The French Impressionists (1860 1900) written by Camille Mauclair
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Camille Mauclair >> The French Impressionists (1860 1900)
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His work can be divided into several great series: the race-courses, the
ballet-dancers, and the women bathing count among the most important.
The race-courses have inspired Degas with numerous pictures. He shows in
them a surprising knowledge of the horse. He is one of the most perfect
painters of horses who have ever existed. He has caught the most curious
and truest actions with infallible sureness of sight. His racecourse
scenes are full of vitality and picturesqueness. Against clear skies,
and light backgrounds of lawn, indicated with quiet harmony, Degas
assembles original groups of horses which one can see moving,
hesitating, intensely alive; and nothing could be fresher, gayer and
more deliciously pictorial, than the green, red and yellow notes of the
jockey's costumes strewn like flowers over these atmospheric, luminous
landscapes, where colours do not clash, but are always gently
shimmering, dissolved in uniform clearness. The admirable drawing of
horses and men is so precise and seems so simple, that one can only
slowly understand the extent of the difficulty overcome, the truth of
these attitudes and the nervous delicacy of the execution.
[Illustration: DEGAS
THE DANCING LESSON--PASTEL]
The dancers go much further still in the expression of Degas's
temperament. They have been studied at the _foyer_ of the Opera and at
the rehearsal, sometimes in groups, sometimes isolated. Some pictures
which will always count among the masterpieces of the nineteenth
century, represent the whole _corps de ballet_ performing on the stage
before a dark and empty house. By the feeble light of some lamps the
black coats of the stage managers mix themselves with the gauze skirts.
Here the draughtsman joins the great colourist: the petticoats of pink
or white tulle, the graceful legs covered with flesh-coloured silk, the
arms and the shoulders, and the hair crowned with flowers, offer
motives of exquisite colour and of a tone of living flowers. But the
psychologist does not lose his rights: not only does he amuse himself
with noting the special movements of the dancers, but he also notes the
anatomical defects. He shows with cruel frankness, with a strange love
of modern character, the strong legs, the thin shoulders, and the
provoking and vulgar heads of these frequently ugly girls of common
origin. With the irony of an entomologist piercing the coloured insect
he shows us the disenchanting reality in the sad shadow of the scenes,
of these butterflies who dazzle us on the stage. He unveils the reverse
side of a dream without, however, caricaturing; he raises even, under
the imperfection of the bodies, the animal grace of the organisms; he
has the severe beauty of the true. He gives to his groups of
ballet-dancers the charming line of garlands and restores to them a
harmony in the _ensemble_, so as to prove that he does not misjudge the
charm conferred upon them by rhythm, however defective they may be
individually. At other times he devotes himself to the study of their
practice. In bare rooms with curtainless windows, in the cold and sad
light of the boxes, he passionately draws the dancers learning their
steps, reaching high bars with the tips of their toes, forcing
themselves into quaint poses in order to make themselves more supple,
manoeuvring to the sound of a fiddle scratched by an old teacher--and he
leaves us stupefied at the knowledge, the observation, the talent
profusely spent on these little pictures. Furthermore there are humorous
scenes: ballet-dancers chatting in the dark with _habitues_ of the
Opera, others looking at the house through the small opening of the
curtain, others re-tying their shoe-laces, and they all are prodigious
drawings of movement anatomically as correct as they are unexpected.
Degas's old style of drawing undergoes modification: with the help of
slight deformations, accentuations of the modelling and subtle
falsifications of the proportions, managed with infinite tact and
knowledge, the artist brings forth in relief the important gesture,
subordinating to it all the others. He attempts _drawing by movement_ as
it is caught by our eyes in life, where they do not state the
proportions, but first of all the gesture which strikes them. In these
drawings by Degas all the lines follow the impulsion of the thought.
What one sees first, is the movement transmitted to the members by the
will. The active part of the body is more carefully studied than the
rest, which is indicated by bold foreshortenings, placed in the second
plane, and apparently only serves to throw into relief the raised arm or
leg. This is no longer merely _exact_, it is _true_; it is a superior
degree of truth.
[Illustration: DEGAS
THE DANCERS]
These pictures of dancers are psychologic documents of great value. The
physical and moral atmosphere of these surroundings is called forth by a
master. Such and such a figure or attitude tells us more about Parisian
life than a whole novel, and Degas has been lavish of his intellect and
his philosophy of bitter scepticism. But they are also marvellous
pictorial studies which, in spite of the special, anecdotal subjects,
rise to the level of grand painting through sheer power of
draughtsmanship and charm of tone. Degas has the special quality of
giving the precise sensation of the third dimension. The atmosphere
circulates round his figures; you walk round them; you see them in their
real plane, and they present themselves in a thousand unexpected
arrangements. Degas is undoubtedly the one man of his age who has most
contributed towards infusing new life into the representation of human
figures: in this respect his pictures resemble no one else's. The same
qualities will be found in his series of women bathing. These interiors,
where the actions of the bathers are caught amidst the stuffs, flowered
cushions, linen, sponges and tubs, are sharp visions of modernity. Degas
observes here, with the tenacious perfection of his talent, the
slightest shiver of the flesh refreshed by cold water. His masterly
drawing follows the most delicate inflexion of the muscles and suggests
the nervous system under the skin. He observes with extraordinary
subtlety the awkwardness of the nude being at a time when nudity is no
longer accustomed to show itself, and this true nudity is in strong
contrast to that of the academicians. One might say of Degas that he has
the disease of truth, if the necessity of truth were not health itself!
These bodies are still marked with the impressions of the garments; the
movements remain those of a clothed being which is only nude as an
exception. The painter notices beauty, but he looks for it particularly
in the profound characterisation of the types which he studies, and his
pastels have the massiveness and the sombre style of bronze. He has also
painted cafe-scenes, prostitutes and supers, with a mocking and sad
energy; he has even amused himself with painting washerwomen, to
translate the movements of the women of the people. And his colour with
its pearly whites, subdued blues and delicate greys, always elevates
everything he does, and confers upon him a distinctive style.
Finally, about 1896, Degas has revealed himself as a dreamy landscapist.
His recent landscapes are symphonies in colours of strange harmony and
hallucinations of rare tones, resembling music rather than painting. It
is perhaps in these pictures that he has revealed certain dreams
hitherto jealously hidden.
And now I must speak of his technique. It is very singular and varied,
and one of the most complicated in existence. In his first works, which
are apparently as simple as Corot's, he does not employ the process of
colour-spots. But many of the works in his second manner are a
combination of drawing, painting and pastel. He has invented a kind of
engraving mixed with wash-drawing, pastel crayon crushed with brushes of
special pattern. Here one can find again his meticulous spirit. He has
many of the qualities of the scientist; he is as much chemist as
painter. It has been said of him, that he was a great artist of the
decadence. This is materially inexact, since his qualities of
draughtsmanship are those of a superb Classicist, and his colouring of
very pure taste. But the spirit of his work, his love of exact detail,
his exaggerated psychological refinement, are certainly the signs of an
extremely alert intellect who regards life prosaically and with a
lassitude and disenchantment which are only consoled by the passion for
truth. Certain water-colours of his heightened by pastel, and certain
landscapes, are somewhat disconcerting through the preciousness of his
method; others are surprisingly spontaneous. All his work has an
undercurrent of thought. In short, this Realist is almost a mystic. He
has observed a limited section of humanity, but what he has seen has not
been seen so profoundly by anybody else.
[Illustration: DEGAS
HORSES IN THE MEADOWS]
Degas has exercised an occult, but very serious, influence. He has lived
alone, without pupils and almost without friends; the only pupils one
might speak of are the caricaturist Forain, who has painted many small
pictures inspired by him, and the excellent American lady-artist Miss
Mary Cassatt. But all modern draughtsmen have been taught a lesson by
his painting: Renouard, Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen have been
impressed by it, and the young generation considers Degas as a master.
And that is also the unexpressed idea of the academicians, and
especially of those who have sufficient talent to be able to appreciate
all the science and power of such an art. The writer of this book
happened one day to mention Degas's name before a member of the
Institute. "What!" exclaimed he, "you know him? Why didn't you speak to
me about him?" And when he received the reply, that I did not consider
Degas to be an agreeable topic for him, the illustrious official
answered vivaciously, "But do you think I am a fool, and that I do not
know that Degas is one of the greatest draughtsmen who have ever
lived?"--"Why, then, my dear sir, has he never been received at the
Salons, and not even been decorated at the age of sixty-five?"--"Ah,"
replied the Academician a little angrily, "that is another matter!"
Degas despises glory. It is believed that he has by him a number of
canvases which will have to be burnt after his death in accordance with
his will. He is a man who has loved his art like a mistress, with
jealous passion, and has sacrificed to it all that other
artists--enthusiasts even--are accustomed to reserve for their personal
interest. Degas, the incomparable pastellist, the faultless draughtsman,
the bitter, satirical, pessimistic genius, is an isolated phenomenon in
his period, a grand creator, unattached to his time. The painters and
the select few among art-lovers know what considerable force there is in
him. Though almost latent as yet, it will reveal itself brilliantly,
when an opportunity arises for bringing together the vast quantity of
his work. As is the case with Manet, though in a different sense, his
powerful classic qualities will become most prominent in this ordeal,
and this classicism has never abandoned him in his audacities. To Degas
is due a new method of observation in drawing. He will have been the
first to study the relation between the moving lines of a living being
and the immovable lines of the scene which serves as its setting; the
first, also, to define drawing, not as a graphic science, but as the
valuation of the third dimension, and thus to apply to painting the
principles hitherto reserved for sculpture. Finally, he will be counted
among the great analysts. His vision, tenacious, intense, and sombre,
stimulates thought: across what appears to be the most immediate and
even the most vulgar reality it reaches a grand, artistic style; it
states profoundly the facts of life, it condenses a little the human
soul: and this will suffice to secure for Degas an important place in
his epoch, a little apart from Impressionism. Without noise, and through
the sheer charm of his originality, he has contributed his share towards
undermining the false doctrines of academic art before the painters, as
Manet has undermined them before the public.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
AN INTERIOR, AFTER DINNER]
V
CLAUDE MONET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE
With Claude Monet we enter upon Impressionism in its most significant
technical expression, and touch upon the principal 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 hitherto, 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 Pissarro, 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 principally 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 anticipate 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 nobody 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.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
THE HARBOUR, HONFLEUR]
So much has Monet been attracted by the analysis 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 passes 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 quantity 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.
[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET
THE CHURCH AT VARENGEVILLE]
Generally he finds a very simple _motif_ sufficient; a hay-rick, some
slender trunks rising skywards, or a cluster of shrubs. But he also
proves himself as powerful draughtsman when he attacks themes of greater
complexity. Nobody 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
cluster of pines bent by the wind, how to throw a bridge across a river,
or how to express the massiveness 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 accumulation 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 impassibility 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 hoar frost of exquisite softness, and
sailing boats passing 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 space, 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.
[Illustration: 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
accumulation 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.
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