Artists Past and Present Part 4

[Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy of Berlin Photographic Company.

SASKIA

_From a portrait by Rembrandt_]

To Rembrandt's early years also are ascribed certain careful studies of old men's heads and several portraits of younger men. Among these are one of the writing-master Coppenol and one of the poet Krul, the former painted in 1632, the latter in 1633. The Krul portrait is the more striking of the two, and the pictorial costume with the broad hat casting its lucent shadow over the fine brow, the silken jacket with its gleaming reflections and the wide white ruffles at neck and sleeve on which the light blazes full, adds to the dignity and richness of the effect. It is easy, however, to agree with Dr. Voll in ranking the splendid portrait of an unknown man, of some five or six years later date, far above the Krul portrait in artistic quality. Although excessively warm in tone it has in addition to excellent construction and a lifelike aspect a n.o.bility of bearing that imposes itself directly and irresistibly upon the spectator.

The portrait of Coppenol is not easily a.n.a.lyzed and Dr. Bode notes that the likeness to the authenticated portraits of the famous drawing master is not altogether convincing. Simpler and homelier in appearance than the portrait of Krul, this solid and even heavy figure seated comfortably in an armchair, the well-drawn hands busy with mending a quill pen, the glance reflective, but hardly thoughtful, the mouth under the small fair moustache slightly indeterminate, the head covered with short hair, the smooth fat face three-quarters in light, presents at first glance a commonplace aspect enough. But returning to it from the Krul or even from the more masterly later portrait, the spectator is certain to be deeply impressed by the quiet yet searching execution that takes account of every significant change in plane or outline in the large cheek and full chin. From the very commonplace of the pose and type one gains a special pleasure, since the power of the artist to irradiate an ordinary subject is the more clearly seen. The serene light enveloping the good head and falling gently on the background brings no thought of method or pigment to the mind, and the fleshlike quality of the face and hands is as near imitation of reality as is possible within the bounds of synthetic art. It is easy to agree with Dr. Bode's opinion that the homely simple portraits painted in ordinary costume and under ordinary conditions of light during Rembrandt's first three years in Amsterdam are intellectually more worth while than the earlier more personal works. The theory is that he turned them out in compet.i.tion with his contemporaries and eclipsed them on their own ground.

The portrait of "Rembrandt's Father in Indoor Dress," of the preceding year (1631), is in a quite different manner, and closely resembles the painting in Boston of an old man with downcast eyes, from the same model. The bald head and scanty beard, the wrinkled face and slightly uncertain mouth, are familiar to all students of Rembrandt's art. In 1631 Rembrandt was still in his father's house and one gains some notion of the old miller's amiability from the frequency with which he appeared in etchings and paintings and the variety of the poses which he took on behalf of his ardent son, adjusting his expression to his a.s.sumed character with no little dramatic skill. Never in his later years did Rembrandt so delicately render the patience and discipline of age. In this alert, unprepossessing yet kindly face we can read a not too fanciful history of the temperament of the sitter. We see, at all events, the mark of a sympathetic mind.

The next picture in the collection to mark a special period and one of brilliant achievement in Rembrandt's career is the so-called "Woodcutter's Family," belonging to the decade between 1640 and 1650.

After an old fashion the Holy Family is represented as seen in a painting before which a curtain is partly drawn. The mother sits by the side of a cradle from which she has lifted the child who clings to her neck while she presses him to her in a close embrace. In the farther corner of the room is the figure of the father in his carpenter's ap.r.o.n, and in the center a cat is crouching near some dishes on the floor. The room is filled with a mild sunlight that filters through the air and falls across the figures of the mother and child and across the broad expanse of floor. The simplicity and poetic feeling in lighting and gesture are worthy of Rembrandt's prime, and there is no trace of the extreme drama that marks the religious compositions at Munich. The color is beautiful and the tone mysterious. Nevertheless one misses the precious quality of the earlier craftmanship as it shines in such lovely paintings as the "Saskia" and the "Portrait of a Young Woman." In these the painter shows that he was still young, that he had arrived at a skill of hand that permitted him to use his medium with ease and certainty, but that he had not yet ceased to attempt what lay just beyond his powers. His brush still sought out subtle refinements of modeling with the patience that allied him to the earlier Dutch and Flemish masters. He had, no doubt, the instinctive feeling of ardent youth, the a.s.sumption of time ahead for the carrying out of all projects, and his brilliant manipulations of his pigment showed neither haste, nor as yet the complete confidence that leaves untold the detail of the story for the imagination of the audience to supply. He was not ready to sacrifice everything else to that light and atmosphere of which he made his own world in his later years. Characteristic of his most winning use of this light that he created for his own purposes is the portrait of Nicholas Bruyningh, Secretary of one of the divisions of the Courts of Justice at Amsterdam: one of the most salient and brilliant of the Rembrandts in the Ca.s.sel Gallery. This portrait belongs to the year 1652 when the artist was about forty-five years old, and it is a superb example of matured genius. The subject offered an opportunity for daring handling and pictorial arrangement upon which Rembrandt seized with a full understanding of its possibilities. The beautiful gay face with its suggestion of irresponsibility glows from a mist of atmosphere that veils all minor detail, leaving in strong relief the ma.s.s of curling hair, the smiling dark eyes, the smiling mouth unconcealed by the slight moustache, the firmly modeled nose and pliant chin, with the ta.s.seled collar below catching the point of highest light. It is the poetry of good humor, of physical beauty, of content with life and life's adventures. It also marks what Herr Knackfuss calls Rembrandt's "softer manner" in which all sharp outlines of objects are effaced, and the lights gleam from a general darkness. More than "The Sentinel," which sometimes is given as the starting point for this departure in style, it has the appearance of a dramatic emergence from shadow. From having been a painstaking craftsman Rembrandt at this time had become a dramatist selecting from his material those elements best adapted to sway the emotions. He has lost himself--or found himself--in the expression of character; not merely character as one element in a picture's interest, but character as _the_ element. In this picture of Nicholas Bruyningh we cannot escape from the merry careless temperament. We cannot as in the early portrait of Saskia linger in dalliance over charming accessories and beautifully discriminated textures until we reach by moderate degrees the eloquence of the profoundly studied face. Bruyningh's face is like the "_tirade_" of a French play--it is rendered at white heat and in one inconceivably long breath. Its significance is so intensified as to produce a profound feeling in a sympathetic spectator.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy of Berlin Photographic Company. In the Ca.s.sel Museum.

NICHOLAS BRUYNINGH

_From a portrait by Rembrandt_]

If we compare it with the badly named "Laughing Cavalier" of Franz Hals we see clearly enough the difference between drama and realism. Drama as defined by Robert Louis Stevenson consists not of incident but of pa.s.sion that must progressively increase in order that the actor may be able to "carry the audience from a lower to a higher pitch of interest and emotion." This also defines Rembrandt's painting at all periods. As one approaches the human face in his pictures one becomes aware of an emotional quality that is irresistible, and in a portrait like that of Bruyningh the emotional quality is almost isolated from incident or detail. It is the great moment of the third act when the audience holds its breath.

"The Standard Bearer" is not accepted by Dr. Bode as a fine work or even as certainly original, the version of the same subject in Baron G. du Rothschild's collection having made much deeper an impression upon him.

The Ca.s.sel version is nevertheless a work of great distinction, the grave and beautiful face and shining armor looking out of a luminous atmosphere that has more of the Rembrandtesque quality than many authenticated works of Rembrandt's riper period. The work is engaging, personal, striking, and if not entirely great certainly possessed of many of the qualities of greatness.

While the Ca.s.sel collection does not contain any of the superb self portraits of Rembrandt's later years, the one example in this kind having authority without great interest, it does include one biblical picture of unusual importance belonging to the year 1656, the "Jacob Blessing his Grandchildren," which is, however, unfinished. The square, direct brush strokes suggest those of Hals, the drapery is thinly painted with a flowing medium, the black shadows on the face of Jacob cut sharply into the half tones, there is little discrimination in the textures and the background comes forward. But the faces of the children are charming in characterization, recalling the simple tenderness of the "Girl Leaning Out of the Window" at Dulwich, one of the most enchanting embodiments of youth ever achieved by Rembrandt, and the woman, Israelitish in type, with large eyes and features rather abruptly defined, is an attractive attempt to realize feminine beauty, a task in which Rembrandt was never dexterous, however.

Of the two landscapes, that with the ruined castle is the most impressive, but neither compares favorably with the dainty perfection of the landscape etchings.

If we add to these examples the studies of old men's heads and the delightful portrait of the artist's sister holding a pink in her hand, we realize that the group as a whole covers many phases of Rembrandt's constantly changing inspiration. He betrayed in his later works the impatience of those to whom few years are left in which to complete their accomplishment, but he kept the sensitiveness of his youth well into his brief prime, although he transferred it from the field of form to that of light. It betrays itself in the quality of that light which absorbs all that is ugly, coa.r.s.e, or ultra real in its poetizing glamour. From the tender explicit craftsmanship of the wonderful Saskia to the golden mist enveloping the figure of Nicholas Bruyningh, is a long step, but not longer than many a painter has taken in his progress from youth to maturity. The special comment upon Rembrandt's character as a painter which we are able to gather from the Ca.s.sel pictures is that in casting off the trammels of particularity he did not become less receptive to poetic influences. He grew more and more a dreamer, and in losing the clear objective manner of his early portraits he subst.i.tuted not the idle carelessness which in the work of a painter's later years is apt to be condoned as freedom, but the generalization that excludes vulgarities of execution and makes necessary increased mastery of the difficult craft of painting.

FANTIN-LATOUR

VIII

FANTIN-LATOUR

Fantin-Latour was born in 1836, was the son of a painter, and was educated at Paris under his father's guidance and that of Lecoq and Boisbaudeau, professor at a little art school connected with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. One of the most interesting painters of the little group in France whose work began to come before the public about the middle of the nineteenth century, a close friend of Whistler, a pa.s.sionate admirer of Delacroix, and an inspired student of the old masters, he managed to preserve intact an individuality that has a singular richness and simplicity seen against the many-colored tapestry of nineteenth-century art. Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and Nicolaas Maas, Pieter de Hooch and Vermeer of Delft, Watteau and Chardin, Van Dyck, t.i.tian, Tintoret, and Veronese were his true masters and his copies of their works are said by his enlightened critic, M. a.r.s.ene Alexandre, to have a masterly quality of their own, to be far removed from the conventionality of facsimiles, and to bear upon an underlying fidelity of transcription an impress of individual sentiment. He sought to be faithful to the originals beyond external imitation, by seeking to render the original tone of the painting in its first freshness, as it appeared before time and varnish had yellowed and darkened it. He thus made himself familiar with the technical methods of the great periods of painting, and, coming into his inheritance of modern ideas and ideals, he was able to achieve a beauty of execution much too rarely sought by his contemporaries, although his intimate companions like himself frequented the Louvre with a considerable a.s.siduity, spending upon the old masters the enthusiasm which they withheld from the later academic school of painting.

His earlier subjects were largely Biblical and historical. He then pa.s.sed to domestic scenes and in 1859, 1861, and 1863 was painting his pictures of _Les Liseurs_ and _Les Brodeuses_ which showed the charming face of his sister with her sensitive smiling mouth and softly modeled brows, and later that of his wife. At the Salon of 1859 he and Whistler both submitted subjects drawn from family life, Whistler his _At the Piano_ with his own sister and his niece, little Annie Haden, for the models, and Fantin his painting of young women embroidering and reading, only to have their canvases refused. Fantin was not, however, a martyr to his predilections in art. He early obtained admission to the Salon although he had enough rejected work to permit him to appear among the painters exhibiting in the famous little "Salon des Refuses" of 1863. He received medals and official recognitions. But his modesty of taste led him to hold himself somewhat apart and exclusive among those who shared his likings. His portrait of himself, painted in 1858, shows a dreamy young man with serious, almost solemn, eyes, sitting before his easel, and looking into the distance with the expression of one who sees visions.

As a matter of fact he did see visions and attempted to fix them with his art. An ardent lover of music, he was eager to translate the emotions aroused by it into the terms of his own art. As early as 1859 he was in England, to which he returned in 1861 and 1864, and while there he was surrounded by a group of people who shared his enthusiasm for German music. There he first became familiar with Schumann's melodies, and made the rare little etching representing his English friends, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, playing one of Schumann's compositions, Edwards with his flute and Mrs. Edwards at the piano. In 1862 he had the very tempered satisfaction of finding that Wagner, already beloved by him, had reached the public taste through the labors of the courageous Pasdeloup. "I always regret," he wrote to Edwards, "seeing the objects of my adoration adored by others, especially by the ma.s.ses. I am very jealous when I love."

In order to celebrate Wagner's triumph over these ma.s.ses, however, he at once made the lithograph called _Venusberg_, from which sprang the very different oil version of the same subject which together with the _Hommage a Delacroix_, the story of which M. Benedite has recounted, was admitted to the Salon of 1864. Fantin's lithographs, a number of which are in the print room of the Lenox Library building in New York City, show clearly his preoccupation with music, and an interesting article on this phase of his temperament appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, September 15, 1906. Naturally a worshiper, he did not confine himself to commemorating only the musicians who were his favorites. In lithography and painting he exalted such diverse heroes of the different arts as Stendhal, Hugo, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Manet, Schumann, Weber, Berlioz, and Wagner. In 1877 his enthusiasm for Wagner revived in his work, and compositions based on the Ring music followed each other in rapid succession. Wolfram gazing at the evening star, or following with enchanted eyes Elizabeth's ghostly figure as it moves slowly up the hill toward the towers of Wartburg; the Rhine maidens playing with rhythmic motions in the swirling waters, with Alberic, crouched in the foreground, watching them; Sieglinde, giving Siegmund to drink, as hounded and pursued he sinks at the door of Hunding's dwelling; the evocation of Kundry by Klingner; Siegfried blowing his horn and receding from the enticements of the Rhine maidens--these are among the subjects that engaged him. It would be difficult to describe his manner of interpretation. Quite without theatrical suggestion, it combines a dramatic use of dark and light and a feeling for palpable atmosphere hardly equaled by Rembrandt himself, with a remarkably certain touch.

Nothing could better emphasize the value of technical drill to a poetic temperament than these imaginative drawings. In them Fantin gives full rein to his emotional delight in tender visions and twilight dreams. The lovely rhythm of his lines, the rise and fall of his sensitive shadows and lights that play and interplay in as strict obedience to law as the waves of the sea, his delicate modeling by which he brings form out of nebulous half-tones with the slightest touches, the least discernible accents, the accurate bland drawing, the ordered composition, the subtle s.p.a.cing, the innumerable indications of close observation of life--all these qualities combine to give an impression of fantasy and reality so welded and fused as to be indistinguishable to the casual glance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the Brooklyn Art Museum.

PORTRAIT OF MME. MAiTRE

_From a painting by Fantin-Latour_]

In spite of the a.s.siduous study of Dutch and Italian masters, Fantin's work is characteristically French in both its fantasy and its realism.

Not only the grace of the forms and the elegance of the gestures, but the sentiment of the composition and the quality of the color, are undisguisedly Gallic. He is closer to Watteau than to any other painter but his firmer technic and more patient temperament give him an advantage over the feverish master of eighteenth-century idyls. His art throbs with a fuller life and in his airiest dreams his world is made of a more solid substance. For melancholy he offers serenity, for daintiness he offers delicacy.

His technique, especially in his later work, is quite individual in its character. He models with short swift strokes of the brush--not unlike the brush work in some of Manet's pictures. His pigment is rather dry and often almost crumbly in texture, but his values are so carefully considered that this delicately ruffled surface has the effect of casting a penumbra about the individual forms, of causing them to swim in a thickened but fluent atmosphere, instead of suggesting the rugosity of an ill-managed medium.

In his paintings of flowers he found the best possible expression for his subtle color sense. The letters written to him by Whistler in the sixties show how fervently these paintings were admired by the American master of harmony, and also how much good criticism came to him from his comrade whose enthusiasm for j.a.panese art already was fully awakened.

As a portraitist, Fantin was peculiarly fortunate. His exquisitely painted flower studies, his pearly-toned beautifully drawn nudes, his lithographs with their soft darks and tender manipulations of line, his ambitious imaginative compositions, are none of them so eloquent of his personality as his portraits with their absolute integrity, their fine divination, and their fluent technique. The portrait which we reproduce is of Madam Maitre, was painted in 1882, and was acquired by the Museum of the Brooklyn Inst.i.tute of Arts and Sciences in 1906. It represents a woman of middle years with a sincere and thoughtful face and a quiet bearing. The felicities of Fantin's brush are seen in the way in which the silk sleeve follows the curve of the round firm arm, and the soft lace of the bodice rests against the throat and is relieved almost without contrast of color against the white skin. The touches of pure pale blue in the fan and the delicate tints of the rose are manifestations of the artist's restrained and subtle management of color, but above all there is a perfectly una.s.suming yet uncompromising rendering of character. There is nothing in the plain refined features that cries out for recognition of a temperament astutely divined. They have the calm repose that indicates entire lack of self-consciousness, no quality is unduly insisted upon, there is neither sentimentality nor brutal realism in the handling, the sitter simply lives as naturally upon the canvas as we feel that she must have lived in the world. It is for such sweet and logical truth-telling, such mild and strict interpretation, that we must pay our debt of appreciation to Fantin, the painter of ideal realities and of actual ideals.

CARL LARSSON

IX

CARL LARSSON

The accomplished Swedish critic, Georg Nordensvan, opens his monograph on Carl Larsson with the statement that the latter is unquestionably the most popular artist of the present day in his own country, and that he is equally popular as a man. It is not often that the personality of an artist seems so essentially connected with his work as in Larsson's case.

His gay, pugnacious, independent, yet amiable temper of mind is so directly reflected in the character of his various production as to make a consideration of the two together an almost necessary prelude to any account of him. He has insisted upon expressing his individuality at whatever cost of traditional and conventional technique and he has at the same time unconsciously represented the frankest, most wholesome, and, on the whole, most characteristic side of the Swedish character. A rather daring and flippant humor enters into his paintings. One of his portraits of himself shows him standing, his happy reddish face aglow, against a yellowish-brown wall. He is dressed in a long, yellowish-brown smoking frock, and holds in his raised hand a pencil from which appears to spring a little feminine figure supposed to represent his genius. "This figure carries what looks like a quant.i.ty of small round cookies," says his critic, "possibly to symbolize the adequacy with which his genius provides for his nourishment."

Another shows him with his little girl sitting on his head, maintaining her equilibrium by planting stout feet on his shoulders. The painter wears a house-jacket, loose slippers and baggy trousers, his face beams with good-humor; the child is br.i.m.m.i.n.g with laughter; the little scene is instinctive with the spirit of intimate domesticity, and the drawing, free and easy, without apparent effort in the direction of elegant arrangement or expressiveness of line, is nevertheless singularly nervous and vigorous.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MY FAMILY

_From a painting by Carl Larsson_]

In still another portrait, he is sitting before his easel, his little girl on one knee, his canvas on the other with the easel serving only as a prop. His eyes are turned toward a mirror which is outside the picture and the reflection in which he is using as a model; the child's eyes are fixed on the canvas watching the growth of the design. These are "self-portraits" in more than the usual sense. It is the rarest thing in art to find a painter representing his own aspect with such complete lack of self-consciousness. No characteristics seem especially to be emphasized, none betray exaggeration, there apparently is neither distortion nor idealization, nor is there any attempt to select a mood that shall preserve a favorable impression of the sitter. Nothing could, however, more favorably present a character to the critical scrutiny of strangers than this superb good faith. The least sentimental of us must recognize with frank delight the wholesome sweetness of the world these kindly faithful records open to us.

Larsson was born at Stockholm in 1853. From the age of thirteen he depended upon his own labors for support; retouching photographs at first.

Later he entered the elementary school of the academy where he received honors. He drew from the antique and from the model and began to make drawings for ill.u.s.tration when he was about eighteen. The public knew him first through his drawings for the comic paper called _Kasper_, and he shortly became a much sought after ill.u.s.trator for papers and books. The first book ill.u.s.trated by him was a collection of stories by Richard Gustafsson, the editor of _Kasper_, the next was Anderson's "Tales." In the latter he succeeded Isidor Tornblom, who died in 1876 after having executed only a few drawings for the first part. He became bold and rapid in improvisation, and light and easy in execution--qualities that he never lost. He was obliged to make of his academic studies a side issue, bread-winning taking necessarily the first place with him. No doubt it is to this necessity that he owes that prompt adaptation of his facility to various uses, that practical application of his freshly acquired knowledge which give to the simple compositions of his earlier period an especial spontaneity. He had no time to fix himself in ruts of practice. To draw from the Antinous one day and the next to press one's Greek outline into service for the representation of little dancing girls and happy babies is to effect that union between art and life which makes the first moving and the second beautiful; the union in which Daumier found the source of his prodigious strength. In his early years Larsson was anything but a realist. His fancy turned to unusual and vast subjects, and his natural impatience caused him to launch himself upon them with very inadequate preliminary study. The first canvas attempted by him during the study-time in Paris (time which he won at the Academy) was nearly ten feet high and represented a scene from the deluge with figures double life size.

Naturally, he found himself unable to cope with the difficulties that promptly arose and was obliged to give it up. In 1877, when he was twenty-four years old, he painted a three-quarter length portrait of a woman standing, which was his best work of that period. The genre pictures which he sent home to Stockholm at about the same time awakened little enthusiasm and spread the impression that he had no future as a painter and would be obliged to content himself with ill.u.s.tration. As an ill.u.s.trator he became thoroughly successful, turning out a large amount of work and gaining for himself in Stockholm the very inappropriate name of "the Swedish Dore." He made enough money in this branch of art to try painting again in Paris, but with almost no success until the Spring of 1883, when he exhibited at the Salon a couple of small water-colors, the subjects taken from the field and garden life of Grez, a little painting village that lies south of the Fontainebleau forest. These pictures won a medal and were bought in Gothenburg. Other similar subjects followed, all distinguished, Nordensvan affirms, by the same pleasing delicacy of handling, the same glow and splendor of sunlight, and the same glad color-harmony. He now was in a position to marry, and pictures of family life presently appeared in great numbers. These are altogether charming--spirited, vivid, original, and full of an indescribable freshness and heartiness. Sometimes he painted his young wife holding her baby, sometimes he painted his two boys parading as mimic soldiers; sometimes it was his little girl hiding under the great, handsome dining-table; or a young people's party in the characteristic dining-room, all the furniture and decorations of which are reproduced with crisp naturalism.

Not the least charm of his paintings lies in the beauty of these handsome interiors in which detail has the precise definition found in the work of the old Dutch artists. While Larsson's technique lacks the exquisite finish of a Terborch or Vermeer of Delft he tells almost as many truths about a house and its occupants as they do. If we consider, for example, the charming composition which he calls "The Sluggard's Melancholy Breakfast" ("Sjusofverskans dystra frukost") we find worthy of note not only the pensive and rather cross little girl sitting alone at the table with her loaf of bread and cup of milk, but also the long tablecloth with its handsome conventional design, obviously a bit of artistic handicraft since it is signed and dated above the fringe at one end, the decoration on the wall, possibly the lower part of a painted window, with its significant motto "Arte et Probitate"; the graceful pattern of the chairs, the big pitcher full of flowers and fruits, the plain ample dishes, the polished floor of the pa.s.sage-way at the end of which a door opens on the green fields with a child's figure half-seen standing on the threshold, the fine rich color harmony of greens and reds and blues and browns held together by a subtlety of tone that involves no loss of strength.

His outdoor scenes are hardly less personal in their portraiture. There is the one called "Apple-Bloom" with a Larsson child in a pink sunbonnet clinging to the slim stem of a young apple-tree; in the distance some long low red buildings behind a board fence, in the foreground the pale green of spring gra.s.s; there is the one in which the larger part of the picture is filled with delicate field growth, thin sprays of pink, blue and white blossoms, and long slender leaves, at the top of the canvas a little thicket of trees with a small bright head peering between the branches; there is the one in which a baby lies on the greensward under the trees; each has an indescribable charm of individuality. Doubtless resembling a hundred other groves or meadows, these have an expression of their own distinguishing them from their kind. It is the genius of the close observer for discrimination between like things.