THE LAST RAYS · EMILE CLAUS
CHAPTER X · “LA PEINTURE CLAIRE”: CLAUS, LE SIDANER, BESNARD, DIDIER-POUGET
“TOUT HOMME QUI NE RESSEMBLE PAS AUX AUTRES, DEVIENT PAR LA MÊME UN OBJET DE DÉFIANCE. DÈS QUE LA FOULE NE COMPREND PLUS, ELLE RIT. IL FAUT TOUTE UNE ÉDUCATION POUR FAIRE ACCEPTER LE GÉNIE”
ZOLA
THE work of Emile Claus is a manifestation in quite another direction of the Impressionist idea. Born in Western Flanders in 1849, he was the sixteenth child of parents in very humble circumstances. Their business in life was to supply with provisions the boatmen who passed along on the river Lys. By various means the boy, who had very early displayed a yearning for the painter’s career, managed to evade all attempts to harness him in the drudgery of the home life. A pastrycook, a railway watchman, a linendraper’s assistant, these were a few of the vocations he was condemned to try, yet from which he escaped. At last he set out for Antwerp, with £7 in his pocket, and the warning that he need not expect a penny more. In the city of Rubens he became a free pupil of Professor de Keyser. All day long he studied in the Academy. When night came he earned a livelihood by giving drawing-lessons, acting as a sculptor’s “devil,” and colouring pictures of the Stations of the Cross. At last, after many struggles, he became a popular portrait-painter in the city, particularly of children in fancy costume. In 1879 he travelled through Spain and Morocco, painting the conventional compositions of an Iberian tour, and much influenced by the style of Charles Verlat. Despite his great success in Antwerp, in 1883 Emile Claus changed his manner entirely. He shook off the dust of the city for ever, renounced portrait-painting, and became “paysagiste.” Impelled by an intense love of nature he returned to his native village on the banks of the Lys, and recommenced his life as a landscape painter “en plein air.” He has never returned to the distracting turmoil of town, and, in his quaint white and green shuttered house at Astene between Ghent and Courtrai, has buried himself in the heart of the country. Although some distance from the larger cities of Belgium, Emile Claus does not vegetate in his obscurity. On wheel or a-foot he is equally active, visiting his friends and working on his canvases, of which he has always some six or eight in progress. It may be noted that he works entirely in the open air, and finishes in front of nature. One might judge of this from the strength and completeness of his pictures.
It is years since the writer first saw a landscape by Claus, and he remembers vividly the pleasure it gave. The painting was in the well-known collection of Mr. John Maddocks, of Bradford. Upon a huge canvas the artist had depicted a cornfield ripe for the sickle, and in the midst of the wheat red poppies grew. Across the foreground, emerging from the wheat, wandered a few white ducks. Over the whole was the fierce glare of a noon-day sun. The work was convincing, naturalistic, yet poetic, inasmuch as it seemed to chant the universal hymn of nature. It was a revelation to those artists who found themselves in Bradford at that period. Unknown and a stranger, Claus received in spirit silent congratulations for his splendid achievement, which aroused in several breasts a keen feeling of emulation. The artist writes: “Mr. Maddocks has always strongly encouraged me, and had the courage to buy my work at a time when everybody in Belgium found me by far too audacious, because, as you may know, the leaders, the standard-bearers as it were, of the young Belgian school of painting are not at all in sympathy with the beautiful art of Monet and his school.” Since that day Emile Claus has greatly increased his following throughout the world, being least appreciated in his own country.
Emile Claus is a painter whose brush is charged with the sweetness of life, courageous, healthful, and buoyant. His pictures breathe of sunlight and fresh air, and it is easy to see with what sheer delight he throws himself into his work. When one seeks for the reason which so suddenly changed this prosaic painter of the Antwerp bourgeois into an Impressionist of the most modern school, one discovers the usual cause, the Englishmen of the commencement of the last century. In a recent letter to the writer, Emile Claus says that in England, above all other countries, were born light and life in painting. “I have all too quickly glanced at the Turners and Constables of London, nevertheless it was a revelation to me, and those great artists Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro continue simply what that giant Turner discovered; just as the grand epoch of Rousseau, Millet, Dupré, and Corot, passed over Belgium to find their inspiration in the marvellous works of the Dutch school.”
EMILE CLAUS