CHAPTER XIX

ITALY AND THE EAST In the beginning of the century the man who did not wear a uniform was not a proper subject for art unless he lived in Italy as a peasant or a robber. That is to say, painters were either archæologists or tourists; when they did not dive into the past they sought their romantic ideal in the distance. Italy, where monumental painting had first seen the light, was the earliest goal for travellers, and satisfied the desire of artists, since, for the rest of the world, it was still enveloped in poetic mystery. Only in Rome, in Naples, and in Tuscany was it thought possible to meet with human beings who had not become vulgar and hideous under the influence of civilisation. There they still preserved something of the beauty of Grecian statues. There artists were less afraid of being diverted from absolute beauty by the study of nature, and thus an important principle was carried. Instead of copying directly from antique statues, as David and Mengs had done before them, painters began to study the descendants of those who had been the models of the old Roman sculptors; and so it was that, almost against their will, they turned from museums to look rather more closely into nature, and from the past to cast a glance into the present. To _Leopold Robert_ belongs the credit of having opened out this new province to an art which was enclosed in the narrow bounds of Classicism. He owes his success with the public of the twenties and his place in the history of art entirely to the fact that in spite of his strict classical training he was one of the first to interest himself, however little, in contemporary life. Hundreds of artists had wandered into Italy and seen nothing but the antique until this young man set out from Neufchâtel in 1818 and became the painter of the Italian people. What struck him at the first glance was the character of the people, together with their curious habits and usages, and their rude and picturesque garb. "He wished to render this with all fidelity," and especially "to do honour to the absolute nobility of that people which still bore a trace of the heroic greatness of their forefathers." Above all, he fancied that he could find this phenomenon of atavism amongst the bandits; and as Sonnino, an old brigand nest, had been taken and the inhabitants removed to Engelsburg shortly after his arrival, a convenient opportunity was offered to him for making his studies in this place. The pictures of brigand life which he painted in the beginning of the twenties soon found a most profitable market. "Dear M. Robert," said the fashionable guests who visited his studio by the dozen, "could you paint a little brigand, if it is not asking too much?" Robbers with sentimental qualms were particularly prized: for instance, at the moment when they were fondling their wives, or praying remorsefully to God, or watching over the bed of a sick child. From brigands he made a transition to the girls of Sorrento, Frascati, Capri, and Procida, and to shepherd lads, fishers, pilgrims, hermits, and _pifferari_. Early in the twenties, when he made an exhibition of a number of these little pictures in Rome, it effectually prepared the way for his fame; and when he sent a succession of larger pictures to the Paris Salon in 1824-31 he was held as one of the most brilliant masters of the French school, to whom Romanticists and Classicists paid the same honour. In the first of these pictures, painted in 1824, he had represented a number of peasants listening to a Neapolitan fisherman improvising to the accompaniment of a harmonica. "The Return from a Pilgrimage to the Madonna dell' Arco" of 1827 is the painting of a triumphal waggon yoked with oxen. Upon it are seated lads and maidens adorned with foliage, and in their gay Sunday best. An old _lazzarone_ is playing the mandolin, and girls are dancing with tambourines, whilst a young man springs round clattering his castanets, and a couple of boys, to complete the seasons of life, head the procession. His third picture, "The Coming of the Reapers to the Pontine Marshes," was the chief work in the Salon of 1831 after the "Freedom" of Delacroix. Heine accorded him a classical passage of description, and the orthodox academical critics were liberal with most unmerited praise, treating the painter as a dangerous revolutionary who was seducing art into the undignified naturalism of Ribera and Caravaggio. Robert, the honest, lamblike man, who strikes us now as being a conscientious follower of the school of David! [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ LEOPOLD ROBERT.] How little did the artistic principles which he laid down in his letters accord with his own paintings! "I try," he wrote to a friend in 1819, "to follow Nature in everything. Nature is the only teacher who should be heard. She alone inspires and moves me, she alone appeals to me: it is Nature that I seek to fathom, and in her I ever hope to find the special impulse for work." She is a miracle to him, and one that is greater than any other, a book in which "the simple may read as well as the great." He could not understand "how painters could take the old masters as their model instead of Nature, who is the only great exemplar!" What is to be seen in his pictures is merely an awkward transference of David's manner of conception and representation to the painting of Italian peasants--a scrupulously careful adaptation of classical rules to romantic subjects. He looked at modern Italians solely through the medium of antique statuary, and conducts us to an Italy which can only be called Leopold Robert's Italy, since it never existed anywhere except in Robert's map. All his figures have the movement of some familiar work of antique sculpture, and that expression of cherished melancholy which went out of fashion after the time of Ary Scheffer. Never does one see in his pictures a casual and unhackneyed gesture in harmony with the situation. It seems as if he had dressed up antique statues or David's Horatii and his Sabine women in the costume of the Italian peasantry, and grouped them for a _tableau vivant_ in front of stage scenery, and in accordance with Parisian rules of composition. His peasants and fishers make beautiful, noble, and often magnificent groups. But one can always give the exact academic rules for any particular figure standing here and not there, or in one position and not in another. His pictures are much too official, and obtrusively affect the favourite pyramid form of composition. [Illustration: L. ROBERT. FISHERS OF THE ADRIATIC.] But as they are supposed to be pictures of Italian manners, the contrast between nature and the artificial construction is almost more irritating than it is in David's mythological representations. It is as if Robert had really never seen any Italian peasants, though he maintains all the while that he is depicting their life. The hard outlines and the sharp bronze tone of his works are a ghastly evidence of the extent to which the sense of colour had become extinct in the school of David. It was merely form that attracted him; the sun of Italy left him indifferent. The absence of atmosphere gives his figures an appearance of having been cut out of picture sheets. O great artists of Holland, masters of atmospheric effect and of contour bathed in light, what would you have said to such heartless silhouettes! In his youth Robert had been a line engraver, and he adapted the prosaic technique of line engraving to painting. However, he was a transitional painter, and as such he has an historical interest. He was a modern Tasso, too, and on the strength of the adventurous relationship to Princess Charlotte Napoleon, which ultimately drove him to suicide, he could be used with effect as the hero of a novel. Through the downfall of the school of David his star has paled--one more proof that only Nature is eternal, and that conventional painting falls into oblivion with the age that saw it rise. "I wished to find a _genre_ which was not yet known, and this _genre_ has had the fortune to please. It is always an advantage to be the first." With these words he has himself indicated, in a way which is as modest as it is accurate, the ground of his reputation amongst contemporaries, and why it is that the history of art cannot quite afford to forget him. [Illustration: L. ROBERT. THE COMING OF THE REAPERS TO THE PONTINE MARSHES.] Amongst the multitude of those who, incited by Robert's brilliant successes, made the Spanish staircase in Rome the basis of their art, _Victor Schnetz_, by his "Vow to the Madonna" of 1831, specially succeeded in winning public favour. At a later time his favourite themes were the funerals of children, inundations, and the like; but his arid method of painting contrasts with the sentimental melancholy of these subjects in a fashion which is not particularly agreeable. [Illustration: SCHNETZ. AN ITALIAN SHEPHERD.] It was _Ernest Hébert_ who first saw Italy with the eyes of a painter. He might be called the Perugino of this group. He was the most romantic of the pupils of Delaroche, and owed his conception of colour to that painter. His spiritual father was Ary Scheffer. The latter has discovered the poetry of sentimentality; Hébert the poetry of disease. His pictures are invariably of great technical delicacy. His style has something femininely gracious, almost languishing: his colouring is delicately fragrant and tenderly melting. He is, indeed, a refined artist who occupies a place by himself, however mannered the melancholy and sickliness of his figures may be. In "The Malaria" of 1850 they were influenced by the subject itself. The barge gliding over the waters of the Pontine Marshes, with its freight of men, women, and children, seems like a gloomy symbol of the voyage of life; the sorrow of the passengers is that of resignation: dying they droop their heads like withering flowers. But later the fever became chronic in Hébert. The interesting disease returned even where it was out of place, as it does still in the pictures of his followers. The same fate befell the painters of Italy which befalls tourists. What Robert had seen in the country as the first comer whole generations saw after him, neither more nor less than that. The pictures were always variations on the old theme, until in the sixties Bonnat came with his individual and realistic vision. [Illustration: _Portfolio._ HÉBERT. THE MALARIA.] In Germany, where "the yearning for Italy" had been ventilated in an immoderate quantity of lyrical poems ever since the time of Wackenroder's _Herzensergiessungen_, _August Riedel_ represented this phase of modern painting; and as Leopold Robert is still celebrated, Riedel ought not to be forgotten. Riedel lived too long (1800-1883), and, as he painted nothing but bad pictures during the last thirty years of his life, what he had done in his youth was forgotten. At that time he was the first apostle of Leopold Robert in Germany, and as such he has his importance as an innovator. When he began his career in the Munich Academy in 1819 Peter Langer, a Classicist of the order of Mengs, was still director there. Riedel also painted classical subjects and church pictures--"Christ on the Mount of Olives," "The Resurrection of Lazarus," and "Peter and Paul healing the Lame." But when he returned from Italy in 1823 he reversed the route which others had taken: the classic land set him free from Classicism, and opened his eyes to the beauty of life. Instead of working on saints in the style of Langer, he painted beautiful women in the costume of modern Italy. His "Neapolitan Fisherman's Family" was for Germany a revelation similar to that which Robert's "Neapolitan Improvisator" had been for France. The fisherman, rather theatrically draped, is sitting on the shore, while his wife and his little daughter listen to him playing the zither. The blue sea, dotted with white sails, and distant Ischia and Cape Missene, form the background; and a blue heaven, dappled with white clouds, arches above. Everything was of an exceedingly conventional beauty, but denoted progress in comparison with Robert. It already announced that search for brilliant effects of light which henceforward became a characteristic of Riedel, and gave him a peculiar position in his own day. "Even hardened connoisseurs," wrote Emil Braun from Rome about this time, "stand helpless before this magic of colouring. It is often long before they are able to persuade themselves that such glory of colour can be produced by the familiar medium of oil painting, and with materials that any one can buy at a shop where pigments are sold." Riedel touched a problem--diffidently, no doubt--which was only taken up much later in its full extent. And if Cornelius said to him, "You have fully attained what I have avoided with the greatest effort during the course of my whole life," it is none the less true that Riedel's Italian girls in the full glow of sunlight have remained, in spite of their stereotyped smile, so reminiscent of Sichel, better able to stand the test of galleries than the pictures of the Michael-Angelo of Munich. Before his "Neapolitan Fisherman's Family," which went the world over like a melody from Auber's _Masaniello_, before his "Judith" carrying the head of Holofernes in the brightest light of morning, before his "Girls Bathing" in the dimness of the forest, and before his "Sakuntala," painted "with refined effects of light," the cartoon painters mumbled and grumbled, and raised hue and cry over the desecration of German art; but Riedel's friends were just as loud in proclaiming the witchery of his colour, and "the Southern sunlight which he had conjured on to his palette," to be splendid beyond the powers of comprehension. It is difficult at the present day to understand the fame that he once had as "a pyrotechnist in pigments." But the results which he achieved by himself in colouring, long before the influence of the Belgians in Germany, will always give him a sure place in the history of German art. And these qualities were unconsciously inherited by his successors, who troubled their heads no further about the pioneer and founder. [Illustration: RIEDEL. THE NEAPOLITAN FISHERMAN'S FAMILY.] [Illustration: RIEDEL. JUDITH.] Those who painted the East with its clear radiance, its interesting people, and its picturesque localities, stand in opposition to the Italian enthusiasts. They are the second group of travellers. Gros had given French art a vision of that distant magic land, but he had had no direct disciples. Painters were as yet in too close bondage to their classical proclivities to receive inspiration from Napoleon's expedition into Egypt. But the travels of Chateaubriand and the verse of Byron, and then the Greek war of liberation, and, above all, the conquest of Algiers, once more aroused an interest in these regions, and, when the revolution of the Romanticists had once taken place, taught art a way into the East. Authors, journalists, and painters found their place in this army of travellers. The first view of men and women standing on the shore in splendid costume, with turbans or high sheepskin hats, and surrounded by black slaves, or mounted upon horses richly caparisoned, or listening to the roll of drums and the muezzin resounding from the minarets, was like a scene from _The Arabian Nights_. The bazaars and the harems, the quarters of the Janizaries and gloomy dungeons were visited in turn. Veiled women were seen, and mysterious houses where every sound was hushed. At first the Moors, obedient to the stern laws of the Koran, fled before the painters as if before evil spirits, but the Moorish women were all the more ready to receive these conquerors with open arms. Artists plunged with rapture into a new world; they anointed themselves with the oil of roses, and tasted all the sweets of Oriental life. The East was for the Byronic enthusiasts of 1830 what Italy had been for the Classicists. Could anything be imagined more romantic? You went on board a steamer provided with all modern comforts and all the appliances of the nineteenth century, and it carried you thousands of years back in the history of the world; you set foot on a soil where the word progress did not exist--in a land where the inhabitants still sat in the sun as if cemented to the ground, and wore the same costumes in which their forefathers had sat there two thousand years ago. Here the Romanticists not only found nature decked in the rich hues which satisfied their passion for colour, but discovered a race of people possessed of that beauty which, according to the Classicists, was only to be seen in the Italian peasants. They beheld "men of innate dignity and remarkable distinction of pose and gesture." Thus a new experience was added to life. There was the East, where splendour and simplicity, cruelty and beauty, softness of temper and savage austerity, and brilliant colour and blinding light are more completely mingled than anywhere else in the world; there was the East, where rich tints laugh in the midst of squalor and misery, the brightness of earlier days in the midst of outworn usages, and the pride of art in the midst of ruined villages. It was so great, so unfathomable, and so like a fairy tale that it gave every one the chance of discovering in it some new qualities. For _Delacroix_, the Byron of painting, it was a splendid setting for passion in its unfettered wildness and its unscrupulous daring. He, who had lived exclusively in the past, now turned to the observation of living beings, as may be seen in his "Algerian Women," his "Jewish Wedding," his "Emperor of Morocco," and his "Convulsionaries of Tangier." Amongst the Orientals he also found the hotly flaming sensuousness and primitive wildness which beset his imagination with its craving for everything impassioned. The great _charmeur_, the master of pictorial caprice, _Decamps_, found his province in the East, because its sun was so lustrous, its costume so bright, and its human figures so picturesque. If Delacroix was a powerful artist, Decamps was no more than a painter,--but painter he was to his finger-tips. He was indifferent to nothing in nature or history: he showed as much enthusiasm for a pair of tanned beggar-boys playing in the sunshine at the corner of a wall as for Biblical figures and old-world epics. He has painted hens pecking on a dung-heap, dogs on the chase and in the kennel, monkeys as scholars, and musicians in all the situations which Teniers and Chardin loved. His "Battle of Tailleborg" of 1837 has been aptly termed the only picture of a battle in the Versailles Museum. He looked on everything as material for painting, and never troubled as to how another artist would have treated the subject. There is an individuality in every one of his works; not an individuality of the first order, but one that is decidedly charming and that assures him a very high place amongst his contemporaries. Having made a success in 1829 with an imaginary picture of the East, he had a wish to see how far the reality corresponded with his ideas of Turkey, and in the same year--therefore before Delacroix--he went on that journey to the Greek Archipelago, Constantinople, and Asia Minor which became a voyage of discovery for French painting. In the Salon of 1831 was exhibited his "Patrol of Smyrna," which at once made him one of the favourite French painters of the time. Soon afterwards came the picture of the "Pasha on his Rounds," accompanied by a lean troop of running and panting guards, that of the great "Turkish Bazaar," in which he gave such a charming representation of the gay and noisy bustle of an Oriental fair, those of the "Turkish School," the "Turkish Café," "The Halt of the Arab Horsemen," and "The Turkish Butcher's Shop." In everything which he painted from this time forward--even in his Biblical pictures--he had before his eyes the East as it is in modern times. Like Horace Vernet, he painted his figures in the costume of modern Arabs and Egyptians, and placed them in landscapes with modern Arab buildings. But the largeness of line in these landscapes is expressive of something so patriarchal and Biblical, and of such a dreamy, mystical poetry, that, in spite of their modern garb, the figures seem like visions from a far distance. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ DECAMPS. THE SWINEHERD.] Decamps' painting never became trivial. All his pictures soothe and captivate the eye, however much they disappoint, on the first glance, the expectations which the older descriptions of them may have excited. Fifty years ago it was said that Delacroix painted with colour and Decamps with light; that his works were steeped in a bath of sunshine. This vibrating light, this transparent atmosphere, which contemporaries admired, is not to be found in Decamps' pictures. Their brilliancy of technique is admirable, but he was no painter of light. The world of sunshine in which everything is dipped, the glow and lustre of objects in shining, liquid, and tremulous air, is what Gustave Guillaumet first learnt to paint a generation later. Decamps attained the effect of light in his pictures by the darkening of shadows, precisely in the manner of the old school. To make the sky bright, he threw the foreground into opaque and heavy shade. And as, in consequence of the ground of bole used to produce his beautiful red tones, the dark parts of his pictures gradually became as black as pitch, and the light parts dead and spotty, he will rather seem to be a contemporary of Albert Cuyp than of Manet. As draughtsman to a German baron making a scientific tour in the East, _Prosper Marilhat_, the third of the painters of Oriental life, was early in following this career. He visited Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and returned to Paris in 1833 intoxicated with the beauties of these lands. Especially dear to him was Egypt, and in his pictures he called himself, "Marilhat the Egyptian." Decamps had been blinded by the sharp contrast between light and shadow in Oriental nature, by the vivid blaze of colour in its vegetation, and by the tropical glow of the Southern sky. Marilhat took novelties with a more quiet eye, and kept close to pure reality. He has not so much virtuosity as Decamps, and in colour he is less daring, but he is perhaps more poetic, and on that account, in the years 1833-44, he was prized almost more. The exhibition of 1844, in which eight of his pictures appeared, closed his career. He had expected the Cross of the Legion of Honour, but did not get it, and this disappointment affected him so deeply that he became first hypochondriacal and then mad. His early death at thirty-six set Decamps free from a powerful rival. _Eugène Fromentin_ went further in the same direction as Marilhat. He knew nothing of the preference for the glowing hues of the tropics nor of the fantastic colouring of the Romanticists. He painted in the spirit of a refined social period in which no loud voice is tolerated, but only light and familiar talk. The East gave him his grace; the proud and fiery nature of the Arab horse was revealed to him. In his portraits Fromentin looks like a cavalry officer. In his youth he had studied law, but that was before his acquaintance with the landscape painter Cabat brought him to his true calling, and a sojourn made on three different occasions--in 1845, 1848, and 1852--on the borders of Morocco decided for him his specialty. By his descriptions of travels, _A Year in Sahel_, which appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, he became known as a writer: it was only after 1857, however, that he became famous as a painter. Fromentin's East is Algiers. While Marilhat tried to render the marvellous clearness of the Southern light, and Decamps depicted the glowing heat of the East, its dark brooding sky in the sultry hours of summer and the grand outlines of its landscape, Fromentin has tried--and perhaps with too much system--to express the grace and brilliant spirit of the East. Taste, refinement, ductility, distinction of colouring, and grace of line are his special qualities. His Arabs galloping on their beautiful white horses have an inimitable chivalry; they are true princes in every pose and movement. The execution of his pictures is always spirited, easy, and in keeping with their high-bred tone. Whatever he does has the nervous vigour of a sketch, with that degree of finish which satisfies the connoisseur. There is always a coquetry in his arrangement of colour, and his tones are light and delicate if they are not deep. In the landscape his little Arab riders have the effect of flowers upon a carpet. [Illustration: _Baschet._ DECAMPS. COMING OUT FROM A TURKISH SCHOOL. (_By permission of Mme. Moreau-Nélaton, the owner of the picture._)] [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ DECAMPS. THE WATERING PLACE.] Afterwards, when naturalism was at its zenith, Fromentin was much attacked for this wayward grace. He was accused of making a superficial appeal to the eye, and of offering everything except truth. And for its substantive fidelity Fromentin's "East" cannot certainly be taken very seriously. He was a man of fine culture, and in his youth he had studied the old Dutch masters more than nature; he even saw the light of the East through the Dutch _chiaroscuro_. His pictures are subtle works of art, nervous in drawing and dazzling in brilliancy of construction, but they are washed in rather than painted, and stained rather than coloured. In his book he speaks himself of the cool, grey shadows of the East. But in his pictures they turn to a reddish hue or to brown. An effort after beauty of tone in many ways weakened his Arab scenes. He looked at the people of the East too much with the eyes of a Parisian. And the more his recollections faded, the more did he begin to create for himself an imaginary Africa. He painted grey skies simply because he was tired of blue; he tinted white horses with rosy reflections, chestnuts with lilac, and dappled-greys with violet. The grace of his works became more and more an affair of affectation, until at last, instead of being Oriental pictures, they became Parisian fancy goods, which merely recalled the fact that Algiers had become a French town. [Illustration: MARILHAT. A HALT.] But after all what does it matter whether pictures of the East are true to nature or not? Other people whose names are not Fromentin can provide such documents. In his works Fromentin has expressed himself, and that is enough. Take up his first book, _L'été dans la Sahara_: by its grace of style it claims a place in French literature. Or read his classic masterpiece, _Les maîtres d'autrefois_, published in 1876 after a tour through Belgium and Holland: it will remain for ever one of the finest works ever written on art. A connoisseur of such refinement, a critic who gauged the artistic works of Belgium and Holland with such subtlety, necessarily became in his own painting an epicure of beautiful tones. This man, who never made an awkward movement nor uttered a brutal word, this sensitive, distinguished spirit could be no more than a subtle artist who had eyes for nothing but the aristocratic side of Eastern life. As a painter, however, he might wish to be true to nature; he could be no more than this. His art, compact of grace and distinction, was the outcome of his own nature. He is a descendant of those delicately feminine, seductively brilliant, facile and spontaneous, sparkling and charming painters who were known in the eighteenth century as _peintres des fêtes galantes_. He is the Watteau of the East, and in this capacity one of the most winning and captivating products of French art. [Illustration: E. FROMENTIN. ARABIAN FALCONERS.] Finally, _Guillaumet_, the youngest and last of the group, found in the East peace: a scion of the Romanticists, there is none the less a whole world of difference between him and them. While the Romanticists, as sons of a flaccid, inactive period, lashed themselves into enthusiasm for the passion and wild life of the East, Guillaumet, the child of a hurried and neurotic epoch, sought here an opiate for his nerves. Where they saw contrasts he found harmony; and he did not find it, like Fromentin, in what is understood as _chic_. Manet's conception of colour had taught him that nature is everywhere in accord and harmoniously delicate. He writes: "_Je commence à distinguer quelques formes: des silhouettes indécises bougent le long des murs enfumés sous des poutres luisantes de sui. Les détails sortent du demi-jour, s'animent graduellement avec la magie des Rembrandt. Même mystère des ombres, mêmes ors dans les reflets--c'est l'aube.... Des terrains poudreux inondés de soleil; un amoncellement de murailles grises sous un ciel sans nuage; une cité somnolente baignée d'une lumière égale, et dans le frémissement visible des atomes aériens quelques ombres venant ça et là détacher une forme, accuser un geste parmi les groupes en burnous qui se meuvent sur les places ... tel m'apparait le ksar, vers dix heures du matin...._ "_L'oeil interroge: rien ne bouge. L'oreille écoute: aucun bruit. Pas un souffle, si ce n'est le frémissement presque imperceptible de l'air au-dessus du sol embrasé. La vie semble avoir disparu, absorbée par la lumière. C'est le milieu du jour.... Mais le soir approche.... Les troupeaux rentrent dans les douars; ils se pressent autour des tentes, à peine visibles, confondus sous cette teinte neutre du crépuscule, faite avec les gris de la nuit qui vient et les violets tendres du soir qui s'en va. C'est l'heure mystérieuse, où les couleurs se mèlent, où les contours se noient, où toute chose s'assombrit, où toute voix se tait, où l'homme, à la fin du jour, laisse flotter sa pensée devant ce qui s'éteint, s'efface et s'evanouit._" [Illustration: _L'Art._ EUGÈNE FROMENTIN.] This description of a day in Algiers in Guillaumet's _Tableaux algériens_ interprets the painter Guillaumet better than any critical appreciation could possibly do. For him the East is the land of dreams and melting softness, a far-off health-resort for neurotic patients, where one lies at ease in the sun and forgets the excitements of Paris. It was not what was brilliant and pictorial in sparkling jewels and bright costume that attracted him at all, but the silence, the mesmeric spell of the East, the vastness of the infinite horizon, the imposing majesty of the desert, and the sublime and profound peace of the nights of Africa. "The Evening Prayer in the Desert" was the name of the first picture that he brought back with him in 1863. There is a wide and boundless plain; the straight line of the horizon is broken by a few mountain forms and by the figures of a party belonging to a caravan; but, bowed as they are in prayer, these figures are scarcely to be distinguished. The smoke of the camp ascends like a pillar into the air. The monotony of the wilderness seems to stretch endlessly to the right and to the left, like a grand and solemn Nirvana smiting the human spirit with religious delirium. [Illustration: FROMENTIN. ARABIAN WOMEN RETURNING FROM DRAWING WATER.] For Decamps and Marilhat the East was a great, red copper-block beneath a blue dome of steel; a beautiful monster, bright and glittering. Guillaumet has no wish to dazzle. His pictures give one the impression of intense and sultry heat. His light is really "_le frémissement visible des atomes aériens_." Moreover, he did not see the chivalry of the East like Fromentin. The latter was fascinated by the nomad, the pure Arab living in tent or saddle, the true aristocrat of the desert, mounted on his white palfrey, hunting wild beasts through fair blue and green landscapes. Poor folk who never owned a horse are the models of Guillaumet. With their dogs--wild creatures who need nothing--they squat in the sun as if with their own kin: they are the lower, primitive population, the pariahs of the wilderness; tattered men whose life-long siesta is only interrupted by the anguish of death, animal women whose existence flows by as idly as in the trance of opium. After the French Romanticists had shown the way, other nations contributed their contingent to the painters of Oriental subjects. In Germany poetry had discovered the East. Rückert imitated the measure and the ideas of the Oriental lyric, and the Greek war of liberation quickened all that passionate love for the soil of old Hellas which lives in the German soul. _Wilhelm Müller_ sang his songs of the Greeks, and in 1825 _Leopold Schefer_ brought out his tale _Die Persierin_. But just as the Oriental tale was a mere episode in German literature, an exotic grafted on the native stem, so the Oriental painting produced no leading mind in the country, but merely a number of good soldiers who dutifully served in the troops of foreign commanders. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ FROMENTIN. THE CENTAURS.] _Kretszchmer_ of Berlin led the way with ethnographical representations, and was joined at a later time by Wilhelm Gentz and Adolf Schreyer of Frankfort. _Gentz_, a dexterous painter, and, as a colourist, perhaps the most gifted of the Berlin school in the sixties, is, in comparison with the great Frenchmen who portrayed the East, a thoroughly arid realist. He brought to his task a certain amount of rough vigour and restless diversity, together with North German sobriety and Berlin humour. _Schreyer_, who lived in Paris, belonged to the following of Fromentin. The Arab and his steed interested him also. His pictures are bouquets of colour, dazzling the eye. Arabs in rich and picturesque costume repose on the ground or are mounted on their milk-white steeds, which rear and prance with tossing manes and wide-stretched nostrils. The desert undulates away to the far horizon, now pale and now caressed by the softened rays of the setting sun, which tip the waves of sand with burnished gold. Schreyer was--for a German--a man with an extraordinary gift for technique and a brilliantly effective sense of life. The latter remark is specially true of his sketches. At a later date--in 1875, after being with Lembach and Makart in Cairo--the Viennese _Leopold Müller_ found the domain of his art beneath the clear sky, in the brightly coloured land of the Nile. Even his sketches are often of great delicacy of colour, and the ethnographical accuracy which he also possessed has long made him the most highly valued delineator of Oriental life and a popular illustrator of works on Egypt. The learned and slightly pedantic vein in his works he shares with Gérôme, but by his greater charm of colour he comes still nearer to Fromentin. [Illustration: _L'Art._ GUILLAUMET. THE SÉGUIA, NEAR BISKRA.] [Illustration: _L'Art._ GUILLAUMET. A DWELLING IN THE SAHARA.] The route to the East was shown to the English by the glowing landscapes of _William Müller_; but the English were just as unable to find a Byron amongst their painters. _Frederick Goodall_ has studied the classical element in the East, and endeavoured to reconstruct the past from the present. Best known amongst these artists was _J. F. Lewis_, who died in 1876 and was much talked of in earlier days. For long years he wandered through Asia Minor, filling his portfolios with sketches and his trunks with Oriental robes and weapons. When he returned there was a perfect scramble for his pictures. They revealed a new world to the English then, but no one scrambles for them now. John Lewis was exceedingly diligent and conscientious; he studied the implements, the costumes, and the popular types of the East with incredible industry. In his harem pictures as in his representations of Arabian camp life everything is painted, down to the patterns of embroidery, the ornaments of turbans, and the pebbles on the sand. Even his water-colours are triumphs of endurance; but patience and endurance are not sufficient to make an interesting artist. John Lewis stands in respect of colour, too, more or less on a level with Gentz. He has seized neither the dignity of the Mussulman nor the grace of the Bedouin, but has contented himself with a faithful though somewhat glaring reproduction of accessories. _Houghton_ was the first who, moving more or less parallel with Guillaumet, succeeded in delicately interpreting the great peace and the mystic silence of the East. [Illustration: W. MÜLLER. PRAYER IN THE DESERT.] The East was in this way traversed in all directions. The first comers who beheld it with eager, excited eyes collected a mass of gigantic legends, with no decided aim or purpose and driven by no passionate impulse, merely eager to pluck here or there an exotic flower, or lightly to catch some small part of the glamour that overspread all that was Eastern, piled up dreams upon dreams, and gave it a gorgeous and fantastic life. There were deserts shining in the sun, waves lashed by the storm, the nude forms of women, and all the Asiatic splendour of the East: dark-red satin, gold, crystal, and marble were heaped in confusion and executed in terrible fantasies of colour in the midst of darkness and lightning. After this generation had passed like a thunderstorm the _chic_ of Fromentin was delicious. He profited by the taste which others had excited. Painters of all nationalities overran the East. The great dramas were transformed into elegies, pastorals, and idylls; even ethnographical representations had their turn. Guillaumet summed up the aims of that generation. His dreamy and tender painting was like a beautiful summer evening. The radiance of the blinding sky was mitigated, and a peaceful sun at the verge of the horizon covered the steppes of sand, which it had scorched a few hours before, with a network of rosy beams. They were all scions of the Romantic movement. The yearning which filled their spirits and drove them into distant lands was only another symptom of their dissatisfaction with the present. Classicism had dealt with Greek and Roman history by the aid of antique statues, and next used the colours of the Flemish masters to paint Italian peasantry. Romanticism had touched the motley life of the Middle Ages and the richly coloured East; but both had anxiously held aloof from the surroundings of home and the political and social relations of contemporaries. It was obvious that art's next task was to bring down to earth again the ideal that had hovered so long over the domain of ancient history, and then winged its flight to the realms of the East. "_Ah la vie, la vie! le monde est là; il rit, crie, souffre, s'amuse, et on ne le rend pas._" In these words the necessity of the step has been indicated by Fromentin himself. The successful delivery of modern art was first accomplished, the problem stated in 1789 was first solved, when the subversive upheaval of the Third Estate, which had been consummating itself more and more imperiously ever since the Revolution, found distinct expression in the art of painting. Art always moves on parallel lines with religious conceptions, with politics, and with manners. In the Middle Ages men lived in the world beyond the grave, and so the subjects of painting were Madonnas and saints. According to Louis XIV, everything was derived from the King, as light from the sun, and so royalty by the grace of God was reflected in the art of his epoch. The royal sun suffered total eclipse in the Revolution, and with this mighty change of civilisation art had to undergo a new transformation. The 1789 of painting had to follow on the politics of 1789: the proclamation of the liberty and equality of all individuals. Only painting which recognised man in his full freedom, no privileged class of gods and heroes, Italians and Easterns, could be the true child of the Revolution, the art of the new age. Belgium and Germany made the first diffident steps in this direction.