“L’HIVER”
(Salon d’Arrivée, Hôtel de Ville, Paris)
In the meantime he had found his subject; as for the question of the ridiculous price offered him, he did not even refer to it.
His production was enormous, his energy untiring. After months of labour he would go to the seaside, and give himself up to rest and indolence. “In these times I am in despair,” he said, “and feel as though I should never work again. Delightful as is this repose, it is to the days of labour that I look back with the greatest pleasure. It seems as though my power were gone for ever.” This he wrote from Dieppe, where he was digging shrimps in the sand like a boy. He began his studies for the career of an artist late. What other men accomplished and put by he saw fulfilled in his own day. And because of his unusual vigour and fecund power of production he realised in mature years what to others are the dreams of youth. It is this juvenance carried into ripe age that gives a virginal freshness to his painting. His fresco in the Boston Library, as well as the work upon which he was engaged at the time of his death—“The Old Age of Ste. Geneviève,” a new series for the Panthéon—far from suggesting declining power, possess the fresh bloom by which only the young spirit can make beautiful its creations. The painter had reached an apotheosis of power. He had been the product of a country whose times are strange and complex. His land, his race, its blood and tradition generated his genius, and he leaves to it in turn his glory, and the stirring example of his life, at the time of his country’s need, it may be well said; and the relics of his beautiful art will remain, when political crusade, when exaggerated types and schools are past and forgotten.
JEAN CHARLES CAZIN
In the month of March 1901, the French painter Jean Charles Cazin died at Lavandou, a little nook in Southern France on the borders of the Mediterranean. He was in the plenitude of his talent, in the rich and mellow prime of his life. He had gone to Lavandou on one of his frequent voyages in search of change and refreshment; he died there alone.
It is an ancient prayer—“Lord, may I die in my bed,” but rather an original idea to seek to pass out of life in the very bed where one was born! This, however, was Cazin’s dream. He had carefully preserved every beloved detail in the home of his childhood and youth in Samer (Pas-de-Calais); thither he planned to return and pass his last days. He longed to inhabit again his boyhood’s room; to go forth for ever surrounded by all that had welcomed him into a world he was to leave richer for his existence. Fate disposed otherwise.