Hanfstaengl.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
DANTAN.A PLASTER CAST FROM NATURE.GERVEX.DR. PÉAN AT LA SALPÉTRIÈRE.
(By permission of the Artist.)

It would be impossible to classify painters according to further specialties. In fact, it is as little possible to bring individuals into categories as it was at the time of the Renaissance, when the painter busied himself at the same time with sculpture, architecture, and the artistic crafts. Great artists do not wall themselves up in a narrow space to be studied. Liberated from the studio and restored to nature, they endeavour, as in the best periods of art, to encompass life as widely as possible. A mere enumeration, such as chance offers, and such as will preserve a sense for the individuality of every man’s talent without attempting comparisons, seems therefore a better method to pursue than a systematic grouping which could only be attained artificially and by ambiguities.

The late Ulysse Butin settled down on the shore of the Channel and painted the life of the fishermen of Villerville, a little spot upon the coast near Honfleur. Sturdy, large-boned fellows drag their nets across the strand, carry heavy anchors ashore, or lie smoking upon the dunes. The rays of the evening sun play upon their clothes; the night falls, and a profound silence rests upon the landscape.

By preference Édouard Dantan has painted the interiors of sculptors’ studios—men turning pots, casting plaster, or working on marble, with grey blouses, contrasting delicately with the light grey walls of workrooms which are themselves flooded with bright and tender light. Very charming was “A Plaster Cast from Nature,” painted in 1887: in the centre was a nude female figure most naturally posed, whilst a fine, even atmosphere, which lay softly upon the girl’s form, streaming gently over it, was shed around.

Having cultivated in the beginning the province of feminine nudity with little success, in such pictures as “The Bacchante” of the Luxembourg, “The Woman with the Mask,” and “Rolla,” Henri Gervex, the spoilt child of contemporary French painting, turned to the lecture-rooms of the universities, and by his picture of Dr. Péan at La Salpétrière gave the impulse to the many hospital pictures, surgical operations, and so forth which have since inundated the Salon. With the upper part of her body laid bare and her lips half opened, the patient lies under the influence of narcotics, whilst Péan’s assistant is counting her pulse. His audience have gathered round. The light falls clear and peacefully into the room. Everything is rendered simply, without diffidence, and with confidence and quietude.

L’Art.
DUEZ.   ON THE CLIFF.

Duez, when he had had his first success in 1879 with a large religious picture—the triptych of Saint Cuthbert in the Luxembourg—appeared with animal pictures, landscapes, portraits, or fashionable representations of life in the streets and cafés. In the hands of such mild and complacent spirits as Friant and Goeneutte, Naturalism fell into a mincing, lachrymose condition; but in a series of quiet, unpretentious pictures Dagnan-Bouveret was more successful in meeting the growing inclination of recent years for contemplative repose, just as in the province of literature Ohnet, Malot, and Claretie, with their spirit of compromise, came after those stern naturalists Flaubert and Zola. According to the drawing of Paul Renouard, Dagnan-Bouveret is a little, black-haired man with a dark complexion and deep-set eyes, a short blunt nose, and a black pointed beard. There is nothing in him which betrays spirit, caprice, and audacity, but everything which is an indication of patience and endurance; and, as a matter of fact, such are the qualities by which he has gained his high position. He is a man of poetic talent, though rather tame, and stands to Bastien-Lepage and Roll as Breton to Millet. One often fancies that it is possible to observe in him that German Gemüth, that genial temper, for the satisfaction of which Frau Marlitt provided in fiction. A pupil of Gérôme, he made his first great success in the Salon of 1879 with the picture “A Wedding at the Photographer’s.” This was succeeded in 1882 by “The Nuptial Benediction”; in 1883 by “The Vaccination”; in 1884 by “The Horse-pond” of the Musée Luxembourg; in 1885 by a “Blessed Virgin,” a homely, thoughtful, and delicately coloured picture which gained him many admirers in Germany; and in 1886 by “The Consecrated Bread,” in which he was one of the first to take up the study of light in interiors. In a Catholic church there are sitting devout women—most of them old, but also one who is young—and children, while an acolyte is handing them consecrated bread. This simple scene in the damp village church, filled with a tender gloom, is rendered with a winning homely plainness, and with that touch of compassionate sentimentality which is the peculiar note of Dagnan-Bouveret. The “Bretonnes au Pardon” of 1889 thoroughly displayed this definitive Dagnan: a soft, peaceful picture, full of simple and cordial poetry. In the grass behind the church, the plain spire of which rises at the end of a wall, women are sitting, both young and old, in black dresses and white caps. One of them is reading a prayer from a devotional book. The rest are listening. Two men stand at the side. Everything is at peace; the scheme of colour is soft and quiet, while in the execution there is something recalling Holbein, and the effect is idyllically moving like the chime of a village bell when the sun is going down.

DUEZ.L’Art
THE END OF OCTOBER.
(By permission of the Artist.)

The zeal with which painters took up the study of contemporary life, so long neglected, did not, however, prevent the quality of French landscape painting from being exceedingly high. New parts of the world were no longer to be conquered. For fifteen years none of the nobler, nor of the less noble, landscapes of France had been neglected, nor any strip of field; there were no flowers that were not plucked, whether they were cultivated in forcing-houses or had sprung pallid in a dark garden of old Paris. It was only the joy in brightness and the newly discovered beauty of sunshine that brought with them any change of material. Following the Impressionists, the landscape painters deserted their forests. Those “woodland depths,” such as Diaz and Rousseau painted, seldom appear in the works of the most modern artists. In the severest opposition to such once popular scenes there lies the plain, the wide expanse stretching forth like a carpet in bright, shining tones under the play of tremulous sunbeams, and scarcely do a few trees break the quiet line of the distant horizon. At first the poorest and most humble corners were preferred. The painting of the poor brought even the most forlorn regions into fashion. Later, in landscape also, a bent towards the most tender lyricism corresponded with that inclination to idyllic sentiment which was on the increase in figure painting. These painters have a peculiar joy in the fresh mood of morning, when a light vapour hovers over the meadows and the waters, before it is dissolved into shining dew. They love the bloom of fruit-trees and the first smile of spring, or revel in the gradations of the dusk, rich as they are in shades of tint, mistily wan and grey, pale lilac, delicate green, and milky blue. The perspective is broad and fine; objects are entirely absorbed by the harmony of colour, and the older and coarser treatment of free light heightened to the most refined play by the most delicate shades of hue. And these colourists deriving from Corot, with their soft grey enveloping all, are opposed by others who strike novel and higher chords upon the keyboard of Manet—landscape painters whom such simple and intimate things do not satisfy, but who search after unexpected, fleeting, and extraordinary impressions, analysing fantastically combined effects of light.

L’Art.
DAGNAN-BOUVERET.   CONSECRATED BREAD.