“It was a cold November morning. Cold it was certainly, but in compensation the morning vapour was as fine as snow turned into mist. Yonder in the crowded, populous, sooty quarters of the city, in Paris busy with trade and industry, this early vapour which settles in the broad streets is not to be found; the hurry of awakening life, and the confused movement of country carts, omnibuses, and heavy, rattling freight-waggons, have scattered, divided, and dispersed it too quickly. Every passer-by bears it away on his shabby overcoat, on his threadbare comforter, or disperses it with his baggy gloves. It dribbles down the shivering blouses and the waterproofs of toiling poverty, it dissolves before the hot breath of the many who have passed a sleepless or dissipated night, it is absorbed by the hungry, it penetrates into shops which have just been opened, into gloomy backyards, and it floats up the staircases, dripping on the walls and banisters, right up to the frozen attics. And that is the reason why so little of it remains outside. But in the spacious and stately quarter of Paris, upon the broad boulevards planted with trees and the empty quays the mist lay undisturbed, section over section, like an undulating mass of transparent wool in which one felt isolated, hidden, almost imbedded in splendour, for the sun rising lazily on the distant horizon already shed a mild purple glow, and in this light the mist level with the tops of the houses shone like a piece of muslin spread over scarlet.”

Cassell & Co.
HEILBUTH.FINE WEATHER.

This opening passage in Daudet’s Le Nabab most readily gives the mood awakened by Giuseppe do Nittis’ Parisian landscapes. De Nittis was born in 1846 at Barletta, near Naples, in poor circumstances. In 1868, when he was two-and-twenty years of age, he came to Paris, where Gérôme and Meissonier interested themselves in him. Intercourse with Manet led him to his range of subject. He became the painter of Parisian street-life as it is to be seen in the neighbourhood of the quays, the painter of mist, smoke, and air. The Salons of 1875 and 1876 contained his first pictures, the “Place des Pyramides” and the view of the Pont Royal, fine studies of mist with a tremulous grey atmosphere, out of which graceful little figures raise their faint, vanishing outlines. From that time he has stood at the centre of artistic life in Paris. He observed everything, saw everything, painted everything—a strip of the boulevards, the Place du Carrousel, the Bois de Boulogne, the races, the Champs Elysées, in the daytime with the budding chestnuts, the flower-beds blooming in all colours, the playing fountains, the women of grace and beauty, and the light carriages which crowd between the Arc de Triomphe, the Obelisk, and the Gardens of the Tuileries, and in the evening when chains of white and coloured lights flash among the dark trees. De Nittis has interpreted all atmospheric phases. He seized the intangible, the vibration of vapour, the dust of summer, and the rains of December days. He breathed the atmosphere, as it were, with his eyes, and felt with accuracy its greater or its diminished density. The great public he gained by his exquisite sense of feminine elegance. Of marvellous charm are the figures which give animation to the Place des Pyramides, the Place du Carrousel, the Quai du Pont Neuf—women in the most coquettish toilettes, men chatting together as they lean against a newspaper kiosk, flower-girls offering bouquets, loiterers carelessly turning over the books exposed for sale upon a stall, bonnes with short petticoats and broad ribbons, smart-looking boys with hoops, and little girls with the air of great ladies. Since Gabriel de Saint Aubin, Paris has had no more faithful observer. “De Nittis,” said Claretie in 1876, “paints modern French life for us as that brilliant Italian, the Abbé Galliani, spoke the French language—that is to say, better than we do it ourselves.”

L’Art.
ULYSSE BUTIN.

The summit of his ability was reached in his last pictures from England. One knows the London fogs of November, which hover over the town as black as night, so that the gas has to be lit at noon, fogs which are suffocating and shroud the nearest houses in a veil of crape. Scenes like this were made for de Nittis’ brush. He roamed about in the smoke of the city, observed the fashion of the season, the confusion of cabs and drays upon London Bridge, the surge and hurry of the human stream in Cannon Street, the vast panorama of the port of London veiled with smoke and fog, the fashionable West End with its magnificent clubs, the green, quiet squares and great, plainly built mansions; he studied the dense smoky atmosphere of fog compressed into floating phantom shapes, the remarkable effects of light seen when a fresh breeze suddenly drives the black clouds away. And again his eye adapted itself at once to the novel environment. It was not merely the blithe splendour of Paris that found an incomparable painter in Giuseppe de Nittis, but London also with its thick atmosphere and that mixture of damp, tawny fog and grey smoke. Piccadilly, the National Gallery, the railway bridge at Charing Cross, the Green Park, the Bank, and Trafalgar Square are varied samples of these English studies, which showed British painters themselves that not one of them had understood the foggy atmosphere of London as this tourist who was merely travelling through the town. “Westminster” and “Cannon Street,” a pair of dreary, sombre symphonies in ash-grey, perhaps display the highest of what De Nittis has achieved in the painting of air.

Born in Hamburg, though a naturalised Frenchman, Ferdinand Heilbuth took up again the cult of the Parisienne in the wake of Stevens, and as he turned the acquisitions of Impressionism to account in an exceedingly pleasing manner he seems, in comparison with Stevens, lighter and more vaporous and gracious. He painted water-scenes, scenes on the greensward or in the entrance squares of châteaux, placing in these landscapes girls in fashionable summer toilette. He was particularly fond of representing them in a white hat, a white or pearl-grey dress with a black belt and long black gloves, in front of a bright grey stream, seated upon a fallen trunk, with a parasol resting against it. The bloom of the atmosphere is harmonised in the very finest chords with the virginal white of their dresses and the fresh verdure of the landscapes. His pictures are little Watteaus of the nineteenth century, as discreet in effect as they are piquant.

L’Art.
BUTIN.THE DEPARTURE.

After Heilbuth’s death Albert Aublet, who in earlier days depicted sanguinary historical pieces, became the popular painter of girls, whose beauties are gracefully interpreted in his pictures. When he paints the composer Massenet, sitting at the piano surrounded by flowers and beautiful women,—when he represents the doings of the fashionable world on the shore at a popular watering-place, or young ladies plucking roses, or wandering meditatively in bright dresses amid green shrubs and yellow flowers, or going into the sea in white bathing-gowns, there may be nothing profound or particularly artistic in it all, but it is none the less charming, attractive, bright, joyous, and fresh.

Jean Béraud, another interpreter of Parisian elegance, has found material for numerous pictures in the blaze of the theatres, the naked shoulders of ballet-girls, the dress-coats of old gentlemen, the evening humour of the boulevards, the mysteries of the Café Anglais, the bustle of Monte Carlo, and the footlights of the Café-Concert. But absolute painter he is not. One would prefer to have a less oily heaviness in his works, a bolder and freer execution more in keeping with the lightness of the subject, and for this one would willingly surrender the touches of genre which Béraud cannot let alone even in these days. But his illustrations are exceedingly spirited.