It is a singular and bold conception, magnificently drawn and pastel-like in treatment.
The Musée du Luxembourg is especially rich in the artist’s works, and the buyers for the State have shown wisdom and penetration in their choice. In one of the rooms is a small canvas not over 18 by 6 inches. It recalls in character and distinction the little picture of Gambetta’s room done by Cazin, and it is only the great masters who thus wonderfully fill small bits of canvas with whole histories of life. Besnard has called his study “La Mort”—a miserable little mansard room au sixième in a third-class hotel—the meagre furnishings are a chair, table, and iron bed on which lies the dead figure of a woman. At the door the voluble concierge, half curious and half touched, ushers in a young man, no doubt the lover of the wretched creature beyond all the questions of life; the man is in evening dress, hat in his hand. Here we have poverty, misery, debauch, disgrace and despair in a medallion, as it were. The composition and the treatment recall no one but Besnard himself, but the literary quality of the picture suggests Hogarth series, and Tolstoi and Balzac. This affinity with a sister art is now and then interestingly observed in the narrative pictures of the great masters.
“Entre Deux Rayons” is the so-called portrait of a woman. Again the effect of two lights is here accentuated. The canvas is full of light and seems positively to radiate. The tones are red and yellow, warm and iridescent, and the flesh of the arms and neck melt into the scheme of the drapery. The picture is a marvel of delicate beauty and technique. (1893.)
But surpassing all the pictures in this Museum, in the same room, on a considerably larger canvas, is “La Femme qui se chauffe,” the nude figure of a woman crouching before a fire whose existence is only evinced by the play of its reflections upon her flesh. From a little cup of blue and white china she is drinking a draught, evidently warm and delicious, to judge from her attitude, which is expressive of entire comfort and bien être. The work, in point of view of modelling and drawing, is absolute perfection. This treatment of the nude has the strength and power of marble with the addition of colour. In none of Besnard’s paintings is the luminous quality more striking. There is in it an opalescence and vibration, it possesses the softness of old paintings, and alone in a gallery of masterpieces would give Besnard the right to first rank. The scheme of “La Femme qui se chauffe” is blue and yellow, the
HORSES TORMENTED BY FLIES
background a penumbra of azure, from which the brilliant figure of the woman comes dazzlingly forth.
The pictures in the possession of Monsieur Martignac deserve note. “Le Sourire,” painted in 1895, is a portrait of merit and perhaps particularly interesting because uncharacteristic of Besnard. It is successful as a study of dark, more sombre tones, and has many of the characteristics of Dutch painting.