(By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright.)
MONET.
HAY-RICKS.
(By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright.)
On many of his pictures, saturated as they are with light, Claude Monet could inscribe the name of Turner without inciting unbelief. In exceedingly unequal works, which are nevertheless full of audacity and genius, he has grasped what would seem to be intangible. Except Turner there is no one who has carried so far the study of the effects of light, of the gradations and reflections of sunbeams, of momentary phases of illumination, no one who has embodied more subtle and forcible impressions. For Monet man has no existence, but only the earth and the light. He delights in the rugged rocks of Belle-Isle, and the wild banks of the Creuse, when the oppressive sun of summer is brooding over them. He paints phenomena as transitory as the shades of expression in Renoir. The world appears in a glory of light, such as it only has in fleeting moments, and such as would be blinding were it always to be seen. Nature, in his version, is an inhospitable dwelling where it is impossible to dream and live. One hopes sometimes to hear a word of intimate association from Monet—but in vain; Claude Monet is only an eye. Carouses of sunshine and orgies in the open air are the exclusive materials of his pictures. Thus he has little to say for those who seek the soul of a human being in every landscape. Like Degas, he is par excellence the master in technique whose highest endeavour is to enrich the art of painting with novel sensations and unedited effects, even if it has to be done by violence. There are sea-pieces filled with the spirit of evening, when the sea, red as a mirror of copper, merges into the glory of the sky, in a great radiant ocean of infinity; moods of evening storm, when gloomy clouds over the restless tree-tops race across the smoky red sky, losing tiny shreds in their flight, little thin strips of loosened cloud, saturated through and through with a wine-red glow by the splendour of the sun. Or there are spring meadows fragrant with bloom, and hills parched by the sun; rushing trains with their white smoke gleaming in the light; yellow sails scudding over glittering waters; waves shining blue, red, and golden; and burning ships, with shooting tongues of flame leaping upon the masts; and, behind, a jagged rim of the evening glow. Claude Monet has followed light everywhere—in Holland, Normandy, the South of France, Belle-Isle-en-Mer, the villages of the Seine, London, Algiers, Brittany. He became an enthusiast for nature as she is in Norway and Sweden, for French cathedrals rising into the sky, tall and fair, like the peaks of great promontories. He interpreted the surge of towns, the movement of the sea, the majestic solitude of the sky. But he knows too that the artist could pass his life in the same corner of the earth and work for years upon the same objects without the drama of nature played before him ever becoming exhausted. For the light which streams between things is for ever different. So he stood one evening two paces in front of his little house, in the garden, amid a flaming sea of flowers scarlet like poppies. White summer clouds shifted in the sky, and the beams of the setting sun fell upon two stacks, standing solitary in a solitary field. Claude Monet began to paint, and came again the next day, and the day after that, and every day throughout the autumn, and winter, and spring. In a series of fifteen pictures, “The Hay-ricks,” he painted—as Hokusai did in his hundred views of the Fuji mountain—the endless variations produced by season, day, and hour upon the eternal countenance of nature. The lonely field is like a glass, catching the effects of atmosphere, the breeze, and the most fleeting light. The stacks gleam softly in the brightness of the beautiful afternoons, stand out sharp and clear against the cold sky of the forenoon, loom like phantoms in the mist of a November evening, or sparkle like glittering jewels beneath the caress of the rising sun. They shine like glowing ovens, absorbed by the light of the autumnal sunset; they are surrounded as by a rosy halo, when the early sun pierces like a wedge through the dense morning mist. They rise distinctly, covered with sparkling, rose-tinged snow, into the cloudless heaven, and cast their pure, blue shadows upon the silent, white, wintry landscape, or stand out in ghostly outlines against the night firmament, mantled with silver by the moonlight. Without moving his easel, Monet has interpreted the silence of winter, and autumn with her sad and splendid feasts of colour—dusk and rain, snow and frost and sun. He heard the voices of evening and the jubilation of morning; he painted the eternal undulation of light upon the same objects, the altered impression which the same particle of nature yields according to the changing light of the hour. He chanted the poetry of the universe in a single fragment of nature, and would be a pantheistic artist of world-wide compass had he merely painted these stacks of hay for the rest of his natural existence.
MONET.
Gaz des Beaux-Arts. A VIEW OF ROUEN.
(By permission of the Artist.)
And here ends the battle for the liberation of modern art. Libertas artibus restituta. The painters of the nineteenth century are no longer imitators, but have become makers of a new thing, “enlargers of the empire.” The prophetic words written in the beginning of the nineteenth century by the Hamburger, Philipp Otto Runge, “light, colour, and moving life,” were to form the great problem, the great conquest of modern art; they were fulfilled after two generations. Through the Impressionists art was enriched by an opulence of new beauties. A new and independent style had been discovered for the representation of new things, and a new province—a province peculiar to herself—was won for painting.
