The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

In fact, if we consider the differences between the system of education in painting and that in music or any other art or occupation in which the highest executive ability is required, we shall see that we give insufficient opportunity for the painter's hand to acquire the subtle skill we find in the successful violinist or pianist, and which is due to the early and incessant practice in the manual operations of his art. The fact is recognized, that the education of a violinist must begin in the early years, when the will and hand are flexible, and not merely the training, but the occupation, is almost exclusive, for the specialist is made only by a special and relatively exclusive devotion to the particular faculties which are desired to be trained. It is useless to attempt to develop the finest qualities of the draughtsman without the same attention to the condition of training which we insist on in the musician. The theory may come later, the intellectual element may develop under many influences, and healthily, later in life, but the hand is too fine and subtly constituted an implement to be brought into its best condition and efficiency unless trained from the beginning to the definite use imposed on it.

Admitting, therefore, as I do, that the criticism of Delacroix was just, it is evident that, until we give to the modern student of painting a similar training to that which the early one had, we cannot expect him to attain the executive powers of the Italian renaissance, nor can we be sure that he appreciates the subtlety of the work of the masters, any more than the member of a village choir can understand the finesse of the highest order of musical execution, or its first violinist appreciate the touch of a Joachim or a Sarasate. For it is just in the last refinement of touch of a Raphael drawing or the rapid and expressive outline of a Mantegna that we find the analogy between the two arts, in a refinement of touch which is lost on the public, and appreciated only by the practiced student either of music or painting. This final attainment of the hand is only possible to a man who has been trained as a boy to his work. We find it in a water-color drawing of Turner, as in a pencil drawing of Raphael, and in the outlines of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but in modern figure painting never, even in France, where the youth generally takes up the training at fourteen to sixteen. I believe that the reason why this supreme manual excellence is so completely lacking, even in French art, that, so far as I know, only Meissonier amongst them has attained a measure of it, is that the seriousness of life and purpose necessary for any consummate achievement is so rarely found there in conjunction with that early and sound training.

Another acquaintance made in these days, which has always remained a delight to me, was that of Théodore Rousseau, to my mind the greatest of the French landscape painters. Though living and working mostly at Barbison, he had a studio in Paris, and there I used to see him, always received in the friendly and helpful way which was characteristic of most of the French artists of the higher order. Later I went to Barbison, where, besides Rousseau, I knew J.F. Millet, and a minor, but in his way a very remarkable, painter, Charles Jacque. Rousseau was a most instructive talker on art, beyond the sphere of which he hardly seemed to care to go in his thinking. He had never been out of France, had never seen the Alps, and did not care for mountain scenery, but concentrated all his feelings and labor on what he used to call "sujets intimes," the picturesque nooks of landscape one can always find in a highly cultivated country, where nature is tamed to an intimacy with the domestic spirit, or where she vainly struggles against the invasion of culture, as in the borders of the forest of Fontainebleau. In such material, nature withdraws farther and makes a wider margin for art, and the wedding and welding of the two become more subtle and playful.

It has always seemed to me that with all the differences inherent in the antagonism of the characters of the two men, the essential features of the art of Rousseau and Turner were the same; pure impressionism based on the most intimate and largest knowledge of the facts of nature, but without direct copying of them—rather working from memoranda or memories, for neither ever painted directly from nature; the same conception of the subject as a whole, its rhythmic and harmonic unity as opposed to the fragmentary manner of treatment of most of their contemporaries; the lyric passion in line and tint; the same originality which often became waywardness in the conception of subject in itself; the same revolt from all precedent; and the same passion for subtle gradation and infinite space, air, and light—and some of Rousseau's skies were the most vaporous I have ever seen. These are the fundamental agreements of the art of the two great masters, and in those qualities no other man of their countries and epoch has equaled them, but outside of these the contrasts are of the most pronounced. Pyne told me that Turner said he wished he could do without trees; Rousseau worshiped them. Turner loved the mountains; Rousseau never cared to see them and never painted one. Turner, a colorist, reveled in color like a Bacchanal; Rousseau, a tonalist, felt it like a vestal; but both had the sense of color in the subtlest refinement.

Rousseau used to say that if you had not your picture in the first five lines you would never have it, and he laid down as a rule that whenever you worked on it you should go over the whole and keep it together, growing in all parts pari passu. Wishing to give me a lesson in values one day as he was painting, he turned his palette over and painted a complete little scheme of a picture on the back of it, suggested by the subject before us as we looked out of the studio window. He showed me his studies from nature, mere notes of form and of local color and pastel. It was to me always a puzzle that, even in the educated art circles of Paris, Corot should have found so great a popularity as compared to that of Rousseau. Without in the least disparaging the greatness of Corot's best work, such for instance as the St. Sebastian and some other classical subjects, the names of which I cannot recall, the range of conception and treatment is limited as compared with that of Rousseau. This alone would give Corot a lower rank, in the absence of a marked superiority in some special high quality—superiority which does not exist, for the picked work of Rousseau possesses technical excellences all its own, as consummate as anything in the world's landscape art, while the range of treatment and subject, so much greater in Rousseau than in Corot, puts the limited and mannered art of the latter as a whole in a distinct inferiority.

Of Millet I saw much less, but enough to know the man and his art, simple and human, the one as the other. His love for manhood in its most primitive attainable types, those furnished by the peasant, was the outcome of his conception of art, such as the Greek of the early schools conceived it, the expression of humanity in a simple and therefore noble state, and of the honest, open, healthy nature of the man himself, averse to all sophistication of society, reverent of an ideal in art, and intolerant of affectations. He conceived and executed his pictures in the pure Greek spirit, working out his ideal as his imagination presented it to him, not as the model served him. The form is of his own day, the spirit of his art that of all time and of all good art, the elaboration of a type and not merely the reproduction of a picturesque model. It is the custom now to class all peasant subjects, emulating the forms of Millet, as belonging to his art. Nothing is more absurd, for the art of Millet was subjective, not realistic; it was in the feeling of the art of Phidias and the Italian renaissance, not in the modern pose plastique. The peasant in it was merely incidental to his sympathy with ideal life. Millet was himself a peasant, he used to say, and his moral purpose, if he had any, was the glorification, so far as art can effect it, of his class, the class which above all others in his eyes dignified humanity and held his sympathy. This feeling was with him no affectation, but the deliberate, final conclusion of his life—he reverenced the sabot and the blouse, the implements of tillage and work, as the Greek did his gods and the implements of war and glory; he saw humanity reduced to its simplest and most noble physical functions and possibilities, as the Greek did the perfection of the physical form, but he lacked the perception of the types of pure beauty of the Greek.

The personal relations between Rousseau and Millet were in the best sense of the word fraternal, and from neither did I ever hear a word to the disparagement of a brother artist, while Rousseau used to talk in the subtlest vein of critical appreciation of his rivals among the landscape painters, the Duprés, Ziem, Troyon, and others, so that I regret that in those days I thought only of my own instruction, and not of the putting on record the opinions of a man whose ideas of art were amongst the most exalted I have known.

A charming nature was that of Troyon, a simple, robust worker, and, like all the larger characters in the French art world with whom I became acquainted, full of sympathy and guidance for those who wanted light and leading. But the lives of these three great painters, like that of Corot (whom I never knew personally), show how completely the French public, so proud of its intelligence of art, ignored the best qualities of it till outsiders pointed to them. Troyon told me that for the first ten years of his career he had never sold a picture, but lived by painting for Sèvres; the prosperity of Millet came from the patronage of American collectors, led by the appreciation of a Bostonian painter, William Hunt, and I well remember his famous "Sowers" on the highest line in the Salon, so completely skied that only one who looked for a Millet was likely to see it; while Rousseau, at the time I speak of, was glad to accept the smallest commission, and sold mostly to American collectors. Nor is it otherwise with the Rousseaus, Millets, and Troyons of to-day—the public taste, and the banal criticism of a journalism at its best the tardy echo of the opinions of the rare wise man, find genius only when it has ceased to have the quality of the new and unforeseen.

Yvon, in whose atelier I worked, was essentially a teacher, and his more recent assignment to the directorship of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts put him in his true place, that of a master of style in drawing and the elements of art instruction. He was engaged, when I knew him, on the battle-pieces of the Crimean war, the chief of which were already at Versailles. His was an earnest, indefatigable nature. He was as kindly and zealous a teacher as if he were receiving, like his English confrères, a guinea a lesson. Nothing so strongly marked the difference between the French and the English feeling for art as this characteristic feature of the disinterestedness of the French artist in giving instruction without compensation, while his English colleague of equal distinction gave instruction only at a price impracticable for a poor artist, if indeed he would give it at any price. And even thus, the English drawing-master did not teach art, but facile tricks of the brush. Need one seek any other reason for the curious fact that, with a marked superiority in the occasional highest attainment of rare and original abilities which English art shows, France has become the school of Europe, than that in England the master will teach only on terms which are prohibitive of the formation of a school, while in France, with few exceptions, the most eminent painters regard it as a duty to open their ateliers to pupils often gratuitously, but in any case freely and on terms which are adaptable to the modest means of the poorest class of workers? In how different a position in relation to the art of the world would English art now be in, had Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Turner, and two or three others who could be named, thrown open their studios to the young enthusiasts who followed them, and the sterling talents which have never been wanting in England been enabled to profit by the experience and art of their elders, instead of groping their way alone to efficiency, or, still worse, going to South Kensington, generally "arriving" too late to succeed fully!

Waiting the word from Kossuth which should call me to join the ever-impending and ever-postponed insurrection, I passed the winter thus, profiting as I could by all opportunities for the study of art and making acquaintance with the artists. My money was running to an end, but this was a matter in which my faith in Providence did not allow me to borrow trouble, and I made it a rule never to run into debt. That I never borrowed I cannot say, but I never did so except in cases where I was in such personal relations with the lender that if I died without paying the debt, it would neither weigh on him nor on my conscience. I kept up my regular round of economy and work, and one Saturday, when I had paid for my dinner at the Palais Royal restaurant, I found myself with fifty centimes in my pocket, and went on a long walk in the streets of Paris, to meditate on my immediate future. Mrs. Coxe, one of the kindest of friends, would, I knew, gladly lend me what I needed, but I did not allow her to know that I needed, and how to pay for my next day's dinner I did not see. Still, confident that something would turn up, I walked towards my lodgings through the Rue Royale and its arcades, feeling the ten-sou piece in my pocket, when I saw a young girl dart out from one of the recesses of the arcade, dragging after her a boy of two or three years, and then, as if her courage failed, turn and hide herself and him again in the doorway from which she had come. I saw her case at once,—want and shame at begging,—went to her and gave her the ten-sou piece, and went to bed feeling better.