There was nothing eccentric or unusual in his methods or in what he worked with. Probably no painter in all Paris used simpler means to arrive at great results. It is quite likely that no other painter of to-day—judging entirely from appearances of modern canvases—could achieve any satisfactory results with materials so elemental.
To make the sketch required possibly thirty minutes. To the casual observer there was often more of a likeness in the first sketch than at any time after,—which simply goes to show the power of line devoid of color and also the easy task of the caricaturist.
The sketch finished, the long-handled brushes were discarded and work began in earnest. With one or more, sometimes a handful of brushes,—for they would accumulate without his realizing it,—he would again stand back and carefully scrutinize sitter and canvas until it seemed as if—and no doubt it was so—he transferred a visual impression of the subject to the canvas and fixed it there ready to be made permanent with line and color; then quickly, often with a run and a slide, he rushed up to the canvas and, without glancing at his sitter, vigorously painted so long as his visual image lasted, then going back the full distance he took another look, and so on day after day to the end.
In life-size work he seldom stood close to the canvas and painted direct from his sitter.
He has laid down the proposition:
“The one aim of the unsuspecting painter is to make his man ‘stand out’ from the frame, never doubting that, on the contrary, he should really, and in truth absolutely does, stand within the frame, and at a depth behind it equal to the distance at which the painter sees his model. The frame is, indeed, the window through which the painter looks at his model, and nothing could be more offensively inartistic than this brutal attempt to thrust the model on the hitherside of this window.”[46]
The number of sittings required varied greatly, and did not depend in any degree upon the size of the canvas. Sometimes he would paint a life-size figure with great rapidity; again he would spend weeks and months on a very small picture. All depending upon conditions over which he had no control.
He has devoted as many as ninety sittings to a portrait, only to pronounce it unfinished and unsatisfactory.
No work counted or was permitted to remain save that painted in what he called his “grand manner,” which meant the work of those days and hours when everything—sitter, light, weather, spirits, mood, enthusiasm—was just right,—a combination that might come several days in succession or but once in a fortnight.