Artists Past and Present Part 2

IV

ALFRED STEVENS

An exhibition of the paintings of Alfred Stevens was held in April and May, 1907, at the city of Brussels, and later in May and in June at the city of Antwerp. The collection comprised examples from the museums at Brussels, Antwerp, Paris and Ma.r.s.eilles, and from the galleries of many private owners. It was representative in the fullest sense of the word, showing the literal tendencies of the artist's youth in such pictures as _Les Cha.s.seurs de Vincennes_ (1855) tightly painted, conscientiously modeled, with only the deep, resonant red of a woman's cape to indicate the magnificent color-sense soon to be revealed; or _Le Convalescent_, in which the two sympathetic women hovering over the languid young man in a Paris drawing-room are photographically true to the life of the time, without, however, conveying its spiritual or intellectual expression; showing also the rich and grave middle period in which beauty of face and form and the charm of elegant accessories are rendered with singular intensity and perfect sincerity; as in _Les Visiteuses_, _Desesperee_, etc.; and, finally, showing the psychological synthesis of the later years, which reveals itself in such works as _Un Sphinx Parisien_, baffling in its fixed introspective gaze, and executed with an impeccable technique.

Many of the early pictures have a joyousness of frank workmanship, a directness of attack and a simplicity of arrangement that appeal to the world at large more freely than the subtler blonde harmonies of the later years. The _Profil de Femme_ (1855) in which M. Lambotte discerns the influence of Rembrandt, is more suggestive to the present writer of familiarity with Courbet's bold, heavy impasto and sharp transitions from light to shadow. The _Reverie_ of the preceding year has also its suggestions of Courbet, in spite of the delicately painted flowers in the j.a.panese vase; but in the pictures of the next few years, the robust freshness of the painter's Flemish vision finds expression in color-schemes that resemble nothing so much as the gardens of Belgium in springtime, filled with hardy blossoms and tended by skillful hands; _La Consolation_ of 1857, for example, in which the two black-robed women form the heavy note of dead color against which are relieved the pink and white of their companion's gown, the pale yellow of the wall, the blue of the floor and the low, softly brilliant tones of the beautiful tapestry curtain. Another painting of about the same time has almost the charm of Fantin-Latour's early renderings of serious women bending over their books or their sewing. In _La Liseuse_ the girl's face is absorbed and thoughtful, the color harmony is quiet, the white dress, the dull red of the chair, the blue and yellow and green wools on the table, forming a pattern of closely related tones as various in its unity as the motley border of an old-fashioned dooryard. In other examples we have reminiscences of that time of excitement and esthetic riot when the silks and porcelains and enamels of the Far East came into the Paris of artists and artisans and formed at once a part of the baggage of the Parisian atelier. _L'Inde a Paris_ is a particularly delightful reflection of this period of "Chinoiseries." It depicts a young woman in a black gown of the type that Millais loved, leaning forward with both hands on a table covered with an Indian drapery. On the table stands the miniature figure of an elephant. The background is of the strong green so often used by Manet and the varied pattern of the table cover gives opportunity for a.s.sembling a number of rich and vivid yet quiet hues in an intricate and interesting color composition.

_La Parisienne j.a.ponaise_ is a subject of the kind that enlisted Whistler's interest during the sixties--a handsome girl in a blue silk kimono embroidered with white and yellow flowers, and a green sash, looks into a mirror that reflects a yellow background and a vase of flowers. The colors are said to have faded and changed, to the complete demoralization of the color-scheme, but it is still a picture of winning charm, less reserved and dignified than Whistler's _Lange Leizen_ of 1864, but with pa.s.sages of subtle color and a just relation of values that have survived the encroachments of time.

From a very early period Stevens adopted the camel's-hair shawl with its multi-colored border as the model for his palette and the chief decoration of his picture. It is easier, says one of his French critics, to enumerate the paintings in which such a shawl does not appear than those in which it does. It slips from the shoulders of the _Desesperee_ and forms a wonderful contrast to the smooth fair neck and arm relieved against it; it is the magnificent background of the voluminous gauzy robe in _Une Douloureuse Cert.i.tude_; it falls over the chair in which the young mother sits nursing her baby in _Tous les Bonheurs_; it hangs in the corners of studios, it is gracefully worn by fashionable visitors in fashionable drawing-rooms; its foundation color is cream or red or a deep and tender yellow as soft as that of a tea-rose; it determines the harmony of the colored silks and bric-a-brac which are in its vicinity, it rules its surroundings with a truly oriental splendor, and it gives to the work in which it plays so prominent a part an individuality supplementary to the artist's own. It is as important as the rugs in the pictures of Vermeer of Delft or Gerard Terborch.

[Ill.u.s.tration: L'ATELIER

_From a painting by Alfred Stevens_]

The silks and muslins of gowns and scarves are also important accessories in these pictures which have a modernity not unlike that of the pictures of Velasquez, in which the ugliness of contemporary fashions turns to beauty under the learned rendering of textures and surfaces. Bibelots and furnishings, wall-hangings, pictures, rugs, polished floors, gla.s.s and silver and china and jewels are all likewise pressed into the service of an art that used what lay nearest to it, not for the purposes of realism but for the enchantment of the vision. M.

Lambotte has pointed out that Stevens introduced mirrors, crystals and porcelains into his canva.s.ses with the same intention as that of the landscape-painter who makes choice of a subject with a river, lake or pond, knowing that clear reflections and smooth surface aid in giving the effect of distance and intervening atmosphere. The same writer has told us that so far from reproducing the ordinary costumes of his period Stevens took pains to seek exclusive and elegant examples, _chefs d'oeuvres_ of the dressmaker's art, and that such were put at his service by the great ladies of the second empire. The beautiful muslin over-dress of the _Dame en Rose_ is perhaps the one that most taxed his flexible brush. It is diaphanous in texture, elaborately cut and trimmed with delicate laces and embroideries, and the rose of the under-robe, the snowy white of the muslin, the silver ornaments and the pale blonde hair of the wearer make the lightest and daintiest of harmonies accentuated by the black of the lacquer cabinet with its brilliant polychromatic insets.

Unlike Whistler, Stevens never abandoned the rich and complicated color arrangements of his youth for an austere and restricted palette. He nevertheless was at his best when his picture was dominated by a single color, as in the wonderful _Fedora_ of 1882 or _La Tricoteuse_. In the former the warmly tinted hair and deep yellow fan are the vibrant notes, the creamy dress, the white flowers, the silver bracelet, and the white b.u.t.terfly making an _ensemble_ like a golden wheatfield swept by pale lights. The piquant note of contrast is given by the blue insolent eyes and the hardly deeper blue blossoms of the love-in-a-mist held in the languid hands.

In _La Tricoteuse_ the composition of colors is much the same--a creamy white dress with gray shadows, reddish yellow hair, and a bit of blue knitting with the addition of a sharp line of red made by the signature.

There is no austerity in these vaporous glowing arrangements of a single color. They are as near to the portraiture of full sunlight as pigment has been able to approach and if it can be said that Whistler has "painted the soul of color," it certainly can be said that Stevens here has painted its embodied life. For the most part we have, however, to think of Alfred Stevens as a portraitist of the ponderable world; a Flemish lover of brilliant appearances, a scrupulous translator of the language of visible things into the idiom of art. In the picture ent.i.tled _L'Atelier_, which we reproduce, is a more or less significant instance of his artistic veracity. On the crowded wall, forming the background against which is seen the model's charming profile, is a picture which obviously is a copy of the painting of _La Fuite en Egypte_ by Breughel. Two versions of the same subject, one, the original by Breughel the elder, the other, a copy by his son, now hang in the Brussels Museum, alike in composition but differing in tone, the son's copy having apparently been left in an unfinished condition with the brown underpainting visible throughout. That this, and not the elder Breughel's, is the original of the picture in Steven's _L'Atelier_ is clear at the first glance, the warm tonality having been accurately reproduced and even the drawing of the tree branches, which differs much in the two museum pictures having conformed precisely to that in the copy by the younger Breughel. It is by this accuracy of touch, this respect for differences of texture and material, this recognition of the part played in the ensemble by insignificant detail, this artistic conscience, in a word, that Stevens demonstrates his descent from the great line of Flemish painters and makes good their tradition in modern life. Many of his sayings are expressive of his personal att.i.tude toward art. For example:

"It is first of all necessary to be a painter. No one is wholly an artist who is not a perfect workman."

"When your right hand becomes too facile--more facile than the thought that guides it, use the left hand."

"Do not put into a picture too many things which attract attention. When every one speaks at once no one is heard."

Concerning technique, he says to his pupils: "Paint quant.i.ties of flowers. It is excellent practice. Use the palette knife to unite and smooth the color, efface with the knife the traces of the brush. When one paints with a brush the touches seen through a magnifying gla.s.s are streaked with light and shade because of the hairs of the brush. The use of the palette knife renders these strokes as smooth as marble, the shadows have disappeared. The material brought together renders the tone more beautiful. Marble has never an ugly tone."

"One may use impasto, but not everywhere. Your brush should be handled with reference to the character of what you are copying ... do not forget that an apple is smooth. I should like to see you model a billiard ball. Train yourself to have a true eye."

These are precepts that might be given by any good painter, but few of the moderns could more justly claim to have practiced all that they preached.

As a creative artist Stevens had his limitations. His lineal arrangements are seldom entirely fortunate and his compositions, despite the skill with which the given s.p.a.ce is filled, lack except in rare instances the serenity of less crowded canva.s.ses. He invariably strove to gain atmosphere by his choice and treatment of accessories but he rarely used the delicate device of elimination. Nevertheless he was a great painter and a great Belgian, untrammeled by foreign influences. He not only drank from his own gla.s.s but he drank from it the rich old wines of his native country.

A SKETCH IN OUTLINE OF JACQUES CALLOT

V

A SKETCH IN OUTLINE OF JACQUES CALLOT

In the Print Room of the New York Public Library are a large number of etchings by Jacques Callot, which are a mine of wealth to the painter-etcher of to-day, curious of the methods of his predecessors.

Looking at the portrait of Callot in which he appears at the height of his brief career with well formed, gracious features, ardent eyes, a bearing marked by serenity and distinction, an expression both grave and genial, the observer inevitably must ask: "Is this the creator of that grotesque manner of drawing which for nearly three centuries has borne his name, the artist of the _Balli_, the _Gobbi_, the _Beggars_?" In this dignified, imaginative countenance we have no hint of Callot's tremendous curiosity regarding the most fantastic side of the fantastic times in which he lived. We see him in the role least emphasized by his admirers, although that to which the greater number of his working years were dedicated: the role, that is, of moralist, philosopher and historian, one deeply impressed by the sufferings and cruelties of which he became a sorrowful critic.

There surely never was an artist whose life and environment were more faithfully ill.u.s.trated by his art. To know one is to know the other, at least as they appear from the outside, for with Callot, as with the less veracious and ingenuous Watteau, it is the external aspect of things that we get and from which we must form our inferences. Only in his selection of his subjects do we find the preoccupation of his mind; in his rendering he is detached and impersonal, helping us out at times in our knowledge of his mental att.i.tude with such quaint rhymes as those accompanying _Les Grandes Miseres de la Guerre_, but chiefly confining his hand to the representation of forms, relations and distances, with as little concern as possible for the expression of his own temperament, or for psychological portraiture of any sort.

In the little history, more or less authenticated, of his eventful youth is the key to his charm as an artist, a charm the essence of which is freedom, an easy, informal way of looking at the visible world, a light abandon in the method of reproducing it, an independence of the tool or medium, resulting in art which, despite its minuteness of detail, seems to "happen" as Whistler has said all true art must. The beginning was distinctly picturesque, befitting a nature to which the world at first unfolded itself as a great Gothic picturebook filled with strange, eccentric and misshapen figures.

One spring day in 1604, a band of Bohemians, such as are described in Gautier's _Le Capitaine Fraca.s.se_, might have been seen journeying through the smiling country of Lorraine on their way to Florence to be present there at the great Fair of the Madonna. No gipsy caravan of to-day would so much as suggest that bizarre and irresponsible company of men, women, and children, clad in motley rags, some in carts, some trudging on foot, some mounted on a.s.ses or horses rivaling Rosinante in bony ugliness, the men armed with lance, cutla.s.s and rifle, a cask of wine strapped to the back of one, a lamb in the arms of another. A couple of the swarming children were decked out with cooking utensils, an iron pot for a hat, a turnspit for a cane, a gridiron hanging in front ap.r.o.n wise. Chickens, ducks, and other barnyard plunder testified to the marauding course of the troop whose advent at an inn was the signal for terrified flight on the part of the inmates. The camp by night, if no shelter were at hand, was in the forest, where the travelers tied their awnings to the branches of trees, built their fires, dressed their stolen meats, and lived so far as they could accomplish it on the fat of the land--for the most part of their way a rich and lovely land of vine-clad hills and opulent verdure.

The period was lavish in curious gay figures to set against the peaceful background of the landscape. Strolling players of the open-air theaters, jugglers, fortune-tellers, acrobats, Pierrots, and dancers amused the pleasure-loving people. The band of Bohemians just described was but one of many. Its peculiarity consisted in the presence among its members of a singularly fair and spirited child, about twelve years of age, whose alert face and gentle manner indicated an origin unmistakably above that of his companions. This was little Jacques Callot, son of Renee Brunehault and Jean Callot, and grandson of the grandniece of the Maid of Orleans, whose self-reliant temper seems to have found its way to this remote descendant.

Already determined to be an artist, he had left home with almost no money in his pocket and without the consent of his parents, set upon finding his way to Rome, where one of his playfellows--the Israel Henriet, "_son ami_," whose name is seen upon so many of the later Callot prints--was studying.

Falling in with the gipsies, he traveled with them for six or eight weeks, receiving impressions of a flexible, wanton, vagabond life that were never entirely to lose their influence upon his talent, although his most temperate and scholarly biographer, M. Meaume, finds little of Bohemianism in his subsequent manner of living. Felibien records that according to Callot's own account, when he found himself in such wicked company, "he lifted his heart to G.o.d and prayed for grace not to join in the disgusting debauchery that went on under his eyes." He added also that he always asked G.o.d to guide him and to give him grace to be a good man, beseeching Him that he might excel in whatever profession he should embrace, and that he "might live to be forty-three years old." Strangely enough this most explicit prayer was granted to the letter, and was a prophecy in outline of his future.

Arriving in Florence with his friends the Bohemians, fortune seemed about to be gracious to him. His delicate face with its indefinable suggestions of good breeding attracted the attention of an officer of the Duke, who took the first step toward fulfilling his ambition by placing him with the painter and engraver, Canta Gallina, who taught him design and gave him lessons in the use of the burin. His taste was already for oddly formed or grotesque figures, and to counteract this tendency Gallina had him copy the most beautiful works of the great masters.

Possibly this conventional beginning palled upon his boyish spirit, or he may merely have been impatient to reach Israel and behold with his own eyes the golden city described in his friend's letters. At all events, he shortly informed his master that he must leave him and push on to Rome. Gallina was not lacking in sympathy, for he gave his pupil a mule and a purse and plenty of good advice, and started him on his journey.

Stopping at Siena, Callot gained his first notion of the style, later to become so indisputably his own, from Duccio's mosaics, the pure unshadowed outline of which he bore in mind when he dismissed shading and cross-hatching from the marvelously expressive little figures that throng his prints. He had hardly entered Rome, however, when some merchants from the town of Nancy, his birthplace, recognized him and bore him, protesting, back to his home.

Once more he ran away, this time taking the route to Italy through Savoy and leading adventurous days. In Turin he was met by his elder brother and again ignominiously returned to his parents. But his persistence was not to go unrewarded. The third time that he undertook to seek the light burning for him in the city of art, he went with his father's blessing, in the suite of the amba.s.sador dispatched to the Pope by the new duke, Henry II.

It is said that a portrait of Charles the Bold, engraved by Jacques from a painting, was what finally turned the scale in favor of his studying seriously with the purpose of making art his profession. He had gained smatterings of knowledge, so far as the use of his tools went, from Dumange Crocq, an engraver and Master of the Mint to the Duke of Lorraine, and from his friend Israel's father, chief painter to Charles III. He had the habit also of sketching on the spot whatever happened to attract his attention.

In truth he had lost but little time. At the age of seventeen he was at work, and very hard at work, in Rome under Tempesta. Money failing him, he became apprenticed to Philippe Thoma.s.sin, a French engraver, who turned out large numbers of rubbishy prints upon which his apprentices were employed at so much a day. Some three years spent in this fashion taught Callot less art than skill in the manipulation of his instruments. Much of his early work is buried in the ma.s.s of Thoma.s.sin's production, and such of it as can be identified is poor and trivial. His precocity was not the indication of rapid progress. His drawing was feeble and was almost entirely confined to copying until 1616, when, at the age of twenty-four, he began regularly to engrave his own designs, and to show the individuality of treatment and the abundant fancy that promptly won for him the respect of his contemporaries.

While he was in Thoma.s.sin's studio, it is reported that his bright charm of face and manner gained him the liking of Thoma.s.sin's young wife--much nearer in age to Callot than to her husband--and the jealousy of his master. He presently left the studio and Rome as well, never to return to either. It is the one misadventure suggestive of erratic tendencies admitted to Callot's story by M. Meaume, although other biographers have thrown over his life in Italy a sufficiently lurid light, hinting at revelries and vagaries and lawless impulses unrestrained. If, indeed, the brilliant frivolity of Italian society at that time tempted him during his early manhood, it could only have been for a brief s.p.a.ce of years. After he was thirty all unquestionably was labor and quietness.

From Rome he went to Florence, taking with him some of the plates he recently had engraved. These at once found favor in the eyes of Cosimo II, of the Medici then ruling over Tuscany, and Callot was attached to his person and given a pension and quarters in what was called, "the artist's gallery." At the same time he began to study under the then famous Jules Parigi, and renewed his acquaintance with his old friend Canta Gallina, meeting in their studios the most eminent artists of the day--the bright day not yet entirely faded of the later Renaissance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTRAIT OF JACQUES CALLOT

_Engraved by Vosterman after the painting of Van Dyck_]

Still his work was copying and engraving from the drawings of others.

Had he been under a master less interested and sympathetic than the good Parigi, it is possible that his peculiar talent would never have declared itself. At all events, Parigi urged him, and the urging seems to have been necessary, to improve his drawing, to drop the burin and study the great masters. Especially Parigi prayed him to cultivate his precious talent for designing on a very small scale the varied and complicated compositions with which his imagination teemed. His taste for whatever was fantastic and irregular in aspect had not been destroyed by his study of the beautiful. The Bohemian side of human nature, the only nature for which he cared, still fascinated his mind, whether it had or had not any influence upon his activities, and Parigi's remonstrances were silenced by his appreciation of the comic wit sparkling in his pupil's sketches.

We see little of Callot among his friends of this period, but the glimpses we get reveal a lovable and merry youth in whose nature is a strain of st.u.r.dy loyalty, ardent in work and patient in seeking perfectness in each individual task undertaken, but with a curious contrasting impatience as well, leading him frequently to drop one thing for another, craving the relaxation of change. An anecdote is told of him that ill.u.s.trates the sweet-tempered blitheness of spirit with which he quickly won affection.

In copying a head he had fallen into an error common among those who draw most successfully upon a small scale, he had made it much too large. His fellow-students were prompt to seize the opportunity of jeering at him, and he at once improvised a delightful crowd of impish creatures on the margin of his drawing, dancing and pointing at it in derision.

His progress under Parigi's wise instruction was marked, but it was four years after his arrival in Florence before he began to engrave to any extent from his own designs. In the meantime, he had studied architecture and aerial and linear perspective, and had made innumerable pen and pencil drawings from nature. He had also begun to practice etching, attaining great dexterity in the use of the needle and in the employment of acids.

In 1617--then twenty-five years old--he produced the series of plates which he rightly deemed the first ripe fruits of his long toil in the domain of art. These were the delightful _Capricci di varie figure_ in which his individuality shone resplendent. They reproduced the spectacle of Florence as it might then have been seen by any wayfarer; street people, soldiers, officers, honest tradesmen and rogues, mandolin players, loiterers of the crossways and bridges, turnpike-keepers, cut-throats, buffoons and comedians, grimacing pantaloons, fops, coquettes, country scenes, a faithful and brilliant study of the time, the manners, and the place. Parigi was enthusiastic and advised his pupil to dedicate the plates to the brother of the Grand Duke.