Chapter II: Part 2

In 1882, after about a year of study in Munich, he painted the important frescoes for the Steglitz Villa, in which the influence of Boecklin played freely. It was in Paris, however, where he studied between 1883 and 1885, that Klinger received his strongest and most definite impulse toward painting. His _Judgment of Paris_ revealed the fact that the young painter had come into possession of himself, and could be depended upon for qualities demanding constraint and a measure of severity. In choosing a legend of antiquity for the subject of his picture, he may have felt a psychological obligation to obey the greater influences of the antique tradition. At all events he rather suddenly developed a style of great maturity and firmness. From Paris he went back to Berlin, but in 1889 he started for Rome, where he spent four profitable years. The fruit of this Roman period has continued to ripen up to the present time, although since 1893 Klinger has made his home in Leipzig, his _wanderjahre_ apparently over and done with. He not only painted in Rome a _Pieta_, a _Crucifixion_, and a number of pictures in which problems of open-air painting are attacked, but he conceived there the powerful series of etchings on the subject of death, and there he made his first attempts in colored sculpture. From his earliest years, the image of death had often solicited him, and some of his interpretations are filled with dignity and pathos. In the slender, rigid figure on a white draped bed, from the etching cycle entitled _Eine Liebe_, there is the suggestion of a classic tomb, severe and impressive in outline, while nothing could be more poignant than the emotional appeal of the _Mutter und Kind_ in the second death series. To turn from these to the two religious paintings executed in Rome, is to realize that eccentric as Klinger often is, both in choice of subject and treatment, his attitude toward the mysteries and problems of man's existence is that of a serious thinker with a strong artistic talent, but a still stronger intelligence. It is not, however, until we reach the period which he devotes to sculpture, that we find in his art the quality of nobility, a certain breadth, which in spite of innovations in execution and almost trivial symbolic detail, impresses upon his conceptions the classic mark.

He began his studies for his great polychromatic statue of Beethoven as early as 1886, fifteen years before its completion. In 1892 it was reported in Rome that he had turned to sculpture as a new field in which to prove himself a master, and his first exhibited figure placed him above the rank of the amateur. He threw himself into his new work with his usual energy, making himself familiar with the technicalities of marble cutting in order to follow the execution with intelligence at every stage. He sought for his material with unwearying zest, taking long journeys into Italy, Greece and the Pyrenees to procure marble with the soft, worn, rich quality produced by exposure to the weather; with this he combined onyx and brilliant stones, bronze, ivory and gold, always with the intention of creating an impression of life in addition to producing a decorative result. His strong decorative instinct comes to his aid, however, in avoiding the incoherence that would seem inevitable from the mixture of so many and such diverse materials, and the equally strong intellectual motive always obvious in his work also tends to hold it together in a more or less dignified unity. The _Cassandra_, his second colored statue, finished in Leipzig in 1895, and now in possession of the Leipzig Museum, is especially free from eccentricity and caprice. The beautiful Greek head, with its deep-set eyes and delicate mouth, is expressive of intense but normal feeling. The flesh is represented by warm-toned marble, the hair is brownish-red, the garment is of alabaster, yellowish-red with violet tones, and the figure stands on a pedestal of Pyranean marble. In color effect, however, the _Beethoven_ is the most striking. In _Les Maitres Contemporains_, M. Paul Mongre thus describes it:

"The pedestal, half rock, half cloud, which supports the throne of the Olympian master, is of Pyranean marble of a dark violet-brown; the eagle is of black marble, veined with white, its eyes are of amber. The nude bust of Beethoven is of white Syrian marble, with light yellowish reflections, the drapery, hanging in supple folds, is of Tyrolean onyx with yellow-brown streaks in it. The throne of bronze is of a dull brown tone, except in the curved arms, which are brilliantly gilded. Five angel heads in ivory are placed like a crown on the inside of the back of the throne; their wings are studded with multi-colored gems and with antique fluorspar; the back of the throne is laid with blue Hungarian opals." All these different elements, the French critic maintains, are held together in reciprocal cohesion, and are kept subordinated to the bold conception of Beethoven as the Jupiter of music--"the godlike power accumulated and concentrated, on the point of breaking forth in lightnings; the eagle in waiting, ready to take flight, as the visible thought of Jupiter, before whom will spring up a whole world, or the musical image of a world: that is what is manifested by this close alliance of idea and form."

_From a statue in colored marble by Max Klinger_]

This monument to Beethoven is a performance designed to express not merely the artistic interest of the subject for Klinger, but the abounding enthusiasm of the latter for the great musician's genius. Immediately after leaving Rome, Klinger also brought to completion a series of etchings called _Brahms-phantasie_, and intended to illustrate the emotions aroused by the compositions of Brahms. In 1901 he made a portrait bust of Liszt, and his drawings for the _Metamorphoses_ were dedicated to Schumann. In the autumn of 1906 his Brahms memorial was placed in the new Music Hall in Hamburg. This memorial monument has the form of a powerful Hermes with the head of Brahms. The Muse of tone is apparently whispering secrets of art into the ears of the master. His debt, therefore, to the masters of music may be considered as fully and promptly paid, and the impression of hero-worship conveyed by these ardent tributes is a reminder that the artist is young in temperament, Teutonic in origin, and untouched by the modern spirit of indifference to persons. Unlike many German artists of the present day, he did not find in Paris the atmosphere that suited him. In spite of his years there and in Rome, he has remained undisturbed by any anti-German influence. His compatriots speak with pride of the intensely national character of his mind, and have early recognized his importance, as perhaps could hardly have failed to be the case with powers so far from humble, and a method so far from patient. France also has paid him more than one tribute of appreciation, and the general feeling toward him seems now to be that expressed by one of his German admirers in America: "Why criticize him? He is so overwhelming, so overpowering intellectually that the best we can do is to try to understand him."

ALFRED STEVENS

IV

ALFRED STEVENS

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

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

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

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

_From a painting by Alfred Stevens_]

The silks and muslins of gowns and scarves are also important accessories in these pictures which have a modernity not unlike that of the pictures of Velasquez, in which the ugliness of contemporary fashions turns to beauty under the learned rendering of textures and surfaces. Bibelots and furnishings, wall-hangings, pictures, rugs, polished floors, glass and silver and china and jewels are all likewise pressed into the service of an art that used what lay nearest to it, not for the purposes of realism but for the enchantment of the vision. M. Lambotte has pointed out that Stevens introduced mirrors, crystals and porcelains into his canvasses with the same intention as that of the landscape-painter who makes choice of a subject with a river, lake or pond, knowing that clear reflections and smooth surface aid in giving the effect of distance and intervening atmosphere. The same writer has told us that so far from reproducing the ordinary costumes of his period Stevens took pains to seek exclusive and elegant examples, _chefs d'oeuvres_ of the dressmaker's art, and that such were put at his service by the great ladies of the second empire. The beautiful muslin over-dress of the _Dame en Rose_ is perhaps the one that most taxed his flexible brush. It is diaphanous in texture, elaborately cut and trimmed with delicate laces and embroideries, and the rose of the under-robe, the snowy white of the muslin, the silver ornaments and the pale blonde hair of the wearer make the lightest and daintiest of harmonies accentuated by the black of the lacquer cabinet with its brilliant polychromatic insets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A SKETCH IN OUTLINE OF JACQUES CALLOT

V

A SKETCH IN OUTLINE OF JACQUES CALLOT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Engraved by Vosterman after the painting of Van Dyck_]

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

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

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

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

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

After this all went well and swiftly. Passing over many plates, important and unimportant, we come three years later to the _Great Fair of Florence_, pronounced by M. Meaume, Callot's masterpiece. "It is doubtful," says this excellent authority, "if in Callot's entire work a single other plate can be found worthy to compete with the _Great Fair of Florence_. He has done as well, perhaps, but never better."

At this time his production was, all of it, full of life and spirit, vivacious and fluent, the very joy of workmanship. He frequently began and finished a plate in a day, and his long apprenticeship to his tools had made him completely their master. In many of the prints are found traces of dry point, and those who looked on while he worked have testified that when a blank space on his plate displeased him he was wont to take up his instrument and engrave a figure, a bit of drapery, or some trees in the empty spaces, directly upon the copper, improvising from his ready fancy.

For recreation he commonly turned to some other form of his craft. He tried painting, and some of his admirers would like to prove that he was a genius in this sort, but it is fairly settled that when once he became entangled in the medium of color he was lost, producing the heaviest and most unpleasing effects, and that he produced no finished work in this kind. He contributed to the technical outfit of the etcher a new varnish, the hard varnish of the lute-makers which up to that time had not been used in etching, and which, substituted for the soft ground, enabled him to execute his marvelous little figures with great lightness and delicacy, and also made it possible for him to keep several plates going at once, as he delighted to do, turning from one to another as his mood prompted him.

This Florentine period was one of countless satisfactions for him. More fortunate than many artists, he won his fame in time to enjoy it. His productions were so highly regarded during his lifetime that good proofs were eagerly sought, and to use Baldinucci's expression, were "_enfermees sous sept clefs_." He was known all over Europe, and about his neck he wore a magnificent gold chain given him by the Grand Duke Cosimo II, in token of esteem. In the town which he had entered so few years before in the gipsy caravan, he was now the arbiter of taste in all matters of art, highly honored, and friend of the great. When Cosimo died and the pensions of the artists were discontinued, Callot was quite past the need of princely favors, and could choose his own path. He had already refused offers from Pope and emperor and doubtless would have remained in Florence had not Prince Charles of Lorraine determined to reclaim him for his native place.

In 1621 or 1622 he returned to Nancy, never again to live in Italy. He went back preeminent among his countrymen. He had done in etching what had not been done before him and much that has not been done since. He had created a new genre and a new treatment. He had been faithful to his first lesson from Duccio and had become eloquent in his use of simple outline to express joy, fear, calm or sorrow, his work gaining from this abandonment of shadows a largeness and clearness that separates him from his German contemporaries and adds dignity to the elegance and grace of his figures. His skill with the etching needle had become so great that technical difficulties practically did not exist for him. What he wished to do he did with obvious ease and always with distinction. His feeling for synthesis and balance was as striking as his love of the curious, and as these qualities seldom go together in one mind, the result was an art extremely unlike that of other artists. It was characteristic of him that he could not copy himself, and found himself completely at a loss when he tried to repeat some of his Florentine plates under other skies.

Arrived at Nancy, he found Henry II, the then reigning Duke of Lorraine, ready to accord him a flattering welcome, and under his favor he worked with increasing success. Among the plates produced shortly after his return is one called _Les Supplices_, in which is represented all the punishments inflicted throughout Europe upon criminals and legal offenders. In an immense square the revolting scenes are taking place, and innumerable little figures swarm about the streets and even upon the roofs of the houses. Yet the impression is neither confused nor painful. A certain impersonality in the rendering, a serious almost melancholy austerity of touch robs the spectacle of its ignoble suggestion. Inspection of this remarkable plate makes it easy to realize Callot's supreme fitness for the tasks that shortly were to be laid upon him.

He was chosen by the Infanta Elisabeth-Claire-Eugenie of Austria to commemorate the Siege of Breda, in a series of etchings, and while he was in Brussels gathering his materials for this tremendous work he came to know Van Dyck, who painted his portrait afterward engraved by Vosterman, a superb delineation of both his face and character at this important period of his eminent career. Soon after the etchings were completed, designs were ordered by Charles IV, for the decorations of the great carnival of 1627. Callot was summoned to Paris to execute some plates representing the surrender of La Rochelle in 1628, and the prior attack upon the fortress of St. Martin on the Isle of Re. In Paris he dwelt with his old friend Israel Henriet, who dealt largely in prints and who had followed with keen attention Callot's constantly increasing renown. Henriet naturally tried to keep his friend with him in Paris as long as possible, but Callot had lost by this time the vagrant tendencies of his youth. He was married and of a home-keeping disposition, and all that Henriet could throw in his way of stimulating tasks and congenial society, in addition to the formidable orders for which he had contracted, detained him hardly longer than a year. Upon leaving he made over all his Parisian plates save those of the great sieges to Henriet, whose name as publisher appears upon them.

Callot's return to Nancy marked the close of the second period of his art, the period in which he painted battles with ten thousand episodes revealed in one plate, and so accurately that men of war kept his etchings among their text-books for professional reference. The next demand that was made upon him to represent the downfall of a brave city came from Louis XIII, upon the occasion of his entering Nancy on the 25th of September, 1633. By a ruse Richelieu had made the entry possible, and the inglorious triumph Louis deemed worthy of commemoration by the accomplished engraver now his subject. Neither Callot's high Lorraine heart nor his brilliant instrument was subjugated, however, and he respectfully begged the monarch to absolve him from a task so revolting to his patriotism. "Sire," he said, "I am of Lorraine, and I cannot believe it my duty to do anything contrary to the honor of my Prince and my Country." The king accepted his remonstrance in good part, declaring that Monsieur of Lorraine was very happy to have subjects so faithful in affection. Certain courtiers took Callot to task, however, for his refusal to obey the will of His Majesty, and to them Callot responded that he would cut off his thumb rather than do violence to his sense of honor. Some of the artist's historians have made him address this impetuous reply to the king himself, but M. Meaume reminds us that, familiar with courts, he knew too well the civility due to a sovereign to make it probable that he so forgot his dignity. Later the king tried to allure Callot by gifts, honors and pensions, but in vain. The sturdy gentleman preferred his oppressed prince to the royal favor, and set himself to immortalizing the misfortunes of his country in the superb series of etchings which he called "_Les Miseres de la Guerre_." He made six little plates showing in the life of the soldier the misery he both endures and inflicts upon others. These were the first free inspiration of the incomparable later set called "_Les Grandes Miseres_," "a veritable poem," M. Meaume declares, "a funeral ode describing and deploring the sorrows of Lorraine." These sorrows so much afflicted him that he would gladly have gone back to Italy to spend the last years of his life, had not the condition of his health, brought on by his indefatigable labor, prevented him.

He lived simply in the little town where he had seen his young visions of the spirit of art, walking in the early morning with his elder brother, attending mass, working until dinner time, visiting in the early afternoon with the persons, many of them distinguished and even of royal blood, who thronged his studio, then working until evening. He rarely attended the court, but grew constantly more quiet in taste and more severe in his artistic method, until the feeling for the grotesque that inspired his earlier years were hardly to be discerned. Once only, in the tremendous plate illustrating the Temptation of Saint Anthony, did he return to his old bizarre vision of a world conceived in the mood of Dante and Ariosto.

Callot died on the 24th of March, 1635, at the age of forty-three. Still a young man, he had passed through all the phases of temperament that commonly mark the transit from youth to age. And he had used his art in the manner of a master to express the external world and his convictions concerning the great spiritual and ethical questions of his age. He enunciated his message distinctly; there were no tender gradations, no uncertainties of outline or mysteries of surface in his work. It is the grave utterance of the definite French intelligence with a note of deeper suggestion brought from those regions of ironic gloom in which the Florentine recorded his sublime despair.

CARLO CRIVELLI

VI

CARLO CRIVELLI

Among the more interesting pictures acquired by the Metropolitan Museum within the past two years are the panels by Carlo Crivelli, representing respectively St. George and St. Dominic.

Crivelli is one of the fifteenth century Italian masters who show their temperament in their work with extraordinary clearness. His spirit was ardent and his moods were varying. With far less technical skill than his contemporary, Mantegna, he has at once a warmer and more brilliant style and a more modern feeling for natural and significant gesture. His earliest known work that bears a date is the altar-piece in S. Silvestro at Massa near Fermo; but his most recent biographer, Mr. Rushworth, gives to his Venetian period before he left for the Marches, the Virgin and Child now at Verona, and sees in this the strongest evidences of his connection with the School of Padua. Other important pictures by him are at Ascoli, in the Lateran Gallery, Rome, in the Vatican, in the Brera Gallery at Milan, in the Berlin Gallery, in the National Gallery at London, in Frankfurt (the Staedel Gallery), in the Museum of Brussels, in Lord Northbrook's collection, London, in the Boston Museum, in Mrs. Gardiner's collection at Boston, and in Mr. Johnson's collection at Philadelphia. The eight examples in the National Gallery, although belonging for the most part to his later period, show his wide range and his predominating characteristics, which indeed are stamped with such emphasis upon each of his works that despite the many and great differences in these, there seems to be little difficulty in recognizing their authorship. No. 788, _The Madonna and Child Enthroned, surrounded by Saints_, an altarpiece painted for the Dominican Church at Ascoli in 1476, is the most elaborate and pretentious of the National Gallery compositions, but fails as a whole to give that impression of moral and physical energy, of intense feeling expressed with serene art, which renders the _Annunciation_ (No. 739) both impressive and ingratiating. The lower central compartment is instinct with grace and tenderness. The Virgin, mild-faced and melancholy, is seated on a marble throne. The Child held on her arm, droops his head, heavy with sleep, upon her arm in a babyish and appealing attitude curiously opposed to the dignity of the Child in Mantegna's group which hangs on the opposite wall. His hand clasps his mother's finger and his completely relaxed figure has unquestionably been studied from life. At the right and left of the Virgin are St. Peter and St. John, St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Dominic, whole-length figures strongly individualized and differentiated. St. John in particular reveals in the beauty of feature and expression Crivelli's power to portray subtleties and refinements of character without sacrificing his sumptuous taste for accessories and ornament. The Saint, wearing his traditional sheep skin and bearing his cross and scroll, bends his head in meditation. His brows are knit, his features, ascetic in mold and careworn, are eloquent of serious thought and moral conviction. By the side of St. Peter resplendent in pontifical robes and enriched with jewels, he wears the look of a young devout novice not yet so familiar with sanctity as to carry it with ease. He stands by the side of a little stream, in a landscape that combines in the true Crivelli manner direct realism with decorative formality. The St. Dominic with book and lily in type resembles the figure in the Metropolitan, but the face is painted with greater skill and has more vigor of expression. Above this lower stage of the altarpiece are four half-length figures of St. Francis, St. Andrew the Apostle, St. Stephen and St. Thomas Aquinas, and over these again are four pictures showing the Archangel Michael trampling on the Dragon, St. Lucy the Martyr, St. Jerome and St. Peter, Martyr, all full length figures of small size and delicately drawn, but which do not belong to the original series. The various parts of the altarpiece were enclosed in a splendid and ornate frame while in the possession of Prince Demidoff in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the whole is a magnificent monument to Crivelli's art. The heavy gold backgrounds and the free use of gold in the ornaments, together with the use of high relief (St. Peter's keys are modeled, for example, almost in the round, so nearly are they detached from the panel) represent his tendency to overload his compositions with archaic and realistic detail, but here as elsewhere the effect is one of harmony and corporate unity of many parts. The introduction of sham jewels, such as those set in the Virgin's crown and in the rings and medallions worn by Peter, fails to destroy the dignity of the execution. It may even be argued that these details enhance it by affording a salient support to the strongly marked emotional faces of the saints and to the vigorous gestures which would be violent in a classic setting.

_From a panel by Carlo Crivelli_]

A quite different note is struck in the grave little composition belonging to an altarpiece of early date in which two infant angels support the body of Christ on the edge of the tomb. Nothing is permitted to interrupt the simplicity of this pathetic group. In the much more passionate rendering of a similar subject--the _Pieta_ in Mr. Johnson's collection--the child angels are represented in an agony of grief, their features contorted and their gestures despairing. The little angels of the National Gallery picture, on the contrary, are but touched by a pensive sorrow. One of them rests his chin upon the shoulder of the Christ half tenderly, half wearily; the other in fluttering robes of a lovely yellow, applies his slight strength to his task seriously but without emotion. The figure of Christ, tragically quiet, with suffering brows, the wound in the side gaping, is without the suggestion of extreme physical anguish that marks the figure in the Boston _Pieta_. The sentiment with which the panel is inspired is one of gentleness, of resignation, of self-control and piety. The same sentiment is felt in the companion panel, now in the Brussels Gallery--_The Virgin and the Child Jesus_--which originally, with the _Pieta_, formed the central double compartment of a triptych at Monte Fiore, near Fermo. The sad coloring of the Virgin's robe--a dull bluish green with a gold pattern over an under robe of pale ashes of roses, the calm, benign features, the passive hands, are all in the spirit of subdued feeling. The child alone, gnomish in expression and awkward in a straddling attitude upon his mother's knee, fails to conform to the general gracious scheme.

In the _Annunciation_ already mentioned, we have another phase of Crivelli's flexible genius--a phase in which are united the pomp and splendor of his fantastic taste with the innocence and sweetness of his most engaging feminine type. It would be difficult to imagine a more demure and girlish Virgin than the small kneeling figure in the richly furnished chamber at the right of the panel. The glory of her fate is symbolized by the broad golden ray falling from the heavens upon her meekly bowed head. Her face is pale with the dim pallor that commonly rests upon Crivelli's flesh tones, and her clasped hands have the exaggerated length of finger and also the look of extraordinary pliability which he invariably gives. Outside the room in the open court kneels the Angel of the Annunciation and by his side kneels St. Emedius, the patron of Ascoli, with a model of the city in his hands. These figures are realistic in gesture and expression, interested, eager, responsive, filled with quick life and joyous impulse. The richly embroidered garment of the angel, his gilded wings, his traditional attitude, neither overpower nor detract from the vivid individuality of the beautiful face so firmly yet so freely modeled within its delicate hard bounding line. This feeling of actuality in the scene is carried still farther by the introduction of a charming little child on a balcony at the left, peering out from behind a pillar with naive curiosity and half-shy, half-bold determination to see the end of the adventure. All this is conceived in the spirit of modernity and the personal quality is unmistakable and enchanting. There is no excess of emotion nor is there undue restraint. There is a blithe sense of the interest of life and the personality of human beings that gives a value to the subject and a meaning beyond its accepted symbolism. On the technical side, also, the panel has remarkable merit even for this expert and careful painter. His Venetian fondness for magnificent externals finds ample expression in the rich accessories. A peacock is perched on the casement of the Virgin's room, flowers and fruits, vases and variegated marbles all come into the plan of the handsome environment, and are justified artistically by the differentiation of textures, the gradation of color, the research into intricacies of pattern, the light firm treatment of architectural structure, and the skilful subordination of all superficial detail to the elements of the human drama, the figures of which occupy little space, but are overwhelming in significance.

ST. GEORGE

_From a panel by Carlo Crivelli_]