CHAPTER XXXI

THE IMPRESSIONISTS

The name Impressionists dates from an exhibition in Paris which was got up at Nadar’s in 1871. The catalogue contained a great deal about impressions—for instance, “Impression de mon pot au feu,” “Impression d’un chat qui se promène.” In his criticism Claretie summed up the impressions and spoke of the Salon des Impressionistes.

The beginning of the movement, however, came about the middle of the sixties, and Zola was the first to champion the new artists with his trenchant pen. Assuming the name of his later hero Claude, he contributed in 1866 to L’Événement, under the title Mon Salon, that article which swamped the office with such a flood of indignant letters and occasioned such a secession of subscribers that the proprietor of the paper, the sage and admirable M. de Villemessant, felt himself obliged to give the naturalist critic an anti-naturalistic colleague in the person of M. Théodore Pelloquet. In these reviews of the Salon, collected in 1879 in the volume Mes Haines, and in the essay upon Courbet, the Painter of Realism—Courbet, the already recognised “master of Ornans “—those theories are laid down which Lantier and his friends announced at a later date in L’Œuvre. Then the architect Dubiche, one of the members of the young Bohème, dreamed in a spirit of presage of a new architecture. “With passionate gestures he demanded and insisted upon the formula for the architecture of this democracy, that work in stone which should give expression to it, a building in which it should feel itself at home, something strong and forcible, simple and great, something already proclaimed in our railway stations and our markets in the grace and power of their iron girders, but purified and made beautiful, declaring the largeness of our conquests.” A few years went by, and then the Paris Centenary Exhibition provided that something, though it was not in monumental stone. The great edifices were fashioned of glass and iron, and the mighty railway buildings were their forerunners. The enormous engine-rooms which gave space for thousands and the Eiffel Tower announced this new architecture. And as Dubiche prophesied a new architecture, so did Claude prophesy a new painting. “Sun and open air and bright and youthful painting are what we need. Let the sun come in and render objects as they appear under the illumination of broad daylight.” In Zola Claude Lantier is the martyr of this new style. He is scorned, derided, avoided, and cast out. His best picture is smuggled, through grace and mercy, into the Exhibition by a friend upon the hanging committee as a charité. But, ten years after, these new doctrines had penetrated all the studios of Paris and of Europe like germs borne in the air.

The artistic ideas of Claude Lantier were given to Zola by his friend Édouard Manet, the father of Impressionism, and in that way the creator of the newest form of art. Manet appeared for the first time in 1862. In 1865, when the Committee of the Salon gave up a few secondary rooms to the rejected, the first of his pictures which made any sensation were to be seen—a “Scourging of Christ” and a picture of a girl with a cat resting—both invariably surrounded by a dense circle of the scornful. Forty years before, the first works of the Romanticists, whose doctrine was likewise scoffed at in the formula Le laid c’est le beau, had called forth a similar outcry against the want of taste common to them all. A generation later people laughed at “The Funeral in Ornans,” and now the same derision was directed against Manet, who completed Courbet’s work. His pictures were held to be a practical joke which the painter was playing upon the public, the most unheard of farce that had ever been painted. If any one had declared that these works would give the impulse to a revolution in art, people would have turned their backs upon him or thought that he was jesting. “Criticism treated Manet,” wrote Zola, “as a kind of buffoon who put out his tongue for the amusement of street boys.” The rage against “The Scourging of Christ” went so far that the picture had to be protected by special precautions from the assaults of sticks and umbrellas.

But the matter took a somewhat different aspect when, five years afterwards, from twenty to thirty more recent pictures were exhibited together in Manet’s studio. Whether it was because the aims of the painter had become clearer in the meanwhile, or because his works suffered less from the proximity of others, they made an impression, and that although they represented nothing in the least adventurous and sensational. Life-size figures, light and almost without shadow, rowed over blue water, hung out white linen, watered green flower-pots, and leant against grey walls. The light colours placed immediately beside each other had a bizarre effect on the eye accustomed to chiaroscuro. The eye, which, like the human spirit, has its habitudes, and believes that it always sees nature as she is painted, was irritated by these delicately chosen tone-values which seemed to it arbitrary, by these novel harmonies which it took for discords. Nevertheless the clarity of the pictures made a striking effect, and something of “Manet’s sun” lingered in the memory. People still laughed, only not so loud, and they gave Manet credit for having the courage of his convictions. “A remarkable circumstance has to be recorded. A young painter has followed his personal impressions quite ingenuously, and has painted a few things which are not altogether in accord with the principles taught in the schools. In this way he has executed pictures which have been a source of offence to eyes accustomed to other paintings. But now, instead of abusing the young artist through thick and thin, we must be first clear as to why our eyes have been offended, and whether they ought to have been.” With these words criticism began to take Manet seriously. Charles Ephrussi and Duranty, besides Zola, came forward as his first literary champions in the press. “Manet is bold” was now the phrase used about him in public. The Impressionists took the salon by storm. And Manet’s bright and radiant sun was seen to be a better thing than the brown sauce of the Bolognese. It was as if a strong power had suddenly deranged the focus of opinion in all the studios, and Manet’s victory brought the same salvation to French art as that of Delacroix had done forty years before and that of Courbet ten years before. Manet et manebit. Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet are the three great names of modern French painting, the names of the men who gave it the most decisive impulses.

ÉDOUARD MANET.MANET.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
THE FIFER.
(By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright.)

Édouard Manet, le maître impressioniste, was born in 1832, in the Rue Bonaparte, exactly opposite the École des Beaux-Arts, and his life was quietly and simply spent, without passion and excitement, unusual events, or sanguinary battles. At sixteen, having passed through the Collège Rollin, he entered the navy with the permission of his parents, and made a voyage to Rio de Janeiro, which was accomplished without any incident of interest, without shipwreck or any one being drowned. With his cheerful, even temperament he looked on the boundless sea and satiated his eyes with the marvellous spectacle of waves and horizon, never to forget it. The luminous sky was spread before him, the great ocean rocked and sported around, revealing colours other than he had seen in the Salon. On his return he gave himself up entirely to painting. He is said to have been a slight, pale, delicate, and refined young man when he became a pupil of Couture in 1851, almost at the same time as Feuerbach. Nearly six years he remained with the master of “The Decadent Romans,” without a suspicion of how he was to find his way, and even after he had left the studio he was still pursued by the shade of Couture; he worked without knowing very well what he really wanted. Then he travelled, visiting Germany, Cassel, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and Munich, where he copied the portrait of Rembrandt in the Pinakothek; and then he saw Florence, Rome, and Venice. Under the influence of the Neapolitan and Flemish artists, to whom Ribot, Courbet, and Stevens pointed at the time, he gradually became a painter. His first picture, “The Child with Cherries,” painted in 1859, reveals the influence of Brouwer. In 1861 he exhibited, for the first time, the “double portrait” of his parents, for which he received honourable mention, although—or because—the picture was entirely painted in the old Bolognese style. These works are only of interest because they make it possible to see the rapidity with which Manet learnt to understand his craft with the aid of the old masters, and the sureness and energy with which he followed, from the very beginning, the realistic tendency initiated by Courbet. “The Nymph Surprised,” in 1862, was a medley of reminiscences from Jordaens, Tintoretto, and Delacroix. His “Old Musician,” executed with diligence but trivial in its realism, had the appearance of being a tolerable Courbet. Then he made—not at first in Madrid, which he only knew later, but in the Louvre—the eventful discovery of another old master, not yet known in all his individuality to the master of Ornans.