The sensitive Boutet de Monvel reveals the Champs-Elysées, the Bois de Boulogne, the parks, the communal schools, and the gardens; for this painter of children seeks only the reposeful ways where children go, where they study, are led, carried, or wander safely alone.
In Belleville, Geoffroy has been responsive to benevolence and charity from man to man. He presents the Foundling Schools, the Asylums. The
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soothing atmosphere of charity envelops his work—he has seen the poor through the medium of philanthropic faith. Daumier, the father of personal caricature, sixty years ago regarded Paris with the philosopher’s eyes. Gavarni looked through the single eyeglass of the man of fashion, as it were, on the petty vanities of the gay social world.
And Steinlen?
He is “a lover of life,” “an adorer of truth.” In his youth, even, surrounded by the wild jeunesse of the student quarter, his spirit was calmer, profounder than the others. Montmartre became the magnet drawing to its centre this ardent soul; in Montmartre, then, as to-day, he saw the Giant Need, imperfectly met by the vast charity of the world. It is from this district that his eternal plea resounds for the poor whose necessities are eternal. He finds his quarter tragic in its commonplace moods; to him the passions of the people have spoken. There is vibrant and touching pathos in his rendering of the love-story of the grisettes, the love-story of the workman and workwoman of the people, an infinite tenderness in his pictures of humble family life—the gathering of the sad little bands enveloped by the fervour of maternity, when the frail mother, bending over her children, has more love to give than bread. And if, as we study and consider his work, we are shocked at times, and claim that the truth is unpleasing—is this not because his subjects are sought among those phases of life to which too often we willingly close our eyes?
Steinlen is a Swiss Protestant of simple parentage. He was born in Lausanne, and is Parisian by adoption only. His grandfather was a painter of talent. Save for the fact that Steinlen married at twenty and came to Paris to earn his bread with his brush and pencil, his history has no special interest. He had no time or chance to follow the academic course of study in the ateliers of Paris. In order to meet his responsibilities, he had to make money, and at once. He therefore turned his talent to every use.