Baschet.
CABAT.LE JARDIN BEAUJON.
L’Art.
PAUL HUET.

In this calling many Dutch pictures had passed through his hands, and they suggested to him the unseasonable idea of looking more closely into nature in the neighbourhood than he had done in his youth—nature not as she was in Italy, but in the environs of the city. While Valenciennes and his pupils made so many objections to painting what lay under their eyes, Georges Michel remained in the country, and was the first to light on the idea of placing himself in the midst of nature, and not above her; no longer to arrange and adapt, but to approach her by painting her with directness. If any one spoke of travelling to Italy, he answered: “The man who cannot find enough to paint during his whole life in a circuit of four miles is in reality no artist. Did the Dutch ever run from one place to another? And yet they are good painters, and not merely that, but the most powerful, bold, and ideal artists.” Every day he made a study in the precincts of Paris, without any idea that he would count in these times among the forerunners of modern art. He shares the glory of having discovered Montmartre with Alphonse Karr, Gérard de Nerval, and Monselet. After his death such studies were found in the shops of all the second-hand dealers of the Northern Boulevard; they were invariably without a frame, as they had never seemed worth framing, and when they were very dear they were to be had for forty francs. Connoisseurs appreciated his wide horizons, stormy skies, and ably sketched sea-shores. For, in spite of his poverty, Michel had now and then deserted Montmartre and found means to visit Normandy. Painfully precise in the beginning, while he worked with Swebach and Demarne, he had gradually become large and bold, and employed all means in giving expression to what he felt. He was a dreamer, who brought into his studies a unison of lights, and, now and then, beams of sun which would have delighted Albert Cuyp. A genuine offspring of the old Dutch masters—of the grand and broad masters, not of those who worked with a fine brush—already he was aiming at l’expression par l’ensemble, and since the Paris Universal Exhibition he has been fittingly honoured as the forerunner of Théodore Rousseau. His pictures, as it seems, were early received in various studios, and there they had considerable effect in setting artists thinking. But as he ceased to date his pictures after 1814 it is, nevertheless, difficult to be more precise in determining the private influence which this Ruysdael of Montmartre exerted on men of the younger generation.

One after the other they began to declare the Italian pilgrimage to be unnecessary. They buried themselves as hermits in the villages around the capital. The undulating strip of country, rich in wood and water, which borders on the heights of Saint-Cloud and Ville d’Avray, is the cradle of French landscape painting. In grasping nature they proceeded by the most various ways, whilst they drew everything scrupulously and exactly which an observing eye may discern, or wedded their own temperament with the moods of nature.

Baschet.
HUET.THE INUNDATION AT ST. CLOUD.

That remarkable artist Charles de la Berge seems like a forerunner of the English Pre-Raphaelite school. He declared the ideal of art to consist in painting everything according to nature, and overlooking nothing; in carrying drawing to the most minute point, and yet preserving the impression of unison and harmony in the picture—which is as easy to say as it is difficult to perform. His brief life was passed in this struggle. His pictures are miracles of patience: to see that it is only necessary to know the “Sunset” of 1839, in the Louvre. There is something touching in the way this passionate worker had branches and the bark of trees brought to his room, even when he lay on his deathbed, to study the contortions of wood and the interweaving of fibres with all the zeal of a naturalist. The efforts of de la Berge have something of the religious devotion with which Jan van Eyck or Altdorfer gazed at nature. But he died too young to effect any result. He copied the smallest particulars of objects with the utmost care, and in the reproduction even of the smallest aimed at a mathematical precision, neutralising his qualities of colour, which were otherwise of serious value, by such hair-splitting detail.

Camille Roqueplan, the many-sided pupil of Gros, made his first appearance as a landscape painter with a sunset in 1822. He opposed the genuine windmills of the old Dutch masters to those everlasting windmills of Watelet, with their leaden water and their meagre landscape. In his pictures a green plain, intersected by canals, stretches round; a fresh and luminous grey sky arches above. That undaunted traveller Camille Flers, who had been an actor and ballet dancer in Brazil before his appearance as a painter, represented the rich pastures of Normandy with truth, but was diffident in the presence of nature where she is grand. His pupil, Louis Cabat, was hailed with special enthusiasm by the young generation on account of his firm harmonious style. His pictures showed that he had been a zealous student of the great Dutch artists, and that it was his pride to handle his brush in their manner, expressing as much as possible without injuring pictorial effect. He is on many sides in touch with Charles de la Berge. Later he even had the courage to see Italy with fresh eyes, and in a simple manner to record his impressions without regard for the rules and theories of the Classicists. But the risk was too great. He became once more an admirer of imposing landscape, an adherent of Poussin, and as such he is almost exclusively known to us of a younger generation.

Baschet.
J. M. W. TURNER.

Paul Huet was altogether a Romanticist. In de la Berge there is the greatest objectivity possible, in Huet there is impassioned expression. His heart told him that the hour was come for giving passion utterance; he wanted to render the energy of nature, the intensity of her life, with the whole might of vivid colouring. In his pictures there is something of Byronic poetry; the conception is rich and powerful, the symphony of colour passionately dramatic. In every one of his landscapes there breathes the human soul with its unrest, its hopelessness, and its doubts. Huet was the child of an epoch, which at one moment exulted to the skies and at another sorrowed to death in the most violent contrast; and he has proclaimed this temper of the age with all the freedom and power possible, where it is only earth and sky, clouds and trees that are the medium of expression. Most of his works, like Romanticism in general, have an earnest, passionate, and sombre character; nothing of the ceremonial pompousness peculiar to Classical landscapes. He has a passion for boisterous storms and waters foaming over, clouds with the lightning flashing through them, and the struggle of humanity against the raging elements. In this effort to express as much as possible he often makes his pictures too theatrical in effect. In one of his principal works, the “View of Rouen,” painted in 1833, the breadth of execution almost verges on emptiness and panoramic view. Huet was in the habit of heaping many objects together in his landscapes. He delighted in expressive landscapes in the sense in which, at that time, people delighted in expressive heads. This one-sidedness hindered his success. When he appeared in the twenties his pictures were thought bizarre and melancholy. And later, when he achieved greater simplicity, he was treated by the critics merely with the respect that was paid to the Old Guard, for now a pleiad of much brighter stars beamed in the sky.

TURNER.A SHIPWRECK.