Before his time what was good in the so-called monumental painting of the nineteenth century was usually not new, but borrowed from more fortunate ages, and what was new in it, the narrative element, was not good, or at least not in good taste. When Paolo Veronese produced his pictures in the Doge’s Palace or Giulio Romano his frescoes in the Sala dei Giganti in Mantua, neither of them thought of the great mission of instructing the people or of patriotic sentiments; they wanted to achieve an effect which should be pictorial, festal, and harmonious in feeling. The task of painters who were entrusted with the embellishment of the walls of a building was to waken dreams and strike chords of feeling, to summon a mood of solemnity, to delight the eye, to uplift the spirit. What they created was decorative music, filling the mansion with its august sound as the solemn notes of an organ roll through a church. Their pictures stood in need of no commentary, no exertion of the mind, no historical learning. But the painting which in the nineteenth century did duty upon official occasions and was encouraged by governments for the sake of its pedagogical efficiency was not permitted to content itself with this general range of sentiment; it had to lay on the colours more thickly, and to appeal to the understanding rather than to sentiment. Descriptive prose took the place of lyricism.

Puvis de Chavannes went back to the true principle of the old painters by renouncing any kind of didactic intention in his art. In the Panthéon of Paris, when the eye turns to the works of Puvis de Chavannes after beholding all the admirable panels with which the recognised masters of the flowing line have illustrated the temple of St. Geneviève, when it turns from St. Louis, Clovis, Jeanne d’Arc, and Dionysius Sanctus to “The Girlhood of St. Geneviève,” it is as if one laid aside a prosy history of the world to read the Eclogues of Virgil.

In the one case there are archæological lectures, stage scenery, and histrionic art; in the other, simple poetry and lyrical magic, a marvellous evocation from the distant past of that atmosphere of legend which banishes the commonplace. His art would express nothing, would represent nothing; it would only charm and attune the spirit, like music heard faintly from the distance. His figures perform no significant actions; nor are any learned attributes employed in their characterisation, such as were introduced in Greece and at the Renaissance. He does not paint Mars, Vulcan, and Minerva, but war, work, and peace. In translating the word bellum into the language of painting in the Museum of Amiens he did not need academical Bellonas, nor sword-cuts, nor knightly suits of armour, nor fluttering standards. A group of mourning and stricken women, warlike horsemen, and a simple landscape sufficed him to conjure up the drama of war in all its terrible majesty. And he is as far from gross material heaviness as from academical sterility. The reapers toiling in his painting entitled “Summer” are modern in their movements and in their whole appearance, and yet they belong to no special time and seem to have been wafted into a world beyond; they are beings who might have lived yesterday, or, for the matter of that, a thousand years ago. The whole of existence seems in Puvis de Chavannes like a day without beginning or end, a day of Paradise, unchangeable and eternal. And very simple means sufficed him to attain this transcendental effect: like Millet, he generalises what is individual, and tempers what is presented in nature; antique nudity is associated in an unforced manner with modern costume; a designed simplicity, which has nothing of the academical painting of the nude, is expressed in the handling of form. Even his landscape he constructs upon its elementary forms, and by means of its essential, expressive features. But by a certain concordance of lines, by a distinct rhythm of form, he compasses a sentiment which is grave and solemn or idyllic.

PUVIS DE CHAVANNES.A VISION OF ANTIQUITY.
(By permission of the Artist.)

The Quattrocentisti, especially Ghirlandajo, were his models in this epical simplicity, and beside Baudry, the deft and spirited decorator of the most modernised High Renaissance style, he has the effect of a primitive artist risen from the grave. His pictures have an archaic bloom—something sacerdotal, if you will, something seraphic and holy. Often one fancies that one recognises the influence of old tapestries, to say nothing of Fra Angelico, but one is at a loss to give the model copied. And what places him like Moreau in sharp opposition to the old masters is that, instead of their sunny, smiling blitheness, he too is under the sway of that heavy melancholy spirit which the close of the nineteenth century first brought into the world.

When he, a countryman of Flandrin and Chenavard, began his career under Couture over half a century ago, the world did not understand his pictures. People blamed the poverty of his palette, asserted that he was too simple and restricted in his methods of colouring, and he was called a Lenten painter, un peintre de carême, whose dull eye noted nothing in nature except ungainly lines and uniformly grey tones. Women were especially unfavourable to him, taking his lean figures as a personal insult to themselves. Moreover, the calm and immobility of his figures were censured, and when he exhibited his earliest pictures in 1854, at the same time as those of Courbet, he was called un fou tranquille, just as the latter was christened un fou furieux. In later years it was precisely through these two qualities, his grandiose quietude and his “anæmic” painting, that he brought the world beneath his spell, and diverted French art into a new course.

PUVIS DE CHAVANNES.Baschet.
THE BEHEADING OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.
(By permission of the Artist.)

As his landscapes know nothing of agitated clouds, nor abruptness nor the strife of the elements, so his figures avoid all oratorical vehemence. They are eternally young, free from brutal passions, lost in oblivion. Let him conjure up old Hellas or the quiet life of the cloister, over figures and landscapes there always rests a tender sentiment of consecration and dreamy peace; no violent gesture and no loud tone disturb that harmony of feeling by any vehement action.

PUVIS DE CHAVANNES.THE THREADSPINNER.
(By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the picture.)