Realist, but always poet, in his treatment of these themes—and in the treatment of such a dramatic plate as “ncendie,” such a nobly imaginative plate as “La Mort et le Bûcheron”—Legros, when he betakes himself to landscape, is realist no longer, or, rather, his realism here is shown only in his contentment with the homely scene, the most everyday material. Generally, on impression of his landscape is that it is built to some extent upon the memories of his youth; that, since then, a little observation has gone a long way—that he has cared to dream and fancy rather than to actually notice. Here and there, in his etchings, one maybe reminded of the uplands around Dijon, or of the chalk hills of the Boulognais, with its wide fields and haystacks, its gaunt outhouses—a land which rumours of “high farming” have never reached. As the railway train swept under the hillside, Legros, one thinks, may have profited by a glance from the windows. And out of the glance, and out of the memory, and out of the artis genuine sympathy with humble and monotonous days, there has grown a homely poem.
With Mr. Whistler, on the rare occasions on which he has treated it in his mature art (in the rare “Dam Wood” especially), Landscape becomes Decoration. With Sir Seymour Haden, landscape is a matter that must be energetically observed. Swift, skilful memoranda are taken of it—memoranda which are not the less scientific because they may be dramatic besides. With Legros, the landscape must submit to change, to simplification, to abstraction, generalization even, in the processes of his mind; and the picture which his hand fashions—the hand with reverie behind it—is one which travel will help no one to encounter, and experience help no one to realize. Yet it has its own value.
Before I leave this deeply interesting and so original artist, I will add that in the “Catalogue Raisonné de uvre gravé et lithographié lphonse Legros,” compiled by Messieurs Thibaudeau and Poulet-Malassis in 1877, there are chronicled 168 pieces, but that, writing to me ten years later, M. Thibaudeau was able to tell of nearly ninety additions to the list. Since then the number has been yet further extended, for Legros, to this day, has not ceased to etch.
XII.
WILLIAM STRANG.
PROFESSOR, during something like a score of years, at the Slade School in London, Legros had then a dominating influence upon many amiable followers who will hardly hereafter be heard of, and upon two or three clever people with a future in Art. Among these latter—if, for our present purpose, we disregard men who are painters exclusively, like Tuke and Gotch—the most conspicuous are William Strang and Charles Holroyd. Strang is the senior. He has thus far, naturally, been much the most prolific. He is also the most technically accomplished, and, more than any younger etcher of the day—almost as much, indeed, as Monsieur Legros—he has shown himself possessed of the vital gift of imagination. Like Legros, he has looked immensely at Old Masters—at the Italian Primitives and at Rembrandt—and has seen Nature in great measure through their eyes, and this as much when Humanity as when Landscape has been the object of his gaze. In Stran case, too, to these accepted and avowed Old Masters, there has come to be added another Old Master—I mean, Alphonse Legros.
Strang is a Scotsman. That devotion to the weirdness and the uncanny, which is a note of the full Celtic temperament, is shown amazingly in his selection of subject; he is, perhaps, most of all contented with himself when he sets himself to illustrate a ballad of the supernatural, written in a dialect into the last recesses of which I—who love best the English tongue—lack, I confess, the energy to penetrate. His imagination, however, is far from being exercised alone on these themes of the supernatural. It is occupied, not seldom, with as great a power, upon modern incidents treated with quaintness and intensity—the meditations of a jury, the expositions of a preacher, the rescue of the drowned from some dark river, the ill-bred hysteria of the Salvation Army. In portraiture, while it is yet visible, and even valuable, it is controlled sometimes by sense of Style, and then we have, as in the almost Vandyke-like portraits of Mr. Sichel, and of Jan Strang—the nearest approach which Mr. Strang suffers himself to make to the wide domain of beauty. His customary indifference to charm of form, to charm of
