L’Art.
BONVIN.THE WORK-ROOM.RIBOT.THE STUDIO.

Even Théodule Ribot, the most eminent of the group, one of the most dexterous executants of the French school, a master who for power of expression is worthy of being placed between Frans Hals and Ribera, made a beginning with still-life. He was born in 1823, in a little town of the department of Eure. Early married and poor, he supported himself at first by painting frames for a firm of mirror manufacturers, and only reserved the hours of the evening for his artistic labours. In particular he is said to have accustomed himself to work whole nights through by lamplight, while he nursed his wife during a long illness, watching at her bedside. The lamplight intensified the contrasts of light and shadow. Thus Ribot’s preference for concentrated light and strong shadows is partially due, in all probability, to what he had gone through in his life, and in later days Ribera merely bestowed upon him a benediction as his predecessor in the history of art.

His first pictures from the years 1861 to 1865 were, for the most part, scenes from household and kitchen life: cooks, as large as life, plucking poultry, setting meat before the fire, scouring vessels, or tasting sauces; sometimes, also, figures in the streets; but even here there was a strong accentuation of the element of still-life. There were men with cooking utensils, food, dead birds, and fish. Then after 1865 there followed a number of religious pictures which, in their hard, peasant-like veracity and their impressive, concentrated life, stood in the most abrupt contrast with the conventionally idealised figures of the academicians. His “Jesus in the Temple,” no less than “Saint Sebastian” and “The Good Samaritan”—all three in the Musée Luxembourg—are works of simple and forceful grandeur, and have a thrilling effect which almost excites dismay. Sebastian is no smiling saint gracefully embellished with wounds, but a suffering man, with the blood streaming from his veins, stretched upon the earth; yet half-raising himself, a cry of agony upon his lips, and his whole body contorted by spasms of pain. In his “Jesus in the Temple,” going on parallel lines with Menzel, he proclaims the doctrine that it is only possible to pour new life-blood into traditional figures by a tactful choice of models from popular life around. And in “The Good Samaritan,” also, he was only concerned to paint, with naturalistic force, the body of a wounded man lying in the street, a thick-set French peasant robbed of his clothes. From the seventies his specialty was heads—separate figures of weather-beaten old folk, old women knitting or writing, old men reading or lost in thought; and these will always be ranked with the greatest masterpieces of the century. Ribot attains a remarkable effect when he paints those expressive faces of his, which seem to follow you with their looks, and are thrown out from the darkness of his canvas. A black background, in which the dark dresses of his figures are insensibly lost, a luminous head with such eyes as no one of the century has ever painted, wrinkled skin and puckered old hands rising from somewhere—one knows not whence—these are things which all lend his figures something phantasmal, superhuman, and ghostly. Ribot is the great king of the under-world, to which a sunbeam only penetrates by stealth. Before his pictures one has the sense of wandering in a deep, deep shaft of some mine, where all is dark and only now and then a lantern glimmers. No artist, not even Ribera, has been a better painter of old people, and only Velasquez has painted children who have such sparkling life. Ribot worked in Colombes, near Paris, to which place he had early withdrawn, in a barn where only tiny dormer-windows let in two sharp rays of light.

L’Art.
RIBOT.AT A NORMAN INN.

By placing his canvas beneath one window and his model beneath the other, in a dim light which allowed only one golden ray to fall upon the face, he isolated it completely from its surroundings, and in this way painted the parts illuminated with the more astonishing effect. No one had the same power in modelling a forehead, indicating the bones beneath the flesh, and rendering all the subtleties of skin. A terrible and intense life is in his figures. His old beggars and sailors especially have something kingly in the grand style of their noble and quiet faces. An old master with a powerful technique, a painter of the force and health of Jordaens, has manifested himself once more in Ribot.

L’Art.
RIBOT.   KEEPING ACCOUNTS.

Courbet’s principles, accordingly, had won all down the line, in the course of a few years. “It is only Ribera, Zurbaran, and Velasquez that I admire; Ostade and Craesbeeck also allure me; and for Holbein I feel veneration. As for M. Raphael, there is no doubt that he has painted some interesting portraits, but I cannot find any ideas in him.” In these words he had prophesied as early as 1855 the course which French art would take in the next decade. When Courbet appeared the grand painting stood in thraldom to the beauté suprême, and the æsthetic conceptions of the time affected the treatment of contemporary subjects. Artists had not realism enough to give truth and animation to these themes. When Cabanel, Hamon, and Bouguereau occasionally painted beggars and orphans, they were bloodless phantoms, because by beautifying the figures they deprived them of character in the effort to give them, approximately, the forms of historical painting. Because painters did not regard their own epoch, because they had been accustomed to consider living beings merely as elements of the second and third rank, they never discovered the distinctiveness of their essential life. Like a traveller possessed by one fixed mania, they made a voyage round the world, thinking only how they might adapt living forms to those which their traditional training recommended as peculiarly right and alone worthy of art. Even portrait painting was dominated by this false method, of rendering figures as types, of improving the features and the contour of bodies, and giving men the external appearance of fair, ideal figures.

But now the sway of the Cinquecento has been finally broken. A fresh breeze of realism from across the Pyrenees has taken the place of the sultry Italian sirocco. From the pictures of the Neapolitans, the Spaniards, and the Dutch it has been learnt that the joys and sorrows of the people are just as capable of representation as the actions of gods and heroes, and under the influence of these views a complete change in the cast has taken place.

L’Art.
RIBOT.ST. SEBASTIAN, MARTYR.