A SKETCH IN OUTLINE OF JACQUES CALLOT
V
A Sketch in Outline of Jacques Callot
In the Print Room of the New York Public Library are a large number of etchings by Jacques Callot, which are a mine of wealth to the painter-etcher of to-day, curious of the methods of his predecessors. Looking at the portrait of Callot in which he appears at the height of his brief career with well formed, gracious features, ardent eyes, a bearing marked by serenity and distinction, an expression both grave and genial, the observer inevitably must ask: "Is this the creator of that grotesque manner of drawing which for nearly three centuries has borne his name, the artist of the Balli, the Gobbi, the Beggars?" In this dignified, imaginative countenance we have no hint of Callot's tremendous curiosity regarding the most fantastic side of the fantastic times in which he lived. We see him in the rôle least emphasized by his admirers, although that to which the greater number of his working years were dedicated: the rôle, that is, of moralist, philosopher and historian, one deeply impressed by the sufferings and cruelties of which he became a sorrowful critic.
There surely never was an artist whose life and environment were more faithfully illustrated by his art. To know one is to know the other, at least as they appear from the outside, for with Callot, as with the less veracious and ingenuous Watteau, it is the external aspect of things that we get and from which we must form our inferences. Only in his selection of his subjects do we find the preoccupation of his mind; in his rendering he is detached and impersonal, helping us out at times in our knowledge of his mental attitude with such quaint rhymes as those accompanying Les Grandes Misères de la Guerre, but chiefly confining his hand to the representation of forms, relations and distances, with as little concern as possible for the expression of his own temperament, or for psychological portraiture of any sort.
In the little history, more or less authenticated, of his eventful youth is the key to his charm as an artist, a charm the essence of which is freedom, an easy, informal way of looking at the visible world, a light abandon in the method of reproducing it, an independence of the tool or medium, resulting in art which, despite its minuteness of detail, seems to "happen" as Whistler has said all true art must. The beginning was distinctly picturesque, befitting a nature to which the world at first unfolded itself as a great Gothic picturebook filled with strange, eccentric and misshapen figures.
One spring day in 1604, a band of Bohemians, such as are described in Gautier's Le Capitaine Fracasse, might have been seen journeying through the smiling country of Lorraine on their way to Florence to be present there at the great Fair of the Madonna. No gipsy caravan of to-day would so much as suggest that bizarre and irresponsible company of men, women, and children, clad in motley rags, some in carts, some trudging on foot, some mounted on asses or horses rivaling Rosinante in bony ugliness, the men armed with lance, cutlass and rifle, a cask of wine strapped to the back of one, a lamb in the arms of another. A couple of the swarming children were decked out with cooking utensils, an iron pot for a hat, a turnspit for a cane, a gridiron hanging in front apron wise. Chickens, ducks, and other barnyard plunder testified to the marauding course of the troop whose advent at an inn was the signal for terrified flight on the part of the inmates. The camp by night, if no shelter were at hand, was in the forest, where the travelers tied their awnings to the branches of trees, built their fires, dressed their stolen meats, and lived so far as they could accomplish it on the fat of the land—for the most part of their way a rich and lovely land of vine-clad hills and opulent verdure.