Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning

the rabid antagonism of the public toward all ornament and richness in painting and toward all subject-matter which did not inspire thoughts of inflexible simplicity. This attitude was attributable

ng his art a vehicle for a series of parental sermons, died a pauper. He too lacked the aridity requisite for popular taste. Chardin, the Le Nains and Fouquet were set aside: they were considered too trivial, too insufficientl

f the new degeneracy. He apotheosised all that is false and decadent in art. But the adulation of him was short-lived. The French imagination is too fecund for only thorns. Ingres superseded him. This new idol, going to the Greeks for inspiration, made David fluen

nto the public gaze, not only because of its implied blasphemy in deviating from the méthode David, but because the tragedy of its subject was still fresh in the national mind. Was this a clever device on the part of the painter to circumven

enterprise. So much of the energy of pioneers is spent in combating hostile criticism and indifference, that their fund of creative force is depleted. This was true in the case of Delacroix. Like all the greater painters he was self-taught. The essence of knowledge is untransmittable. True, he occasionally visited the studio of Guérin, but his real education came from the Louvre where he

s its popularity that the government bought it for 2,000 francs. Rubens still held him firmly two years later in the Massacre de Scio, although there were in the picture indubitable indications of the advent of Venice. This picture was to be hung in the famous Salon of 1824, where Lawrence, Bonington, Fielding, and Consta

prairies can be applied to all the other tones as well." By this method, primitive as it seems today, he beheld a way of augmenting the dramatic significance of his conceptions. The next year, 1825, he went to London to study the English painters at closer range. There he learned much from Bonington, as he did from Constable, and in one of his letters he wrote: "Grey is the enemy of all

the characters, it is then a harmony, and its combinations are so adapted that they produce a unique song.... A conception, having become a composition, must move in the milieu of a colour peculiar to it. There seems to be a particular tone belonging to some part of every picture which is a key that governs all the other tones.... The ar

ements of sumptuousness and sensuality; but in this eastern land his colour reached maturity. Studying the productions of the native crafts in their relation to colour, he dreamed of making pictures as variegated as rugs and vases. In this he was trespassing on the precincts of Veronese who had

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once said that we get Delacroix's full significance in black-and-white reproduction. This comes perilously near being true. Today his pictures appear as devoid of brilliancy as those of the Venetians. Yet, when he first exhibited, he was reproached for his raucous tones. T

of the least compounded of Rubens's figure pieces. For instance, in the Bataille de Taillebourg-an excellent example of his dramatic method-it will be noted that the canvas opens at the bottom-centre to form a triangle of struggling forms, and that in the breach thus made the rearing charger looms white. The identical composition can be found in La Justice, La Liberté, the Janissaires à l'Attaque, La Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange, the Enlèvement de Rébecca and the Entrée des Croisés à

(as for Veronese in the Retour de Christophe Colomb, and for the Dutch in Cromwell au Chateau de Windsor) made him forget himself. Even this primitive comprehension of linear balance had passed out of French painting with t

ure to express a spirit as modern as Rubens's lay in his inability to understand the opposition in rhythmic line-balance of three dimensions which is to be found in even the slightest of Rubens's canvases. His details are always interesting, but he never succeeded in welding them into a sequacious and interrelated whole. His high gift of invention was inad

ine defined the limits of his ability for organisation. If he had carried out in other pictures the compositional elements of his Piéta, which had distinct movement, his work would have taken a higher place in the history of art. In many canvases his seeming fullness of form is only a richness of line-a richness, however, which had seldom

a petty one. Even his patriotism was chauvinistic. He was rabidly anti-Teutonic and attempted to compress all the great masters of art into the French mould. He inveighed against style in painting because France had always been barren of it. He pretended to detest Wagner, his musical prototype, and ignoring the latter's dramatic undulations, critici

emes. And though he had sufficient foresight to see the hopeless trend of the painting of his day, and combated it, he did not advance. His muse was the corpse of Venet

s influence had died out, and the painter himself was an exile in Brussels. Fromentin tells us that Géricault helped paint Delacroix's first canvas. Certain it is that several of the great Englishmen painted some of his second. This, no doubt, taught De

Gautier, Dumas, Baudelaire, Stendhal and Merimée-there was none whose temperament was not either romantic or idealistic. They could not see that, though he strove with them for modernity of express

x's first canvas contains influences of both Rubens and Michelangelo. His second picture echoes Rubens, the Venetians and Goya. Later came more prominent evidences of Titian and Veronese. Delacroix was museum-bred. He absorbed impressions avidly, and did his best work only after he had undergone an intellectual experience. Had his

galleries than as mural decorations. In trying to paint monumental subjects on extensive canvases he lost that spirit of organisation which would have been his on more limited surfaces. One of his finest expositions of colour, La Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange, in a chapel at Saint Sulpice, is ineffective because its surface is too large for his treatment of the theme. Delacroix in reality was a painter of still-life in the broad meaning of the term, just as Rembrandt and Cézanne were still-life painters. He failed

rmer, Courbet's struggle would have been more difficult, and rhythm in drawing would have had to wait for another resuscitator. Without his colour theories Impressionism would have been postponed for half a century; Van Gogh could not have done his best pictures; and the Pointillists, with their system of

f expression. He is the link in the chain which holds the brilliant gems of painting. If he himself fell short of genius, he neverth

his lifetime. He accomplished this feat by praise which was largely enthusiasm and by criticism which spelled partiality. But a panegyric not founded on accuracy and authenticity defeats its own object in the end. Turner himself remarked that Ruskin discovered recondite points in his painting of which he, as the artist, was ignorant. This might have been true, or it might have been sarcasm. But whether Ruskin or Turner knew more about the l

bjects into minute touches of different colours-not, perhaps, for the purpose of heightening the emotional qualities of the paintings as a whole, but for the primitive reason that the device gave accuracy to them as representations of nature. These pictures Monet and Pissarro studied closely during the Franco-Prussian War, and there is no doubt that the result of this study determined the directi

known humorist of the Charivari named Impressionism. This process was given further impetus by another Frenchman, Jongkind, called the European Hiroshige. There is more than a superficial analogy between Jongkind and Turner; and the Impressionists, first under the influence of Corot and Courbet, found the effects they sought by using the purity of Turner with the facture of Jongkind. It was thus they were brought back

pe painters before Turner's day conceived their out-of-door pictures in more or less definite moulds. A tree in one man's canvas, being an idealistic conception, was difficult of differentiation from a tree in anoth

s before models, taken their canvases home, organised and modified them, they would no doubt have produced greater net results artistically. Organisation, in its finest sense, comes only through contemplation and reflection; and while Turner did not possess the genius for rhythm in any of its manifestations, he nevertheless realised that mere truth does not make a picture. The Sun of Venice Going to Sea is as excellent as anything Monet or Sisley has ever done. In Turner there is a feeling for the grandiose such as few moderns possess. Did this gift come

ose triumphant above every opposition. His art stemmed temperamentally from the Dutch and Spaniards, for while he imitated no one, he was unconsciously influenced by many. So complete was his assimilation of great men that in his expression they all had a place. He himself says that he studied antiquity as a swimmer crosses a river. The academicians were dro

nt of vision approaching decadence. Courbet's deportmental crudities alone were a source of antagonism, and when to these were added scorn and indifference the hostility against him became violent. But temperamentally he was aristocratic. The peasant mind is fundamentally traditional: Courbet was violently revolutionary. Nor did he lack fineness of mind. His early portraits embodied the subtleties of modelling in Rembrandt as well as the extrao

d as a means of silencing his adversaries. He regarded all public demonstration as blague, and later in life carried this attitude into politics. Whistler, his pupil, was quick to sense the advantage of his teacher's methods; and it is the irony of fate that this ineffectual American was believed and respected while Courbet was abused and ridiculed and forced to die in exile. He had carried his assaults too far. "To be not only a painter but a man," he wrote at one time. "To create a livi

terity than Courbet, and some of the artist's letters are not dissimilar in tone to the bombastic manifestos of certain ultra-modern schools. At the time of his first exhibition he wrote to Bruyas: "I stupefy the entire world. I am triumphant not only over the moderns but the ancients as well. Here is the Louvre gallery. The Champs Elysées does not exist, nor the Luxembourg. There is no more Champs de Mars. I have thrown consternation into the world of art." This spirit of monumental self-

A poet so superficial as to call Delacroix "a haunted lake of blood" could not be expected to appreciate the terre à terre qualities of this master of Ornans. And Courbet was so little French that he was incomprehensible to his

tions grew out of his sheer enjoyment in visible objects, whether they were dramatic or not. To the public his pictures appeared ugly, even repellent. Here was a man who painted a funeral realistically-Dieu m'en garde! With only the example of canvases filled with familiar gods and goddesses and melting nudes in golden pink, he dared set forth, in a sacred theme, peasants' faces and peasants' shoes, cloudy skies, and holes in the brown earth. To those who had come to look upon art as something ethereal and evanescent, L'Enterrement à Ornans was mo

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irst view the picture appears to have been inspired by El Greco's Obsequies of the Count of Orgaz, but it is more likely that these peasants of Ornans, each a notable of the town, with their indifferent expressions and awkward gestures, were attributable to The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew of Ribera and La Folle of Géricault, rather than to the master of Toledo. But that the Spanish helped paint it is evident: some parts of the landscape are taken bodily from their canvases. Meier-G

ed himself with a palette as meagre as that of Caravaggio and Guercino. And yet, though colour has come latterly to mean tactile form in its highest sense, this black canvas, when place

of dainty trees copied for their drawing and tone. In Courbet all this was changed. He organised landscapes as he did still-lives and nudes. Objects, as such, meant nothing to him. In this he struck a new and modern note which the good people of his day considered not only bad art but a slur upon the spiritual meanings of nature. Even in Les Baigneuses, where the f

ver done, despite the vast popularity of such purely sentimental pictures as The Angelus and The Man with the Hoe. Courbet could never have been satisfied with the angularity and absence of rhythm in the other's work. In Millet's best canvases one finds at most onl

f study can produce and no amount of adverse criticism influence. Delacroix, on the other hand, was the archetype of the highly cultured and educated man. He foresaw the necessity for radical reform, but was unable

ns, but it was Courbet who brought to art a new mental attitude without which there would be no excuse for modern painting. By turning men's thoughts from ancient Italy to the actualities of their own day, and by expelling the literary canvas from art, he left those who came after him free to evolve a medi

turist at twenty-five. Such fame was warranted, for he was unquestionably the greatest and most trenchant caricaturist the world has ever produced. From 1835 to 1848 he made capital of all those many catastrophes which overtook France. Only the curtailing of the freedom of the press on December 2, 1848, put an end to his career as publicist. This culmination of his

tained. His significance, however, lies more especially in his new method of obtaining volume than in the flexibility of his line drawings. He built his pictures in tone first. The drawing came afterward as a direct result of the tonal volumes. This new manner of painting permitted him a greater subtlety and fluency than Courbet possessed. In fact, Daumier's comprehension of form in the subjective sense was greater than that of any Frenchman up to his time. Compare, for instance, Daumier's canvas, Les Lutteurs, with Courbet's picture of the same name.

d perspective. With Daumier it meant a plastic building up of volume from the background forward. The feeling we have before his canvases that we are looking at form itself and not merely an excellent representation of it, is as strong as it is in a greater way when we stand befor

IN DA

d any direct and conscious influence. Frankly this is but a modernisation of one of the sibyls on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The truth is Daumier is more akin to Rembrandt than to Michelangelo. But there is in him none of the conscious copying of Rembrandt that we find, for instance, in Joshua Reynolds. The latter, admiring Rembrandt, essayed to equal his power by imitating his externals with academic pro

faces is the prefiguration of the modern conception of form. In this particular Daumier, even more than Rembrandt, was the avant-courier of Cézanne. This latter artist, through his concern with the play of one colour on another, gave birth to form more intensely than did either of the older men. Too much stress cannot

blossoms forth in all the hot softness of now the Venetians, of again the Spaniards;

also had some trifling influence on him in such paintings as Don Quichotte. But Daumier's influence on others is more direct and far-reaching than his own garnerings of inspiration. He foreshadowed the formal abbreviations of Toulouse-Lautrec, Forain and Steinlen, and he affected, more than is commonly admitted, the works of Manet, Degas, and Van Gogh. In his s

ent contemporary, Courbet. For if choice there is between the intrinsically artistic achievements o

pective and creative souls who open, free from the stain of combat, to the sun of achievement. Delacroix, Turner, Courbet, Daumier-these are the men who cleared the ground and thereby made possible a new age of ?sthetic creation. To Delacroix belongs the credit for giving an impetus to the vitalisation of colour, and for freeing drawing from the f