Chapter XXXIV: France (1)

Paris, which for a hundred years had given the signal for all novel tactics in European art, still remained at the head of the movement; the artistic temperament of the French people themselves, and the superlatively excellent training which the painter enjoys in Paris, enable him at once to follow every change of taste with confidence and ease. In 1883 Manet died, on the varnishing day of the Salon, and in the preface which Zola wrote to the catalogue of the exhibition held after the death of the master he was well able to say: "His influence is an accomplished fact, undeniable, and making itself more deeply felt with every fresh Salon. Look back for twenty years, recall those black Salons, in which even studies from the nude seemed as dark as if they had been covered with mouldering dust. In huge frames history and mythology were smothered in layers of bitumen; never was there an excursion into the province of the real world, into life and into perfect light; scarcely here or there a tiny landscape, where a patch of blue sky ventured bashfully to shine down. But little by little the Salons were seen to brighten, and the Romans and Greeks of mahogany to vanish in company with the nymphs of porcelain, whilst the stream of modern representations taken from ordinary life increased year by year, and flooded the walls, bathing them with vivid tones in the fullest sunlight. It was not merely a new period; it was a new painting bent upon reaching the perfect light, respecting the law of colour values, setting every figure in full light and in its proper place, instead of adapting it in an ideal fashion according to established tradition."

When the way had been paved for this change, when the new principles had been transferred from the chamber of experiments to full publicity, from the _Salon des Refusés_ to the Salon which was official, it was chiefly _Bastien-Lepage_ who gained the first adherents to them amongst the public. But because he does not belong to the pioneers of art, and merely adapted for the great public elements that had been won by Manet, the immoderate praise which was accorded him in earlier days has been recently brought within more legitimate limits. It has been urged, by way of restriction, that he stands in relation to Manet as Breton to Millet, and that, admitting all differences, he has nevertheless a certain resemblance to his teacher, Cabanel. As the latter rendered Classicism elegant, Bastien-Lepage, it has been said, softened the ruggedness of Naturalism, cut and polished the nails of his peasants, and made their rusticity a pretty thing, qualifying it for the drawing-room. Degas was in the habit of calling him the Bouguereau of Naturalism. As a matter of fact, Naturalism was bound to make certain concessions if it were ever to prevail, and such critics forget that it was just these amiable concessions which helped the principles of Manet to prevail more swiftly than would have been otherwise possible. All the forms and ideas of the Impressionists, with which no one, outside the circle of artists, had been able to reconcile himself, were to be found in Bastien-Lepage, purified, mitigated, and set in a golden style. He followed the _eclaireurs_, as the leader of the main body of the army which has gained the decisive battle, and in this way he has fulfilled an important mission in the history of art.

Bastien-Lepage was born in ancient Damvillers--once a small stronghold of Lorraine--in a pleasant, roomy house that told a tale of even prosperity rather than of wealth. As a boy he played amongst the venerable moats which had been converted into orchards. Thus in his youth he received the freshest impressions, being brought up in the heart of nature. His father drew a good deal himself, and kept his son at work with the pencil, without any æsthetic theories, without any vague ideal, and without ever uttering the word "academy" or "museum." Having left school in Verdun, Bastien-Lepage went to Paris to become an official in the post-office. Of an afternoon, however, he drew and painted with Cabanel. But he was Cabanel's pupil much as Voltaire was a pupil of the Jesuits. "My handicraft," as he said afterwards, "I learnt at the Academy, but not my art. You want to paint what exists, and you are invited to represent the unknown ideal, and to dish up the pictures of the old masters. In old days I scrawled drawings of gods and goddesses, Greeks and Romans, beings I didn't know, and didn't understand, and regarded with supreme indifference. To keep up my courage, I repeated to myself that this was possibly 'grand art,' and I ask myself sometimes whether anything academical still remains in my composition. I do not say that one should only paint everyday life; but I do assert that when one paints the past it should, at any rate, be made to look like something human, and correspond with what one sees around one. It would be so easy to teach the mere craft of painting at the academies, without incessantly talking about Michael Angelo, and Raphael, and Murillo, and Domenichino. Then one would go home afterwards to Brittany, Gascony, Lorraine, or Normandy, and paint what lies around; and any morning, after reading, if one had a fancy to represent the Prodigal Son, or Priam at the feet of Achilles, or anything of the kind, one would paint such scenes in one's own fashion, without reminiscences of the galleries--paint them in the surroundings of the country, with the models that one has at hand, just as if the old drama had taken place yesterday evening. It is only in that way that art can be living and beautiful."

BASTIEN-LEPAGE. PORTRAIT OF HIS GRANDFATHER.

(_By permission of M. E. Bastien-Lepage, the owner of the picture._)]

The outbreak of the war fortunately prevented him from remaining long at the Academy. He entered a company of Franc-Tireurs, took part in the defence of Paris, and returned ill to Damvillers. Here he came to know himself and his peculiar talent. At once a poet and a realist, he looked at nature with that simple frankness which those alone possess who have learnt from youth upwards to see with their own eyes instead of trusting to other people's. His friends called him "primitive," and there was some truth in what they said, for Bastien-Lepage came to art free from all trace of mannerism; he knew nothing of academical rules, and merely relied upon his eyes, which were always open and trustworthy.

Looking back as far as he could, he was able to remember nothing except gleaners bowed over the stubble-fields, vintagers scattered amid the furrows of the vineyards, mowers whose robust figures rose brightly from the green meadows, shepherdesses seeking shelter beneath tall trees from the blazing rays of the midday sun, shepherds shivering in their ragged cloaks in winter, pedlars hurrying with great strides across the plain raked by a storm, laundresses laughing as they stood at their tubs beneath the blossoming apple-trees. He was impressionable to everything: the dangerous-looking tramp who hung about one day near his father's house; the wood-cutter groaning beneath the weight of his burden; the passer-by trampling the fresh grass of the meadows and leaving his trace behind him; the little sickly girl minding her lean cow upon a wretched field; the fire which broke out in the night and set the whole village in commotion. That was what he wanted to paint, and that is what he has painted. The life of the peasants of Lorraine is the theme of all his pictures, the landscape of Lorraine is their setting. He painted what he loved, and he loved what he painted.

BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE FLOWER GIRL.]

It was in Damvillers that he felt at home as an artist. He had his studio in the second storey of his father's house, though he usually painted in the open air, either in the field or the orchard, whilst his grandfather, an old man of eighty, was near him clipping the trees, watering the flowers, and weeding the grass. His mother, a genuine peasant, was always busy with the thousand cares of housekeeping. Of an evening the whole family sat together round the lamp, his mother sewing, his father reading the paper, his grandfather with the great cat on his lap, and Jules working. It was at this time that he produced those familiar domestic scenes, thrown off with a few strokes, which were to be seen at the exhibition of the works which he left behind him. He knew no greater pleasure than that of drawing again and again the portraits of his father and mother, the old lamp, or the velvet cap of his grandfather. At ten o'clock sharp his father gave the signal for going to bed.

In Paris, indeed, other demands were made. In 1872 he painted, with the object of being represented in the Salon, that remarkable picture "In the Spring," the only one of his works which is slightly hampered by conventionality in conception. The pupil of Cabanel is making an effort at truth, and has not yet the courage to be true altogether. Here, as in the "Spring Song" which followed, there is a mixture of borrowed sentiment, work in the old style and fresh Naturalism. The landscape is painted from nature, and the peasant woman is real, but the Cupids are taken from the old masters.

BASTIEN-LEPAGE. SARAH BERNHARDT.]

The next years were devoted to competitive labours. To please his father and mother Bastien-Lepage twice contested the _Prix de Rome_. In 1873 he painted as a prize exercise a "Priam before Achilles," and in 1875 an "Annunciation of the Angel to the Shepherds," that now famous picture which received the medal at the World Exhibition of 1878. And he who afterwards revelled in the clearest _plein-air_ painting here celebrates the secret wonders of the night, though the influences of Impressionism are here already visible. In his picture the night is as dark as in Rembrandt's visions; yet the colours are not harmonised in gold-brown, but in a cool grey silver tone. And how simple the effect of the heavenly appearance upon the shepherds lying round the fire of coals! The place of the curly ideal heads of the old sacred painting has been taken by those of bristly, unwashed men who, nurtured amid the wind and the weather, know nothing of those arts of toilette so much in favour with the imitators of Raphael, and who receive the miracle with the simplicity of elemental natures. Fear and abashed astonishment at the angelic appearance are reflected in their faces, and the plain and homely gestures of their hands are in correspondence with their inward excitement. Even the angel turning towards the shepherds was conceived in an entirely human and simple way. In spite of this, or just because of it, Bastien failed with his "Annunciation to the Shepherds," as he had done previously with his "Priam." Once the prize was taken by Léon Comerre, a pupil of Cabanel, and on the other occasion by Josef Wencker, the pupil of Gérôme. It was written in the stars that Bastien-Lepage was not to go to Rome, and it did him as little harm as it had done to Watteau a hundred and sixty years before. In Italy Bastien-Lepage would only have been spoilt for art. The model for him was not one of the old Classic painters, but nature as she is in Damvillers,--Nature, the great mother. When the works sent in for the competition were exhibited a sensation was made when one day a branch of laurel was laid on the frame of Bastien-Lepage's "Annunciation to the Shepherds" by Sarah Bernhardt. And Sarah Bernhardt's portrait became the most celebrated of the small likenesses which soon laid the foundation of the painter's fame.

The portrait of his grandfather, that marvellous work of a young man of five-and-twenty, is the first picture in which he was completely himself. The old man sits in a corner of the garden, just as usual, in a brown cap, his spectacles upon his nose, his arms crossed upon his lap, with a horn snuff-box and a check handkerchief lying upon his knees. How perfectly easy and natural is the pose, how thoughtful the physiognomy, what a personal note there is in the dress! Nor are there in that garden, bathed in light, any of those black shadows which only fall in the studio. Everything bore witness to a simplicity and sincerity which justified the greatest hopes. After that first work the world knew that Bastien-Lepage was a preeminent portrait painter, and he did not betray the promise of his youth. His succeeding pictures showed that he had not merely rusticity and nature to rely upon, but that he was a _charmeur_ in the best sense of the word.

BASTIEN-LEPAGE. MME. DROUET.]

BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE HAY HARVEST.]

This ingenuous artist, who knew nothing of the history of painting, and felt more at home in the open air than in museums, was not ignorant, at any rate, of the portraits of the sixteenth century, and had chosen for his likenesses a scale as small as that which Clouet and his school preferred. The representation here reaches a depth of characterisation which recalls Jan van Eyck's little pearls of portrait painting. In these works also he mostly confined himself to bright lights. Portraits of this type are those of his brother, of Madame Drouet, the aged friend of Victor Hugo, with her weary, gentle, benevolent face--a masterpiece of intimate feeling and refinement; of his friend and biographer André Theuriet, of Andrieux the prefect of the police, and, above all, the famous and signal work of inexorable truth and marvellous delicacy, Sarah Bernhardt in profile, with her tangled chestnut hair, sitting upon a white fur, arrayed in a white China-silk dress with yellowish lights in it, and carefully examining a Japanese bronze. The bizarre grace of the tragic actress, her slender figure, fashioned, as it were, for Donatello, the nervous intensity with which she sits there, her weird Chinese method of wearing the hair, and the profile of which she is so proud, have been rendered in none of her many likenesses with such an irresistible force of attraction as in this little masterpiece. In some of his other portraits Bastien-Lepage has not disdained the charm of obscure light; he has not done so, for example, in the little portrait of Albert Wolff, the art-critic, as he sits at his writing-desk amongst his artistic treasures, with a cigarette in his hand. Only Clouet and Holbein painted miniature portraits of such refinement. Amongst moderns, probably Ingres alone has reached such a depth of characterisation upon the smallest scale, and in general he is the most closely allied to Bastien-Lepage as a portrait painter in profound study of physiognomy, and in the broad and, one might say, chased technique of his little drawings. Comparison with Gaillard would be greatly to the disadvantage of this great engraver, for Bastien-Lepage is at once more seductive and many-sided. It is curious how seldom his portraits have that family likeness which is elsewhere to be found amongst almost all portrait painters. In his effort at penetrative characterisation he alters, on every occasion, his entire method of painting according to the personality, so that it leaves at one time an effect that is bizarre, coquettish, and full of intellectual power and spirit, at another one which is plain and large, at another one which is bashful, sparing, and _bourgeois_.

As a painter of peasant life he made his first appearance in 1878.

BASTIEN-LEPAGE. LE PÈRE JACQUES.]

BASTIEN-LEPAGE. JOAN OF ARC.]

In the Salon of this year a sensation was made by a work of such truth and poetry as had not been seen since Millet; this was the "Hay Harvest." It is noon. The June sun throws its sultry beams over the mown meadows. The ground rises slowly to a boundless horizon, where a tree emerges here and there, standing motionless against the brilliant sky. The grey and the green of these great plains--it is as if the weariness of many toilsome miles rose out of them--weighed heavily upon one, and created a sense of forsaken loneliness. Only two beings, a pair of day-labourers, break the wide level scorched by a quivering, continuous blaze of light. They have had their midday meal, and their basket is lying near them upon the ground. The man has now lain down to sleep upon a heap of hay, with his hat tilted over his eyes. But the woman sits dreaming, tired with the long hours of work, dazzled with the glare of the sun, and overpowered by the odour of the hay and the sultriness of noon. She does not know the drift of her thoughts; nature is working upon her, and she has feelings which she scarcely understands herself. She is sunburnt and ugly, and her head is square and heavy, and yet there lies a world of sublime and mystical poetry in her dull, dreamy eyes gazing into a mysterious horizon. By this picture and "The Potato Harvest," which succeeded it in 1879, Bastien-Lepage, the splendid, placed himself in the first line of modern French painters. This time he renders the sentiment of October. The sandy fields, impregnated with dust, rest in a white, subdued light of noon; pale brown are the potato stalks, pale brown the blades of grass, and the roads are bright with dust; and through this landscape, with its wide horizon, where the tree-tops, half despoiled already, shiver in the wind, there blows _le grand air_, a breeze strong as only Millet in his water-colours had the secret of painting. With Millet he shares likewise the breath of tender melancholy which broods so sadly over his pictures. "The Girl with the Cow," the little Fauvette, that child of social misery--misery that lies sorrowful and despairing in the gaze of her eyes--is perhaps the most touching example of his brooding devotion to truth. Her brown dress is torn and dirty, while a grey kerchief borders her famished, sickly face. A waste, disconsolate landscape, with a frozen tree and withered thistles, stretches round like a boundless Nirvana. Above there is a whitish, clear, tremulous sky, making everything paler, more arid and wearily bright; there is no gleam of rich luxuriant tints, but only dry, stinted colours; and not a sound is there in the air, not a scythe driving through the grass, not a cart clattering over the road. There is something overwhelming in this union between man and nature. One thinks of the famous words of Taine: "Man is as little to be divided from the earth as an animal or a plant. Body and soul are influenced in the same way by the environment of nature, and from this influence the destinies of men arise." As an insect draws its entire nature, even its form and colour, from the plant on which it lives, so is the child the natural product of the earth upon which it stands, and all the impulses of its spirit are reflected in the landscape.

In 1879 Bastien-Lepage went a step further. In that year appeared "Joan of Arc," his masterpiece in point of spiritual expression. Here he has realised the method of treating historical pictures which floated before him as an idea at the Academy, and has, at the same time, solved a problem which beset him from his youth--the penetration of mysticism and the world of dreams into the reality of life. "The Annunciation to the Shepherds," "In Spring," and "The Spring Song" were merely stages on a course of which he reached the destination in "Joan of Arc." His ideal was "to paint historical themes without reminiscences of the galleries--paint them in the surroundings of the country, with the models that one has at hand, just as if the old drama had taken place yesterday evening."

BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE BEGGAR.]

The scene of the picture is a garden of Damvillers painted exactly from nature, with its grey soil, its apple and pear-trees clothed with small leaves, its vegetable beds, and its flowers growing wild. Joan herself is a pious, careworn, dreamy country girl. Every Sunday she has been to church, lost herself in long mystic reveries before the old sacred pictures, heard the misery of France spoken of; and the painted statues of the parish church and its tutelary saints pursue her thoughts. And just to-day, as she sat winding yarn in the shadow of the apple-trees, murmuring a prayer, she heard of a sudden the heavenly voices speaking. The spirits of St. Michael, St. Margaret, and St. Catharine, before whose statues she has prayed so often, have freed themselves from the wooden images and float as light phantoms, as pallid shapes of mist, which will as suddenly vanish into air before the eyes of the dreaming girl. Joan rises trembling, throwing her stool over, and steps forward. She stands in motionless ecstasy stretching out her left arm, and gazing into vacancy with her pupils morbidly dilated. Of all human phases of expression which painting can approach, such mystical delirium is perhaps the hardest to render; and probably it was only by the aid of hypnotism, to which the attention of the painter was directed just then by the experiments of Charcot, that Bastien-Lepage was enabled to produce in his model that look of religious rapture, oblivious to the whole world, which is expressed in the vague glance of her eyes, blue as the sea.

BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE POND AT DAMVILLERS.]

"Joan of Arc" was succeeded by "The Beggar," that life-size figure of the haggard old tramp who, with a thick stick under his arm--of which he would make use upon any suitable occasion--picks up what he can in the villages, saying a paternoster before the doors while he begs. This time he has been ringing at the porch of an ordinary middle-class dwelling, and he is sulkily thrusting into the wallet slung round his shoulders a great hunch of bread which a little girl has just given to him. There is a mixture of spite and contempt in his eyes as he shuffles off in his heavy wooden shoes. And behind the doorpost the little girl, who, in her pretty blue frock, has such a trim air of wearing her Sunday best, looks rather alarmed and glances timidly at the mysterious old man.

"Un brave Homme," or "Le Père Jacques," as the master afterwards called the picture, was to some extent a pendant to "The Beggar." He comes out of the wood wheezing, with a pointed cap upon his head and a heavy bundle of wood upon his shoulders, whilst at his side his little grandchild is plucking the last flowers. It is November; the leaves have turned yellow and cover the ground. Père Jacques is providing against the Winter. And the Winter is drawing near--death.

BASTIEN-LEPAGE. THE HAYMAKER.]

L'HERMITTE. THE PARDON OF PLOURIN.]

Bastien-Lepage's health had never been good, nor was Parisian life calculated to make it better. Slender and delicate, blond with blue eyes and a sharply chiselled profile--_tout petit, tout blond, les cheveux à la bretonne, le nez retroussé et une barbe d'adolescent_, as Marie Baskirtscheff describes him--he was just the type which _Parisiennes_ adore. His studio was besieged; there was no entertainment to which he was not invited, no committee, no meeting to hold judgment over pictures at which he was not present. Amateurs fought for his works and asked for his advice when they made purchases. Pupils flocked to him in numbers. He was intoxicated with the Parisian world, enchanted with its modern elegance; he loved the vibration of life, and rejoiced in masked balls like a child. Consumptive people are invariably sensuous, drinking in the pleasures of life with more swift and hasty draughts. He then left Paris and plunged into the whirlpool of other great cities. From Switzerland, Venice, and London he came back with pictures and landscapes. In London, indeed, he painted that beautiful picture "The Flower-Girl," the pale, delicate child upon whose faded countenance the tragedy of life has so early left its traces. Through the whole summer of 1882 he worked incessantly in Damvillers. Once more he painted his native place in a landscape of the utmost refinement. Here, as in his portraits, everything has been rendered with a positive trenchancy, with a severe, scientific effort after truth, in which there lies what is almost a touch of aridness. And yet an indescribable magic is thrown over the fragrant green of the meadows, the young, quivering trees, and the still pond which lies rippling in the cloudless summer day.

L'HERMITTE. PAY TIME IN HARVEST.]

In 1883 there appeared in the Salon that wonderful picture "Love in the Village." The girl has hung up her washing on the paling, and the neighbour's son has run down with a flower in his hand; she has taken the flower, and in confusion they have suddenly turned their backs upon each other, and stand there without saying a word. They love each other, and wish to marry, but how hard is the first confession. Note how the lad is turning his fingers about in his embarrassment; note the confusion of the girl, which may be seen, although she is looking towards the background of the picture; note the spring landscape, which is as fair as the figures it surrounds.

It is a tender dreamer who gives himself expression here--and love came to him also.

Enthusiastically adored by the women in his school of painting, he had found a dear friend in _Marie Baskirtscheff_, the distinguished young Russian girl who had become his pupil just as his fame began to rise. It is charming to see the enthusiasm with which Marie speaks of him in her diary. "_Je peins sur la propre palette du vrai Bastien, avec des couleurs à lui, son pinceau, son atelier, et son frère pour modèle._" And how the others envy her because of it! "_La petite Suédoise voulait toucher à sa palette._" With Marie he sketched his plans for the future, and in the midst of this restless activity he was summoned hence together with her, for she also died young, at the age of twenty-four, just as her pictures began to create a sensation. A touching idyll in her diary tells how the girl learnt, when she was dying of consumption, that young Bastien had also fallen ill, and been given up as hopeless. So long as Marie could go out of doors she went with her mother and her aunt to visit her sick friend; and when she was no longer allowed to leave the house he had himself carried up the steps to her drawing-room by his brother, and there they both sat beside each other in armchairs, and saw the end draw near, merciless and inevitable, the end of their young lives, their talents, their ambition, and their hopes. "At last! Here it is then, the end of all my sufferings! So many efforts, so many wishes, so many plans, so many ---- ----, and then to die at four-and-twenty upon the threshold of them all!"

Her last picture was one of six schoolboys, sons of the people, who are standing at a street corner chattering; and it makes a curiously virile impression, when one considers that it was painted by a blond young girl, who slept under dull blue silken bed-curtains, dressed almost entirely in white, was rubbed with perfumes after a walk in hard weather, and wore on her shoulders furs which cost two thousand francs. It hangs in the Luxembourg, and for a long time a lady dressed in mourning used to come there every week and cry before the picture painted by the daughter whom she had lost so early. Marie died on 31st October 1884, and Bastien barely a month afterwards. "The Funeral of a Young Girl," in which he wished to immortalise the funeral of Marie, was his last sketch, his farewell to the world, to the living, alluring, ever splendid nature which he loved so much, grasped and comprehended so intimately, and to the hopes which built up their deceptive castles in the air before his dying gaze. He died before he reached Raphael's age, for he was barely thirty-six. The final collapse came on 10th December 1884, upon a sad, rainy evening, after he had lain several months upon a bed of sickness. His frame was emaciated, and as light as that of a child; his face was shrivelled--the eyes alone had their old brilliancy.

ROLL. THE WOMAN WITH A BULL.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

On 14th December his body was brought up to the Eastern railway station. The coffin was covered with roses, white elder blossoms, and immortelles. And now he lies buried in Lorraine, in the little churchyard of Damvillers, where his father and grandfather rest beneath an old apple-tree. Red apple-blossoms he too loved so dearly. His importance Marie Baskirtscheff has summarised simply and gracefully in the words: "_C'est un artiste puissant, originel, c'est un poète, c'est un philosophe; les autres ne sont que des fabricants de n'importe quoi à côté de lui.... On ne peut plus rien regarder quand on voit sa peinture, parce que c'est beau comme la nature, comme la vie...._"

ROLL. MANDA LAMÉTRIE, FERMIÈRE.]

This tender poetic trait which runs through his works is what principally distinguishes him from _L'hermitte_, the most sterling representative of the picture of peasant life at the present time. L'hermitte, also, like most of these painters of peasants, was himself the son of a peasant. He came from Mont-Saint-Père, near Château-Thierry, a quiet old town, where from the great "Hill of Calvary" one sees a dilapidated Gothic church and the moss-grown roofs of thatched houses. His grandfather was a vine-grower and his father a schoolmaster. He worked in the field himself, and, like Millet, he painted afterwards the things which he had done himself in youth. His principal works were pictures of reapers in the field, peasant women in church, young wives nursing their children, rustics at work, here and there masterly water-colours, pastels and charcoal drawings, in 1888 the pretty illustrations to André Theuriet's _Vie Rustique_, the decoration of a hall at the Sorbonne with representations of rustic life, in his later period occasionally pictures from other circles of life, such as "The Fish-market of St. Malo," "The Lecture in the Sorbonne," "The Musical Soirée," and finally, as a concession to the religious tendency of recent years, a "Christ visiting the House of a Peasant." He has his studio in the Rue Vaquelin in Paris, though he spends most of his time in the village where he was born, and where he now lives quietly and simply with the peasants. Most of his works, which are to be ranked throughout amongst the most robust productions of modern Naturalism, are painted in the great glass studio which he built in the garden of his father's house. Whilst Bastien-Lepage, through a certain softness of temperament, was moved to paint the weak rather than the strong, and less often men in the prime of life than patriarchs, women, and children, L'hermitte displays the peasant in all his rusticity. He knows the country and the labours of the field which make the hands horny and the face brown, and he has rendered them in a strictly objective manner, in a great sculptural style. Bastien-Lepage is inclined to refinement and poetic tenderness; in L'hermitte everything is clear, precise, and sober as pale, bright daylight.

RAFFAELLI. PLACE ST. SULPICE.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

_Alfred Roll_ was born in Paris, and the artisan of the Parisian streets is the chief hero of his pictures. Like Zola in his Rougon-Macquart series, he set before himself the aim of depicting the social life of the present age in a great sequence of pictures--the workmen's strike, war, and toil. His pictures give one the impression that one is looking down from the window upon an agitated scene in the street. And his broad, plebeian workmanship is in keeping with his rough and democratic subjects. He made a beginning in 1875 with the colossal picture of the "Flood at Toulouse." The roofs of little peasants' houses rise out of the expanse of water. Upon one of them a group of country people have taken refuge, and are awaiting a boat which is coming from the distance. A young mother summons her last remnant of strength to save her trembling child. Beside her an old woman is sitting, sunk in the stupor of indifference, while in front a bull is swimming, bellowing wildly in the water. The influence of Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa" is indeed obvious; but how much more plainly and actually has the struggle for existence been represented here, than by the great Romanticist still hampered by Classicism. The devastating effect of the masses of water in all their elemental force could not have been more impressively rendered than has been done through this bull struggling for life with all its enormous strength.

RAFFAELLI. THE MIDDAY SOUP.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

In technique this picture belongs to the painter's earlier phase. Even in the colouring of the naked figures it has still the dirty heaviness of the Bolognese. This bond which united him to the school of Courbet was broken when--probably under the influence of Zola's _Germinal_--he painted "The Strike," in 1880. The stern reality which goes through Zola's accounts of the life of pit-men is likewise to be found in these ragged and starving figures, clotted with coal dust, assembling in savage desperation before the manufactory walls, prepared for a rising. The dull grey of a rainy November morning spreads above. In 1887 he painted war, war in the new age, in which one man is not pitted against another, but great masses of men, who kill without seeing one another, are made to manoeuvre with scientific accuracy--war in which the balloon, distant signalling, and all the discoveries of science are turned to account. "Work" was the last picture of the series. There are men toiling in the hot, dusty air of Paris with sandstones of all sizes. Life-size, upon life-size figures, the drops of sweat were seen upon the apathetic faces, and the patches upon the blouses and breeches. Any one who only reckons as art what is fine and delicate will necessarily find these pictures brutal; but whoever delights in seeing art in close connection with the age, as it really is, cannot deny to Alfred Roll's great epics of labour the value of artistic documents of the first rank.

RAFFAELLI. THE CARRIER'S CART.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

He devoted himself to the more delicate problems of light, especially in certain idyllic summer scenes, in which he delighted in painting life-size bulls and cows upon the meadow, and beside them a girl, sometimes intended as a milkmaid and sometimes as a nymph. Of this type was the picture of 1888, A Woman returning from Milking, "Manda Lamétrie, Fermière." With a full pail she is going home across the sunny meadow. Around there is a gentle play of light, a soft atmosphere transmitting faint reflections, lightly resting upon all forms, and mildly shed around them. A yet more subtle study of light in 1889 was named "The Woman with a Bull." Pale sunbeams are rippling through the fluttering leaves, causing a delicious play of fine tones upon the nude body of the young woman and the shining hide of the bull.

RAFFAELLI. PARIS 4K. 1.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

On a strip of ground in the suburbs of Paris, where the town has come to an end and the country has not yet begun, _Raffaelli_, perhaps the most spirited of the Naturalists, has taken up his abode. He has painted the workman, the vagabond, the restlessness of the man who does not know where he is going to eat and sleep; the small householder, who has all he wants; the ruined man, overtaken by misfortune, whose only remaining passion is the brandy-bottle,--he has painted them all amid the melancholy landscape around Paris, with its meagre region still in embryo, and its great straight roads losing themselves disconsolately in the horizon. Théophile Gautier has written somewhere that the geometricians are the ruination of landscapes. If he lived in these days he would find, on the contrary, that those monotonous roads running straight as a die give landscape a strange and melancholy grandeur. One thinks of the passage in Zola's _Germinal_, where the two socialists, Étienne and Suwarin, walk in the evening silently along the edge of a canal, which, with the perpendicular stems of trees at its side, stretches for miles, as if measured with a pair of compasses, through a monotonous flat landscape. Only a few low houses standing apart break the straight line of the horizon; only here and there, in the distance, does there emerge a human being, whose diminished figure is scarcely perceptible above the ground. Raffaelli was the first to understand the virginal beauty of these localities, the dumb complaining language of poverty-stricken regions spreading languidly beneath a dreary sky. He is the painter of poor people and of wide horizons, the poet and historian of humanity living in the neighbourhood of great cities. There sits a house-owner, or the proprietor of a shop, in front of his own door; there a pedlar, or a man delivering parcels, hurries across the field; there a rag-picker's dog strays hungry about a lonely farmyard. Sometimes the wide landscapes are relieved by the manufactories, water and gas-works which feed the huge crater of Paris. At other times the snow lies on the ground, the skeletons of trees stand along the high-road, and a driver shouts to his team; the heavy cart-horses covered with worsted cloths, shiver, and an impression of intense cold strikes through you to your very bones. Indeed, Raffaelli's austerity was first subdued a little when he came to make a lengthy residence in England. Then he acquired a preference for the light-coloured atmosphere and the gracious verdure of nature in England. He began to take pleasure in tender spring landscapes, in place of rigid scenes of snow. The poor soil no longer seems so hard and inhospitable, but becomes attractive beneath the soft, peaceful, bluish atmosphere. Even the uncivilised beings, with famine in their eyes, who wandered about in his earliest pictures, become milder and more resigned. The grandfather, in his blouse and wooden shoes, leads his grandchild by the hand amid the first shyly budding verdure. Old men sit quietly in the grounds of the alms-house, with the sun shining upon them. People no longer stand in the mist of November evenings with their teeth chattering from the frost, but breathe with delight the soft air of bright spring mornings.

RAFFAELLI. LE CHIFFONIER.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

Raffaelli, for fifteen years the master of this narrowly circumscribed region, has recorded his impressions of it in an entirely personal manner, in a style which in one of his _brochures_ he has himself designated "caractérisme." And by comparing the costumed models in the pictures of the previous generation with the figures of Raffaelli, the happiness of this phrase is at once understood. In fact, Raffaelli is a great master of characterisation, and perhaps nowhere more trenchant than in the illustrations which he drew for the _Revue Illustrée_. Spirited caricatures of theatrical representations alternate with the grotesque figures of the Salvation Army. Yet he feels most in his element when he dives into the horrors of Paris by night. The types which he has created live; they meet you at every step, wander about the boulevards in the cafés and outside the barriers, and they haunt you with their looks of misery, vice, and menace.

_Giuseppe de Nittis_, an Italian turned a Parisian, a bold, searching, nervously excitable spirit, was the first _gentilhomme_ of Impressionism, the first who made a transition from the rugged painting of the proletariat to coquettish pictures from the fashionable quarters of the city, and reconciled even the wider public to the principles of Impressionism by the delicate flavouring of his works.

DE NITTIS. PARIS RACES.]

"It was a cold November morning. Cold it was certainly, but in compensation the morning vapour was as fine as snow turned into mist. Yonder in the crowded, populous, sooty quarters of the city, in Paris busy with trade and industry, this early vapour which settles in the broad streets is not to be found; the hurry of awakening life, and the confused movement of country carts, omnibuses, and heavy, rattling freight-waggons, have scattered, divided, and dispersed it too quickly. Every passer-by bears it away on his shabby overcoat, on his threadbare comforter, or disperses it with his baggy gloves. It dribbles down the shivering blouses and the waterproofs of toiling poverty, it dissolves before the hot breath of the many who have passed a sleepless or dissipated night, it is absorbed by the hungry, it penetrates into shops which have just been opened, into gloomy backyards, and it floats up the staircases, dripping on the walls and banisters, right up to the frozen attics. And that is the reason why so little of it remains outside. But in the spacious and stately quarter of Paris, upon the broad boulevards planted with trees and the empty quays the mist lay undisturbed, section over section, like an undulating mass of transparent wool in which one felt isolated, hidden, almost imbedded in splendour, for the sun rising lazily on the distant horizon already shed a mild purple glow, and in this light the mist level with the tops of the houses shone like a piece of muslin spread over scarlet."

HEILBUTH. FINE WEATHER.]

This opening passage in Daudet's _Le Nabab_ most readily gives the mood awakened by Giuseppe do Nittis' Parisian landscapes. De Nittis was born in 1846 at Barletta, near Naples, in poor circumstances. In 1868, when he was two-and-twenty years of age, he came to Paris, where Gérôme and Meissonier interested themselves in him. Intercourse with Manet led him to his range of subject. He became the painter of Parisian street-life as it is to be seen in the neighbourhood of the quays, the painter of mist, smoke, and air. The Salons of 1875 and 1876 contained his first pictures, the "Place des Pyramides" and the view of the Pont Royal, fine studies of mist with a tremulous grey atmosphere, out of which graceful little figures raise their faint, vanishing outlines. From that time he has stood at the centre of artistic life in Paris. He observed everything, saw everything, painted everything--a strip of the boulevards, the Place du Carrousel, the Bois de Boulogne, the races, the Champs Elysées, in the daytime with the budding chestnuts, the flower-beds blooming in all colours, the playing fountains, the women of grace and beauty, and the light carriages which crowd between the Arc de Triomphe, the Obelisk, and the Gardens of the Tuileries, and in the evening when chains of white and coloured lights flash among the dark trees. De Nittis has interpreted all atmospheric phases. He seized the intangible, the vibration of vapour, the dust of summer, and the rains of December days. He breathed the atmosphere, as it were, with his eyes, and felt with accuracy its greater or its diminished density. The great public he gained by his exquisite sense of feminine elegance. Of marvellous charm are the figures which give animation to the Place des Pyramides, the Place du Carrousel, the Quai du Pont Neuf--women in the most coquettish toilettes, men chatting together as they lean against a newspaper kiosk, flower-girls offering bouquets, loiterers carelessly turning over the books exposed for sale upon a stall, _bonnes_ with short petticoats and broad ribbons, smart-looking boys with hoops, and little girls with the air of great ladies. Since Gabriel de Saint Aubin, Paris has had no more faithful observer. "De Nittis," said Claretie in 1876, "paints modern French life for us as that brilliant Italian, the Abbé Galliani, spoke the French language--that is to say, better than we do it ourselves."

The summit of his ability was reached in his last pictures from England. One knows the London fogs of November, which hover over the town as black as night, so that the gas has to be lit at noon, fogs which are suffocating and shroud the nearest houses in a veil of crape. Scenes like this were made for de Nittis' brush. He roamed about in the smoke of the city, observed the fashion of the season, the confusion of cabs and drays upon London Bridge, the surge and hurry of the human stream in Cannon Street, the vast panorama of the port of London veiled with smoke and fog, the fashionable West End with its magnificent clubs, the green, quiet squares and great, plainly built mansions; he studied the dense smoky atmosphere of fog compressed into floating phantom shapes, the remarkable effects of light seen when a fresh breeze suddenly drives the black clouds away. And again his eye adapted itself at once to the novel environment. It was not merely the blithe splendour of Paris that found an incomparable painter in Giuseppe de Nittis, but London also with its thick atmosphere and that mixture of damp, tawny fog and grey smoke. Piccadilly, the National Gallery, the railway bridge at Charing Cross, the Green Park, the Bank, and Trafalgar Square are varied samples of these English studies, which showed British painters themselves that not one of them had understood the foggy atmosphere of London as this tourist who was merely travelling through the town. "Westminster" and "Cannon Street," a pair of dreary, sombre symphonies in ash-grey, perhaps display the highest of what De Nittis has achieved in the painting of air.

Born in Hamburg, though a naturalised Frenchman, _Ferdinand Heilbuth_ took up again the _cult_ of the _Parisienne_ in the wake of Stevens, and as he turned the acquisitions of Impressionism to account in an exceedingly pleasing manner he seems, in comparison with Stevens, lighter and more vaporous and gracious. He painted water-scenes, scenes on the greensward or in the entrance squares of châteaux, placing in these landscapes girls in fashionable summer toilette. He was particularly fond of representing them in a white hat, a white or pearl-grey dress with a black belt and long black gloves, in front of a bright grey stream, seated upon a fallen trunk, with a parasol resting against it. The bloom of the atmosphere is harmonised in the very finest chords with the virginal white of their dresses and the fresh verdure of the landscapes. His pictures are little Watteaus of the nineteenth century, as discreet in effect as they are piquant.

BUTIN. THE DEPARTURE.]

After Heilbuth's death _Albert Aublet_, who in earlier days depicted sanguinary historical pieces, became the popular painter of girls, whose beauties are gracefully interpreted in his pictures. When he paints the composer Massenet, sitting at the piano surrounded by flowers and beautiful women,--when he represents the doings of the fashionable world on the shore at a popular watering-place, or young ladies plucking roses, or wandering meditatively in bright dresses amid green shrubs and yellow flowers, or going into the sea in white bathing-gowns, there may be nothing profound or particularly artistic in it all, but it is none the less charming, attractive, bright, joyous, and fresh.

_Jean Béraud_, another interpreter of Parisian elegance, has found material for numerous pictures in the blaze of the theatres, the naked shoulders of ballet-girls, the dress-coats of old gentlemen, the evening humour of the boulevards, the mysteries of the Café Anglais, the bustle of Monte Carlo, and the footlights of the Café-Concert. But absolute painter he is not. One would prefer to have a less oily heaviness in his works, a bolder and freer execution more in keeping with the lightness of the subject, and for this one would willingly surrender the touches of _genre_ which Béraud cannot let alone even in these days. But his illustrations are exceedingly spirited.

DANTAN. A PLASTER CAST FROM NATURE.]

It would be impossible to classify painters according to further specialties. In fact, it is as little possible to bring individuals into categories as it was at the time of the Renaissance, when the painter busied himself at the same time with sculpture, architecture, and the artistic crafts. Great artists do not wall themselves up in a narrow space to be studied. Liberated from the studio and restored to nature, they endeavour, as in the best periods of art, to encompass life as widely as possible. A mere enumeration, such as chance offers, and such as will preserve a sense for the individuality of every man's talent without attempting comparisons, seems therefore a better method to pursue than a systematic grouping which could only be attained artificially and by ambiguities.

The late _Ulysse Butin_ settled down on the shore of the Channel and painted the life of the fishermen of Villerville, a little spot upon the coast near Honfleur. Sturdy, large-boned fellows drag their nets across the strand, carry heavy anchors ashore, or lie smoking upon the dunes. The rays of the evening sun play upon their clothes; the night falls, and a profound silence rests upon the landscape.

By preference _Édouard Dantan_ has painted the interiors of sculptors' studios--men turning pots, casting plaster, or working on marble, with grey blouses, contrasting delicately with the light grey walls of workrooms which are themselves flooded with bright and tender light. Very charming was "A Plaster Cast from Nature," painted in 1887: in the centre was a nude female figure most naturally posed, whilst a fine, even atmosphere, which lay softly upon the girl's form, streaming gently over it, was shed around.

Having cultivated in the beginning the province of feminine nudity with little success, in such pictures as "The Bacchante" of the Luxembourg, "The Woman with the Mask," and "Rolla," _Henri Gervex_, the spoilt child of contemporary French painting, turned to the lecture-rooms of the universities, and by his picture of Dr. Péan at La Salpétrière gave the impulse to the many hospital pictures, surgical operations, and so forth which have since inundated the Salon. With the upper part of her body laid bare and her lips half opened, the patient lies under the influence of narcotics, whilst Péan's assistant is counting her pulse. His audience have gathered round. The light falls clear and peacefully into the room. Everything is rendered simply, without diffidence, and with confidence and quietude.

GERVEX. DR. PÉAN AT LA SALPÉTRIÈRE.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

_Duez_, when he had had his first success in 1879 with a large religious picture--the triptych of Saint Cuthbert in the Luxembourg--appeared with animal pictures, landscapes, portraits, or fashionable representations of life in the streets and cafés. In the hands of such mild and complacent spirits as _Friant_ and _Goeneutte_, Naturalism fell into a mincing, lachrymose condition; but in a series of quiet, unpretentious pictures _Dagnan-Bouveret_ was more successful in meeting the growing inclination of recent years for contemplative repose, just as in the province of literature Ohnet, Malot, and Claretie, with their spirit of compromise, came after those stern naturalists Flaubert and Zola. According to the drawing of Paul Renouard, Dagnan-Bouveret is a little, black-haired man with a dark complexion and deep-set eyes, a short blunt nose, and a black pointed beard. There is nothing in him which betrays spirit, caprice, and audacity, but everything which is an indication of patience and endurance; and, as a matter of fact, such are the qualities by which he has gained his high position. He is a man of poetic talent, though rather tame, and stands to Bastien-Lepage and Roll as Breton to Millet. One often fancies that it is possible to observe in him that German _Gemüth_, that genial temper, for the satisfaction of which Frau Marlitt provided in fiction. A pupil of Gérôme, he made his first great success in the Salon of 1879 with the picture "A Wedding at the Photographer's." This was succeeded in 1882 by "The Nuptial Benediction"; in 1883 by "The Vaccination"; in 1884 by "The Horse-pond" of the Musée Luxembourg; in 1885 by a "Blessed Virgin," a homely, thoughtful, and delicately coloured picture which gained him many admirers in Germany; and in 1886 by "The Consecrated Bread," in which he was one of the first to take up the study of light in interiors. In a Catholic church there are sitting devout women--most of them old, but also one who is young--and children, while an acolyte is handing them consecrated bread. This simple scene in the damp village church, filled with a tender gloom, is rendered with a winning homely plainness, and with that touch of compassionate sentimentality which is the peculiar note of Dagnan-Bouveret. The "Bretonnes au Pardon" of 1889 thoroughly displayed this definitive Dagnan: a soft, peaceful picture, full of simple and cordial poetry. In the grass behind the church, the plain spire of which rises at the end of a wall, women are sitting, both young and old, in black dresses and white caps. One of them is reading a prayer from a devotional book. The rest are listening. Two men stand at the side. Everything is at peace; the scheme of colour is soft and quiet, while in the execution there is something recalling Holbein, and the effect is idyllically moving like the chime of a village bell when the sun is going down.

DUEZ. ON THE CLIFF.]

DUEZ. THE END OF OCTOBER.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]