Books on Artists.
"Life and Reminiscences of Gustave Doré". Compiled from Material supplied by Doré's Relations and Friends and from Personal Recollection. With many Original Unpublished Sketches and Selections from Doré's best Published Illustrations. By Blanche Roosevelt. New York: Cassell & Co.
"Eugène Delacroix, par lui-même." Paris: J. Ronam.
"J. F. Millet." Par Charles Yriarte. "Hans Holbein." Par Jean Rousseau. (Bibliothèque d'Art Moderne.) Paris: Jules Ronam.
Mrs. Roosevelt's volume is an engaging jumble of fact and fancy, a medley of impressions, hasty generalizations, souvenirs, reminiscences, all jotted down apparently in such breathless haste that we can only wonder that the result is a coherent and tolerably serious study of Gustave Doré, his life and his works. The author's methods are, indeed, those of the great designer himself, who obtained brilliant results regardless of careful processes. A genuine biography of Doré is yet to be written; but here we have a rather fascinating book of five hundred pages, full of personal and intimate narrations by the artist's family and friends, profuse, naïf, tender, overflowing with French sentiment and an intense sympathy and camaraderie. Interspersed with this biographical matter are innumerable pen-and-ink sketches, caricatures, designs, and finished pictures, illustrating the natural evolution of Doré's marvellous talent, the first instances of which show what he could do at the age of five. In fact, long before he could read the child showed clear signs of possessing a distinctively artistic organization. His practice with pen and pencil was pursued, however, without any sympathy or encouragement from his family, and his father, at least, was strongly averse to his taking up the career of an artist. In 1847, when Gustave was in his fifteenth year, his parents, who resided at Strasbourg, took him for a fortnight to Paris. The delights of the capital made a strong impression on the mind of the stripling, and he ardently wished to remain there. The thought occurred to him of offering some of his work to publishers, and, dashing off a few caricatures, he took advantage of the momentary absence of his parents to show them to Philipon, who had just founded his "Journal pour Rire." The result was that the publisher instantly engaged Gustave as one of the regular artists for his paper, and the boy remained in Paris, supporting himself and paying for his tuition at the Lycée Charlemagne, where he had Taine and About for fellow-collegians. This early success, combined with the most untiring industry and steady, almost passionate, devotion to his work, is one of the most remarkable biographical facts on record. A year later the elder Doré died, and his widow came to Paris to reside with her two sons, the chief expenses of the ménage being supported by Gustave, then little more than sixteen years of age. Between the years 1850 and 1870 he is said to have made by his pencil seven millions of francs,—almost a million and a half of dollars. Besides this enormous activity, a supreme and jealous ambition induced him to undertake not only every piece of work offered, from Bible-illustrations to a comic almanac, but whatever his brain or his fancy could conceive as possible for artist to achieve. Inspiration seized him at each new idea, bold and striking images, fantastic fancies, all the splendors of a magnificent or grotesque ideal. His work was a delirium; in a single morning he has been known to throw off twenty blocks which brought him ten thousand francs. He was, however, perpetually discontented, disgusted with his vocation, and envious of successful painters. He had almost a convulsion one day on hearing that Meissonier had received two hundred thousand francs for a single painting. "What!" he exclaimed; "a thing like that? Now, look at me. I can paint; I know I could paint better than Meissonier, at any rate. Have I ever been paid two hundred thousand francs for anything? No; and I never shall be. The fact is that no one understands me. I shall live and die misunderstood, or never comprehended at all,—which is worse." Fired by emulation, he shut himself up to create masterpieces which should surpass Meissonier and paralyze the world; and in a short time he showed his friend Lacroix twelve colossal canvases on which he had painted revolting realistic pictures which he called the "Abominations of Paris." "What do you think of Meissonier now?" he asked.
He longed ardently to be a painter, and was never at peace with critical Paris while it refused him the name of painter and called him only a designer. London was dearer to his heart from the fact that there were enshrined in the Doré Gallery and made one of the sights of the town his stupendous canvases imaging forth his conceptions of Scripture subjects. What he might have done as a painter had he studied at any early age under good masters must be left to conjecture, although his paintings carry with them a clear confession that naturally he did not possess a good eye for color. He was always impatient of criticism which made him feel that there was any lack of technique in his works. "He has it all in him, but lacks 'school,'" was the verdict of the critics. Undoubtedly, wishing to do all that man has done, Doré would have liked to focus his powers on marvels of refinement and exactness, like Meissonier's; but he was proud of his distinctive characteristics, and wanted the least block he touched to show something Doréish.
"Now you will give us some Velasquezes," a lady said to him during his journey in Spain.
"No, madame," he replied; "I shall give you some more 'Dorés.'"
What he enjoyed was an audacious and gigantic experiment, a subject which allowed him free and bold handling and a mystic, half-grotesque attitude toward what he found in it of poetry or strength. The feverish and hurried character of his work is sadly evident in many of his most ambitious designs. His illustrations of Milton, Dante, and the Wandering Jew may be said to show his powers at their best,—and perhaps we ought to include his Bible-pictures. Too often he uses without apparent motive feeble allegory and fantasy; and many of his later works must be considered by his most charitable critics not only obscure, but almost insane.
To turn from Doré to Delacroix is to take up the very different career of one of those "immortals" among whose works the great designer was eager to see his own unlucky paintings enrolled. Opposite as these two artists were, they had nevertheless certain things in common: their work was their life,—all personal gratification was subordinated to art,—each denied himself marriage, and yet enjoyed the untiring devotion of some sort of womankind. Doré had both his mother and his nurse to humor and spoil him. Delacroix endured the affectionate tyranny of his housekeeper, who watched over him as a lioness over her young. Delacroix, who was frail, sensitive, feverishly carried away by his work, needed just the careful intervention which this woman imposed to save him from the depressing influences of every-day life. She kept all uncongenial visitors from him. He was fastidious to a degree,—could not use a spoiled palette, and Jenny learned to prepare his palette, colors, and brushes with the nicest care. Delacroix began with a masterpiece. He was only twenty-three when he produced his "Dante and Virgil," which put him at the head of the so-called "romantic school." His clear intellect, his strength as a draughtsman, his abundance of invention, his wonderful color, made themselves felt at once. He had a long career in which to develop, and he was tireless in reinforcing his own great powers by profound and careful study of great authors, besides working perpetually to discover the secrets of the splendid paintings of Raphael, Velasquez, Veronese, and, above all, Rubens. It was his habit to spend whole days at the Jardin des Plantes, watching the animals, observing their postures and movements, aiming to pluck the heart out of the mystery of each organization. In 1828 he went to England, and, although he disliked the country, its architecture, the ill-made shoes and soiled stockings of the women, he carried back with him powerful impressions from Constable and from Kean's impersonations of Shakespeare which animated all his later work. His picture of "Hamlet," although it was not completed until 1843, owes its conception to this period. His lithographs of "Faust" elicited from Goethe the remark, "He has surpassed the pictures I had made for myself of the scenes written by myself."
The carefully-prepared monographs on Millet and Holbein, accompanied by excellent designs after their works, are full of suggestive criticism, and show how well the modern practice of popularizing art is carried on in Paris. Millet was born some sixteen years after Delacroix, and came to Paris in 1837, when that great master had produced some of his best pictures, which of all contemporary art were what aroused Millet's admiration and homage. "Grands par les gestes," he called them, "grands par l'invention et la richesse du coloris." Millet himself, however, was to found a separate school from that of the brilliant Delacroix. The fac-similes in this brochure from his original designs in crayon or pastel give much of the sentiment and meaning of his work. As the author says, they might well be the illustrations of a mighty poem called "The Earth." Night and morning, sunrise, noon, and sunset, the succession of seasons, the patient industries of the workers who toil like nature's own forces, simply, sternly, and with silent strength, all tell their story here. Millet had passed his youth in the fields, and, the son of a peasant, he must himself have been the central figure in many such scenes as those with which he has charmed the world. His picture of "The Haricot-Gatherer" represents the paternal cottage, and the figure of the woman in the garden is that of his mother herself. When he enshrined personal memories like these, no wonder we find in Millet's work the interpretation of so much that is deepest and most intimate in the history of man.
The gallery of the portraits of Hans Holbein the younger is well chosen, and gives some excellent instances of the artist's unsurpassed manner. There is inevitably something in any picture of Holbein's which holds the attention by its absolute reality: it is not only natural, but true, the reflection of an actual personality. An interest attaches to the portrait of Anne of Cleves, although one hardly finds in it the beauty which misled Henry VIII. and altered the history of England a little.