CHAPTER VIII · “REALISTS”: RAFFAËLLI, DEGAS, TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
“IL Y A SELON MOI, DEUX ÉLÉMENTS DANS UNE ŒUVRE: L’ÉLÉMENT RÉEL, QUI EST LA NATURE, ET L’ÉLÉMENT INDIVIDUEL, QUI EST L’HOMME”
ZOLA
JEAN FRANÇOIS RAFFAËLLI joined the Impressionist movement late, and did not commence to exhibit with the other members of the group until 1880, when he sent a canvas to the gallery in the Rue des Pyramides. He had clearly grasped the trend and scope of the idea, but cannot be classed altogether with the other members of the group as a “Luminarist.” This may be due to many causes apparent in his work. He is not a painter for the love of painting itself, and does not revel in colour for colour’s sake. He is no analyst of the shimmering effects of a summer’s sun. That side of Impressionism has never appealed to him. Yet his right to be numbered amongst them is assured, for, in spirit, he is one of the first of the school.
Raffaëlli is the historian of the “banlieue” of Paris. His street scenes are typical, life-like, and modern, and they will be treasured in future years as veritable documents of the daily existence of the great city. He wanders through the dreary “no man’s land” outside the fortifications, and transfers to his block the most vivid portraits of the nondescript characters who swarm through that gaunt wilderness. He is a man of much mental refinement, who has had to struggle for every inch of the artistic success which now surrounds him. Richly endowed by nature, he had no resources to fall back upon save his determination to conquer. In a few words M. Geffroy sums up the opening of this curious career.
Raffaëlli has had many employments, has been engaged in many trades, has searched the town for work. He has been in an office, has sung bass at the Théâtre Lyrique, has chanted psalms in a church choir, and at the same time painted under the tuition of Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts. He travelled through Europe, penetrating even so far as Algeria, working in each town as he stopped. Returning to Paris he exhibited landscapes founded upon the studies he had accumulated in his portfolio, some pictures of the Louis XIII. style, some portraits, a view of the Opera. Suddenly he opened his eyes to a sight nobody had seen before, disdained by the whole world, subjects which had never reached the dignity of an entrance in art circles. He became the recorder of the suburbs of Paris and their wandering inhabitants.
For years he experimented endeavouring to produce a medium best suited to his temperament. In the solid paint crayons we have an addition to the working tools of the artist which is of notable importance. This is not his only gift to France, for it is he who practically resuscitated the beautiful but dying art of etching in colours. In this work he was ably seconded by Miss Mary Cassatt. He is not only an artist but an actor, a musician, an orator, a sculptor, an etcher, a pastellist, an illustrator, and a man of letters. He is a fine example of the pioneer temperament. No sooner is success achieved in one branch of energy than he is in chase of another idea. One day he is trying to invent a perfect oil-crayon; the next, and colour etching is his sole ambition. He draws the elegant “mondaine” of the Boulevards, and then sallies out to study the frowsy denizens of the “banlieue.” In this quarter he found congenial subjects for a series of little masterpieces.
Amidst these wretched surroundings, warehouses, factories, wooden sheds ruinous and dilapidated, refuse heaps, brick-kilns, homes of the outcasts and cut-throats of the metropolis, Raffaëlli discovered a rich mine of material hitherto entirely unworked. The district is peculiar to Paris, and owes its existence to the clear half-mile of view required around the useless fortifications. This territory has, in mining phrase, been “jumped” by the penniless. Upon it squat the failures, the drunkards, the thieves, all the vicious under-life of the city. The artist revealed this world to the unsuspecting citizens. He lived in it, studied it day by day, and is a greater authority than the “sergots” upon the manners and customs of a neighbourhood which even the police shun. Such a blot upon the fair page of so magnificent a capital is rapidly being wiped away, but Raffaëlli has immortalised in his etchings and drawings some of the poetic atmosphere which enveloped these legions of the damned.
Photo by Braun, Clement & Co.
NOTRE DAME · J. F. RAFFAËLLI
J. F. RAFFAËLLI
During the course of a long and strenuous career, Raffaëlli has received many decorations. He is of the Legion of Honour, besides having received numerous medals and awards from foreign exhibitions. He is represented adequately in the Luxembourg, and many continental galleries. He enjoys the admiration and friendship of a host of connoisseurs throughout the world. His studio is most pleasant. Facing the broad green sweeps of the boulevard by the fortifications, in the Rue de Courcelles, it occupies a large area on the ground floor, having been built over a spacious courtyard surrounded by banks of foliage and flowers. The predominant note is that of cheerfulness. The decoration is bright and restful, the ruling colours being delicate shades of yellow and blue. The usual theatrical adornments of a French studio are absent; there are no oriental carpets and rugs, no armour, no antique furniture, so dear to the heart of the Gallic painter. In this atelier the master holds periodical conferences, exhibitions, and friendly gatherings. Upon these occasions one will meet the cleverest men in Paris, for Raffaëlli is a celebrated conversationalist as well as a famous artist.
Degas has a temperament strangely different from that of Raffaëlli, and, although always classed with the Impressionists, he stands apart from the recognised group. He has never endeavoured to transmit the impression of atmosphere, and work “en plein air” does not attract him. He has, however, profited much by the teaching of the Impressionists, particularly in relation to the use of radiant colour, for at one time he painted in greys which were closely allied to black. He exhibited continually with the other men in the early days of the movement, and proved a genius both in suggestion and organisation.
Hilaire Germain Edgard Degas was born in Paris, July 19, 1834. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1855, studying under Lamothe and also having Ingres for a master. He made his first appearance at the Salon of 1865 with a pastel entitled War in the Middle Ages. In 1866 he contributed the Steeplechase, the first of his series devoted to scenes of modern life. In 1867 he exhibited Family Portraits, in 1868 the portrait of a ballet-dancer, and during 1869 and 1870 some further portraits which closed his connection with official art, for he never sent contributions to the Salon again. In his early work he did not confine his brush to subjects of daily actuality, such compositions as Semiramis Building the Walls of Babylon and Spartan Youths Wrestling being far removed both in style and genre from later work. During the sixties his canvases were classical in spirit as well as in subject. He had a strong feeling for the Primitives together with Fra Angelico, and much of his work conveyed a reminiscence of Holbein. A Realist from the beginning, the Interior of an American Cotton-Broker’s Office, painted in 1860, shows that his temperament has never radically changed. This canvas, now in the museum at Pau, is minutely exact in all its details. It is Realism but emotionless, without atmosphere and lacking all feeling. It shows too that forty-three years ago the artist was acquiring that facility of hand which has placed him at the head of modern draughtsmen.
Degas exhibited in company with Manet, Monet, and the Impressionists generally, at five exhibitions, namely 1874, 1876, 1878, 1879 and 1880. In the last-named year he exhibited a series of portraits of criminals, and commenced to model figures of dancers in wax. In December 1884 he showed some racecourse scenes, and at the last exhibition of the Impressionists in 1886 exhibited studies of the nude, jockeys, washerwomen, and other characters of modern life. He has worked with the etcher’s needle, and also in lithography, his subjects being generally confined to theatrical life and incidents noticeable on the Parisian boulevards.
The characteristic of Degas personally is mystery. He now refuses to exhibit his works, he shuts his door to all visitors. Like most artists he detests writers, and there is a legend that he successfully grappled with one enterprising but unwelcome interviewer and dropped the unfortunate critic down a flight of stairs. This proves how thoroughly his principles are carried out in practice. “I think that literature has only done harm to art,” he said once to George Moore. “You puff out the artist with vanity, you inculcate the taste for notoriety, and that is all; you do not advance public taste by one jot. Notwithstanding all your scribbling it never was in a worse state than it is at present. You do not even help us to sell our pictures. A man buys a picture, not because he read an article in a newspaper, but because a friend, who he thinks knows something about pictures, told him it would be worth twice as much ten years hence as it is worth to-day.”
With these strong views one can understand the attitude of Degas to the art world in general. It was a very different attitude from that of Manet who gloried in the fight. “Do you remember,” Degas said once to George Moore (who quotes the conversation in his “Impressions and Opinions”), “how Manet used to turn on me when I wouldn’t send my pictures to the Salon? He would say, ‘You, Degas, you are above the level of the sea, but for my part, if I get into an omnibus and some one doesn’t say, “M. Manet, how are you, where are you going?” I am disappointed, for I know then that I am not famous.’” This conversation reveals in a curious manner the differing characters of the two men; Manet with that attractive vanity so often to be found in the artistic temperament, Degas, a satiric misanthrope analysing the degraded types which make up the gay life of Paris.
DANCING GIRL FASTENING HER SHOE · EDGAR DEGAS
The work of Degas may be sorted into four main groups—the racing series, the theatrical studies, the drawings of the nude, and a few landscapes. From many points of view the scenes of the coulisses come first. Superb in draughtsmanship, they represent the life of the theatre in a way it has never been represented before. In one we see shivering girls rehearsing upon a cold cheerless stage lit by a few gas jets; in another the première danseuse quivering upon tiptoe amidst the frenzied plaudits of an excited audience. Degas reproduces the atmosphere with a marvellous precision, which only those engaged in the busy turmoil behind the curtain can fully judge. Upon these scènes de théâtre will rest his fame, for humankind is never likely to tire of such vivid renderings of a life always fascinating to the outside world.
Degas is not a countryman, and cannot be classed amongst sportsmen, or lovers of horseflesh. His jockeys and racehorses are highly extolled, but with animals he has not always succeeded. It is not sufficient to be a great artist in order to convey convincing impressions of sporting scenes. An artist must have the whole spirit of sport thoroughly engrained in his nature before he can properly represent it. Apart from the city, Degas is out of his element, and this is very apparent in the landscapes he has painted during the last eight years. The glamour of the fields and hedges does not touch his soul. Rural life he finds dull, and naturally his essays in landscape painting are somewhat painful. He has not the temperament which can faithfully interpret the poetry of the countryside, and is more at home in the purlieus of the opera or upon the asphalte of the boulevards.
Degas is a realist, and his subjects are for the most part exceedingly trivial in selection. After racehorses and ballet-dancers, he loves to depict buxom ladies of the lower classes engaged in personal ablution. It is extraordinary that the pupil of Ingres, the painter of La source, should create such appalling creatures. The most plausible apology comes from Mr. George Moore. The nude, he writes, has become well-nigh incapable of artistic treatment. Even the more naïve are beginning to see that the well-known nymph exhibiting her beauty by the borders of a stream can be endured no longer. Let the artist strive as he will, he will not escape the conventional; he is running an impossible race. Broad harmonies of colour are hardly to be thought of; the gracious mystery of human emotion is out of all question—he must rely on whatever measure of elegant drawing he can include in his delineation of arms, neck, and thigh; and who in sheer beauty has a new word to say? Since Gainsborough and Ingres, all have failed to infuse new life into the worn-out theme. But cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the Middle Ages; and with cynicism Degas has again rendered the nude an artistic possibility. The critic then describes these works in most sympathetic phrases. Three coarse women, middle-aged and deformed by toil, are perhaps the most wonderful. One sponges herself in a tin bath; another passes a rough nightdress over her lumpy shoulders, and the touching ugliness of this poor human creature goes straight to the heart. Then follows a long series conceived in the same spirit. “Hitherto,” says Degas, “the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience, but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition.” In another phrase he gives you his point of view, “it is as if you looked through a keyhole.”
Descendant of Poussin and Ingres (when Ingres fell down in the fit from which he never recovered, it was his pupil who carried him out of his studio), Degas worships drawing, and line is with him a cult. Japanese art has helped to mould his style, as it influenced many of the Impressionists. His oil-paintings, though for the most part correct in draughtsmanship, are frequently wiry and academic in technique. Colour was never his strong point, and it is in his pastels that we find the achievement of his life. In a masterly essay on this artist, Thèodore Duret writes: “Degas has proved once more that, with genius, subject is a secondary matter, merely its opportunity, one may say. It is out of itself, out of its inner consciousness, that the poetry and the beauty discovered in its production are drawn. His work will thus remain one of the most powerful, the most complete, and the most instinct with vitality amongst that of the masters of the nineteenth century.”
Of Degas personally little is known. He comes of an old bourgeoise family, and at one time it is said that he possessed considerable financial means, which he sacrificed in order to save a brother from financial disaster. Although seventy years of age he still works with excessive labour at the art over which he has gained such a mastery. Scorning wealth, publicity, and popularity, he lives a life of complete isolation, dispensing with friends, able to more than hold his own against enemies.
DANCING GIRL · E. DEGAS
He has had two pupils whose names stand out prominently in the art of to-day, the American artist Miss Mary Cassatt (referred to elsewhere in this volume) and the caricaturist Forain. Degas has always had a bitter wit, the dread of his contemporaries, and many of his sayings have passed into history. During the height of the battle which raged around the Impressionists during the seventies, he remarked concerning the academic painters and critics: “On nous fusille, mais on fouille nos poches,” or, in other words, “They cover us with injuries, yet they make use of our ideas.” In him Whistler met his match. “My dear friend,” he said once to that great artist, “you conduct yourself in life just as if you had no talent at all.” Upon another occasion, speaking of Whistler when the latter was having a number of photographic portraits taken, he observed sarcastically, “You cannot talk to him; he throws his cloak around him—and goes off to the photographer.” It was not likely that two such spirits would appreciate each other.
Degas is a pessimist. He has always been a realist, and the realist in this troubled world cannot look through rosy spectacles; acute pessimism becomes the natural result, especially when a great city is the venue. He is the analyst and ironist of the Impressionist group, with whom he has a sympathy of temperament rather than a sympathy of technique. At the present moment there are few artists better known in Paris, yet few who have received so small an amount of official acknowledgment. He has never received an official commission, has refused all decorations, his chief works are to be found in foreign countries. Yet an enthusiastic French critic has summed up the opinion of the art world of France in the striking phrase, “Degas is one of the greatest draughtsmen who have ever lived.”
Ten years ago, when the writer was a student in Paris, the name of Toulouse-Lautrec was known only in connection with various daring and flamboyant posters advertising the exotic attractions of the “Moulin Rouge” and the “Divan Japonais,” and also through extraordinary sketches which appeared from time to time in Aristide Bruant’s feuilleton “Le Mirliton.” Now and again one found a sketch, with his signature, pinned up in an artistic cabaret of the Batignolles quarter. Few had seen him, nobody seemed to have any wish to discover his whereabouts. In the studios he was almost invariably spoken of with contempt as half a fool. He was celebrated in a way, and yet unknown.
He was by no means a fool, for few men have possessed a brighter intellect. His semi-retirance and evident reluctance to appear amidst the crowd were partly owing to a temperament of ultra-refinement, and still more directly the result of a terrible personal misfortune. The story of his life is romantic.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was born in 1864 at Albi, a scion of an ancient and illustrious family. His father, the Count de Toulouse-Lautrec, was a wealthy country gentleman, of sporting tastes, a splendid horseman, a crack shot, a sculptor, and a person of most violent and impulsive temper. The son inherited many of his father’s qualities. Generations of ancestors accustomed to the beauties and refinements of such a life in the country had developed at last an artist of peculiar sensibilities. These natural gifts were carefully cultivated, and the boy became a professional artist, who, although he possessed gifts of the most extreme refinement, became through the irony of fate primarily famous amongst his countrymen as a designer of street posters and comic sketches. Those who knew him superficially could not comprehend how his delicate and extraordinary exterior could cover such excellent qualities of heart, such delicacy of spirit. He met with scant respect and few patrons. Happily he was not dependent upon his brush for the means of existence, and his works, when they sold, fetched but little. After his sad and untimely death, the most insignificant sketches were eagerly disputed for and changed hands at large prices.
Physically Toulouse-Lautrec was a weak man, of a highly-developed nervous temperament, with a brain too active for its frail tenement. To such a nature all excess proves fatal, although it is generally such natures that seek excess. In his infancy the artist had the unlucky mischance to break both his legs, and these, badly set, left him malformed for life, a dwarf. Thoroughly embittered, his proud and sensitive soul could not endure the inquisitive stares of the curious with which he was invariably greeted, and for the most part he lived a very solitary life. “Je suis une demi-bouteille,” he would often say to his friends in sarcastic reference to his own unhappy condition.
CAFÉ SCENE ON THE BOULEVARD MONTMARTRE · E. DEGAS
He drowned his griefs, as many have done before, keeping in his studio huge stocks of the most fiery spirits and liqueurs, from which he compounded wonderful “cocktails” for the benefit of himself and his friends. It is not surprising that first came the madhouse and then premature death completed this tragedy. Of an excitable temperament he found much pleasure in resorts such as the “Moulin Rouge.” Taverns, theatres, and the circus, found in him a constant patron. These were his schools; and hundreds, one may say thousands of sketches are the result of such teaching. He loved horses as his ancestors had done before him, and he studied their attitudes at the circus, sketching them in barbaric trappings and in eccentric poses. The smell of the sawdust always inspired him. The sketches here reproduced illustrate this phase of his career.
M. Princeteau, the designer of sporting scenes, influenced Lautrec’s style, and became his intimate friend. Forain also counts for something in his development, whilst Pissarro and Renoir were frequent visitors to and critics of the young Impressionist. Perhaps of all men Degas inspired him most, and at times he undoubtedly copied the methods of that master. With serious study he had little to do. He worked in the atelier-Bonnat in 1883, and later on in the atelier-Cormont, where he continued the study of the nude; yet it was only after he had complete liberty and was entirely free from scholastic influence that his style began to form. Then his strong individuality displayed itself, and he became Toulouse-Lautrec as we know him.
BABY’S TOILET · MARY CASSATT