Manet had a passion for the world. He was a man with a slight and graceful figure, a beard of the colour known as blond cendré, deep blue eyes filled with the fire of youth, a refined, clever face, aristocratic hands, and a manner of great urbanity. With his wife, the highly cultured daughter of a Dutch musician, he went into the best circles of Parisian society, and was popular everywhere for his trenchant judgment and his sparkling intellect. His conversation was vivid and sarcastic. He was famous for his wit à la Gavarni. He delighted in the delicate perfume of drawing-rooms, the shining candle-light at receptions; he worshipped modernity and the piquant frou-frou of toilettes; he was the first who stood with both feet in the world which seemed so inartistic to others. Thus the progress made in the acquisition of subject and material may be seen even in the outward appearance of the three pioneers of modern art. Millet in his portrait stands in wooden shoes, Courbet in his shirt-sleeves; Manet wears a tall hat and a frock-coat. Millet, the peasant, painted peasants. Courbet, the democrat from the provinces, gave the rights of citizenship to the artisan, but without himself deserting the provinces and the bourgeoisie. He was repelled by everything either distinguished or refined. In such matters he could not find the force and vehemence which were all he sought. Manet, the Parisian and the man of refinement, gave art the elegance of modern life.
In the year 1879 he made the Parisian magistracy the offer of painting in the session-room of the Town Hall the entire Ventre de Paris, the markets, railway stations, lading-places, and public gardens, and beneath the ceiling a gallery of the celebrated men of the present time. His letter was unanswered, and yet it gave the impulse to all those great pictures of contemporary life painted afterwards in Paris and the provinces for the walls of public buildings. In 1880 he received, through the exertions of his friend Antonin Proust, a medal of the second class, the only one ever awarded to him. And the dealer Duret began to buy pictures from him; Durand-Ruel followed suit, and so did M. Faure, the singer of the Grand Opera, who himself is the owner of five-and-thirty Manets. The poor artist did not long enjoy this recognition. On 30th April 1883, the varnishing day at the Salon, he died from blood-poisoning and the consequences of the amputation of a leg.
But the seed which he had scattered had already thrown out roots. It had taken him years to force open the doors of the Salon, but to-day his name shines in letters of gold upon the façade of the École des Beaux-Arts as that of the man who has spoken the most decisive final utterance on behalf of the liberation of modern art. His achievement, which seems to have been an unimportant alteration in the method of painting, was in reality a renovation in the method of looking at the world and a renovation in the method of thinking.
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| Mansell Photo. | |
| DEGAS. | THE BALLET SCENE IN ROBERT THE DEVIL. |
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| DEGAS. | THE BALLET IN DON JUAN. |
| (By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright.) | |
| DEGAS. A BALLET DANCER. |
| (By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright.) |
Up to this time it was only the landscape painters who had emancipated themselves from imitation of the gallery tone, and what was done by Corot in landscape had, logically enough, to be carried out in figure-painting likewise; for men and women are encompassed by the air as much as trees. After the landscape painters of Barbizon had made evident the vast difference between the light of day and that of a closed room in their pictures painted in the open air, the figure-painters, if they made any claim to truth of effect, could no longer venture to content themselves with the illumination falling upon their models in the studio, when they were painting incidents taking place out of doors. Yet even the boldest of the new artists did not set themselves free from tradition. Even after they had become independent in subject and composition they had remained the slaves of the old masters in their intuition of colour. Some imitated the Spaniards, without reflecting that Ribera painted his pictures in a small, dark studio, and that the cellar-light with which they were illuminated was therefore correct, whereas applied, in the present age, to the bright interiors of the nineteenth century it was utterly false. Others treated open-air scenes as if they were taking place in a ground-floor parlour, and endeavoured by curtains and shutters to create a light similar to that which may be found in old masters and pictures dimmed with age. Or the artist painted according to a general recipe and in complete defiance of what he saw with his eyes. For instance, an exceedingly characteristic episode is told of the student days of Puvis de Chavannes. Upon a grey, misty day the young artist had painted a nude figure. The model appeared enveloped in tender light as by a bright, silvery halo. “That’s the way you see your model?” grumbled Couture indignantly when he came to correct the picture. Then he mixed together white, cobalt blue, Naples yellow, and vermilion, and turned Puvis de Chavannes’ nude grey figure by a universal recipe into one that was highly coloured and warmly luminous—such a figure as an old master might perhaps have painted under different conditions of light. With his “Fiat Lux” Manet uttered a word of redemption that had hovered upon many lips. The jurisdiction of galleries was broken now also in regard to colour; the last remnant of servile dependence upon the mighty dead was cast aside; the aims attained by the landscape painters thirty years before were reached in figure-painting likewise.