The French Impressionists Part 3

With Claude Monet we enter upon Impressionism in its most significant technical expression, and touch upon the princ.i.p.al points referred to in the second chapter of this book.

Claude Monet, the artistic descendant of Claude Lorrain, Turner, and Monticelli, has had the merit and the originality of opening a new road to landscape painting by deducing scientific statements from the study of the laws of light. His work is a magnificent verification of the optical discoveries made by Helmholtz and Chevreul. It is born spontaneously from the artist's vision, and happens to be a rigorous demonstration of principles which the painter has probably never cared to know. Through the power of his faculties the artist has happened to join hands with the scientist. His work supplies not only the very basis of the Impressionist movement proper, but of all that has followed it and will follow it in the study of the so-called chromatic laws. It will serve to give, so to say, a mathematic necessity to the happy finds met by the artists. .h.i.therto, and it will also serve to endow decorative art and mural painting with a process, the applications of which are manyfold and splendid.

I have already summed up the ideas which follow from Claude Monet's painting more clearly even than from Manet's. Suppression of local colour, study of reflections by means of complementary colours and division of tones by the process of touches of pure, juxtaposed colours--these are the essential principles of _chromatism_ (for this word should be used instead of the very vague term "Impressionism").

Claude Monet has applied them systematically, especially in landscape painting.

There are a few portraits of his, which show that he might have made an excellent figure painter, if landscape had not absorbed him entirely.

One of these portraits, a large full-length of a lady with a fur-lined jacket and a satin dress with green and black stripes, would in itself be sufficient to save from oblivion the man who has painted it. But the study of light upon the figure has been the special preoccupation of Manet, Renoir, and p.i.s.sarro, and, after the Impressionists, of the great lyricist, Albert Besnard, who has concentrated the Impressionist qualities by placing them at the service of a very personal conception of symbolistic art. Monet commenced with trying to find his way by painting figures, then landscapes and princ.i.p.ally sea pictures and boats in harbours, with a somewhat sombre robustness and very broad and solid draughtsmanship. His first luminous studies date back to about 1885.

Obedient to the same ideas as Degas he had to avoid the Salons and only show his pictures gradually in private galleries. For years he remained unknown. It is only giving M. Durand-Ruel his due, to state that he was one of the first to antic.i.p.ate the Impressionist school and to buy the first works of these painters, who were treated as madmen and charlatans. He has become great with them, and has made his fortune and theirs through having had confidence in them, and no fortune has been better deserved. Thirty years ago n.o.body would have bought pictures by Degas or Monet, which are sold to-day for a thousand pounds. This detail is only mentioned to show the evolution of Impressionism as regards public opinion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLAUDE MONET

THE HARBOUR, HONFLEUR]

So much has Monet been attracted by the a.n.a.lysis of the laws of light that he has made light the real subject of all his pictures, and to show clearly his intention he has treated one and the same site in a series of pictures painted from nature at all hours of the day. This is the principle whose results are the great divisions of his work which might be called "Investigation of the variations of sunlight." The most famous of these series are the _Hay-ricks_, the _Poplars_, the _Cliffs of Etretat_, the _Golfe Juan_, the _Coins de Riviere_, the _Cathedrals_, the _Water-lilies_, and finally the _Thames_ series which Monet is at present engaged upon. They are like great poems, and the splendour of the chosen theme, the orchestration of the shivers of brightness, the symphonic _parti-pris_ of the colours, make their realism, the minute contemplation of reality, approach idealism and lyric dreaming.

Monet paints these series from nature. He is said to take with him in a carriage at sunrise some twenty canvases which he changes from hour to hour, taking them up again the next day. He notes, for example, from nine to ten o'clock the most subtle effects of sunlight upon a hay-rick; at ten o'clock he pa.s.ses on to another canvas and recommences the study until eleven o'clock. Thus he follows step by step the modifications of the atmosphere until nightfall, and finishes simultaneously the works of the whole series. He has painted a hay-stack in a field twenty times over, and the twenty hay-stacks are all different. He exhibits them together, and one can follow, led by the magic of his brush, the history of light playing upon one and the same object. It is a dazzling display of luminous atoms, a kind of pantheistic evocation. Light is certainly the essential personage who devours the outlines of the objects, and is thrown like a translucent veil between our eyes and matter. One can see the vibrations of the waves of the solar spectrum, drawn by the arabesque of the spots of the seven prismatic hues juxtaposed with infinite subtlety; and this vibration is that of heat, of atmospheric vitality. The silhouettes melt into the sky; the shadows are lights where certain tones, the blue, the purple, the green and the orange, predominate, and it is the proportional quant.i.ty of the spots that differentiates in our eyes the shadows from what we call the lights, just as it actually happens in optic science. There are some midday scenes by Claude Monet, where every material silhouette--tree, hay-rick, or rock--is annihilated, volatilised in the fiery vibration of the dust of sunlight, and before which the beholder gets really blinded, just as he would in actual sunlight. Sometimes even there are no more shadows at all, nothing that could serve to indicate the values and to create contrasts of colours. Everything is light, and the painter seems easily to overcome those terrible difficulties, lights upon lights, thanks to a gift of marvellous subtlety of sight.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLAUDE MONET

THE CHURCH AT VARENGEVILLE]

Generally he finds a very simple _motif_ sufficient; a hay-rick, some slender trunks rising skywards, or a cl.u.s.ter of shrubs. But he also proves himself as powerful draughtsman when he attacks themes of greater complexity. n.o.body knows as he does how to place a rock amidst tumultuous waves, how to make one understand the enormous construction of a cliff which fills the whole canvas, how to give the sensation of a cl.u.s.ter of pines bent by the wind, how to throw a bridge across a river, or how to express the ma.s.siveness of the soil under a summer sun. All this is constructed with breadth, truth and force under the delicious or fiery symphony of the luminous atoms. The most unexpected tones play in the foliage. On close inspection we are astonished to find it striped with orange, red, blue and yellow touches, but seen at a certain distance the freshness of the green foliage appears to be represented with infallible truth. The eye recomposes what the brush has dissociated, and one finds oneself perplexed at all the science, all the secret order which has presided over this acc.u.mulation of spots which seem projected in a furious shower. It is a veritable orchestral piece, where every colour is an instrument with a distinct part, and where the hours with their different tints represent the successive themes. Monet is the equal of the greatest landscape painters as regards the comprehension of the true character of every soil he has studied, which is the supreme quality of his art. Though absorbed beyond all by study of the sunlight, he has thought it useless to go to Morocco or Algeria.

He has found Brittany, Holland, the _Ile de France_, the _Cote d'Azur_ and England sufficient sources of inspiration for his symphonies, which cover from end to end the scale of perceptible colours. He has expressed, for instance, the mild and vaporous softness of the Mediterranean, the luxuriant vegetation of the gardens of Cannes and Antibes, with a truthfulness and knowledge of the psychology of land and water which can only be properly appreciated by those who live in this enchanted region. This has not prevented him from understanding better than anybody the wildness, the grand austereness of the rocks of _Belle-Isle en mer_, to express it in pictures in which one really feels the wind, the spray, and the roaring of the heavy waters breaking against the impa.s.sibility of the granite rocks. His recent series of _Water-lilies_ expressed all the melancholic and fresh charm of quiet basins, of sweet bits of water blocked by rushes and calyxes. He has painted underwoods in the autumn, where the most subtle shades of bronze and gold are at play, chrysanthemums, pheasants, roofs at twilight, dazzling sunflowers, gardens, tulip-fields in Holland, bouquets, effects of snow and h.o.a.r frost of exquisite softness, and sailing boats pa.s.sing in the sun. He has painted some views of the banks of the Seine which are quite wonderful in their power of conjuring up these scenes, and over all this has roved his splendid vision of a great, amorous and radiant colourist. The _Cathedrals_ are even more of a _tour de force_ of his talent. They consist of seventeen studies of Rouen Cathedral, the towers of which fill the whole of the picture, leaving barely a little s.p.a.ce, a little corner of the square, at the foot of the enormous stone-shafts which mount to the very top of the picture. Here he has no proper means to express the play of the reflections, no changeful waters or foliage: the grey stone, worn by time and blackened by centuries, is for seventeen times the monochrome, the thankless theme upon which the painter is about to exercise his vision. But Monet finds means of making the most dazzling atmospheric harmonies sparkle upon this stone. Pale and rosy at sunrise, purple at midday, glowing in the evening under the rays of the setting sun, standing out from the crimson and gold, scarcely visible in the mist, the colossal edifice impresses itself upon the eye, reconstructed with its thousand details of architectural chiselling, drawn without minuteness but with superb decision, and these pictures approach the composite, bold and rich tone of Oriental carpets.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLAUDE MONET

POPLARS ON THE EPTE IN AUTUMN]

Monet excels also in suggesting the _drawing of light_, if I may venture to use this expression. He makes us understand the movement of the vibrations of heat, the movement of the luminous waves; he also understands how to paint the sensation of strong wind. "Before one of Manet's pictures," said Mme. Morisot, "I always know which way to incline my umbrella." Monet is also an incomparable painter of water.

Pond, river, or sea--he knows how to differentiate their colouring, their consistency, and their currents, and he transfixes a moment of their fleeting life. He is intuitive to an exceptional degree in the intimate composition of matter, water, earth, stone or air, and this intuition serves him in place of intellectuality in his art. He is a painter _par excellence_, a man born for painting, and this power of penetrating the secrets of matter and of light helps him to attain a kind of grand, unconsciously lyrical poetry. He transposes the immediate truth of our vision and elevates it to decorative grandeur. If Manet is the realist-romanticist of Impressionism, if Degas is its psychologist, Claude Monet is its lyrical pantheist.

His work is immense. He produces with astonishing rapidity, and he has yet another characteristic of the great painters: that of having put his hand to every kind of subject. His recent studies of the Thames are, at the decline of his energetic maturity, as beautiful and as spontaneous as the _Hay-ricks_ of seventeen years back. They are thrillingly truthful visions of fairy mists, where showers of silver and gold sparkle through rosy vapours; and at the same time Monet combines in this series the dream-landscapes of Turner with Monticelli's acc.u.mulation of precious stones. Thus interpreted by this intense faculty of synthesis, nature, simplified in detail and contemplated in its grand lines, becomes truly a living dream.

Since the _Hay-ricks_ one can say that the work of Claude Monet is glorious. It has been made sacred to the admiring love of the connoisseurs on the day when Monet joined Rodin in an exhibition which is famous in the annals of modern art. Yet no official distinction has intervened to recognise one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century. The influence of Monet has been enormous all over Europe and America. The _process of colour spots_[1] (let us adhere to this rudimentary name which has become current) has been adopted by a whole crowd of painters. I shall have to say a few words about it at the end of this book. But it is befitting to terminate this all too short study by explaining that the most lyrical of the Impressionists has also been the theorist _par excellence_. His work connects easel painting with mural painting. No Minister of Fine Arts has been found, who would surmount the systematic opposition of the official painters, and give Manet a commission for grand mural compositions, for which his method is admirably suited. It has taken long years before such works were entrusted to Besnard, who, with Puvis de Chavannes, has given Paris her most beautiful modern decorations, but Besnard's work is the direct outcome of Claude Monet's harmonies. The principle of the division of tones and of the study of complementary colours has been full of revelations, and one of the most fruitful theories. It has probably been the principle which will designate most clearly the originality of the painting of the future. To have invented it, is enough to secure permanent glory for a man. And without wishing to put again the question of the antagonism of realism and idealism, one may well say that a painter who invents a method and shows such power, is highly intellectual and gifted with a pictorial intelligence. Whatever the subjects he treats, he creates an aesthetic emotion equivalent, if not similar, to those engendered by the most complex symbolism. In his ardent love of nature Monet has found his greatness; he suggests the secrets by stating the evident facts. That is the law common to all the arts.

[Footnote 1: _Procede de la tache._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLAUDE MONET

THE BRIDGE AT ARGENTEUIL]

VI

AUGUSTE RENOIR AND HIS WORK

The work of Auguste Renoir extends without interruption over a period of forty years. It appears to sum up the ideas and methods of Impressionist art so completely that, should it alone be saved from a general destruction, it would suffice to bear witness to this entire art movement. It has unfolded itself from 1865 to our days with a happy magnificence, and it allows us to distinguish several periods, in the technique at least, since the variety of its subjects is infinite. Like Manet, and like all truly great and powerful painters, M. Renoir has treated almost everything, nudes, portraits, subject pictures, seascapes and still-life, all with equal beauty.

His first manner shows him to be a very direct descendant of Boucher.

His female nudes are altogether in eighteenth century taste and he uses the same technique as Boucher: fat and sleek paint of soft brilliancy, laid on with the palette knife, with precise strokes round the princ.i.p.al values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues similar to those of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and almost excluding the opposition of the shadows; and, finally, vivacious att.i.tudes and an effort towards decorative convention. Nevertheless, his _Bathers_, of which he has painted a large series, are in many ways thoroughly modern and personal. Renoir's nude is neither that of Monet, nor of Degas, whose main concern was truth, the last-named even trying to define in the undressed being such psychologic observations as are generally looked for in the features of the clothed being. Nor is Renoir's nude that of the academicians, that poetised nude arranged according to a pseudo-Greek ideal, which has nothing in common with contemporary women.

What Renoir sees in the nude is less the line, than the brilliancy of the epidermis, the luminous, nacreous substance of the flesh: it is the "ideal clay"; and in this he shows the vision of a poet; he transfigures reality, but in a very different sense from that of the School.

Renoir's woman comes from a primitive dream-land; she is an artless, wild creature, blooming in perfumed scrub. He sets her in backgrounds of foliage or of blue, foam-fringed torrents. She is a luxuriant, firm, healthy and nave woman with a powerful body, a small head, her eyes wide open, thoughtless, brilliant and ignorant, her lips blood-red and her nostrils dilated; she is a gentle being, like the women of Tahiti, born in a tropical clime where vice is as unknown as shame, and where entire ingenuousness is a guarantee against all indecency. One cannot but be astonished at this mixture of "j.a.panism," savagism and eighteenth century taste, which const.i.tutes inimitably the nude of Renoir.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RENOIR

DeJEUNER]

[Ill.u.s.tration: RENOIR

IN THE BOX]

M. Renoir's second manner is more directly related to the Impressionist methods: it is that of his landscapes, his flowers and his portraits.

Here one can feel his relationship with Manet and with Claude Monet.

These pictures are hatchings of colours acc.u.mulated to render less the objects than their transparency across the atmosphere. The portraits are frankly presented and broadly executed. The artist occupies himself in the first place with getting correct values and an exact suggestion of depth. He understands the illogicality of a false perfection which is as interested in a trinket as in an eye, and he knows how to proportion the interest of the picture which should guide the beholder's look to the essential point, though every part should be correctly executed. He knows how to interpret nature in a certain sense; how to stop in time; how to suggest by leaving a part apparently unfinished; how to indicate, behind a figure, the sea or some landscape with just a few broad touches which suffice to suggest it without usurping the princ.i.p.al part. It is now, that Renoir paints his greatest works, the _Dejeuner des Canotiers_, the _Bal au Moulin de la Galette_, the _Box_, the _Terrace_, the _First Step_, the _Sleeping Woman with a Cat_, and his most beautiful landscapes; but his nature is too capricious to be satisfied with a single technique. There are some landscapes that are reminiscent of Corot or of Anton Mauve; the _Woman with the broken neck_ is related to Manet; the portrait of _Sisley_ invents pointillism fifteen years before the pointillists; _La Pensee_, this masterpiece, evokes Hoppner. But in everything reappears the invincible French instinct: the _Jeune Fille au panier_ is a Greuze painted by an Impressionist; the delightful _Jeune Fille a la promenade_ is connected with Fragonard; the _Box_, a perfect marvel of elegance and knowledge, condenses the whole worldliness of 1875. The portrait of _Jeanne Samary_ is an evocation of the most beautiful portraits of the eighteenth century, a poem of white satin and golden hair.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RENOIR

YOUNG GIRL PROMENADING]

Renoir's realism bears in spite of all, the imprint of the lyric spirit and of sweetness. It has neither the nervous veracity of Manet, nor the bitterness of Degas, who both love their epoch and find it interesting without idealising it and who have the vision of psychologist novelists.

Before everything else he is a painter. What he sees in the _Bal au Moulin de la Galette_, are not the stigmata of vice and impudence, the ridiculous and the sad sides of the doubtful types of this low resort.

He sees the gaiety of Sundays, the flashes of the sun, the oddity of a crowd carried away by the rhythm of the valses, the laughter, the clinking of gla.s.ses, the vibrating and hot atmosphere; and he applies to this spectacle of joyous vulgarity his gifts as a sumptuous colourist, the arabesque of the lines, the gracefulness of his bathers, and the happy eurythmy of his soul. The straw hats are changed into gold, the blue jackets are sapphires, and out of a still exact realism is born a poem of light. The _Dejeuner des Canotiers_ is a subject which has been painted a hundred times, either for the purpose of studying popular types, or of painting white table-cloths amidst sunny foliage.

Yet Renoir is the only painter who has raised this small subject to the proportions and the style of a large canvas, through the pictorial charm and the masterly richness of the arrangement. The _Box_, conceived in a low harmony, in a golden twilight, is a work worthy of Reynolds. The pale and attentive face of the lady makes one think of the great English master's best works; the necklace, the flesh, the flounce of lace and the hands are marvels of skill and of taste, which the greatest modern virtuosos, Sargent and Besnard, have not surpa.s.sed, and, as far as the man in the background is concerned, his white waistcoat, his dress-coat, his gloved hand would suffice to secure the fame of a painter. The _Sleeping Woman_, the _First Step_, the _Terrace_, and the decorative _Dance_ panels reveal Renoir as an _intimiste_ and as an admirable painter of children. His strange colouring and his gifts of grasping nature and of ingenuity--strangers to all decadent complexity--have allowed him to rank among the best of those who have expressed childhood in its true aspect, without overloading it with over-precocious thoughts. Finally, Renoir is a painter of flowers of dazzling variety and exquisite splendour. They supply him with inexhaustible pretexts for suave and subtle harmonies.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RENOIR

WOMAN'S BUST]

His third manner has surprised and deceived certain admirers of his. It seems to mix his two first techniques, combining the painting with the palette knife and the painting in touches of divided tones. He searches for certain accords and contrasts almost a.n.a.logous to the musical dissonances. He realises incredible "false impressions." He seems to take as themes oriental carpets: he abandons realism and style and conceives symphonies. He pleases himself in a.s.sembling those tones which one is generally afraid of using: Turkish pink, lemon, crushed strawberry and viridian. Sometimes he amuses himself with ama.s.sing faded colours which would be disheartening with others, but out of which he can extract a harmony. Sometimes he plays with the crudest colours. One feels disturbed, charmed, disconcerted, as one would before an Indian shawl, a barbaric piece of pottery or a Persian miniature, and one refrains from forcing into the limits of a definition this exceptional virtuoso whose pa.s.sionate love of colour overcomes every difficulty. It is in this most recent part of his evolution, that Renoir appears the most capricious and the most poetical of all the painters of his generation. The flowers find themselves treated in various techniques according to their own character: the gladioles and roses in pasty paint, the poor flowers of the field are defined by a cross-hatching of little touches. Influenced by the purple shadow of the large flower-decked hats, the heads of young girls are painted on coa.r.s.e canvas, sketched in broad strokes, with the hair in one colour only.

Some little study appears like wool, some other has the air of agate, or is marbled and veined according to his inexplicable whim. We have here an incessant confusion of methods, a complete emanc.i.p.ation of the virtuoso who listens only to his fancy. Now and then the harmonies are false and the drawing incorrect, but these weaknesses do at least no harm to the values, the character and the general movement of the work, which are rather accentuated by them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RENOIR

YOUNG WOMAN IN EMPIRE COSTUME]

Surely, it would be false to exclude ideologist painting which has produced wonders, and not less iniquitous to reproach Impressionism with not having taken any interest in it! One has to avoid the kind of criticism which consists in reproaching one movement with not having had the qualities of the others whilst maintaining its own, and we have abandoned the idea of Beauty divided into a certain number of clauses and programmes, towards the sum total of which the efforts of the eclectic candidates are directed. M. Renoir is probably the most representative figure of a movement where he seems to have united all the qualities of his friends. To criticise him means to criticise Impressionism itself. Having spent half of its strength in proving to its adversaries that they were wrong, and the other half in inventing technical methods, it is not surprising to find that Impressionism has been wanting in intellectual depth and has left to its successors the care of realising works of great thought. But it has brought us a sunny smile, a breath of pure air. It is so fascinating, that one cannot but love its very mistakes which make it more human and more accessible.

Renoir is the most lyrical, the most musical, the most subtle of the masters of this art. Some of his landscapes are as beautiful as those of Claude Monet. His nudes are as masterly in painting as Manet's, and more supple. Not having attained the scientific drawing which one finds in Degas's, they have a grace and a brilliancy which Degas's nudes have never known. If his rare portraits of men are inferior to those of his rivals, his women's portraits have a frequently superior distinction.

His great modern compositions are equal to the most beautiful works by Manet and Degas. His inequalities are also more striking than theirs.

Being a fantastic, nervous improvisator he is more exposed to radical mistakes. But he is a profoundly sincere and conscientious artist.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RENOIR

ON THE TERRACE]

The race speaks in him. It is inexplicable that he should not have met with startling success, since he is voluptuous, bright, happy and learned without heaviness. One has to attribute his relative isolation to the violence of the controversies, and particularly to the dignity of a poet gently disdainful of public opinion and paying attention solely to painting, his great and only love. Manet has been a fighter whose works have created scandal. Renoir has neither shown, nor hidden himself: he has painted according to his dream, spreading his works, without mixing up his name or his personality with the tumult that raged around his friends. And now, for that very reason, his work appears fresher and younger, more primitive and candid, more intoxicated with flowers, flesh and sunlight.