CHAPTER XXVII

REALISM IN FRANCE To continue in Paris what Millet had begun in the solitude of the forest of Fontainebleau there was need of a man of the unscrupulous animal power of _Gustave Courbet_. The task assigned to him was similar to that which fell to Caravaggio in the seventeenth century. In that age, when the eclectic imitation of the Cinquecento had reached the acme of mannerism, when Carlo Dolci and Sassoferato devoted themselves in mythological pictures to watering down the types of Raphael by idealising, Caravaggio painted scenes amongst dregs of the people and the unbridled soldiery of his age. At a period when these artists indulged in false, artificial, and doctrinaire compositions, which, on a barren system, merely traced the performances of classic masters back to certain rules of art, Caravaggio created works which may have been coarse, but which had an earnest and fruitful veracity, and gave the entire art of the seventeenth century another direction by their healthy and powerful naturalism. When Courbet appeared the situation was similar: Ingres, in whose frigid works the whole Cinquecento had been crystallised, was at the zenith of his fame. Couture had painted his "Decadent Romans" and Cabanel had recorded his first successes. Beside these stood that little Neo-Grecian school with Louis Hamon at its head--a school whose prim style of china painting had the peculiar admiration of the public. Courbet, with all his brutal weight, pushed between the large symmetrical figures of the thoroughbred Classicists and the pretty confectionery of the Neo-Grecian painters of beauty. But the old panacea is never without effect: in all periods when art has overlived its bloom and falls into mannerism it is met by a strong cross-current of realism pouring into it new life-blood. In painting, nature had been made artificial, and it was time for art to be made natural. Painters still strayed in the past, seeking to awaken the dead, and give life once more to history. The time had come for accentuating the claims of the present more sharply than before, and for setting art amid the seething life of modern cities: it was a development naturally and logically following that of political life; it is historically united with the unintermittent struggle for universal suffrage. Courbet merely fought the decisive battle in the great fight which Jeanron, Leleux, Octave Tassaert, and others had begun as skirmishing outposts. As a painter he towered over these elder artists, whose sentimental pictures had not been taken seriously as works of art, and challenged attention all the more by painting life-size. In this manner the last obstacle was removed which had stood in the way of the treatment of modern subjects. Scanty notice had been taken of Millet's little peasant figures, which were merely reckoned as accessories to the landscape. But Courbet's pictures first taught the Academy that the "picture of manners," which had seemed so harmless, had begun to usurp the place of historical painting in all its pride. At the same time--and this made Courbet's appearance of still more consequence than that of his predecessors--a most effective literary propaganda went hand in hand with that which was artistic. Millet had been silent and was known only by his friends. He had never arranged for an exhibition of his works, and quietly suffered the rejections of the hanging committee and the derision of the public. Courbet blustered, beat the big drum, threw himself into forcible postures like a strong man juggling with cannon-balls, and announced in the press that he was the only serious artist of the century. No one could ever _embêter le bourgeois_ with such success, no one has called forth such a howl of passion, no one so complacently surrendered his private life to the curiosity of the great public, with the swaggering attitude of an athlete displaying his muscles in the circus. As regards this method of making an appearance--a method by which he became at times almost grotesque--one may take whatever view one pleases; but when he came he was necessary. In art revolutions are made with the same brutality as in life. People shout and sing, and break the windows of those who have windows to break. For every revolution has a character of inflexible harshness. Wisdom and reason have no part in the passions necessary for the work of destruction and rebuilding. Caravaggio was obliged to take to his weapons, and make sanguinary onslaughts. In our civilised nineteenth century everything was accomplished according to law, but not with less passion. One has to make great demands to receive even a little; this has been true in all times, and this is precisely what Courbet did. He was a remarkable character striving for high aims, an eccentric man of genius, a modern Narcissus for ever contemplating himself in his vanity, and yet he was the truest friend, the readiest to sacrifice himself; for the crowd a cynic and a reckless talker; at home an earnest and mighty toiler, bursting out like a child and appeased the very next moment; outwardly as brutal as he was inwardly sensitive, as egotistic as he was proud and independent; and being what he was, he formulated his purposes as incisively by his words as in his works. Full of fire and enthusiasm, destroying and inciting to fresh creation--a nature like Lorenz Gedon, whom he also resembled in appearance--he became the soul and motive power of the great realistic movement which flooded Europe from the beginning of the fifties. Altogether he was the man of whom art had need at that time: a doctor who brought health with him, shed it abroad, and poured blood into the veins of art. Both as man and artist his entry upon the arena is in some degree like the breaking in of an elemental force of nature. He comes from the country in wooden shoes, with the self-reliance of a peasant who is afraid of nothing. He is a great and powerful man, as sound and natural as the oxen of his birthplace. He had broad shoulders, with which he pushed aside everything standing in his way. His was an instinct rather than a reflecting brain, a _peintre-animal_, as he was called by a Frenchman. And such a plebeian was wanted to beat down the academic Olympus. In making him great and strong, nature had herself predestined him for the part he had to play: a man makes a breach the more easily for having big muscles. Furnished with the strength of a Samson wrecking the temple of the Philistines, he was himself "The Stone-breaker" of his art, and, like the men he painted, he has done a serviceable day's work. [Illustration: _L'Art._ GUSTAVE COURBET.] Gustave Courbet, the strong son of Franche-Comté, was born in 1819, in Ornans, a little town near Besançon. Like his friend and fellow-countryman Proudhon, the socialist, he had a strain of German blood in his veins, and in their outward appearance it gave them both something Teutonic, rugged, and heavy, contrasting with French ease and elegance. On his massive frame was set a thick, athletic neck, and a broad countenance with black hair, and big, strong eyes like those of a lion-tamer, which sparkled like black diamonds. A strong man, who had never been stinted, he was of medium height, broad-shouldered, bluff, ruddy like a slaughterman, and, as the years passed, disposed to acquire a more liberal circumference of body. He went about working like Sisyphus, and never without a short pipe in his mouth, the classic _brûle-gueule_, loaded with strong caporal. His movements were broad and heavy, and, being a little short in his breathing, he wheezed when he was excited, and perspired over his painting. His dress was comfortable, but not elegant; and his head was formed for a cap rather than the official tall hat. In speech he was cynical, and often broke into a contemptuous laugh. Both in his studio and at his tavern he moved more freely in his shirt-sleeves, and at the Munich Exhibition of 1869 he seemed to the German painters like a thorough old Bavarian, when he sat down to drink with them at the _Deutsches Haus_ in his jovial way, and, by a rather Teutonic than Latin capacity for disposing of beer, threw the most inveterate of the men of Munich into the shade. Originally destined for the law, he determined in 1837 to become a painter, and began his artistic studies under Flageoulot, a mediocre artist of the school of David, who had drifted into the provinces, and boastfully called himself _le roi du dessin_. In 1839 he came to Paris, already full of self-reliance, fire and strength. On his first turn through the Luxembourg Gallery he paused before Delacroix's "Massacre of Chios," glowing as it is in colour, and said it was not bad, but that he could do that style of thing whenever he liked. After a short time he acquired a power of execution full of bravura by studying the old masters in the Louvre. Self-taught in art, he was in life a democrat and in politics a republican. In 1848, during a battle in June, he had a fair prospect of being shot with a party of insurgents whom he had joined, if certain "right-minded" citizens had not interceded for their neighbour, who was popular as a man and already much talked about as a painter. In the beginning of the fifties he was to be found every evening at a _brasserie_ much frequented by artists and students in the Rue Hautefeuille in the _Quartier Latin_, in the society of young authors of the school of Balzac. He had his studio at the end of the street, and is said to have been at the time a strong, fine, spirited young man, who made free use of the drastic slang of the studios. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ COURBET. THE MAN WITH A LEATHER BELT. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AS A YOUTH.] "His notable features," writes Théophile Silvestre of Courbet at this time,--"his notable features seem as though they had been modelled from an Assyrian bas-relief. His well-shaped and brilliant dark eyes, shadowed by long silken lashes, have the soft quiet light of an antelope's. The moustache, scarcely traceable beneath his slightly curved aquiline nose, is joined by a fan-shaped beard, and borders his thick, sensuous lips; his complexion is olive-brown, but of a changing, sensitive tone. The round, curiously shaped head and prominent cheek-bones denote stubbornness, and the flexible nostrils passion." A great dispute over realism usually took the place of dessert at meal-times. Courbet never allowed himself to be drawn into controversy. He threw his opinion bluntly out, and when he was opposed cut the conversation short in an exceedingly forcible manner. It was another murder of the innocents when he spoke of the celebrities of his time. He designated historical painting as nonsense, style as humbug, and blew away all ideals, declaring that it was the greatest impudence to wish to paint things which one has never seen, and of the appearance of which one cannot have the faintest conception. Fancy was rubbish, and reality the one true muse. [Illustration: _L'Art._ COURBET. A FUNERAL AT ORNANS.] "Our century," he says, "will not recover from the fever of imitation by which it has been laid low. Phidias and Raphael have hooked themselves on to us. The galleries should remain closed for twenty years, so that the moderns might at last begin to see with their own eyes. For what can the old masters offer us? It is only Ribera, Zurbaran, and Velasquez that I admire; Ostade and Craesbeeck also allure me; and for Holbein, I feel veneration. As for M. Raphael, there is no doubt that he has painted some interesting portraits, but I cannot find any ideas in him. And the artistic kin, the heirs, or more properly the slaves of this great man, are really preceptors of the lowest art. What do they teach us? Nothing. A good picture will never come from their _École des Beaux-Arts_. The most precious thing is the originality, the independence of an artist. Schools have no right to exist; there are only painters. Independently of system and without attaching myself to any party, I have studied the art of the old masters and of the more modern. I have tried to imitate the one as little as I have tried to copy the other, but out of the total knowledge of tradition I have wished to draw a firm and independent sense of my own individuality. My object was by gaining knowledge to gain in ability; to have the power of expressing the ideas, the manners, and the aspect of our epoch according to an appreciation of my own, not merely to be a painter, but a man also--in a word, to practise living art is the compass of my design. I am not only a socialist, but also a democrat and a republican--that is to say, a supporter of every revolution; and moreover, a sheer realist, which means a loyal adherent to the _vérité vraie_. But the principle of realism is the negation of the ideal. And following all that comes from this negation of the ideal, I shall arrive at the emancipation of the individual, and, finally, at democracy. Realism, in its essence, is democratic art. It can only exist by the representation of things which the artist can see and handle. For painting is an entirely physical language, and an abstract, invisible, non-existent object does not come within its province. The grand painting which we have stands in contradiction with our social conditions, and ecclesiastical painting in contradiction with the spirit of the century. It is nonsensical for painters of more or less talent to dish up themes in which they have no belief, themes which could only have flourished in some epoch other than our own. Better paint railway stations with views of the places through which one travels, with likenesses of great men through whose birthplace one passes, with engine-houses, mines, and manufactories; for these are the saints and miracles of the nineteenth century." These doctrines fundamentally tallied with those which the Neapolitan and Spanish naturalists vindicated in the seventeenth century against the eclectics. For men like Poussin, Leseur, and Sassoferato, Raphael was "an angel and not a man," and the Vatican "the academy of painters." But Velasquez when he came to Rome found it wearisome. "What do you say of our Raphael? Do you not think him best of all, now that you have seen everything that is fair and beautiful in Italy?" Don Diego inclined his head ceremoniously, and observed: "To confess the truth, for I like to be candid and open, I must acknowledge that I do not care about Raphael at all." There are reported utterances of Caravaggio which correspond almost word for word with those of Courbet. He, too, declaimed against the antique and Raphael, in whose shadow he saw so many shallow imitators sitting at their ease, and he declared, in a spirit of sharp opposition, that the objects of daily life were the only true teachers. He would owe all to nature and nothing to art. He held painting without the model to be absurd. So long as the model was out of sight, his hands and his spirit were idle. Moreover, he called himself a democratic painter, who brought the fourth estate into honour; he "would rather be the first of vulgar painters than second amongst the superfine." And just as these naturalists in the seventeenth century were treated by the academical artists as rhyparographists, Courbet's programme did not on the whole facilitate his acceptance in formal exhibitions as he desired that it should. A play must be acted, a manuscript printed, and a picture viewed. So Courbet had no desire to remain an outsider. When the picture committee of the World Exhibition of 1855 gave his pictures an unfavourable position, he withdrew them and offered them to public inspection separately in a wooden hut in the vicinity of the Pont de Jena, just at the entry of the exhibition. Upon the hut was written in big letters: REALISM--G. COURBET. And in the interior the theories which he had urged hitherto by his tongue and his pen, at the tavern and in his pamphlets, were demonstrated by thirty-eight large pictures, which elucidate his whole artistic development. [Illustration: _Baschet._ COURBET. THE STONE-BREAKERS.] "Lot's Daughters" and "Love in the Country" were followed in 1844 by the portrait of himself and the picture of his dog, in 1845 by "A Guitarrero," in 1846 by the "Portrait of M. M----," and in 1847 by "The Walpurgisnacht"; all works in which he was still groping his way. "The Sleeping Bathers," "The Violoncello Player," and a landscape from his native province, belonging to the year 1848, made a nearer approach to his realistic aim, and with the date 1849 there are seven portraits, landscapes, and pictures from popular national life: "The Painter," "M. H. T---- looking over Engravings," "The Vintage in Ornans below the Roche du Mont," "The Valley of the Bue seen from the Roche du Mont," "View of the Château of Saint-Denis," "Evening in the Village of Scey-en-Varay," and "Peasants returning from Mass near Flagey." All these works had passed the doors of the Salon without demur. The first picture which brought about a collision of opinion was "A Fire in Paris," and, according to the account given by contemporaries, it must have been one of his finest works. Firemen, soldiers, artisans in jacket and blouse, were exerting themselves, according to Paul d'Abrest who describes the picture, around a burning house; even women helped in the work of rescue, and formed part of the chain handing buckets from the pump. Opposite stood a group of young dandies with girls upon their arms looking inactively upon the scene. An artillery captain, who was amongst Courbet's acquaintances, had through several nights sounded the alarm for his men and exercised them on the scaffolding of a wall, so that the painter could make his studies. Courbet transferred his studio to the barracks and made sketches by torch-light. But he had reckoned without the police; scarcely was the picture finished before it was seized, as the Government recognised in it, for reasons which did not appear, "an incitement to the people of the town." This was after the _coup d'état_ of 1851. So Courbet's manifesto was not "The Fire in Paris." "The Stone-breakers," two men in the dress of artisans, in a plain evening landscape, occupied once more the first place in the exhibition of 1855, having already made the effect, amongst its classical surroundings in the Salon of 1851, of a rough, true, and honest word, spoken amid elaborate society phrases. There was also to be seen "Afternoon at Ornans,"--a gathering of humble folk sitting after meal-time at a table laid out in a rustic kitchen. A picture which became celebrated under the title of "Bonjour, M. Courbet" dealt with a scene from Courbet's native town. Courbet, just arrived, is alighting from a carriage in his travelling costume, looking composedly about him with a pipe in his mouth. A respectable prosperous gentleman, accompanied by a servant in livery, who is carrying his overcoat, is stretching out his hand to him. This gentleman is M. Bryas, the Mæcenas of Ornans, who for long was Courbet's only patron, and who had a whim for having his portrait taken by forty Parisian painters in order to learn the "manners" of the various artists. And there was further to be seen the "Demoiselles de Village" of 1852, three country beauties giving a piece of cake to a peasant-girl. Finally, as masterpieces, there were "The Funeral at Ornans," which now hangs in the Louvre, and that great canvas, designated in the catalogue as "a true allegory," "My Studio after Seven Years of Artistic Life," the master himself painting a landscape. Behind him is a nude model, and in front of him a beggar-woman with her child. Around are portrait figures of his friends, and the heroes of his pictures, a poacher, a parson, a sexton, labourers, and artisans. [Illustration: _L'Art._ COURBET. THE RETURN FROM MARKET.] The exhibition was, at all events, a success with young painters, and Courbet set up a teaching studio, at the opening of which he again issued a kind of manifesto in the _Courrier du Dimanche_. "Beauty," he wrote, "lies in nature, and it is to be met with under the most various forms. As soon as it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it. But the painter has no right to add to this expression of nature, to alter the form of it and thereby weaken it. The beauty offered by nature stands high above all artistic convention. That is the basis of my views of art." It is said that his first model was an ox. When his pupils wanted another, Courbet said: "Very well, gentlemen, next time let us study a courtier." The break-up of the school is supposed to have taken place when one day the ox ran away and was not to be recaptured. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ COURBET. THE BATTLE OF THE STAGS.] Courbet did not trouble himself over such ridicule, but painted quietly on, the many-sidedness of his talent soon giving him a firm seat in every saddle. After the scandal of the separate exhibition of 1855 he was excluded from the Salon until 1861, and during this time exhibited in Paris and Besançon upon his own account. "The Funeral at Ornans" was followed by "The Return from Market," a party of peasants on the high-road, and in 1860 by "The Return from the Conference," in which a number of French country priests have celebrated their meeting with a hearty lunch and set out on the way back in a condition which is far too jovial. In 1861, when the gates of the Champs Elysées were thrown open to him once more, he received the medal for his "Battle of the Stags," and regularly contributed to the Salon until 1870. In these years he attempted pictures with many figures less frequently, and painted by preference hunting and animal pieces, landscapes, and the nude figures of women. "The Woman with the Parrot," a female figure mantled with long hair, lying undressed amid the cushions of a couch playing with her gaudily feathered favourite, "The Fox Hunt," a coast scene in Provence, the portrait of Proudhon and his family, "The Valley of the Puits-Noir," "Roche Pagnan," "The Roe Hunt," "The Charity of a Beggar," the picture of women bathing in the gloom of the forest, and "The Wave," afterwards acquired by the Luxembourg, belong to his principal works in the sixties. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ COURBET. A WOMAN BATHING. (_By permission of M. Sainctelette, of Brussels, the owner of the picture._)] These works gradually made him so well known that after 1866 his pictures came to have a considerable sale. The critics began to take him seriously. Castagnary made his début in the _Siècle_ with a study of Courbet; Champfleury, the apostle of literary realism, devoted to him a whole series of _feuilletons_ in the _Messager de l'Assemblée_, and from his intercourse with him Proudhon derived the fundamental principles of his book on Realism. The son of Franche-Comté triumphed, and there was a beam in his laughing eyes, always like those of a deer. His talent began more and more to unfold its wings in the sun of success, and his power of production seemed inexhaustible. When the custom arose of publishing in the Parisian papers accounts of the budget of painters, he took care to communicate that in six months he had made a hundred and twenty-three thousand francs. Incessantly busy, he had in his hand at one moment the brush and at another the chisel. And when he gave another special exhibition of his works in 1867, at the time of the great World Exhibition--he had a mania for wooden booths--he was able to put on view no less than a hundred and thirty-two pictures in addition to numerous pieces of sculpture. In 1869 the committee of the Munich Exhibition set apart a whole room for his works. With a self-satisfied smile he put on the Order of Michael, and was the hero of the day whom all eyes followed upon the boulevards. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ COURBET. DEER IN COVERT.] The nature of the bullfighter was developed in him more strongly than before, and he stretched his powerful limbs, prepared to do battle against all existing opinions. Naturally the events of the following years found no idle spectator in such a firebrand as Courbet; and accordingly he rushed into those follies which embittered the evening of his life. The _maître peintre d'Ornans_ became Courbet _le colonnard_. First came the sensational protest with which he returned to the Emperor Napoleon the Order of the Legion of Honour. Four weeks after Courbet had plunged into this affair the war broke out. Eight weeks later came Sedan and the proclamation of the Republic, and shortly afterwards the siege of Paris and the insurrection. On 4th September 1870 the Provisional Government appointed him Director of the Fine Arts. Afterwards he became a member of the Commune, and dominated everywhere, with the _brûle-gueule_ in his mouth, by the power of his voice; and France has to thank him for the rescue of a large number of her most famous treasures of art. He had the rich collections of Thiers placed in the Louvre, to protect them from the rough and ready violence of the populace. But to save the Luxembourg he sacrificed the column of the Vendôme. When the Commune fell, however, Courbet alone was held responsible for the destruction of the column. He was brought before the court-martial of Versailles, and, although Thiers undertook his defence, he was condemned to six months' imprisonment. Having undergone this punishment he received his freedom once more, but the artist had still to suffer a mortal blow. The pictures which he had destined for the Salon of 1873 were rejected by the committee, because Courbet was held morally unworthy to take part in the exhibition. [Illustration: _Baschet._ COURBET. GIRLS LYING ON THE BANK OF THE SEINE.] Soon after this an action was brought against him, on the initiative of certain reactionary papers, for the payment of damages connected with the overthrow of the Vendôme column, and the painter lost his case. For the recovery of these damages, which were assessed at three hundred and thirty-four thousand francs, the Government brought to the hammer his furniture and the pictures that were in his studio, at a compulsory sale at the Hôtel Drouot, where they fetched the absurdly trifling figure of twelve thousand one hundred and eighteen francs fifty centimes. The loss of his case drove him from France to Switzerland. He gave the town of Vevay, where he settled, a bust of Helvetia, as a mark of his gratitude for the hospitality it had extended towards him. But the artist was crushed in him. "They have killed me," he said; "I feel that I shall never do anything good again." And thus the jovial, laughing Courbet, that honoured leader of a brilliant pleiad of disciples, the friend and companion of Corot, Decamps, Gustave Planché, Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Silvestre, Proudhon, and Champfleury; the enthusiastic patriot and idol of the fickle Parisians, passed his last years in melancholy solitude, forgotten by his adherents and scorned by his adversaries. He was attacked by a disease of the liver, and privation, disillusionment, and depression came all at once. Moreover, the French Government began again to make claims for indemnification. His heart broke in a prolonged mortal struggle. Shortly before his death he said to a friend: "What am I to live upon, and how am I to pay for the column? I have saved Thiers more than a million francs, and the State more than ten millions, and now they are at my heels--they are baiting me to death. I can do no more. To work one must have peace of spirit, and I am a ruined man." And Champfleury writes, referring to the last visit which he paid to the dying exile on 19th December 1877: "His beard and hair were white, and all that remained of the handsome, all-powerful Courbet whom I had known was that notable Assyrian profile, which he raised to the snow of the Alps, as I sat beside him and saw it for the last time. The sight of such pain and misery as this premature wreck of the whole man was overwhelming." [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ COURBET. A RECUMBENT WOMAN.] The Lake of Geneva, over which he looked from his window in Vevay, was the subject of the last picture that he painted in Switzerland. Far from home and amid indifferent strangers he closed his eyes, which had once been so brilliant, in endless grief of spirit. The apostle of Realism died of a broken heart, the herculean son of Franche-Comté could not suffer disillusionment. Courbet passed away, more or less forgotten, upon New Year's Eve in 1877, in that chilly hour of morning when the lake which he had learnt to love trembles beneath the first beams of the sun. It was only in Belgium, where he had often stayed and where his influence was considerable, that the intelligence of his death woke a painful echo. In Paris it met with no word of sympathy. Courbetism was extinguished; as impressionists and independents his adherents had gathered round new flags. Zola has done him honour in _L'Oeuvre_ in the person of old Bongrand, that half-perished veteran who is only mentioned now and then with veneration. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ COURBET. BERLIOZ.] And the course of development has indeed been so rapid since Courbet's appearance that in these days one almost fails to understand, apart from historical reasons, the grounds which in 1855 made his separate exhibition of his works an event of epoch-making importance. It was not Cham alone who at that time devoted a large cartoon to Courbet, as he did in "The Opening of Courbet's Studio and Concentrated Realism." All the comic journals of Paris were as much occupied with him as with the crinoline, the noiseless pavement, the new tramways, or the balloon. Haussard, the principal representative of criticism, in discussing "The Funeral at Ornans," spoke of "these burlesque masks with their fuddled red noses, this village priest who seems to be a tippler, and the harlequin of a veteran who is putting on a hat which is too big for him." All this, he continued, suggested a masquerade funeral, six metres long, in which there was more to laugh at than to weep over. Even Paul Mantz declared that the most extravagant fancy could not descend to such a degree of jejune triviality and repulsive hideousness. In a _revue d'année_ produced at the Odéon, the authors, Philoxène Hoyer and Théodore de Banville, make "a realist" say-- "Faire vrai ce n'est rien pour être réaliste, C'est faire laid qu'il faut! Or, monsieur, s'il vous plait, Tout ce que je dessine est horriblement laid! Ma peinture est affreuse, et, pour qu'elle soit vraie, J'en arrache le beau comme on fait de l'ivraie. J'aime les teints terreux et les nez de carton, Les fillettes avec de la barbe au menton, Les trognes de Varasque et de coquecigrues, Les dorillons, les cors aux pieds et les verrues! Voilà le vrai!" [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ COURBET. THE HIND ON THE SNOW.] So it went on through the sixties also. When the Empress Eugénie passed through the exhibition on the opening day of the Salon of 1866, with an elegant walking-stick in her hand, she was so indignant at Courbet's "Naked Women" that the picture had to be immediately removed. In the beginning of the seventies, when he exhibited in Germany, a few young Munich painters recognised in his pictures something like the cry of a conscience. But otherwise "artists and laymen shook their heads, not knowing what to make of them. Some smiled and went indifferently on, while others were indignant in their condemnation of this degradation of art." For "Courbet went to the lowest depths of society, and took his themes from a class where man really ceases to be man, and the image of God prolongs a miserable existence as a moving mass of flesh. Living bodies with dead souls, which exist only for the sake of their animal needs; in one place sunk in misery and wretchedness, and in another having never risen from their brutal savagery--that is the society from which Courbet chooses his motives, to gloss over the debility of his imagination and his want of any kind of training. Had he possessed the talent for composition, then perhaps his lifeless technique would have become interesting; as it is he offers a merely arbitrary succession of figures in which coherence is entirely wanting." In "The Stone-breakers" it was an offence that he should have treated such "an excessively commonplace subject" at all as mere artisans in ragged and dirty clothes. And by "The Funeral at Ornans" it was said that he meant to sneer at the religious ceremony, since the picture had a defiant and directly brutal vulgarity. The painter was alleged to have taken pains to expose the repulsive, ludicrous, and grotesque elements in the members of the funeral party, and to have softened no feature which could excite an unseasonable merriment. In the "Demoiselles de Village" the design had been to contrast the stilted, provincial nature of these village misses with the healthy simplicity of a peasant child. In the picture, painted in 1857, of the two grisettes lying in the grass on the bank of the Seine he had "intentionally placed the girls in the most unrefined attitudes, that they might appear as trivial as possible." And umbrage was taken at his two naked wrestlers because he "had not painted wrestlers more or less like those of classic times, but the persons who exhibit the strength of their herculean frames at the Hippodrome," and therefore given "the most vulgar rendering of nudity that was at all possible." And in his naked women it was said that this love of ugly and brutal forms became actually base. All these judgments are characteristic symptoms of the same sort of taste which rose in the seventeenth century against Caravaggio. Even his principal work, the altar-piece to St. Matthew, which now hangs in the Berlin Museum, excited so much indignation that it had to be removed from the Church of St. Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. Annibale Carracci has a scornful caricature in which the Neapolitan master appears as a hairy savage, with a dwarf at his side and two apes upon his knees, and, in this fashion, intended to brand the hideousness of his rival's art and his ape-like imitation of misshapen nature. Francesco Albani called him the "Antichrist of Painting," and "a ruination to art." And Baglione adds: "Now a number of young men sit down to copy a head after nature; they study neither the foundations of drawing, nor concern themselves about the more profound conditions of art, merely contenting themselves with a crude reproduction of nature, and therefore they do not even know how to group two figures appropriately, nor to bring any theme into an artistic composition. No one any longer visits the temples of art, but every one finds his masters and his models for a servile imitation of nature in the streets and open places." The nineteenth century formed a different estimate of Caravaggio. In opposing his fortune-telling gipsies, his tipplers, gamblers, musicians, and dicing mercenaries to the noble figures of the academical artists, with their generalised and carefully balanced forms, their trivial, nugatory countenances, and their jejune colouring, he accomplished the legitimate and necessary reaction against a shallow and empty idealistic mannerism. No one is grateful to the eclectic artists for the learned efforts which it cost them to paint so tediously: in Caravaggio there is the fascination of a strong personality and a virile emphasis in form, colour, and light. The Carracci and Albani were the issue of their predecessors; Caravaggio is honoured as a fearless pioneer who opened a new chapter in the history of art. [Illustration: COURBET. MY STUDIO AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF ARTISTIC LIFE.] Courbet met with a similar fate. If one approaches him after reading the criticisms of his pictures already cited, a great disillusionment is inevitable. Having imagined a grotesque monster, one finds to one's astonishment that there is not the slightest occasion either for indignation or laughter in the presence of these powerful, sincere, and energetic pictures. One has expected caricatures and a repulsive hideousness, and one finds a broad and masterly style of painting. The heads are real without being vulgar, and the flesh firm and soft and throbbing with powerful life. Courbet is a personality. He began by imitating the Flemish painters and the Neapolitans. But far more did he feel himself attracted by the actual world, by massive women and strong men, and wide fertile fields smelling of rich, rank earth. As a healthy and sensuously vigorous man he felt a voluptuous satisfaction in clasping actual nature in his herculean arms. Of course, by the side of his admirable pictures there are others which are heavy and uncouth. But if one is honest one paints according to one's inherent nature, as old Navez, the pupil of David, was in the habit of saying. Courbet was honest, and he was also a somewhat unwieldy being, and therefore his painting too has something bluff and cumbrous. But where in all French art is there such a sound painter, so sure of his effects and with such a large bravura, a _maître peintre_ who was so many-sided, extending his dominion as much over figure-painting as landscape, over the nude as over _nature morte_? There is no artist so many of whose pictures may be seen together without surfeit, for he is novel in almost every work. He has painted not a few pictures of which it may be said that each one is _sui generis_, and on the variations of which elsewhere entire reputations might have been founded. With the exception of Millet, no one had observed man and nature with such sincere and open eyes. With the great realists of the past Courbet shares the characteristic of being everywhere and exclusively a portrait painter. A pair of stone-breakers, kneeling as they do in his picture, with their faces protected by wire-masks, were figures which every one saw working at the street corner, and Courbet represented the scene as faithfully as he could, as sincerely and positively as was at all possible. "Afternoon in Ornans" is a pleasant picture, in which he took up again the good tradition of Lenain. And in "The Funeral at Ornans" he has painted exactly the manner in which such ceremonies take place in the country. The peasants and dignitaries of a little country town--portrait figures such as the masters of the fifteenth century brought into their religious pictures--have followed the funeral train, and behave themselves at the grave just as peasants would. They make no impassioned gesticulations, and form themselves into no fine groups, but stand there like true rustics, sturdy and indifferent. They are men of flesh and blood, they are like the people of real life, and they have been subjected to no alteration: on the one side are the women tearfully affected by the words of the preacher, on the other are the men bored by the ceremony or discussing their own affairs. In the "Demoiselles de Village" he gives a portrait of his own sisters, as they went to a dance of a Sunday afternoon. The "Girls lying on the Bank of the Seine" are grisettes of 1850, such as Gavarni often drew; they are both dressed in doubtful taste, one asleep, the other lost in a vacant reverie. His naked women make a very tame effect compared with the colossal masses of human flesh in that cascade of nude women of the plumpest description who in Rubens' "Last Judgment" plunge in confusion into hell, like fish poured out from a bucket. But they are amongst the best nude female figures which have been created in the nineteenth century. Courbet was a painter of the family of Rubens and Jordaens. He had the preference shown by the old Flemish artists for healthy, plump, soft flesh, for fair, fat, and forty, the three F's of feminine beauty, and in his works he gave the academicians a lesson well worth taking to heart; he showed them that it was possible to attain a powerful effect, and even grace itself, by strict fidelity to the forms of reality. [Illustration: _Neuerdein, photo._ COURBET. THE WAVE.] His portraits--and he had the advantage of painting Berlioz and Baudelaire, Champfleury and Proudhon--are possibly not of conspicuous eminence as likenesses. As Caravaggio, according to Bellori, "had only spirit, eyes and diligence for flesh-tints, skin, blood, and the natural surface of objects," a head was merely a _morceau_ like anything else for Courbet too, and not the central point of a thinking and sensitive being. The physical man, Taine's human animal, was more important in his eyes than the psychical. He painted the epidermis without giving much suggestion of what was beneath. But he painted this surface in such a broad and impressive manner that the pictures are interesting as pictorial masterpieces if not as analyses of character. [Illustration: _L'Art._ STEVENS. THE LADY IN PINK.] [Illustration: _L'Art._ STEVENS. LA BÊTE À BON DIEU.] To these his landscapes and animal pieces must be added as the works on which his talent displayed itself in the greatest purity and most inherent vigour: "The Battle of the Stags," that most admirable picture "The Hind on the Snow," "Deer in Covert," views of the moss-grown rocks and sunlit woods of Ornans and the green valleys of the Franche-Comté. He had the special secret of painting with a beautiful tone and a broad, sure stroke dead plumage and hunting-gear, the bristling hide of wild-boars, and the more delicate coat of deer and of dogs. As a landscape painter he does not belong to the family of Corot and Dupré. His landscapes are green no doubt, but they have limitations; the leaves hang motionless on the branches, undisturbed by a breath of wind. Courbet has forgotten the most important thing, the air. Whatever the time of the year or the day may be, winter or summer, evening or morning, he sees nothing but the form of things, regarding the sun as a machine which has no other purpose than to mark the relief of objects by light and shade. Moreover, the lyricism of the Fontainebleau painters was not in him. He paints without reverie, and knows nothing of that tender faltering of the landscape painter in which the poet awakes, but has merely the equanimity of a good and sure worker. In regard to nature, he has the sentiments of a peasant who tills his land, is never elegiac or bucolic, and would be most indignant if a nymph were to tread on the furrows of his fields. He paints with a pipe in his mouth and a spade in his hand, the plain and the hills, potatoes and cabbages, rich turf and slimy rushes, oxen with steaming nostrils heavily ploughing the clods, cows lying down and breathing at ease the damp air of the meadows drenched with rain. He delights in fertile patches of country, and in the healthy odour of the cow-house. A material heaviness and a prosaic sincerity are stamped upon all. But his painting has a solidity delightful to the eye. It is inspiriting to meet a man who has such a resolute and simple love of nature, and can interpret her afresh in powerful and sound colour without racking his brains. His attachment to the spot of earth where he was born is a leading characteristic of his art. He borrowed from Ornans the motives of his most successful creations, and was always glad to return to his parents' house. The patriotism of the church-spire, provincialism, and a touching and vivid sense of home are peculiar to all his landscapes. But in his sea-pieces, to which he was incited by a residence in Trouville in the summer of 1865, he has opened an altogether new province to French art. _Eugène Le Poittevin_, who exhibited a good deal in Berlin in the forties, and therefore became very well known in Germany, cannot count as a painter. _Théodore Gudin_, whose signature is likewise highly valued in the market, was a frigid and rough-and-ready scenical painter. His little sea-pieces have a professional manner, and the large naval battles and fires at sea which he executed by the commission of Louis Philippe for the Museum of Versailles are frigid, pompous, and spectacular sea-pieces parallel with Vernet's battle-pieces. _Ziem_, who gave up his time to Venice and the Adriatic, is the progenitor of Eduard Hildebrandt. His water and sky take all the colours of the prism, and the objects grouped between these luminous elements, houses, ships, and men, equally receive a share of these flattering and iridescent tones. This gives something seductive and dazzling to his sketches, until it is at last perceived that he has only painted one picture, repeating it mechanically in all dimensions. Courbet was the first French painter of sea-pieces who had a feeling for the sombre majesty of the sea. The ocean of Gudin and Ziem inspires neither wonder nor veneration; that of Courbet does both. His very quietude is expressive of majesty; his peace is imposing, his smile grave; and his caress is not without a menace. [Illustration: _L'Art._ STEVENS. THE JAPANESE MASK.] Courbet has positively realised the programme which he issued in that pamphlet of 1855. When he began his activity, eclectic idealism had overgrown the tree of art. But Courbet stripped off the parasitic vegetation to reach the firm and serviceable timber. And having once grasped it he showed the muscles of an athlete in making its power felt. Something of the old Flemish sturdiness lived once more in his bold creations. If he and Delacroix were united, the result would be Rubens. Delacroix had the fervour and passionate tamelessness, while Courbet contributed the Flemish weight. Each made use of blood, purple, thrones, and Golgothas in composing the dramas they had imagined. The latter pictured creation with the absolutism of complete objectivity. Delacroix rose on the horizon like a brilliant meteor catching flame from the light of vanished suns; he reflected their radiance, had almost their magnitude, and followed the same course amid the same coruscation and blaze of light. Courbet stands firm and steady upon the earth. The former had the second sight known to visionaries, the latter opened his eyes to the world that can be felt and handled. Neurotic and distempered, Delacroix worked feverishly. As a sound, full-blooded being Courbet painted, as a man drinks, digests, and talks, with an activity that knows no exertion, a force that knows no weariness. Delacroix was a small, weakly man, and his whole power rested in his huge head. That of Courbet, as in animals of beauty and power, was dispersed through his whole frame; his big arms and athletic hands render the same service to his art as his eyes and his brain. And as, like all sincere artists, he rendered himself, he was the creator of an art which has an irrepressible health and overflows with an exuberant opulence. His pictures brought a savour of the butcher's shop into French painting, which had become anæmic. He delighted in plump shoulders and sinewy necks, broad breasts heaving over the corset, the glow of the skin dripping with warm drops of water in the bath, the hide of deer and the coat of hares, the iridescent shining of carp and cod-fish. Delacroix, all brain, caught fire from his inward visions; Courbet, all eye and maw, with the sensuousness of an epicure and the satisfaction of a _gourmet_, gloats over the shining vision of things which can be devoured--a Gargantua with a monstrous appetite, he buried himself in the navel of the generous earth. Plants, fruit, and vegetables take voluptuous life beneath his brush. He triumphs when he has to paint a _déjeuner_ with oysters, lemons, turkeys, fish, and pheasants. His mouth waters when he heaps into a picture of still-life all manner of delicious eatables. The only drama that he has painted is "The Battle of the Stags," and this will end in brown sauce amid a cheerful clatter of knives and forks. [Illustration: _L'Art._ STEVENS. THE VISITORS. (_By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture._)] Even as a landscape painter he is luxurious and phlegmatic. In his pictures the earth is a corpulent nurse, the trees fine and well-fed children, and all nature healthy and contented. His art is like a powerful body fed with rich nourishment. In such organisms the capacity for enthusiasm and delicacy of sentiment are too easily sacrificed to their physical satisfaction, but their robust health ensures them the longer life. Here is neither the routine and external technique and the correct, academic articulation of form belonging to mannerists, nor the strained, neurotic, sickly refinement of the decadents, but the powerful utterance of inborn, instinctive talent, and the strong cries of nature which rise out of it will be understood at all times, even the most distant. It is hardly necessary to add that the appearance of a genius of this kind was fraught with untold consequences to the further development of French painting. [Illustration: _Baschet._ RICARD. MADAME DE CALONNE.] What is held beautiful in nature must likewise be beautiful in pictorial art when it is faithfully represented, and nature is beautiful everywhere. In announcing this and demonstrating it in pictures of life-size, Courbet won for art all the wide dominion of modern life which had hitherto been so studiously avoided--the dominion in which it had to revel if it was to learn to see with its own eyes. One fragment of reality after another would then be drawn into the sphere of representation, and no longer in the form of laboriously composed _genre_ pictures, but after the fashion of really pictorial works of art. What Millet had done for the peasant, and Courbet for the artisan, _Alfred Stevens_ did for "society": he discovered the _Parisienne_. Until 1850 the graceful life of the refined classes, which Gavarni, Marcellin, and Cham had so admirably drawn, found no adequate representation in the province of painting. The _Parisienne_, who is so _chic_ and piquant, and can hate and kiss with such fervour, fascinated every one, but Grecian profile was a matter of prescription. _Auguste Toulmouche_ painted little women in fashionable toilette, but less from any taste he had for the graceful vision than from delight in _genre_ painting. They were forced to find forbidden books in the library, to resist worldly marriages, or behave in some such interesting fashion, to enter into the kingdom of art. It was reserved for a foreigner to reveal this world of beauty, _chic_, and grace. Alfred Stevens was a child of Brussels. He was born in the land of Flemish matrons on 11th May 1828, and was the second of three children. Joseph, the elder brother, became afterwards the celebrated painter of animals; Arthur, the youngest, became an art-critic and a picture-dealer; he was one of the first who brought home to the public comprehension the noble art of Rousseau, Corot, and Millet. Stevens' father fought as an officer in the great army at the battle of Waterloo, and is said to have been an accomplished critic. Some of the ablest sketches of Delacroix, Devéria, Charlet, and Roqueplan found their way into his charming home. Roqueplan, who often came to Brussels, took the younger Stevens with him to his Parisian studio. He was a tall, graceful young man, who, with his vigorous upright carriage, his finely chiselled features, and his dandified moustache, looked like an officer of dragoons or cuirassiers. He was a pleasure-loving man of the world, and was soon the lion of Parisian drawing-rooms. The grace of modern life in great cities became the domain of his art. The _Parisienne_, whom his French fellow-artists passed by without heed, was a strange, interesting phenomenon to him, who was a foreigner--an exotic and exquisitely artistic _bibelot_, which he looked upon with eyes as enraptured as those with which Decamps had looked upon the East. [Illustration: _L'Art._ CHAPLIN. THE GOLDEN AGE. (_By permission of Messrs. Goupil & Co., the owners of the copyright._)] His very first picture, exhibited in 1855, was called "At Home." A charming little woman is warming her feet at the fire; she has returned from visiting a friend, and it has been raining or snowing outside. Her delicate hands are frozen in spite of her muff, her cheeks have been reddened by the wind, and she has a pleasant sense of comfort as her rosy lips breathe the warm air of the room. From the time of this picture women took possession of Stevens' easel. His way was prescribed for him, and he never left it. Robert Fleury, the president of the judging committee in the Salon, said to him: "You are a good painter, but alter your subjects; you are stifling in a sphere which is too small; how wide and grand is that of the past!" Whereon Stevens is said to have showed him a volume of photographs from Velasquez. "Look here at Velasquez," he said. "This man never represented anything but what he had before his eyes--people in the Spanish dress of the seventeenth century. And as the justification of my _genre_ may be found in this Spanish painter, it may be found also in Rubens, Raphael, Van Dyck, and all the great artists. All these masters of the past derived their strength and the secret of their endurance from the faithful reproduction of what they had themselves seen: it gives their pictures a real historical as well as an artistic value. One can only render successfully what one has felt sincerely and seen vividly before one's eyes in flesh and blood." In these sentences he is at one with Courbet, and by not allowing himself to be led astray into doing sacrifice to the idols of historical painting he continues to live as the historical painter of the _Parisienne_. [Illustration: _Baschet._ CHAPLIN. PORTRAIT OF COUNTESS AIMERY DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.] In his whole work he sounds a pæan to the delicate and all-powerful mistress of the world, and it is significant that it was through woman that art joined issue with the interests of the present. Millet, the first who conquered a province of modern life, was at the same time the first great painter of women in the century. Stevens shows the other side of the medal. In Millet woman was a product of nature; in Stevens she is the product of modern civilisation. The woman of Millet lives a large animal life, in the sweat of her brow, bowed to the earth. She is the primæval mother who works, bears children, and gives them nourishment. She stands in the field like a caryatid, like a symbol of fertile nature. In Stevens woman does not toil and is seldom a mother. He paints the woman who loves, enjoys, and knows nothing of the great pangs of child-birth and hunger. The one woman lives beneath the wide, open sky, _dans le grand air_; the other is only enveloped in an atmosphere of perfume. She is ancient Cybele in the pictures of Millet; in those of Stevens the holy Magdalene of the nineteenth century, to whom much will be forgiven, because she has loved much. The pictures of Stevens represent, for the first time, the potent relations of woman to the century. Whilst most works of this time are silent concerning ourselves, his art will speak of our weaknesses and our passions. In a period of archaic painting he upheld the banner of modernity. On this account posterity will honour him as one of the first historians of the nineteenth century, and will learn from his pictures all that Greuze has revealed to the present generation about the civilisation of the eighteenth century. [Illustration: _Baschet._ GAILLARD. PORTRAIT.] And perhaps more, for Stevens never moralised--he merely painted. Painter to his finger tips, like Delacroix, Roqueplan, and Isabey, he stood in need of no anecdotic substratum as an adjunct. The key of his pictures was suggested by no theme of one sort or another, but by his treatment of colour. The picture was evolved from the first tone he placed upon the canvas, which was the ground-note of the entire scale. He delighted in a thick pasty handling, in beautiful hues, and in finely chased detail. And he was as little inclined to sentimentality as to pictorial novels. Everything is discreet, piquant, and full of charm. He was a delicate spirit, avoiding tears and laughter. Subdued joy, melancholy, and everything delicate and reserved are what he loves; he will have nothing to do with stereotyped arrangement nor supernumerary figures, but although a single person dominates the stage he never repeats himself. He has followed woman through all her metamorphoses--as mother or in love, weary or excited, proud or humbled, fallen or at the height of success, in her morning-gown or dressed for visiting or a promenade, now on the sea-shore, now in the costume of a Japanese, or dallying with her trinkets as she stands vacantly before the glass. The surroundings invariably form an accompaniment to the melody. A world of exquisite things is the environment of the figures. Rich stuffs, charming _petit-riens_ from China and Japan, the most delicate ivory and lacquer-work, the finest bronzes, Japanese fire-screens, and great vases with blossoming sprays, fill the boudoir and drawing-room of the _Parisienne_. In the pictures of Stevens she is the fairy of a paradise made up of all the most capricious products of art. A new world was discovered, a painting which was in touch with life; the symphony of the salon was developed in a delicate style. A tender feminine perfume, something at once melancholy and sensuous, was exhaled from the pictures of Stevens, and by this shade of _demi-monde haut-goût_ he won the great public. They could not rise to Millet and Courbet, and Stevens was the first who gave general pleasure without paying toll to the vicious taste for melodramatic, narrative, and humorous _genre_ painting. Even in the sixties he was appreciated in England, France, Germany, Russia, and Belgium, and represented in all public and private collections; and through the wide reception offered to his pictures he contributed much to create in the public a comprehension for good painting. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ DUBOIS. PORTRAIT OF MY SONS. (_By permission of the Artist._)] In the same way _James Tissot_ achieved the representation of the modern woman. Stevens, a Belgian, painted the _Parisienne_; Tissot, a Frenchman, the Englishwoman. It was not till they went into foreign countries that these artists perceived the grace of what was not deemed suitable to art at home. In Paris from the year 1859 Tissot had painted scenes from the fifteenth century, to which he was moved by Leys, and he studied with archæological accuracy the costume and furniture of the late Gothic period. When he migrated to England in 1871 he gave up the romantic proclivities of his youth, and devoted himself to the representation of fashionable society. His oil paintings fascinate us by their delicate feeling for cool transparent tone values, whilst his water-colours--restaurant, theatre, and ball scenes--assure him a place among the pioneers of modernity. At first Stevens found no successors amongst Parisian painters. A few, indeed, painted interiors in graceful Paris, but they were only frigid compositions of dresses and furniture, without a breath of that delicate aroma which exhales from the works of the Belgian. The portrait painters alone approached that modern grace which still awaited its historian and poet. An exceedingly delicate artist, _Gustave Ricard_, in whose portraits the art of galleries had a congenial revival, was called the modern Van Dyck in the sixties. Living nature did not content him; he wished to learn how it was interpreted by the old masters, and therefore frequented galleries, where he sought counsel sometimes from the English portrait-painters, sometimes from Leonardo, Rubens, and Van Dyck. In this way Ricard became a _gourmet_ of colour, who knew the technique of the old masters as few others have done, and his works have an attractive golden gallery-tone of great distinction. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ CAROLUS DURAN.] In _Charles Chaplin_ Fragonard was revived. He was the specialist of languishing flesh and _poudre de riz_, the refined interpreter of aristocratic beauty, one on whose palette there might still be found a delicate reflection of the _fêtes galantes_ of the eighteenth century. In Germany he was principally known by those dreamy, frail, and sensual maidens, well characterised by the phrase of the Empress Eugénie. "M. Chaplin," she said, "I admire you. Your pictures are not merely indecorous, they are more." But Chaplin had likewise the other qualities of the _rococo_ painter. He was a decorative artist of the first rank, and, like Fragonard, he carelessly scattered round him on all sides grace and beauty, charm and fascination. In 1857 he decorated the _Salon des Fleurs_ in the Tuileries, in 1861-65 the bathroom of the Empress in the _Palais de l'Elysée_, and from 1865 a number of private houses in Paris, Brussels, and New York; and there is in all these works a refined _haut-goût_ of modern Parisian elegance and fragrant _rococo_ grace. He revived no nymphs, and made no pilgrimage to the island of Cythera; he was more of an epicurean. But Fragonard's fine tones and Fragonard's sensuousness were peculiar to him. He had a method of treating the hair, of introducing little patches, of setting a dimple in the chin, and painting the arms and bosom, which had vanished since the _rococo_ period from the power of French artists. Rosebuds and full-blown roses blossom like girls _à la_ Greuze, and fading beauties, who are all the more irresistible, are the elements out of which his refined, indecorous, and yet fragrant art is constituted. [Illustration: _L'Art._ BONNAT. ADOLPHE THIERS. (_By permission of the Artist._)] The great engraver _Gaillard_ brought Hans Holbein once more into honour. He was the heir of that method of painting, the eternal matrix of which Jan van Eyck left to the world in unapproachable perfection. His energetic but conscientiously minute brush noted every wrinkle of the face, without doing injury to the total impression by this labour of detail. Indeed, his pictures are as great in conception and as powerful in characterisation as they are small in size. Gaillard is a profound physiognomist who attained the most vivid analysis of character by means of the utmost precision. _Paul Dubois_ takes us across the Alps; in his portraits he is the same great quattrocentist that he was from the beginning in his plastic works. His ground is that of the excellent and subtle period when Leonardo, who had been in the beginning somewhat arid, grew delicate and allowed a mysterious sphinx-like smile to play round the lips of his women. Manifestly he has studied Prudhon and had much intercourse with Henner in those years when the latter, after his return from Italy, directed attention once more to the old Lombards. From the time when he made his début in 1879, with the portrait of his sons, he received great encouragement, and stands out in these days as the most mature painter of women that the present age has to show. Only the great English portrait painters Watts and Millais, who are inferior to him in technique, have excelled him in the embodiment of personalities. As the most skilful painter of drapery, the most brilliant decorator of feminine beauty, _Carolus Duran_ was long celebrated. The studies which he had made in Italy had not caused him to forget that he took his origin from across the Flemish border; and when he appeared with his first portraits, in the beginning of the seventies, it was believed that an eminent colourist had been born to French painting. At that time he had a fine feeling for the eternal feminine and its transitory phases of expression, and he was as dexterous in seizing a fleeting gesture or a turn of the head as he was in the management of drapery and the play of its hues. Then, again, he made a gradual transition from delicate and discreetly coquettish works to the crude arts of upholstery. Yet even in his last period he has painted some masculine portraits--those of Pasteur, and of the painters Français, Fritz Thaulow, and René Billotte--which are striking in their vigorous simplicity and unforced characterisation after the glaring virtuosity of his pictures of women. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BONNAT. VICTOR HUGO. (_By permission of the Artist._)] _Léon Bonnat_, the pupil of Madrazos, brought about the fruitful connection between French painting and that of the old Spaniards. By this a large quantity of the fresh blood of naturalism was poured into it once more. Born in the South of France and educated in Spain, he had conceived there a special enthusiasm for Ribera, and these youthful impressions were so powerful that he remained faithful to them in Paris. As early as his residence in Italy, which included the three years from 1858 to 1860, his individuality had been fortified in a degree which prevented him from wasting himself on large academical compositions like the holders of the _Prix de Rome_; on the contrary, he painted scenes from the varied life of the Roman people. Several religious pictures, such as "The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew" (1863), "Saint Vincent de Paul" (1866), and the "Job" of the Luxembourg, showed that he was steadily progressing on the road paved by Spagnoletto. He had a virtuosity in conjuring on to the canvas visages furrowed by the injustices of life--grey hair, waving grey beards, and the starting sinews and muscles of old weather-beaten frames. In the beginning of the seventies, when he had to paint a Crucifixion for the jury-chamber in the Paris Palais de Justice, he executed a virile figure, the muscles and anatomy of which were as clearly marked as the buttresses in a Gothic cathedral. As in the paintings of Caravaggio, a sharp, glaring light fell upon certain parts of the body, whilst others remained dark and colourless in the gloomy background. He applied the same principles to his portraits. A French Lenbach, he painted in France a gallery of celebrated men. With an almost tangible reality he painted Hugo, Madame Pasta, Dumas, Gounod, Thiers, Grévy, Pasteur, Puvis de Chavannes, Jules Ferry, Carnot, Cardinal Lavigerie, and others. Over two hundred persons, famous or not, have sat to him, and he has painted them with an exceedingly intelligent power, masculine taste, and a learning which never loses itself in unnecessary detail. [Illustration: _L'Art._ ANTOINE VOLLON.] The delicate physiognomy of women, the _frou-frou_ of exquisite toilettes, the dreaminess, the fragrance, the coquetry of the modern Sphinx, were no concern of his. On the other hand, his masculine portraits will always keep their interest, if only on historical grounds. In all of them he laid great stress on characteristic accessories, and could indicate in the simplest way the thinker, the musician, the scholar, and the statesman. One remembers his pictures as though they were phrases uttered with conviction, though a German does not hesitate to place Lenbach far above Bonnat as a psychologist. The latter has not the power of seizing the momentary effect, the intimacy, the personal note, the palpitating life peculiar to Lenbach. With the intention of saying all things he often forgets the most important--the spirit of the man and the grace of the woman. His pictures are great pieces of still-life--exceedingly conscientious, but having something of the conscientiousness of an actuary copying a tedious protocol. The portrait of Léon Cogniet, the teacher of the master, with his aged face, his spectacled eyes, and his puckered hands (Musée Luxembourg), is perhaps the only likeness in which Bonnat rivals Lenbach in depth of characterisation. His pictorial strength is always worthy of respect; but, for the sake of variety, the _esprit_ is for once on the side of the German. Ruled by a passion for the Spanish masters, such as Bonnat possessed, _Roybet_ painted cavaliers of the seventeenth century, and other historical pictures of manners, which are distinguished, to their advantage, from older pictures of their type, because it is not the historical anecdote but the pictorial idea which is their basis. All the earlier painters were rather bent upon archæological accuracy than on pictorial charm in the treatment of such themes. Roybet revelled in the rich hues of old costumes, and sometimes attained, before he strained his talent in the Procrustean bed of pictures of great size, a bloom and a strong, glowing tone which rival the old masters. [Illustration: _L'Art._ VOLLON. A CARNIVAL SCENE.] In all periods which have learnt to see the world through a pictorial medium, still-life has held an important place in the practice of art. A technical instinct, which is in itself art, delights in investing musical instruments, golden and silver vessels, fruit and other eatables, glasses and goblets, coverings of precious work, gauntlets and armour, all imaginable _petit-riens_, with an artistic magic, in recognising and executing pictorial problems everywhere. After the transition from historical and _genre_ painting had been made to painting proper there once more appeared great painters of still-life in France as there did in Chardin's days. Yet _Blaise Desgoffe_, who painted piecemeal and with laborious patience goldsmith's work, crystal vases, Venetian glass, and such things, is certainly rather petty. In France he was the chief representative of that precise and detailed painting which understands by art a deceptive imitation of objects, and sees its end attained when the holiday public gathers round the pictures as the birds gathered round the grapes of Zeuxis. It is as if an old master had revived in _Philippe Rousseau_. He had the same earnest qualities as the Dutch and Flemish Classic masters--a broad, liquid, pasty method of execution, a fine harmony of clear and powerful tones--and with all this a marvellous address in so composing objects that no trace of "composition" is discernible. His work arose from the animal picture. His painting of dogs and cats is to be ranked with the best of the century. He makes a fourth with Gillot, Chardin, and Decamps, the great painters of monkeys. As a decorator of genius, like Hondekoeter, he embellished a whole series of dining-halls with splendidly coloured representations of poultry, and, like Snyders, he heaped together game, dead and living fowl, fruit, lobsters, and oysters into huge life-size masses of still-life. Behind them the cook may be seen, and thievish cats steal around. But, like Kalf, he has also painted, with an exquisite feeling for colour, Japanese porcelain bowls with bunches of grapes, quinces, and apricots, metal and ivory work, helmets and fiddles, against that delicate grey-brown-green tone of background which Chardin loved. [Illustration: _L'Art._ BONVIN. THE COOK.] _Antoine Vollon_ became the greatest painter of still-life in the century. Indeed, Vollon is as broad and nervous as Desgoffe is precise and pedantic. Flowers, fruit, and fish--they are all painted in with a firm hand, and shine out of the dark background with a full liquid freshness of colour. He paints dead salt-water fish like Abraham van Beyeren, grapes and crystal goblets like Davids de Heem, dead game like Frans Snyders, skinned pigs like Rembrandt and Maes. He is a master in the representation of freshly gathered flowers, delicate vegetables, copper kettles, weapons, and suits of armour. Since Chardin no painter depicted the qualities of the skin of fresh fruit, its life and its play of colour, and the moist bloom that rests upon it, with such fidelity to nature. His fish in particular will always remain the wonder of all painters and connoisseurs. But landscapes, Dutch canal views, and figure-pictures are also to be found amongst his works. He has painted everything that is picturesque, and the history of art must do him honour as, in a specifically pictorial sense, one of the greatest in the century. A soft grey-brown wainscoting, a black and white Pierrot costume, and a white table-cloth and dark green vegetables--such is the harmony of colour which he chiefly loved in his figure-pictures. On the same purely pictorial grounds nuns became very popular in painting, as their white hoods and collars standing out against a black dress gave the opportunity for such a fine effect of tone. This was the province in which poor _François Bonvin_ laboured. Deriving from the Dutch, he conceived an enthusiasm for work, silence, the subdued shining of light in interiors, cold days, the slow movements and peaceful faces of nuns, and painted kitchen scenes with a strong personal accent. Before he took up painting he was for a long time a policeman, and was employed in taking charge of the markets. Here he acquired an eye for the picturesqueness of juicy vegetables, white collars, and white hoods, and when he had a day free he studied Lenain and Chardin in the Louvre. Bonvin's pictures have no anecdotic purport. Drinkers, cooks, orphan children in the schoolroom, sempstresses, choristers, sisters of mercy, boys reading, women in church, nuns conducting a sewing-class--Bonvin's still, picturesque, congenial world is made up of elements such as these. What his people may think or do is no matter: they are only meant to create an effect as pictorial tones in space. During his journey to Holland he had examined Metsu, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hoogh, Terborg, and Van der Meer with an understanding for their merits, but it was Chardin in both his phases--as painter of still-life and of familiar events--who was in a special sense revived in Bonvin. All his pictures are simple and quiet; his figures are peaceful in their expression, and have an easy geniality of pose; his hues have a beauty and fulness of tone recalling the old masters. [Illustration: _L'Art._ BONVIN. THE WORK-ROOM.] Even _Théodule Ribot_, the most eminent of the group, one of the most dexterous executants of the French school, a master who for power of expression is worthy of being placed between Frans Hals and Ribera, made a beginning with still-life. He was born in 1823, in a little town of the department of Eure. Early married and poor, he supported himself at first by painting frames for a firm of mirror manufacturers, and only reserved the hours of the evening for his artistic labours. In particular he is said to have accustomed himself to work whole nights through by lamplight, while he nursed his wife during a long illness, watching at her bedside. The lamplight intensified the contrasts of light and shadow. Thus Ribot's preference for concentrated light and strong shadows is partially due, in all probability, to what he had gone through in his life, and in later days Ribera merely bestowed upon him a benediction as his predecessor in the history of art. [Illustration: RIBOT. THE STUDIO.] His first pictures from the years 1861 to 1865 were, for the most part, scenes from household and kitchen life: cooks, as large as life, plucking poultry, setting meat before the fire, scouring vessels, or tasting sauces; sometimes, also, figures in the streets; but even here there was a strong accentuation of the element of still-life. There were men with cooking utensils, food, dead birds, and fish. Then after 1865 there followed a number of religious pictures which, in their hard, peasant-like veracity and their impressive, concentrated life, stood in the most abrupt contrast with the conventionally idealised figures of the academicians. His "Jesus in the Temple," no less than "Saint Sebastian" and "The Good Samaritan"--all three in the Musée Luxembourg--are works of simple and forceful grandeur, and have a thrilling effect which almost excites dismay. Sebastian is no smiling saint gracefully embellished with wounds, but a suffering man, with the blood streaming from his veins, stretched upon the earth; yet half-raising himself, a cry of agony upon his lips, and his whole body contorted by spasms of pain. In his "Jesus in the Temple," going on parallel lines with Menzel, he proclaims the doctrine that it is only possible to pour new life-blood into traditional figures by a tactful choice of models from popular life around. And in "The Good Samaritan," also, he was only concerned to paint, with naturalistic force, the body of a wounded man lying in the street, a thick-set French peasant robbed of his clothes. From the seventies his specialty was heads--separate figures of weather-beaten old folk, old women knitting or writing, old men reading or lost in thought; and these will always be ranked with the greatest masterpieces of the century. Ribot attains a remarkable effect when he paints those expressive faces of his, which seem to follow you with their looks, and are thrown out from the darkness of his canvas. A black background, in which the dark dresses of his figures are insensibly lost, a luminous head with such eyes as no one of the century has ever painted, wrinkled skin and puckered old hands rising from somewhere--one knows not whence--these are things which all lend his figures something phantasmal, superhuman, and ghostly. Ribot is the great king of the under-world, to which a sunbeam only penetrates by stealth. Before his pictures one has the sense of wandering in a deep, deep shaft of some mine, where all is dark and only now and then a lantern glimmers. No artist, not even Ribera, has been a better painter of old people, and only Velasquez has painted children who have such sparkling life. Ribot worked in Colombes, near Paris, to which place he had early withdrawn, in a barn where only tiny dormer-windows let in two sharp rays of light. [Illustration: _L'Art._ RIBOT. AT A NORMAN INN.] By placing his canvas beneath one window and his model beneath the other, in a dim light which allowed only one golden ray to fall upon the face, he isolated it completely from its surroundings, and in this way painted the parts illuminated with the more astonishing effect. No one had the same power in modelling a forehead, indicating the bones beneath the flesh, and rendering all the subtleties of skin. A terrible and intense life is in his figures. His old beggars and sailors especially have something kingly in the grand style of their noble and quiet faces. An old master with a powerful technique, a painter of the force and health of Jordaens, has manifested himself once more in Ribot. [Illustration: _L'Art._ RIBOT. KEEPING ACCOUNTS.] Courbet's principles, accordingly, had won all down the line, in the course of a few years. "It is only Ribera, Zurbaran, and Velasquez that I admire; Ostade and Craesbeeck also allure me; and for Holbein I feel veneration. As for M. Raphael, there is no doubt that he has painted some interesting portraits, but I cannot find any ideas in him." In these words he had prophesied as early as 1855 the course which French art would take in the next decade. When Courbet appeared the grand painting stood in thraldom to the _beauté suprême_, and the æsthetic conceptions of the time affected the treatment of contemporary subjects. Artists had not realism enough to give truth and animation to these themes. When Cabanel, Hamon, and Bouguereau occasionally painted beggars and orphans, they were bloodless phantoms, because by beautifying the figures they deprived them of character in the effort to give them, approximately, the forms of historical painting. Because painters did not regard their own epoch, because they had been accustomed to consider living beings merely as elements of the second and third rank, they never discovered the distinctiveness of their essential life. Like a traveller possessed by one fixed mania, they made a voyage round the world, thinking only how they might adapt living forms to those which their traditional training recommended as peculiarly right and alone worthy of art. Even portrait painting was dominated by this false method, of rendering figures as types, of improving the features and the contour of bodies, and giving men the external appearance of fair, ideal figures. But now the sway of the Cinquecento has been finally broken. A fresh breeze of realism from across the Pyrenees has taken the place of the sultry Italian sirocco. From the pictures of the Neapolitans, the Spaniards, and the Dutch it has been learnt that the joys and sorrows of the people are just as capable of representation as the actions of gods and heroes, and under the influence of these views a complete change in the cast has taken place. [Illustration: _L'Art._ RIBOT. ST. SEBASTIAN, MARTYR.] The figures which in 1855 filled Courbet's picture "The Studio"--beggar-women, agricultural labourers, artisans, sailors, tippling soldiers, buxom girls, porters, rough members of the proletariat of uncouth stature--now crowd the stage of French art, and impart even to the heroes of history, bred through centuries from degenerated gods, something of their full-blooded, rough, hearty, and plebeian force of life. The artists of Italian taste only gave the rights of citizenship to "universal forms"; every reminiscence of national customs or of local character was counted vulgar; they did not discover the gold of beauty in the rich mines of popular life, but in the classic masters of foreign race. But now even what is unearthly is translated into the terms of earth. If religious pictures are to be painted, artists take men from the people for their model, as Caravaggio did before them--poor old peasants with bones of iron, and bronzed, weather-beaten faces, porters with figures bowed and scarred by labour, men of rough, common nature, though of gnarled and sinewy muscles. The pictures of martyrs, once artificial compositions of beautiful gesture and vacant, generalised countenances, receive a tone local to the scaffold, a trait of merciless veracity--the heads the energy of a relief, the gestures force and impressiveness, the bodies a science in their modelling which would have rejoiced Ribera. As Caravaggio said that the more wrinkles his model had the more he liked him, so no one is any longer repelled by horny hands, tattered rags, and dirty feet. In the good periods of art it is well known that the beauty or uncomeliness of a work has nothing to do with the beauty or uncomeliness of the model, and that the most hideous cripple can afford an opportunity for making the most beautiful work. The old doctrine of Leonardo, that every kind of painting is portrait painting, and that the best artists are those who can imitate nature in the most convincing way, comes once more into operation. The apotheosis of the model has taken the place of idealism. And during these same years England reached a similar goal by another route. BIBLIOGRAPHY BIBLIOGRAPHY