Courbet and Ribot for France, Holman Hunt and Madox Brown for England, Stevens for Belgium, Menzel, Lenbach, and Leibl for Germany, are the great names of modern Realism, the names of the men who subjected modern life to art, and subjected art to the nineteenth century.

One point, however, the question of colour, still remained unsolved: as the preceding generation took their form, so these painters took their colour, not from nature, but from the treasury of old art.

Courbet announced it as his programme to express the manners, ideas, and aspect of his age—in a word, to create living art. He described himself as the sincere lover of la vérité vraie: “la véritable peinture doit appeler son spectateur par la force et par la grande vérité de son imitation.” But one may question how far his figures, and the environment of them, are true in colour? Where there is a delightful subtlety of fleeting nuances in nature, an oppressive opaque heaviness is found in this modern Caravaggio of Franche-Comté. He certainly painted modern stone-breakers, but it was in the tone of saints of the Spanish school of the seventeenth century. His pictures of artisans have the odour of the museum. The home of his men and women is not the open field of Ornans, but that room in the Louvre where hang the pictures of Caravaggio.

Alfred Stevens made a great stride by painting modern Parisiennes. Whereas the costume picture had up to his time sought the truth of the old masters only in the matter of the skirts which the fashion of their age prescribed, Stevens was the first to dress his women in the garb of 1860, just as Terborg painted his in the costume of 1660 and not of 1460. But the very atmosphere in which the Parisienne of the nineteenth century lived is no longer that in which the women of de Hoogh moved. The whole of life is brighter. The studios in which pictures are painted are brighter, and the rooms in which they are destined to hang. Van der Meer of Delft, the greatest painter of light amongst the Dutch, still worked behind little casements; and in dusky patrician dwellings, “where the very light of heaven breaks sad through painted window,” his pictures were ultimately hung. The old masters paid special attention to these conditions of illumination. The golden harmony of the Italian Renaissance came into being from the character of the old cathedrals furnished with glass windows of divers colours; the half-light of the Dutch corresponded to the dusky studios in which painters laboured, and the gloomy, brown-wainscoted rooms for which their pictures were destined. The nineteenth century committed the mistake even here of regarding what was done to meet a special case as something absolute. Rooms had long become bright when studios were artificially darkened, and artists still sought, by means of coloured windows and heavy curtains, to subdue the light, so as to be able to paint in tones dictated by the old masters. Stevens shed over a modern woman, a Parisienne, sitting in a drawing-room in the Avenue de Jena, the light of Gerard Dow, without reflecting that this illumination, filtered through little lattice-windows, was quite correct in Holland during the seventeenth century, but no longer proper in the Paris of 1860, in a salon where the windows had great cross-bars and clear white panes which were not leaded. It is chiefly this that makes his pictures untrue, lending them an old Flemish heaviness, something earthy, savouring of the clay, and not in keeping with the fresh fragrance of the modern Parisienne. Her modernity is seen through the yellowish glass which the old Flemish masters seemed to hold between Stevens and his model.

Quantin, Paris.Quantin, Paris.
HOKUSAI IN THE COSTUME OF A JAPANESE WARRIOR.HOKUSAI.WOMEN BATHING.

Considered as a separate personality Ribot, too, is a great artist; his works are masterpieces. Yet when young men spoke of him as the last representative of the school of cellar-windows there was an atom of truth in what they said. Like Courbet, he continued the art of galleries. The master of a style and yet the servant of a manner, he marks the summit of a tendency in which the great traditions of Frans Hals and Ribera were once more embodied. When he paints subjects resembling the themes of these old masters he is as great as they are, as genuine and as much a master of style; but as soon as he turns to other subjects the imitative mannerist is revealed. Even things as tender and unsubstantial as the flowers of the field seem as if they were made of wax. His disdain for what is light, fluent, and fickle, like air and water, is evident in his sea-pieces. His steamers plough their way through a greyish-black sea beneath a thick black stormy sky, as though through grey deserts. Nature quivering in the air and bathed in light is not so heavy and compact, nor has it such plasticity of appearance. His women reading are the ne plus ultra of painting; only it is astonishing that any human being can read in such a dark room.

Ribot’s parallel in Germany is Lenbach, who had less pictorial and greater intellectual power. As a painter of copies, particularly copies of the artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he formed and perfected a school for the understanding of the old masters, as none of his contemporaries had done. The copies which he made as a young man for Count Schack in Italy and Spain are probably the best translations by the brush that have ever been executed. He has reproduced Titian and Rubens, Velasquez and Giorgione, with equal magic; no other painter has entered into all the subtleties of their technique with such intelligence and keenness; and by the aid of these sleights of art, which he learnt as a copyist from classic masterpieces, he communicated to his own works that impress which qualifies them for the gallery and suggests the old masters with such refinement. His pictures mark the summit of ability reached in Germany in the pictorial style of the old artists.

But, at the same time, his weakness lies in this very eminence. The man who had passed through the high-school of the old masters with the greatest success was entered as a student for life, and never took the professorial chair himself. Helferich has called him the impersonated spirit of the galleries, the spirit which is centuries old.

Quantin, Paris.
HOKUSAI.   FUSIYAMA SEEN THROUGH A SAIL.

This indicates the direction which must be taken by the further development of painting. A really new and independent art must finally emancipate itself from the Renaissance colouring, the tone of Church painting, and the chiaroscuro of pictures painted behind the variegated panes of lattice-windows. It must be evident that the methods of the old Spanish and old Dutch schools, excellent in themselves, were fully in keeping with strange scenes of martyrdom or quiet interiors with peasants and fat matrons, but that they could not possibly be employed in pictures of artisans beneath the free sky, nor in those of elegant interiors of our own days, nor of pale and delicate Parisiennes attired in silks, beings of a new epoch. A different period necessitates different methods. It is not merely that the subjects of art change, but the way in which they are handled must bear the marks of the period. Nature should no longer be studied through the prism of old pictures, and the phrase beau par la vérité must be exalted to a principle applying to colour also.