A CENTURY OF PAINTING.
NOTES DESCRIPTIVE AND CRITICAL.—COROT AND THE MODERN PASTORAL.—THE MEN OF 1830.—ROUSSEAU, DIAZ, DUPRÉ, AND DAUBIGNY.—FOUR FIGURE PAINTERS OF DIFFERING AIMS.
By Will H. Low.
ICTURES?" boasted Turner. "Give me canvas, colors, a room to work in, with a door that will lock, and it is not difficult to paint pictures!" This was the spirit of the older men, against which Constable rose in his might. It was the legacy of the past; the principle, or the lack of it, which permitted Titian (in a picture now in the National Gallery, London) to paint the shadows of his figures falling away from the spectator into the picture, and towards the setting sun in the background. The return to nature, however, was not accomplished at once. It is doubtful, indeed, if a painter can ever arrive at a respectable technical achievement without imbibing certain conventions which prevent complete submission to nature; absolute naïveté thus becoming only theoretically possible. Constable, with all his independence, dared not throw over all received canons of art. And Géricault, while daring to paint a modern theme, daring still more to embody it in forms plausibly like average humanity, and refusing to place on a raft in mid-ocean a carefully chosen assortment of antique statues, still did not think, apparently, that the heavily marked shadows prevalent throughout his picture were never seen under the far-reaching arch of the sky, but fell from a studio window. Nor do the early pictures by Corot free themselves from the influences of the academy at once. In the studies which he bequeathed to the Louvre—two tiny canvases on which are depicted the Coliseum and the Castle of St. Angelo at Rome—the conventional picking out of detail, the painting of separate objects by themselves, without due relation to each other, is the effect of early study; and it is only in the as yet timid reaching for effect of light and atmosphere that we feel the Corot of the future. These studies were painted in 1826; and as late as 1835 the same influences are manifest in the "Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert," a historical landscape of the kind dear to the academies, but saved and made of interest by the native qualities of the painter struggling to the surface.
Jean Baptiste Camille Corot was born in Paris, July 28, 1796. His father was originally a barber; but, marrying a dressmaker, he joined forces with his wife to such effect that they became the fashionable house of their time; and a "dress from Corot's" found its place in the comedies of the early part of the century, very much as the name of Worth has been potent in later days. The youth's distaste for business (certain unfortunate experiences in selling olive-colored cloth leading directly thereto) at length vanquished the parents' opposition to his choice of a career; and after a solemn family conclave, it was decided that he was to have an allowance of three hundred dollars a year, and be free to follow his own inclinations. Procuring materials for work, Corot sat him down the same day on the bank of the Seine, almost under the windows of his father's shop, and began to paint. It is prettily related that one of the shop-women, Mademoiselle Rose by name, was the only person of his entourage who sympathized with the young fellow, and who came to look at his work to encourage him. Late in life the good Corot said: "Look at my first study; the colors are still bright, the hour and day remain fixed on the canvas; and only the other day Mademoiselle Rose came to see me; and, alas, the old maid and the old man, how faded they are!"
JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT. AFTER A PHOTOGRAPH FROM LIFE.
This portrait represents "good Papa Corot," as he was universally known, at work out of doors.
It was Corot's good fortune to meet at the start a young landscape painter, Michallon, who had lately returned from Rome, where he had gone after winning the prize for historical landscape, which then formed part of the curriculum of the École des Beaux Arts. Michallon died in 1824, when only twenty-eight years old, too soon to have shown the fruits of an independent spirit which had already revolted against the trammels of the school. Desiring to save Corot from the mistakes which he had himself made, he adjured him to remain naïf, to paint nature as he saw it, and to disregard the counsels of those who were for the moment in authority. Gentle, almost timid by nature, having met so far in life with little but disapproval, Corot disregarded his friend's advice at first, and placed himself under the guidance of Victor Bertin, a painter then in vogue, and, needless to say, deeply imbued with scholastic tradition. In his company Corot made his first voyage to Italy, in 1825, and thus came for the first time under the true classic influence. The lessons taught in the school of nature, where Claude had studied, were those best fitted for the temperament of Corot, who has been called "a child of the eighteenth century, grown in the midst of that imitation of antiquity so ardent, and so often unintelligent, where the Directory copied Athens, and the Empire forced itself to imitate Rome." It is a curious and interesting fact that when, as in this case, the spirit of classicism reveals itself anew, its never-dying influence can be the motive for work as fresh and modern as that of Corot. It is also true that the rigid enforcement of the study of drawing was a healthy influence on Corot's early life. All the pictures of his early period show the most minute attention to form and modelling; and when he had finally rid himself of the hard manner which it entailed, there remained the substratum of a constructive basis upon which his freer brush played at will.
A BY-PATH. FROM A PAINTING BY JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT.
One of Corot's later works, and treated with greater freedom than the earlier.
Many years, however, Corot was to wait before the memorable day when he bewailed that his complete collection of works had been spoiled, he having sold a picture. Living on his modest income, which his father doubled when, in 1846, the son was given the cross of the Legion of Honor, he was happy with his two loves, nature and painting. Little by little he gained a reputation among the artists, especially when, after 1835, on his return from a second voyage to Italy, he found that the true country of the artist is his native country. After that period his works are nearly all French in subject, many of them painted in the environs of Paris; though, with his Theocritan spirit, he could see the fountain of Jouvence in the woods of Sèvres, and for him the classic nymph dwelt by the pond at Ville d'Avray. His life was long—he died February 22, 1875—and completely filled with his work.
After Corot's death, there was exhibited at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris a collection of several hundred of his pictures, and then, perhaps for the first time, the genius of the man was profoundly felt. To those who were inclined to undervalue the pure, sweet spirit which shone through his work, and to complain of the representation of a world in which no breeze stronger than a zephyr blew, in which the birds always sang, and the shepherd piped to a flock unconscious of the existence of wolves, there were shown efforts in so many and various directions as to forever silence their reproach of monotony, so often directed against Corot's work. There were landscapes, showing the gradual emancipation, due to the most sincere study of nature, hard and precise, in the early period; vaporous and filled with suggestion, as the sentiment of the day and hour represented became important to the painter, and his technical mastery became more certain in later years. There were figures, none too well drawn from the point of view of David or Ingres, but serving, to a painter whose interest in atmospheric problems never ceased, as objects around which the luminous light of day played, and which were bathed in circumambient air.
EARLY MORNING. JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT.
From a painting now in the Louvre. One of the best known of the works of the master, executed during the transitional period, when he still gave great attention to detail. The original is remarkable for its sense of dewy freshness.
DIANA'S BATH. JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT.
From a painting in the Museum at Bordeaux.
A SHALLOW RIVER. FROM A PAINTING BY THÉODORE ROUSSEAU.
With all this variety, however, the true value of Corot's work lies in the expression of the spirit of the man himself. It is often possible, and it is always theoretically desirable, to separate the personality of a painter from his production in any critical consideration of his achievement. It is at least only fair to believe that the light which shines from so many canvases is the true expression of many a life which is clouded to our superficial view. With Corot, however, it is impossible to make this separation. Every added detail of his life—and they are so numerous that in the difficulty of a choice they must remain unrecorded here—gives a new perception of his work. A youthful Virgilian spirit to the day of his death, as old at his birth as the classic source from which he sprang, he invented a method essentially his own, in which to express his new-old message. In our work-a-day, materialistic age, like a thrush singing in a boiler-shop, he is the quiet but triumphant vindication of the truth that all great art has its roots firmly implanted in the earth of Hellenic civilization, though its expression may be, as in Corot's case, through an art unknown to the Greeks, and even, as in the case of the one greater man of this century than Corot—Millet—by the presentation of types which the beauty-loving sons of Hellas disdained to represent.
Millet's work must be considered later in these papers, but it is useful here to make this passing comment, that with Corot he represents what is best in our modern art; that the greatest quality of our modern art is its steadfast reliance on nature; and that, paradoxical as it may seem, they are alike in taking only that from nature which is serviceable to the clarity of their expression, being in this both at odds with the common practice of modern painting, which usually adopts a more servile attitude towards nature. Corot painted out of doors constantly; but in the maturity of his art his work was only based upon the scene before him, a practice dangerous to the student, and fraught with difficulty to the master. In the fever of production; in the almost childish joy which the long neglected painter felt when dealers and collectors besieged his door; and, finally, in the necessity which arose for large sums of money to carry on works of charity, which were his only dissipation, and which it was his pride to sustain without impairing the patrimony which in the course of time he had inherited, and which he left intact to his relatives, Corot undoubtedly weakened his legacy to the future by over-production. In addition, his work became the prey of unscrupulous dealers (as there is nothing easier to imitate superficially than a Corot), and the mediocre pictures signed by his name are not always of his workmanship. Such works apart, his art has given us a message from the purest source of poetry and painting, couched in a language which is thoroughly of our time; and in this year, which is the centenary of his birth, it can be said that no other painter of the century, save the graver Millet, has held fast that which was good in the art of the past, and so enriched it by added truth and beauty as Corot. It was fitting that when he lay dying as cheerfully as he had lived, contented that he had "had good parents and good friends," beautiful landscapes flitted before his eyes, "more beautiful than painting." On the morning of February 22, 1875, his servant urged him to eat to sustain his strength; but he gently shook his head, saying: "Papa Corot will breakfast in heaven to-day."
THE EDGE OF THE FOREST (FONTAINEBLEAU). FROM A PAINTING BY THÉODORE ROUSSEAU.
Eighteen years before, on December 22, 1867, there had died at Barbizon, Théodore Rousseau, who, born in Paris, July 15, 1812, had been the leader of the revolution in landscape painting, in which we to-day count Corot, Daubigny, Dupré, Troyon, Diaz, Jacque, and others who, with our mania for classification, we call the "Barbizon school." The fact that these men, more than any painters before their time, had, by direct study from nature, developed strongly individual characteristics, makes this title, localized as it is by the name of a village with which a number of them had slight, if any, connection, a misnomer. The French name for the group, "the men of 1830," is more correct; for it was about that time that their influence in the Salon began to be felt, as a result of the pictorial invasion of Constable. Lacking the poetic feeling of Corot, and more realistic in his aims, though not always in result, Rousseau met with instant success when he exhibited for the first time at the Salon in 1834. His picture, "Felled Trees, Forest of Compiègne," received a medal, and was purchased by the Due d'Orleans. The following year the jury, presided over by Watelet, a justly forgotten painter, refused Rousseau's pictures, and from that time until 1849, when the overthrow of Louis Philippe had opened the Salon doors to all comers, no picture by Rousseau was exhibited at the Salon.
ON THE RIVER OISE. FROM A PAINTING BY CHARLES FRANÇOIS DAUBIGNY.
A typical French river, with the familiar figures of peasant women washing linen in the stream. Probably painted during one of the voyages of his house-boat studio "Le Bottin," in which the painter passed many summers.
THE STORMY SEA. FROM A PAINTING BY JULES DUPRÉ.
This powerful picture gives an idea of the dramatic force of one who has been fitly termed a symphonic painter.
A SUNLIT GLADE. FROM A PAINTING BY LÉON GERMAIN PELOUSE.
A remarkable rendering of intricate detail without sacrifice of general effect, this picture, nevertheless, gives somewhat the impression of a photograph from nature.
In the meantime, however, Rousseau's fame had grown, fostered by the more advanced critics of the time. He lived at Barbizon, on the border of the forest of Fontainebleau; and, basing his work on the most uncompromising study of nature, his pictures bore an impress of simple truth, which to our latter-day vision seems so obvious and easily understood that nothing could show more clearly the depth of error into which his opponents had fallen than the systematic rejection of his work for so many years. He was by nature a leader, and in his country home he was soon joined by Millet and Charles Jacque, while in Paris he had the hearty support of Delacroix and his followers of the Romantic school. While forced by circumstances to find allies in these men, Rousseau had, however, but little of the imaginative temperament. He was, above all, the close student of natural phenomena. He sat, an impartial recorder of the phases of nature's triumphal procession. Early and late, in the fields, among the rocks, or under the trees of the forest, his cunning hand noted an innumerable variety of facts which before him, through ignorance or disdain, the landscape painter had never seen. It is but fair to say that, like all pioneers in the untrodden fields of art, his means of expression at times failed to keep pace with his intention. His work is occasionally overburdened with detail, through the embarrassment of riches which nature poured at his feet. Then, heir to the processes of painting of former generations, it seemed to him necessary to endow nature with a warmth of coloring, an abuse of the richer tones of the palette, which we may presume he would have discarded but for the fact already noted, that a painter carries through his earthly pilgrimage a baggage of early-formed habits difficult to throw off en route. The belief that color to be beautiful must of necessity be warm, rich, and deep in tone was shared by all painters of Rousseau's time, and lingers still in the minds of many, despite the fact that nature has created the tea-rose as well as the orange. When, however, Rousseau was completely successful—as, for instance, in the "Hoar-frost," in the Walters gallery in Baltimore—the reward of his painstaking methods was measurably great. In such works as this the rendition of effect, the certainty of modelling, the sustained power throughout the work, lift it beyond mere transcription of fact into the realm of typical creations which appear more true than average reality.
A SHEPHERD AND HIS FLOCK. FROM A PAINTING BY CHARLES ÉMILE JACQUE.
A typical example of the master, solidly painted, though, as was often his habit, somewhat forced in effect.
Of the life of Rousseau as the head of the little colony of painters who for longer or shorter periods resided at Barbizon, much could be said if space permitted. It is pleasant to think that the more prosperous Rousseau helped with purse and influence his comrades, and that, by nature sad and irritable, he was always considerate of them in the many discussions which took place. Corot, ill at ease in the revolutionary atmosphere, made an occasional appearance. Diaz, he of meridional extraction, turbulent and emphatic, stamped his wooden leg, and was as illogical in debate as in painting. Charles Jacque, with the keen smile and the facility for absorbing ideas from the best of them; Ziem even, who painted Venice for some years in the shades of Fontainebleau; Dupré, whose nature expresses itself in deep sunsets gleaming through the oaks of the forest; Daubigny, the youngest of the group, and the more immediate forerunner of landscape as it is to-day, then winning his first success; Decamps, who later sometimes left the Imperial Court, domiciled for the moment at the palace of Fontainebleau, and brought his personality of a great painter who failed through lack of elementary instruction, among them; Daumier, the great caricaturist, and possibly greater painter, but for the engrossing character of the work which first fell in his way—all these and more made up the constantly shifting group. The first innkeeper of the place and his wife, whose hyphenated name, Luniot-Ganne, commemorated their union, kept for many years on the walls, the panels of the doors, and on odd cabinets and bits of furniture, souvenirs of the passage of all these men, in the shape of sketches made by their hands. This little museum, created in sportive mood, bore all these names and many more, those of men, often celebrated, who from sympathy or curiosity visited the place. Millet was in life, as in art, somewhat apart in the later years; but he was the consistent friend of Rousseau, whose life closed in the darkness of a disordered mind.
"THE MAN WITH THE LEATHERN BELT." PORTRAIT OF GUSTAVE COURBET AS A YOUNG MAN, BY HIMSELF.
From the original, in the Louvre.
Narcisco Virgilio Diaz de la Peña was the noble name of him who, born at Bordeaux in 1807, the son of a Spanish refugee, died at Mentone, November 18, 1876. Left an orphan when very young, he drifted to Paris, and found work, painting on china, in the manufactory at Sèvres. Here he met Dupré, employed like himself; and in their work in other fields it is not fanciful to feel the influence of the delight in rich translucent color, of the tones employed with over-emphasis on the surface of faïence. After a bitter acquaintance with poverty, Diaz produced work which brought him great popularity. The earlier pictures were studies in the forest of Fontainebleau, whose venerable tree-trunks, moss-grown; whose lichen-covered rocks, and gleaming pools reflecting the sky, he rendered with force of color and strength of effect. Gradually he began to attempt the figure, which in his hands never attained a higher plane than an assemblage of charming though artificial color; and these little bouquets, which superficially imitated Correggio, Da Vinci, or Prud'hon, as the fancy seized the painter, bathed in a color that is undeniably agreeable, were and are to this day loved by the collector. Of a whimsical temperament, Diaz was the life of artist gatherings; and his facility in work, and its popularity, gave him the means of doing many generous acts, the memory of which lives. But of the group of men of his time, he has exercised, perhaps, the least influence.
THE STONE-BREAKERS. FROM A PAINTING BY GUSTAVE COURBET.
One of Courbet's early pictures, which, when exhibited at the Salon, excited considerable discussion, certain adverse critics finding in it an appeal to the socialistic elements. It represents a scene common in France, where stones are piled by the roadsides, to be broken up for repairing the route.
Jules Dupré rises to a higher plane. But his work, freed from the colder academical bondage, is pitched in a key of color which takes us to a world where the sun shines through smoke; where the clouds float heavily, filled with inky vapors; and the light shoots from behind the trees explosively. It is a grave, rhythmic world, however; and if it lacks the dewy atmosphere of Corot, it has an intensity which the more sanely balanced painter seldom reached. Dupré, born at Nantes in 1812, and dying near Paris, at the village of L'Isle-Adam, in 1889, made his first important exhibit at the Salon in 1835, after a visit to England, where he met Constable. This picture, "Environs of Southampton," was typical of the work he was to do. A long waste of land near the sea, the middle distance in deepest shadow, and richly colored storm-clouds racing overhead; the foreground in sunlight, enhanced by the artificial contrast of the rest of the picture; a wooden dyke on which, together with two white horses near by, the gleam of sunlight falls almost with a sound, so intensified is all the effect, make up the picture. Dupré's work is generally keyed up to the highest possible pitch, and it is no little merit that, with the constant insistence on this note, it is seldom or never theatrical.
Constant Troyon, from sympathy of aim, is commonly included in this group, although it was gradually, and after success achieved in landscape, that his more powerful cattle pictures were produced, which alone entitle him to the place. Born at Sèvres in 1810, where his father was employed at the manufactory of porcelain, he was thrown in contact with Dupré and Diaz. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1832, and for nearly twenty years was known as a landscape painter. His work at that time was eclectic, sufficiently in touch with Rousseau, whose acquaintance he had made, to be of interest, but never revolutionary enough to alarm the academical juries of the Salon. In 1849, after a visit to Holland, he turned his attention to animal painting, and became in that field the first of his time. In common with his quondam comrades in the porcelain manufactory, Troyon delighted in warmth and richness of tone and color; but in the rendering of the texture and color of cattle the quality availed him greatly, and as objects in his foreground the landscape environment gained in depth by its judicious use. Troyon will be chiefly remembered by the pictures painted from 1846 to 1858. The later years of his life, until his death in 1865, were passed with a clouded intellect.
THE GOOD SAMARITAN. FROM A PAINTING BY THÉODULE RIBOT.
From the Salon of 1870; now in the Luxembourg. The story of the man who went down to Jericho and fell among thieves is here treated as a pretext for a forcible effect of light and shade, though it is also a novel and dramatic presentation of the scene.
The youngest of the group proper was Charles François Daubigny, who was born in Paris in 1817, and died there in 1878. He was the son of a well-known miniature painter, and passed his youth in the country, where he imbibed the love for simple nature which he afterwards rendered with less of fervor than Rousseau, with less poetry than either Corot or Dupré; but, in his way, with as much or more of truth. His task was easier. In the progress which landscape painting had made, there were hosts of younger painters, each adding a particle of truth, each making an advance in technical skill and daring, and Daubigny profited by it all. Corot, it is true, had never been afflicted with the preoccupation of combining the freshness of nature with the patine with which ages had embrowned the old gallery pictures; but Daubigny, looking at nature with a more literal eye than Corot, ran a gamut of color greater than he. It was Daubigny who said of Corot, in envious admiration: "He puts nothing on the canvas, and everything is there." His own more prosaic nature took delight in enregistering a greater number of facts. Floating quietly down the rivers of France in a house-boat, he diligently reproduced the sedgy banks, the low-lying distances the poplars and clumps of trees lining the shore, and reflected in the waters. He painted the "Springtime," now in the Louvre, with lush grass growing thick around the apple trees in blossom; with tender greens, soft, fleecy clouds, and the moist, humid atmosphere of France; without preoccupation of rich color, of "brown sauce," of "low tone," of the thousand and one conventions which have enfeebled the work of men stronger than he. Thus he fills a middle place between the men who made an honest effort at painting nature as they saw and felt it, but could not altogether rid themselves of their early education, and the lawless band who, with the purple banner of impressionism, now riot joyously in the fields, with brave show of gleaming color, and fearless attempt to enlist science in their ranks.
SERVANT AT THE FOUNTAIN. FROM A PAINTING BY FRANÇOIS SAINT BONVIN.
From the Salon of 1863; now in the Luxembourg galleries. A quiet scene, essentially French from the type of the woman to the "fountain" of red copper so often seen in French kitchens, it recalls the work of the old Holland masters, and proves that, in our day, and with material near at hand, one can be thoroughly modern, and yet claim kinship with the great painters of the past.
It is to these latter that the future must look, and it can do so with confidence. In all the license which runs ahead of progress there is less danger than resides in stagnation. The men of 1830, who by ungrateful youths are now derided, had their turn at derision, and extravagances were committed in their name, according to the beliefs of their time. They carried their work, however, to its full completion, and it remains the greatest achievement of this century in painting, the greatest in landscape art of all time. What the next century may bring is undoubtedly foreshadowed in the work of impressionistic tendency. It has the merit of being a new direction, one as yet hardly opened before us, but more hopeful, despite certain excesses, than it would be to see the men of our time settle down to an imitation of the works, however great, of those men of 1830. The immediate effect of their example was and can still be seen in the works of men too numerous to be enregistered here.
AN UNHAPPY FAMILY. FROM A PAINTING BY NICOLAS FRANÇOIS OCTAVE TASSAERT.
In the Luxembourg catalogue, to which museum the picture came from the Salon of 1850, is printed a long quotation from Lamennais's "Les Paroles d'un Croyant" (The Words of a Believer), an emphatic work, of great popularity about the time that the picture was painted. The women represented, having fallen into poverty, are suffering from cold and hunger, the obvious end of the tragedy being explained by these words, "Shortly after there were seen two forms, luminous like souls, which took their flight towards Heaven." The picture, like much of Tassaert's work, affords an instance of misguided and morbid talent.
In Henri Harpignies, a living painter, though now aged, the influence is felt in the careful attention to form throughout the landscape. The delicate branching of trees is depicted in his work with accuracy tempered by a sense of the beauty of line, which prevents it from becoming photographic. Léon Germain Pelouse, who was born at Pierrelay in 1838, and died in Paris, 1891, carried somewhat the same qualities to excess. His pictures, though undeniably excellent, are marred by the dangerous facility which degenerates into mere virtuosity. Charles Jacque, who was born in 1813, and lived until 1894, was of the original group living for many years in Barbizon. He was, perhaps, of less original mind than any of the others, but was gifted with a power of assimilation which enabled him to form an eclectic style that is now recognized as his own. His pictures are many in number and varied in character, though his somewhat stereotyped pictures of sheep, done in the later years of his life, are best known.
The limits of space render it difficult to make even a summary enumeration of certain tendencies in figure painting which marked the years of the growth of this great landscape school. Gustave Courbet (born at Ornans in 1819, died in Switzerland, 1877), who might be classed both as a figure and a landscape painter, would demand by right a longer consideration than can be here given. Of his career as a champion of realism, as a past master in the peculiarly modern art of keeping one's self before the public, culminating in his connection with the Commune in Paris in 1871, and the destruction of the column in the Place Vendôme, there could be much to say. Courbet was, as a painter, a powerful individuality; of more force, however, as a painter of the superficial envelope than of the deeper qualities which nature makes pictorial at the bidding of one of finer fibre. His claim to be considered modern can be contested, inasmuch as it was only in subject that his work was novel. In manner of painting he was of a time long past, of a school of greater masters than he showed himself to be. With this reserve, however, as a vigorous painter, both of the figure and landscape, he is interesting; and as one of the first to look about him and find his subjects in our daily life, his work will live.
Curiously enough, the revival of the art of another epoch in the case of Saint Bonvin remained absolutely modern. By nature or by choice this painter (born at Vaugirard, near Paris, in 1817, and dying at St. Germain-en-Laye in 1887) is a modern Pieter de Hooghe; and as the Dutch masters addressed themselves to a painstaking and sincere representation of the life about them, in like manner Bonvin, bringing to his work much the same qualities, choosing as his subjects quiet interiors, with the life of the family pursuing its even tenor (or the still more placid progress of conventual life, like the "Ave Maria in the Convent of Aramont," in the Luxembourg), remains himself while resembling his prototypes. It is instructive to look at his "Servant at the Fountain," reproduced here, compare it with many of the pictures of familiar life like those of Wilkie, Webster, or Mulready, published last month, and note the unconsciousness of the work before us.
The work of a painter equally able, though suffering somewhat as representing an art with which we moderns have little sympathy, falls into comparison here, and undoubtedly loses by it. The unfortunate painter, Octave Tassaert, who was born in Paris in 1800, and lived there, undergoing constant privation, until he voluntarily ended his life in 1874, possibly found consolation for his hard lot in depicting scenes like that entitled "An Unhappy Family."
The lesson of the art of the men considered here is that of direct inspiration of nature, of reliance on native qualities rather than those acquired; and the impulse given by them has continued in force until to day. We have before us, as a consequence, two strongly defined tendencies which will control the future of painting. The first and strongest, for the moment, is the impressionistic tendency, with its negation of any pictorial qualities other than those based on direct study from objects actually existing. This would, if carried to a logical conclusion, eliminate the imaginative quality, and render the painter a human photographic camera. The other tendency is that which has existed since art was born, and which, though temporarily and justly ignored in periods when it is necessary to recreate a technical standard, always comes to the surface when men have learned their trade as painters. It is the desire to create; the instinct which impels one to use the language given him to express thought. The two tendencies are not incompatible; and in the end the artist will arise who, with certainty of expression, will express thought.