Beside this amiable Pierrot Forain is like the modern Satyr, the true outcome of the Goncourts and Gavarni, the product of the most modern decadence. All the vice and grace of Paris, all the luxury of the world, and all the chic of the demi-monde he has drawn with spirit, with bold stenographical execution, and the elegance of a sure-handed expert. Every stroke is made with trenchant energy and ultimate grace. Adultery, gambling, chambres séparées, carriages, horses, villas in the Bois de Boulogne; and then the reverse side—degradation, theft, hunger, the filth of the streets, pistols, suicide,—such are the principal stages of the modern epic which Forain composed; and over all the Parisienne, the dancing-girl, floats with smiling grace like a breath of beauty. His chief field of study is the promenade of the Folies-Bergères—the delicate profiles of anæmic girls singing, the heavy masses of flesh of gluttonising gourmets, the impudent laughter and lifeless eyes of prostitutes, the thin waists, lean arms, and demon hips of fading bodies laced in silk. Little dancing-girls and fat roués, snobs with short, wide overcoats, huge collars, and long, pointed shoes—they all move, live, and exhale the odour of their own peculiar atmosphere. There is spirit in the line of an overcoat which Forain draws, in the furniture of a room, in the hang of a fur or a silk dress. He is the master of the light, fleeting seizure of the definitive line. Every one of his plates is like a spirited causerie, which is to be understood through nods and winks.

CARRIÈRE.MOTHERHOOD.

The name of Paul Renouard is inseparable from the opera. Degas had already painted the opera and the ballet-dancers with wonderful reality, fine irony, or in the weird humour of a dance of death. But Renouard did not imitate Degas. As a pupil of Pils he was one of the many who, in 1871, were occupied with the decoration of the staircase of the new opera house, and through this opportunity he obtained his first glance into this capricious and mysterious world made up of contrasts,—a world which henceforward became his domain. All his ballet-dancers are accurately drawn at their rehearsals, but the charm of their smile, of their figures, their silk tights, their gracious movements, has something which almost goes beyond nature. Renouard is a realist with very great taste. Girls practising at standing on the tips of their toes, dancing, curtseying, and throwing kisses to the audience are broadly and surely drawn with a few strokes. The opera is for him a universe in a nutshell—a résumé of Paris, where all the oddities, all the wildness, and all the sadness of modern life are to be found.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
BESNARD.   EVENING.

Mention must also be made of Daniel Vierge, torn prematurely from his art by a cruel disease, but not before he had been able to complete his masterpiece, the edition of Don Pablo de Segovia. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec too must be named, the grim historian of absinthe dens, music halls and dancing saloons; and we must give a passing glance to Léandre and Steinlen, in whose drawings also the whole of Parisian life breathes and pulsates, with all the glitter of over-civilisation, with all its ultra-refinement of pleasure. But a detailed appreciation of these draughtsmen is obviously out of place in a history of painting.

If we turn back to those who have done good work in the province of painting pure and simple, we must tarry for a while with that refined painter of elegiac landscape, Charles Cazin. He awaits us as the evening gathers, and tells with a vibrating voice of things which induce a mood of gentle melancholy. He has his own hour, his own world, his own men and women. His hour is that secret and mystic time when the sun has gone down and the moon is rising, when soft shadows repose upon the earth and bring forgetfulness. The land he enters is a damp, misty land with dunes and pale foliage, one that lies beneath a heavy sky and is seldom irradiated by a beam of hope, a land of Lethe and oblivion of self, a land created to yield to the tender colour of infinite weariness. The motives of his landscapes are always exceedingly simple, though they have a simplicity which is perhaps forced, instead of being entirely naïve. He represents, it may be, the entrance into a village with a few cottages, a few thin poplars, and reddish tiled roofs, bathed in the pale shadows of evening. Upon the broad street lined with irregular houses, in a provincial town, the rain comes splashing down. Or it is night, and in the sky there are black clouds, with the moon softly peering between them. Lamps are gleaming in the windows of the houses, and an old post-chaise rolling heavily over the slippery pavement. Or dun-green shadows repose upon a solitary green field with a windmill and a sluggish stream. The earth is wrapt in mysterious silence, and there is movement only in the sky, where a flash of lightning quivers—not one that blazes into intensely vivid light, but rather a silvery white electric spark lambent in the dark firmament. Corot alone has painted such things, but where he is joyous Cazin is elegiac. The little solitary houses are of a ghostly grey. The trees sway towards each other as if in tremulous fear. And the mist hangs damp in the brown boughs. Faint evening shadows flit around. A Northern malaria seems to prevail. At times a sea-bird utters a wailing complaint. One thinks of Russian novels, Nihilism, and Raskolnikoff, though I know not through what association of ideas. One is disposed to sit by the wayside and dream, as Verlaine sings:—

“La lune blanche Luit dans les bois; De chaque branche Part une voix. L’étang reflète, Profond miroir, La silhouette Du saule noir Où le vent pleure: Rêvons c’est l’heure. Un vaste et tendre Apaisement Semble descendre Du firmament Que l’astre irise: C’est l’heure exquise.”