Modern French Masters

by Marie Van Vorst

On these walls also hang the celebrated picture of the painter’s family, painted about twenty years ago, a group of red-cheeked children and their mother.

In this large, agreeable room, Besnard paints from models and statues, makes his designs and drawings, his etchings, his sketches and his pastels. But upstairs at the top of his house (whose walls are rich with their friezes of designs) is an elaborate studio particularly designed for posers for portraits. This sumptuous apartment—furnished in the most luxurious manner—suggests a drawing-room and not a studio at all. Rich screens of Chinese and Japanese workmanship, paintings by the old masters (none of his work is here), objects and bibelots and treasures of art adorn the apartment. The chimney-piece is interesting as an example of Besnard’s taste for plastic art. It is set in panels of stained glass, and around the fender are coiled a pair of gigantic boa-constrictors made in plaster and afterwards painted. The effect is picturesque, terrifying and peculiar, and is the work of the artist himself.

This room boasts the black-and-gold cabinet which

THE FLIRTATION

figured in “La Féerie intime.” The picture, as will be remembered, is the nude figure of a young woman ensconced in a great armchair. The garments she has just quitted softly surround her. The brilliant and dazzling effect of the painting is in the meshes of her spangled dress blazing with reflected light, and from the gold that gleams and glitters is the lacquer of the Chinese cabinet. The whole picture is a glow of gold and fire, and in this luscent envelope the woman muses and dreams. This picture is in Russia, as are many of Besnard’s canvases. Many critics and painters class this picture as the finest example of modern art.

It would not be complete to close the study of Besnard without mention of his etchings. Here and there a dealer may have a complete set of the few produced, but they are few indeed, and difficult to obtain. The most celebrated is known as “La Femme.” In this series Besnard has drawn woman in every stage of her existence. We have the flirt, the mistress, the wife, the happy mother with her children, the miserable mother, who to cover the form of her freezing child denudes herself, and at length casts her body over her son; the woman of the ball-room, the woman of the streets, and, in short, he has seen fit to display every state and condition of femininity in this study of black and white.

There also is a weird and eccentric suite, designated as “La Mort.” In these studies Besnard has indeed played with his conception, ringing its changes to endless and infinite variety. Death, the skeleton, pursues his prey in every imaginable state of society—in the streets, in the crowd, to the lonely individual, to the lovers’ embrace, to the man and wife before the altar, he lurks behind a pillar to seize the solitary passer-by, he appears in the ball-room, jogging elbows with the débutante, he rescues the beggar and menaces the rich man. Here in these drawings the painter displays his first and only hint of morbidness. The idea of death, he says, has always been with him an obsession. Whistler’s etchings are alone to be mentioned in class with these admirable eaux-fortes.