To these his landscapes and animal pieces must be added as the works on which his talent displayed itself in the greatest purity and most inherent vigour: “The Battle of the Stags,” that most admirable picture “The Hind on the Snow,” “Deer in Covert,” views of the moss-grown rocks and sunlit woods of Ornans and the green valleys of the Franche-Comté. He had the special secret of painting with a beautiful tone and a broad, sure stroke dead plumage and hunting-gear, the bristling hide of wild-boars, and the more delicate coat of deer and of dogs. As a landscape painter he does not belong to the family of Corot and Dupré. His landscapes are green no doubt, but they have limitations; the leaves hang motionless on the branches, undisturbed by a breath of wind. Courbet has forgotten the most important thing, the air. Whatever the time of the year or the day may be, winter or summer, evening or morning, he sees nothing but the form of things, regarding the sun as a machine which has no other purpose than to mark the relief of objects by light and shade. Moreover, the lyricism of the Fontainebleau painters was not in him. He paints without reverie, and knows nothing of that tender faltering of the landscape painter in which the poet awakes, but has merely the equanimity of a good and sure worker. In regard to nature, he has the sentiments of a peasant who tills his land, is never elegiac or bucolic, and would be most indignant if a nymph were to tread on the furrows of his fields. He paints with a pipe in his mouth and a spade in his hand, the plain and the hills, potatoes and cabbages, rich turf and slimy rushes, oxen with steaming nostrils heavily ploughing the clods, cows lying down and breathing at ease the damp air of the meadows drenched with rain. He delights in fertile patches of country, and in the healthy odour of the cow-house. A material heaviness and a prosaic sincerity are stamped upon all. But his painting has a solidity delightful to the eye. It is inspiriting to meet a man who has such a resolute and simple love of nature, and can interpret her afresh in powerful and sound colour without racking his brains. His attachment to the spot of earth where he was born is a leading characteristic of his art. He borrowed from Ornans the motives of his most successful creations, and was always glad to return to his parents’ house. The patriotism of the church-spire, provincialism, and a touching and vivid sense of home are peculiar to all his landscapes. But in his sea-pieces, to which he was incited by a residence in Trouville in the summer of 1865, he has opened an altogether new province to French art. Eugène Le Poittevin, who exhibited a good deal in Berlin in the forties, and therefore became very well known in Germany, cannot count as a painter. Théodore Gudin, whose signature is likewise highly valued in the market, was a frigid and rough-and-ready scenical painter. His little sea-pieces have a professional manner, and the large naval battles and fires at sea which he executed by the commission of Louis Philippe for the Museum of Versailles are frigid, pompous, and spectacular sea-pieces parallel with Vernet’s battle-pieces. Ziem, who gave up his time to Venice and the Adriatic, is the progenitor of Eduard Hildebrandt. His water and sky take all the colours of the prism, and the objects grouped between these luminous elements, houses, ships, and men, equally receive a share of these flattering and iridescent tones. This gives something seductive and dazzling to his sketches, until it is at last perceived that he has only painted one picture, repeating it mechanically in all dimensions. Courbet was the first French painter of sea-pieces who had a feeling for the sombre majesty of the sea. The ocean of Gudin and Ziem inspires neither wonder nor veneration; that of Courbet does both. His very quietude is expressive of majesty; his peace is imposing, his smile grave; and his caress is not without a menace.

Courbet has positively realised the programme which he issued in that pamphlet of 1855. When he began his activity, eclectic idealism had overgrown the tree of art. But Courbet stripped off the parasitic vegetation to reach the firm and serviceable timber. And having once grasped it he showed the muscles of an athlete in making its power felt. Something of the old Flemish sturdiness lived once more in his bold creations. If he and Delacroix were united, the result would be Rubens. Delacroix had the fervour and passionate tamelessness, while Courbet contributed the Flemish weight. Each made use of blood, purple, thrones, and Golgothas in composing the dramas they had imagined. The latter pictured creation with the absolutism of complete objectivity. Delacroix rose on the horizon like a brilliant meteor catching flame from the light of vanished suns; he reflected their radiance, had almost their magnitude, and followed the same course amid the same coruscation and blaze of light. Courbet stands firm and steady upon the earth. The former had the second sight known to visionaries, the latter opened his eyes to the world that can be felt and handled. Neurotic and distempered, Delacroix worked feverishly. As a sound, full-blooded being Courbet painted, as a man drinks, digests, and talks, with an activity that knows no exertion, a force that knows no weariness. Delacroix was a small, weakly man, and his whole power rested in his huge head. That of Courbet, as in animals of beauty and power, was dispersed through his whole frame; his big arms and athletic hands render the same service to his art as his eyes and his brain. And as, like all sincere artists, he rendered himself, he was the creator of an art which has an irrepressible health and overflows with an exuberant opulence. His pictures brought a savour of the butcher’s shop into French painting, which had become anæmic. He delighted in plump shoulders and sinewy necks, broad breasts heaving over the corset, the glow of the skin dripping with warm drops of water in the bath, the hide of deer and the coat of hares, the iridescent shining of carp and cod-fish. Delacroix, all brain, caught fire from his inward visions; Courbet, all eye and maw, with the sensuousness of an epicure and the satisfaction of a gourmet, gloats over the shining vision of things which can be devoured—a Gargantua with a monstrous appetite, he buried himself in the navel of the generous earth. Plants, fruit, and vegetables take voluptuous life beneath his brush. He triumphs when he has to paint a déjeuner with oysters, lemons, turkeys, fish, and pheasants. His mouth waters when he heaps into a picture of still-life all manner of delicious eatables. The only drama that he has painted is “The Battle of the Stags,” and this will end in brown sauce amid a cheerful clatter of knives and forks.

L’Art.Baschet.
STEVENS.THE VISITORS.RICARD.MADAME DE CALONNE.
(By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture.)

Even as a landscape painter he is luxurious and phlegmatic. In his pictures the earth is a corpulent nurse, the trees fine and well-fed children, and all nature healthy and contented. His art is like a powerful body fed with rich nourishment. In such organisms the capacity for enthusiasm and delicacy of sentiment are too easily sacrificed to their physical satisfaction, but their robust health ensures them the longer life. Here is neither the routine and external technique and the correct, academic articulation of form belonging to mannerists, nor the strained, neurotic, sickly refinement of the decadents, but the powerful utterance of inborn, instinctive talent, and the strong cries of nature which rise out of it will be understood at all times, even the most distant. It is hardly necessary to add that the appearance of a genius of this kind was fraught with untold consequences to the further development of French painting.

What is held beautiful in nature must likewise be beautiful in pictorial art when it is faithfully represented, and nature is beautiful everywhere. In announcing this and demonstrating it in pictures of life-size, Courbet won for art all the wide dominion of modern life which had hitherto been so studiously avoided—the dominion in which it had to revel if it was to learn to see with its own eyes. One fragment of reality after another would then be drawn into the sphere of representation, and no longer in the form of laboriously composed genre pictures, but after the fashion of really pictorial works of art.

What Millet had done for the peasant, and Courbet for the artisan, Alfred Stevens did for “society”: he discovered the Parisienne. Until 1850 the graceful life of the refined classes, which Gavarni, Marcellin, and Cham had so admirably drawn, found no adequate representation in the province of painting. The Parisienne, who is so chic and piquant, and can hate and kiss with such fervour, fascinated every one, but Grecian profile was a matter of prescription. Auguste Toulmouche painted little women in fashionable toilette, but less from any taste he had for the graceful vision than from delight in genre painting. They were forced to find forbidden books in the library, to resist worldly marriages, or behave in some such interesting fashion, to enter into the kingdom of art. It was reserved for a foreigner to reveal this world of beauty, chic, and grace.

Alfred Stevens was a child of Brussels. He was born in the land of Flemish matrons on 11th May 1828, and was the second of three children. Joseph, the elder brother, became afterwards the celebrated painter of animals; Arthur, the youngest, became an art-critic and a picture-dealer; he was one of the first who brought home to the public comprehension the noble art of Rousseau, Corot, and Millet. Stevens’ father fought as an officer in the great army at the battle of Waterloo, and is said to have been an accomplished critic. Some of the ablest sketches of Delacroix, Devéria, Charlet, and Roqueplan found their way into his charming home. Roqueplan, who often came to Brussels, took the younger Stevens with him to his Parisian studio. He was a tall, graceful young man, who, with his vigorous upright carriage, his finely chiselled features, and his dandified moustache, looked like an officer of dragoons or cuirassiers. He was a pleasure-loving man of the world, and was soon the lion of Parisian drawing-rooms. The grace of modern life in great cities became the domain of his art. The Parisienne, whom his French fellow-artists passed by without heed, was a strange, interesting phenomenon to him, who was a foreigner—an exotic and exquisitely artistic bibelot, which he looked upon with eyes as enraptured as those with which Decamps had looked upon the East.

L’Art.Baschet.
CHAPLIN.THE GOLDEN AGE.CHAPLIN.PORTRAIT OF COUNTESS AIMERY DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
(By permission of Messrs. Goupil & Co., the owners of the copyright.)

His very first picture, exhibited in 1855, was called “At Home.” A charming little woman is warming her feet at the fire; she has returned from visiting a friend, and it has been raining or snowing outside. Her delicate hands are frozen in spite of her muff, her cheeks have been reddened by the wind, and she has a pleasant sense of comfort as her rosy lips breathe the warm air of the room. From the time of this picture women took possession of Stevens’ easel. His way was prescribed for him, and he never left it. Robert Fleury, the president of the judging committee in the Salon, said to him: “You are a good painter, but alter your subjects; you are stifling in a sphere which is too small; how wide and grand is that of the past!” Whereon Stevens is said to have showed him a volume of photographs from Velasquez. “Look here at Velasquez,” he said. “This man never represented anything but what he had before his eyes—people in the Spanish dress of the seventeenth century. And as the justification of my genre may be found in this Spanish painter, it may be found also in Rubens, Raphael, Van Dyck, and all the great artists. All these masters of the past derived their strength and the secret of their endurance from the faithful reproduction of what they had themselves seen: it gives their pictures a real historical as well as an artistic value. One can only render successfully what one has felt sincerely and seen vividly before one’s eyes in flesh and blood.” In these sentences he is at one with Courbet, and by not allowing himself to be led astray into doing sacrifice to the idols of historical painting he continues to live as the historical painter of the Parisienne.

In his whole work he sounds a pæan to the delicate and all-powerful mistress of the world, and it is significant that it was through woman that art joined issue with the interests of the present. Millet, the first who conquered a province of modern life, was at the same time the first great painter of women in the century. Stevens shows the other side of the medal. In Millet woman was a product of nature; in Stevens she is the product of modern civilisation. The woman of Millet lives a large animal life, in the sweat of her brow, bowed to the earth. She is the primæval mother who works, bears children, and gives them nourishment. She stands in the field like a caryatid, like a symbol of fertile nature. In Stevens woman does not toil and is seldom a mother. He paints the woman who loves, enjoys, and knows nothing of the great pangs of child-birth and hunger. The one woman lives beneath the wide, open sky, dans le grand air; the other is only enveloped in an atmosphere of perfume. She is ancient Cybele in the pictures of Millet; in those of Stevens the holy Magdalene of the nineteenth century, to whom much will be forgiven, because she has loved much. The pictures of Stevens represent, for the first time, the potent relations of woman to the century. Whilst most works of this time are silent concerning ourselves, his art will speak of our weaknesses and our passions. In a period of archaic painting he upheld the banner of modernity. On this account posterity will honour him as one of the first historians of the nineteenth century, and will learn from his pictures all that Greuze has revealed to the present generation about the civilisation of the eighteenth century.