The French Impressionists (1860 1900) written by Camille Mauclair
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Camille Mauclair >> The French Impressionists (1860 1900)
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What we shall have to thank Impressionism for, will be moral and
material advantages of considerable importance. Morally it has rendered
an immense service to all art, because it has boldly attacked routine
and proved by the whole of its work that a combination of independent
producers could renew the aesthetic code of a country, without owing
anything to official encouragement. It has succeeded where important but
isolated creators have succumbed, because it has had the good fortune of
uniting a group of gifted men, four of whom will count among the
greatest French artists since the origin of national art. It has had the
qualities which overcome the hardest resistance: fecundity, courage and
sure originality. It has known how to find its strength by referring to
the true traditions of the national genius, which have happily
enlightened it and saved it from fundamental errors. It has, last, but
not least, inflicted an irremediable blow on academic convention and has
wrested from it the prestige of teaching which ruled tyrannically for
centuries past over the young artists. It has laid a violent hand upon a
tenacious and dangerous prejudice, upon a series of conventional notions
which were transmitted without consideration for the evolution of modern
life and intelligence. It has dared freely to protest against a
degenerated ideal which vainly parodied the old masters, pretending to
honour them. It has removed from the artistic soul of France a whole
order of pseudo-classic elements which worked against its blossoming,
and the School will never recover from this bold contradiction which has
rallied to it all the youthful. The moral principle of Impressionism has
been absolutely logical and sane, and that is why nothing has been able
to prevent its triumph.
Technically Impressionism has brought a complete renewal of pictorial
vision, substituting the beauty of character for the beauty of
proportions and finding adequate expression for the ideas and feelings
of its time, which constitutes the secret of all beautiful works. It has
taken up again a tradition and added to it a contemporary page. It will
have to be thanked for an important series of observations as regards
the analysis of light, and for an absolutely original conception of
drawing. Some years have been wasted by painters of little worth in
imitating it, and the Salons, formerly encumbered with academic
_pastiches_, have been encumbered with Impressionist _pastiches_. It
would be unfair to blame the Impressionists for it. They have shown by
their very career that they hated teaching and would never pretend to
teach. Impressionism is based upon irrefutable optic laws, but it is
neither a style, nor a method, likely ever to become a formula in its
turn. One may call upon this art for examples, but not for receipts. On
the contrary, its best teaching has been to encourage artists to become
absolutely independent and to search ardently for their own
individuality. It marks the decline of the School, and will not create a
new one which would soon become as fastidious as the other. It will only
appear, to those who will thoroughly understand it, as a precious
repertory of notes, and the young generation honours it intelligently by
not imitating it with servility.
Not that it is without its faults! It has been said, to belittle it,
that it only had the value of an interesting attempt, having only been
able to indicate some excellent intentions, without creating anything
perfect. This is inexact. It is absolutely evident, that Manet, Monet,
Renoir and Degas have signed some masterpieces which did not lose by
comparison with those in the Louvre, and the same might even be said of
their less illustrious friends. But it is also evident that the time
spent on research as well as on agitation and enervating controversies
pursued during twenty-five years, has been taken from men who could
otherwise have done better still. There has been a disparity between
Realism and the technique of Impressionism. Its realistic origin has
sometimes made it vulgar. It has often treated indifferent subjects in a
grand style, and it has too easily beheld life from the anecdotal side.
It has lacked psychologic synthesis (if we except Degas). It has too
willingly denied all that exists hidden under the apparent reality of
the universe and has affected to separate painting from the ideologic
faculties which rule over all art. Hatred of academic allegory,
defiance of symbolism, abstraction and romantic scenes, has led it to
refuse to occupy itself with a whole order of ideas, and it has had the
tendency of making the painter beyond all a workman. It was necessary at
the moment of its arrival, but it is no longer necessary now, and the
painters understand this themselves. Finally it has too often been
superficial even in obtaining effects; it has given way to the wish to
surprise the eyes, of playing with tones merely for love of cleverness.
It often causes one regret to see symphonies of magnificent colour
wasted here in pictures of boating men; and there, in pictures of cafe
corners; and we have arrived at a degree of complex intellectuality
which is no longer satisfied with these rudimentary themes. It has
indulged in useless exaggerations, faults of composition and of harmony,
and all this cannot be denied.
But it still remains fascinating and splendid for its gifts which will
always rouse enthusiasm: freedom, impetuousness, youth, brilliancy,
fervour, the joy of painting and the passion for beautiful light. It is,
on the whole, the greatest pictorial movement that France has beheld
since Delacroix, and it brings to a finish gloriously the nineteenth
century, inaugurating the present. It has accomplished the great deed of
having brought us again into the presence of our true national lineage,
far more so than Romanticism, which was mixed with foreign elements. We
have here painting of a kind which could only have been conceived in
France, and we have to go right back to Watteau in order to receive
again the same impression. Impressionism has brought us an almost
unhoped-for renaissance, and this constitutes its most undeniable claim
upon the gratitude of the race.
It has exercised a very appreciable influence upon foreign painting.
Among the principal painters attracted by its ideas and research, we
must mention, in Germany, Max Liebermann and Kuehl; in Norway, Thaulow;
in Denmark, Kroyer; in Belgium, Theo Van Rysselberghe, Emile Claus,
Verheyden, Heymans, Verstraete, and Baertson; in Italy, Boldini,
Segantini, and Michetti; in Spain, Zuloaga, Sorolla y Bastida, Dario de
Regoyos and Rusinol; in America, Alexander, Harrison, Sargent; and in
England, the painters of the Glasgow School, Lavery, Guthrie and the
late John Lewis Brown. All these men come within the active extension of
the French movement, and one may say that the honour of having first
recognised the truly national movement of this art must be given to
those foreign countries which have enriched their collections and
museums with works that were despised in the land which had witnessed
their birth. At the present moment the effects of this new vision are
felt all over the world, down to the very bosom of the academies; and at
the Salons, from which the Impressionists are still excluded, can be
witnessed an invasion of pictures inspired by them, which the most
retrograde juries dare not reject. In whatever measure the recent
painters accept Impressionism, they remain preoccupied with it, and even
those who love it not are forced to take it into account.
The Impressionist movement can therefore now be considered, apart from
all controversies, without vain attacks or exaggerated praise, as an
artistic manifestation which has entered the domain of history, and it
can be studied with the impartial application of the methods of
critical analysis which is usually employed in the study of the former
art movements. We shall not pretend to have given in these pages a
complete and faultless history; but we shall consider ourselves well
rewarded for this work, which is intended to reach the great public, if
we have roused their curiosity and sympathy with a group of artists whom
we consider admirable; and if we have rectified, in the eyes of the
readers of a foreign nation, the errors, the slanders, the undeserved
reproaches, with which Frenchmen have been pleased to overwhelm sincere
creators who thought with faith and love of the pure tradition of the
national genius, and who have for that reason been vilified as much as
if they had in an access of anarchical folly risen against the very
common sense, taste, reason and clearness, which will remain the eternal
merits of their soil. This small, imperfect volume will perhaps find its
best excuse in its intention of repairing an old injustice and of
affirming a useful and permanent truth: that of the authenticity of the
classicism of Impressionism, in the face of the false classicism of the
academic world which official honours have made the guardian of a French
heritage, whose soul it denied and whose spirit it deceived with its
narrow and cold formulas.
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