Title: French Painting of the 19th Century in the National Gallery of Art
Author: Grose Evans
Release date: April 16, 2019 [eBook #59288]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Cover illustration (see description on page 42):
Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
A Girl with a Watering Can
Canvas. 39½ × 28¾ inches. Dated 1876
Chester Dale Collection
by
Grose Evans
Curator of Extension Services
Washington, D. C.
Copyright 1959
Publications Fund
National Gallery of Art
Washington, D. C.
Revised 1967
Designed, Engraved, and Printed
in the United States of America by
The Beck Engraving Company
The story of French painters during the nineteenth century is an exciting one, colored by personal rivalries and revolutions in taste. In the face of an indifferent or jeering public, artists often had to make great sacrifices to achieve the sincere expression of their ideals. Firmly established academic painters bitterly opposed all young artists who tried to create new styles, and the inertia of popular taste lent such authority to the Academy that artists could only be original at their own peril.
The academic style grew out of the classical idealism of Jacques-Louis David (page 13). He rose to fame during the French Revolution (1789-95) by producing pictures with propaganda content and attained great prominence as “the painter of the people.” Son of a Paris tradesman, David had been fortunate enough to study painting in the French Royal Academy. After four failures and an attempted suicide, he won the Prix de Rome and in 1774 was able to go to Italy, which was then considered the fountainhead of art. There, during a ten-year stay, he reacted violently against the gay, trivial style of painting that French aristocrats had loved. Idolizing 2 the ancient statues he saw in Rome, he introduced a powerful Neo-Classical style and, after his return to France, he reorganized the Academy to sanction only a sober and “elevating” imitation of classical art. When Napoleon became emperor, in 1804, he appointed David his court painter and commissioned a series of huge pictures illustrating imperial ceremonies. However, soon after the Bourbon monarchy was restored, in 1814, David was exiled to Brussels, where he spent his last years.
David’s style was continued and refined by his pupil J.-A.-Dominique Ingres (page 15), whose father was a painter at Montauban. Ingres’ apprenticeship with David and eighteen years spent in Italy led Ingres to paint with precise, sculpturesque draftsmanship and coldly calculated color. To sustain the classical tradition, his subjects were usually drawn from mythology and ancient history. After he returned to Paris, in 1824, Ingres’ ideal of perfectionism came to dominate academic art.
Behind it the Academy had the weight of traditionally accepted theory and the splendid accomplishments of the Old Masters. The theory, growing from ancient classical concepts of art, seemed infallible and, on such a theoretical basis, the five hundred years preceding the nineteenth century had produced an extremely impressive art. Imitation of idealized figures was the chief aim of the academic painter. By showing nature “as it 3 ought to be,” the artist served philosophical and ethical ends; he could educate mankind by painting morally improving illustrations of heroic deeds. On this premise art had been raised during the Renaissance from a handicraft to rank with the liberal arts. Academies had arisen to prove the merits of art, and why should such august institutions be challenged?
But even in the early years of the century artists revolted against the academic limitations. Eugène Delacroix (page 17) was the central figure in the opposing Romantic movement. Son of a prefect of Marseilles, Delacroix began painting in 1813 as an amateur in a Parisian academic studio. Soon new sensuous richness of coloring and a feeling of lively movement entered Delacroix’s pictures to express strong emotions. His art reveals new psychological penetration; as he said, addressing his fellow artists, “Anything can be a subject. The real subject is yourself; it is your impressions, your emotions before nature. You must search within yourself, not look about you.” Delacroix’s life was embittered by the jealous rivalry of Ingres, who called him “the apostle of ugliness” and prevented him from teaching in the Academy, but his daring use of color was to influence many later painters.
In the Romantic era, nature, which had been neglected as long as the classical tradition prevailed, was extolled by poets and painted by outstanding masters. Camille Corot (page 19), son of a Parisian milliner, became 4 a leading landscapist. Although his teachers were academicians, admirers of Poussin and Ingres, Corot turned to his own fresh experiences of nature. As a Romantic, he saw the world about him passionately. “While imitating conscientiously,” he said, “I never for a moment lose the emotion which first caught my interest.” At times Corot painted with the group of artists who worked at Barbizon near the Forest of Fontainebleau, or sometimes he traveled in Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and England, but usually he was content to stay with his parents in Paris or at their summer home in Ville d’Avray. Versatile in his art, he combined elements of classical composition with romantic feeling and realistic vision.
Corot’s breadth of taste allowed him to see the importance of paintings by Daumier, whom he saved from neglect and poverty. Honoré Daumier (page 21), after serving as a bailiff’s clerk and a librarian, was trained as a lithographer and turned to political and social caricature. In the Paris journals, his lithographs, lampooning prominent figures, exposing graft, and making fun of the bourgeoisie, were intensely popular. Politics had been uppermost in French minds after the Revolution and times were very unsettled. Two civil revolutions in 1830 and 1848 were followed by invasion during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. During this time the government swerved precariously from monarchy to republic, to empire, and back to republic. The turbulence of 5 these years together with daily human follies was the material of Daumier’s striking cartoons. His paintings, largely made for personal satisfaction, dwelt on the hardships of life in the growing industrial city or, in a lighter vein, on artists, connoisseurs, and circus performers. With his interest in the life about him, Daumier was drawn from Romanticism to Realism.
Among artists, dissatisfaction was growing ever stronger against the implausible gods and heroes painted by academicians and also against the escapist tendency of the Romantics, who loved to paint exotic scenes, removed from ordinary experience. The increasing materialism and scientific objectivity of the nineteenth century demanded a realistic style. The role of leader in the Realist school was taken by Gustave Courbet (page 23). This big, boisterous son of a wealthy farmer in Ornans came to Paris in 1842. After a few lessons, Courbet taught himself to paint, chiefly by copying in the Louvre galleries. His large, coarsely executed pictures of common people shocked most of his contemporaries. When his work was refused at the International Exhibition of 1855, he opened his own pavilion, boldly titling it “Le Pavillon du Réalisme.” Among his best-known sayings are, “Painting should consist only in the depiction of things visible and tangible to the artist,” and, “Show me an angel, and then I’ll paint it.” His outspoken nature led him to embroil himself in politics after the Franco-Prussian War. Finally, to escape 6 imprisonment he fled to Switzerland, where he spent his last years in exile.
Both Daumier’s and Courbet’s realism depended upon their acceptance of everyday subjects as worthy of being painted. But realism could be manifest, too, in meticulous attention to details. Henri Fantin-Latour (page 25), a friend of our American painter Whistler, exhibits this exacting realism in portraits and still-life pictures. Strongly influenced by the early developments in photography, he produced works which, because they were pleasant and unassuming, were often shown at the annual Salon beside the conservative paintings of approved academicians. In 1863, however, he found himself with the young “rebels” who were allowed to exhibit only at the Salon des Refusés, and he began then to associate with the more advanced artists.
Édouard Manet (page 27) was probably more influential as a realist than even Courbet. His father, a Paris magistrate, offered him a choice between studying law and joining the merchant marine. After a try at the latter, in 1857 he was allowed to take up painting. Ironically he was warned by his academic teacher that unless he gave up his common subjects, he “would be only the Daumier of painting.” His boldly painted, unorthodox canvases stirred great controversy, were defended by Emile Zola, the realistic novelist, and brought new courage to other artists who sought to escape from academic dullness.
Manet associated with a number of young artists who became known as Impressionists after a group exhibition in 1874. One of them, Claude Monet (page 29), displayed a picture called Impression, Sunrise, and a newspaper critic, vastly amused at its sketchy style and at the similar sketchiness of the other pictures in the exhibit, jeered that these artists were not painters at all, but “impressionists.” The name stuck to the group because it so aptly characterized their intentions. Their aim was to catch a fresh impression of nature in their pictures. Monet was the leading figure in Impressionism, which developed in the 1870’s and ’80’s. Son of a grocer in Le Havre, he was doing clever caricatures at the age of fifteen. He began to paint landscapes with a fellow artist, Boudin, who taught him to be aware of special effects of outdoor lighting. Going to Paris in 1863, he attended academic classes but usually stayed only long enough to answer roll call. Then he would be off to the city’s outskirts to paint nature instead of ancient heroes. Often he lured others with him, and Impressionism was born in the friendly competition of Monet, Renoir, Bazille, and Sisley. Soon they were joined by others, among them Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot. For many years they sought understanding for their works. Monet, who alone pursued Impressionism to its ultimate possibilities by painting vivid sensations of light, suffered abject poverty. Only in his last years was his art recognized and internationally imitated.
Few of the other Impressionists analyzed light as Monet did; they contented themselves with sketchy brush strokes which seemed to dissolve their forms in light. Berthe Morisot (page 31), for example, followed Manet rather than Monet. After six years of study with Corot, she met Manet while they were both copying pictures in the Louvre. A strong friendship developed between Manet and the Morisot family. Berthe became his pupil and soon afterward married his brother. Her crisp, delicate brushwork is a feminine version of Manet’s bold style.
Auguste Renoir (cover illustration and page 42), whose glowing colors rivaled Monet’s, was among the first to outgrow Impressionism. This son of a Limoges tailor was earning his living at thirteen in Paris by painting flowers on china. He saved enough money to attend an academy and met Monet, with whom he often painted along the banks of the Seine. But by about 1883 he found he “had wrung Impressionism dry.” He regretted the loss of form, composition, and human values in the shimmering Impressionist pictures. Setting himself again to paint forms solidly in space, he nevertheless retained the brilliant colors of Impressionism.
Sometimes exhibiting with the Impressionists, Edgar Degas (page 33) was strongly influenced by their coloring and used it in realistic scenes of Paris life, the race track, and the opera ballet. Degas, son of a wealthy banker, received a thorough classical education and 9 learned painting from a pupil of Ingres. In his compositions, he preserved a classical sense of order which was quite foreign to Impressionist aims. As he said, “No art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I accomplish is the result of reflection upon and study of the old masters....” Yet he reshaped conventional ideas of composition by drawing his subjects from life and refining his outlines after the example of Japanese prints. These Oriental colored woodcuts, which also influenced Manet, Whistler, and many others, came to Paris first as wrapping in boxes of china; they were discovered by painters, who found inspiration in their simple lines and decorative flat areas of color.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (page 35), like Degas, saw his pictures as both realistic and decorative. As a delicate boy of fourteen he injured both his legs so that they failed to grow. His father, Count Alphonse de Toulouse, had no patience with his weakling heir, but his mother encouraged him to paint. In 1885 he turned his back upon the academic style and, taking hints from the free brushwork of the Impressionists and from Japanese designs, Lautrec began to paint his pictures of Parisian night life, circus performers, and cabaret entertainers. Degas, at first hostile toward him, eventually declared, “Well, Lautrec, I can see you are one of our trade.”
Vincent van Gogh (page 37) was a Dutchman who came to Paris in 1886 and met the Impressionists. He possessed a deep sincerity, but also had a difficult, flaring 10 temper which alienated many people. After working unsuccessfully as a picture dealer, a tutor, and a lay preacher, he turned to art as a means of expressing his passionate emotions. At first he used dark, somber colors like those of his countryman Rembrandt; then seeing the Impressionists’ canvases, he adopted their brilliant colors. But their painting of merely optical impressions could not satisfy his urge for emotional expression. While he borrowed their bright palette, he used colors for emotional effects, and in his hands the broken brushwork became a nervous, intensely expressive agent to record his inner feelings. His whole remarkable career as an artist fell within the ten years before 1890, when he shot himself to escape insanity.
His friend Paul Gauguin (page 39) shared similar artistic aims. A wealthy Parisian stockbroker, Gauguin gave up his business and deserted his family because he felt compelled to paint. After living for a time in Brittany, he went to Tahiti and broke entirely with Impressionism. He formed a style in which his experiences and feelings were symbolized by intense colors and sweeping outlines. His art, which anticipates twentieth-century trends, was incomprehensible to his contemporaries, and he died impoverished in the Marquesas.
Paul Cézanne (page 41), too, is a forerunner of the moderns. Born at Aix-en-Provence, this banker’s son followed his school friend Zola to Paris. Although an extremely shy youth he soon married a model and for a 11 time painted and exhibited with the Impressionists. But, constantly rebuffed by critics and even scorned by Zola, who failed to see any promise in his forceful early works, Cézanne withdrew to live in Provence during the 1880’s and perfected his individual style. His methods paved the way for the abstract painting of our own day. In his old age a number of young artists and critics sought him out and he enjoyed a small degree of recognition within his lifetime. His work, together with that of Manet, Monet, Degas, Lautrec, van Gogh, and Gauguin, has become the most popular painting today.
Remarkably free from the allegorical pomposity of most official portraits, this picture presents Napoleon I with reserved dignity. The emperor himself approved it and, upon its completion in 1812, complimented David. Dressed in his favorite costume, the uniform of the chasseur de la garde with a general’s epaulettes, Napoleon wears the Legion of Honor and the Order of the Iron Cross, which commemorates his earlier coronation as king of Italy. He seems to have just risen from his desk, on which lies the Code Napoléon, the codification of French law which he promulgated.
David’s style is at its best in portraiture. Combining realism with a classicist’s respect for human dignity, he shows Napoleon in a characteristic pose but with an air of grandeur. David’s assured touch gives authority to the work by its incisive, strong handling of details. The composition is severely rectilinear; framing the figure, vertical lines descend through the pilaster and table leg at the left and, again, from the clock through Napoleon’s arm and the leg of the chair. Against these, horizontal lines, marked by the book shelves, wall molding, and desk, lend compositional stability. The diagonal lines of the chair are countered by the diagonal arrangement of the map and book on the floor. Before this orderly grid of lines Napoleon’s figure appears subtly animated.
Canvas. 80¼ × 49¼ inches Dated 1812
“Never has beauty more regal, more splendid, more superb, and of a type more Junoesque yielded its proud contours to the sensitive drawing of an artist.” So the poet Théophile Gautier described Ingres’ first portrait of Madame Moitessier. But Ingres destroyed it because the lady’s daughter, who was included, would not stand still for him. He produced this second picture in 1851, after six months of careful work. It perfectly embodies both his exacting perfectionism and French elegance during the Second Republic.
Ingres was seventy-one years old when he painted this. Evidently he admired Madame Moitessier, for she was one of the very few people he consented to paint in his latter years. He dreaded the arduous demands he imposed upon himself when doing a portrait. “Art is never nearer perfection,” he said, “than when it resembles nature so closely that it might be mistaken for nature itself.” Yet for Ingres, nature had to be refined through the classical tradition of art, and he sought to cast Madame Moitessier in the form of an ideal figure by Raphael. Despite astonishing realism in the hair with its flowers, in the lace and the jewelry, our eyes move over graceful Raphaelesque curving lines, which dominate the face and figure. By such means Ingres strove to unite the real and the ideal.
Canvas. 57¾ × 39½ inches Dated 1851
In 1491 Columbus, despairing of Spanish support for his voyage of exploration, was on his way to seek aid in France when he and his son Diego stopped at the monastery of La Rábida, near Huelva, in southern Spain. Delacroix shows them resting here after their exhausting journey. Columbus gazes thoughtfully at a map, while the prior, Juan Perez, behind him, is about to welcome him. Perez, who had been Queen Isabella’s confessor, was able to arrange a royal interview for Columbus so that ships and men were secured for the adventure.
Delacroix painted this in 1838, after a trip through Spain. Evidently the air of quiet mystery in a Spanish monastery caught his fancy, and he recreates it here. Unlike the Neo-Classicists, the Romantic Delacroix does not attempt to define his subjects exactly. In his painting, vague, suggestive forms are used to stimulate the imagination. His composition is not a linear design; it is spatial; and our interest is drawn into the space of this room to discover the whispered confidences of the monks, the mystery of dark corridors, and the kind reception of the weary travelers. Delacroix sought a “silent power which speaks alone to the eyes and gains and conquers all the faculties of the spirit.”
Canvas. 35⅝ × 46⅝ inches Dated 1838
With clean, luminous colors Corot has shown a serene view near his summer home, at Ville d’Avray. His father had bought a house in this small village a few miles west of Paris, and Corot often returned to it throughout his long life. Painted when he was in his seventies, this picture seems to epitomize the development of Corot’s style. The simple buff and terra-cotta planes, which emphasize the cubic construction of the distant buildings, recall his early works, especially those painted in Italy between 1825 and 1828. After 1850 he evolved his most popular style, with its predominant silver-gray hues. Gentle, diffuse outdoor light gives harmony in these pictures to misty greens and watery blues, and the trees take on a feathery softness. A few touches of reddish hue complement the cool colors. All of these qualities are apparent in this late picture.
Corot conceived his paintings broadly in form and value. “I am never in a hurry to determine details,” he said; “the masses and general character of a picture concern me above all.” He also sought to preserve his emotions about nature: “What we feel is indeed real. Before a subject, we are moved by a certain elegant grace. Never lose sight of that in looking for exactness and detail.” The mood he suggests is a romantic reverie upon the subtle colors and serenity of nature.
Canvas. 19⅜ × 25⅝ inches Painted c. 1867-1870
Daumier’s broad planes of deep, vibrant color and his roughly applied highlights struck most of his contemporaries as preposterously crude. His paintings were astonishingly daring for an era which looked for meretricious fidelity to nature in its pictures. Few could grasp the significance of his simple, massive forms or understand how his profound human sympathy made these forms expressive symbols of emotion. In this picture a mood, sympathetic and quiet, is established between the young man and his master as they discuss a sketch selected from the big portfolio.
For the eye sensitive to color and value, there is a remarkable satisfaction in Daumier’s choice of hues. How deftly he contrasts the cool, shadowed paper in the old man’s hands with the warm white of the sheets below, yet how nicely distinguished the grayish paper is from the gray smock of the young man! These cool hues reappear, echoed in the background, to climax in the blue portfolio which rests against the red couch. The starkly simple, brown-clad old man stands out against the cool colors about him. On his face a few details, boldly indicated in dark lines and planes of light, strengthen the picture’s emotional content. Such a composition has qualities analogous to the majestic movements of a symphony.
Canvas. 16⅛ × 12⅞ inches Painted probably after 1860
Below a three-hundred-foot perpendicular cliff in the Jura mountains, the Loue River issues in cascades from a cavernous grotto and flows through Courbet’s native town, Ornans, to join the Doubs and ultimately swell the Saône. Courbet, who loved his native scenery, does not choose to paint the picturesque aspects of this fine scene. Instead he looks with new intensity at nature and places his unprecedented, forthright vision almost brutally on canvas. Having little patience with refinements of draftsmanship, he seems to have used the thick body of his generously applied paint to counterfeit reality in his picture. While light and shade are present, Courbet is unconventional in his modeling of the great rocks. The eye is often uncertain of the surfaces of these rocks; their directions in space are ill-defined and one form is not connected with another. But viewing the work broadly, we are conscious of the painter’s power. How solidly the man spearing a fish stands before the opening of the spacious cavern and how substantially the huge masses of rock swell forward from the darkness! With his powerful, unorthodox style, Courbet broke radically with traditional modes of painting “to transcribe,” as he said, “the customs, ideas, the appearances,” of his time, “in a word, to create a living art.”
Canvas. 38¾ × 51⅜ inches Painted c. 1865
A careful rendering of objects selected for their varied colors, shapes, and textures and neatly arranged on a table top is a perfect vehicle for the display of Fantin-Latour’s technical facility. A companion of artists with such diverse tastes as Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, and Whistler, he created a delicate art which appealed to all. The objects in this still life have been skillfully placed on the table to establish a self-contained pictorial composition. The book is turned at an angle to lead the eye back towards the vase of flowers, which forms a climax for the picture. The bald shape of the book is artfully interrupted by the silhouette of the dainty cup; and the tray, overlapping the table edge, also relieves the monotony of too straight a line. For the same reason the fruits overlap the tray and basket. Further variety is given by the careful distinction of various textures. Like a Dutch Old Master, Fantin-Latour has included a peeled orange to let him display his cleverness in showing textural variety, and he has dwelt lovingly on the petals of the flowers. Such a picture conservatively retains much of the academic style; it was composed on the table top before it was ever painted, and it should be distinguished from the work of Fantin-Latour’s more progressive friends.
Canvas. 24⅜ × 29½ inches Dated 1866
As chic as a fashion plate, Manet’s picture shows how he reacted against the academy and found a fresh style to paint the life of his times. The fashionable young woman is Victorine Meurend, Manet’s favorite model, whom he painted in The Picnic and Olympia, where his bold treatment of the nude figure shocked or entertained most of Paris. The little girl was the daughter of a friend, in whose garden Manet painted the picture. The child looks through the iron railing, evidently fascinated by a train that has pulled into the Saint-Lazare station in Paris. Obligingly the train has left behind it a cloud of white smoke which obliterates unwanted detail from the background so that Manet can arrange the figures in a handsome pattern against the regular intervals of the railing.
Like the Impressionists Manet used light colors and, by suppressing shadows, he secured the effect of bright, outdoor lighting. While he satisfies the Realist’s love for an apparently casual composition, with its figures off-center and “unposed,” actually he has sensitively composed them according to principles learned from Japanese prints. As in the Oriental woodcuts, here, too, broad silhouettes of contrasting colors lend the picture its sparkle, while graceful curving contours in the figures and costumes form a pleasing design.
Canvas. 36¾ × 45⅛ Dated 1873
The hot sun of early afternoon blazes down upon the lacy stone façade of Rouen Cathedral. Painted in 1894, twenty years after the first Impressionist exhibition, this picture reveals Monet’s ultimate achievement in capturing sunlight with broken color. The myriad glowing spots of color almost dissolve the cathedral’s form. Small, separate touches of paint, prismatic in their brilliance, complement each other to dazzle the eye and suggest the shimmer of actual light. Monet painted an extensive series of pictures showing different effects of light playing across the elaborate Gothic tracery of Rouen Cathedral. He said that often he could paint on each picture for only two or three minutes at a time; after that, the light would have changed and, for him, the subject would become quite different.
Monet created a new kind of pictorial unity. It did not depend upon lines or patterns, but upon the unity of a single visual sensation, an impression. He gave up such traditional aims as balancing his composition or expressing emotions about his subjects. Instead he painted vivid optical sensations. Through long experience he had discovered what effects of light might be achieved by juxtaposing certain bright, pure colors which interplay, one against another, to simulate the visual experience of light. As Cézanne said, “Monet was only an eye, but what an eye!”
Canvas. 39½ × 26 inches Dated 1894
Characteristically feminine in her choice of subject and delicacy of coloring, Berthe Morisot has painted an interior of the house at Bougival, near Paris, where she spent her summers in the 1880’s. Probably it is her housemaid, busy in the dining room, who stands between the open cupboard and the table. A playful little dog adds a touch of animation to the domestic scene.
During the middle of her career, Berthe Morisot was strongly influenced by Impressionism. In this picture particular details of the furniture, of the girl’s costume, or even of her face, held interest for the painter only in so far as they reflected light in different ways. Much as it does in Monet’s art, light seems to fill the scene and blur the edges of the forms. Yet, as in Manet’s pictures, the colors here have not the daring brilliance of the spectrum hues Monet used. Berthe Morisot has sustained a refined color harmony of delicate warm and cool hues in the blue-grays and creamy highlights. Her composition, too, shows her allegiance to Manet rather than to Monet; the forms are broadly seen in silhouette so that light and shadow do not impinge upon them enough to destroy their character as elements in the design.
Canvas. 24⅛ × 19¾ inches Painted 1886
Before a colorful stage set, four ballerinas are awaiting their cue to perform. Dancers were among Degas’ most frequent subjects. Because the forms of their flaring skirts and bodices were simple, he could arrange them easily into handsome patterns and make them colorful by the artificial richness of stage lighting. He sketched the ballet dancers frequently during their exhausting hours of rehearsal and again in their spritely performances at the Paris Opera.
Though Degas shared interests with both Realists and Impressionists, he cannot be classified simply as either. His art synthesized several trends; he merged the academic and the progressive styles. Firmly grounded in the academic manner, he used precise outlines, which were foreign to the Realist or Impressionist. In this picture, his lines describe the ballerinas’ heads, arms and costumes and also establish an intricate design of diagonals moving back into depth. While the extreme off-center balance of the composition gives a realistic “snap-shot” view, it also heightens our awareness of the design so that the eye enjoys the variety of shapes and colors. Though the colors are applied with Impressionistic freedom, they combine into a vibrant harmony typical of Degas’ late style. Very fond of this picture, Degas kept it in his studio until his death.
Canvas. 59½ × 71 inches Painted c. 1899
In tones of green and copper Toulouse-Lautrec has captured the tawdry gaiety of Montmartre’s most colorful night spot in the gay ’nineties. The Moulin Rouge, despite its name, was never a windmill; it is a dance hall which uses the sails of a mill for advertising. Lautrec frequented it because he enjoyed watching the nightly performances of its spirited dancers. Their specialty, the quadrille, grew out of the high-kicking cancan; almost as vigorous, it was even more complicated. Dominating the scene here, Gabrielle, a popular professional dancer, has hoisted her skirts as she lines up with the others to begin the dance. With telling outline, Lautrec characterizes her robust physique and hoydenish air. She is in sharp contrast to the woman facing her, in the foreground, whom Lautrec has shown as delicately refined.
Admiring Manet, Morisot, and especially Degas, Lautrec produced handsome compositions similar to theirs. Again, under the influence of Japanese prints, light and shadow have disappeared, replaced by bold color patterns and strong lines. But Lautrec was far more concerned with characterization than were the other painters of his time and, like Daumier in an earlier generation, he gives a wonderfully vivid picture of his age.
Gouache on cardboard. 31½ × 23¾ inches Painted 1892
Loving the delicacy of Japanese art and having read about Japan, van Gogh named this young girl a “mousmé.” The word was taken from a romantic novel by Pierre Loti, who used it in describing the charm of the young Japanese tea-house attendants. Actually this subject was a peasant of Provence, in southern France. Van Gogh went there in 1888 hoping to capture in its bright sunshine some of the beauty he imagined in Japan.
With a very personal interpretation of Japanese style, he has shown this figure in a bold pattern of startling, bright colors. Earlier in Paris he had learned the color theories which Neo-Impressionists were applying to painting, and here his green, orange red, and intense blue are used with the purity that characterizes them in the spectrum. The Neo-Impressionists juxtaposed very small touches of such pure colors in order to suggest light even brighter than the Impressionists had achieved. But van Gogh was disinterested in effects of natural lighting. In this picture the girl is like a figure in an icon. Set against the plain, intense green background, she seems to be isolated from commonplace experience, and we are reminded of van Gogh’s stated aim, “I wish to paint men and women with that quality of the eternal which used to be suggested by the halo and which we attempt to give by the pure radiance and vibration of the colors.”
Canvas. 28⅞ × 23¾ inches Painted 1888
Fatata te Miti means simply “by the sea,” but what a curious vision Gauguin’s imagination has created from this scene of two Tahitian girls on the beach! The artist has found himself in a disquieting, primeval world where rich tropical colors and exotic forms of life, both human and vegetable, engender a haunting air of mystery. Gauguin painted this in 1892, during his second year in Tahiti. He had fled from Western civilization for he believed its materialistic culture rejected the artist as a useful citizen. He turned to the Pacific islands because he felt the need to become a primitive in both life and art. Only by returning to the primitive’s simple standards might man rediscover significant meaning in his life and work.
The almost forgotten religion of the Maori cult stirred Gauguin’s mind to prodigious creative activity. Lingering superstitions delighted him; phosphorescent fungi on the trees glowing in the twilight, as he painted them here, were thought to represent the spirits of long dead ancestors. In his art he evolved an expressive symbolism. He spoke of “the music of the picture,” a “magic accord” of the colors and arabesque patterns, which “addresses itself to the most intimate part of the soul.”
Canvas. 26¾ × 36 inches Dated 1892
Against rigid horizontal and vertical lines in the background, Cézanne has juxtaposed the curves of apples, bottles, and folds of drapery in turbulent, sweeping lines. He delighted in painting still-life subjects, for here were things that, unlike people, did not want to move but remained uncomplainingly motionless during the long hours, even days, that Cézanne needed for his intensive, exacting studies.
Realizing that Impressionists sacrificed the pictorial structure he admired in the Old Masters’ works, Cézanne took the formless touches of the Impressionists’ broken color and made each brush stroke a distinct “little plane.” In an apple, for example, he realized its form and color by integrating these small modulating planes of color so that the apple appears solid, round, and glowing with light. Yet Cézanne was aiming beyond simply reproducing the appearance of an apple. He strove for a total form in which every brush stroke in his composition is integrated. Every touch of paint, like a link in a chain, must contribute to the consistent unity of the picture. He believed a picture should give a unified sensation in which “every color-touch must contain air, light, the object, the plane, the character, the drawing, the style.” By abstracting nature into the painter’s colored planes, Cézanne paved the way for the abstract styles of the present century.
Canvas. 26 × 32⅜ inches Painted c. 1890
This picture of a very dressed-up little girl, who has been watering flowers in her garden, inherits the long tradition of appealing children’s portraits which have been well loved since the days of Titian and Van Dyck. Renoir, with his love of the Old Masters, combined this tradition and his Impressionist style. He created delightful portraits, which were popular at once and gained wider understanding for the Impressionists. Their art was still entirely misunderstood in 1876, when this was painted. They were thought to be incompetent daubers, incapable of “finishing” a picture properly. But Renoir’s extraordinarily deft handling of delicate flesh tones, as in the child’s face, and the radiance of his coloring could silence such criticism.
By nature Renoir was too sympathetic with his fellow man—and too charmed by the loveliness of women and children—to be content with the strict limits of Monet’s Impressionism. Merely painting sensations of light in a landscape did not satisfy the humanist Renoir. Once he showed a friend a delicately tinted sketch of rose petals and told him it was really a study for flesh tones. “For me,” he said, “a painting should be a lovable thing, gay and pretty; yes, pretty. There are enough things to bore us in life without our making more of them.”
Illustration pages in bold-faced italics.
| Artist | Page |
|---|---|
| Cézanne, Paul | 10-11, 28, 40, 41 |
| Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille | 3-4, 8, 18, 19, 24 |
| Courbet, Gustave | 5-6, 22, 23, 24 |
| Daumier, Honoré | 4-5, 6, 20, 21, 34 |
| David, Jacques-Louis | 1-2, 12, 13 |
| Degas, Edgar | 8-9, 11, 32, 33, 34 |
| Delacroix, Eugène | 3, 16, 17, 24 |
| Fantin-Latour, Henri | 6, 24, 25 |
| Gauguin, Paul | 10, 11, 38, 39 |
| Gogh, Vincent van | 9-10, 11, 36, 37 |
| Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique | 2, 4, 9, 14, 15, 24 |
| Manet, Édouard | 6-7, 8, 9, 11, 26, 27, 30, 34 |
| Monet, Claude | 7-8, 11, 28, 29, 30, 42 |
| Morisot, Berthe | 7, 8, 30, 31, 34 |
| Renoir, Auguste | cover, 7, 8, 42 |
| Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de | 9, 11, 34, 35 |
