Neurdein frères, photo.
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES.THE POOR FISHERMAN.

Nor does the colour admit any discord in the large harmony. It is exceedingly soft and light, although subdued; it has that faint, deadened indecisiveness to be seen in faded tapestries or vanishing frescoes. Tender and delicate in its chalky grey unity, which banishes reality and creates a world of dreams, it is spread around the shadowy figures. It is impossible to imagine his pictures without this light so pure and yet veiled, this silvery, transparent air, impregnated with the breath of the Divine, as Plato would say; it is impossible to imagine them without the delicate tones of these pale green, pale rose-coloured, and pale violet dresses, which are as delicate as fading flowers, and without this flesh-tint, which lends a phantomlike and unearthly appearance to his figures. It is all like a melody pitched in the high, finely touched, and tremulous tones of a violin; it invites a mood which is at once blithe and sentimental, happy and sad, banishes all earthly things into oblivion, and carries one into a distant, peaceful, and holy world.

“Mon cœur est en repos, mon âme est en silence, Le bruit lointain du monde expire en arrivant, Comme un son éloigné qu’affaiblit la distance, À l’oreille incertaine apporté par le vent. J’ai trop vu, trop senti, trop aimé dans ma vie; Je viens chercher vivant le calme du Léthé: Beaux lieux, soyez pour moi ces bords où l’on oublie; L’oubli seul désormais est ma félicité. D’ici je vois la vie, à travers un nuage, S’évanouir pour moi dans l’ombre du passé... L’amitié me trahit, la pitié m’abandonne, Et, seul, je descends le sentier de tombeaux. Mais la nature est là qui t’invite et qui t’aime; Plonge-toi dans son sein qu’elle t’ouvre toujours; Quand tout change pour toi, la nature est la même, Est le même soleil se lève sur tes jours.”
Levy et ses Fils, photo.
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES.SUMMER.

It was not long before the doctrine of the two souls in Faust was exemplified in Germany also: from the fertile manure of Naturalism there sprang the blue flower of a new Romanticism. In Germany there had once lived Albrecht Dürer, the greatest and most profound painter-poet of all time; and there, too, even in an unpropitious age that genial visionary Moritz Schwind succeeded in flourishing. When the period of eclectic imitation had been overcome by Naturalism, was it not fitting that artists should once more attempt to embody the world of dreams beside that of actual existence, and beside tangible reality to give shape to the unearthly foreboding which fills the human heart with the visions and the cravings of fancy? In that age of hope arose the cult of Boecklin, and Germany began to honour in him who had been so long blasphemed the founder of a new and ardently desired art.

Burne-Jones, Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Arnold Boecklin make up the four-leaved clover of modern Idealism. To future generations they will bear witness to the sentiment of Europe at the close of the nineteenth century. All four are more or less of the same age; they all four began their work in the beginning of the fifties; and they were all different from their contemporaries and from those who had gone before them. They embodied the spirit of the future. Boecklin had gone through a process of change as little as the others. His spirit was so rich that it comprised a century in itself, and leads us now towards the century to come. He was the contemporary of Schwind, he is our own contemporary, and he will be the contemporary of those who come after us. And it were as impossible to derive his art from that of any previous movement as to explain how he, our greatest visionary, came to be born in Basle, the most prosaic town in Europe.

Levy et ses Fils, photo.
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. AUTUMN.

His father was a merchant there, and he was born in the year 1827. In 1846 he went to Schirmer in Düsseldorf, and upon Schirmer’s advice repaired to Brussels, where he copied the old Dutch masters in the gallery. By the sale of some of his works he acquired the means of travelling to Paris. He passed through the days of the Revolution of June in 1848, studied the pictures in the Louvre, and returned home after a brief stay to perform his military duties. In the March of 1850, when he was three-and-twenty, he went to Rome, where he entered the circle of Anselm Feuerbach; and in 1853 he married a Roman lady. In the following year he produced the decorative pictures in which he represented the relations of man to fire; these had been ordered for the house of a certain Consul Wedekind in Hanover, but were sent back as being “bizarre.” In 1856 he betook himself—rather hard up for money—to Munich, where he exhibited in the Art Union “The Great Pan,” which was bought by the Pinakothek. Paul Heyse was the medium of his making the acquaintance of Schack. And in 1858 he was appointed a teacher at the Academy of Weimar, by the influence of Lenbach and Begas. During this time he produced “Pan startling a Goat-herd” in the Schack Gallery, and “Diana Hunting.” After three years he was again in Rome, and painted there “The Old Roman Tavern,” “The Shepherd’s Plaint of Love,” and “The Villa by the Sea.” In 1866 he went to Basle to complete the frescoes over the staircase of the museum, and in 1871 he was in Munich, where “The Idyll of the Sea” was exhibited amongst other things. In 1876 he settled in Florence, in 1886 at Zürich. From 1895 until the day of his death, January 16, 1901, he lived like a patriarch of art in his country house on the ridge of Fiesole.