To consider a picture by Vuillard, whose work is often compared with that of Bonnard, might help us here. Vuillard loves what he paints, and his pictures are attractive, as often as not, chiefly because they represent lovely things. A picture by Bonnard, for all its fascinating overtones, has a life entirely of its own. It is like a flower, which is beautiful not because it represents, or reminds one of, something beautiful, but because it is beautiful. A picture by Bonnard escapes from its subject, and from its author, too. And this is all-important because it is just this independent life of its own that gives to a work of art its peculiar character and power. Unluckily, about this detached life, about a work of art considered as a work of art, there is little or nothing to be said; so perhaps M. Werth has done well to confine himself to the task of giving his readers a taste of the quality of an artist's mind. This task was difficult enough in all conscience; the mind of Bonnard is subtle, delicate, and creative, and it has needed subtlety, delicacy, and not a little creative power, to give us even a glimpse of it.
The first thing one gets from a picture by Bonnard is a sense of perplexed, delicious colour: tones of miraculous subtlety seem to be flowing into an enchanted pool and chasing one another there. From this pool emerge gradually forms which appear sometimes vaporous and sometimes tentative, but never vapid and never woolly. When we have realized that the pool of colour is, in fact, a design of extraordinary originality and perfect coherence our æsthetic appreciation is at its height. And not until this excitement begins to flag do we notice that the picture carries a delightful overtone—that it is witty, whimsical, fantastic.
Such epithets one uses because they are the best that language affords, hoping that they will not create a false impression. They are literary terms, and the painting of Bonnard is never literary. Whatever, by way of overtone, he may reveal of himself is implicit in his forms: symbolism and caricature are not in his way. You may catch him murmuring to himself, "That's a funny-looking face"; he will never say "That's the face of a man whom I expect you to laugh at." If you choose to take his Après-Midi Bourgeoise (which is not reproduced here) as a sly comment on family life you may: but anyone who goes to it for the sort of criticism he would find in the plays of Mr. Shaw or Mr. Barker is, I am happy to say, doomed to disappointment. What amused Bonnard was not the implication, social, moral, or political, of the scene, but the scene itself—the look of the thing. Bonnard never strays outside the world of visual art. He finds significance in the appearance of things and converts it into form and colour. With the pompous symbolism of the grand-mannerist, or the smart symbolism of the caricaturist, or the half-baked symbolism of the pseudo-philosophical-futuro-dynamitard he has no truck whatever. His ambition is not to convey, without the aid of words, certain elementary ideas, unimportant facts, or obvious sentiments, but to create forms that shall correspond with his intimate sense of the significance of things. The paraphernalia of symbolism are nothing to his purpose: what he requires are subtlety of apprehension and lightness of touch, and these are what he has. So M. Léon Werth meets people who complain that "Bonnard manque de noblesse."
Bonnard is not noble. A kitten jumping on to the table moves him, not because he sees in that gesture a symbol of human aspiration or of feminine instability, the spirit of youth or the pathos of the brute creation, nor yet because it reminds him of pretty things, but because the sight is charming. He will never be appreciated by people who want something from art that is not art. But to those who care for the thing itself his work is peculiarly sympathetic, because it is so thoroughly, so unmitigatedly that of an artist; and therefore it does not surprise me that some of them should see in him the appropriate successor to Renoir. Like Renoir, he loves life as he finds it. He, too, enjoys intensely those good, familiar things that perhaps only artists can enjoy to the full—sunshine and flowers, white tables spread beneath trees, fruits, crockery, leafage, the movements of young animals, the grace of girls and the amplitude of fat women. Also, he loves intimacy. He is profoundly French. He reminds one sometimes of Rameau and sometimes of Ravel, sometimes of Lafontaine and sometimes of Laforgue.
Renoir never reminded anyone of Ravel or Laforgue. Renoir and Bonnard are not so much alike after all. In fact, both as artists and craftsmen they are extremely different. Renoir's output was enormous; he painted with the vast ease of a lyrical giant. His selections and decisions were instinctive and immediate. He trusted his reactions implicitly. Also, there is nothing that could possibly be called whimsical, nothing critical or self-critical, about him. Bonnard, on the other hand, must be one of the most painstaking artists alive. He comes at beauty by tortuous ways, artful devices, and elaboration. He allows his vision to dawn on you by degrees: no one ever guesses at first sight how serious, how deliberately worked out his compositions are.
There is something Chinese about him; and he is one of those rare Europeans who have dealt in "imposed" rather than "built-up" design. Bonnard's pictures grow not as trees; they float as water-lilies. European pictures, as a rule, spring upwards, masonry-wise, from their foundations; the design of a picture by Bonnard, like that of many Chinese pictures and Persian textiles, seems to have been laid on the canvas as one might lay cautiously on dry grass some infinitely precious figured gauze. Assuredly, the hand that lets fall these beauties is as unlike that which, even in the throes of rheumatism, affirmed with supreme confidence the mastery of Renoir, as the easy accessibility of our last old master is unlike this shy, fastidious spirit that M. Léon Werth, by a brilliant stroke of sympathetic intelligence, has contrived to catch and hold for an instant.
DUNCAN GRANT
(Mrs. Jowitt's Collection)
DUNCAN GRANT
To-day,[N] when the Carfax Gallery opens its doors at No. 5 Bond Street, and invites the cultivated public to look at the paintings of Duncan Grant, that public will have a chance of discovering what has for some time been known to alert critics here and abroad—that at last we have in England a painter whom Europe may have to take seriously. Nothing of the sort has happened since the time of Constable; so naturally one is excited.