Baschet.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
GAILLARD.PORTRAIT.DUBOIS.PORTRAIT OF MY SONS.
(By permission of the Artist.)

And perhaps more, for Stevens never moralised—he merely painted. Painter to his finger tips, like Delacroix, Roqueplan, and Isabey, he stood in need of no anecdotic substratum as an adjunct. The key of his pictures was suggested by no theme of one sort or another, but by his treatment of colour. The picture was evolved from the first tone he placed upon the canvas, which was the ground-note of the entire scale. He delighted in a thick pasty handling, in beautiful hues, and in finely chased detail. And he was as little inclined to sentimentality as to pictorial novels. Everything is discreet, piquant, and full of charm. He was a delicate spirit, avoiding tears and laughter. Subdued joy, melancholy, and everything delicate and reserved are what he loves; he will have nothing to do with stereotyped arrangement nor supernumerary figures, but although a single person dominates the stage he never repeats himself. He has followed woman through all her metamorphoses—as mother or in love, weary or excited, proud or humbled, fallen or at the height of success, in her morning-gown or dressed for visiting or a promenade, now on the sea-shore, now in the costume of a Japanese, or dallying with her trinkets as she stands vacantly before the glass. The surroundings invariably form an accompaniment to the melody. A world of exquisite things is the environment of the figures. Rich stuffs, charming petit-riens from China and Japan, the most delicate ivory and lacquer-work, the finest bronzes, Japanese fire-screens, and great vases with blossoming sprays, fill the boudoir and drawing-room of the Parisienne. In the pictures of Stevens she is the fairy of a paradise made up of all the most capricious products of art. A new world was discovered, a painting which was in touch with life; the symphony of the salon was developed in a delicate style. A tender feminine perfume, something at once melancholy and sensuous, was exhaled from the pictures of Stevens, and by this shade of demi-monde haut-goût he won the great public. They could not rise to Millet and Courbet, and Stevens was the first who gave general pleasure without paying toll to the vicious taste for melodramatic, narrative, and humorous genre painting. Even in the sixties he was appreciated in England, France, Germany, Russia, and Belgium, and represented in all public and private collections; and through the wide reception offered to his pictures he contributed much to create in the public a comprehension for good painting.

In the same way James Tissot achieved the representation of the modern woman. Stevens, a Belgian, painted the Parisienne; Tissot, a Frenchman, the Englishwoman. It was not till they went into foreign countries that these artists perceived the grace of what was not deemed suitable to art at home. In Paris from the year 1859 Tissot had painted scenes from the fifteenth century, to which he was moved by Leys, and he studied with archæological accuracy the costume and furniture of the late Gothic period. When he migrated to England in 1871 he gave up the romantic proclivities of his youth, and devoted himself to the representation of fashionable society. His oil paintings fascinate us by their delicate feeling for cool transparent tone values, whilst his water-colours—restaurant, theatre, and ball scenes—assure him a place among the pioneers of modernity.

At first Stevens found no successors amongst Parisian painters. A few, indeed, painted interiors in graceful Paris, but they were only frigid compositions of dresses and furniture, without a breath of that delicate aroma which exhales from the works of the Belgian. The portrait painters alone approached that modern grace which still awaited its historian and poet.

An exceedingly delicate artist, Gustave Ricard, in whose portraits the art of galleries had a congenial revival, was called the modern Van Dyck in the sixties. Living nature did not content him; he wished to learn how it was interpreted by the old masters, and therefore frequented galleries, where he sought counsel sometimes from the English portrait-painters, sometimes from Leonardo, Rubens, and Van Dyck. In this way Ricard became a gourmet of colour, who knew the technique of the old masters as few others have done, and his works have an attractive golden gallery-tone of great distinction.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.L’Art.
CAROLUS DURAN.BONNAT.ADOLPHE THIERS.
(By permission of the Artist.)

In Charles Chaplin Fragonard was revived. He was the specialist of languishing flesh and poudre de riz, the refined interpreter of aristocratic beauty, one on whose palette there might still be found a delicate reflection of the fêtes galantes of the eighteenth century. In Germany he was principally known by those dreamy, frail, and sensual maidens, well characterised by the phrase of the Empress Eugénie. “M. Chaplin,” she said, “I admire you. Your pictures are not merely indecorous, they are more.” But Chaplin had likewise the other qualities of the rococo painter. He was a decorative artist of the first rank, and, like Fragonard, he carelessly scattered round him on all sides grace and beauty, charm and fascination. In 1857 he decorated the Salon des Fleurs in the Tuileries, in 1861-65 the bathroom of the Empress in the Palais de l’Elysée, and from 1865 a number of private houses in Paris, Brussels, and New York; and there is in all these works a refined haut-goût of modern Parisian elegance and fragrant rococo grace. He revived no nymphs, and made no pilgrimage to the island of Cythera; he was more of an epicurean. But Fragonard’s fine tones and Fragonard’s sensuousness were peculiar to him. He had a method of treating the hair, of introducing little patches, of setting a dimple in the chin, and painting the arms and bosom, which had vanished since the rococo period from the power of French artists. Rosebuds and full-blown roses blossom like girls à la Greuze, and fading beauties, who are all the more irresistible, are the elements out of which his refined, indecorous, and yet fragrant art is constituted.

The great engraver Gaillard brought Hans Holbein once more into honour. He was the heir of that method of painting, the eternal matrix of which Jan van Eyck left to the world in unapproachable perfection. His energetic but conscientiously minute brush noted every wrinkle of the face, without doing injury to the total impression by this labour of detail. Indeed, his pictures are as great in conception and as powerful in characterisation as they are small in size. Gaillard is a profound physiognomist who attained the most vivid analysis of character by means of the utmost precision.

Paul Dubois takes us across the Alps; in his portraits he is the same great quattrocentist that he was from the beginning in his plastic works. His ground is that of the excellent and subtle period when Leonardo, who had been in the beginning somewhat arid, grew delicate and allowed a mysterious sphinx-like smile to play round the lips of his women. Manifestly he has studied Prudhon and had much intercourse with Henner in those years when the latter, after his return from Italy, directed attention once more to the old Lombards. From the time when he made his début in 1879, with the portrait of his sons, he received great encouragement, and stands out in these days as the most mature painter of women that the present age has to show. Only the great English portrait painters Watts and Millais, who are inferior to him in technique, have excelled him in the embodiment of personalities.

As the most skilful painter of drapery, the most brilliant decorator of feminine beauty, Carolus Duran was long celebrated. The studies which he had made in Italy had not caused him to forget that he took his origin from across the Flemish border; and when he appeared with his first portraits, in the beginning of the seventies, it was believed that an eminent colourist had been born to French painting. At that time he had a fine feeling for the eternal feminine and its transitory phases of expression, and he was as dexterous in seizing a fleeting gesture or a turn of the head as he was in the management of drapery and the play of its hues. Then, again, he made a gradual transition from delicate and discreetly coquettish works to the crude arts of upholstery. Yet even in his last period he has painted some masculine portraits—those of Pasteur, and of the painters Français, Fritz Thaulow, and René Billotte—which are striking in their vigorous simplicity and unforced characterisation after the glaring virtuosity of his pictures of women.