Alfred Roll was born in Paris, and the artisan of the Parisian streets is the chief hero of his pictures. Like Zola in his Rougon-Macquart series, he set before himself the aim of depicting the social life of the present age in a great sequence of pictures—the workmen’s strike, war, and toil. His pictures give one the impression that one is looking down from the window upon an agitated scene in the street. And his broad, plebeian workmanship is in keeping with his rough and democratic subjects. He made a beginning in 1875 with the colossal picture of the “Flood at Toulouse.” The roofs of little peasants’ houses rise out of the expanse of water. Upon one of them a group of country people have taken refuge, and are awaiting a boat which is coming from the distance. A young mother summons her last remnant of strength to save her trembling child. Beside her an old woman is sitting, sunk in the stupor of indifference, while in front a bull is swimming, bellowing wildly in the water. The influence of Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” is indeed obvious; but how much more plainly and actually has the struggle for existence been represented here, than by the great Romanticist still hampered by Classicism. The devastating effect of the masses of water in all their elemental force could not have been more impressively rendered than has been done through this bull struggling for life with all its enormous strength.
In technique this picture belongs to the painter’s earlier phase. Even in the colouring of the naked figures it has still the dirty heaviness of the Bolognese. This bond which united him to the school of Courbet was broken when—probably under the influence of Zola’s Germinal—he painted “The Strike,” in 1880. The stern reality which goes through Zola’s accounts of the life of pit-men is likewise to be found in these ragged and starving figures, clotted with coal dust, assembling in savage desperation before the manufactory walls, prepared for a rising. The dull grey of a rainy November morning spreads above. In 1887 he painted war, war in the new age, in which one man is not pitted against another, but great masses of men, who kill without seeing one another, are made to manœuvre with scientific accuracy—war in which the balloon, distant signalling, and all the discoveries of science are turned to account. “Work” was the last picture of the series. There are men toiling in the hot, dusty air of Paris with sandstones of all sizes. Life-size, upon life-size figures, the drops of sweat were seen upon the apathetic faces, and the patches upon the blouses and breeches. Any one who only reckons as art what is fine and delicate will necessarily find these pictures brutal; but whoever delights in seeing art in close connection with the age, as it really is, cannot deny to Alfred Roll’s great epics of labour the value of artistic documents of the first rank.
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| RAFFAELLI. | Studio. THE CARRIER’S CART. |
| (By permission of the Artist.) | |
He devoted himself to the more delicate problems of light, especially in certain idyllic summer scenes, in which he delighted in painting life-size bulls and cows upon the meadow, and beside them a girl, sometimes intended as a milkmaid and sometimes as a nymph. Of this type was the picture of 1888, A Woman returning from Milking, “Manda Lamétrie, Fermière.” With a full pail she is going home across the sunny meadow. Around there is a gentle play of light, a soft atmosphere transmitting faint reflections, lightly resting upon all forms, and mildly shed around them. A yet more subtle study of light in 1889 was named “The Woman with a Bull.” Pale sunbeams are rippling through the fluttering leaves, causing a delicious play of fine tones upon the nude body of the young woman and the shining hide of the bull.
| Baschet. |
| RAFFAELLI. PARIS 4K. 1. |
| (By permission of the Artist.) |
On a strip of ground in the suburbs of Paris, where the town has come to an end and the country has not yet begun, Raffaelli, perhaps the most spirited of the Naturalists, has taken up his abode. He has painted the workman, the vagabond, the restlessness of the man who does not know where he is going to eat and sleep; the small householder, who has all he wants; the ruined man, overtaken by misfortune, whose only remaining passion is the brandy-bottle,—he has painted them all amid the melancholy landscape around Paris, with its meagre region still in embryo, and its great straight roads losing themselves disconsolately in the horizon. Théophile Gautier has written somewhere that the geometricians are the ruination of landscapes. If he lived in these days he would find, on the contrary, that those monotonous roads running straight as a die give landscape a strange and melancholy grandeur. One thinks of the passage in Zola’s Germinal, where the two socialists, Étienne and Suwarin, walk in the evening silently along the edge of a canal, which, with the perpendicular stems of trees at its side, stretches for miles, as if measured with a pair of compasses, through a monotonous flat landscape. Only a few low houses standing apart break the straight line of the horizon; only here and there, in the distance, does there emerge a human being, whose diminished figure is scarcely perceptible above the ground. Raffaelli was the first to understand the virginal beauty of these localities, the dumb complaining language of poverty-stricken regions spreading languidly beneath a dreary sky. He is the painter of poor people and of wide horizons, the poet and historian of humanity living in the neighbourhood of great cities. There sits a house-owner, or the proprietor of a shop, in front of his own door; there a pedlar, or a man delivering parcels, hurries across the field; there a rag-picker’s dog strays hungry about a lonely farmyard. Sometimes the wide landscapes are relieved by the manufactories, water and gas-works which feed the huge crater of Paris. At other times the snow lies on the ground, the skeletons of trees stand along the high-road, and a driver shouts to his team; the heavy cart-horses covered with worsted cloths, shiver, and an impression of intense cold strikes through you to your very bones. Indeed, Raffaelli’s austerity was first subdued a little when he came to make a lengthy residence in England. Then he acquired a preference for the light-coloured atmosphere and the gracious verdure of nature in England. He began to take pleasure in tender spring landscapes, in place of rigid scenes of snow. The poor soil no longer seems so hard and inhospitable, but becomes attractive beneath the soft, peaceful, bluish atmosphere. Even the uncivilised beings, with famine in their eyes, who wandered about in his earliest pictures, become milder and more resigned. The grandfather, in his blouse and wooden shoes, leads his grandchild by the hand amid the first shyly budding verdure. Old men sit quietly in the grounds of the alms-house, with the sun shining upon them. People no longer stand in the mist of November evenings with their teeth chattering from the frost, but breathe with delight the soft air of bright spring mornings.
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| RAFFAELLI. | THE HIGHROAD TO ARGENTEUIL. |
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| Studio. | Gaz. des Beaux-Arts. | ||
| RAFFAELLI. | LE CHIFFONIER. | DE NITTIS. | PARIS RACES. |
| (By permission of the Artist.) | |||
Raffaelli, for fifteen years the master of this narrowly circumscribed region, has recorded his impressions of it in an entirely personal manner, in a style which in one of his brochures he has himself designated “caractérisme.” And by comparing the costumed models in the pictures of the previous generation with the figures of Raffaelli, the happiness of this phrase is at once understood. In fact, Raffaelli is a great master of characterisation, and perhaps nowhere more trenchant than in the illustrations which he drew for the Revue Illustrée. Spirited caricatures of theatrical representations alternate with the grotesque figures of the Salvation Army. Yet he feels most in his element when he dives into the horrors of Paris by night. The types which he has created live; they meet you at every step, wander about the boulevards in the cafés and outside the barriers, and they haunt you with their looks of misery, vice, and menace.
Giuseppe de Nittis, an Italian turned a Parisian, a bold, searching, nervously excitable spirit, was the first gentilhomme of Impressionism, the first who made a transition from the rugged painting of the proletariat to coquettish pictures from the fashionable quarters of the city, and reconciled even the wider public to the principles of Impressionism by the delicate flavouring of his works.