enfance_ of Catulle Mendès with the charming naïveté of
+Hans Memlinc, and afterwards attracted attention by his delicate,
+archaic pictures.
+
+_Bonnard_, _Vuillard_, _Valloton_ and _Roussel_ are others whose names
+have in the last few years become well known. Their art is built up on
+the foundation laid by the Impressionists only so far as they use the
+new colour-values discovered by the "bright painters," in a free,
+harmonious manner, and place them at the service of a new decorative
+purpose. In exhibitions one is often at a loss how to view these
+decorative paintings, such, for instance, as those of Bonnard and
+Vuillard; the eye is astounded for a moment when, after looking at the
+usual array of good pictures, it suddenly comes upon works that look
+more like pieces of Gobelin tapestry than paintings. Then one's mind
+reverts to rooms such as Olbrich, Van de Velde, or Josef Hoffmann
+designed with some particular purpose in view, and one understands the
+object of these pictures. "We can hang in our rooms any picture which is
+beautiful in itself and by itself." That is the old familiar story, but
+that feeling never enters our minds when we stand in a mediæval room in
+which there are no pictures that can be taken away from their
+surroundings. It is a difficult task to arrange things that are
+individually beautiful into a harmonious whole. The realisation of the
+old-time principle is for obvious reasons well-nigh impracticable--the
+modern man is a restless, fickle creature; he must always be at liberty
+to pitch his tent anywhere--but we can surely make some approach to it.
+One may imagine in every dwelling a room in which furniture and pictures
+are made to fit into some conception of harmony, and the works of
+Bonnard and Vuillard may be conceived as parts of such a scheme for the
+decoration of a room, and indeed--though we must not forget similar
+attempts which have been made in other directions--as parts of a scheme
+which, though thoroughly modern and by no means a mere external copy,
+reverts to the style of bygone centuries.
+
+From the historian's standpoint these young artists scarcely come into
+question; they are still too much in the embryonic stage for any
+conclusion to be arrived at with respect to either of them. But the art
+lover who looks to the future rather than the past feels bound to follow
+with care their creations, in which the wealth of beauty that is already
+indicated in their first prints, the certainty of purpose with which
+they direct their efforts towards the point at which Impressionism has
+left the widest gap, seems to give a guarantee that in the future France
+will maintain in the province of art the position she has held during
+the nineteenth century as the leading artistic nation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+SPAIN
+
+
+Just as France to-day shows such a wealth of talent, Spain,
+correspondingly, can scarcely be said to come into the question of
+modern endeavour in art; in fact, it is quite impossible to treat of a
+history of Spanish art, one can only consider individual artists, for
+they each go their own way, working in different directions and without
+any concerted plan.
+
+It was in the spring of 1870 that a little picture called "La Vicaria"
+was exhibited in Paris at the dealer Goupil's. A marriage is taking
+place in the sacristy of a _rococo_ church in Madrid. The walls are
+covered with faded Cordova leather hangings figured in gold and dull
+colours, and a magnificent _rococo_ screen separates the sacristy from
+the middle aisle. Venetian lustres are suspended from the ceiling;
+pictures of martyrs, Venetian glasses in carved oval frames hang on the
+wall, richly ornamented wooden benches, and a library of missals and
+gospels in sparkling silver clasps, and shining marble tables and
+glistening braziers form part of the scene in which the marriage
+contract is being signed. The costumes are those of the time of Goya. As
+a matter of fact, an old beau is marrying a young and beautiful girl.
+With affected grace and a skipping minuet step, holding a modish
+three-cornered hat under his arm, he approaches the table to put his
+signature in the place which the _escribano_ points out with an
+obsequious bow. He is arrayed in delicate lilac, while the bride is
+wearing a white silk dress trimmed with flowered lace, and has a wreath
+of orange blossoms in her luxuriant black hair. As a girl-friend is
+talking to her she examines with abstracted attention the pretty little
+pictures upon her fan, the finest she has ever possessed. A very piquant
+little head she has, with her long lashes and her black eyes. Then, in
+the background, follow the witnesses, and first of all a young lady in a
+swelling silk dress of the brightest rose-colour. Beside her is one of
+the bridegroom's friends in a cabbage-green coat with long flaps, and a
+shining belt from which a gleaming sabre hangs. The whole picture is a
+marvellous assemblage of colours, in which tones of Venetian glow and
+strength, the tender pearly grey beloved of the Japanese, and a melting
+neutral brown, each sets off the other and give a shimmering effect to
+the whole.
+
+The painter, who was barely thirty, bore the name of _Mariano Fortuny_,
+and was born in Reus, a little town in the province of Tarragona, on
+11th June 1838. Five years after he had completed this work he died, at
+the age of thirty-six, on 21st November 1874. Short as his career was,
+it was, nevertheless, so brilliant, his success so immense, his
+influence so great, that his place in the history of modern painting
+remains assured to him.
+
+Like French art, Spanish art, after Goya's death, had borne the yoke of
+Classicism, Romanticism, and academical influence by turns. In the grave
+of Goya there was buried for ever, as it seemed, the world of torreros,
+majas, manolas, monks, smugglers, knaves, and witches, and all the local
+colour of the Spanish Peninsula. As late as the Paris World Exhibition
+of 1867, Spain was merely represented by a few carefully composed, and
+just as carefully painted, but tame and tedious, historical pictures of
+the David or the Delaroche stamp--works such as had been painted for
+whole decades by José Madrazo, J. Ribera y Fernandez, Federigo Madrazo,
+Carlo Luis Ribera, Eduardo Rosales, and many others whose names there is
+no reason for rescuing from oblivion. They laboured, meditating an art
+which was not their own, and could not waken any echo in themselves.
+Their painting was body without soul, empty histrionic skill. As
+complete darkness had rested for a century over Spanish art, from the
+death of Claudio Coellos in 1693 to the appearance of Goya, rising like
+a meteor, so the first half of the nineteenth century produced no single
+original artist until Fortuny came forward in the sixties.
+
+He grew up amid poor surroundings, and when he was twelve years of age
+he lost his father and mother. His grandfather, an enterprising and
+adventurous joiner, had made for himself a cabinet of wax figures, which
+he exhibited from town to town in the province of Tarragona. With his
+grandson he went on foot through all the towns of Catalonia, the old man
+showing the wax figures which the boy had painted. Whenever he had a
+moment free the latter was drawing, carving in wood, or modelling in
+wax. It chanced, however, that a sculptor saw his attempts, spoke of
+them in Fortuny's birthplace, and succeeded in inducing the town to make
+an allowance of forty-two francs a month to a lad whose talent had so
+much promise. By these means Fortuny was enabled to attend the Academy
+of Barcelona for four years. In 1857, when he was nineteen years of age,
+he received the _Prix de Rome_, and set out for Rome itself in the same
+year. But whilst he was copying the pictures of the old masters there a
+circumstance occurred which set him upon another course. The war between
+Spain and the Emperor of Morocco determined his future career. Fortuny
+was then a young man of three-and-twenty, very strong, rather thick-set,
+quick to resent an injury, taciturn, resolute, and accustomed to hard
+work. His residence in the East, which lasted from five to six months,
+was a discovery for him--a feast of delight. He found the opportunity of
+studying in the immediate neighbourhood a people whose life was opulent
+in colour and wild in movement; and he beheld with wonder the gleaming
+pictorial episodes so variously enacted before him, and the rich
+costumes upon which the radiance of the South glanced in a hundred
+reflections. And, in particular, when the Emperor of Morocco came with
+his brilliant suite to sign the treaty of peace, Fortuny developed a
+feverish activity. The great battle-piece which he should have executed
+on the commission of the Academy of Barcelona remained unfinished. On
+the other hand, he painted a series of Oriental pictures, in which his
+astonishing dexterity and his marvellously sensitive eye were already to
+be clearly discerned: the stalls of Moorish carpet-sellers, with little
+figures swarming about them, and the rich display of woven stuffs of the
+East; the weary attitude of old Arabs sitting in the sun; the sombre,
+brooding faces of strange snake-charmers and magicians. This is no
+Parisian East, like Fromentin's; every one here speaks Arabic.
+Guillaumet alone, who afterwards interpreted the fakir world of the
+East, dreamy and contemplative in the sunshine, has been equally
+convincing.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._ MARIANO FORTUNY.]
+
+Yet Fortuny first discovered his peculiar province when he began, after
+his return, to paint those brilliant kaleidoscopic _rococo_ pictures
+with their charming play of colour, the pictures which founded his
+reputation in Paris. Even in the earliest, representing gentlemen of the
+_rococo_ period examining engravings in a richly appointed interior, the
+Japanese weapons, Renaissance chests, gilded frames of carved wood, and
+all the delightful _petit-riens_ from the treasury of the past which he
+had heaped together in it, were so wonderfully painted that Goupil began
+a connection with him and ordered further works. This commission
+occasioned his journey, in the autumn of 1866, to Paris, where he
+entered into Meissonier's circle, and worked sometimes at Gérôme's. Yet
+neither of them exerted any influence upon him at all worth mentioning.
+The French painter in miniature is probably the father of the department
+of art to which Fortuny belongs; but the latter united to the delicate
+execution of the Frenchman the flashing, gleaming spirit of the Latin
+races of the South. He is a Meissonier with _esprit_ recalling Goya. In
+his picture "The Spanish Marriage" (La Vicaria) all the vivid,
+throbbing, _rococo_ world, buried with Goya, revived once more. While in
+his Oriental pieces--"The Praying Arab," "The Arabian Fantasia," and
+"The Snake Charmers"--he still aimed at concentration and unity of
+effect, this picture had something gleaming, iridescent and pearly,
+which soon became the delight of all collectors. Fortuny's successes,
+his celebrity, and his fortune dated from that time. His fame flashed
+forth like a meteor. After fighting long years in vain, not for
+recognition, but for his very bread, he suddenly became the most honored
+painter of the day, and began to exert upon a whole generation of young
+artists that powerful influence which survives even at this very day.
+
+[Illustration: FORTUNY. THE SPANISH MARRIAGE (LA VICARIA).
+
+ (_By permission of Messrs. Goupil & Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+The studio which he built for himself after his marriage with the
+daughter of Federigo Madrazo in Rome was a little museum of the most
+exquisite products of the artistic crafts of the West and the East: the
+walls were decorated with brilliant oriental stuffs, and great glass
+cabinets with Moorish and Arabian weapons, and old tankards and glasses
+from Murano stood around. He sought and collected everything that shines
+and gleams in varying colour. That was his world, and the basis of his
+art.
+
+Pillars of marble and porphyry, groups of ivory and bronze, lustres of
+Venetian glass, gilded consoles with small busts, great tables supported
+by gilded satyrs and inlaid with variegated mosaics, form the
+surroundings of that astonishing work "The Trial of the Model." Upon a
+marble table a young girl is standing naked, posing before a row of
+academicians in the costume of the Louis XV period, while each one of
+them gives his judgment by a movement or an expression of the face. One
+of them has approached quite close, and is examining the little woman
+through his lorgnette. All the costumes gleam in a thousand hues, which
+the marble reflects. By his picture "The Poet" or "The Rehearsal" he
+reached his highest point in the capricious analysis of light. In an old
+_rococo_ garden, with the brilliant façade of the Alhambra as its
+background, there is a gathering of gentlemen assembled to witness the
+rehearsal of a tragedy. The heroine, a tall, charming, luxuriant beauty,
+has just fallen into a faint. On the other hand, the hero, holding the
+lady on his right arm, is reading the verses of his part from a large
+manuscript. The gentlemen are listening, and exchanging remarks with the
+air of connoisseurs; one of them closes his eyes to listen with thorough
+attention. Here the entire painting flashes like a rocket, and is as
+iridescent and brilliant as a peacock's tail. Fortuny splits the rays of
+the sun into endless _nuances_ which are scarcely perceptible to the
+eye, and gives expression to their flashing glitter with astonishing
+delicacy. Henri Regnault, who visited him at that time in Rome, wrote to
+a Parisian friend: "The time I spent with Fortuny yesterday is haunting
+me still. What a magnificent fellow he is! He paints the most marvellous
+things, and is the master of us all. I wish I could show you the two or
+three pictures that he has in hand, or his etchings and water-colours.
+They inspired me with a real disgust of my own. Ah! Fortuny, you spoil
+my sleep."
+
+[Illustration: FORTUNY. THE TRIAL OF THE MODEL.
+
+ (_By permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+Even as an etcher he caught all the technical finesses and appetising
+piquancies of his great forerunner Goya. It is only with very light and
+spirited strokes that the outlines of his figures are drawn; then, as in
+Goya, comes the aquatint, the colour which covers the background and
+gives locality, depth, and light. A few scratches with a needle, a black
+spot, a light made by a judiciously inserted patch of white, and he
+gives his figures life and character, causing them to emerge from the
+black depth of the background like mysterious visions. "The Dead Arab,"
+covered with his black cloak, and lying on the ground with his musket on
+his arm, "The Shepherd" on the stump of a pillar, "The Serenade," "The
+Reader," "The Tambourine Player," "The Pensioner," the picture of the
+gentleman with a pig-tail bending over his flowers, "The Anchorite," and
+"The Arab mourning over the Body of his Friend," are the most important
+of his plates, which are sometimes pungent and spirited, and sometimes
+sombre and fantastic.
+
+In the picture "The Strand of Portici" he attempted to strike out a new
+path. He was tired of the gay rags of the eighteenth century, as he said
+himself, and meant to paint for the future only subjects from
+surrounding life in an entirely modern manner like that of Manet. But he
+was not destined to carry out this change any further. He passed away in
+Rome on 21st November 1874. When the unsold works which he left were put
+up to auction the smallest sketches fetched high figures, and even his
+etchings were bought at marvellous prices.
+
+[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._
+
+ FORTUNY. THE SNAKE CHARMERS.]
+
+In these days the enthusiasm for Fortuny is no longer so glowing. The
+capacity to paint became so ordinary in the course of years that it was
+presupposed as a matter of course; it was a necessary acquirement for an
+artist to have before approaching his pictures in a psychological
+fashion. And in this later respect there is a deficiency in Fortuny. He
+is a _charmeur_ who dazzles the eyes, but rather creates a sense of
+astonishment than holds the spectator in his grip. Beneath his hands
+painting has become a matter of pure virtuosity, a marvellous, flaring
+firework that amazes and--leaves us cold after all. With enchanting
+delicacy he runs through the brilliant gamut of radiant colours upon the
+small keyboard of his little pictures painted with a pocket-lens, and
+everything glitters golden, like the dress of a fairy. He united to the
+patience of Meissonier a delicacy of colour, a wealth of pictorial
+point, and a crowd of delightful trifles, which combine to make him a
+most exquisite and fascinating juggler of the palette--an amazing
+colourist, a wonderful clown, an original and subtle painter with
+vibrating nerves, but not a truly great and moving artist. His pictures
+are dainties in gold frames, jewels delicately set, astonishing efforts
+of patience lit up by a flashing, rocket-like _esprit_; but beneath the
+glittering surface one is conscious of there being neither heart nor
+soul. His art might have been French or Italian, just as appropriately
+as Spanish. It is the art of virtuosi of the brush, and Fortuny himself
+is the initiator of a religion which found its enthusiastic followers,
+not in Madrid alone, but in Naples, Paris, and Rome.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ FORTUNY. MOORS PLAYING WITH A VULTURE.]
+
+Yet Spanish painting, so far as it is individual, works even now upon
+the lines of Fortuny. After his death it divided into two streams. The
+official endeavour of the academies was to keep the grand historical
+painting in flower, in accord with the proud programme announced by
+Francisco Tubino in his brochure, _The Renaissance of Spanish Art_. "Our
+contemporary artists," he writes, "fill all civilised Europe with their
+fame, and are the object of admiration on the far side of the Atlantic.
+We have a peculiar school of our own with a hundred teachers, and it
+shuns comparison with no school in any other country. At home the
+Academy of the Fine Arts watches over the progress of painting; it has
+perfected the laws by which our Academy in Rome is guided, the Academy
+in the proud possession of Spain, and situated so splendidly upon the
+Janiculum. In Madrid there is a succession of biennial exhibitions, and
+there is no deficiency in prizes nor in purchases. Spanish painting does
+not merely adorn the citizen's house or the boudoir of the fair sex
+with easel-pieces; by its productions it recalls the great episodes of
+popular history, which are able to excite men to glorious deeds.
+Austere, like our national character, it forbids fine taste to descend
+to the painting of anything indecorous. Before everything we want grand
+paintings for our galleries; the commercial spirit is no master of ours.
+In such a way the glory of Zurburan, Murillo, and Velasquez lives once
+more in a new sense."
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ FORTUNY. THE CHINA VASE.]
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ FORTUNY. AT THE GATE OF THE SERAGLIO.]
+
+The results of such efforts were those historical pictures which at the
+Paris World Exhibition of 1878, the Munich International Exhibition of
+1883, and at every large exhibition since have been so exceedingly
+refreshing to all admirers of the illustration of history upon ground
+that was genuinely Spanish. At the Paris World Exhibition of 1878
+_Pradilla's_ "Joan the Mad" received the large gold medal, and was,
+indeed, a good picture in the manner of Laurens. Philip the Fair is
+dead. The funeral train, paying him the last honours, has come to a halt
+upon a high-road, and the unhappy princess rushes up with floating hair
+and staring eyes fixed upon the bier which hides the remains of her
+husband. The priests and women kneeling around regard the unfortunate
+mad woman with mournful pity. To the right the members of the Court are
+grouped near a little chapel where a priest is celebrating a mass for
+the dead; to the left the peasantry are crowding round to witness the
+ceremony. Great wax candles are burning, and the chapel is lit up with
+the sombre glow of torches. This was all exceedingly well painted,
+carefully balanced in composition, and graceful in drawing. At the
+Munich Exhibition of 1883 he received a gold medal for his "Surrender of
+Granada, 1492," a picture which made a great impression at the time upon
+the German historical painters, as Pradilla had made a transition from
+the brown bituminous painting of Laurens to a "modern" painting in grey,
+which did more justice to the illumination of objects beneath the open
+sky. In the same year _Casado's_ large painting, "The Bells of Huesca,"
+with the ground streaming with blood, fifteen decapitated bodies, and
+as many bodiless heads, was a creation which was widely admired. _Vera_
+had exhibited his picture, filled with wild fire and pathos, "The
+Defence of Numantia," and _Manuel Ramirez_ his "Execution of Don Alvaro
+de Luna," with the pallid head which has rolled from the steps and
+stares at the spectator in such a ghastly manner. In his "Conversion of
+the Duke of Gandia," _Moreno Carbonero_ displayed an open coffin _à la_
+Laurens: as Grand Equerry to the Empress Isabella at the Court of
+Charles V, the Duke of Gandia, after the death of his mistress, has to
+superintend the burial of her corpse in the vault at Granada, and as the
+coffin is opened there, to confirm the identity of the person, the
+distorted features of the dead make such a powerful impression upon the
+careless noble that he takes a vow to devote himself to God. _Ricardo
+Villodas_ in his picture "Victoribus Gloria" represents the beginning of
+one of those sea-battles which Augustus made gladiators fight for the
+amusement of the Roman people. By _Antonio Casanova y Estorach_ there
+was a picture of King Ferdinand the Holy, who upon Maundy Thursday is
+washing the feet of eleven poor old men and giving them food. And a
+special sensation was made by the great ghost picture of _Benliure y
+Gil_, which he named "A Vision in the Colosseum." Saint Almaquio, who
+was slain, according to tradition, by gladiators in the Colosseum, is
+seen floating in the air, as he swings in fanatical ecstasy a crucifix
+from which light is streaming. Upon one side men who have borne witness
+to Christianity with their blood chant their hymns of praise; upon the
+other, troops of female martyrs clothed in white and holding tapers in
+their hands move by; but below, the earth has opened, and the dead rise
+for the celebration of this midnight service, praying from their graves,
+while the full moon shines through the apertures of the ruins and pours
+its pale light upon the phantom congregation. There was exhibited by
+_Checa_ "A Barbarian Onset," a Gallic horde of riders thundering past a
+Roman temple, from which the priestesses are flying in desperation.
+_Francisco Amerigo_ treated upon a huge canvas a scene from the sacking
+of Rome in 1527, when the despoiling troops of Charles V plundered the
+Eternal City. "Soldiers intoxicated with wine and lust, tricked out with
+bishops' mitres and wrapped in the robes of priests, are desecrating the
+temples of God. Nunneries are violated, and fathers kill their daughters
+to save them from shame." So ran the historical explanation set upon the
+broad gold frame.
+
+But, after all, these historical pictures, in spite of their great
+spaces of canvas, are of no consequence when one comes to characterise
+the efforts of modern art. Explanations could be given showing that in
+the land of bull-fights this painting of horrors maintained itself
+longer than elsewhere, but the hopes of those who prophesied from it a
+new golden period for historical painting were entirely disappointed.
+For Spanish art, as in earlier days for French art, the historical
+picture has merely the importance implied by the _Prix de Rome_. A
+method of colouring which is often dazzling in result, and a vigorous
+study of nature, preserved from the danger of "beautiful" tinting, make
+the Spanish works different from the older ones. Their very passion
+often has an effect which is genuine, brutal, and of telling power. In
+the best of these pictures one believes that a wild temperament really
+does burst into flame through the accepted convention that the painters
+have delight in the horrible, which the older French artists resorted to
+merely for the purpose of preparing veritable _tableaux_. But in the
+rank and file, in place of the Southern vividness of expression which
+has been sincerely felt, histrionic pose is the predominant element, the
+petty situation of the stage set upon a gigantic canvas, and in addition
+to this a straining after effect which grazes the boundary line where
+the horrible degenerates into the ridiculous. Through their
+extraordinary ability they all compel respect, but they have not
+enriched the treasury of modern emotion, nor have they transformed the
+older historical painting in the essence of its being. And the man who
+handles again and again motives derived from what happens to be the mode
+in colours renders no service to art. Delaroche is dead; but though he
+may be disinterred he cannot be brought to life, and the Spaniards
+merely dug out of the earth mummies in which the breath of life was
+wanting. Their works are not directing-posts to the future, but the last
+_revenants_ of that histrionic spirit which wandered like a ghost
+through the art of all nations. Even the composition, the shining
+colours, the settles and carpets picturesquely spread upon the ground,
+are the same as in Gallait. How often have these precious stage
+properties done duty in tragic funereal service since Delaroche's
+"Murder of the Duke of Guise" and Piloty's "Seni"!
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ PRADILLA. THE SURRENDER OF GRANADA.]
+
+[Illustration: _Kunst unserer Zeit._
+
+ PRADILLA. ON THE BEACH.]
+
+And these conceptions, nourished upon historical painting, had an
+injurious influence upon the handling of the modern picture of the
+period. Even here there is an endeavour to make a compromise with the
+traditional historic picture, since artists painted scenes from modern
+popular life upon great spaces of canvas, transforming them into
+pageants or pictures of tragical ceremonies, and sought too much after
+subjects with which the splendid and motley colours of historical
+painting would accord. _Viniegra y Lasso_ and _Mas y Fondevilla_ execute
+great processions filing past, with bishops, monks, priests, and
+choristers. All the figures stand beaming in brightness against the sky,
+but the light glances from the oily mantles of the figures without real
+effect. _Alcazar Tejedor_ paints a young priest reading his "First Mass"
+in the presence of his parents, and merely renders a theatrical scene in
+modern costume, merely transfers to an event of the present that
+familiar "moment of highest excitement" so popular since the time of
+Delaroche. By his "Death of the Matador," and "The Christening," bought
+by Vanderbilt for a hundred and fifty thousand francs, _José Villegas_,
+in ability the most striking of them all, acquired a European name;
+whilst a hospital scene by _Luis Jimenez_ of Seville is the single
+picture in which something of the seriousness of French Naturalism is
+perceptible, but it is an isolated example from a province of interest
+which is otherwise not to be found in Spain.
+
+[Illustration: VILLEGAS. DEATH OF THE MATADOR.]
+
+Indeed, the Spaniards are by no means most attractive in gravely
+ceremonial and stiffly dignified pictures, but rather when they indulge
+in unpretentious "little painting" in the manner of Fortuny. Yet even
+these wayward "little painters," with their varied glancing colour, are
+not to be properly reckoned amongst the moderns. Their painting is an
+art dependent on deftness of hand, and knows no higher aim than to bring
+together in a picture as many brilliant things as possible, to make a
+charming bouquet with glistening effects of costume, and the play, the
+reflections, and the caprices of sunbeams. The earnest modern art which
+sprang from Manet and the Fontainebleau painters avoids this
+kaleidoscopic sport with varied spots of colour. All these little folds
+and mouldings, these prismatic arts of blending, and these curious
+reflections are what the moderns have no desire to see: they half close
+their eyes to gain a clearer conception of the chief values; they
+simplify; they refuse to be led from the main point by a thousand
+trifles. Their pictures are works of art, while those of the disciples
+of Fortuny are sleights of artifice. In all this _bric-à-brac_ art there
+is no question of any earnest analysis of light. The motley spots of
+colour yield, no doubt, a certain concord of their own; but there is a
+want of tone and air, a want of all finer sentiment: everything seems to
+have been dyed, instead of giving the effect of colour. Nevertheless
+those who were independent enough not to let themselves be entirely
+bewitched by the deceptive adroitness of a conjurer have painted little
+pictures of talent and refinement; taking Fortuny's _rococo_ works as
+their starting-point, they have represented the fashionable world and
+the highly coloured and warm-blooded life of the people of modern Spain
+with a bold and spirited facility. But they have not gone beyond the
+observation of the external sides of life. They can show guitarreros
+clattering with castanets and pandarets, majas dancing, and ribboned
+heroes conquering bulls instead of Jews and Moors. Yet their pictures
+are at any rate blithe, full of colour, flashing with sensuous
+brilliancy, and at times they are executed with stupendous skill.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ BENLIURE Y GIL. A VISION IN THE COLOSSEUM.]
+
+_Martin Rico_ was for the longest period in Italy with Fortuny, and his
+pictures also have the glitter of a casket of jewels, the pungency of
+sparkling champagne. Some of his sea-pieces in particular--for instance,
+those of the canal in Venice and the Bay of Fontarabia--might have been
+painted by Fortuny. In others he seems quieter and more harmonious than
+the latter. His execution is more powerful, less marked by spirited
+stippling, and his light gains in intensity and atmospheric refinement
+what it loses in mocking caprices, while his little figures have a more
+animated effect, notwithstanding the less piquant manner in which they
+are painted. Their outlines are scarcely perceptible, and yet they are
+seen walking, jostling, and pressing against each other; whereas those
+of Fortuny, precisely through the more subtle and microscopic method in
+which they have been executed, often seem as though they were benumbed
+in movement. Certain market scenes, with a dense crowd of buyers and
+sellers, are peculiarly spirited, rapid sketches, with a gleaming charm
+of colour.
+
+_Zamacois_, _Casanova_, and _Raimundo de Madrazo_, Fortuny's
+brother-in-law, show no less virtuosity of the palette. Sea-pieces and
+little landscapes alternate with scenes from Spanish popular life, where
+they revel, like Fortuny, in a scintillating medley of colour. Later, in
+Paris, Madrazo was likewise much sought after as a painter of ladies'
+portraits, as he lavished on his pictures sometimes a fine _hautgoût_ of
+fragrant _rococo_ grace _a la_ Chaplin, and sometimes devoted himself
+with taste and deftness to symphonic _tours de force à la_ Carolus
+Duran. Particularly memorable is the portrait of a graceful young girl
+in red, exhibited in the Munich Exhibition of 1883. She is seated upon a
+sofa of crimson silk, and her feet rest upon a dark red carpet. Equally
+memorable in the Paris World Exhibition of 1889 was a pierrette, whose
+costume ran through the whole gamut from white to rose-colour. Her skirt
+was of a darker, her bodice of a brighter red, and a light rose-coloured
+stocking peeped from beneath a grey silk petticoat; over her shoulders
+lay a white swansdown cape, and white gloves and white silk shoes with
+rose-coloured bows completed her toilette. His greatest picture
+represented "The End of a Masked Ball." Before the Paris Opera cabs are
+waiting with coachmen sleeping or smoking, whilst a troop of pierrots
+and pierrettes, harlequins, Japanese girls, _rococo_ gentlemen, and
+Turkish women are streaming out, sparkling with the most glittering
+colours in the grey light of a winter morning, in which the gas lamps
+cast a warm yellow glimmer.
+
+[Illustration: CASADO. THE BELLS OF HUESCA.]
+
+Even those who made their chief success as historical painters became
+new beings when they came forward with such piquant "little paintings."
+_Francisco Domingo_ in Valencia is the Spanish Meissonier, who has
+painted little horsemen before an inn, mercenary soldiers, newspaper
+readers, and philosophers of the time of Louis XV, with all the
+daintiness in colour associated with the French patriarch--although a
+huge canvas, "The Last Day of Sagunt," has the reputation of being his
+chief performance. In the year in which he exhibited his "Vision in the
+Colosseum," _Benliure y Gil_ made a success with two little pictures
+stippled in varied colours, the "Month of Mary" and the "Distribution
+of Prizes in Valencia," in which children, smartened and dressed in
+white frocks, are moving in the ante-chambers of a church, decorated for
+the occasion. _Casado_, painter of the sanguinary tragedy of Huesca,
+showed himself an admirable little master full of elegance and grace in
+"The Bull-Fighter's Reward," a small eighteenth-century picture. The
+master of the great hospital picture, _Jimenez_, took the world by
+surprise at the very same time by a "Capuchin Friar's Sermon before the
+Cathedral of Seville," which flashed with colour. _Emilio Sala y
+Francés_, whose historical masterpiece was the "Expulsion of the Jews
+from Spain in 1493," delights elsewhere in spring, Southern gardens with
+luxuriant vegetation, and delicate _rococo_ ladies, holding up their
+skirts filled with blooming roses, or gathering wild flowers among the
+grass. _Antonio Fabrés_ was led to the East by the influence of
+Regnault, and excited attention by his aquarelles and studies in pen and
+ink, in which he represented Oriental and Roman street figures with
+astonishing adroitness. But the _ne plus ultra_ is attained by the bold
+and winning art of _Pradilla_, which is like a thing shot out of a
+pistol. He is the greatest product of contemporary Spain, a man with a
+talent for improvisation as ingenious as it was free, who treated with
+equal facility the most varied subjects. In the bold and spirited
+decorations with which he embellished Spanish palaces he sported with
+nymphs and Loves and floating genii _à la_ Tiepolo. All the grace of the
+_rococo_ period is cast over his works in the Palais Murga in Madrid.
+The figures join each other with ease--coquettish nymphs swaying upon
+boughs, and audacious "Putti" tumbling over backwards in quaint games.
+Nowhere is there academic sobriety, and everywhere life, pictorial
+inspiration, the intoxicating joyousness of a fancy creating without
+effort and revelling in the festal delight of the senses. In the
+accompanying wall pictures he revived the age of the troubadours, of
+languishing love-song and knightly romance free from the burden of
+thought, in tenderly graceful and fluent figures. And this same painter,
+who filled these huge spaces of wall, lightly dallying with subjects
+from the world of fable, seems another man when he grasps fragments from
+the life of our own age in pithy inspirations sure in achievement. His
+historical pictures are works which compel respect; but those paintings
+on the most diminutive scale, in which he represented scenes from the
+Roman carnival and the life in Spanish camps, the shore of the sea and
+the joy of a popular merry-making with countless figures of the most
+intense vividness, carried out with an unrivalled execution of detail
+which is yet free from anything laboured, and full of splendour and
+glowing colour,--these, indeed, are performances of painting beside
+which as a musical counterpart at best Paganini's variations on the G
+string are comparable--sleights of art of which only Pradilla was
+capable, and such as only Fortuny painted forty years ago.
+
+Two masters who do not live at home, but in France, have followed still
+further the modern development of art with great power. The first is
+_Zuloaga_. The pictures of this artist have something truly Spanish,
+something that one as an admirer of Goya looks for eagerly in Spanish
+pictures. At the first glance the eye receives rather a shock. One seeks
+in vain for delicate painting of light in Zuloaga, or exquisite
+harmonies of colour. He places the crudest reds and yellows next to each
+other, strong, almost brutal, like a poster. With an uncompromising love
+of truth he paints the rouge-smeared cheeks and blackened eyebrows of
+his women-about-town, does not even try to make their movements graceful
+or give their costumes a touch of modish smartness. But what a breadth
+of conception! With what daring he sweeps his bold strokes over the
+picture! It is just because he avoids all flattery, because he brings
+nothing foreign, nothing cosmopolitan into his exclusive world, that the
+characteristics of Spanish life are mirrored with such truth in his
+works. Especially in his portrait of the popular poet, Don Miguel de
+Segovia, the whole picture is suffused with a rare Don Quixote feeling.
+Velasquez' Pablillas stands before you reincarnated. It is interesting,
+too, that Zuloaga, though in France, remains still a Spaniard. Even when
+he paints Parisiennes he translates toilette and gesture into grandiose
+Spanish style.
+
+The influence of the French school is much more marked in the second of
+these Spanish masters, _Hermen Anglada_. He has come to the front in
+the exhibitions of the last few years. Besnard has given him much of
+his refined epicurism, and this French _hautgoût_ lends his pictures a
+charm which is altogether their own. If you are seeking for unusual and
+quaint effects you will find them in this Spaniard, who paints pale,
+colourless women in the most astonishing costumes, places them in the
+midst of sensuous, misty landscapes, and gives you a glistening
+potpourri of colours. But Anglada's work is in itself the best testimony
+to the fact that the Spain of to-day is getting worn-out and bloodless.
+There is something senile and sapless in this over-refined art that
+takes pleasure in nothing but the most extraordinary nuances, and that
+needs something very unusual to tickle its nerves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+ITALY
+
+
+Italy has played a very different part from that of Spain in the
+development of modern art. Even at the World Exhibition of 1855 Edmond
+About called Italy "the grave of painting" in his _Voyage à travers
+l'Exposition des Beaux-Arts_. He mentions a few Piedmontese professors,
+but about Florence, Naples, and Rome he found nothing to say. The Great
+Exhibition of 1862 in England was productive of no more favourable
+criticism, for W. Bürger's account is as little consolatory as About's.
+"Renowned Italy and proud Spain," writes Burger, "have no longer any
+painters who can rival those of other schools. There is nothing to be
+said about the rooms where the Italians, Spanish, and Swiss are
+exhibited." To-day there are in Italy a great number of vigorous
+painters. In Angelo de Gubernati's lexicon of artists there are over two
+thousand names, some of which are favourably known in other countries
+also. But the mass dwindles to a tiny heap if those only are included
+who have risen from the level of dexterous picture-makers to that of
+painters of real importance in the world of art.
+
+Whether it be from direct influence or similarity of origin, Fortuny has
+found his ablest successors amongst the Neapolitan artists. As early as
+the seventeenth century the school of painting there was very different
+from those in the rest of Italy; the Greek blood of the population and
+the wild, romantic scenery of the Abruzzi gave it a peculiar stamp.
+Southern _brio_, the joy of life, colour, and warmth, in contrast with
+the noble Roman ideal of form, were the qualities of Salvator Rosa, Luca
+Giordano, and Ribera, bold and fiery spirits. And a breath of such power
+seems to live in their descendants still. Even now Neapolitan painting
+sings, dances, and laughs in a bacchanal of colour, pleasure, delight in
+life, and glowing sunshine.
+
+[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
+
+ MORELLI. THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY.]
+
+A wild and restless spirit, _Domenico Morelli_, whose biography is like
+a chapter from _Rinaldo Rinaldini_, is the head of this Neapolitan
+school. He was born on 4th August, 1826, and in his youth he is said to
+have been, first a pupil in a seminary of priests, then an apprentice
+with a mechanician, and for some time even _facchino_. He never saw such
+a thing as an academy. Indeed, it was a Bohemian life that he led,
+making his meals of bread and cheese, wandering for weeks together with
+Byron's poems in his pocket upon the seashore between Posilippo and
+Baiæ. In 1848 he fought against King Ferdinand, and was left severely
+wounded on the battle-field. After these episodes of youth he first
+became a painter, beginning his career in 1855 with the large picture
+"The Iconoclasts," followed in 1857 by a "Tasso," and in 1858 by a "Saul
+and David." Biblical pictures remained his province even later, and he
+was the only artist in Italy who handled these subjects from an entirely
+novel point of view, pouring into them a peculiarly exalted and
+imaginative spirit. A Madonna rocking her sleeping Child, whilst her
+song is accompanied by a legion of cherubs playing upon instruments,
+"The Reviling of Christ," "The Ascension," "The Descent from the Cross,"
+"Christ walking on the Sea," "The Raising of the Daughter of Jairus,"
+"The Expulsion of the Money-Changers from the Temple," "The Marys at the
+Grave," "Salve Regina," and "Mary Magdalene meeting Christ risen from
+the Grave," are the principal stages of his great Christian epic, and in
+their imaginative naturalism a new revolutionary language finds
+utterance through all these pictures. There is in them at times
+something of the mystical quietude of the East, and at times something
+of the passionate breath of Eugène Delacroix. In these pictures he
+revealed himself as a true child of the land of the sun, a lover of
+painting which scintillates and flickers. As yet hard, ponderous, dark,
+and plastic in "The Iconoclasts," he was a worshipper of light and
+resplendent in colour in the "Mary Magdalene." "The Temptation of St.
+Anthony" probably marks the summit of his creative power in the matter
+of colour. Morelli has conceived the whole temptation as a
+hallucination. The saint squats upon the ground, claws with his fingers,
+and with fixed gaze tries to stifle thoughts, full of craving
+sensuality, which are flaming in him. Yet they throng ever more
+thickly, take shape ever more distinctly, are transformed into
+red-haired women who detach themselves from corners upon all sides. They
+rise from beneath the matting, wind nearer from the depth of the cavern;
+even the breeze that caresses the fevered brow of the tormented man
+changes into the head of a girl pressing her kisses upon him. Only
+Naples could produce an artist at once so bizarre, so many-sided and
+incoherent, so opulent and strange. Younger men of talent trooped around
+him. A fiery spirit, haughty and independent, he became the teacher of
+all the younger generation. He led them to behold the sun and the sea,
+to marvel at nature in her radiant brightness. Through him the joy in
+light and colour came into Neapolitan painting, that rejoicing in colour
+which touches such laughing concords in the works of his pupil _Paolo
+Michetti_.
+
+A man of bold and magnificent talent, the genuine product of the wild
+Abruzzi, Michetti was the son of a day-labourer, like Morelli. However,
+a man of position became the protector of the boy, who was early left an
+orphan. But neither at the Academy at Naples nor in Paris and London did
+this continue long. As early as 1876 he was back in Naples, and settled
+amid the Abruzzi, close to the Adriatic, in Francavilla à Mare, near
+Ostona, a little nest which the traveller passes just before he goes on
+board the Oriental steamer at Brindisi. Here he lives out of touch with
+old pictures, in the thick of the vigorous life of the Italian people.
+In 1877 he painted the work which laid the foundation of his celebrity,
+"The Corpus Domini Procession at Chieti," a picture which rose like a
+firework in its boisterous, exhilarating medley of bright colours. The
+procession is seen just coming out of church: men, women, naked
+children, monks, priests, a canopy, choristers with censers, old men and
+youths, people who kneel and people who laugh, the mist of incense, the
+beams of the sun, flowers scattered on the ground, a band of musicians,
+and a church façade with rich and many-coloured ornaments. There is the
+play of variously hued silk, and colours sparkle in all the tints of the
+prism. Everything laughs, the faces and the costumes, the flowers and
+the sunbeams. Following upon this came a picture which he called "Spring
+and the Loves." It represented a desolate promontory in the blue sea,
+and upon it a troop of Cupids, playing round a hawthorn bush in full
+flower, are scuffling, buffeting each other, and leaping as riotously as
+Neapolitan street-boys. Some were arrayed like little Japanese, some
+like Grecian terra-cotta figures, whilst a marble bridge in the
+neighbourhood shone in indigo blue. The whole picture gleamed with red,
+blue, green, and yellow patches of colour: a serpentine dance painted
+twelve years before the appearance of Loie Fuller. Then again he painted
+the sea. It is noon, and the sultry heat broods over the azure tide.
+Naked fishermen are standing in it, and on the shore gaily dressed women
+are searching for mussels; whilst, in the background, vessels with the
+sun playing on their sails are mirrored brightly in the water. Or the
+moon rises casting greenish reflections upon the body of Christ, which
+shines like phosphorus as it is being taken from the cross: or there is
+a flowery landscape upon a summer evening; birds are settling down for
+the night, and little angels are kissing each other and laughing. In all
+these pictures Michetti showed himself an improviser of astonishing
+dexterity, solving every difficulty as though it were child's play, and
+shedding a brilliant colour over everything--a man to whom "painting"
+was as much a matter of course as orthography is to ourselves. Even the
+Paris World Exhibition of 1878 made him celebrated as an artist, and
+from that time his name was to the Italian ear a symbol for something
+new, unexpected, wild, and extravagant. The word "Michetti" means
+splendid materials, dazzling flesh-tones, conflicting hues set with
+intention beside each other, the luxuriant bodies of women basking in
+heat and sun, fantastic landscapes created in the mad brain of the
+artist, strange and curious frames, and village idylls in the glowing
+blaze of the sun. There are no lifeless spots in his works; every whim
+of his takes shape, as if by sorcery, in splendid figures.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ MICHETTI. GOING TO CHURCH.]
+
+Another pupil of Morelli, _Edoardo Dalbono_, completed his duty to
+history by a scene of horror _à la_ Laurens, "The Excommunication of
+King Manfred," and then became the painter of the Bay of Naples. "The
+Isle of Sirens" was the first production of his able, appetising, and
+nervously vibrating brush. There is a steep cliff dropping sheer into
+the blue sea. Two antique craft are drawing near, the crews taking no
+heed of the reefs and sandbanks. With phantomlike gesture the naked
+women stretch out their arms beckoning, embodiments as they are of the
+deadly beautiful and voluptuously cruel ocean. By degrees the sea
+betrayed to him all its secrets--its strangest combinations of colour
+and atmospheric effects, its transparency, and its eternally shifting
+phases of ebb and flow. He has painted the Bay of Naples under bright,
+hot noon and the gloom of night, in the purple light of the sinking sun
+and in the strange and many-coloured mood of twilight. At one moment it
+shines and plays variegated and joyous in blue, grass-green, and violet
+tones; at another it seems to glitter with millions of phosphorescent
+sparks: the rosy clouds of the sky are glassed in it, and the lights of
+the houses irregularly dotted over abrupt mountain-chains or the
+dark-red glow of lava luridly shining from Vesuvius. Now and then he
+painted scenes from Neapolitan street-life--old, weather-beaten seamen,
+young sailors with features as sharply cut as if cast in bronze,
+beautiful, fiery, brown women, shooting the hot Southern flame from
+their eyes, houses painted white or orange-yellow, with the sun
+glittering on the windows. The "Voto alla Madonna del Carmine" was the
+most comprehensive of these Southern pictures. Everything shines in
+joyous blue, yellowish-green, and red colours. Warmth, life, light,
+brilliancy, and laughter are the elements on which his art is based.
+
+[Illustration: _Kunst für Alle._
+
+ MICHETTI. THE CORPUS DOMINI PROCESSION AT CHIETI.]
+
+_Alceste Campriani_, _Giacomo di Chirico_, _Rubens Santoro_, _Federigo
+Cortese_, _Francesco Netti_, _Edoardo Toffano_, _Giuseppe de Nigris_
+have, all of them, this kaleidoscopic sparkle, this method of painting
+which gives pictures the appearance of being mosaics of precious stones.
+As in the days of the Renaissance, the Church is usually the scene of
+action, though not any longer as the house of God, but as the background
+of a many-coloured throng. As a rule these pictures contain a crowd of
+canopies, priests, and choristers, and country-folk, bowing or kneeling
+when the host is carried by, or weddings, horse-races, and country
+festivals; and everything is vivid and joyous in colour, saturated with
+the glowing sun of Naples. Alceste Campriani's chief work was entitled
+"The Return from Montevergine." Carriages and open rack-waggons are
+dashing along, the horses snorting and the drivers smacking their whips,
+while the peasants, who have had their fill of sweet wine, are shouting
+and singing, and the orange-sellers in the street are crying their
+goods. A coquettish glancing light plays over the gay costumes, and the
+white dust sparkles like fluid silver, as it rises beneath the hoofs of
+the horses wildly plunging forward. The leading work of _Giacomo di
+Chirico_, who became mad in 1883, was "A Wedding in the Basilicata." It
+represents a motley crowd. The entire village has set out to see the
+ceremony. The wedding guests are descending the church steps to the
+square, which is decked out with coloured carpets and strewn with
+flowers. Triumphal arches have been set up, and the pictures of the
+Madonna are hung with garlands. Meanwhile the _sindaco_ gives his arm to
+the bride, beneath whose gay costume a charmingly graceful little foot
+is peeping out. Then the bridegroom follows with the _sindaco's_ wife.
+All the village girls are looking on with curiosity, and the musicians
+are playing. Winter has covered the square with a white cloak of snow;
+yet the sunbeams sport over it, making it shine vividly with a thousand
+reflections.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ FAVRETTO. ON THE PIAZZETTA.]
+
+Of course, the derivation of all these pictures is easily recognisable.
+Almost all the Neapolitan painters studied at Fortuny's in the seventies
+in Rome, and when they came home again they perceived that the life of
+the people offered themes which had a coquettish fitness in Fortuny's
+scale of tones. From the variously coloured magnificence of old
+churches, the red robes of ecclesiastics, the gaudy splendour of the
+country-people's clothes, and the gay glory of rags amongst the
+Neapolitan children, they composed a modern _rococo_, rejoicing in
+colour, whilst the Spaniard had fled to the past to attain his gleaming
+effects.
+
+A great number of the Italians do the same even now. In numerous costume
+pictures, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, flashing with
+silk and velvet, the Southerner's bright pleasure in colour still loves
+to celebrate its orgies. Gay trains rustle, rosy Loves laugh down from
+the walls, Venetian chandeliers shed their radiance; no other epoch in
+history enables the painter with so much ease to produce such an
+efflorescence of full-toned chords of colour. With his shining glow of
+hue the delectable and spirited _Favretto_ (who, like Fortuny, entered
+the world of art as a victor, and, like him again, was snatched from it
+when barely thirty-seven, after a brief and brilliant career) stands at
+the head of this group. The child of poor parents, indeed the son of a
+joiner, he was born in Venice in 1849, and, like the Spaniard, passed a
+youth which was full of privations. But all the cares of existence, even
+the loss of an eye, did not hinder him from seeing objects under a
+laughing brightness of colour. Through his studies and the bent of his
+fancy he had come to be no less at home in the Venice of the eighteenth
+century than in that of his own time. This Venice of Francesco Guardi,
+this city of enchantment surrounded with the gleam of olden splendour,
+the scene of rich and brilliantly coloured banquets and a graceful and
+modish society, rose once more under Favretto's hands in fabulous
+beauty. What _brio_ of technique, what harmony of colours, were to be
+found in the picture "Un Incontro," the charming scene upon the Rialto
+Bridge, with the bowing cavalier and the lady coquettishly making her
+acknowledgments! This was the first picture which gave him a name in the
+world. What fanfares of colour were in the two next pictures, "Banco
+Lotto" and "Erbajuolo Veneziano"! At the Exhibition in Turin in 1883 he
+was represented by "The Bath" and "Susanna and the Elders"; at that in
+Venice in 1887 he celebrated his last and greatest triumph. The three
+pictures "The Friday Market upon the Rialto Bridge," "The Canal Ferry
+near Santa Margherita," and "On the Piazzetta" were the subject of
+enthusiastic admiration. All the Venetian society of the age of Goldoni,
+Gozzi, and Casanova had become vivid in this last picture, and moved
+over the smooth brick pavement of the Piazzetta at the hour of the
+promenade, from the Doge's palace to the library, and from the Square of
+St. Mark to the pillar of the lions and Theodore, to and fro in surging
+life. Men put up their glasses and chivalrously greeted the queens of
+beauty. The enchanting magic building of Sansovino, the _loggetta_ with
+their bright marble pillars, bronze statues of blackish-grey, and
+magnificent lattice doors, formed the background of the standing and
+sauntering groups, whose variegated costumes united with the tones of
+marble and bronze to make a most beautiful combination of colours.
+Favretto had a manner of his own, and, although a member of the school
+of Fortuny, he was stronger and healthier than the latter. He drew like
+a genuine painter, without having too much of the Fortuny fireworks. His
+soft, rich painting was that of a colourist of distinction, always
+tasteful, exquisite in tone, and light and pleasing in technique.
+
+By the other Italian costume painters the scale run through by Fortuny
+was not enriched by new notes. Most of their pictures are nugatory,
+coquettishly sportive toys, masterly in technique no doubt, but so empty
+of substance that they vanish from memory like novels read upon a
+railway journey. Many have no greater import than dresses, cloaks, and
+hats worn by ladies during a few weeks of the season. Sometimes their
+significance is not even so great, since there are modistes and
+dressmakers who have more skill in making ruches and giving the right
+_nuance_ to colours. Some small part of Favretto's refined taste seems
+to have been communicated to the Venetian _Antonio Lonza_, who delights
+in mingling the gleaming splendour of Oriental carpets, fans, and
+screens amid the motley, picturesque costumes of the _rococo_
+period--Japanese who perform as jugglers and knife-throwers in quaint
+_rococo_ gardens before the old Venetian nobility. But the centre of
+this costume painting is Florence, and the great mart for it the
+_Società artistica_, where there are yearly exhibitions.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ FAVRETTO. SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS.]
+
+Francesco Vinea, Tito Conti, Federigo Andreotti, and Edoardo Gelli are
+in Italy the special manufacturers who have devoted themselves, with the
+assistance of Meissonier, Gérôme, and Fortuny, to scenes from the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to plumed hats, Wallenstein boots,
+and horsemen's capes, to Renaissance lords and laughing Renaissance
+ladies, and they have thereby won great recognition in Germany. Pretty,
+languishing women in richly coloured costumes, tippling soldiers and
+gallant cavaliers, laughing peasant women and trim serving-girls drawing
+wine in the cellar vaults and setting it before a trooper, who in
+gratitude affectionately puts his arm round their waist, beautiful and
+still more languishing noble ladies, who laugh with a parrot or a dog,
+instead of a trooper, in apartments richly furnished with Gobelins--such
+for the most part are the subjects treated by _Francesco Vinea_ with
+great virtuosity bordering on the routine of a typewriter. His technique
+is neither refined nor fascinating; the colours are so crude that they
+affect the eye as a false note the ear. But the mechanical power of his
+painting is great. He has much ability, far more, indeed, than Sichel,
+and possesses the secret of painting, in an astonishing manner, the
+famous lace kerchiefs wound round the heads of his fair ones.
+_Andreotti_ and _Tito Conti_ work in the same fashion, except that the
+ballad-singers and rustic idylls of Andreotti are the smoother and more
+mawkish, whereas the pictures of Conti make a somewhat more refined and
+artistic effect. His colour is superior and more transparent, and his
+tapestry backgrounds are warmer.
+
+And, so far as one can judge from their pictures, life runs as merrily
+for the Italians of the present as it did for those _rococo_ cavaliers.
+Hanging here and there beside the serious art of other nations, these
+little picture-people enjoy their careless tinsel pomp; art is a gay
+thing for them, as gay as a Sunday afternoon with a procession and
+fireworks, walks and sips of sherbet, to an Italian woman. By the side
+of the blue-plush and red-velvet costume-picture comic _genre_ still
+holds its sway: barbaric in colour and with materials which are merrier
+than is appropriate in tasteful pictures, _Gaetano Chierici_ represents
+children, both good and naughty, making their appearance upon a tiny
+theatre. _Antonio Rotta_ renders comic episodes from the life of
+Venetian cobblers and the menders of nets. _Scipione Vannuttelli_ paints
+young girls in white dresses arrayed as nuns or being confirmed in
+church. _Francesco Monteverde_ rejoices in comical _intermezzi_ in the
+style of Grützner--for instance, an ecclesiastical gentleman observing,
+to his horror, that his pretty young servant-girl is being kissed by a
+smart lad in the yard. This is more or less his style of subject.
+_Ettore Tito_ paints the pretty Venetian laundresses whom Passini, Cecil
+van Haanen, Charles Ulrich, Eugène Blaas, and others introduced into
+art. Only a very few struck deeper notes. _Luigi Nono_, in Venice,
+painted his beautiful picture "Refugium Peccatorum"; _Ferragutti_, the
+Milanese, his "Workers in the Turnip Field," a vivid study of sunlight
+of serious veracity; and after these _Giovanni Segantini_ came forward
+with his forcible creations, in which he has demonstrated that it is
+possible for a man to be an Italian and yet a serious artist.
+
+[Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._
+
+ TITO. THE SLIPPER SELLER.]
+
+Segantini's biography is like a novel. Born the child of poor parents,
+in Arco, in 1858, he was left, after the death of his parents, to the
+care of a relative in Milan with whom he passed a most unhappy time. He
+then wanted to make his fortune in France, and set out upon foot; but he
+did not get very far, in fact he managed to hire himself out as a
+swine-herd. After this he lived for a whole year alone in the wild
+mountains, worked in the field, the stable, the barn. Then came the
+well-known discovery, which one could not believe were it not to be read
+in Gubernati. One day he drew the finest of his pigs with a piece of
+charcoal upon a mass of rock. The peasants ran in a crowd and took the
+block of stone, together with the young Giotto, in triumph to the
+village. He was given assistance, visited the School of Art in Milan,
+and now paints the things he did in his youth. In a secluded village of
+the Alps, Val d'Albola in Switzerland, a thousand metres above the sea,
+amid the grand and lofty mountains, he settled down, surrounded only by
+the peasants who make a precarious living from the soil. Out of touch
+with the world of artists the whole year round, observing great nature
+at every season and every hour of the day, fresh and straightforward in
+character, he is one of those natures of the type of Millet, in whom
+heart and hand, man and artist, are one and the same thing. His shepherd
+and peasant scenes from the valleys of the high Alps are free from all
+flavour of _genre_. The life of these poor and humble beings passes
+without contrasts and passions, being spent altogether in work, which
+fills the long course of the day in monotonous regularity. The sky
+sparkles with a sharp brilliancy. The spiky yellow and tender green of
+the fields forces its way modestly from the rocky ground. In front is
+something like a hedge where a cow is grazing, or there is a shepherdess
+pasturing her sheep. Something majestic there is in this cold nature,
+where the sunshine is so sharp, the air so thin. And the primitive, it
+might almost be said antique, execution of these pictures is in accord
+with the primitive simplicity of the subjects. In fact, Segantini's
+pictures, with their cold silvery colours, and their contours so sharp
+in outline, standing out hard against the rarefied air, make an
+impression like encaustic paintings or mosaics. They have nothing
+alluring or pleasing, and there is, perhaps, even a touch of mannerism
+in this mosaic painting; but they are nevertheless exceedingly true,
+rugged, austere, and yet sunny. Segantini opened up to painting an
+entirely new world of beauty, the poetry of the highlands. His
+appearance dates from the Impressionistic period when preference was
+given to damp, misty atmospheres which toned down all colour and melted
+away all lines, and artists made a specialty of flat, monotonous plains.
+At that time the mountains were in bad repute, thanks to the
+old-fashioned painters of views, the masters of the "picture-postcard
+style." Segantini led the way again up to the heights; but he did not
+paint the mountain-tops that, like the Titans of old, strive to reach
+the sky; he painted the plateaus, not the plains of the lowlands, but of
+the highlands, lonely, weird, sublime, where man draws near to the heart
+of Nature, far from the noise and struggle of everyday life. The air of
+the heights is there, the colours and lines speak with no uncertain
+voice. Thus Segantini learnt from the locale of his pictures to become
+the first master of line among the Impressionists. How he mirrors in his
+pictures the stillness, the might and grandeur of these lofty heights!
+With what astounding truth his cold, clear colours make us feel the
+coldness and clearness of these regions. Like a dome of steel, the sky
+stretches over the steel-blue lakes, clear as crystal, over the
+pale-green meadows in the grip of the frost; the tender foliage rustles
+and freezes in the quivering ice-cold air: there glaciers gleam, there
+glitters the snow, there the sun pours down his beams upon the earth
+like plumes of fire. A thunder cloud draws near, calm and majestic as
+destiny in its relentless course. There is something Northern and
+virginal, something earnest and grandiose, which stands in strange
+contrast with the joyful, conventional smile which is otherwise spread
+over the countenance of Italian painting. Though he died so young,
+Giovanni Segantini will live for all time in the history of art.
+
+With the exception of Segantini, not one of these painters will own that
+there are poverty-stricken and miserable people in his native land. An
+everlasting blue sky still laughs over Italy, sunshine and the joy of
+life still hold undisputed sway over Italian pictures. There is no work
+in sunny Italy, and in spite of that there is no hunger. Even where work
+is being done there are assembled only the fairest girls of Lombardy,
+who kneel laughing and jesting on the strand, while the wind dallies
+with their clothes. They have a special delight for showing themselves
+while engaged at their toilette, in a bodice, their little feet in neat
+little slippers, their naked arms raised to arrange their red-gold hair.
+As a rule, however, they do nothing whatever but smile at you with their
+most seductive smile, which shows their pearl-white teeth, and ensnares
+every poor devil who does not suspect that they have smiled for years in
+the same way, and most of all with him who pays highest: "_j'aime les
+hommes parse que j'aime les truffes_." These pictures are almost
+invariably works which are well able to give pleasure to their
+possessor, only they seldom suggest discussion on the course of art.
+_Trop de marchandise_ is the phrase generally used in the Paris Salon
+when the Italians come under consideration. Few there are amongst them
+who are real pioneers, spirits pressing seriously forward and having a
+quickening influence on others. The vital questions of the painting of
+free light, Impressionism, and Naturalism do not interest them in the
+least. A naïve, pleasant, lively, and self-complacent technique is in
+most cases the solitary charm of their works. One feels scarcely any
+inclination to search the catalogue for the painter's name, and whether
+the beauty--for she is not the first of her kind--who was called Ninetta
+last year has now become Lisa. Most of these modern Italians execute
+their pictures in the way in which gold pieces are minted, or in the way
+in which plastic works, which run through so many editions, are produced
+in Italy. Nowhere are more beautiful laces chiselled, and in the same
+manner painters render the shining splendour of satin and velvet, the
+glittering brilliancy of ornaments, and the starry radiance of the
+beautiful eyes of women. Only, as soon as one has once seen them one
+knows the pictures by heart, as one knows the works in marble, and this
+is so because the painters had them by heart first. Everywhere there are
+the evidences of talent, industry, ability, and spirit, but there is no
+soul in the spirit and no life in the colours. So many brilliant tones
+stand beside each other, and yet there is neither a refined tone nor the
+impression of truth to nature.
+
+[Illustration: SEGANTINI. MATERNITY.]
+
+In all this art of theirs there is scarcely a question of any serious
+landscape. Apart from the works of some of the younger men--for
+instance, _Belloni_, _Serra_, _Gola_, _Filippini_, and others, who
+display an intimacy of observation which is worthy of honour--a really
+close connection with the efforts made across the Alps is not achieved
+in these days. As a rule the landscapes are mere products of
+handicraft, which are striking for the moment by their technical
+routine, but seldom waken any finer feelings, whether the Milanese paint
+the dazzling Alpine effects or the Venetian lagunes steeped in light,
+with gondolas and gondola-poles glowing in the sunshine, or the
+Neapolitans set glittering upon the canvas their beautiful bay like a
+brilliant firework. Most of them continue to pursue with complete
+self-satisfaction the flagged gondola of Ziem; the conquests of the
+Fontainebleau painters and of the Impressionists are unnoticed by them.
+
+And this industrial characteristic of Italian painting is sufficiently
+explained by the entire character of the country. The Italian painter is
+not properly in a position to seek effects of his own and to make
+experiments. Hardly anything is bought for the galleries, and there are
+few collectors of superior taste. He labours chiefly for the traveller,
+and this gives his performances the stamp of attractive mercantile
+wares. The Italian is too much a man of business to undertake great
+trials of strength _pour le roi de Prusse_. He paints no great pictures,
+which would be still-born children in his home, nor does he paint severe
+studies of _plein-air_, preferring a specious, exuberant, flickering,
+and glaring revel in colour. In general he produces nothing which will
+not easily sell, and has a fine instinct for the taste of the rich
+travelling public, who wish to see nothing which does not excite
+cheerful and superficial emotions.
+
+But it is possible that this decline of the Latin races is connected
+with the nature of modern art itself. Of late the words "Germanic" and
+"Latin" have been much abused. It has been proclaimed that the new art
+meant the victory of the German depth of feeling over the Latin sense of
+form, the onset of German cordiality against the empty exaggeration in
+which the imitation of the Cinquecento resulted. Such assertions are
+always hard to maintain, because every century shows similar reactions
+of truth to nature against mannerism. Nevertheless is it true that
+modern art, with its heartfelt devotion to everyday life and the
+mysteries of light, has an essentially Germanic character, finding its
+ancestors not in Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian, but in the English
+of the eighteenth, the Dutch of the seventeenth, and the Germans of the
+sixteenth century. The Italians and Spaniards, whose entire intellectual
+culture rests upon a Latin foundation, may therefore find it difficult
+to follow this change of taste. They either adhere to the old bombastic
+and theatrical painting of history, or they recast the new painting in
+an external drawing-room art draped with gaudy tinsel. Even in France
+the rise of the new art meant, as it were, the victory of the Frankish
+element over the Gallic. Millet the Norman, Courbet the Frank,
+Bastien-Lepage of Lorraine, drove back the Latins--Ingres and Couture,
+Cabanel and Bouguereau--just as in the eighteenth century the
+Netherlander Watteau broke the yoke of the rigid Latin Classicism.
+
+It is perhaps no mere chance that the threads of the Germanic aim in art
+were drawn out with such zeal by the Germanic nations. With the Latins
+a striking effect is made by brilliant technique, mastery of the manual
+art of painting, and careless sway over all the enchantments of the
+craft; with the Teutons one stands in the presence of an art which is so
+natural and simple that one scarcely thinks of the means by which it was
+called into being. In one case there is virtuosity, ductility, and
+grace; in the other, health, intrinsic feeling, and temperament.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+ENGLAND
+
+
+To English painting the acquisitions of the French could now give little
+that was radically novel, for the epoch-making labours of the
+pre-Raphaelites were already in existence. Apart from certain cases of
+direct borrowing, it has either completely preserved its autonomy, or
+recast everything assimilated from France in a specifically English
+fashion. It is in art, indeed, as it is with men themselves. The English
+travel more than any other people, for travel is a part of their
+education. They are to be met in every quarter of the globe--in Africa,
+Asia, America, or the European Continent; and they scarcely need to open
+their mouths, even from a distance, to betray that they are English. In
+the same way there is no need of a catalogue at exhibitions to recognise
+all English pictures at the first glance. English painting is too
+English not to be fond of travel. The painter delights in reconnoitring
+all other schools and studying all styles; he is as much at home in the
+past as in the present. But as the English tourist, let him go to the
+world's end, retains everywhere his own customs, tastes, and habits, so
+English painting, even on its most adventurous journeys, remains
+unwaveringly true to its national spirit, and returns from all its
+wanderings more English than before; it adapts what is alien with the
+same delicious abnegation of all scruple with which the English tongue
+brings foreign words into harmony with its own sense of convenience. A
+certain softness of feeling and tenderness of spirit induce the English
+even in these days to avoid hard contact with reality. Their art rejects
+everything in nature which is harsh, rude, and brutal; it is an art
+which polishes and renders the reality poetic at the risk of
+debilitating its power. It considers matters from the standpoint of what
+is pretty, touching, or intelligible, and by no means holds that
+everything true is necessarily beautiful. And just as little does the
+English eye--so much occupied with detail--see light in its most
+exquisite subtleties. Indeed, it rather sees the isolated fact than the
+total harmony, and is clearer than it is fine.
+
+For this reason _plein-air_ painting has very few adepts, and the
+atmospheric influences which blunt the lines of objects, efface colours,
+and bring them nearer to each other, meet with little consideration.
+Things are given all the sharpness of their outlines, and the harmony,
+which in the French follows naturally from the observation of light and
+air saturating form and colour, is the more artificially attained by
+everything being brought into concord in a bright and delicate tone,
+which is almost too fine. The audacities of Impressionism are excluded,
+because painting which starts from a masterly seizure of total effect
+would seem too sketchy to English taste, which has been formed by
+Ruskin. Painting must be highly finished and highly elaborated; that is
+a _conditio sine qua non_ which English taste refuses to renounce in
+oil-painting as little as in water-colour, and in England they are more
+closely related than elsewhere, and have mutually influenced each other
+in the matter of technique. In fact, English water-colours seek to rival
+oil-painting in force and precision, and have therefore forfeited the
+charm of improvisation, the _verve_ of the first sketch, and the
+freshness and ease which they should have by their very character.
+Through a curious change of parts oil-painting has a fancy for borrowing
+from water-colours their effects and their processes. English pictures
+have no longer anything heavy or oily, but they likewise show nothing of
+the manipulation of the brush, rather resembling large water-colours,
+perhaps even pastels or wax-painting. The colours are chosen with
+reserve, and everything is subdued and softened like the quiet step of
+the footman in the mansion of a nobleman. The special quality in all
+English pictures--putting aside a preference for bright yellow and vivid
+red in the older period--consists in a bluish or greenish luminous
+general tone, to which every English painter seems to conform as though
+it were a binding social convention, and it even recurs in English
+landscapes. In fact, English painting differs from French as England
+from France.
+
+France is a great city, and the name of this city is Paris. Here, and
+not in the provinces, lives that fashionable, thinking world which has
+become the guide of the nation and the censor of beauty, by the
+refinement of its taste and its preeminent intellect. The ideas which
+fly throughout the land upon invisible wires are born in Paris.
+Painting, likewise, receives them at first hand. It stands amid the
+seething whirlpool of the age, the heart's-blood of the present streams
+through all its veins, and there is nothing human that is alien to it,
+neither the filth nor the splendour of life, its laughter nor its
+misery. All the nerves of the great city are vibrating in it. Paris has
+made her people refined and, at the same time, insatiate in enjoyment.
+Every day they have need of new impressions and new theories to ward off
+tedium. And thus is explained the universally comprehensive sphere of
+subject in French painting, and its feverish versatility in technique.
+
+But London has, in no sense, the importance for England which Paris has
+for France. It is a centre of attraction for business; but the more
+refined classes of society live in the country. As soon as one is off in
+the Dover express country houses fly past on either side of the train.
+They are all over England--upon the shores of the lakes, upon the strand
+of the sea, upon the tops of the hills. And how pleasant they are, how
+well appointed, how delightful to look at, with their gabled roofs and
+their gleaming brickwork overgrown with ivy! Around them stretches a
+fresh lawn which is rolled every morning, as soft as velvet. Fat oxen,
+and sheep as white as if they had been just washed, lie upon the grass.
+Thus all rustic England is like a great summer resort, where there is
+heard no sound of the ringing and throbbing strokes of life. Nor is
+painting allowed to disturb this idyllic harmony. No one wishes that
+anything should remind him of the prose of life when his work is done
+and the town has vanished. Schiller's assertion, "Life is earnest,
+blithe is art," is here the first law of æesthetics.
+
+[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._ LORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A.]
+
+English painting is exclusively an art based on luxury, optimism, and
+aristocracy; in its neatness, cleanliness, and good-breeding it is
+exclusively designed to ingratiate itself with English ideas of comfort.
+Yet the pictures have to satisfy very different tastes--the taste of a
+wealthy middle class which wishes to have substantial nourishment, and
+the æesthetic taste of an _élite_ class, which will only tolerate the
+quintessence of art, the most subtle art that can be given. But all
+these works are not created for galleries, but for the drawing-room of a
+private house, and in subject and treatment they have all to reckon with
+the ascendant view that a picture ought, in the first place, to be an
+attractive article of furniture for the sitting-room. The traveller, the
+lover of antiquity, is pleased by imitation of the ancient style; the
+sportsman, the lover of country life, has a delight in little rustic
+scenes; and the women are enchanted with feminine types. And everything
+must be kept within the bounds of what is charming, temperate, and
+prosperous, without in any degree suggesting the struggle for existence.
+The pictures have themselves the grace of that mundane refinement from
+the midst of which they are beheld.
+
+England is the country of the sculptures of the Parthenon, the country
+where Bulwer Lytton wrote his _Last Days of Pompeii_, and where the most
+Grecian female figures in the world may be seen to move. Thus painters
+of antique subjects still play an important part in the pursuit of
+English art--probably the pursuit of art rather than its development.
+For they have never enriched the treasury of modern sentiment. Trained,
+all of them, in Paris or Belgium, they are equipped with finer taste,
+and have acquired abroad a more solid ability than James Barry, Haydon,
+and Hinton, the half-barbaric English Classicists of the beginning of
+the century. But at bottom--like Cabanel and Bouguereau--they represent
+rigid conservatism in opposition to progress, and the way in which they
+set about the reconstruction of an august or domestic antiquity is only
+distinguished by an English _nuance_ of race from that of Couture and
+Gérôme.
+
+_Lord Leighton_, the late highly cultured President of the Royal
+Academy, was the most dignified representative of this tendency. He was
+a Classicist through and through--in the balance of composition, the
+rhythmical flow of lines, and the confession of faith that the highest
+aim of art is the representation of men and women of immaculate build.
+In the picture galleries of Paris, Rome, Dresden, and Berlin he received
+his youthful impressions; his artistic discipline he received under
+Zanetti in Florence, under Wiertz and Gallait in Brussels, under Steinle
+in Frankfort, and under Ingres and Ary Scheffer in Paris. Back in
+England once more, he translated Couture into English as Anselm
+Feuerbach translated him into German with greater independence.
+Undoubtedly there has never been anything upon his canvas which could be
+supposed ungentlemanlike. And as a nation is usually apt to prize most
+the very thing which has been denied it, and for which it has no talent,
+Leighton was soon an object of admiration to the refined world. As early
+as 1864 he became an associate, and in November 1879 President of the
+Royal Academy. For sixteen years he sat like a Jupiter upon his throne
+in London. An accomplished man of the world and a good speaker, a
+scholar who spoke many languages and had seen many countries, he
+possessed every quality which the president of an academy needs to have;
+he had an exceedingly imposing presence in his red gown, and did the
+honours of his house with admirable tact.
+
+But one stands before his works with a certain feeling of indifference.
+There are few artists with so little temperament as Lord Leighton, few
+in the same degree wanting in the magic of individuality. The purest
+academical art, as the phrase is understood of Ingres, together with
+academical severity of form, is united with a softness of feeling
+recalling Hofmann of Dresden; and the result is a placid classicality
+adapted _ad usum Delphini_, a classicality foregoing the applause of
+artists, but all the more in accordance with the taste of a refined
+circle of ladies. His chief works, "The Star of Bethlehem," "Orpheus and
+Eurydice," "Jonathan's Token to David," "Electra at the Tomb of
+Agamemnon," "The Daphnephoria," "Venus disrobing for the Bath," and the
+like, are amongst the most refined although the most frigid creations of
+contemporary English art.
+
+[Illustration: LEIGHTON. CAPTIVE ANDROMACHE.
+
+ (_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Portfolio._
+
+ LEIGHTON. SIR RICHARD BURTON.]
+
+Perhaps the "Captive Andromache" of 1888 is the quintessence of what he
+aimed at. The background is the court of an ancient palace, where female
+slaves are gathered together fetching water. In the centre of the stage,
+as the leading actress, stands Andromache, who has placed her pitcher on
+the ground before her, and waits with dignity until the slaves have
+finished their work. This business of water-drawing has given Leighton
+an opportunity for combining an assemblage of beautiful poses. The widow
+of Hector expresses a queenly sorrow with decorum, while the
+amphora-bearers are standing or walking hither and thither, in the
+manner demanded by the pictures upon Grecian vases, but without that
+sureness of line which comes of the real observation of life. In its
+dignity of style, in the noble composition and purity of the lines which
+circumscribe the forms with so much distinction and in so impersonal a
+manner, the picture is an arid and measured work, cold as marble and
+smooth as porcelain. "Hercules wrestling with Death for the Body of
+Alcestis" might be a Grecian relief upon a sarcophagus, so carefully
+balanced are the masses and the lines. The pose of Alcestis is that of
+the nymphs of the Parthenon; only, it would not have been so fine were
+these not in existence. His "Music Lesson" of 1877 is charming, and his
+"Elijah in the Wilderness" is a work of style. And in his frescoes in
+the South Kensington Museum there is a perfect compendium of beautiful
+motives of gesture. The eye delights to linger over these feminine
+forms, half nude, half enveloped with drapery, yet it notes, too, that
+these creations are composed out of the painter's knowledge and artistic
+reminiscences; there is a want of life in them, because the master has
+surrendered himself to feeling with the organs of a dead Greek.
+Leighton's colour is always carefully considered, scrupulously polished,
+and endowed with the utmost finish, but it never has the magical charm
+by which one recognises the work of a true colourist. It is rather the
+result of painstaking study and cultivated taste than of personal
+feeling. The grace of form is always carefully prepared--a thing which
+has the consciousness of its own existence. Beautiful and spontaneous as
+the movements undoubtedly are, one has always a sense that the artist
+is present, anxiously watching lest any of his actors offend against a
+law of art.
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ LEIGHTON. THE LAST WATCH OF HERO.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+Lord Leighton's pupils, Poynter and Prinsep, followed him with a good
+deal of determination. _Val Prinsep_ shares with Leighton the smooth
+forms of a polished painting, whereas _Edward Poynter_ by his more
+earnest severity and metallic precision verges more on that union of
+aridness and style characteristic of Ingres. His masterpiece, "A Visit
+to Æsculapius," is in point of technique one of the best products of
+English Classicism. To the left Æsculapius is sitting beneath a pillared
+porch overgrown with foliage, while, like Raphael's Jupiter in the
+Farnesina, he supports his bearded chin thoughtfully with his left hand.
+A nymph who has hurt her foot appears, accompanied by three companions,
+before the throne of the god, begging him for a remedy. To say nothing
+of many other nude or nobly draped female figures, numerous decorative
+paintings in the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul's, and St. Stephen's
+Church in Dulwich owe their existence to this most industrious artist.
+
+_Alma Tadema_, the famous Dutchman who has called to life amid the
+London fog the sacrifices of Pompeii and Herculaneum, stands to this
+grave academical group as Gérôme to Couture. As Bulwer Lytton, in the
+field of literature, created a picture of ancient civilisation so
+successful that it has not been surpassed by his followers, Alma Tadema
+has solved the problem of the picture of antique manners in the most
+authentic fashion in the province of painting. He has peopled the past,
+rebuilt its towns and refurnished its houses, rekindled the flame upon
+the sacrificial altars and awakened the echo of the dithyrambs to new
+life. Poynter tells old fables, while Alma Tadema takes us in his
+company, and, like the best-informed cicerone, leads us through the
+streets of old Athens, reconstructing the temples, altars, and
+dwellings, the shops of the butchers, bakers, and fishmongers, just as
+they once were.
+
+[Illustration: LEIGHTON. THE BATH OF PSYCHE.
+
+ (_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+This power of making himself believed Alma Tadema owes in the first
+place to his great archæological learning. By Leys in Brussels this side
+of his talent was first awakened, and in 1863, when he went to Italy for
+the first time, he discovered his archæological mission. How the old
+Romans dressed, how their army was equipped and attired, became as well
+known to him as the appearance of the citizens' houses, the artizans'
+workshops, the market and the bath. He explored the ruins of temples,
+and he grew familiar with the privileges of the priests, the method of
+worship, of the sacrifices, and of the festal processions. There was no
+monument of brass or marble, no wall-painting, no pictured vase nor
+mosaic, no sample of ancient arts, of pottery, stone-cutting, or work in
+gold, that he did not study. His brain soon became a complete
+encyclopædia of antiquity. He knew the forms of architecture as well as
+he knew the old myths, and all the domestic appointments and robes as
+exactly as the usages of ritual. In Brussels, as early as the sixties,
+this complete power of living in the period he chose to represent gave
+Alma Tadema's pictures from antiquity their remarkable _cachet_ of
+striking truthfulness to life. And London, whither he migrated in 1870,
+offered even a more favourable soil for his art. Whereas the French
+painters of the antique picture of manners often fell into a diluted
+idealism and a lifeless traffic with old curiosities, with Alma Tadema
+one stands in the presence of a veritable fragment of life; he simply
+paints the people amongst whom he lives and their world. The Pompeian
+house which he has built in London, with its dreamy vividarium, its
+great golden hall, its Egyptian decorations, its Ionic pillars, its
+mosaic floor, and its Oriental carpets, contains everything one needs to
+conjure up the times of Nero and the Byzantine emperors. It is
+surrounded by a garden in the old Roman style, and a large conservatory
+adjoining is planted with plane-trees and cypresses. All the celebrated
+marble benches and basins, the figures of stone and bronze, the
+tiger-skins and antique vessels and garments of his pictures, may be
+found in this notable house in the midst of London. Whether he paints
+the baths, the amphitheatre, or the atrium, the scenes of his pictures
+are no other than parts of his own house which he has faithfully
+painted.
+
+[Illustration: _Dixon, photo._
+
+ POYNTER. IDLE FEARS.
+
+ (_By permission of Lord Hillingdon, the owner of the picture._)]
+
+And the figures moving in them are Englishwomen. Among all the beautiful
+things in the world there are few so beautiful as English girls. Those
+tall, slender, vigorous figures that one sees upon the beach at Brighton
+are really like Greek women, and even the garb which they wear in
+playing tennis is as free and graceful as that of the Grecian people.
+Alma Tadema was able to introduce into his works these women of lofty
+and noble figure with golden hair, these forms made for sculpture--to
+use the phrase of Winckelmann--without any kind of beautifying idealism.
+In their still-life his pictures are the fruit of enormous archæological
+learning which has become intuitive vision, but his figures are the
+result of a healthy rendering of life. In this way the unrivalled
+classical local colour of his interiors is to be explained, as well as
+the lifelike character of his figures. By his works a remarkable problem
+is solved: an intense feeling for modern reality has called the ancient
+world into being in a credible fashion, whilst it has remained
+barricaded against all others who have approached it by the road of
+idealism.
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ POYNTER. THE IDES OF MARCH.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+It is only in this method of execution that he still stands upon the
+same ground as Gérôme, with whom he shares a taste for anecdote, and a
+pedantic, neat, and correct style of painting. His ancient comedies
+played by English actors are an excellent archæological lecture; they
+rise above the older picture of antique manners by a more striking
+fidelity to nature, very different from the generalisation of the
+Classicists' ideal; yet as a painter he is wanting in every quality. His
+marble shines, his bronze gleams, and everything is harmonised with the
+green of the cypresses and delicate rose-colour of the oleander blossoms
+in a cool marble tone; but there is also something marble in the figures
+themselves. He draws and stipples, works like a copper engraver, and
+goes over his work again and again with a fine and feeble brush. His
+pictures have the effect of porcelain, his colours are hard and
+lifeless. One remembers the anecdotes, but one cannot speak of any idea
+of colour.
+
+[Illustration: _Dixon, photo._
+
+ POYNTER. A VISIT TO ÆSCULAPIUS.
+
+ (_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ ALMA TADEMA. SAPPHO.
+
+ (_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+_Albert Moore_ is to be noted as the solitary "painter" of the group: a
+very delicate artist, with a style peculiar to himself; one who is not
+so well known upon the Continent as he deserves to be. His province,
+also, is ancient Greece, yet he never attempted to reconstruct classical
+antiquity as a learned archæologist. Merely as a painter did he love to
+dream amid the imperishable world of beauty known to ancient times. His
+figures are ethereal visions, and move in dreamland. He was influenced,
+indeed, by the sculptures of the Parthenon, but the Japanese have also
+penetrated his spirit. From the Greeks he learnt the combination of
+noble lines, the charm of dignity and quietude, while the Japanese gave
+him the feeling for harmonies of colour, for soft, delicate, blended
+tones. By a capricious union of both these elements he formed his
+refined and exquisite style. The world which he has called into being is
+made up of white marble pillars; in its gardens are cool fountains and
+marble pavements; but it is also full of white birds, soft colours, and
+rosy blossoms from Kioto, and peopled with graceful and mysterious
+maidens, clothed in ideal draperies, who love rest, enjoy an eternal
+youth, and are altogether contented with themselves and with one
+another. It might be said that the old figures of Tanagra had received
+new life, were it not felt, at the same time, that these beings must
+have drunk a good deal of tea. Not that they are entirely modern, for
+their figures are more plastic and symmetrical than those of the actual
+daughters of Albion; but in all their movements they have a certain
+_chic_, and in all their shades of expression a weary modernity, through
+which they deviate from the conventional woman of Classicism. Otherwise
+the pictures of Albert Moore are indescribable. Frail, ethereal beings,
+blond as corn, lounge in æesthetically graduated grey and blue,
+salmon-coloured, or pale purple draperies upon bright-hued couches
+decorated by Japanese artists with most æsthetic materials; or are
+standing in violet robes with white mantles embroidered with gold, by a
+grey-blue sea which has a play of greenish tones where it breaks upon
+the shore. They stand out with their rosy garments from the light grey
+background and the delicate arabesques of a gleaming silvery gobelin, or
+in a graceful pose occupy themselves with their rich draperies. They do
+as little as they possibly can, but they are living and seductive, and
+the stuffs which they wear and have around them are delicately and
+charmingly painted. It is harmonies of tone and colour that exclusively
+form the subject of every work. The figures, accessories, and detail
+first take shape when the scheme of colour has been found; and then
+Albert Moore takes a delight in naming his pictures "Apricots,"
+"Oranges," "Shells," etc., according as the robes are apricot or orange
+colour or adorned with light ornaments of shell. Everything which comes
+from his hands is delightful in the charm of delicate simplicity, and
+for any one who loves painting as painting it has something soothing in
+the midst of the surrounding art, which still confuses painting with
+poetry more than is fitting.
+
+[Illustration: _Mansell Photo._
+
+ ALMA TADEMA. A VISIT.]
+
+[Illustration: _Scribner._ ALBERT MOORE.]
+
+Such a painter-poet of the specifically English type is
+_Briton-Rivière_. He is a painter of animals, and as such one of the
+greatest of the century. Lions and geese, royal tigers and golden
+eagles, stags, dogs, foxes, Highland cattle, he has painted them all,
+and with a mastery which has nothing like it except in Landseer. Amongst
+the painters of animals he stands alone through his power of conception
+and his fine poetic vein, while in all his pictures he unites the
+greatest simplicity with enormous dramatic force. Accessory work is
+everywhere kept within the narrowest limits, and everywhere the
+character of the animals is magnificently grasped. He does not alone
+paint great tragic scenes as Barye chiselled them, for he knows that
+beasts of prey are usually quiet and peaceable, and only now and then
+obey their savage nature. Moreover, he never attempts to represent
+animals performing a masquerade of humanity in their gestures and
+expression, as Landseer did, nor does he transform them into comic
+actors. He paints them as what they are, a symbol of what humanity was
+once itself, with its elemental passions and its natural virtues and
+failings. Amongst all animal painters he is almost alone in resisting
+the temptation to give the lion a consciousness of his own dignity, the
+tiger a consciousness of his own savageness, the dog a consciousness of
+his own understanding. They neither pose nor think about themselves. In
+addition to this he has a powerful and impressive method, and a deep and
+earnest scheme of colour. In the beginning of his career he learnt most
+from James Ward. Later he felt the influence of the refined, chivalrous,
+and piquant Scotchmen Orchardson and Pettie. But the point in which
+Briton-Rivière is altogether peculiar is that in which he joins issue
+with the painters influenced by Greece: he introduces his animals into a
+scene where there are men of the ancient world.
+
+Briton-Rivière is descended from a French family which found its way
+into England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and he is one
+of those painters--so frequent in English art--whose nature has
+developed early: when he was fourteen he left school, exhibited in the
+Academy when he was eighteen, painted as a pre-Raphaelite between the
+ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and graduated at Oxford at
+seven-and-twenty. In his youth he divided his time between art and
+scholarship--painting pictures and studying Greek and Latin literature.
+Thus he became a painter of animals, having also an enthusiasm for the
+Greek poets, and he has stood for a generation as an uncontested lord
+and master on his own peculiar ground. In his first important picture,
+of 1871, the comrades of Ulysses, changed into swine, troop grunting
+round the enchantress Circe. In the masterpiece of 1872 the Prophet
+Daniel stands unmoved and submissive to the will of God amid the lions
+roaring and showing their teeth, ready to spring upon him in their
+hunger, yet regarding him with a mysterious fear, spellbound by the
+power of his eye; while his great picture "Persepolis" makes the appeal
+of a page from the philosophy of history, with its lions roaming
+majestically amid the ruins of human grandeur and human civilisation,
+which are flooded with moonlight. The picture "In Manus Tuas, Domine,"
+showed St. George riding solitary through the lonely and silent recesses
+of a primitive forest upon a pale white horse. He is armed in mail and
+has a mighty sword; a deep seriousness is imprinted on his features, for
+he has gone forth to slay the dragon. In yet another picture, "An
+Old-World Wanderer," a man of the early ages has come ashore upon an
+untrodden island, and is encompassed by flocks of great white birds,
+fluttering round him with curiosity and confidence, as yet ignorant of
+the fear of human beings. The picture of 1891, "A Mighty Hunter before
+the Lord," is one of his most poetic night-pieces: Nimrod is returning
+home, and beneath the silvery silence of the moon the dead and dying
+creatures which he has laid low upon the wide Assyrian plain are tended
+and bemoaned by their mates.
+
+[Illustration: _Scribner._
+
+ ALBERT MOORE. MIDSUMMER.
+
+ (_By permission of Messrs. Cadbury, Jones & Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+[Illustration: ALBERT MOORE. COMPANIONS.
+
+ (_By permission of Messrs. Dowdeswell & Dowdeswells, the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+Between whiles he painted subjects which were not borrowed from ancient
+history, illustrating the friendship between man and dog, as Landseer
+had done before him. For instance, in "His Only Friend" there is a poor
+lad who has broken down at the last milestone before the town and is
+guarded by his dog. In "Old Playfellows," again, one of the playmates is
+a child, who is sick and leans back quietly in an armchair covered with
+cushions. His friend the great dog has one paw resting on the child's
+lap, and looks up with a pensive expression, such as Landseer alone had
+previously painted. But in this style he reached his highest point in
+"Sympathy." No work of Briton-Rivière's has become more popular than
+this picture of the little maiden who has forgotten her key and is
+sitting helpless before the house-door, consoled by the dog who has laid
+his head upon her shoulder.
+
+[Illustration: _Scribner._
+
+ ALBERT MOORE. YELLOW MARGUERITES.
+
+ (_By permission of W. Connal, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
+
+Since the days of Reynolds English art has shown a most vivid
+originality in such representations of children. English picture-books
+for children are in these days the most beautiful in the world, and the
+marvellous fairy-tales and fireside stories of _Randolph Caldecott_ and
+_Kate Greenaway_ have made their way throughout the whole Continent. How
+well these English draughtsmen know the secret of combining truth with
+the most exquisite grace! How touching are these pretty babies, how
+angelically innocent these little maidens! Frank eyes, blue as the
+flowers of the periwinkle, gaze at you with no thought of their being
+looked at in return. The naïve astonishment of the little ones, their
+frightened mien, their earnest look absently fixed upon the sky, the
+first tottering steps of a tiny child and the mobile grace of a
+schoolgirl, all are rendered in these prints with the most tender
+intimacy of feeling. And united with this there is a delicate and
+entirely modern sentiment for scenery, for the fascination of bare
+autumn landscapes robbed of their foliage, for sunbeams and the budding
+fragrance of spring. Everything is idyllic, poetic, and touched by a
+congenial breath of tender melancholy.
+
+[Illustration: _Scribner._
+
+ ALBERT MOORE. WAITING TO CROSS.
+
+ (_By permission of Lord Davey, the owner of the picture._)]
+
+And this aerial quality, this delicacy and innocent grace and
+tenderness, is not confined alone to such representations of children,
+but is peculiar to English painting. Even when perfectly ordinary
+subjects from modern life are in question the basis of this art is, as
+in the first half of the century, by no means the sense for what is
+purely pictorial, by no means that naturalistic pantheism which inspires
+the modern French, but rather a sense for what is moral or ethical. The
+painter seldom paints merely for the joy of painting, and the numberless
+technical questions which play such an important part in French art are
+here only of secondary importance. It accords with the character and
+taste of the people that their artists have rather a poetic design than
+one which is properly pictorial. The conception is sometimes allegorical
+and subtle to the most exquisite fineness of point, sometimes it is
+vitiated by sentimentality, but it is never purely naturalistic; and
+this qualified realism, this realism with a poetic strain to keep it
+ladylike, set English art, especially in the years when Bastien-Lepage
+and Roll were at their zenith, in sharp opposition to the art of France.
+In those days the life-size artisan picture, the prose of life, and the
+struggle for existence reigned almost exclusively in the Parisian Salon,
+whereas in the Royal Academy everything was quiet and cordial; an
+intimate, inoffensive, and heartfelt cheerfulness was to be found in the
+pictures upon its walls, as if none of these painters knew of the
+existence of such a place as Whitechapel. A connection between pictures
+and poems is still popular, and some touching trait, some tender
+episode, some expression of softness, is given to subjects drawn from
+the ordinary life of the people. Painters seek in every direction after
+pretty rustic scenes, moving incidents, or pure emotions. Instead of
+being harsh and rugged in their sense of truth and passion, they glide
+lightly away from anything ugly, bringing together the loveliest and
+most beautiful things in nature, and creating elegies, pastorals, and
+idylls from the passing events of life. Their method of expression is
+fastidious and finished to a nicety; their vision of life is smiling and
+kindly, though it must not be supposed that their optimism has now
+anything in common with the _genre_ picture of 1850. The _genre_
+painters from Wilkie to Collins epitomised the actual manners of the
+present in prosaic compositions. But here the most splendid poetry
+breaks out, as indeed it actually does in the midst of ordinary life. If
+in that earlier period English painting was awkward in narration,
+vulgar, and didactic, it is now tasteful, refined, beautiful, and of
+distinction. The philistinism of the pictures of those days has been
+finally stripped away, and the humorously anecdotic _genre_ entirely
+overcome. The generation of tiresome narrative artists has been followed
+by painter-poets of delicacy and exquisite tenderness of feeling.
+
+[Illustration: _Scribner._
+
+ ALBERT MOORE. READING ALOUD.
+
+ (_By permission of W. Connal, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
+
+Two masters who died young and have a peculiarly captivating
+individuality, George Mason and Fred Walker, stand at the head of this,
+the most novel phase of English painting. Alike in the misfortune of
+premature death, they are also united by a bond of sympathy in their
+taste and sentiment. If there be truth in what Théophile Gautier once
+said in a beautiful poem, "_Tout passe, l'art robuste seul a
+l'éternité_," neither of them will enter the kingdom of immortality.
+That might be applied to them which Heine said of Leopold Robert: they
+have purified the peasant in the purgatory of their art, so that nothing
+but a glorified body remains. As the pre-Raphaelites wished to give
+exquisite precision to the world of dream, Walker and Mason have taken
+this precision from the world of reality, endowing it with a refined
+subtlety which in truth it does not possess. Their pictures breathe only
+of the bloom and essence of things, and in them nature is deprived of
+her strength and marrow, and painting of her peculiar qualities, which
+are changed into coloured breath and tinted dream. They may be
+reproached with an excess of nervous sensibility, an effort after style
+by which modern truth is recast, a morbid tendency towards suave
+mysticism. Nevertheless their works are the most original products of
+English painting during the last thirty years, and by a strange union of
+realism and poetic feeling they have exercised a deeply penetrative
+influence upon Continental art.
+
+"_Æquam semper in rebus arduis servare mentem_" might be chosen as a
+motto for _George Mason's_ biography. Brought up in prosperous
+circumstances, he first became a doctor, but when he was
+seven-and-twenty he went to Italy to devote himself to painting; here he
+received the news that he was ruined. His father had lost everything,
+and he found himself entirely deprived of means, so that his life became
+a long struggle against hunger. He bound himself to dealers, and
+provided animal pieces by the dozen for the smallest sums. In a freezing
+room he sat with his pockets empty, worked until it was dark, and crept
+into bed when Rome went to feast. After two years, however, he had at
+last saved the money necessary for taking him back to England, and he
+settled with his young wife in Wetley Abbey. This little village, where
+he lived his simple life in the deepest seclusion, became for him what
+Barbizon had been for Millet. He wandered by himself amongst the fields,
+and painted the valleys of Wetley with the tenderness of feeling with
+which Corot painted the outskirts of Fontainebleau. He saw the ghostly
+mists lying upon the moors, saw the peasants returning from the plough
+and the reapers from the field, noted the children, in their life so
+closely connected with the change of nature. And yet his peasant
+pictures more resemble the works of Perugino than those of
+Bastien-Lepage. The character of their landscape is to some extent
+responsible for this. For the region he paints, in its lyrical charm,
+has kinship with the hills in the pictures of Perugino. Here there grow
+the same slender trees upon a delicate, undulating soil. But the silent,
+peaceful, and resigned human beings who move across it have also the
+tender melancholy of Umbrian Madonnas. Mason's realism is merely
+specious; it consists in the external point of costume. There are really
+no peasants of such slender growth, no English village maidens with such
+rosy faces and such coquettish Holland caps. Mason divests them of all
+the heaviness of earth, takes, as it were, only the flower-dust from
+reality. The poetic grace of Jules Breton might be recalled, were it not
+that Mason works with more refinement and subtlety, for his idealism was
+unconscious, and never resulted in an empty, professional painting of
+beauty.
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ CALDECOTT. THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+When he painted his finest pictures he suffered from very bad health,
+and his works have themselves the witchery of disease, the fascinating
+beauty of consumption. He painted with such delicacy and refinement,
+because sickness had made him weak and delicate; he divested his peasant
+men and women of everything fleshly, so that nothing but a shadow of
+them remained, a spirit vibrating in fine, elusive, dying chords. In his
+"Evening Hymn" girls are singing in the meadow; to judge from their
+dresses, they should be the daughters of the peasantry, but one fancies
+them religious enthusiasts, brought together upon this mysterious and
+sequestered corner of the earth by a melancholy world-weariness, by a
+yearning after the mystical. Fragile as glass, sensitive to the ends of
+their fingers, and, one might say, morbidly spiritual, they breathe out
+their souls in song, encompassed by the soft shadows of the evening
+twilight, and uttering all the exquisite tenderness of their subtle
+temperament in the hymn they chant. Another of his pastoral symphonies
+is "The Harvest Moon." Farm labourers are plodding homewards after their
+day's work. The moon is rising, and casts its soft, subdued light upon
+the dark hills and the slender trees, in the silvery leaves of which the
+evening wind is playing. "The Gander," "The Young Anglers," and "The
+Cast Shoe" are captivating through the same delicacy and the same mood
+of peaceful resignation. George Mason is an astonishing artist, almost
+always guilty of exaggeration, but always seductive. Life passes in his
+pictures like a beautiful summer's day, and with the accompaniment of
+soft music. A peaceful, delicate feeling, something mystical,
+bitter-sweet, and suffering, lives beneath the light and tender veil of
+his pictures. They affect the nerves like a harmonica, and lull one with
+low and softly veiled harmonies. Many of the melancholy works of Israels
+have a similar effect, only Israels is less refined, has less of
+distinction and--more of truth.
+
+[Illustration: MASON. THE END OF THE DAY.
+
+ (_By gracious permission of H.M. Queen Victoria, the owner of the
+ picture._)]
+
+This suavity of feeling is characteristic in an almost higher degree of
+_Fred Walker_, a sensitive artist never satisfied with himself. Every
+one of his pictures gives the impression of deep and quiet reverie;
+everywhere a kind of mood, like that in a fairy tale, colours the
+ordinary events of life in his works, an effect produced by his refined
+composition of forms and colours. In his classically simple art Mason
+was influenced by the Italians, and especially the Umbrians. Walker drew
+a similar inspiration from the works of Millet. Both the Englishman and
+the Frenchman died in the same year, the former on 20th January 1875, in
+Barbizon, the latter on 5th June, in Scotland; and yet in a certain
+sense they stand at the very opposite poles of art. Walker is graceful,
+delicate, and tender; Millet forceful, healthy, and powerful. "To draw
+sublimity from what is trivial" was the aim of both, and they both
+reached it by the same path. All their predecessors had held truth as
+the foe of beauty, and had qualified shepherds and shepherdesses,
+ploughmen and labourers, for artistic treatment by forcing upon them the
+smiling grace and the strained humour of _genre_ painting. Millet and
+Fred Walker broke with the frivolity of this elder school of painting,
+which had seen matter for jesting, and only that, in the life of the
+rustic; they asserted that in the life of the toiler nothing was more
+deserving of artistic representation than his toil. They always began by
+reproducing life as they saw it, and by disdaining, in their effort
+after truth, all artificial embellishment; they came to recognise, both
+of them at the same time, a dignity in the human frame, and grandiose
+forms and classic lines in human movement, which no one had discovered
+before. With the most pious reverence for the exact facts of life, there
+was united that greatness of conception which is known as style.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ WALKER. THE BATHERS.
+
+ (_By permission of Messrs. Thomas Agnew & Sons, the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+Fred Walker, the Tennyson of painting, was born in London in 1840, and
+had scarcely left school before the galleries of ancient art in the
+British Museum became his favourite place of resort. Drawings for
+wood-engraving were his first works, and with Millet in France he has
+the chief merit of having put fresh life into the traditional style of
+English wood engraving, so that he is honoured by the young school of
+wood-engravers as their lord and master. His first, and as yet
+unimportant, drawings appeared in 1860 in a periodical called _Once a
+Week_, for which Leech, Millais, and others also made drawings. Shortly
+after this _début_ he was introduced to Thackeray, then the editor of
+_Cornhill_, and he undertook the illustrations with Millais. In these
+plates he is already seen in his charm, grace, and simplicity. His
+favourite season is the tender spring, when the earth is clothed with
+young verdure, and the sunlight glances over the naked branches, and
+the children pluck the first flowers which have shot up beneath their
+covering of snow.
+
+His pictures give pleasure by virtue of the same qualities--delicacy of
+drawing, bloom of colouring, and a grace which is not affected in spite
+of its Grecian rhythm.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ BOUGHTON. GREEN LEAVES AMONG THE SERE.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+Walker was the first to introduce that delicate rosy red which has since
+been popular in English painting. His method of vision is as widely
+removed from that of Manet as from Couture's brown sauce. The surface of
+every one of his pictures resembles a rare jewel in its delicate finish:
+it is soft, and gives the sense of colour and of refined and soothing
+harmony. His first important work, "Bathers," was exhibited in 1867 at
+the Royal Academy, where works of his appeared regularly during the next
+five years. About a score of young people are standing on the verge of a
+deep and quiet English river, and are just about to refresh themselves
+in the tide after a hot August day. Some, indeed, are already in the
+water, while others are sitting upon the grass and others undressing.
+The frieze of the Parthenon is recalled, so plastic is the grace of
+these young frames, and the style and repose of the treatment of lines,
+which are such as may only be found in Puvis de Chavannes. In his next
+picture, "The Vagrants," he represented a group of gipsies camping round
+a fire in the midst of an English landscape. A mother is nursing her
+child, while to the left a woman is standing plunged in thought, and to
+the right a lad is throwing wood upon the faintly blazing fire. Here,
+too, the figures are all drawn severely after nature and yet have the
+air of Greek statues. There is no modern artist who has united in so
+unforced a manner actuality and fidelity to nature with "the noble
+simplicity and quiet grandeur" of the antique. In a succeeding picture
+of 1870, "The Plough," a labourer is striding over the ground behind the
+plough. The long day is approaching its end, and the moon stands silvery
+in the sky. Far into the distance the field stretches away, and the
+heavy tread of the horses mingles in the stillness of evening with the
+murmur of the stream which flows round the grassy ridge, making its soft
+complaint. "Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the
+evening" is its thoroughly English motto. The same still mournfulness of
+sunset he painted in that work of marvellous tenderness, "The Old Gate."
+The peace of dusk is resting upon a soft and gentle landscape. A lady
+who is the owner of a country mansion and is dressed like a widow has
+just stepped out from the garden gate, accompanied by her maid, who is
+in the act of shutting it; children are playing on the steps, and a
+couple of labourers are going past in front and look towards the lady of
+the house. It is nothing except the meeting of certain persons, a scene
+such as takes place every day, and yet even here there is a subtlety and
+tenderness which raise the event from the prose of ordinary life into a
+mysterious world of poetry.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ BOUGHTON. SNOW IN SPRING.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+In his later period he deviated more and more towards a fragrant
+lyricism. In his great picture of 1872, "The Harbour of Refuge," the
+background is formed by one of those peaceful buildings where the aged
+poor pass the remainder of their days in meditative rest. The sun is
+sinking, and there is a rising moon. The red-tiled roof stands out clear
+against the quiet evening sky, while upon the terrace in front, over
+which the tremulous yellow rays of the setting sun are shed, an old
+woman with a bowed figure is walking, guided by a graceful girl who
+steps lightly forward. It is the old contrast between day and night,
+youth and age, strength and decay. Yet in Walker there is no opposition
+after all. For as light mingles with the shadows in the twilight, this
+young and vigorous woman who paces in the evening, holding the arm of
+the aged in mysterious silence, has at the moment no sense of her youth,
+but is rather filled with that melancholy thought underlying Goethe's
+"_Warte nur balde_," "Wait awhile and thou shalt rest too." Her eyes
+have a strange gaze, as though she were looking into vacancy in mere
+absence of mind. And upon the other side of the picture this theme of
+the transient life of humanity is still further developed. Upon a bench
+in the midst of a verdant lawn covered with daisies a group of old men
+are sitting meditatively near a hedge of hawthorn luxuriant in blossom.
+Above the bench there stands an old statue casting a clearly defined
+shadow upon the gravel path, as if to point to the contrast between
+imperishable stone and the unstable race of men, fading away like the
+autumn leaves. Well in the foreground a labourer is mowing down the
+tender spring grass with a scythe--a strange, wild, and rugged figure, a
+reaper whose name is Death.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ BOUGHTON. A BREATH OF WIND.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+It was not long before evening drew on for the painter, and Death, the
+mighty reaper, laid him low.
+
+Of a nervous and sensitive temperament, Walker had one of those natures
+which find their way with difficulty through this rude world of fact.
+Those little things which he had the art of painting so beautifully, and
+which occupy such an important place in his work, had, in another sense,
+more influence upon his life than ought to have been the case. While
+Mason faced all unpleasantnesses with stoical indifference, Walker
+allowed himself to be disturbed and hindered in his work by every
+failure and every sharp wind of criticism. In addition to that he was,
+like Mason, a victim of consumption. A residence in Algiers merely
+banished the insidious disease for a short time. Amongst the last works,
+which he exhibited in 1875, a considerable stir was made by a drawing
+called "The Unknown Land": a vessel with naked men is drawing near the
+shores of a wide and peaceful island bathed in a magical light. Soon
+afterwards Walker had himself departed to that unknown land: he died in
+Scotland when he was five-and-thirty. His body was brought to the little
+churchyard at Cookham on the banks of the Thames. In this village Fred
+Walker is buried amid the fair river landscape which he so loved and so
+often painted.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ BOUGHTON. THE BEARERS OF THE BURDEN.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+After the pre-Raphaelite revolution, the foundation of the school of
+Walker indicated the last stage of English art. His influence was far
+greater than might be supposed from the small number of his works, and
+fifty per cent. of the English pictures in every exhibition would
+perhaps never have been painted if he had not been born. A national
+element long renounced, that old English sentiment which once inspired
+the landscapes of Gainsborough and the scenes of Morland, and was lost
+in the hands of Wilkie and the _genre_ painters, lives once more in Fred
+Walker. He adapted it to the age by adding something of Tennyson's
+passion for nature. There is a touch of symbolism in that old gate which
+he painted in the beautiful picture of 1870. He and Mason opened it so
+that English art might pass into this new domain, where musical
+sentiment is everything, where one is buried in sweet reveries at the
+sight of a flock of geese driven by a young girl, or a labourer stepping
+behind his plough, or a child playing, free from care, with pebbles at
+the water's edge. Their disciples are perhaps healthier, or, should one
+say, "less refined,"--in other words, not quite so sensitive and
+hyper-æsthetic as those who opened the old gate. They seem physically
+more robust, and can better face the sharp air of reality. They no
+longer dissolve painting altogether into music and poetry; they live
+more in the world at every hour, not merely when the sun is setting, but
+also when the prosaic daylight exposes objects in their material
+heaviness. But the tender ground-tone, the effort to seize nature in
+soft phases, is the same in all. Like bees, they suck from reality only
+its sweets. The earnest, tender, and deeply heartfelt art of Walker has
+influenced them all.
+
+Evening when work is over, the end of summer, twilight, autumn, the pale
+and golden sky, and the dead leaves are the things which have probably
+made the most profound impression on the English spirit. The hour when
+toil is laid aside, and rest begins and people seek their homes, and the
+season when fires are first lighted are the hour and the season most
+beloved by this people, which, with all its rude energy, is yet so
+tender and full of feeling. Repose to the point of enervation and the
+stage where it passes into gentle melancholy is the theme of their
+pictures--this, and not toil.
+
+How many have been painted in the last forty years in which people are
+returning from their work of an evening across the country! The people
+in the big towns look upon the country with the eyes of a lover,
+especially those parts of it which lie near the town; not the scenes
+painted by Raffaelli, but the parks and public gardens. Soft, undulating
+valleys and gently swelling hills are spread around, the flowers are in
+bloom, and the leaves glance in the sunshine. And over this country,
+with its trim gravel paths and its green, luxuriant lawns, there comes a
+well-to-do people. Even the labourers seem in good case as they go home
+across the flowery meadows.
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ J. R. REID. TOIL AND PLEASURE.]
+
+_George H. Boughton_ was one of the most graceful and refined amongst
+Walker's followers. By birth and descent a countryman of Crome and
+Cotman, he passed his youth in America, worked several years in Paris
+from 1853, and in 1863 settled in London, where he was exceedingly
+active as a draughtsman, a writer, and a painter. His charming
+illustrations for _Harper's Magazine_, where he also published his
+delicate story _The Return of the Mayflower_, are well known. As a
+painter, too, his brush was only occupied by pleasant things, whether
+belonging to the past or the present. There is something in him both of
+the delicacy of Gainsborough and of the poetry of Memlinc. He delights
+in the murmur of brooks and the rustle of leaves, in fresh children and
+pretty young women in æesthetically fantastic costume; he loves
+everything delicate, quiet, and fragrant. And for this reason he also
+takes delight in old legends entwined with blossoms, and attains a most
+harmonious effect when he places shepherds and kings' daughters of
+story, and steel-clad knights and squires in his charming and entirely
+modern landscapes. Almost always it is autumn, winter, or at most the
+early spring in his pictures. The boughs of the trees are generally
+bare, though sometimes a tender pointed yellowish verdure is budding
+upon them. At times the mist of November hovers over the country like a
+delicate veil; at times the snowflakes fall softly, or the October sun
+gleams through the leafless branches.
+
+[Illustration: FRANK HOLL.]
+
+Moreover, a feeling for the articulation of lines, for a balance of
+composition, unforced, and yet giving a character of distinction, is
+peculiar to him in a high degree. In 1877 he had in the Royal Academy
+the charming picture "A Breath of Wind." Amid a soft landscape with
+slender trees move the thoroughly Grecian figures of the shapely English
+peasants, whilst the tender evening light is shed over the gently rising
+hills. His picture of 1878 he named "Green Leaves among the Sere": a
+group of children, in the midst of whom the young mother herself looks
+like a child, are seated amid an autumn landscape, where the leaves
+fall, and the sky is shrouded in wintry grey. In the picture "Snow in
+Spring" may be seen a party of charming girls--little modern Tanagra
+figures--whom the sun has tempted into the air to search for the
+earliest woodland snowdrops under the guidance of a damsel still in her
+'teens. Having just reached a secret corner of the wood, they are
+standing with their flowers in their hands surrounded by tremulous
+boughs, when a sudden snowstorm overtakes them. Thick white flakes
+alight upon the slender boughs, and combine with the light green leaves
+and pale reddish dresses of the children in making a delicate harmony of
+colour. Among his legendary pictures the poetic "Love Conquers all
+Things," in particular is known in Germany: a wild shepherd's daughter
+sits near her flock, and the son of a king gazes into her eyes lost in
+dream.
+
+[Illustration: HOLL. "THE LORD GAVE, THE LORD HATH TAKEN AWAY; BLESSED
+ BE THE NAME OF THE LORD."
+
+ (_By permission of E. C. Pawle, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
+
+Boughton is not the only painter of budding girlhood. All English
+literature has a tender feminine trait. Tennyson is the poet most widely
+read, and he has won all hearts chiefly through his portraits of women:
+Adeline, Eleänore, Lilian, and the May Queen--that delightful gallery of
+pure and noble figures. In English painting, too, it is seldom men who
+are represented, but more frequently women and children, especially
+little maidens in their fresh pure witchery.
+
+Belonging still to the older period there is _Philip H. Calderon_, an
+exceedingly fertile although lukewarm and academical artist, in whose
+blood is a good deal of effeminate Classicism. When his name appears in
+a catalogue it means that the spectator will be led into an artificial
+region peopled with pretty girls--beings who are neither sad nor gay,
+and who belong neither to the present nor to ancient times, to no age in
+particular and to no clime. Whenever such ethereal girlish figures wear
+the costume of the Directoire period, _Marcus Stone_ is their father. He
+is likewise one of the older men whose first appearance was made before
+the time of Walker. His young ladies part broken-hearted from a beloved
+suitor, turned away by their father, and save the honour of their
+family by giving their hand to a wealthy but unloved aspirant, or else
+they are solitary and lost in tender reveries. In his earliest period
+Marcus Stone had a preference for interiors; rich Directoire furniture
+and objects of art indicate with exactness the year in which the
+narrative takes place. Later, he took a delight in placing his _rococo_
+ladies and gentlemen in the open air, upon the terraces of old gardens
+or in sheltered alleys. All his pictures are pretty, the faces, the
+figures, and the accessories; in relation to them one may use the
+adjective "pretty" in its positive, comparative, or superlative degree.
+In England Marcus Stone is the favourite painter of "sweethearts," and
+it cannot be easy to go so near the boundaries of candied _genre_
+painting and yet always to preserve a certain _noblesse_.
+
+[Illustration: _L'Art._
+
+ HOLL. LEAVING HOME.]
+
+Amongst later artists _G. D. Leslie_, the son of Charles Leslie, has
+specially the secret of interpreting innocent feminine beauty, that
+somewhat predetermined but charming grace derived from Gainsborough and
+the eighteenth century. A young lady who has lately been married is
+paying a visit to her earlier school friends, and is gazed upon as
+though she were an angel by these charming girls. Or his pretty maidens
+have ensconced themselves beneath the trees, or stand on the shore
+watching a boat at sunset, or amuse themselves from a bridge in a park
+by throwing flowers into the water and looking dreamily after them as
+they float away. Leslie's pictures, too, are very pretty and poetic, and
+have much silk in them and much sun, while the soft pale method of
+painting, so highly æsthetic in its delicate attenuation of colour,
+corresponds with the delicacy of their purport.
+
+[Illustration: HOLL. ORDERED TO THE FRONT.]
+
+_P. G. Morris_, not less delicate in feeling and execution, became
+specially known by a "Communion in Dieppe." Directly facing the
+spectator a train of pretty communicants move upon the seashore,
+assuming an air of dignified superiority, like young ladies from
+Brighton or Folkestone. A bluish light plays over the white dresses of
+the girls and over the blue jackets of the sailors lounging about the
+quay; it fills the pale blue sky with a misty vibration and glances
+sportively upon the green waves of the sea. "The Reaper and the Flowers"
+was a thoroughly English picture, a graceful allegory after the fashion
+of Fred Walker. On their way from school a party of children meet at the
+verge of a meadow an old peasant going home from his day's work with a
+scythe upon his shoulder. In the dancing step of the little ones may be
+seen the influence of Greek statues; they float along as if borne by the
+zephyr, with a rhythmical motion which is seldom found in real
+school-children. But the old peasant coming towards them is intended to
+recall the contrast between youth and age as in Fred Walker's "Harbour
+of Refuge"; while the scythe glittering in the last rays of the setting
+sun signifies the scythe of Fate, the scythe of death which does not
+even spare the child.
+
+[Illustration: OULESS. LORD KELVIN.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+And thus the limits of English painting are defined. It always reveals a
+certain conflict between fact and poetry, reverie and life. For whenever
+the scene does not admit of a directly ethical interpretation, refuge is
+invariably taken in lyricism. The wide field which lies between, where
+powerful works are nourished, works which have their roots in reality,
+and derive their life from it alone, has not been definitely conquered
+by English art. England is the greatest producer and consumer in the
+world, and her people press the marrow out of things as no other have
+ever done: and yet this land of industry knows nothing of pictures in
+which work is being accomplished; this country, which is a network of
+railway lines, has never seen a railway painted. Even horses are less
+and less frequently represented in English art, and sport finds no
+expression there whatever. Much as the Englishman loves it from a sense
+of its wholesomeness, he does not consider it sufficiently æsthetic to
+be painted, a matter upon which Wilkie Collins enlarges in an amusing
+way in his book _Man and Wife_.
+
+And in English pictures there are no poor, or, at any rate, none who are
+wretched in the extreme. For although the Chelsea Pensioners were a
+favoured theme in painting, there were none of them miserable and
+heavy-laden; they were rather types of the happy poor who were carefully
+tended. If English painters are otherwise induced to represent the poor,
+they depict a room kept in exemplary order, and endeavour to display
+some touching or admirable trait in honest and admirable people. In
+fact, people seem to be good and honourable wherever they are found.
+Everywhere there is content and humility, even in misfortune. Even where
+actual need is represented, it is only done in the effort to give
+expression to what is moving in certain dispensations of fate, and to
+create a lofty and conciliating effect by the contrast between
+misfortune and man's noble trust in God.
+
+_John R. Reid_, a Scotchman by birth, but residing in London, has
+treated scenes from life upon the seacoast in this manner. How different
+his works are from the tragedies of Joseph Israels, or the grim
+naturalism of Michael Ancher! He occupies himself only with the bright
+side of life with its colour and sunshine, not with the dark side with
+its toils. He paints the inhabitants of the country in their Sunday
+best, as they sit telling stories, or as they go a-hunting, or regale
+themselves in the garden of an inn. The old rustics who sit happy with
+their pipes and beer in his "Cricket Match" are typical of everything
+that he has painted.
+
+And even when, once in a way, a more gloomy trait appears in his
+pictures, it is there only that the light may shine the more brightly.
+The poor old flute-player who sits homeless upon a bench near the house
+is placed there merely to show how well off are the children who are
+hurrying merrily home after school. His picture of 1890, indeed, treated
+a scene of shipwreck, but a passage from a poet stood beneath; there was
+not a lost sailor to be seen, and all the tenderness of the artist is
+devoted to the pretty children and the young women gazing with anxiety
+and compassion across the sea.
+
+_Frank Holl_ was in the habit of giving his pictures a more lachrymose
+touch, together with a more sombre and ascetic harmony of colour. He
+borrowed his subjects from the life of the humble classes, always
+searching, moreover, for melancholy features; he took delight in
+representing human virtue in misfortune, and for the sake of greater
+effect he frequently chose a verse from the Bible as the title. Thus the
+work with which he first won the English public was a picture exhibited
+in 1869: "The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name
+of the Lord." A family of five brothers and sisters, who have just lost
+their mother, are assembled round the breakfast-table in a poorly
+furnished room. One sister is crying, another is sadly looking straight
+before her, whilst a third is praying with folded hands. The younger
+brother, a sailor, has just reached home from a voyage, to close his
+dying mother's eyes, and the eldest of all, a young and earnest curate,
+is endeavouring to console his brothers and sisters with the words of
+Job.
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ SANT. THE MUSIC LESSON.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+The next picture, exhibited in 1871, he called "No Tidings from the
+Sea," and represented in it a fisherman's family--grandmother, mother,
+and child--who in a cheerless room are anxiously expecting the return of
+a sailor. "Leaving Home" showed four people sitting on a bench outside a
+waiting-room at a railway station. To awaken the spectator's pity "Third
+Class" is written in large letters upon the window just above their
+heads. The principal figure is a lady dressed in black, who is counting,
+in a somewhat obtrusive manner, the little money which she still has
+left.
+
+In the picture "Necessity knows no Law" a poor woman with a child in her
+arms has entered a pawnshop to borrow money on her wedding-ring; in
+another, women of the poorer class are to be seen walking along with
+their soldier sons and husbands, who have been called out on active
+service. One of them clasps tightly to her breast her little child, the
+only one still remaining to her in life, whilst an aged widow presses
+the hand of her son with the sad presentiment that, even if he comes
+back to her, she will probably not have long to live after his return.
+Not only did Frank Holl paint stories for his countrymen, but he also
+painted them big in majuscule characters which were legible without
+spectacles, and he partially owed his splendid successes to this cheap
+sentimentality.
+
+Almost everywhere the interest of subject still plays the first part,
+and this slightly lachrymose trait bordering on _genre_, this lyrically
+tender or allegorically subtle element, which runs through English
+figure pictures, would easily degenerate into vaporous enervation in
+another country. In England portrait painting, which now, as in the days
+of Reynolds, is the greatest title to honour possessed by English art,
+invariably maintains its union with direct reality. By acknowledgment
+portrait painting in the present day is exceedingly earnest: it admits
+of no decorative luxuriousness, no sport with hangings and draperies, no
+pose; and English likenesses have this severe actuality in the highest
+degree. Stiff-necked obstinacy, sanguine resolution, and muscular force
+of will are often spoken of as an Englishman's national characteristics,
+and a trace of these qualities is also betrayed in English portrait
+painting. The self-reliance of the English is far too great to suffer or
+demand any servile habit of flattery: everything is free from pose,
+plain and simple. Let the subject be the weather-beaten figure of an old
+sailor or the dazzling freshness of English youth, there is a remarkable
+energy and force of life in all their works, even in the pictures of
+children with their broad open brow, finely chiselled nose, and assured
+and penetrative glance. And as portrait painting in England, to its own
+advantage and the benefit of all art, has never been considered as an
+isolated province, such pictures may be specified among the works of the
+most frigid academician as well as amongst those of the most vigorous
+naturalist. Frank Holl, who had such a Düsseldorfian tinge in his more
+elaborate pictures, showed at the close of his life, in his likenesses
+of the engraver Samuel Cousins, Lord Dufferin, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain,
+Lord Wolseley, Mr. Gladstone, the Duke of Cleveland, Sir George
+Trevelyan, and Lord Spencer, a simple virility altogether wanting in his
+earlier works. They had a trenchant characterisation and an unforced
+pose which were striking even in England. It is scarcely possible to
+exhibit people more naturally, or more completely to banish from their
+expression that concentrated air of attentiveness which suggests
+photography and so easily intrudes into a portrait. Even Leighton, so
+devoid of temperament, so entirely devoted to the measured art of the
+ancients, became at once nervous and almost brutal in his power when he
+painted a portrait in place of ideal Grecian figures. His vivid and
+forcible portrait of Sir Richard Burton, the celebrated African
+traveller, would do honour to the greatest portrait painter of the
+Continent.
+
+[Illustration: FURSE. FRONTISPIECE TO "STORIES AND INTERLUDES."]
+
+Amongst portrait painters by profession _Walter Ouless_ will probably
+merit the place of honour immediately after Watts as an impressive
+exponent of character. He has assimilated much from his master
+Millais--not merely the heaviness of colour, which often has a
+disturbing effect in the latter, but also Millais' powerful flight of
+style, always so free from false rhetoric. The chemical expert Pochin,
+as Ouless painted him in 1865, does not pose in the picture nor allow
+himself to be disturbed in his researches. It is a thoroughly
+contemporary portrait, one of those brilliant successes which later
+occurred in France also. The Recorder of London, Mr. Russell Gurney, he
+likewise painted in his professional character and in his robes of
+office. In its inflexible graveness and earnest dignity the likeness is
+almost more than the portrait of an individual; it seems the embodiment
+of the proud English Bench resting upon the most ancient traditions. His
+portrait of Cardinal Manning had the same convincing power of
+observation, the same large and sure technique. The soft light plays
+upon the ermine and the red stole, and falls full upon the fine,
+austere, and noble face.
+
+Besides Ouless mention may be made from among the great number of
+portrait painters of _J. J. Shannon_, with his powerful and firmly
+painted likenesses; of _James Sant_, with his sincere and energetic
+portraits of women; of _Mouat Loudan_, with his pretty pictures of
+children, and of the many-sided _Charles W. Furse_. Hubert Herkomer was
+the most celebrated in Germany, and is probably the most skilful of the
+young men whom _The Graphic_ brought into eminence in the seventies.
+
+[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
+
+ HERKOMER. JOHN RUSKIN.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ HERKOMER. CHARTERHOUSE CHAPEL.]
+
+The career of _Hubert Herkomer_ is amongst those adventurous ones which
+become less and less frequent in the nineteenth century; there are not
+many who have risen so rapidly to fame and fortune from such modest
+circumstances. His father was a carver of sacred images in the little
+Bavarian village of Waal, where Hubert was born in 1849. In 1851 the
+enterprising Bavarian tried his fortune in the New World. But there he
+did not succeed in making progress, and in 1857 the family appeared in
+England, at Southampton. Here he fought his way honestly at the bench
+where he carved, and as a journeyman worker, whilst his wife gave
+lessons in music. A commission to carve Peter Vischer's four evangelists
+in wood brought him with his son to Munich, where they occupied room in
+the back buildings of a master-carpenter's house, in which they slept,
+cooked, and worked. In the preparatory class of the Munich Academy the
+younger Herkomer received his first teaching, and began to draw from the
+nude, the antique serving as model. At a frame-maker's in Southampton he
+gave his first exhibition, and drew illustrations for a comic paper.
+With the few pence which he saved from these earnings he went to London,
+where he lived from hand to mouth with a companion as poor as himself.
+He cooked, and his friend scoured the pans; meanwhile he worked as a
+mason on the frieze of the South Kensington Museum, and hired himself
+out for the evenings as a zither-player. Then _The Graphic_ became his
+salvation, and after his drawings had made him known he soon had success
+with his paintings. "After the Toil of the Day," a picture which he
+exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1873--a thoughtful scene from the
+village life of Bavaria, carried out after the manner of Fred
+Walker--found a purchaser immediately. He was then able to make a home
+for his parents in the village of Bushey, which he afterwards glorified
+in the picture "Our Village," and he began his masterpiece "The Last
+Muster," which obtained in 1878 the great medal at the World Exhibition
+in Paris. Since then he found the eyes of the English public fixed upon
+him. There followed at first a series of pictures in which he proceeded
+upon the lines of Fred Walker's poetic realism: "Eventide," a scene in
+the Westminster Union; "The Gloom of Idwal," a romantic mountain
+picture from North Wales; "God's Shrine," a lonely Bavarian hillside
+path, with peasants praying at a shrine; "Der Bittgang," a group of
+country people praying for harvest; "Contrasts," a picture of English
+ladies surrounded by school-children in the Bavarian mountains. At the
+same time he became celebrated as a portrait painter, his first
+successes in this field being the likenesses of Wagner and Tennyson,
+Archibald Forbes, his own father, John Ruskin, Stanley, and the
+conductor Hans Richter. And he reached the summit of his international
+fame when his portrait of Miss Grant, "The Lady in White," appeared in
+1886; all Europe spoke of it at the time, and it called forth entire
+bundles of poems, anecdotes, biographies, and romances. From that time
+he advanced in his career with rapid strides.
+
+[Illustration: _Art Annual._
+
+ HERKOMER. PORTRAIT OF HIS FATHER.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+The University of Oxford appointed him Professor of the Fine Arts. He
+opened a School of Art, and had etchings, copper engravings, and
+engravings in mezzotint produced by his pupils under his guidance. He
+wrote articles in the London papers upon social questions, and political
+economy, and all manner of subjects, an article signed with Herkomer's
+name being always capable of creating interest. He has his own theatre,
+and produces in it operas of which he writes the text and the music, and
+manages the rehearsals and the scenery, besides playing the leading
+parts.
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ HERKOMER. HARD TIMES.
+
+ (_By permission of the Manchester Art Gallery, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+Yet it is just his portraits of women, the foundations of his fame,
+which do not seem in general to justify entirely the painter's great
+reputation. Miss Grant was certainly a captivating woman, and she broke
+men's hearts wherever she made her appearance. People gazed again and
+again into the brilliant brown eyes with which she looked so composedly
+before her; they were overwhelmed by her austere and lofty virginal
+beauty. "The Lady in Black (An American Lady)" made yet a more piquant
+and spiritualised effect. There was the unopened bud, and here the
+woman who has had experience of the delights and disappointments of
+life. There was unapproachable pride, and here a trait of distinction
+and of suffering, an almost weary carriage of the body. There would
+certainly be an interesting gallery of beauty if Herkomer unite these
+"types of women" in a series. But even in the first picture how much of
+all the admiration excited was due to the painter and how much to the
+model? The portrait of Miss Grant was such a success primarily because
+Miss Grant herself was so beautiful. The arrangement of white against
+white was nothing new: Whistler, a far greater artist, had already
+painted a "White Girl" in 1863, and it was a much greater work of art,
+though, on account of the attractiveness of the model being less
+powerful, it triumphed only in the narrower circle of artists.
+Bastien-Lepage, who set himself the same problem in his "Sara
+Bernhardt," had also run through the scale of white with greater
+sureness. And Herkomer's later pictures of women--"The Lady in Yellow,"
+Lady Helen Fergusson, and others--are even less alluring, considered as
+works of art. The reserve and evenness of the execution give his
+portraits a somewhat clotted and stiff appearance. Good modelling and
+exceedingly vigorous drawing may perhaps ensure great correctness in
+the counterfeit of the originals, but the life of the picture vanishes
+beneath the greasy technique, the soapy painting through which materials
+of drapery and flesh-tints assume quite the same values. There is
+nothing in it of the transparency, the rosy delicacy, freshness, and
+flower-like bloom of Gainsborough's women and girls. Herkomer appears in
+these pictures as a salon painter in whom a tame but tastefully
+cultivated temperament is expressed with charm. Even his landscapes with
+their trim peasants' cottages and their soft moods of sunset have not
+enriched with new notes the scale executed by Walker.
+
+All the more astonishing is the earnest certainty of touch and the
+robust energy which are visible in his other works. His portraits of
+men, especially the one of his father, that kingly old man with the
+long, white beard and the furrowed brow, take their place beside the
+best productions of English portraiture, which are chiselled, as it
+were, in stone. In "The Last Muster" he showed that it is possible to be
+simple and yet strike a profound note and even attain greatness. For
+there is something great in these old warriors, who at the end of their
+days are praying, having never troubled themselves over prayer during
+all their lives, who have travelled so far and staked their lives dozens
+of times, and are now drawing their last breath softly upon the seats of
+a church. Even his more recent groups--"The Assemblage of the Curators
+of the Charterhouse" and "The Session of the Magistrates of
+Landsberg"--are magnificent examples of realistic art, full of imposing
+strength and soundness. In the representation of these citizens the
+genius of the master who in his "Chelsea Pensioners" created one of the
+"Doelen pieces" of the nineteenth century, revealed itself afresh in all
+its greatness.
+
+Beside portrait painting the painting of landscape stands now as ever in
+full bloom amongst the English; not that the artists of to-day are more
+consistently faithful to truth than their predecessors, or that they
+seem more modern in the study of light. In the province of landscape as
+in that of figure painting, far more weight is laid upon subject than on
+the moods of atmosphere. If one compares the modern English painters
+with Crome and Constable, one finds them wanting in boldness and
+creative force; and placed beside Monet, they seem to be diffident
+altogether. But a touching reverence for nature gives almost all their
+pictures a singularly chaste and fragrant charm.
+
+[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
+
+ HERKOMER. THE LAST MUSTER.
+
+ (_By permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ HERKOMER. FOUND.]
+
+Of course, all the influences which have affected English art in other
+respects are likewise reflected in landscape painting. The epoch-making
+activity of the pre-Raphaelites, the passionate earnestness of Ruskin's
+love for nature, as well as the influence of foreign art, have all left
+their traces. In his own manner Constable had spoken the last word. The
+principal thing in him, as in Cox, was the study of atmospheric effects
+and of the dramatic life of air. They neither of them troubled
+themselves about local colour, but sought to render the tones which are
+formed under atmospheric and meteorological influences; they altogether
+sacrificed the completion of the details of subject to seizing the
+momentary impression. In Turner, generally speaking, it was only the air
+that lived. Trees and buildings, rocks and water, are merely
+_repoussoirs_ for the atmosphere; they are exclusively ordained to lead
+the eye through the mysterious depths of light and shadow. The
+intangible absorbed what could be touched and handled. As a natural
+reaction there came this pre-Raphaelite landscape, and by a curious
+irony of chance the writer who had done most for Turner's fame was also
+he who first welcomed this pre-Raphaelite landscape school. Everything
+which the old school had neglected now became the essential object of
+painting. The landscape painters fell in love with the earth, with the
+woods and the fields; and the more autumn resolved the wide green
+harmony of nature into a sport of colours multiplied a thousand times,
+the more did they love it. Thousands of things were there to be seen.
+First, how the foliage turned yellow and red and brown, and then how it
+fell away: how it was scattered upon a windy day, whirling in a yellow
+drift of leaves; how in still weather leaf after leaf lightly rustled to
+the ground from between the wavering brown boughs. And then when the
+foliage fell from the trees and bushes the most inviolate secrets of
+summer came to light; there lay around quantities of bright seeds and
+berries rich in colour, brown nuts, smooth acorns, black and glossy
+sloes, and scarlet haws. In the leafless beeches there clustered pointed
+beechmast, the mugwort bent beneath its heavy red bunches, late
+blackberries lay black and brown amid the damp foliage upon the road,
+bilberries grew amid the heather, and wild raspberries bore their dull
+red fruit once again. The dying ferns took a hundred colours; the moss
+shot up like the ears of a miniature cornfield. Eager as children the
+landscape painters roamed here and there across the woodland, to
+discover its treasures and its curiosities. They understood how to paint
+a bundle of hay with such exactness that a botanist could decide upon
+the species of every blade. One of them lived for three months under
+canvas, so as thoroughly to know a landscape of heath. Confused through
+detail, they lost their view of the whole, and only made a return to
+modernity when they came to study the Parisian landscape painters. Thus
+English art in this matter made a curious circuit, giving and taking.
+First, the English fertilised French art; but at the time when French
+artists stood under the influence of the English, the latter swerved in
+the opposite direction, until they ultimately received from France the
+impulse which led them back into the old way.
+
+In accordance with these different influences, several currents which
+cross and mingle with each other are to be found flowing side by side in
+English landscape painting: upon one side a spirit of prosaic
+reasonableness, a striving after clearness and precision, which does not
+know how to sacrifice detail, and is therefore wanting in pictorial
+totality of effect; on the other side an artistic pantheism which rises
+at times to high lyrical poetry in spite of many dissonances.
+
+The pictures of _Cecil Lawson_ lead to the point where the
+pre-Raphaelites begin. The elder painters, with their powerful treatment
+and the freedom and boldness of their execution, still keep altogether
+on the lines of Constable, whereas in later painters, with their minute
+elaboration of all particularities, the influence of the pre-Raphaelites
+becomes more and more apparent.
+
+Where Cecil Lawson ended, _James Clarke Hook_ began, the great
+master-spirit who opened the eyes of the world fifty years ago to the
+depth of colouring and the enchanting life of nature, even in its
+individual details. His pictures, especially those sunsets which he
+paints with such delight, have something devout and religious in them;
+they have the effect of a prayer or a hymn, and often possess a
+solemnity which is entirely biblical, in spite of their brusque, pungent
+colours. In his later period he principally devoted himself to
+sea-pieces, and in doing so receded from the pre-Raphaelite painting of
+detail, which is characteristic of his youthful period. His pictures
+give one the breath of the sea, and his sailors are old sea-wolves. All
+that remains from his pre-Raphaelite period is that, as a rule, they
+carry a certain burden of ideas.
+
+_Vicat Cole_, likewise one of the older school, is unequal and less
+important. From many of his pictures one receives the impression that he
+has directly copied Constable, and others are bathed in dull yellow
+tones; nevertheless he has sometimes painted autumn pictures, felicitous
+and noble landscapes, in which there is really a reflection of the sun
+of Claude Lorrain.
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ LAWSON. THE MINISTER'S GARDEN.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+With much greater freedom does _Colin Hunter_ approach nature, and he
+has the secret of seizing her boldly in her most impressive moments. The
+twilight, with its mysterious, interpenetrating tremor of colours of a
+thousand shades, its shine and glimmer of water, with the sky brooding
+heavily above, is what fascinates him most of all. Sometimes he
+represents the dawn, as in "The Herring Market at Sea"; sometimes the
+pale tawny sunset, as in "The Gatherers of Seaweed," in the South
+Kensington Museum. His men are always in a state of restless activity,
+whether they are making the most of the last moments of light or facing
+the daybreak with renewed energies.
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ COLIN HUNTER. THE HERRING MARKET AT SEA.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+Although resident in London, he and Hook are the true standard-bearers
+of the forcible Scotch school of landscape. _MacCallum_, _MacWhirter_,
+and _James Macbeth_, with whom _John Brett_, the landscape painter of
+Cornwall, may be associated, are all gnarled, Northern personalities.
+Their strong, dark tones stand often beside each other with a little
+hardness, but they sum up the great glimpses of nature admirably. Their
+brush has no tenderness, their spirit does not lightly yield to
+dreaminess, but they stand with both feet firmly planted on the earth,
+and they clasp reality in a sound and manly fashion with both arms.
+Their deep-toned pictures, with red wooden houses, darkly painted
+vessels, veiled skies, and rude fishermen with all their heart in their
+work, waken strong and intimate emotions. The difference between these
+Scots and the tentative spirits of the younger generation of the
+following of Walker and Mason is like that between Rousseau and Dupré as
+opposed to Chintreuil and Daubigny. The Scotch painters are sombre and
+virile; they have an accent of depth and truth, and a dark, ascetic
+harmony of colour. Even as landscape painters the English love what is
+delicate in nature, what is refined and tender, familiar and modest:
+blossoming apple-trees and budding birches, the odour of the cowshed and
+the scent of hay, the chime of sheep-bells and the hum of gnats. They
+seek no great emotions, but are merely amiable and kindly, and their
+pictures give one the feeling of standing at the window upon a country
+excursion, and looking out at the laughing and budding spring. In her
+novel _North and South_ Mrs. Gaskell has given charming expression to
+the glow of this feeling of having fled from the smoke and dirt of
+industrial towns to breathe the fresh air and see the sun go down in the
+prosperous country, where the meadows are fresh and well-kept, and where
+the flowers are fragrant and the leaves glisten in the sunshine. In the
+pictures of the Scotch artists toiling men are moving busily; for the
+English, nature merely exists that man may have his pleasure in her. Not
+only is everything which renders her the prosaic handmaiden of mankind
+scrupulously avoided, but all abruptnesses of landscape, all the chance
+incidents of mountain scenery; and, indeed, they are not of frequent
+occurrence in nature as she is in England. A familiar corner of the
+country is preferred to wide prospects, and some quiet phase to nature
+in agitation. Soft, undulating valleys, gently spreading hills
+conforming to the Hogarthian line of beauty, are especially favoured.
+And should the rainbow, the biblical symbol of atonement, stand in the
+sky, the landscape is for English eyes in the zenith of its beauty.
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ AUMONIER. THE SILVER LINING TO THE CLOUD.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._
+
+ COLIN HUNTER. THEIR ONLY HARVEST.]
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ HENRY MOORE. MOUNT'S BAY.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+There is _Birket Forster_, one of the first and most energetic followers
+of Walker--Birket Forster, whose charming woodcuts became known in
+Germany likewise; _Inchbold_, who with a light hand combines the tender
+green of the grasses upon the dunes and the bright blue of the sea into
+a whole pervaded with light, and of great refinement; _Leader_, whose
+bright evening landscapes, and _Corbet_, whose delicate moods of
+morning, are so beautiful. _Mark Fisher_, who in the matter of tones
+closely follows the French landscape school, though he remains entirely
+English in sentiment, has painted with great artistic power the dreamy
+peace of solitary regions as well as the noisy and busy life of the
+purlieus of the town. _John White_, in 1882, signalised himself with a
+landscape, "Gold and Silver," which was bathed in light and air. The
+gold was a waving cornfield threaded by a sandy little yellow path; the
+silver was the sea glittering and sparkling in the background. Moved by
+Birket Forster, _Ernest Parton_ seeks to combine refinement of tone with
+incisiveness in the painting of detail. His motives are usually quite
+simple--a stream and a birch wood in the dusk, a range of poplars
+stretching dreamily along the side of a ditch. _Marshall_ painted gloomy
+London streets enveloped in mist; _Docharty_ blossoming hawthorn bushes
+and autumn evening with russet-leaved oaks; while _Alfred East_ became
+the painter of spring in all its fragrance, when the meadows are
+resplendent in their earliest verdure, and the leaves of the trees which
+have just unfolded stand out against the firmament in light green
+patches of colour, when the limes are blossoming and the crops begin to
+sprout. _M. J. Aumonier_ appears in the harmony of colouring, and in the
+softness of his fine, light-hued tones, as the true heir of Walker and
+Mason. A discreet and intimate sense of poetry pervades his valleys with
+their veiled and golden light, a fertile odour of the earth streams from
+his rich meadows, and from all the luxuriant, cultivated, and peacefully
+idyllic tracts which he has painted so lovingly and so well. _Gregory_,
+_Knight_, _Alfred Parsons_, _David Fulton_, _A. R. Brown_, and _St.
+Clair Simmons_ have all something personal in their work, a bashful
+tenderness beneath what is seemingly arid. The study of water-colour
+would alone claim a chapter for itself. Since water-colour allows of
+more breadth and unity than oil-painting, it is precisely here that
+there may be found exceedingly charming and discreet concords, softly
+chiming tones of delicate blue, greenish, and rosy light, giving the
+most refined sensations produced by English colouring.
+
+[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._
+
+ LUKE FILDES. VENETIAN WOMEN.
+
+ (_By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+Of course, England has a great part to play in the painting of the sea.
+It is not for nothing that a nation occupies an insular and maritime
+position, above all with such a sea and upon such coasts, and the
+English painter knows well how to give an heroic and poetic cast to the
+weather-beaten features of the sailor. For thirty years _Henry Moore_,
+the elder brother of Albert Moore, was the undisputed monarch of this
+province of art. Moore began as a landscape painter. From 1853 to 1857
+he painted the glistening cliffs and secluded nooks of Cumberland, and
+then the green valleys of Switzerland flooded with the summer air and
+the clear morning light--quiet scenes of rustic life, the toil of the
+wood-cutter and the haymaker, somewhat as Julien Dupré handles such
+matters at the present time in Paris. From 1858 he began his conquest of
+the sea, and in the succeeding interval he painted it in all the phases
+of its changing life,--at times in grey and sombre morning, at other
+times when the sun stands high; at times in quietude, at other times
+when the wind sweeps heavily across the waves, when the storm rises or
+subsides, when the sky is clouded or when it brightens. It is a joy to
+follow him in all quarters of the world, to see how he constantly
+studies the waves of every zone on fair or stormy days, amid the
+clearness and brilliancy of the mirror of the sea, as amid the strife of
+the elements; as a painter he is, at the same time, always a student of
+nature, and treats the sea as though he had to paint its portrait. In
+the presence of his sea-pieces one has the impression of a window
+opening suddenly upon the ocean. Henry Moore measures the boundless
+expanse quite calmly, like a captain calculating the chances of being
+able to make a crossing. Nowhere else does there live any painter who
+regards the sea so much with the eyes of a sailor, and who combines such
+eminent qualities with this objective and cool, attentive observation,
+which seems to behold in the sea merely its navigable capacity.
+
+[Illustration: _Brothers, photo._
+
+ STANHOPE FORBES. THE LIGHTHOUSE.
+
+ (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the
+ picture._)]
+
+The painter of the river-port of London and the arm of the Thames is
+_William L. Wyllie_, whose pictures unite so much bizarre grandeur with
+so much precision. One knows the port life of the Thames, with its
+accumulation of work, which has not its like upon the whole planet.
+Everything is colossal. From Greenwich up to London both sides of the
+river are a continuous quay: everywhere there are goods being piled,
+sacks being raised on pulleys, ships being laid at anchor; everywhere
+are fresh storehouses for copper, beer, sails, tar, and chemicals. The
+river is of great width, and is like a street populated with ships, a
+workshop winding again and again. The steamers and sailing vessels move
+up and down stream, or lie in masses, close beside one another, at
+anchor. Upon the bank the docks lie athwart like so many streets of
+water, sending out ships or taking them in. The ranks of masts and the
+slender rigging form a spider's web spreading across the whole horizon;
+and a vaporous haze, penetrated by the sun, envelops it with a reddish
+veil. Every dock is like a town, filled with huge vats and populated
+with a swarm of human beings, that move hither and thither amid
+fluttering shadows. This vast panorama, veiled with smoke and mist, only
+now and then broken by a ray of sunlight, is the theme of Wyllie's
+pictures. Even as a child he ran about in the port of London, clambered
+on to the ships, noted the play of the waves, and wandered about the
+docks; and so he painted his pictures afterwards with all the technical
+knowledge of a sailor. There is no one who knows so well how ships stand
+in the water; no one has such an understanding of their details: the
+heavy sailing vessels and the great steamers, which lie in the brown
+water of the port like mighty monsters, the sailors and the movements of
+the dock labourers, the dizzy tide of men, the confusion of cabs and
+drays upon the bridges spanning the arm of the Thames; only Vollon in
+Paris is to be compared with him as painter of a river-port.
+
+[Illustration: R. ANNING BELL. OBERON AND TITANIA WITH THEIR TRAIN.]
+
+Apart from him, _Clara Montalba_ specially has painted the London port
+in delicate water-colours. Yet she is almost more at home in Venice, the
+Venice of Francesco Guardi, with its magic gleam, its canals, regattas,
+and palaces, the Oriental and dazzling splendour of San Marco, the
+austere grace of San Giorgio Maggiore, the spirited and fantastic
+_décadence_ of Santa Maria della Salute. Elsewhere English water-colour
+often enters into a fruitless rivalry with oil-painting, but Clara
+Montalba cleaves to the old form which in other days under Bonington,
+David Cox, and Turner was the chief glory of the English school. She
+throws lightly upon paper notes and effects which have struck her, and
+the memory of which she wishes to retain.
+
+For the English painters of the day, so far as they do not remain in the
+country, Venice has become what the East was for the earlier
+generations. They no longer study the romantic Venice which Turner
+painted and Byron sang in _Childe Harold_, they do not paint the noble
+beauty of Venetian architecture or its canals glowing in the sun, but
+the Venice of the day, with its narrow alleys and pretty girls, Venice
+with its marvellous effects of light and the picturesque figures of its
+streets. Nor are they at pains to discover "ideal" traits in the
+character of the Italian people. They paint true, everyday scenes from
+popular life, but these are glorified by the magic of light. After
+Zezzos, Ludwig Passini, Cecil van Haanen, Tito, and Eugène Blaas, the
+Englishmen Luke Fildes, W. Logsdail, and Henry Woods are the most
+skilful painters of Venetian street scenes. In the pictures of _Luke
+Fildes_ and _W. Logsdail_ there are usually to be seen in the foreground
+beautiful women, painted life-size, washing linen in the canal or seated
+knitting at the house door; the heads are bright and animated, the
+colours almost glaringly vivid. _Henry Woods_, the brother-in-law of
+Luke Fildes, rather followed the paths prescribed by Favretto in such
+pictures as "Venetian Trade in the Streets," "The Sale of an Old
+Master," "Preparation or the First Communion," "Back from the Rialto,"
+and the like; of all the English he has carried out the study of bright
+daylight most consistently. The little glass house which he built in
+1879 at the back of the Palazzo Vendramin became the model of all the
+glass studios now disseminated over the city of the lagunes.
+
+And these labours in Venice contributed in no unessential manner to lead
+English painting, in general, away from its one-sided æsthetics and
+rather more into the mud of the streets, caused it to break with its
+finely accorded tones, and brought it to a more earnest study of light.
+Beside his idealised Venetian women, Luke Fildes also painted large
+pictures from the life of the English people, such as "The Return of the
+Lost One," "The Widower," and the like, which struck tones more earnest
+than English painting does elsewhere; and in his picture of 1878, "The
+Poor of London," he even recalled certain sketches which Gavarni drew
+during his rambles through the poverty-stricken quarter of London. The
+poor starving figures in this work were rendered quite realistically and
+without embellishment; the general tone was a greenish-grey, making a
+forcible change from the customary light blue of English pictures.
+_Dudley Hardy's_ huge picture "Homeless," where a crowd of human beings
+are sleeping at night in the open air at the foot of a monument in
+London, and _Jacomb Hood's_ plain scenes from London street life, are
+other works which in recent years were striking, from having a character
+rather French than English. _Stott of Oldham_, by his pretty pictures of
+the dunes with children playing, powerful portraits, and delicate,
+vaporous moonlight landscapes, has won many admirers on the Continent
+also. _Stanhope Forbes_ painted "A Philharmonic Society in the Country,"
+a representation of an auction, and scenes from the career of the
+Salvation Army, in which he restrained himself from all subordinate
+ideas of a poetic turn.
+
+In the same way those artists are important who work according to the
+demands of decorative painting. A picture in a room should be like a
+jewel in its setting, in harmony. It should fit agreeably into the
+scheme of decoration, its colour in unison, its lines melodious, its
+general effect toning well with the general design.
+
+[Illustration: BRANGWYN. ILLUSTRATION TO THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM.
+
+ (_By permission of Messrs. Gibbings & Co., the owners of the
+ copyright._)]
+
+These principles, taught by Morris, have had a formative influence on
+the work of a large number of artists. There arose a tendency which, by
+borrowing characteristic effects from woodwork, carpets, and
+stained-glass, and by the application of style to line as well as to
+colour, went one step further than Burne-Jones.
+
+The pictures of _John W. Waterhouse_, for instance, are not only
+conceived in literary vein, but seen with the eye of a painter. By
+smooth, thick lines, by the discordant harmony of blues, greens, and
+violet, he gets a carpet-like effect which is highly decorative.
+
+_Byam Shaw_, still a young man, is just such another master of
+decorative lines. At the age of twenty-five he painted the picture
+"Love's Baubles," which now hangs in the art gallery in Liverpool. The
+subject he took from a poem in Rossetti's "House of Life." Beautiful
+women snatch after the fruit which a boy carries along on a salver. The
+whole is a harmony of melodious lines and rich, quiet colours.
+
+In his next picture, "Truth," he ranges himself with Boutet de Monoel or
+Ludwig von Zumbusch: he strives after the monumental effect that the
+figures of old Brueghel have.
+
+Next to Byam Shaw, _G. E. Moira_ is the chief representative of this
+decorative school. His picture of Pelleas and Melisande is a work quite
+out of the ordinary, original in arrangement, incisive, almost bitter in
+colour, dull-green, black, lilac, and yellow; fine in the atmosphere of
+Maeterlinck that pervades the whole. But he does his best work as a
+decorator, not as a painter of pictures that can be taken away from
+their setting. In the frieze with which he decorated the Trocadéro
+Restaurant in London he, for the first time, made use of polychrome
+relief, that since has played such an important part in the art of
+decoration, and sought to enhance the colour effect still more by the
+use of metal. In the Paris Exhibition he attracted considerable
+attention by the pictures with which he decorated the pavilion of the
+Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company--simple lines and fantasies of
+colour which with their delicate, flowing harmony had an effect like
+music. His designs for stained-glass windows have the same qualities,
+and in his position as professor in the National College of Art at South
+Kensington he is bound to exert a great influence over the younger
+generation.
+
+_Anning Bell_, well known by his design for the cover of the _Studio_,
+has also done excellent work in coloured relief, especially in his
+frieze "Music and Dancing."
+
+_Maurice Greiffenhagen_ surprises one by the ardour of his imagination,
+his strong emphatic line, and the tapestry-like beauty of his colour. He
+reminds one of Aman-Jean, such a wonderful "old-master-like" beauty is
+suffused through the picture "The Sons of God looked upon the Daughters
+of Men." No less effective is the "gourmandise" with which he gives his
+interpretation the appearance of an old picture. The colours, though
+full of sound and movement, are at the same time so etiolated and faint
+that one would think the picture had hung for centuries in a dusty
+corner of an old church, or that spiders had spun their webs across it;
+the frame too is in keeping, and enhances the general effect of
+solemnity.
+
+The same style is found in the later work of _Frank Brangwyn_, who began
+by painting out-of-door pictures in the spirit of the French
+Impressionists, and afterwards, thanks to a visit to the East, was
+brought into touch with Nature saturated in colour and massive in
+feature.
+
+[Illustration: F. CAYLEY ROBINSON. A WINTER EVENING.
+
+ (_By permission of the Artist._)]
+
+All his works are imposing through the decisive way in which he builds
+up his masses, and the wonderful, rhythmical articulation of forms and
+colours combined. The picture "Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh" which has
+been given a place in the Luxembourg, and the large mural painting
+"Commerce and Navigation" in the Royal Exchange in London, are up to now
+his strongest work.
+
+_F. Cayley Robinson_, who arrests one's attention with his austere,
+almost heraldic arrangement of line, and his gloomy acerbity of colour;
+_Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale_, who awoke high hopes with her
+picture "The Deceitfulness of Riches"; and that spirited draughtsman, W.
+Nicholson, whose drawings lead the eye to and fro, backwards and
+forwards, along heavy decided lines, noting every expressive turn and
+movement. Almost all these masters have come to us from the applied
+arts. It was the idea of attaining to unity of effect in decorative
+ornament that impelled these artists to work in the spirit of to-day,
+not that each should bring forward his own work of art and let it stand
+by itself, but that the scheme of decorative architecture, modelling,
+and painting should work together hand in hand in a homogeneous scheme
+of decoration.
+
+With all these artists one cannot help noticing that they owe much in
+the way of light and leading to one who in England, the land of
+poems-in-paint, proclaimed more outspokenly than anyone else the
+principle of "Art for art's sake,"--to the great American, James M'Neill
+Whistler.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+In General:
+
+ John Ruskin: Letters to "The Times" on the Principal Pre-Raphaelite
+ Pictures in the Exhibition of 1854. Reprinted for Private Circulation.
+ London, 1876.
+
+ Pre-Raphaelitism: Its Art, Literature, and Professors, "London and
+ County Review," March 1868.
+
+ The Poetic Phase in Modern English Art, "New Quarterly Magazine," June
+ 1879.
+
+ William Holman Hunt: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, "Contemporary
+ Review," April-June 1886.
+
+ Edouard Rod: Les Préraphaélites Anglais, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts,"
+ 1887, ii 177, 399.
+
+ W. v. Seidlitz: Die englische Malerei auf der Jubiläumsausstellung zu
+ Manchester im Sommer, 1887, "Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft," 1888,
+ xi 274, 405.
+
+ P. T. Forsyth: Religion in Recent Art. Manchester and London, 1889.
+
+ Wilhelm Weigand: Die aesthetische Bewegung in England, "Gegenwart,"
+ 1889 (35), p. 165.
+
+ Wilhelm Weigand: Die Praeraphaeliten, in his "Essays." Munich, 1892.
+
+ Cornelius Gurlitt: Die Praeraphaeliten, eine britische Malerschule,
+ "Westermanns Monatshefte," April-June, 1892.
+
+ W. Holman Hunt: Pre-Rafaelitism and Pre-Rafaelite Brotherhood. London,
+ 1905.
+
+Noël Paton:
+
+ J. M. Gray: Sir Noël Paton, "Art Journal," 1881, p. 78.
+
+Holman Hunt:
+
+ F. G. Stephens: W. Holman Hunt, "Portfolio," 1871, p. 33.
+
+ F. G. Stephens: Holman Hunt's "The Triumph of the Innocents,"
+ "Portfolio," 1885, p. 80.
+
+ J. Beavington-Atkinson: Mr. Holman Hunt, his Work and Career,
+ "Blackwood's Magazine," April 1886.
+
+Madox Brown:
+
+ W. M. Rossetti: Mr. Madox Brown's Exhibition and its Place in our
+ School of Painting, "Fraser's Magazine," May 1865.
+
+ Sidney Colvin: Ford Madox Brown, "Portfolio," 1870, p. 81.
+
+ Madox Brown's Mural Painting at Manchester, "Academy," 1879, p. 379.
+
+ W. M. Rossetti: Mr. Madox Brown's Frescoes in Manchester, "Art
+ Journal," 1881, New Series, p. 9.
+
+ E. Chesneau: Peintres anglais contemporains: Ford Madox Brown,
+ "L'Art," 1883, p. 409.
+
+ F. G. Stephens: Ford Madox Brown, his early Studies and Motives,
+ "Portfolio," 1893, pp. 62 and 69.
+
+Millais:
+
+ Sidney Colvin: Millais, "Portfolio," 1871, p. 1.
+
+ Modern Artists. Illustrated Biographies. 2 vols. 1882-84.
+
+ Emilie Isabel Barrington: Why is Mr. Millais our Popular Painter?
+ "Fortnightly Review," July 1882.
+
+ Walter Armstrong: Sir J. E. Millais, his Life and Work. Illustrated
+ with Engravings and Facsimiles, "The Art Annual." London, 1885.
+
+ John Ruskin: Notes on some of the Principal Pictures of Sir John
+ Millais. London, 1886.
+
+ Helen Zimmern: Sir John Millais, "Die Kunst unserer Zeit," Munich,
+ 1891.
+
+ M. H. Spielmann: Millais and his Works. London, 1898.
+
+ A. L. Baldry: Millais, his Art and his Influence. London, 1899.
+
+ Millais: Life and Letters of Millais. 2 vols. London, 1899.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+Menzel:
+
+ (Beside books, etc. cited for Chapter XV.):
+
+ Duranty: Adolf Menzel, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1880, i and ii.
+
+ A. Lichtwark: Menzels Piazza d'Erbe, "Gegenwart," 1884, 25.
+
+ C. Gurlitt: Menzels Brunnenpromenade in Kissingen, "Gegenwart," 37, p.
+ 61.
+
+ Georg Galland: Das Arbeiterbild in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart,
+ "Frankfurter Zeitung," 1890, p. 139.
+
+ Jul. Meier-Gräfe: Der junge Menzel. Stuttgart, 1906.
+
+Bleibtreu:
+
+ K. Pietschker: Georg Bleibtreu, der Maler des neuen deutschen
+ Kaiserreiches, Kunststudie und biographische Skizze. Koethen, 1877.
+
+A. v. Werner:
+
+ Ludwig Pietsch: "Nord und Süd," 18, 1881, p. 185.
+
+ Ad. Rosenberg, in "Künstlermonographien," ix. Bielefeld, 1900.
+
+Max Michael:
+
+ Hermann Helferich: Erinnerung an Max Michael, "Kunst für Alle," 1891,
+ vi 225.
+
+Güssow:
+
+ Max Kretzer: "Westermanns Monatshefte," vol. 54, 1883, p. 519.
+
+Pettenkofen:
+
+ Alfred de Lostalot: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1877, i 410.
+
+ Carl v. Lützow: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1889.
+
+Lorenz Gedon:
+
+ G. Hirth: "Zeitschrift des Münchener Kunstgewerbevereins," 1884, 1, 2.
+
+ Fr. Schneider, the same, 1884, 5 and 6.
+
+ "Allgemeine Zeitung," 1884, No. 67.
+
+ K.: "Allgemeine Kunstchronik," 1884, viii p. 5.
+
+ Ludwig Pietsch: "Nord und Süd," 30, 1884, p. 42.
+
+Diez:
+
+ Friedrich Pecht: Zu Wilhelm Diez 50 Geburtstage, "Kunst für Alle,"
+ 1889, iv 113.
+
+ H. E. v. Berlepsch: W. Diez, "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," xxii.
+
+Claus Meyer:
+
+ Claus Meyer-Album. Twelve Photogravures, with Biographical Text by W.
+ Lübke. München, 1890.
+
+Harburger:
+
+ Harburger-Album. Munich, Braun & Schneider, 1882.
+
+Fritz August Kaulbach:
+
+ Hermann Helferich: Neue Kunst. Berlin, 1887.
+
+ P. G.: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1888, xxiii 125.
+
+ R. Graul: "Graphische Künste," 1890, xiii 27, 61.
+
+ See also Kaulbach-Album. Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft. München,
+ 1891.
+
+ Ad. Rosenberg, in the "Künstlermonographien." Ed. by Knackfuss.
+ Bielefeld, 1901.
+
+Lenbach:
+
+ Friedrich Pecht: Franz Lenbach, "Nord und Süd," 1877, i 113.
+
+ B. Förster: Franz Lenbachs neueste Porträts, "Zeitschrift für bildende
+ Kunst," 1880, No. 26.
+
+ Ludwig Pietsch: Franz Lenbach, "Nord und Süd," 44, 1888, p. 363.
+
+ C. Gurlitt: Lenbachs Bismarck-Bildniss, "Gegenwart," 37, p. 318.
+
+ H. Helferich: Lenbachs Zeitgenössische Bildnisse, "Nation," 5,
+ 1887-88, pp. 205 and 227.
+
+ H. E. v. Berlepsch: Franz Lenbach, in "Velhagen und Klasings
+ Monatshefte," 1891, i.
+
+ Ad. Rosenberg, in the "Künstlermonographien." Ed. by Knackfuss.
+ Bielefeld, 1898.
+
+ See also Lenbachs Zeitgenössische Bildnisse. Heliogravures by Albert.
+ München, 1888.
+
+Leibl:
+
+ S. R. Köhler: "American Art Review," 1880, 11.
+
+ Hermann Helferich: "Kunst für Alle," January 1892.
+
+ Georg Gronau, in the "Künstlermonographien." Ed. by Knackfuss.
+ Leipzig, 1901.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+Leading Works:
+
+ Louis Gonse: L'Art japonais. Paris, Quantin, 1883.
+
+ Anderson: The Pictorial Arts of Japan, London, 1883.
+
+ J. Brinkmann: Kunst und Handwerk in Japan. Berlin, 1889.
+
+ See also Ernest Chesneau: Le Japon à Paris, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts,"
+ 1878, ii 385, 841.
+
+ H. v. Tschudi: Die Kunst in Japan, "Mittheilungen des k. k.
+ österreichischen Museums," 1879, xiv 170.
+
+ Le Blanc du Vernet: L'Art japonais, "L'Art," 1880, p. 280; Japonisme,
+ "L'Art," 1880, p. 273.
+
+ Th. Duret: L'Art japonais. Les livres illustrés. Les albums imprimés.
+ Hokusai, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1882, ii 113, 300.
+
+ Hans Gierke: Japanesische Malerei, in "Westermanns Monatshefte," May
+ 1883.
+
+ D. Brauns: Die Leistungen der Japaner auf dem Gebiete der Künste,
+ "Unsere Zeit," 1883, ii 765.
+
+ O. v. Schorn: Malerei und Illustration in Japan, "Vom Fels zum Meer,"
+ April 1884.
+
+ F. E. Fenollosa: Review of the Chapter on Painting in "L'Art
+ japonais," by L. Gonse. Yokohama, 1885.
+
+ W. Koopmann: Kunst und Handwerk in Japan, "Zeitschrift für bildende
+ Kunst," xiv 189.
+
+ T. de Wyzewa: La peinture japonaise, "Revue des Deux Mondes," 1 July
+ 1890. Also separately, Les grands peintres de l'Espagne, etc. Paris,
+ 1891.
+
+ S. Bing: Le Japon artistique. Paris, 1888.
+
+ Edward F. Strange: Japanese Illustration. London, 1897.
+
+ W. v. Seidlitz: Geschichte des japanischen Farbenholzschnittes.
+ Dresden, 1897.
+
+Outamaro:
+
+ E. de Goncourt: Outamaro le peintre des maisons vertes. Paris, 1891.
+
+Hokusai:
+
+ G. Geffroy, in "La vie artistique." Paris, 1892.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+In General:
+
+ Duranty: La nouvelle peinture, à propos du groupe d'artistes qui
+ expose dans les galeries Durand-Ruel. Paris, Dentu, 1876.
+
+ Théodore Duret: Les peintres impressionists: C. Monet, Sisley, C.
+ Pissarro, Renoir, B. Morisot. Avec un dessin de Renoir. Paris, 1879.
+
+ Louis Enault: Une revolution artistique. Paris, 1880.
+
+ Frederick Wedmore: The Impressionists, "The Fortnightly Review,"
+ January 1883.
+
+ Felix Fénélon: Les Impressionistes en 1886. (Angrand, Caillebotte,
+ Miss Cassatt, Degas, Dubois-Pillet, David Estoppey, Forain, Gauguin,
+ Guillaumin, Claude Monet, Mme. Morisot, de Nittis, Camille et Lucien
+ Pissarro, Raffaelli, Renoir, Seurat, Signac, Zandomeneghi, etc.)
+ Paris, 1886.
+
+ Catalogue illustré de l'exposition des peintures du groupe
+ Impressioniste et Synthétiste, faite dans le local de M. Volpini au
+ Champ de Mars, 1889.
+
+ G. Lecomte: L'Art Impressioniste. Paris, 1892.
+
+ H. Huysmans: Certains. Paris, 1892.
+
+ H. Huysmans: L'Art moderne. Paris, 1892.
+
+ G. Geffroy: La vie artistique. Paris, 1892.
+
+ Jul. Meier-Gräfe: Der Impressionismus in Muther's series, "Die Kunst."
+ Berlin, 1902.
+
+Manet:
+
+ Zola: Mes Haines. Edouard Manet. Paris, 1878, p. 327.
+
+ Catalogue de l'exposition des Oeuvres de Manet, avec préface d'Emile
+ Zola. Paris, 1884.
+
+ Edmond Bazire: Manet. Paris, 1884.
+
+ Jacques de Biez: Edouard Manet. Conférence faite à la salle des
+ capucines le Mardi, 22 Janvier 1884. Paris, 1884.
+
+ L. Gonse: Manet, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1884, i 133.
+
+ Fritz Bley: Edouard Manet, "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1884, 8.
+
+ Paul D'Abrest: "Allgemeine Kunstchronik," 1884, viii 5.
+
+ Andreas Aubert, in the Copenhagen "Tilskueren," 1888.
+
+ Hugo von Tschudi: Edouard Manet. Berlin, 1902.
+
+Monet:
+
+ Théodore Duret: Le peintre Claude Monet: Notice sur son oeuvre. Paris,
+ 1880.
+
+ A. de Lostalot: Exposition des oeuvres de M. Claude Monet, "Gazette
+ des Beaux-Arts," 1883, i 342.
+
+ C. Dargenty: Exposition des oeuvres de M. Monet, "Courier de l'Art,"
+ 1883, 11.
+
+ Hermann Helferich: Claude Monet, "Freie Bühne," 1890, 8.
+
+Degas:
+
+ George Moore: Degas, the Painter of Modern Life, "Magazine of Art,"
+ 1889.
+
+ Max Liebermann: Degas, Berlin, Cassirer, 1901.
+
+Pissarro:
+
+ G. Lecomte: Camille Pissarro. No. 11 of "Hommes d'aujourd'hui." Paris,
+ 1890.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+Rossetti:
+
+ William Sharp: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Pictorialism in Verse,
+ "Portfolio," 1882, p. 176.
+
+ William Sharp: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Record and a Study. London,
+ 1882.
+
+ William Tirebuck: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his Works and Influence.
+ London, 1882.
+
+ T. Hall Caine: Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London, 1882.
+
+ F. G. Stephens: The Earlier Works of Rossetti, "Portfolio," May 1882.
+
+ Sidney Colvin: Rossetti as a Painter, "Magazine of Art," March 1883.
+
+ W. Tirebuck: Obituary in the "Art Journal," January 1883.
+
+ R. Waldmüller: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dichter und Maler, "Allgemeine
+ Zeitung," 1883, Blatt 344.
+
+ Notes on Rossetti and his Works, "Art Journal," May 1884.
+
+ William Michael Rossetti, Introduction to the two-volume edition of
+ the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London, 1883.
+
+ Franz Hüffer: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Leipzig, 1883.
+
+ J. Beavington-Atkinson: Contemporary Art, Poetic and Positive
+ (Rossetti and Alma Tadema, Linnell and Lawson), "Blackwood's
+ Magazine," March 1883.
+
+ Theodore Watts: The Truth about Rossetti, "Nineteenth Century," March
+ 1883.
+
+ F. G. Stephens: The Earlier Works of Rossetti, "Portfolio," 1883, pp.
+ 87 and 114.
+
+ Théodore Duret: Les expositions de Londres: Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
+ "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1883, ii 49.
+
+ David Hannay: The Paintings of Rossetti, "National Review," March
+ 1883.
+
+ Helen Zimmern: Aus London, D. G. Rossetti, "Westermanns Monatshefte,"
+ August 1883.
+
+ Harry Quilter: The Art of Rossetti, "Contemporary Review," February
+ 1883.
+
+ William Michael Rossetti: Notes on Rossetti and his Works, "Art
+ Journal," 1884, pp. 148, 164, 204, 255.
+
+ F. G. Stephens: Ecce Ancilla Domini, "Portfolio," 1888, p. 125.
+
+ William Michael Rossetti: D. G. Rossetti as Designer and Writer.
+ London, 1889.
+
+ Wilhelm Weigand: "Gegenwart," 1889, p. 38, and his Essays.
+
+ F. G. Stephens: Beata Beatrix, "Portfolio," 1891, p. 45.
+
+ F. G. Stephens: Rosa Triplex, by D. G. Rossetti, "Portfolio," 1892, p.
+ 197.
+
+ H. C. Marillier: D. G. Rossetti, an Illustrated Memorial of his Art
+ and Life. 2nd Edition. London, 1901.
+
+Burne-Jones:
+
+ Sidney Colvin: "Portfolio," 1870, p. 17.
+
+ F. G. Stephens: "Portfolio," 1885, pp. 220 and 227.
+
+ Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Catalogue (with Notes) of the
+ Collections of Paintings by George Frederick Watts and Edward
+ Burne-Jones. Birmingham, 1886.
+
+ F. G. Stephens: "Portfolio," 1889, p. 214.
+
+ F. G. Stephens: Mr. Burne-Jones' Mosaics at Rome, "Portfolio," May
+ 1890.
+
+ Malcolm Bell: Edward Burne-Jones. London, 1892.
+
+ André Michel: "Journal des Débats," 15 March 1893.
+
+ Cornelius Gurlitt: Die Praerafaeliten, eine britische Malerschule,
+ "Westermanns Monatshefte," July 1892.
+
+ P. Leprieur: Burne-Jones, decorateur et ornemaniste, "Gazette des
+ Beaux-Arts," 1892, ii 381.
+
+ Ninety-one Photogravures directly reproduced from the Original
+ Paintings, "Berl. Photogr. Gesell.," 1901.
+
+ Malcolm Bell: Burne-Jones. Muther's "Die Kunst." Bd. 3.
+
+ Otto v. Schleinitz: "Künstlermonographien." Ed. by Knackfuss. Bd. 55.
+ Bielefeld, 1901.
+
+Arthur Hughes:
+
+ William Michael Rossetti: "Portfolio," 1870, p. 113.
+
+J. M. Strudwick:
+
+ G. Bernard Shaw: "Art Journal," 1891, p. 97.
+
+Richmond:
+
+ H. Lascelles: William B. Richmond, "Art Journal," Christmas Annual.
+ 1902.
+
+Morris:
+
+ Aymer Vallance: William Morris, his Art, his Writings, and his Public
+ Life. London, 1897.
+
+ J. W. Mackail: Life of William Morris. 2 vols. London, 1901.
+
+Walter Crane:
+
+ F. G. Stephens: The Designs of Walter Crane, "Portfolio," 1891, 12,
+ 45.
+
+ Cornelius Gurlitt: "Gegenwart," 1893.
+
+ Peter Jessen: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1893.
+
+ V. Berlepsch: Walter Crane. Wien, 1897.
+
+ Otto v. Schleinitz: Walter Crane, in the "Künstlermonographien." Ed.
+ by Knackfuss, Bielefeld, 1901.
+
+ P. G. Konody: The Art of Walter Crane. London, 1902.
+
+Watts:
+
+ J. Beavington-Atkinson: "Portfolio," 1870, p. 65.
+
+ F. W. Myers: On Mr. Watts' Pictures, "Fortnightly Review," February
+ 1882.
+
+ F. W. Myers: Stanzas on Mr. Watts' Collected Works. London, 1882.
+
+ H. Quilter: The Art of Watts, "Contemporary Review," February 1882.
+
+ Walter Armstrong: George Frederick Watts, "L'Art," 1882, p. 379.
+
+ E. I. Barrington: The Painted Poetry of Watts and Rossetti,
+ "Nineteenth Century," June 1883.
+
+ E. Pfeiffer: On Two Pictures by G. F. Watts, "Academy," 1884, p. 627.
+
+ M. H. Spielmann: The Works of Mr. G. F. Watts, with a Catalogue of his
+ Pictures, "Pall Mall Gazette Extra," No. 22. London, 1886.
+
+ F. G. Stephens: G. F. Watts, "Portfolio," 1887, p. 13.
+
+ Helen Zimmern in "Die Kunst unserer Zeit," 1892.
+
+ Hermann Helferich: "Kunst für Alle," December 1893.
+
+ Jarno Jessen: George Frederick F. Watts. Berlin, 1901.
+
+ Rosa E. D. Sketchley: George Frederick Watts. London, 1904.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+Gustave Moreau:
+
+ Paul Leroi: Les parias du Salon, "L'Art," 1876, iii 246.
+
+ Charles Tardieu: La peinture à l'exposition universelle de 1878,
+ "L'Art," 1878, ii 319.
+
+ Ary Renan: G. Moreau, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1886, i 377, ii 36.
+
+ Claude Phillips: Fables of La Fontaine by Gustave Moreau, "Magazine of
+ Art," 1887, p. 37.
+
+ Karl Huysmans: A. Rebours. Paris, 1891, passim.
+
+ P. Flat: Le musée Gustave Moreau. Étude sur Gustave Moreau, ses
+ oeuvres, son influence. Paris, 1898.
+
+ Ary Renan: Gustave Moreau. Paris, 1900.
+
+ G. Larronnet: Gustave Moreau. Paris, 1901.
+
+Puvis de Chavannes:
+
+ A. Baignières: La peinture décorative au XIX siècle. M. Puvis de
+ Chavannes, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1881, i 416.
+
+ Edouard Aynard: Les peintures décoratives de Puvis de Chavannes au
+ Palais des Arts. Lyon, 1884.
+
+ Thiebault-Sisson: Puvis de Chavannes et son oeuvre, "La Nouvelle
+ Revue," December 1887.
+
+ André Michel: Exposition de M. Puvis de Chavannes, "Gazette des
+ Beaux-Arts," 1886, i 36.
+
+ Hermann Bahr: Zur Kritik der Moderne. Zürich, 1890.
+
+ André Michel: "Graphische Künste," xiv, 1892, 37.
+
+ A. Nossig: "Allgemeine Kunstchronik," 1893, No. 12.
+
+ M. Vachon: Puvis de Chavannes. Paris, 1896.
+
+ L. Bénédite: Les dessins de Puvis de Chavannes au musée du Luxembourg.
+ Paris, 1901.
+
+ Golberg: Puvis de Chavannes. Paris, 1901.
+
+Boecklin:
+
+ F. Pecht: "Nord und Süd," 1878, iv 288. Reprinted in "Deutsche
+ Künstler des 19 Jahrhunderts," Nördlingen, 1879, pp. 180-202.
+
+ A. Rosenberg: "Grenzboten," 1879, i pp. 387-397.
+
+ Graf Schack: Meine Gemäldesammlung. Stuttgart, 1881, pp. 139-155.
+
+ O. Berggruen: Die Galerie Schack. Wien, 1883.
+
+ Zwei neue Gemälde von A. Boecklin, "Deutsche Rundschau," June 1883.
+
+ E. Koppel: Arnold Boecklin, "Vom Fels zum Meer," July 1884.
+
+ Otto Baisch: Arnold Boecklin, "Westermanns Monatshefte," August 1884,
+ 37.
+
+ Guido Hauck: Arnold Boecklins Gefilde Seligen und Goethes Faust.
+ Berlin, 1884.
+
+ F. Pecht: Zu Arnold Boecklins 60 Geburtstag, "Kunst für Alle," 1887,
+ iii 2.
+
+ Fritz Lemmermayer: "Unsere Zeit," 1888, ii 492.
+
+ Helen Zimmern: "Art Journal," 1888, p. 305.
+
+ Berthold Haendke: Arnold Boecklin in seiner historischen und
+ künstlerischen Entwicklung. Hamburg, 1890.
+
+ Hugo Kaatz: Der Realismus Arnold Boecklins, "Gegenwart," 1890, 38, p.
+ 168.
+
+ Carus Sterne: Arnold Boecklins Fabelwesen im Lichte der organischen
+ Formenlehre, "Gegenwart," 1890, 37, p. 21.
+
+ A. Fendler: Arnold Boecklin, "Illustrirte Zeitung," 1890, No. 2310.
+
+ Max Lehrs: Arnold Boecklin, Ein Leitfaden zum Verständniss der Kunst.
+ München, 1890.
+
+ J. Mähly: Aus Arnold Boecklins Atelier, "Gegenwart," 1892, 14.
+
+ Emil Hannover, in "Tilskueren," Kopenhagen, 1892, p. 118.
+
+ Franz Hermann, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," Nos. 430 and 433, 1 April and
+ 1 July 1893.
+
+ Franz Hermann, in "Die Kunst Unserer Zeit," December 1893.
+
+ Carl Neumann, "Preussische Jahrbücher," vol. 71, 1893, Part 2.
+
+ Cornelius Gurlitt: "Kunst für Alle," 1894, Part 2.
+
+ Ola Hansson: "Seher und Deuter." Berlin, 1894, p. 152.
+
+ F. von Ostini, in "Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte," 1894.
+
+ See also the work on Boecklin produced by the "Verlag für Kunst und
+ Wissenschaft," with forty of the artist's chief pictures reproduced in
+ photogravure. München, 1892.
+
+ W. Ritter: Arnold Boecklin. Paris, 1895.
+
+ H. F. Meissner: Arnold Boecklin. Berlin, 1898.
+
+ E. Schick: Boecklins Tagebuch. Hrsg. v. Tschudi. Berlin, 1899.
+
+ H. Mendelssohn: Arnold Boecklin. Berlin, 1900.
+
+ H. Brockhaus: Arnold Boecklin. Leipzig, 1901.
+
+ G. Floerke: Gespräche mit Boecklin. München, 1902.
+
+ J. Meier-Gräfe: Der Fall Boecklin. Stuttgart, 1905.
+
+H. von Marées:
+
+ Conrad Fiedler: H. von Marées. Munich, 1889. (1 vol. text, 1 vol.
+ pictures.)
+
+ Conrad Fiedler: H. von Marées auf der Münchener Jahresausstellung,
+ "Allgemeine Zeitung," 1891, Supplement No. 150.
+
+ H. Janitschek: "Die Nation," 1890, No. 51.
+
+ Carl von Pidoll: Aus der Werkstatt eines Künstlers. Luxemburg, 1890.
+
+ Cornelius Gurlitt: "Gegenwart," 1891, 1.
+
+ Heinr. Wölfflin: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1892, Part 4.
+
+ Emil Hannover, in "Tilskueren," Kopenhagen, 1891, p. 1.
+
+Franz Dreber:
+
+ Exhibition in Royal National Gallery of Berlin, 1876.
+
+ Hubert Janitschek: Zur Charakteristik Franz Drebers, "Zeitschrift für
+ bildende Kunst," xi, 1876, p. 681.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+Bastien-Lepage:
+
+ A. Theuriet: J. Bastien-Lepage, l'homme et l'artiste. Paris, 1885.
+
+ A. Hustin: Bastien-Lepage, "L'Art," 1885, i 13.
+
+ G. Dargenty: "L'Art," 1885, i 146, 163.
+
+ A. de Fourcaud: Jules Bastien-Lepage, sa vie et ses oeuvres. Paris,
+ 1888.
+
+ Marie von Baskirtscheff: "Journal intime." Paris, 1890.
+
+Marie Baskirtscheff:
+
+ Cornelius Gurlitt: Marie Baskirtscheff und ihr Tagebuch, in "Die Kunst
+ unserer Zeit," 1892, i 61.
+
+Léon L'Hermitte:
+
+ Robert Walker: L'Hermitte, "Art Journal," 1886, p. 266.
+
+Raffaelli:
+
+ Alfred de Lostalot: Expositions diverses à Paris: Oeuvres de M. J. F.
+ Raffaelli, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1884, i 334.
+
+ Emil Hannover: Raffaelli, "Af Dagens Krönike." Kopenhagen, 1889.
+
+J. de Nittis:
+
+ Philippe Burty: "L'Art," 1880, p. 276.
+
+ Henry Jouin: Maîtres contemporains, p. 229. Paris, 1887.
+
+Ferdinand Heilbuth:
+
+ A. Hustin: "L'Art," 1889, ii 268.
+
+ A. Helferich: "Kunst für Alle," v, 1890, p. 61.
+
+Gervex:
+
+ F. Jahyer: Galerie contemporaine litéraire et artistique, 1879, p.
+ 178.
+
+Friant:
+
+ Roger Marx: Silhouettes d'artistes contemporains, "L'Art," 1883, p.
+ 461.
+
+Ulysse Butin:
+
+ Paul Leroi: "L'Art," 1878, ii 25.
+
+ Abel Patoux: "L'Art," 1890, ii 7, 117.
+
+Dagnan-Bouveret:
+
+ B. Karageorgevitsch: "Magazine of Art," February 1893, No. 148.
+
+On the more Modern Landscape Painters in General:
+
+ P. Taren: Die moderne Landschaft, "Gegenwart," 1889, 20.
+
+On Neo-Impressionism:
+
+ Paul Signac: D'Eugène Delacroix au Neo-impressionisme. Paris, 1903.
+
+George Seurat:
+
+ Obituary in the "Chronique des Arts," 1890, 14.
+
+Cheret:
+
+ Ernest Maindron: Les affiches illustrées, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts,"
+ 1884, ii 418 and 435.
+
+ Karl Huysmans: Certains. Paris, 1891.
+
+ L'affiche illustrée. Le roi de l'affiche. L'oeuvre de Chéret, etc.,
+ "La Plume," No. 110, 15 November 1893.
+
+ R. H. Sherard: "Magazine of Art," September 1893, No. 155.
+
+ L. Morin: Quelques artistes de ce temps. [Cherét, Vierge.] Paris,
+ 1898.
+
+ G. Kahn: Jules Chéret, "Art et Decoration," xii, 1902, p. 177.
+
+Steinlen:
+
+ Crouzat: A. de Steinlen, peintre, graveur, lithographe. Paris, Maison
+ du livre, 1902.
+
+Paul Renouard:
+
+ Eugène Véron: "L'Art," 1875, iii 58; 1876, iv 252.
+
+ Jules Claretie: M. Paul Renouard et l'Opéra, "Gazette des Beaux-Arts,"
+ 1881, i 435.
+
+Daniel Vierge:
+
+ J. and E. R. Pennell: Daniel Vierge, "Portfolio," 1888, p. 201.
+
+ By the Editor: "Magazine of Art," 1892, No. 146 (December).
+
+Cazin:
+
+ Leon Bénédite: Cazin. Paris, 1902.
+
+Lautrec:
+
+ E. Klassowki: Die Maler von Montmartre [Billotte, Steinlen,
+ Toulouse-Lautrec, Léandre]. "Die Kunst," Bd. 15. Edited by R. Muther.
+
+ André Rivoire: "Revue de l'art ancien et moderne," xi, 1902.
+
+Carrière:
+
+ G. Geffroy: La vie artistique. Préface d'Edmond de Goncourt. Pointe
+ sèche d'Eugène Carrière. Paris, Dentu, 1893.
+
+ Léailles: E. Carrière, l'homme et l'artiste. Paris, 1901.
+
+ G. Geffroy: L'oeuvre d'Eugène Carrière. Paris, 1902.
+
+Aman-Jean:
+
+ A. Beaunier, Aman-Jean, "Art et Decoration," vi, 1899.
+
+Odilon Redon:
+
+ J. Destrée: L'oeuvre lithographique de Odilon Redon. Catalogue
+ descriptif. Bruxelles, 1891.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+In General:
+
+ Francisco Tubino: The Revival of Spanish Art. 1882.
+
+ Spanische Künstlermappe. Edited by Prince Ludwig Ferdinand, with an
+ Introduction by F. Reber. Munich, 1885.
+
+ Gustav Diercks: Moderne spanische Maler, "Vom Fels zum Meer," 1890, 5.
+
+Fortuny:
+
+ "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," ix, 1874, p. 341.
+
+ J. C. Davillier: Fortuny, sa vie, son oeuvre, sa correspondance. Avec
+ cinq dessins inédits en facsimile et deux eaux-fortes originales.
+ Paris, Aubry, 1876.
+
+ Fortuny und die moderne Malerei der Spanier, "Allgemeine Zeitung,"
+ 1881, Supplement, 245.
+
+ Walther Fol: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1875, i 267, 351.
+
+ Charles Yriarte: "L'Art," 1875, i 361.
+
+ Charles Yriarte, in "Les artistes célèbres." Paris, 1885.
+
+ See also the Fortuny Album published by Goupil. 40 page photographs.
+ Paris, 1889.
+
+Pradilla:
+
+ Delia Hart: "Art Journal," 1891, p. 257.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+ James Jackson Jarves: Modern Italian Painters and Painting, "Art
+ Journal," 1880, p. 261.
+
+ P. P.: Die Kunstausstellung im Senatspalast zu Mailand, "Zeitschrift
+ für bildende Kunst," xvi, 1881, 361, 381.
+
+ Camillo Boito: Pittura e scultura. Milano, 1883.
+
+ Die modernen Venetianer Maler, "Allgemeine Kunstchronik," 1884, viii
+ 2.
+
+
+ Milliot: De l'art actuel en Italie, "Revue du monde latin," Juin,
+ 1887.
+
+ Angelo de Gubernatis: Dizionario degli Artisti Italiani viventi.
+ Firenze, 1889.
+
+ M. Wittich: Italienische Malerei. Mappe, 1890, 8.
+
+ Helen Zimmern: Die moderne Kunst in Italien, "Kunst unserer Zeit,"
+ 1890, p. 74.
+
+ A. Stella: Pittura e Scultura in Piemonte. Turin, Paravia & Comp.,
+ 1893.
+
+On the Neapolitans:
+
+ Principessa della Rocca: Artisti Italiani Viventi (Napolitani).
+ Napoli, 1878.
+
+ Helen Zimmern: Die neapolitanische Malerschule, "Kunst für Alle,"
+ 1889, p. 81.
+
+Morelli:
+
+ Helen Zimmern: "Art Journal," 1885, pp. 345 and 357.
+
+ E. Dalbano: Domenico Morelli. Napoli Nobilissima, xi, 1902.
+
+Michetti:
+
+ Helen Zimmern: "Art Journal," 1887, pp. 16 and 41.
+
+Dalbono:
+
+ Helen Zimmern: "Art Journal," 1888, p. 45.
+
+Favretto:
+
+ Obituaries in 1887: Garocci, "Arte e storia," vi 16; "Chronique des
+ Arts," 24; "Allgemeine Kunstchronik," 26; "Mittheilungen des Mähr.
+ Gewerbemuseums," 8; "Courrier de l'Art," vi 25; "Kunstchronik," xxii
+ 37; "The Saturday Review," 1 October 1887.
+
+ See also Giacomo Favretto e le sue opere. Edizione unica di tutti i
+ principali Capolavori del celebre Artista Veneziano. Publicata per
+ cura di G. Cesare Sicco. Torino, 1887.
+
+ L. Brasch: Giacomo Favretta, "Die Kunst unserer Zeit," xii, 1902.
+
+Segantini:
+
+ W. Fred: Giovanni Segantini. Wien, 1901.
+
+ Franz Servaes: Giovanni Segantini. Sein Leben und sein Werk. Hrsg. v.
+ k. k. Ministerium für Kultus und Unterricht. Wien, M. Serlach & Co.
+ 1901.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+In General:
+
+ Frederick Wedmore: Some tendencies in Recent Painting, "Temple Bar,"
+ July 1878.
+
+ E. Chesneau: Artistes anglais contemporains. Paris, 1887.
+
+ Claude Phillips: The Progress of English Art as shown at the
+ Manchester Exhibition, "Magazine of Art," December 1887.
+
+ Ford Madox Brown on the same subject in the "Magazine of Art,"
+ February 1888.
+
+ Rutari: Kunst und Künstler in England, "Kölnische Zeitung," 1890, 205.
+
+Leighton:
+
+ J. Beavington Atkinson: "Portfolio," 1870, p. 161.
+
+ Mrs. A. Lang: Sir F. Leighton, his Life and Work. 42 Plates. "The Art
+ Annual," 1884. London, Virtue.
+
+ Wyke Bayliss: Five Great Painters of the Victorian Era. London,
+ Sampson Low, Marston & Co. 1902.
+
+ G. C. Williamson: Frederic Lord Leighton. London, G. Bell & Sons,
+ 1902.
+
+Poynter:
+
+ Sidney Colvin: "Portfolio," 1871, 1.
+
+ P. G. Hamerton: "Portfolio," 1877, 11.
+
+ James Dafforne: "Art Journal," 1877, p. 18; 1881, p. 26.
+
+Alma Tadema:
+
+ G. A. Simcox: "Portfolio," 1874, p. 109.
+
+ H. Billung: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," 1879, xiv 229, 269.
+
+ The Works of Laurence Alma Tadema, "Art Journal," February 1883.
+
+ Alice Meynell: L. Alma Tadema, "Art Journal," November 1884.
+
+ Georg Ebers: Lorenz Alma Tadema, "Westermanns Monatshefte," November
+ and December 1885.
+
+ Helen Zimmern: L. Alma Tadema, his Life and Work, "The Art Annual,"
+ 1886. London, Virtue.
+
+ K. Brügge: Alma Tadema, "Vom Fels zum Meer," 1887, 2.
+
+ Helen Zimmern in "Die Kunst unserer Zeit," 1890, ii 130.
+
+ Rudolf de Cardova: Sir Laurence Alma Tadema, "Cassell's Magazine,"
+ 1902.
+
+ H. Zimmern: Sir Laurence Alma Tadema. London, G. Bell & Sons, 1902.
+
+Albert Moore:
+
+ Sidney Colvin: "Portfolio," 1870, 1.
+
+ Harold Frederic: "Scribner's Magazine," December 1891, p. 712.
+
+ Karl Blind: "Vom Fels zum Meer," 1892.
+
+Briton Rivière:
+
+ James Dafforne: The Works of Briton Rivière, "Art Journal," 1878, p.
+ 5.
+
+ Walter Armstrong: Briton Rivière, his Life and Work, "Art Annual,"
+ 1891. London, Virtue.
+
+ A. Braun: Ein englischer Thiermaler, "Allgemeine Kunstchronik," 1888,
+ 37-39.
+
+R. Caldecott:
+
+ Claude Phillips: "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 1886, i 327.
+
+ See also R. Caldecott: Sketches, with an Introduction by H. Blackburn.
+ London, 1890.
+
+George Mason:
+
+ Sidney Colvin: George Mason, "Portfolio," 1871, p. 113.
+
+ G. A. Simcox: Mr. Mason's Collected Works, "Portfolio," 1873, p. 40.
+
+ Alice Meynell: "Art Journal," 1883, pp. 43, 108, and 185.
+
+Walker:
+
+ Sidney Colvin: Frederick Walker, "Portfolio," 1870, p. 33.
+
+ Obituary in the "Art Journal," 1875, pp. 232, 254, 351.
+
+ James Dafforne: The Works of Frederick Walker, "Art Journal," 1876, p.
+ 297.
+
+ J. Comyns Carr: "Portfolio," 1875, p. 117.
+
+ J. Comyns Carr: "L'Art," 1876, i 175, ii 130.
+
+ J. Comyns Carr: Frederick Walker, an Essay. London, 1885.
+
+ Clementina Black: Frederick Walker. London, Duckworth, 1902.
+
+G. H. Boughton:
+
+ Sidney Colvin: "Portfolio," 1871, p. 65.
+
+ James Dafforne: "Art Journal," 1873, p. 41.
+
+G. D. Leslie:
+
+ Tom Taylor: "Portfolio," 1870, p. 177.
+
+P. H. Calderon:
+
+ Tom Taylor: "Portfolio," 1870, p. 97.
+
+ James Dafforne: "Art Journal," 1870, p. 9.
+
+Marcus Stone:
+
+ Lionel G. Robinson: "Art Journal," 1885, p. 68.
+
+Frank Holl:
+
+ Harry Quilter: In Memoriam: Frank Holl, "Universal Review," August
+ 1888.
+
+ Erwin Volckmann: "Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst," xxiv, 1889, p. 130.
+
+ Gertrude E. Campbell: "Art Journal," 1889, p. 53.
+
+Herkomer:
+
+ J. Dafforne: The Works of Hubert Herkomer, "Art Journal," 1880, p.
+ 109.
+
+ Helen Zimmern: H. Herkomer, "Kunst für Alle," vi, 1891, i.
+
+ W. L. Courtney: Professor Hubert Herkomer, Royal Academician, his Life
+ and Work, "Art Annual" for 1892. London, Virtue.
+
+ Ludwig Pietsch: Hubert Herkomer, "Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte,"
+ 1892.
+
+ See also H. Herkomer: Etching and Mezzotint Engraving. Lectures
+ delivered at Oxford. London, 1892.
+
+ L. Pietsch: Herkomer, "Künstlermonographien." Ed. Knackfuss, No. 54.
+ Bielefeld, 1901.
+
+On Modern English Landscape:
+
+ P. G. Hamerton: The Landscape-Painters, "Portfolio," 1870, p. 145.
+
+ Alfred Dawson: English Landscape Art, its Position and Prospects.
+ London, 1876.
+
+ Alfred W. Hunt: Modern English Landscape-Painting, "Nineteenth
+ Century," May 1880.
+
+Cecil Lawson:
+
+ "Art Journal," 1882, p 223.
+
+ Heseltine Ovon: "Magazine of Art," No. 158, December 1893.
+
+Hook:
+
+ F. G. Stephens: James Clarke Hook, "Portfolio," 1871, p. 181.
+
+ A. H. Palmer: James Clarke Hook, "Portfolio," 1888, pp. 1, 35, 74,
+ 105, 165.
+
+ Frederick George Stephens: James Clarke Hook, his Life and Work, "Art
+ Annual," 1888. London, Virtue.
+
+Vicat Cole:
+
+ James Dafforne: "Art Journal," 1870, p. 177.
+
+Colin Hunter:
+
+ Walter Armstrong: "Art Journal," 1885, p. 117.
+
+Birket Foster:
+
+ James Dafforne: "Art Journal," 1871, p. 157.
+
+ Marcus B. Huish: "Art Annual," 1890. London, Virtue.
+
+David Murray:
+
+ Marion Hepworth Dixon: "Art Journal," 1891, p. 144.
+
+ W. Armstrong: "Magazine of Art," 1891, p. 397.
+
+Ernest Parton:
+
+ "Art Journal," 1892, p. 353.
+
+W. B. Leader:
+
+ James Dafforne: "Art Journal," 1871, p. 45.
+
+W. L. Wyllie:
+
+ J. Penderel-Brodhurst: "Art Journal," 1889, p. 220.
+
+Henry Moore:
+
+ "Art Journal," 1881, pp. 161 and 223.
+
+ P. G. Hamerton: A Modern Marine Painter, "Portfolio," 1890, pp. 88 and
+ 110.
+
+On the Group of English Painters working in Venice:
+
+ Julia Cartwright: The Artist in Venice, "Portfolio," 1884, p 17.
+
+Henry Woods:
+
+ "Art Journal," 1886, p. 97.
+
+Clara Montalba:
+
+ Paul Leroi: "L'Art," 1882, iii 207.
+
+Stanhope A. Forbes:
+
+ Wilfrid Meynell: "Art Journal," 1892, p. 65.
+
+Shaw:
+
+ P. G. Konody: Byam Shaw, "Kunst und Kunsthandwerk," v, 1902.
+
+
+
+
+ _Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The History of Modern Painting, Volume
+3 (of 4), by Richard Muther
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44082 ***
generated by cgit v1.2.3 (git 2.25.1) at 2026-03-17 22:32:11 +0000