Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.L’Art.
BONNAT.VICTOR HUGO.ANTOINE VOLLON.
(By permission of the Artist.)

Léon Bonnat, the pupil of Madrazos, brought about the fruitful connection between French painting and that of the old Spaniards. By this a large quantity of the fresh blood of naturalism was poured into it once more. Born in the South of France and educated in Spain, he had conceived there a special enthusiasm for Ribera, and these youthful impressions were so powerful that he remained faithful to them in Paris. As early as his residence in Italy, which included the three years from 1858 to 1860, his individuality had been fortified in a degree which prevented him from wasting himself on large academical compositions like the holders of the Prix de Rome; on the contrary, he painted scenes from the varied life of the Roman people. Several religious pictures, such as “The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew” (1863), “Saint Vincent de Paul” (1866), and the “Job” of the Luxembourg, showed that he was steadily progressing on the road paved by Spagnoletto. He had a virtuosity in conjuring on to the canvas visages furrowed by the injustices of life—grey hair, waving grey beards, and the starting sinews and muscles of old weather-beaten frames. In the beginning of the seventies, when he had to paint a Crucifixion for the jury-chamber in the Paris Palais de Justice, he executed a virile figure, the muscles and anatomy of which were as clearly marked as the buttresses in a Gothic cathedral. As in the paintings of Caravaggio, a sharp, glaring light fell upon certain parts of the body, whilst others remained dark and colourless in the gloomy background. He applied the same principles to his portraits. A French Lenbach, he painted in France a gallery of celebrated men. With an almost tangible reality he painted Hugo, Madame Pasta, Dumas, Gounod, Thiers, Grévy, Pasteur, Puvis de Chavannes, Jules Ferry, Carnot, Cardinal Lavigerie, and others. Over two hundred persons, famous or not, have sat to him, and he has painted them with an exceedingly intelligent power, masculine taste, and a learning which never loses itself in unnecessary detail.

The delicate physiognomy of women, the frou-frou of exquisite toilettes, the dreaminess, the fragrance, the coquetry of the modern Sphinx, were no concern of his. On the other hand, his masculine portraits will always keep their interest, if only on historical grounds. In all of them he laid great stress on characteristic accessories, and could indicate in the simplest way the thinker, the musician, the scholar, and the statesman. One remembers his pictures as though they were phrases uttered with conviction, though a German does not hesitate to place Lenbach far above Bonnat as a psychologist. The latter has not the power of seizing the momentary effect, the intimacy, the personal note, the palpitating life peculiar to Lenbach. With the intention of saying all things he often forgets the most important—the spirit of the man and the grace of the woman. His pictures are great pieces of still-life—exceedingly conscientious, but having something of the conscientiousness of an actuary copying a tedious protocol. The portrait of Léon Cogniet, the teacher of the master, with his aged face, his spectacled eyes, and his puckered hands (Musée Luxembourg), is perhaps the only likeness in which Bonnat rivals Lenbach in depth of characterisation. His pictorial strength is always worthy of respect; but, for the sake of variety, the esprit is for once on the side of the German.

Ruled by a passion for the Spanish masters, such as Bonnat possessed, Roybet painted cavaliers of the seventeenth century, and other historical pictures of manners, which are distinguished, to their advantage, from older pictures of their type, because it is not the historical anecdote but the pictorial idea which is their basis. All the earlier painters were rather bent upon archæological accuracy than on pictorial charm in the treatment of such themes. Roybet revelled in the rich hues of old costumes, and sometimes attained, before he strained his talent in the Procrustean bed of pictures of great size, a bloom and a strong, glowing tone which rival the old masters.

L’Art.L’Art.
VOLLON.A CARNIVAL SCENE.BONVIN.THE COOK.

In all periods which have learnt to see the world through a pictorial medium, still-life has held an important place in the practice of art. A technical instinct, which is in itself art, delights in investing musical instruments, golden and silver vessels, fruit and other eatables, glasses and goblets, coverings of precious work, gauntlets and armour, all imaginable petit-riens, with an artistic magic, in recognising and executing pictorial problems everywhere. After the transition from historical and genre painting had been made to painting proper there once more appeared great painters of still-life in France as there did in Chardin’s days.

Yet Blaise Desgoffe, who painted piecemeal and with laborious patience goldsmith’s work, crystal vases, Venetian glass, and such things, is certainly rather petty. In France he was the chief representative of that precise and detailed painting which understands by art a deceptive imitation of objects, and sees its end attained when the holiday public gathers round the pictures as the birds gathered round the grapes of Zeuxis.

It is as if an old master had revived in Philippe Rousseau. He had the same earnest qualities as the Dutch and Flemish Classic masters—a broad, liquid, pasty method of execution, a fine harmony of clear and powerful tones—and with all this a marvellous address in so composing objects that no trace of “composition” is discernible. His work arose from the animal picture. His painting of dogs and cats is to be ranked with the best of the century. He makes a fourth with Gillot, Chardin, and Decamps, the great painters of monkeys. As a decorator of genius, like Hondekoeter, he embellished a whole series of dining-halls with splendidly coloured representations of poultry, and, like Snyders, he heaped together game, dead and living fowl, fruit, lobsters, and oysters into huge life-size masses of still-life. Behind them the cook may be seen, and thievish cats steal around. But, like Kalf, he has also painted, with an exquisite feeling for colour, Japanese porcelain bowls with bunches of grapes, quinces, and apricots, metal and ivory work, helmets and fiddles, against that delicate grey-brown-green tone of background which Chardin loved.

Antoine Vollon became the greatest painter of still-life in the century. Indeed, Vollon is as broad and nervous as Desgoffe is precise and pedantic. Flowers, fruit, and fish—they are all painted in with a firm hand, and shine out of the dark background with a full liquid freshness of colour. He paints dead salt-water fish like Abraham van Beyeren, grapes and crystal goblets like Davids de Heem, dead game like Frans Snyders, skinned pigs like Rembrandt and Maes. He is a master in the representation of freshly gathered flowers, delicate vegetables, copper kettles, weapons, and suits of armour. Since Chardin no painter depicted the qualities of the skin of fresh fruit, its life and its play of colour, and the moist bloom that rests upon it, with such fidelity to nature. His fish in particular will always remain the wonder of all painters and connoisseurs. But landscapes, Dutch canal views, and figure-pictures are also to be found amongst his works. He has painted everything that is picturesque, and the history of art must do him honour as, in a specifically pictorial sense, one of the greatest in the century. A soft grey-brown wainscoting, a black and white Pierrot costume, and a white table-cloth and dark green vegetables—such is the harmony of colour which he chiefly loved in his figure-pictures.

On the same purely pictorial grounds nuns became very popular in painting, as their white hoods and collars standing out against a black dress gave the opportunity for such a fine effect of tone. This was the province in which poor François Bonvin laboured. Deriving from the Dutch, he conceived an enthusiasm for work, silence, the subdued shining of light in interiors, cold days, the slow movements and peaceful faces of nuns, and painted kitchen scenes with a strong personal accent. Before he took up painting he was for a long time a policeman, and was employed in taking charge of the markets. Here he acquired an eye for the picturesqueness of juicy vegetables, white collars, and white hoods, and when he had a day free he studied Lenain and Chardin in the Louvre. Bonvin’s pictures have no anecdotic purport. Drinkers, cooks, orphan children in the schoolroom, sempstresses, choristers, sisters of mercy, boys reading, women in church, nuns conducting a sewing-class—Bonvin’s still, picturesque, congenial world is made up of elements such as these. What his people may think or do is no matter: they are only meant to create an effect as pictorial tones in space. During his journey to Holland he had examined Metsu, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hoogh, Terborg, and Van der Meer with an understanding for their merits, but it was Chardin in both his phases—as painter of still-life and of familiar events—who was in a special sense revived in Bonvin. All his pictures are simple and quiet; his figures are peaceful in their expression, and have an easy geniality of pose; his hues have a beauty and fulness of tone recalling the old masters.