CHAPTER VI · PISSARRO, RENOIR, SISLEY
“JE CROIS QU’IL N’Y AURA RIEN DE PLUS TRISTE À RACONTER DANS L’HISTOIRE DE L’ART, QUE LA LONGUE PERSÉCUTION INFLIGÉE AUX ARTISTES VRAIMENT ORIGINAUX ET CRÉATEURS DE CE SIÈCLE”
THÉODORE DURET
THE artists who accepted originally the title of Impressionists numbered about fifty in all, and a complete list of their names can be found in the catalogues of the eight exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886. There were never more than a dozen active members. Twenty-six (including Boudin and Signac) exhibited but once, and ten were represented in two collections only. Pissarro was the single painter who contributed to the whole series, Degas and Berthe Morisot forwarding examples during seven years. Of the remainder, Rouart and Guillaumin were catalogued in six exhibitions; Caillebotte, Monet, and Tillot, in five; Cals, Mary Cassatt, Forain, Gauguin, Renoir, Sisley, and Zandomeneghi, in four. These artists were the original members of the group until it dispersed about 1886.
It will be noted that Camille Pissarro exhibited eight times, and the fact is characteristic of an artist who was famous for his large output. On the eve of the publication of this volume comes the sad intelligence of the death of one of the most gifted members of the early Impressionist group in France. The loss of Camille Pissarro is a severe blow to the art he loved so well, and it has formed the subject of general regret. Born in 1830 at St. Thomas, in the Antilles, son of a well-to-do trader of Jewish descent, Pissarro at an early age showed signs of artistic promise. In 1837 his parents moved to Europe, and his precocious talent was noticed by the Danish painter Melbye, who took the boy into his atelier as a pupil. In 1859 Pissarro exhibited for the first time at the Salon, and, by all accounts, his picture was successfully received. After passing through several varying phases of artistic evolution the young painter became an avowed Impressionist. Camille Pissarro’s career can be divided into no less than four different periods, his temperament being curiously influenced at times by novel technical ideas.
At first he was a victim to Corot’s magic art, and Pissarro worked by the side of that master in the woods of Ville d’Avray. The young painter’s methods were those fashionable amongst such men as Courbet, Manet, and Sisley. He worked upon immense canvases, and some of the productions of this period are almost classic in style and quality of technique. Then he came under the influence of another great master, Jean-François Millet, whose methods he copied most faithfully. Following the example of Millet, Pissarro went to live in the solitude of plains and woods, painting the peasant life and landscape around him, and gradually gaining a considerable reputation. He sought to reproduce nature in art in much the same spirit as Virgil reproduced nature in poetry. His point of view was more that of an idealist than a realist, and his sympathies were clearly with the Fontainebleau school. Had there been no Monet we may feel sure that Pissarro would have ranked in history as one of the leaders of the Barbizon men.
Then blossomed the Impressionist Idea, and Pissarro’s volatile imagination was fired. The great war of 1870 intervening, Pissarro fled from the terrors of the invasion, visited London in company with Monet, and studied on the spot the masterpieces of Turner, Constable, the Norwich painters, Watts, and the great English portraitists. He lodged in Lower Norwood, and painted, also with his friend Monet, in the parks and suburbs of the metropolis, along the riverside, and in the crowded picturesque streets of the City. Twelve years later, after much brilliant practice of Impressionism, Pissarro came under a new influence, the effects of which were but momentary. The hotly discussed idea known as Pointillism, originated by Seurat and Signac, attracted Pissarro, and, for a short time, he joined the group of such restless innovators as Angrand, Maurice Denis, and Van Rysselberghe.
CAMILLE PISSARRO
During a sketching tour in Normandy in the summer of 1903, the writer unexpectedly discovered some of the latest work produced by Pissarro. These pictures had been painted in Havre a few weeks previously, and had been immediately acquired by the Havre City Council, and placed on exhibition in the same gallery which contained the important collection of sketches by Eugene Boudin, as well as a score of works by other artists of the Impressionist group. Pissarro had represented the port of Havre as seen from various “coigns de vantage” offered by neighbouring balconies. The canvases are charged with life, and are painted with a most unsuspected brilliance of colour and freshness of tone pitched in the highest possible key, an effect to be found only in the pure sea-washed sunlit atmosphere of the morning. In this work of his seventy-third year, the veteran artist had never arrived at stronger, happier, and more distinguished results.
PLACE DU THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS · CAMILLE PISSARRO
THE BOULEVARD MONTMARTRE: A WINTER IMPRESSION · CAMILLE PISSARRO
These canvases were extremely different in technique and effect from the drab landscapes Pissarro painted with such a niggling touch during that period of his career prior to 1886. The Havre works prove that he possessed an acute colour sense, and, in conjunction with his inimitable Parisian street scenes, place him second only to Manet and Monet in the history of modern French art. It is the opinion of many connoisseurs that Pissarro’s best work is comprised in the series of views (painted from elevated points of view) of the streets, squares, and railway stations, of Paris and Rouen. These vivid transcripts of modern town life form a remarkable monument of a long career of high resolve and incessant industry.
Like that of Monet and other Impressionist artists, Pissarro’s work now commands high prices, which are steadily advancing. Shortly after his death a landscape entitled La Coté Sainte Catherine à Rouen was sold by public auction for 11,000 francs, an average present value for his canvases, although not a record figure.
With the etching needle Pissarro has done some particularly interesting work little known in England. Students of this fascinating medium should look through the Rouen etchings, a masterly little set.
Camille Pissarro was a man of commanding personality, and his handsome features and long white beard gave him a patriarchal appearance. Of charming disposition, with a mind of simple nobility, an excellent raconteur of droll stories chiefly drawn from his own interesting experiences, he will long be remembered as one of the most attractive of the great French artists of the nineteenth century. He lived and worked, as befitted a “paysagist,” in the midst of a beautiful stretch of country at Eragny, outside Gisors, not far from Monet’s residence at Giverny. Pissarro left a considerable amount of work behind, paintings in oil and water-colour, drawings in every medium, etchings, and lithographs. His art may be summed up as powerful. It possessed a healthy vitality and sentiment, and these will assure a lasting respect and admiration for his name.
Many of the foregoing remarks apply equally to Pissarro’s close comrade and friend, Renoir. Auguste Renoir was born in 1841, and has always taken an important place in the Impressionist movement. His work forms an epitome of the whole school, and perhaps it is for that very reason that the artist has not attained a higher popular appreciation. During his forty years of continual labour he has produced landscapes, seascapes, large subject compositions, studies of still-life, portraits, and exquisite nudes. Critics, charged with enthusiasm, have found in his canvases the finest traits of Boucher, Fragonard, Greuze, Reynolds, and Hoppner.
Renoir is above all the painter of women and children, and his creations in this genre glow with the sure fire of genius. He renders in a marvellous fashion the subtle play of light upon flesh. His portraits are charming and typically French, graceful in line and rich in colour, drawn with extraordinary skill, and with great truth to nature. In the portraits of Bonnat and Duran, writes a German critic, there are people who have “sat,” but here are people from whom the painter has had the power of stealing and holding fast the secret of their being at a moment when they were not “sitting.” Here are dreamy blond girls gazing out of their great blue eyes, ethereal fragrant flowers, like lilies leaning against a rose-bush through which the rays of the setting sun are shining. Here are coquettish young girls, now laughing, now pouting, now blythe and gay, and now angry once more, now faltering between both moods in a charming passion. And there are women of the world, of consummate elegance, slender and lightly built figures, with small hands and feet, an even pallor, almond-shaped eyes catching every light, moist shining lips of a tender grace, bearing witness to a love of pleasure refined by artifice. And children especially there are, children of sensitive and flexuous race; some as yet unconscious, dreamy and free from thought; others already animated, correct in pose, graceful, and wise. Good examples of this artist as portraitist are to be found in the pictures Le loge, and On the Terrace, the latter a most delightful composition.
Another famous canvas by Renoir is the Bal au Moulin de la Galette, a most trying theme in which the master has triumphed over every difficulty. Degas would have conceived the composition in a very different spirit, throwing stress upon the sordidness of this scene from low life, adding a bitterness which is quite foreign to the temperament of Renoir, whose dominant note is one of sunlight and noisy dust-enveloped pleasure.
Criticising the work of Renoir from a purely technical point of view one finds throughout almost the whole of his work an unpleasant tone of Prussian blue, which strikes one at times as spotty and crude. The handling of the large-sized portrait groups seems often unnecessarily coarse and repellent. Many find it hard to appreciate his landscapes, considering them to be thin, of a greasy woolly texture, unatmospheric and lacking many of the qualities one looks for in such representations of nature.
PASTEL PORTRAIT OF CÉZANNE · AUGUSTE RENOIR
AT THE PIANO · AUGUSTE RENOIR
The work of Auguste Renoir will always remain a battlefield for the critics. The champions of the group acclaim him as one of its most brilliant members. Renoir is voluptuous, bright, happy, and learned without heaviness, says M. Camille Mauclair, adding that the artist is intoxicated with the beauties of flowers, flesh, and sunlight.
Rare are the artists who distinguish themselves in every branch of art, lucky the man who excels in one. An example of the latter is Alfred Sisley, “paysagist” pure and simple, who has left a legacy of some of the most fascinating landscapes ever painted.
Sisley was born in Paris of English parents in 1839, and remained a citizen of the country of his birth, although he paid several visits to England. At first he painted conventional landscapes in russet and grey, after the type of Courbet. After passing under the influence of Corot he commenced to evolve a style peculiarly his own, abundantly rich in colour and agreeable in line, loving especially to paint the violet tints of a sunlit countryside, generally upon canvases of small and medium size. In his earlier days canvases of enormous extent alone seemed to satisfy him. He specialised his efforts almost solely to transcripts from the riverside. When in England he remained in the neighbourhood of Hampton Court and the Thames valley generally; in France he painted on the edge of the Seine, or the Loing, finally settling at Moret, where he died in 1899. He was less successful in draughtsmanship than in colour, particularly when he attempted to achieve with Moret church what Monet had done with Rouen cathedral.
In spite of the production of many little masterpieces, Sisley lived to the day of his death on the verge of poverty. Never a popular artist, although he and his wife led a life of the most frugal description, he was for ever uncertain of finding the barest means of subsistence. This embittered his existence, and undoubtedly tended to cut short a life of much activity and talent. “Sisley, be it said, worked always, struggled long, and suffered much. But he was brave and strong, a man of will, consecrated to his art, and determined to go forward on the road he had taken, wherever it might lead. He faced bad fortune with a front of undaunted energy. His years of début were cruel times. His pictures sold seldom and poorly. He kept on, however, with the same brave heart, with that joyous fervour which shines from all his works.” These words were spoken by an old friend at the graveside of Sisley. M. Tavernier went on to remark that the success which arrived for several of the other Impressionists was slower in coming to Sisley. “This never for a moment disturbed him; no approach to a feeling of jealousy swept the heart of this honest man, nor darkened this uplifted spirit. He only rejoiced in the favour which had fallen upon some of his group, saying with a smile, ‘They are beginning to give us our due: my turn will come after that of my friends.’... Sisley is gone too soon, and just at the moment when, in reparation for long injustice, full homage is about to be rendered those strong and charming qualities which make him a painter exquisite and original among them all, a magician of light, a poet of the heavens, of the waters, of the trees—in a word, one of the most remarkable landscapists of this day.”
A contemporary of Sisley, equally gifted and more fortunate financially, is Armand Guillaumin, whose art is practically unknown in England. His style and his subjects are of the simplest, whilst his colour is vigorous, pure, and rich in tone. Possessing few tastes outside his art his life has been one of continued and active devotion to its perfection. Son of a linendraper, like Corot, his youth was passed behind the counter, and later as a clerk in an office. In the meanwhile he attended, when possible, the “Académie Suisse,” by the Quai des Orfèvres, a curious school without professors. Here he worked in company with Pissarro and Cézanne. This, combined with study in the public galleries and sketching along the riverside and in the streets and parks of Paris, constituted his sole education.
In a letter to the writer, Guillaumin says that Courbet, Daubigny, and Monet are the masters who have influenced his style most, with perhaps special stress upon the methods of Monet.
Some years ago a lucky speculation in a lottery attached to the Crédit Foncier brought the artist a “gros lot” of about £4000, which immediately freed him from further anxieties about money, and gave him complete liberty to exercise the art he lives for. He contributed to the original exhibition held by the Impressionists in 1874, where his pictures, views of Charenton, at once marked him as a painter of special talent and originality. In 1894, at the Durand-Ruel galleries, were exhibited about one hundred of his canvases executed in various mediums, and the effect of this collection upon students has been remarkable. These pictures were painted for the most part at Agay, Damiette, and Crozant. In the solitude of these deep valleys, overhung by cliffs down which rush the limpid Creuse and Sédelle from the mountains of the Cevenne to the sea, works the artist in hermit-like solitude, two hundred miles from Paris and far from railways and latter-day civilisation.
OUTSKIRTS OF THE FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU · ALFRED SISLEY
ON THE BANKS OF THE LOING · ALFRED SISLEY
Guillaumin is an incredibly prolific worker, and this, although often a sign of great talent, is much deplored by his admirers, who cannot help believing that he is wasting in the production of countless sketches and repetitions a talent which is strong enough to create masterpieces. Zola’s reproach addressed to Gustave Doré comes to the mind when speaking of Guillaumin. Such an artist is likely to combine with business men in manufacturing works purely commercial. There is yet time for Guillaumin to produce some great masterpiece with which to crown the glory of his long career.
AUGUSTE RENOIR
ALFRED SISLEY
Other manifestations from the parent stem of Impressionism took the form of Idealism with André Mellino at its head; the Salon of the Rose + Croix, with Sar Peladan in command; and the “Intimists,” a body consisting of Charles Cottet, Simon Bussy, and Henri Le Sidaner, who is referred to elsewhere. The Salon of the Rose + Croix, held in the early nineties, was one of the most eccentric art societies of the past century, a mixture of art, religion, politics, and rules of morality. Its members were forbidden to exhibit historical, prosaic, patriotic, and military subjects, portraits, representations of modern life, all rustic scenes and landscapes (except those in the style of Poussin), seamen and seascapes, comic subjects, oriental subjects, pictures of domestic animals, and studies of still-life. The doings of Sar Peladan and his followers have long since been forgotten, but at the time they afforded a curious study in artistic eccentricity.
There are several other men who have rendered good service to Impressionism, although one is not able to mention more than their names in this chapter. Paul Gauguin, an artist of decided ability, whose death has only just been chronicled, contributed to several of the exhibitions in the Durand-Ruel and other galleries. At first a simple painter of Breton landscapes he inclined towards “Pointillism.” Upon his return from a long visit to Tahiti his manner became crude and bizarre to an extreme, not altogether admirable, although leaving an impression of uncommon strength. Gauguin was a friend of Van Gogh whom, together with Renoir and Cézanne, he may be said to have influenced. Another of his pupils is Emile Bernard, the symbolist.
Vincent Van Gogh requires mention as a painter who practised the methods of Impressionism to their extreme limit. A Dutchman who lived in France, Van Gogh, a man of great talent, committed suicide after a most unhappy life. Like his own personality, these canvases are exotic, though at times displaying a more tender note. Had fortune been less unkind he would have developed into a great artist, for nature had endowed him with a rich genius.
In the eighth exhibition organised by the Société des artistes Indépendants were some ambitious works, interesting but totally unconvincing, painted in the new and then hotly discussed “Pointillist” style. Seurat, Signac, Ibels, Maurice Denis, Henri-Edmond Cross, Théo Van Rysselberghe, and Angrand, were members of this movement initiated by Seurat and Signac. George Seurat died at an early age in 1890, and this was doubtless the chief reason for the collapse of the group. The aim of the “Pointillists” was to resolve the colours of nature back into six bands of the spectrum, and to represent these on the canvas by spots of unmixed pigment. At a sufficient distance these spots combine their hues upon the retina, giving the effect of a mixture of coloured lights rather than pigments, resulting in an increase instead of a loss of luminosity. One of the first converts was the veteran Camille Pissarro, who happily abandoned these extraordinary methods which Théo Van Rysselberghe and a few others continue to employ.
OUTSKIRTS OF A WOOD · ALFRED SISLEY
CHILD AND DOG · EUGÈNE CARRIÈRE