Of the generation of the eminent Flemish artists of 1830 Hendrik Leys is the one whose fame has been most enduring. Born in Antwerp on 18th February 1815, at first destined for the priesthood, and then in 1829 admitted to the studio of Ferdinand de Braekeleers, he had made his début in the beginning of the thirties with a pair of historical pictures. These indeed revealed little of the power which he evinced later, but they furnished some indication of what he was aiming at. Here were none of the skirmishes—so popular at the time—in which blood flows as from the pipes of a fountain; the combatants fought with decorum and moderation, and less from conviction than to justify the helmets and cuirasses which had been fetched from the wardrobe. In both of them, on the other hand, the background—a mediæval town with tortuous alleys, lanterns, and picturesque taverns—was most lovingly treated. Here was revealed a thoroughly German delight in minute detail. Instead of subordinating the accessories as others did, with the object of throwing the principal personages into relief, Leys represented an entire corner of the world at once, giving full distinctness to the smallest things, down to the implements of daily life, the grasses and flowers of the landscape, and the variegated corner-stones of the old house-fronts, whose picturesque porches and lattices bulge into the crooked lanes. His next picture, “The Massacre of the Löwen Magistrates,” was a still further departure from precedent, since—quite in Callot’s manner—it mingled with the principal drama a mass of grotesque episodes. The born genre painter was announced by these traits; and not less striking was the form of the art, which was a thorough departure from the manner of the “painters of the grand style.”

The resuscitation of a national art, which had been the life-long aim of Gustav Wappers, who was twelve years his senior, was what Leys also set up as the goal of his artistic endeavours. But their ways divided. Wappers was principally inspired by Rubens, while Leys attached himself at first to the Dutch painters. A visit made to Amsterdam in 1839 had helped him to an understanding of Rembrandt and Pieter de Hoogh. He followed them when, in 1845, he painted his “Wedding in the Seventeenth Century”—a rich display of gleaming hangings, golden plate, and red-plush furniture, amid which move handsomely dressed people, wedding guests, and violin players. The effort to approach Pieter de Hoogh or Jan van der Meer is apparent in the management of light; the treatment of drapery reminds one of Mieris and Metsu. Another pair of anecdotic pictures from the seventeenth century allow one to follow the progress by which Leys, under the influence of Dutch models, gradually developed that power and mastery of colouring, that completeness of pictorial effect, and that soft treatment of subdued light which were justly admired in his first works. In particular, certain works founded on the legends of painters and monarchs—Rubens, Rembrandt, or Frans Floris visited in their studio by some personage of high station—made him the lion of the Paris Salon. In 1852 he stood at the summit of his fame; he was recognised as one of the first of painters, both in Belgium and in other countries, and was everywhere loaded with honours. Then he cast his slough and entered on his “second manner.”

Seemann, Leipzig.
HENDRIK LEYS.

After he had followed Rembrandt for more than a decade he turned from him to cast himself suddenly into the arms of the German masters of the sixteenth century, and, according to his own saying, “from that time forward to become an artist.” During a tour through Germany, in 1852, he had become familiar with Dürer and Cranach; in Dresden, Wittenberg, and Eisenach there hovered round him the great figures of the Reformation period. Half-effaced memories of his countrymen, the brothers Van Eyck and Quentin Matsys, became once more fresh, and drove him decisively forward on his new course. “The Festival at Otto Venius’s” and “Erasmus in his Study” were the first steps in this direction, and when soon afterwards he came forward with his costume pictures, “Luther as a Chorister in Eisenach” and “Luther in his Household at Wittenberg,” every one was enraptured with the exquisite truthfulness of his portrayal of archaic life. At the World’s Exhibition of 1855 he had another magnificent success with three pictures executed in old German style. These were “The Mass in Honour of the Antwerp Burgomaster Barthel de Haze,” “The Walk before the Gate,” and “New Year’s Day in Flanders.” His return from Paris, where he was the only foreigner except Cornelius who had received the great gold medal, took the form of a triumphal progress in Antwerp, where he was greeted with illuminations, torchlight processions, and laurel wreaths made in gold. He was held to be the most eminent master since Quentin Matsys, the Jan van Eyck of the nineteenth century. In the Brussels Salon he appeared as a prince of art, before whom criticism made obeisance, and for whose pictures special shrines were erected. He was striking, not merely as an artist, but as a man: his stately figure was known to every one in Antwerp, and was pointed out to strangers as one of the sights of the place. In 1867, when he again received the medal in Paris, the Antwerp Cercle Artistique had a medal struck to commemorate an event of such importance in Belgian art. His decease, on 25th August 1869, threw the whole town into mourning; the windows in the town hall, where he had painted his last pictures, were hung with black, and the announcement of his death pasted up on great placards at the street corners. “Leys is ons” ran the phrase in the speech made by the burgomaster over his open grave. To-day his statue stands on the Boulevard Leys, and his house is noted down in Baedecker, like those of Matsys and Floris, Rubens and Jordaens.

Leys was thus a favourite child of fortune. Enthusiastic applause showered him with fame and laurels. But it is natural that posterity should find a good deal to cancel in these titles of honour.

Seemann, Leipzig.
LEYS.A FAMILY FESTIVAL.

Through Leys the history of art was not enriched with anything new. His delicate art—severe in outline—which goes back directly to the peculiar manner of the fifteenth century, is in itself not without merit. But how much of it belongs to the nineteenth century? To what extent has the painter stood independent and on his own peculiar ground? He could draw a Van Eyck which might be taken for an original. He seems like an old master gone astray by chance amongst the moderns. His knowledge of the sixteenth century is marvellous. In fact, he was a visionary who saw the past as clearly as though he had lived in the midst of it. The men he paints are his contemporaries. He has drawn them from life in the year of grace 1493, and they make no gesture nor grimace which might not be four hundred years old. Yet that means that he was not an original genius, but merely one who gave an adroit reproduction of a formula already in existence. And much as he affected to be the contemporary of Lucas Cranach and Quentin Matsys, he had not their simplicity: where they painted life he painted the shadow of their realism. Surrounded by old pictures, breviaries, and missals, he contented himself with copying the still forms of Gothic miniatures instead of living nature. He went so deeply into the pictures of the Antwerp town hall that he followed the old masters in their very errors of perspective; and though even the most childish confusion between foreground and background does not disturb one’s pleasure in them, because they knew no better, it is an affectation in him, with his modern knowledge, intentionally to make the same mistakes. Instead of being an imitator of nature, he is an imitator of their imitation—a gourmet in pictorial archaism.

LEYS.THE ARMOURER.LEYS.MOTHER AND CHILD.

Yet it was exactly this uncompromising archaism which was of importance for his time, and amongst his contemporaries it gives him significance as a reformer. He is the only one amongst them who really represents the Flemish race. Wappers was merely a Fleming from Paris, who shook off the yoke of the Greeks to bear that of the French. Delaroche lived again in Louis Gallait, the pupil of David. Their works had the sentiment of French tragedies, and an artificial neatness which completely departed from the truth of nature; the figures were combed and washed and brushed and polished, the gestures were histrionic, the colours toned in a stereotyped fashion to effect a pleasing ensemble. Leys endeavoured to be true. In his pictures he had no wish to express ideas, but merely to bring back a fragment of “the good old time” in all its brightness of life and colour. And whilst as a colourist he was bent upon avoiding uniformity of tone and giving everything its natural character, as a draughtsman, too, he set up, in opposition to the more patrician fluency of others, the citizen-like angularity of an art uninfluenced by the Cinquecento. As in Cranach, Dürer, and Holbein, one finds in his pictures profiles that are vividly true; harsh and often unwieldy heads, wrinkled faces, and heavy, massive shoulders resting on stunted bodies. The human form, with fat stomach and great horny hands, seems almost deformed. Everything which the struggle for existence has made of the image of God is expressed in the works of Leys for the first time since David. Even his “Massacre of the Löwen Magistrates” showed sharp, naturalistic physiognomies in the midst of its confused composition, and his “Barthel de Haze,” fifteen years after, fully exemplified this striving after characteristic and truthful expression. None of his contemporaries has shown himself more cool and indifferent to conventional and graceful profile and “beauty” in the drawing of heads. Hatred of the academic model made Leys bring art back to its sources. The hideousness, so often childish, in primitive pictures was dearer to him than all Raphael. By this emphasising of the characteristic in attitude and the expression of the face he shows himself, although he painted historical subjects, the very antipode of the painter of the historical school, and, at the same time, one of those who effected the transition which led to the modern style. In setting up quaintness and far-fetched archaism against the mannerism of the idealists, Leys accustomed the eye again to recognise that there was something truer than nobility of line and aristocratic pose; and, as he appealed to the old masters as accomplices, it was impossible for æsthetic criticism to be offended.

In France the transition from the absolutely beautiful to the characteristic, from types to individuals, was brought about from various sides. On the one side Romanticism had opposed to the antique style that of the Flemish painters. On the other side, within Classicism itself, there had been a change from the antique and the Cinquecento to the early Italian renaissance. A new world was opened to sculpture by the “Florentine Singer” of Paul Dubois. The more artists buried themselves in the study of those early pioneers of realism, Donatello, Verrochio, della Robbia, and the other masters of the Quatrocento, the more they found themselves fascinated by the sparkling animation of these creations, and sought to transfer it freely into their own work. The fifteenth century, with the energetic force of its figures, its close grasp of nature, and its pithy characterisation, which did not even shrink from ugliness, induced painters to go back more than they had formerly done to the sources of real life and to bring something of its directness into their creations. Élie Delaunay began to look on nature with an eye less bent on making abstractions and regarding all things from the standpoint of style; he began to apprehend more clearly her individual peculiarities and to reproduce them more truly than had been done by the frigid school which cast everything into the mould of Classicism. But Ernest Meissonier went a step further when by his rococo pictures he set the Dutch tradition on a level with the Flemish and Early Italian as a formative influence.