Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
BESNARD.   PORTRAIT OF MLLES. D.

Sometimes the humour of the landscape is associated with the memory of kindred feelings which passages in the Bible or in old legends have awakened in him. In such cases he creates the biblical or mythological pictures which have principally occupied him in recent years. Grey-green dusk rests upon the earth; the shadows of evening drive away the last rays of the sun. A mother with her child is sitting upon a bundle of straw in front of a thatched cottage with a ladder leaning against its roof, and a poverty-stricken yard bordered by an old paling, while a man in a brown mantle stands beside her, leaning upon a stick: this picture is “The Birth of Christ.” Two solitary people, a man and a woman, are walking through a soft, undulating country. The sun is sinking. No house will give the weary wanderers shelter in the night, but the shade of evening, which is gradually descending, envelops them with its melancholy peace: this is “The Flight into Egypt.” An arid waste of sand, with a meagre bush rising here and there, and the parching summer sun brooding sultry overhead, forms the landscape of the picture “Hagar and Ishmael.” Or the fortifications of a mediæval town are represented. Night is drawing on, watch-fires are burning, brawny figures stand at the anvil fashioning weapons, and the sentinels pace gravely along the moat. The besieged town is Bethulia, and the woman who issues with a wild glance from the town gateway is Judith, going forth followed by her handmaid to slay Holofernes. Through such works Cazin has become the creator of the landscape of religious sentiment, which has since occupied so much space in French and German painting. The costume belongs to no time in particular, though it is almost more appropriate to the present than to bygone ages; but something so biblical, so patriarchal, such a remote and mystical poetry is expressed in the great lines of the landscape that the figures seem like visions from a far-off past.

The continuation of this movement is marked by that charming artist who delighted in mystery, Eugène Carrière, “the modern painter of Madonnas,” as he has been called by Edmond de Goncourt. Probably no one before him has painted the unconscious spiritual life of children with the same tender, absorbed feeling: little hands grasping at something, stammering lips of little ones who would kiss their mother, dreamy eyes gazing into infinity. But although young children at the beginning of life, whose eyes open wide as they turn towards the future, look out of his pictures, a profound sadness rests over them. His figures move gravely and silently in a soft, mysterious dusk, as though divided from the world of realities by a veil of gauze. All forms seem to melt, and fading flowers shed a sleepy fragrance around; it is as though there were bats flitting invisible through the air. Even as a portrait painter he is still a poet dreaming in eternal haze and a twilight of mystery. In his portraits, Alphonse Daudet, Geffroy, Dolent, and Edmond de Goncourt looked as though they had been resolved into vapour, although the delineation of character was of astonishing power, and marked firmly with a penetrative insight into spiritual life such as was shared by Ribot alone.

At the very opposite pole of art stands Paul Albert Besnard: amongst the worshippers of light he is, perhaps, the most subtle and forcible poet, a luminist who cannot find tones high enough when he would play upon the fibres of the spirit. Having issued from the École des Beaux-Arts, and gained the Prix de Rome with a work which attracted much notice, he had long moved upon strictly official lines; and he only broke from his academical strait-waistcoat about a dozen years ago, to become the refined artist to whom the younger generation do honour in these days, a seeker whose works vary widely in point of merit, though they always strike one afresh from the bold confidence with which he attacks and solves the most difficult problems of light. In Puvis de Chavannes, Cazin, and Carrière a reaction towards sombre effect and pale, vaporous beauty of tone followed the brightness of Manet; but Besnard, pushing forward upon Manet’s course, revels in the most subtle effects of illumination—effects not ventured upon even by the boldest Impressionists—endeavours to arrest the most unexpected and unforeseen phases of light, and the most hazardous combinations of colour. The ruddy glow of the fire glances upon faded flowers. Chandeliers and tapers outshine the soft radiance of the lamp; artificial light struggles with the sudden burst of daylight; and lanterns, standing out against the night sky like golden lights with a purple border, send their glistening rays into the blue gloom. It is only in the field of literature that a parallel may be found in Jens Pieter Jacobsen, who in his novels occasionally describes with a similar finesse of perception the reflection of fire upon gold and silver, upon silk and satin, upon red and yellow and blue, or enumerates the hundred tints in which the September sun pours into a room.

The portrait group of his children is a harmony in red. A boy and two girls are standing, with the most delightful absence of all constraint, in a country room, which looks out upon a mountainous landscape. The wall of the background is red, and red the costume of the little ones, yet all these conflicting nuances of red tones are brought into harmonious unity with inherent taste. Rubens would have rejoiced over a second landscape exhibited in the same year. A nude woman is seated upon a divan drinking tea, with her feet tucked under her and her back to the spectator. Upon her back are cast the warm and the more subdued reflections of a fire which lies out of sight and of the daylight quivering in yellowish stripes, like a glowing aureole upon her soft skin.

Studio.
AMAN-JEAN.SOUS LA GUERLANDA.

In a third picture, called “Vision de Femme,” a young woman with the upper part of her form unclothed appears upon a terrace, surrounded by red blooming flowers and the glowing yellow light of the moon. Under this symbol Besnard imagined Lutetia, the eternally young, hovering over the rhododendrons of the Champs Elysées and looking down upon the blaze of lights in the Café des Ambassadeurs. In 1889 he produced “The Siren,” a symphony in red. A petite femme of Montmartre stands wearily in a half-antique morning toilette before a billowing lake, which glows beneath the rays of the setting sun in fiery red and dull mallow colour. In his “Autumn” of 1890 he made the same experiment in green. The moon casts its silvery light upon the changeful greenish mirror of a lake, and at the same time plays in a thousand reflections upon the green silk dress of a lady sitting upon the shore; while, in a picture of 1891, a young lady in an elegant négligé is seated at the piano, with her husband beside her turning over the music. The light of the candles is shed over hands, faces, and clothes. Another picture, called “Clouds of Evening,” represented a woman with delicate profile amid a violet landscape over which the clouds were lightly hovering, touched with orange-red by the setting sun. The double portrait, executed in 1892, of the “Mlles. D——,” one of whom is leisurely placing a scarf over her shoulders with a movement almost recalling Leighton, while the other stoops to pick a blossom from a rhododendron bush, is exceedingly soft in its green, red, and blue harmony.

The French Government recognised the eminent decorative talent displayed in these pictures, and gave Besnard the opportunity of achieving further triumphs as a mural painter. Here, too, he is modern to his fingertips, knowing nothing of stately gestures, nothing of old-world naïveté; but merely through his appetising and sparkling play of colour he has the art of converting great blank spaces into a marvellous storied realm.

In 1890 he had to represent “Astronomy” as a ceiling-piece for the Salon des Sciences in the Hôtel de Ville. Ten years before there would have been no artist who would not have executed this task by the introduction of nude figures provided with instructive attributes. One would have held a globe, the second a pair of compasses, and the third a telescope in one hand, and in the other branches of laurel wherewith to crown Galileo, Columbus, or Kepler. Besnard made a clean sweep of all this. He did not forget that a ceiling is a kind of sky, and accordingly he painted the planets themselves, the stars which run their course through the firmament of blue. The figures of the constellations are arranged in a gracious interplay of light bodies floating softly past. Amongst the pictures of the École de Pharmacie a like effect is produced by Besnard’s great composition “Evening,” a work treated with august simplicity. The atmosphere is of a grey-bluish white: stars are glittering here and there, and two very ancient beings, a man and a woman, sit upon the threshold of their house, grave, weather-beaten forms of quiet grandeur, executed with expressive lines. The old man casts a searching glance at the stars, as if yearning after immortality, while the woman leans weary and yet contented upon his shoulder. In the room behind a kettle hangs bubbling over the fire, and a young woman with a child upon her arm steps through the door: man and the starry world, the finite and the infinite, presented under plain symbols.