scorn of material things, but a perfect ability to forego them.
The studio is a workshop first of all; it is free from would-be artistic decorations, full of canvases and folios of drawings. He has his own lithographic stones, and does his own printing, holding this as an art important, as do many of the moderns; and he, as well as many another modern, insists on the expediency of making his own colours.
Steinlen thinks unfavourably of academies and salons, “where,” he says, “in order to exhibit at stated periods the artists paint anything and everything under rush and stress.” He sends to no public collections. When a goodly number of studies have accumulated in his studio, he organises a little exposition of his own, and the admirers of his work have an opportunity to visit a Steinlen exhibition in the autumn, when he will delight, charm, and touch the public as he has never hitherto failed to do.
At this period of his life—and he is still young—he finds the insistent needs of daily existence are met; and he draws, as it were, a sigh of relief, and turns toward what is his recreation, because a beloved labour, and the goal of his career, painting in oil. Steinlen bemoans the fact that he lacks the prescribed technicalities an academic education would have given to him; but this fact has left him a freedom from rules which, in spite of their immense importance, are often trammels to individuality. At all events the daring boldness of his stroke, and his perfect originality, have been developed with no hindrance. Need has been his spur, talent the response to the goad.
Possibly Steinlen is nowhere better displayed than in a certain canvas at present in his studio in the Rue Caulaincourt. It is a life-size oil painting, a study of a man and woman in the working class. It is evidently the end of the day, and the scene a nook or corner in some room so distant from the rooms we all know that it is hard even to imagine where it may be. The workman has taken the young creature in his arms for a long embrace. His head is bent over her, and she looks out from the picture above the man’s arm. Her face is exquisite, and in thorough keeping with the type of her class.
The sombre note predominates throughout Steinlen’s work. That inevitable penalty of sadness which must be paid when the eye dares to look, and the soul dares to consider how our fellow beings struggle for existence.
A STUDY