"Un jour—Meunier approchait déjà de la cinquantaine—Camille Lemonnier l'emmena dans le Hainaut: il devait y faire quelques illustrations pour La Belgique. Ce voyage de Meunier à travers le Borinage lui fut une révélation. Il s'y découvrit lui-même, il y découvrit son art. Dans ce sombre paysage de fumée et de feu, dans le halètement formidable des fabriques, parmi les farouches mineurs et les puddleurs et les verriers, toute une humanité damnée à la peine, son âme tragique s'emplit de cette pitié et de cette admiration qui devaient résonner à travers tout son art. Il avait conquis son propre domaine.
"Meunier a conquis à l'art la beauté spéciale de la nouvelle industrie: la formidable fabrique, pleine de lumière sombre et de tonnerre, les fêtes flamboyantes des fonderies, la puissance grondante des machines. Et toujours cette tendance est au monumental.
"L'hymne au Travail chante avec plus de force lyrique encore dans ses bronzes."
This was his life work, and the life of his world, the world, as with Whistler, around him, for "that is best which nearest lieth." Courbet in work had influenced Legros and Brett and Millet and Segantini, and I have no doubt Ford Madox Brown, the man too big to be a pre-Raphaelite, whose biggest picture is work—"Work in London"—the man who will one day make Manchester a place of pilgrimage because of his pictures of work and of war in the Town Hall.
The Japanese count for a little in work, Hokusai and Hiroshigi. Repine and De Nittis, L'Hermette, Bastien-Lepage, Tissot, Ridley, and W. L. Wyllie have shown the Wonder of Work, the last three on the Thames; and hundreds of imitators of these men have starved peasants, herded kine, rowed boats, and sat in harvest fields, and hauled barges, because they thought it the correct thing to do, or else that they could work the sentimental, pathetic, socialistic game as a diversion from mummy's darling, baby and the mustard-pot, dear little doggie, or poor old Dobbin. I do not mean to say there have not been, there are not, artists who have cared for the work and workers of the fields for their own sake: there are some; but I wish to speak only of industrial work. Millet has, I believe, honestly done the life around his home, the life of the fields, but, though he has endless imitators, there are scarcely any painters to-day who see through their own eyes the real life of the fields and farms and the fisherman—they are blinded by the Frenchman and debauched with sentiment.
It was incredible, but at the Panama-Pacific Exposition there was not one single official "mural" devoted to the glorification of the greatest work of modern times—the Panama Canal—the reason for the Exposition—in fact, there was only one in which there was any attempt at making a decoration out of the things the artist might have known or seen save Mr. Trumbull's Iron Workers in the Pennsylvania Building—and a few rather unimportant things in the Dutch and Argentine Pavilions.
Meunier showed without sentiment the workman at work, not with any idea of preaching about his wrongs, his trials, his struggles, his misery, but to show the Wonder of Work for its own sake, and the pictorial possibilities of workmen and workwomen in Belgium. Meunier showed that the workman was worthy of the artist's chisel, chalk, needle, and paint. There is no sentiment about Meunier; there is grandeur, dignity, and power, and from him we have learned that modern work is wonderful. Meunier was an old man when a few years ago I first heard of him and saw his work. He had then done his heroic "Antwerp" and his puddlers and miners in bronze, his paintings and his chalk drawings, his decorations, his great apse for the unbuilt basilica—the monument to modern work and workers. His work is decorative because it is true, and this brings up another side of the Wonder of Work. In France, Germany, and Italy the Wonder of Work around us has been made the subject of endless commissions from the State to artists mostly realistic. But records of facts, facts of one's own time, in England and America, are scarcely ever recorded. Go to the Royal Exchange, in London, and you will find Wat Tyler, Phœnicians, Britons painted blue, and everything in the history of London that can be made into a painting of the past, and not a single record of the present. Where is the building of the Tower Bridge, the Power Houses, the Docks, the Blackwall Tunnel, the Trams, the Tube, or any of the other works by which this age, this workaday age, has distinguished itself, all of which are worth painting? In America we have imaginings of Holy Grails, Pied Pipers, Religious Liberties, when one fact in "murals" about steel works, skyscrapers, or the Brooklyn Bridge would be worth the lot in the future, when these factless fancies are whitewashed out, or made a good ground to paint on. One man in America, W. B. Van Ingen, has glorified work by his Panama decorations in the Administration Building at Balboa. These were not wanted at the Panama Exhibition. In France men like Henri Martin have painted decoratively, yet realistically, the harvest of last summer; Besnard and Anquetin have done wonders; and the biggest French artists have decorated the Mairies. In Chicago they turn students out to make "murals" in school houses, a system of artistic debauchery worthy of Chicago's originality. And Puvis de Chavannes, first of all magnificently showed the way to combine the old decoration with the new realism. His life work at Amiens is pure convention, so are his designs in the Boston Library and in the Sorbonne, but they are the most perfect examples of decorative, imaginative, conventional work in the modern world.
At Rouen and Marseilles he has treated decoratively modern subjects, or rather he has used modern motives. At Rouen, the city with its spires and chimneys, its old bridges and new transporters, as seen from Bon Secours, prove the Wonder of Work; in the foreground are modern figures, greeting the Spirit of old France. At Marseilles there are two subjects in which symbolism and realism, modernity and mediævalism are harmonised—the most difficult problem to solve; but Puvis has solved it, and proved himself the greatest if not the only decorator since Pierro della Francesco, the supreme master of decoration. Raphael, in the Stanzi of the Vatican, was a decorator of his own time, and so was Pintoricchio in the Library at Siena, and Mantegna at Padua, for they made decoration out of the life about them.
And John Lavery has made, in Glasgow, a decoration out of shipbuilding which is worth the whole wall coverings of the Royal Exchange and the Library of Congress, and the Carnegie Institute put together. But decoration is a difficult matter, and Lavery has done much for Glasgow. I regret that John Alexander and E. A. Abbey, who had far better official opportunities, only proved how unfit the average painter is to decorate.
From the very beginning I have cared for the Wonder of Work; from the time I built cities of blocks and sailed models of ships of them across the floor in my father's office, till I went to the Panama Canal, I have cared for the Wonder of Work. There are others who care—Brangwyn has cared, and so have Sauter, Muirhead Bone, Strang and Short. Crane and Anning Bell, Way, Cameron, Bone and Brangwyn have cared for the building up and the breaking down, and Brangwyn for life—the life of the workman, possibly because of his Belgian and seafaring education or his knowledge of Meunier, his countryman. And Seymour Haden's "Breaking-up the Agamemnon" is notable. And there are Belgians like Baertsoen, de Bruyeke and Pierre Paulus; and Frenchmen like Lepere, Gillot and Adler; and Italians like Pieretto Bianco, and there was the great German Menzel.