“Realism” having led painting from the past to the present, and “Impressionism” having broken the jurisdiction of the galleries by establishing an independent conception of colour for a new class of subjects, the flood of modern life, which had been artificially dammed, began to pour into art in all its volume. A whole series of new problems emerged, and a vigorous band of modern spirits were ready to lay hold upon them and give them artistic shape, each according to his nature, his ability, and his individual knowledge and power. After nineteenth-century painting had found its proper field of activity they were no longer under the necessity of seeking remote subjects. The fresh conquest of a personal impression of nature took the place of that retrospective taste which employed the ready-made language of form and colour belonging to the old masters, as a vocabulary for the preparation of fresh works of art. Nature herself had become a gallery of splendid pictures. Artists were dazzled as if by a new light, overcome as though by a revelation of tones and strains from which the painter was to compose his symphonies. They learnt how to find what was pictorial and poetic in the narrowest family circle and amongst the beds of the simplest vegetable garden; and for the first time they felt more wonder in the presence of reality, the joy of gradual discovery and of a leisurely conquest of the world.
Of course, plein-air painting was at first the chief object of their endeavours. Having painted so long only in brown tones, the radiant magic world of free and flowing light was something so ravishingly novel that for several years all their efforts were exclusively directed to possessing themselves once more of the sun, and substituting the clear daylight for the clare-obscure which had reigned alone, void of atmosphere. In this sunny brightness, flooded with light and air, they found a crowd of problems, and turned to the perpetual discovery of new chords of colour. Sunbeams sparkling as they rippled through the leaves, and greyish-green meadows flecked with dust and basking under light, were the first and most simple themes.
The complete programme, however, did not consist of painting in bright hues, but, generally speaking, in seizing truth of colour and altogether renouncing artificial harmony in a generally accepted tone. Thus, after the painting of daylight and sunlight was learnt, a further claim had still to be asserted: the ideal of truth in painting had to be made the keynote in every other task. For in the sun, light is no doubt white, but in the recesses of the forest, in the moonshine, or in a dim place, it shines and is at the same time charged with colour. Night, or mist, with its hovering and pervasive secrets, is quite as rich in beauties as the radiant world of glistening sunshine. After seeing the summer sun on wood and water, it was a relief for the eye to behold the subdued, soft, and quiet light of a room. Upon the older and rougher painting of free light there followed a preference for dusk, which has a softness more picturesque, a more tender harmony of colours, and more geniality than the broad light of day. Artists studied clare-obscure, and sought for an enhancement of colour in it; they looked into the veil of night, and addressed themselves to a painting of darkness such as could only have proceeded from the plein-air school. For this darkness of theirs is likewise full of atmosphere, a darkness in which there is life and breath and palpitation. In earlier days, when a night was painted, everything was thick and opaque, covered with black verging into yellow; to this latter error artists were seduced by the crusts of varnish upon old pictures. Now they learnt to interpret the mysterious life of the night, and to render the bluish-grey atmosphere of twilight. Or if figures were to be painted in a room, artists rendered the circulation of the air amid groups of people, which Correggio called “the ambient” and Velasquez “respiration.” And there came also the study of artificial illumination—of the delicate coloured charm of many-coloured lanterns, of the flaring gas or lamp-light which streams through the glass windows of shops, flaring and radiating through the night and reflected in a blazing glow upon the faces of men and women. Under these purely pictorial points of view the gradual widening of the range of subject was completed.
So long as the acquisition of sunlight was the point in question, representations from the life of artisans in town and country stood at the centre itself of artistic efforts, because the conception and technical methods of the new art could be tested upon them with peculiar success. And through these pictures painting came into closer sympathy with the heart-beat of the age. At an epoch when the labouring man as such, and the political and social movement in civilisation, had become matters of absorbing interest, the picture of artisans necessarily claimed an important place in art; and one of the best sides of the moral value of modern painting lies in its no longer holding itself in indifference aloof from these themes. When the century began, Hector and Agamemnon alone were qualified for artistic treatment, but in the natural course of development the disinherited, the weary and heavy-laden likewise acquired rights of citizenship. In the passage where Vasari speaks of the Madonnas of Cimabue, comparing them with the older Byzantine Virgins, he says finely that the Florentine master brought more “goodness of heart” into painting. And perhaps the historians of the future will say the same about the art of the present.
The predilection for the disinherited was in the beginning to such an extent identified with the plain, straightforward painting of the proletariat that Naturalism could not be conceived at all except in so far as it dealt with poverty: in making its first great successes it had sought after the miserable and the outcast, and serious critics recognised its chief importance in the discovery of the fourth estate. Of course, the painting of paupers, as a sole field of activity for the new art, would have been an exceedingly one-sided acquisition. It is not merely the working-man who should be painted, because the age must strive to compass in a large and full spirit the purport of its own complicated conditions of life. So there began, in general, the representation, so long needed, of the man of to-day and of society agitated, as it is, by the stream of existence. As Zola wrote in the very beginning of the movement: “Naturalism does not depend upon the choice of subject. The whole of society is its domain, from the drawing-room to the drinking-booth. It is only idiots who would make Naturalism the rhetoric of the gutter. We claim for ourselves the whole world.” Everything is to be painted,—forges, railway-stations, machine-rooms, the workrooms of manual labourers, the glowing ovens of smelting-works, official fêtes, drawing-rooms, scenes of domestic life, cafés, storehouses and markets, the races and the Exchange, the clubs and the watering-places, the expensive restaurants and the dismal eating-houses for the people, the cabinets particuliers and chic des premières, the return from the Bois and the promenades on the seashore, the banks and the gambling-halls, casinos, boudoirs, studios, and sleeping-cars, overcoats, eyeglasses and red dress-coats, balls, soirées, sport, Monte Carlo and Trouville, the lecture-rooms of universities and the fascination of the crowded streets in the evening, the whole of humanity in all classes of society and following every occupation, at home and in the hospitals, at the theatre, upon the squares, in poverty-stricken slums and upon the broad boulevards lit with electric light. Thus the new art flung aside the blouse, and soon displayed itself in the most various costumes, down to the frock-coat and the smoking-jacket. The rude and remorseless traits which it had at first, and which found expression in numbers of peasant, artisan, and hospital pictures, were subdued and softened until they even became idyllic. Moreover, the scale of painting over life-size, favoured in the early years of the movement, could be abandoned, since it arose essentially from competition with the works of the historical school. So long as those huge pictures covered the walls at exhibitions, artists who obeyed a new tendency were forced from the beginning—if they wished to prevail—to produce pictures of the same size. But since historical painting was finally dead and buried, there was no need to set up such a standard any longer, and a transition could be made to a smaller scale, better fitted for works of an intimate character. The dazzling tones in which the Impressionists revelled were replaced by those which were dim and soft, energy and force by subdued and tender treatment, largeness of size by a scale which was small and intimate.
That was more or less the course of evolution run through in all European countries in a similar way between the years 1875 and 1885. Just in the same way from this time onwards the Decorative-Stylists’ tendency set in universally. Hitherto everything was focused on the “picture as such.” Tasteless novelty or methodless imitation held sway over the applied arts. The endeavours of the next decade aimed at freeing the picture from its isolation and making the room itself a harmonious work of art. A long line of eminent artists took in hand the hitherto neglected subject of art in decoration; and as thereby new blood was infused into the applied arts, so on the other hand pictorial art in one way renounced its freedom to fit itself into its new frame. Colour, which formerly was determined principally by the lighting, now became subordinate to a decorative scheme. Truth is no longer the end and aim of art, but fitness, harmony of form and colour values. It is, however, obviously impossible to give verse and chapter to the history of this development, just as it would be impossible to fix a boundary line between the two roads, the Impressionistic on the one hand and the Decorative on the other. We will wander free from one country to another, and try to assign to each its proper place in the general chart of modern painting.
CHAPTER XXXIV
FRANCE