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| DAUBIGNY. | LANDSCAPE: EVENING. |
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| Baschet. |
| CHINTREUIL. LANDSCAPE: MORNING. |
The first of the brilliant pleiad who did not come from Paris itself is Diaz, who in his youth worked with Dupré in the china manufactory of Sèvres. Of noble Spanish origin—Narciso Virgilio Diaz de la Peña ran his high-sounding name in full—he was born in Bordeaux in 1807, after his parents had taken refuge from the Revolution across the Pyrenees, and in his landscapes, too, perhaps, his Spanish blood betrays him now and then. Diaz has in him a little of Fortuny. Beside the great genius wrestling for truth and the virile seriousness of Rousseau, beside the gloomy, powerful landscapes of Dupré with their deep, impassioned poetry, the sparkling and flattering pictures of Diaz seem to be rather light wares. For him nature is a keyboard on which to play capricious fantasies. His pictures have the effect of sparkling diamonds, and one must surrender one’s self to this charm without asking its cause; otherwise it evaporates. Diaz has perhaps rather too much of the talent of a juggler, the sparkle of a magic kaleidoscope. “You paint stinging nettles, and I prefer roses,” is the characteristic expression which he used to Millet. His painting is piquant and as iridescent as a peacock’s tail, but in this very iridescence there is often an unspeakable charm. It has the rocket-like brilliancy and the glancing chivalry which were part of the man himself, and made him the best of good company, the enfant terrible, the centre of all that was witty and spirited in the circle of Fontainebleau.
He, too, was long acquainted with poverty, as were his great brother-artists Rousseau and Dupré. Shortly after his birth he lost his father. Madame Diaz, left entirely without means, came to Paris, where she supported herself by giving lessons in Spanish and Italian. When he was ten years old the boy was left an orphan alone in the vast city. A Protestant clergyman in Bellevue then adopted him. And now occurred the misfortune which he was so fond of relating in after-years. In one of his wanderings through the wood he was bitten by a poisonous insect, and from that time he was obliged to hobble through life with a wooden leg, which he called his pilon. From his fifteenth year he worked, at first as a lame errand boy, and afterwards as a painter on china, together with Dupré, Raffet, and Cabat, in the manufactory of Sèvres. Before long he was dismissed as incompetent, for one day he took it into his head to decorate a vase entirely after his own taste. Then poverty began once more. Often when the evening drew on he wandered about the boulevards under cover of the darkness, opened the doors of carriages which had drawn up at the pavement, and stretched out his hand to beg. “What does it matter?” he said; “one day I shall have carriages and horses, and a golden crutch; my brush will win them for me.” He exhibited a picture on speculation at a picture-dealer’s, in the hope of making a hundred francs; it was “The Descent of the Bohemians,” that picturesque band of men, women, and children, who advance singing, laughing, and shouting by a steep woodland road, to descend on some neighbouring village like a swarm of locusts. A Parisian collector bought it for fifteen hundred francs. Diaz was saved, and he migrated to the forest of Fontainebleau.
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| L’Art. |
| HARPIGNIES. | MOONRISE. |
His biography explains a great deal in the character of the painter’s art. His works are unequal. In his picture “Last Tears,” which appeared in the World Exhibition of 1855, and which stands to his landscapes as a huge block of copper to little ingots of gold, he entered upon a course in which he wandered long without any particular artistic result. He wanted to be a figure-painter, and with this object he concocted a style of painting by a mixture of various traditions, seeking to unite Prudhon, Correggio, and Leonardo. From the master of Cluny he borrowed the feminine type with a snub nose and long almond-shaped eyes, treated the hair like da Vinci, and placed over it the sfumato of Allegri. His drawing, usually so pictorial in its light sweep, became weak in his effort to be correct, and his colouring grew dull and monotonous by its imitation of the style of the Classicists. But during this period Diaz made a great deal of money, sold his pictures without intermission, and avenged himself, as he had determined to do, upon his former poverty. He, who had begged upon the boulevards, was able to buy weapons and costumes at the highest figure, and build himself a charming house in the Place Pigalle. In all that concerns his artistic position these works, which brought him an income of fifty thousand francs, and, for a long time, the fame of a new Prudhon, are nevertheless without importance. Faltering between the widely divergent influences of the old masters, he did not get beyond a wavering eclecticism, and was too weak in drawing to attain results worth mentioning. It is as a landscape painter that he will be known to posterity. He is said to have been the terror of all game as long as he was the house-mate of Rousseau and Millet in Fontainebleau, and wandered through the woods there with a gun on his arm to get a cheap supper. It is reported, too, that when his pictures were rejected by the Salon in those days he laughingly made a hole in the canvas with his wooden leg, saying: “What is the use of being rich? I can’t have a diamond set in my pilon!” It was however in the years before 1855, when he had nothing to do with any picture-dealer, that the immortal works of Diaz were executed.