He showed me large drawings or cartoons of some of his well known subjects representing the arrangement of the compositions and the balancing of the various parts of his pictures. The drawings were made in crayon and suggested in line the technical treatment of his paintings. From these sketches he transferred the drawings to canvas. In this way he saved time and labor. When a drawing was thus transferred to a canvas he carried the canvas to the scene of his subject, where he painted invariably directly from nature. When I asked if he ever completed a picture in the studio, he said: “Absolutely no! I always finish my pictures in the presence of nature.”
Segantini spoke his last word, if I may adopt this form of expression, in the very presence of and under the influence of nature. This to him was the supreme moment in the execution of his work.
Anton Mauve
Another illustration of the method of a great painter in relying upon his memory for the truths and facts of nature is found in Anton Mauve. Mauve’s power is unquestioned. He was one of the great modern Dutch painters. His pictures are always direct and forceful. His knowledge of nature was profound. This knowledge was the result of effort and study. Among his early drawings are found studies from nature which, in spirit, are wholly unlike his later productions. They reveal Mauve as a student of nature who was untiring in his effort to draw minute details with unflinching accuracy. I recall pencil studies of sheep, horses, cows, and plants which have rarely ever been excelled in the delineation of detail, not even by a master draughtsman like Barque. Mauve’s knowledge of nature acquired by this method was intimate and deep. His later manner was based upon a solid foundation. It was by this knowledge he was enabled to depict the more characteristic forms with a few hastily drawn lines. He knew well how important are broad, essential masses in art and he rendered these, eliminating non-essentials and trivial details. His sense of design or appropriate balance of parts was keen and sure; nearly all his pictures possess the distinguishing quality of simplicity. Like Ranger, he preferred to paint his pictures in the studio, but his reliance was, in the highest sense, upon nature.
I recall a visit to Mauve’s country, a country of sand dunes and pastures. These he loved and painted. One of Mauve’s students, an able etcher, was probably more familiar with the artist’s method than any other person. “His [Mauve’s] best pictures, before Laren,” he wrote me, “were all made in his studio from memory, aided with sketches in chalk. Then he went every day, if possible, to the spot he had sketched, to study the effect, the ‘moment,’ and he tried to fix that impression on his canvas when back home.”
Rodin
Let us turn from the art of the painter to the art of the sculptor. Probably no modern sculptor has taken a higher place in the estimation of his fellow artists than has Rodin. As expressions of his art, his “Thinker” stands at one extreme end of the scale and such graceful and beautiful forms as “Eternal Spring” at the other. It is interesting, therefore, to know that Rodin has acknowledged his absolute dependence upon nature for the widely divergent expressions of character rendered by him. He is quoted as saying: “Seeker after truth and student of life as I am, ... I obey Nature in everything, and I never pretend to command her. My only ambition is to be servilely faithful to her.”
“I have not changed it [nature]. Or, rather, if I have done it, it was without suspecting it at the time. The feeling which influenced my vision showed me nature as I have copied her.”
“If I had wished to modify what I saw and to make it more beautiful I should have produced nothing good.”