He was born in 1846, near Samer, a little town in the neighbourhood of Boulogne. His parents were well-to-do, his father a doctor of some renown. Cazin attended the college at Boulogne, and received later his baccalaureate at Lille.
In order to facilitate his artistic studies his parents sent him to Paris, where he joined the art class of the beloved Boiscaudron. This teacher’s influence on his pupils has been enormous. It must be remembered that he also instructed Rodin and Lhermitte. The tuition was free in the little class near the École de Médecine, and this studio made hot war against the more conservative Beaux-Arts.
Cazin never seems to have considered his student days at an end. He was perpetually learning; for ever pursuing his art as an inexhaustible classic; seeking to discover and develop new technique; to test to the uttermost his capacity. Later in life, when long past the student age, he studied in Antwerp, and his fine figure, with noble head on which the hair was already turning grey, was constantly seen in the museums, where he wandered—enjoying the masterpieces he admired and understood.
He married, early, a woman who shared his artistic
THE WINDMILL
tastes, and who herself has added to modern art. He exhibited his first pictures in the salon of ’65-66, and was also among those men who were in later years proscribed by the jury, and with his colleagues reaped the singular benefit of popularity because of adverse criticism, and became a founder of the new salon, known as the Champ de Mars. He had apparently no feverish desire to rush before the public, to present creations of his youth for criticism. Possessed of that rare patience which can wait for fame, he did not choose to force a future, and put off rather than sought a definite introduction to the world.
Meanwhile he matured his work, labouring at his canvases during that fruitful period when hope is most sanguine and talent freshest; he himself was only timidly appreciative of the work done in the interval between his appearance in the salon of 1876 and that of 1887.