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Cornell University Library 
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 Art and common sense, 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 030 649 218 
 
B Cornell University 
 B) Library 
 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030649218 
 
Art and Common Sense 
 
Art and Common Sense 
 
 By Royal Cortissoz 
 
 Author of "John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study," "Augustus 
 Saint-Gaudens," etc. 
 
 New York 
 Charles Scribner's Sons 
 
 MCMXIII 
 
Copyright, igi3,*BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Published October, 19x3 
 
So 
 E. H. C. 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Art and Common Sense i 
 
 J II. Ingres: A Pilgrimage to Montauban ... 23 
 
 III. The Magic of Mere Paint 47 
 
 I. THE OLD tradition AND THE NEW ... 49 
 
 J n. REMBRANDT 53 
 
 <III. HALS 60 
 
 - IV. VERMEER OP DELFT 64 
 
 ,.. V. CHARDIN AND ALFRED STEVENS . . . •71 
 
 IV. Contemporary European Painting .... 79 
 V. A Note on French Military Painting . . .115 
 
 VI. The Post-Impressionist Illusion . . . .123 
 
 VII. A Memorable Exhibition 139 
 
 •^ Vin. WmSTLER . . . '. 179 
 
 1/ IX. Sargent 217 
 
 X. Spanish Art m Spain and Elsewhere . . . 247 
 
 I. THE PRADO 249 
 
 n. THE PRADO REVISITED 276 
 
 J m. VELASQUEZ AT THE HISPANIC MUSEUM . , 288 
 
 IV. THE ROKEBY VENUS -293 
 
 4 V. EL GRECO AND GOYA 3OO 
 
 ^ VI. FOUR MODERN SPANIARDS: FORTUNY, SOROLLA, 
 
 ZULOAGA, AND DANIEL VIERGE . . .304 
 
 vii 
 
viii Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XI. Secular Types in Italian Mural Decoration . 335 
 
 J 1. PINTORICCHIO 337 
 
 .; II. ghtrlandajo 346 
 
 ■/ III. caepaccio 351 
 
 -I IV. tiepolo 3SS 
 
 XII. Rodin 363 
 
 XIII. Four Leaders in American Architecture . .379 
 
 I. H. H. RICHARDSON 384 
 
 II. RICHARD MORRIS HUNT 39O 
 
 m. CHARLES F. MCKIM 4OO 
 
 IV. DANIEL H. BURNHAM 42 1 
 
 XIV. J. PiERPONT Morgan as a Collector . . .433 
 
I 
 
 Art and Common Sense 
 
I 
 
 ART AND COMMON SENSE 
 
 There are some impenetrable mysteries about a 
 great work of art. The creative impulse behind it, 
 the skill of eye and hand indispensable to its making, 
 its strange garment of style — which is doubly strange 
 because it proclaims both the individuality of the 
 artist and the indefinable tie of distinction binding all 
 the masterpieces of all the arts together in a common 
 glory — who shall designate the origin of these things 
 or dogmatize about the processes whereby genius 
 makes them do its bidding? Genius itself cannot 
 read the riddle. But so long as men care for art they 
 will go on talking about it, as they have been talking 
 about it since art began, for there is no greater happi- 
 ness than that which is to be found in disinterested 
 talk about the things of the mind. Whether we get 
 any forrader or not — and in spite of the mysteries 
 there is always progress to be made in this elusive 
 subject — depends altogether upon Just that point, 
 whether we are disinterested or not. Everything lies 
 in the method of approach and there, I think, is the 
 source of much of the confusion prevalent to-day, the 
 explanation of certain errors characteristic of many 
 
 3 
 
Art and Common Sense 
 
 artists and of certain misunderstandings and bewilder- 
 ments often leading the public astray. 
 
 We hear a great deal about the artist's point of 
 view and the necessity for the layman's acquiring it, 
 if he can venture upon so difficult an emprise. Then 
 there is the critic's point of view, quaintly supposed 
 in countless studios, and out of them, too, for that 
 matter, to be antagonistic to the artist's, which is 
 recommended to the layman in the same way. He, 
 poor, harried mortal, if he is wise, will make himself 
 acquainted with both, but he will not try to make 
 either the one or the other, exclusively, his own. He 
 will use them impartially, rather, to fertilize his intel- 
 ligence and will seek to develop a third, independent, 
 point of view, by which I do not mean the caprice 
 of an egotist, but the open-mindedness of a lover of 
 beauty, and, above all, common sense. The absence 
 of that homely element from the counsels of pretty 
 nearly everybody concerned has in my opinion done 
 more than anything else to promote bad art, to re- 
 tard appreciation of good, and to breed generally a 
 habit of false thinking. I withdraw not so much as 
 the shadow of a shade from what I have just said 
 about the impenetrable mystery residing in a great 
 work of art, but I would as unqualifiedly assert that 
 for the purposes of right thinking about a great work 
 of art there is in it no mystery whatever. It is the 
 work of human hands, and meant, just in proportion as 
 it is a great work of art, for human nature's daily 
 
Art and Common Sense 
 
 food. Common sense, I maintain, must force us to 
 this conclusion and in doing so compel us to revise 
 a quantity of long fashionable doctrine. 
 
 The doctrine, to tell the truth, is honeycombed 
 with superstition and its ritual is packed with cant 
 phrases. Artists and critics alike are addicted to an 
 oracular jargon, only the smallest part of which can 
 justify itself as legitimate technical terminology. 
 What is more, this mode of expression, which might, 
 perhaps, be condoned as only a mode of expression, is 
 too often but the outward and visible sign of an 
 inward and invisible bigotry, which would reserve 
 the appreciation of art to a chosen few. Well, there 
 is an old saying anent the fabrication of silk purses 
 which has never lost its point. While the catholic 
 appreciation of art is partly a matter of experience 
 and education it is also a matter of instinct and one 
 may possess that instinct or not, by the whim of 
 nature, as one may possess or lack an ear for music. 
 There are people who could not be lured by years 
 of a patient mentor's loving kindness to comprehend 
 even the rudiments of a fine picture. But what, 
 pray, have they to do with the question? To drag 
 them in would be about as relevant as to drag an 
 imtutored rustic into a discussion of European diplo- 
 macy. No, the real significance of the grand, gloomy 
 and peculiar hypothesis of art lies in the imconfessed 
 but nevertheless unmistakable tendency of its advo- 
 cates to detach their subject from common under- 
 
Art and Common Sense 
 
 standing, to invest it with a kind of sublime aloofness, 
 as though it were something too sacred to be touched 
 with any freedom at all save by priest-like, "expert" 
 hands. Hence a great laying down of laws, by artists 
 and critics alike, I repeat; hence the oscillation of the 
 layman between an imeasy self-assertion, in the patter 
 of the moment, and a pitiful timidity. There is little 
 chance in these circumstances for those who would 
 merely look at a work of art for what it is. 
 
 They have had particularly hard luck in respect to 
 the art of Italy. I should be an ingrate if I were to 
 underestimate the writings of those modern scholars 
 who have done so much to organize a body of infor- 
 mation relating to the Renaissance masters. No one 
 whose business it is to deal with works of art could 
 fail to profit by the books and periodicals in which 
 the lives of the old painters are cleared up, while their 
 works are put in more systematic order, and, in many 
 cases, the list of a given master's productions is short- 
 ened or lengthened to the advantage of truth and 
 knowledge. The quasi-scientific method by which all 
 this is accomplished, too, commands only respect so 
 long as it remains but a means to an end. But pride 
 of success in the employment of a method has re- 
 acted to a preposterous extent upon the modern school 
 of art criticism. Too many members of it spend their 
 time taking in one another's washing, so to say, em- 
 bellishing trivial themes with a wealth of learning 
 out of all proportion to the intrinsic interest of the 
 
Art and Common Sense 
 
 subject, flattering one another half to death with 
 stately allusions, and casting not one scornful thought 
 to the hungry sheep who look up and are not fed. 
 The "general reader" is assiuned to be a hopelessly 
 negligible factor, utterly and eternally unfitted to re- 
 ceive the pure milk of the word. One may put up 
 with all this "bounce" when the scientific school has 
 something worth while to say on a valuable topic 
 and still be impatient of the nonsense that goes with 
 it. There is the hierophant of connoisseurship who 
 is nothing if not a devotee of research and has sub- 
 stituted for the Correggiosity of Correggio the Mo- 
 rellianism of Morelli. Somewhere in the course of his 
 ever so knowing travels he picks up a little picture of 
 a Madonna, authorship unknown. First he talks 
 about its tactile values, its morphological traits, and 
 its deep spiritual content. Then he explains how it 
 affiliates itself to this or that school and winds up by 
 either inventing a new master for his treasure or tack- 
 ing the latter on to the record of some historic genius. 
 Meanwhile it is plain that his picture is nothing more 
 nor less than a modest souvenir of some fif teenth-cen- 
 tiu"y journeyman who, in the course of the day's work, 
 made it for the local convent and went cheerfully on 
 to the next job. There was nothing morphological 
 about him. 
 
 Let me not risk even the appearance of innuendo. 
 The discoveries and reconstructive analyses associated 
 with the name of Mr. Berenson have been of too sig- 
 
8 Art and Common Sense 
 
 nal a service to the history and criticism of art for 
 me to think of directing against his solid achieve- 
 ments the mild satire in which I have ventured to 
 indulge. But I believe that even Mr. Berenson would 
 grant that the kind of criticism here deprecated has 
 flourished exceedingly of late years and that it has 
 done an immense amount of harm. It has exagger- 
 ated minor issues and especially it has thrown dust 
 in the eyes of the layman, who has looked on at these 
 pontifical proceedings in despair of getting at the 
 bottom of them. How, he has wondered, could he 
 ever hope to be initiated into the meaning of such 
 solemnities? He has not needed the initiation. He 
 has only needed to use a little common sense in order 
 to realize when he was being rationally instructed 
 and when he was having his leg pulled. Looking at 
 the unimportant little Madonna in question, with 
 eyes not by any means untrained in the perception 
 of beauty, he has been literally terrorized into the 
 suppression of his opinion of the picture as a feeble, 
 iminteresting and even ugly work. Yet in that opin- 
 ion he is often absolutely right. 
 
 Relief for him from the tyrarmy of critical vanities 
 is apparently in sight. M. Bourget, in "La Dame 
 qui a perdu son peintre," Mr. Henry James, in "The 
 Outcry," and a number of other writers of fiction, 
 have brought a gentle ridicule to bear upon the Mo- 
 rellian principle carried to excess. Sooner or later the 
 pedants who persist; in getting between beauty and 
 
Art and Common Sense 
 
 her votaries will be laughed out of court, and the 
 scholar in art criticism will perform his useful func- 
 tion without casting a blight upon the things he 
 touches. In the meantime the lajonan, escaping per- 
 haps from the critic, is only too apt to fall, in serio- 
 comic fashion, into the arms of the artist; and then 
 I am not sure but that the last state of the tormented 
 man is worse then the first. The danger he runs is 
 serious enough in the broad matter of taste. The 
 artist, save in rare instances, and those chiefly in- 
 stances of genius, is a stout believer in what he likes. 
 Outside of that he must, as a rule, have acquired 
 some special ciiltivation if his guidance is to be worth 
 anything. In short, the artist, as artist, is wofuUy 
 given to narrow and prejudiced views. He is, more- 
 over, obsessed by technique and there the layman, 
 confessedly ignorant, is ever ready to behave as though 
 by the mere utterance of the sacrosanct word, the 
 groimd had been cut from under his feet. I revert 
 here to my "impenetrable mysteries." Technique, or 
 rather a great artist's possession and exploitation of 
 it, is one of them. Consider, for example, how per- 
 sonal it is, how it expresses in even the most fleeting 
 touch the character of a Michael Angelo or a Velas- 
 quez, a Holbein or a Chardin. But in the appre- 
 ciation of art there are times for technique as there 
 are times for other things. It is good to savor an 
 artist's way of painting, or of modelling, just for its 
 own sake. There lies, indeed, one of the joys of life 
 
lo Art and Common Sense 
 
 amongst works of art. But in the final perspective 
 technique is to be apprehended not alone with con- 
 noisseurship, but, as I cannot too often say, with 
 common sense. 
 
 Technique, I think, may be not unfairly described 
 as just the decency of the artistic life. It is so in all 
 the other arts and there is no reason why it should 
 not be so in painting and sculpture. I am well aware 
 of the immeasurable importance of technique. It is 
 the testimony of the ages that the poet, putting the 
 right word in the right place, is doing something near 
 to the divine. But I assert also that the true poet, 
 doing this, knows that he is only doing what is ex- 
 pected of him, what is required by his own self-respect. 
 Literary men make much of Flaubert's martjTdom 
 to his style. Mr. James talks somewhere about his 
 "thin sheets of beaten gold." That is very pretty, 
 but Flaubert, with his mot juste, is a little like the 
 legendary Briton with his constantly assertive tub. 
 Civilized people take these things for granted. One 
 bathes and shaves in the morning to satisfy an innate 
 sense of cleanliness. On going forth one does not 
 ask the first friend he meets to notice that his face 
 is clean, bragging that, as the possessor of a shaving 
 conscience, he has raised himself above his fellows. 
 Pugilists, I am told, go clean-shaven. Flaubert, com- 
 ing up to Paris with his loud voice and his style of 
 the medieval saint, ready to go to the stake for a 
 comma, really brought with him something of the 
 
Art and Common Sense 
 
 II 
 
 complacency of the provincial. Maupassant and the 
 rest thought they were listening to a new gospel when 
 he told them that two and two made four and that 
 the writing man must know his trade. It was like 
 telling a plumber that a clean-wiped joint could only 
 be made with the art of a Cellini and that when he 
 had made it he was the equal of Michael Angelo. 
 There was nothing original about this propaganda. 
 Its partisans forgot that every artist worth his salt 
 has done his work over and over again until he has 
 done it right. No one has hysterics over Beethoven's 
 sketch-books; the care with which he built up a 
 symphony simply showed that he knew his trade. 
 Genius leaves the mot juste to take care of itself, or, 
 seeking it with blood and tears, does so out of a sense 
 of honor which disdains applause for mere dexterity. 
 But aU this, of course, to the average artist to-day, 
 is heresy. 
 
 Just why he has made technique his fetich it is 
 difficult to say. The history of the past throws no 
 light on that problem, for the old master, working 
 miracles with technique, nevertheless took technique 
 in his stride. But the plight of the modern is ex- 
 plained to some extent, I think, by the nature of his 
 training, his segregation in great numbers under the 
 direction of organized schools and his consequent 
 absorption in formulas. Inevitably the latter take 
 on, for him, a talismanic significance, and he thinks 
 he has suffered a mystical laying on of hands when 
 
12 Art and Common Sense 
 
 ■ he has only been drilled in a set of calisthenics. He 
 gets professionalized and there is no process more 
 deadening. I remember having a letter some years 
 ago from one of the most brilliant of contemporary 
 English writers, a type of truly creative imagination. 
 "It seems to me," he wrote, "that the whole busi- 
 ness lies in the success with which the author remains 
 an amateur — that's the difference between the writer 
 and the painter — able to preserve his simplicity, his 
 sense of wonder and magic, the delight he has in the 
 wagging of his pen and the zest with. which he will 
 explore the recesses of his own head. Professional- 
 ism rubs all that out of one desperately soon." There 
 can be no question that it rubs "all that" out of 
 scores, hundreds, I might even say thousands, of art- 
 ists. It makes them nervously self-conscious, fear- 
 ful of doing this, eager to do that, and in both cases 
 yielding not to personal, thought-out conviction, but 
 to the iron rule of their guild. The guild idea has its 
 virtues, only, like scientific criticism, it can be over- 
 done, and its most vicious effects are those revealed 
 not so much in specific deeds as in a frame of mind. 
 The professionalized artist, proudly shutting the lay- 
 man out from his mystery and doing so on purely 
 technical grounds, narrows the whole charming busi- 
 ness of art down to a pin-point. He destroys the 
 bonds of sympathy that should unite him with his 
 public and incidentally arrests his own sensitiveness, 
 diminishes his own power of vision. He and the lay- 
 
Art and Common Sense 13 
 
 man, failing to get together, talk as if some fires of 
 Pentecost were needed to make them both free of the 
 same language. Each would imderstand the other a 
 little better, and would be ready to throw a lot of 
 misimderstanding onto the rubbish heap, if only they 
 would both use a little common sense and look at 
 art as a wholesome, human thing. 
 
 It is common sense that will bring the subject down 
 from the clouds and keep the great work of art before 
 us as the creation of a man, not of a demigod. And 
 this common sense might come into play more fre- 
 quently if in the study of the history of art less atten- 
 tion were given to abstruse, metaphysical phenomena 
 and more to the prosaic facts of biography. It is a 
 singular point, and one not inaptly to be emphasized 
 here, that the men by whom the modern painter 
 swears were all peculiarly human creatures, who in- 
 terested themselves in familiar life, and, to be frank, 
 put on no airs. They were not foolish about tech- 
 nique. Neither is Degas to-day, any more than those 
 masters of the past whose gifts of technique he shares. 
 He is too busy, as they were, establishing all the ele- 
 ments in a work of art in a perfect equilibrium. It 
 is no one factor in the making of a work of art that 
 should be singled out and put in the foreground. It 
 is vuiity that gives the stamp of successful genius. 
 The failure to recognize this explains the puerility of 
 those debates which occasionally arise on the relation 
 of subject to technique. It is a part of the whole. 
 
14 Art and Common Sense 
 
 To carry to its logical conclusion the usual argument 
 against the subject picture would be to accept the 
 proposition that pure color, with no form at all, con- 
 stitutes a picture. Walter Pater deftly touches the 
 problem in his familiar saying about "the stupidity 
 which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity 
 which is dead to form." But I must cite a fuller 
 contribution, made by one who is a literary man, it 
 is true, but whose sympathy for art, whose passion 
 for technique as technique, wiU hardly be challenged. 
 I mean Mr. James. In an old essay of his on Baude- 
 laire he has this cogent passage: 
 
 To deny the relevancy of subject-matter and the im- 
 portance of the moral quality of a work of art strikes us 
 as, in two words, very childish. We do not know what 
 the great moralists would say about the matter — they 
 would probably treat it very good-humouredly; but that 
 is not the question. There is very little doubt what the 
 great artists would say. People of that temper feel that 
 the whole thinking man is one, and that to count out the 
 moral element in one's appreciation of an artistic total is 
 exactly as sane as it would be (if the total were a poem) 
 to eliminate all the words in three syllables, or to consider 
 only such portions of it as had been written by candle- 
 light. The crudity of sentiment of the advocates of "art 
 for art" is often a striking example of the fact that a 
 great deal of what is called culture may fail to dissipate 
 a well-seated provinciaUsm of spirit. They talk of moral- 
 ity as Miss Edgeworth's infantine heroes and heroines 
 talk of "physic" — they allude to its being put into and 
 kept out of a work of art, put into and kept out of one's 
 appreciation of the same, as if it were a coloured fluid 
 kept in a big-labelled bottle in some mysterious intellec- 
 
Art and Common Sense 15 
 
 tual closet. It is in reality simply a part of the essential 
 richness of inspiration — it has nothing to do with the ar- 
 tistic process and it has everything to do with the artistic 
 effect. The more a work of art feels it at its source, the 
 richer it is; the less it feels it, the poorer it is. 
 
 Surely this is obvious and unanswerable. And is 
 it the view of fine-drawn, supersubtle philosophy? 
 It is rather, I think, the view of common sense. It 
 makes, moreover, for that natural and essentially so- 
 cial conception of art which in the last resort is the 
 only conception that endures. I have myself an un- 
 quenchable interest in technique. I never can ignore 
 it in my study of art and on occasion, as perhaps the 
 reader of this volume will discover, it seems to me 
 a subject not merely excusing but irresistibly demand- 
 ing analysis for its own sake. But one may talk and 
 write indefinitely in praise of technique and still be 
 bound to return to the larger idea of art which it is 
 my purpose to urge,, to the beauty, woven of many 
 threads, which is made not by technicians for their 
 comrades but by men for mankind. I spoke Just 
 now of the commonplaces of biography and how nec- 
 essary they are to check the swelling ardors of both 
 artist and critic. They do this because they help us 
 to see things as they are. 
 
 A dip into the biography of Leonardo da Vinci may 
 be of some service. He has been the cause of floods 
 of fine writing. Shoals of enthusiasts, from Gautier 
 down, have been rapt in dithyrambic ecstasy before 
 
1 6 Art and Common Sense 
 
 the "Mona Lisa" and they have all had their say 
 about that lady's enigmatic smile. The smile must 
 have meant a great deal to the master, for he gave it 
 incessant study. In the drawings of heads which are 
 among our most precious souvenirs of Leonardo we 
 find him forever weaving a spell about the lips of his 
 model. Something very sweet and evanescent lies 
 there, something so subtle as to be past finding out, 
 and it belongs, one feels, to the secret recesses of his 
 genius. The key to that smile, if we had it, would 
 unlock his heart and aid us incalculably in the dis- 
 covery of what manner of man he was. But now let 
 us look for a moment into Leonardo's workshop and 
 watch him amongst his apprentices. Like every mas- 
 ter of the Renaissance he held a more or less paternal 
 relation to the lads in his care. Besides teaching 
 them how to be artists he looked after their health, 
 comfort, and morals. Here is what he writes about 
 one of the apprentices in his bottega: 
 
 Giacomo came to live with me on the feast of St. Mary 
 Magdalen, 1490. He was ten years old. The second day 
 I ordered two shirts, a pair of hose, and a doublet for him. 
 When I put aside the money to pay for these things he 
 took it out of my purse. I was never able to make him 
 confess the robbery, although I was certain of it. A 
 thieving, lying, pig-headed glutton. 
 
 The episode would seem, of course, to have nothing 
 whatever to do with Leonardo's art — until one stops 
 to think of what it brings back to us across the ages. 
 
Art and Common Sense 17 
 
 Not, an incredible Olympian, lifting masterpieces out 
 of the vasty deep by the waving of a wand, but a 
 very mortal old Italian, taking the day's work, with 
 its practical duties and its petty vexations, in a simple, 
 man-like mood. The colossal genius was also a man 
 like ourselves. Track him through all the documen- 
 tary and other evidence that we possess and you will 
 find him invariably tinctured with our common hu- 
 manity. He drew Mona Lisa's smile and he painted 
 that "Last Supper" at Milan which even in ruins is 
 a work of supernatural beauty. And when Baron- 
 celli, the conspirator, was hanged in Florence, Leo- 
 nardo sketched him at the rope's end. When he was 
 not dreamily delineating the heads of angelically 
 lovely women he was studying with a strong psycho- 
 logical solicitude the monstrous physiognomies of old 
 witches and beggars. He did not dip his brush into 
 earthquake and eclipse; he dipped it into life, and 
 was content to speak to men as to his fellows. There 
 is a famous letter of his in which he ofifers his services 
 to the Duke of Milan, and in it he tells how he can 
 make portable bridges to be used in war, how he can 
 devise bombs which he says are "proper for throwing 
 showers of small missiles, and with the smoke thereof 
 causing great terror to the enemy, to his imminent 
 loss and confusion." Turn from the "Last Supper" 
 and go to the old Castello. Look up at the ceiling 
 which has been restored from Leonardo's design. He 
 takes II Moro's device, the mulberry tree, and makes 
 
1 8 Art and Common Sense 
 
 a pattern of interlaced boughs and leafage incompara- 
 ble as a piece of formal decoration. A sense of 
 mathematics as well as a sense of beauty went to the 
 creation of this design. The ceiling, like the other ex- 
 amples I have cited and a multitude of others avail- 
 able in his biography, may be taken as pointing to 
 the universality of his genius. But these things also 
 point to the imassuming resourcefulness of a practical 
 man, jealous, as we know, of his private thoughts 
 and dreams; but living his life on workable terms 
 with the people about him. When all is said, the 
 artist really cannot afford to do anything else. 
 
 This is the unimpeachable testimony of the past. 
 Leonardo is typical of European art in his close con- 
 tact with the life of his period, and it is interesting 
 to observe in passing that his spirit is likewise trace- 
 able in Oriental antiquity. One reason why Japa- 
 nese art, which has grown so popular in this country, 
 is yet only partially comprehended here, is that Whis- 
 tler and other noted pioneers in the appreciation of 
 it made a false start, fastening upon the decorative 
 motive and letting everything else go by the board. 
 Okakura, in his "Ideals of The East," makes short 
 work of the perfervid zeal which would erect Hokusai 
 and the other masters of the print into towering por- 
 tents. "Those charmingly colored wood-cuts," he 
 says, "full of vigor and versatility, stand apart from 
 the main line of development of Japanese art." The 
 inros, sword guards, and objects in lacquer of which 
 
Art and Common Sense 19 
 
 we make so much he stigmatizes as playthings, and, 
 as such, "no embodiment of national fervor, in which 
 all true art exists." He tells hov*^ in ancient China 
 "painting was held in esteem for its inculcation of 
 the practice of virtue," and in another passage he de- 
 scribes the history of Japanese art as "the history of 
 Asiatic ideals, the beach where each successive wave 
 of Eastern thought has left its sand-ripple as it beat 
 against the national consciousness." I see in that 
 poetically suggestive figure no impracticable affirma- 
 tion of an overwrought, too metaphysical, idealism. 
 Oh the contrary, Okakura's appeal is simply to com- 
 mon sense. He realizes, as every one must realize 
 who thinks disinterestedly on the subject, that "na- 
 tional fervor" has a status in art fully equal to that 
 of paint. 
 
 The French have some notion of this but elsewhere 
 in modern art the principle makes slow headway. In 
 very recent years, and especially since the develop- 
 ment of mural decoration in this country, we have 
 begun to make a little more of the themes in our own 
 history, a history aboimding in picturesqueness from 
 Columbus down, but we are still handicapped by a 
 droll provincialism. The statue of an Indian used 
 to be called the youthfid sin of every American sculp- 
 tor. Though we have got over that there is much 
 still to be learned. Our forefathers fought two great 
 wars but we have had very gradually to be lured into 
 painting them, because they did not wear the cos- 
 
20 Art and Common Sense 
 
 tumes of mediasval Europe. We protest against the 
 frock coat and other details in contemporary dress 
 but Velasquez was not afraid of the tailor of his time. 
 Think of the long, commonplace garment worn by his 
 "Don Diego del Corral," or, even better, of the gro- 
 tesque farthingales worn by his Infantas! When we 
 rave, as Whistler and hosts of other artists have raved, 
 over what he did with those grim problems of his, do 
 we give a moment's thought to questions of costume? 
 Do we worry over the out-of-date flounces and hats 
 in the pictures of Alfred Stevens, when we are de- 
 lighting in his art? We reject our past on the high- 
 sounding pretext that we must live in the present 
 and then we think that we are living in the present 
 when we shut our eyes to its real stuff and pose the 
 matinee girl in our studios. We would make the 
 world of art over into something totally imlike the 
 world of life. "By the lUissus there was no Wragg, 
 poor thing!" Matthew Arnold was thinking only 
 of a matter of hideous nomenclature; but the cita- 
 tion may stand, for the sake of the "poor thing." 
 There were Wraggs, in that sense, in Greece, and 
 Phidias looked at them, we may be quite sure. That 
 he did not actually portray them is a retort which 
 the enemy might be rash enough to proffer, but it 
 will not do. Common sense replies that all is fish 
 that comes to the artist's net, that the condition 
 on which he succeeds is that he keep his sympathies 
 wide open, responsive to every human emotion. 
 
Art and Common Sense 21 
 
 The proof, if proof be needed, is supplied by a mul- 
 titude of examples. I have cited perhaps more than 
 is necessary of these, yet I am tempted to add another. 
 Every one remembers the kind of pictures that David 
 used to paint in his cold, eighteenth-century manner. 
 Taking a classical subject and working it out with 
 the aid of innumerable figures and studio properties, 
 he would pile it all up as upon a scaffold and leave 
 it a frigid, hollow fabric of artificiality. But outside 
 that academic workshop of his, the Revolution was 
 turning France upside down and occasionally he would 
 look out of the window. In a few hastily scratched 
 lines he thus drew Marie Antoinette as she sat in 
 the tumbrel on the way to the guillotine, and as he did 
 so something happened to David. Human emotion 
 crept in and stirred the man's soul. There is more 
 of power, there is more of life, there is more of true 
 artistic eloquence in that little sketch that he made 
 of the Queen going to her death than there is in all 
 his classical compositions put together. I would not 
 exaggerate the significance of that incident. Human 
 emotion does not automatically produce a great work 
 of art and neither do I ask the reader to believe that 
 common sense will automatically make him free of 
 those mysteries from which we took our point of de- 
 parture. But I think he will admit that the bene- 
 ficial reaction of life upon art, which I have illustrated 
 in David and others, is no fanciful speculation, but 
 one of the truths of human history which we may 
 
22 Art and Common Sense 
 
 all successfully test for ourselves in what goes on 
 about us. In advocating the use of common sense 
 in the study of art I am only urging the reader to 
 keep his head and his sense of humor, to be wary 
 of the esoteric qualities commended to him by the 
 pundit of whatever artistic or critical persuasion, to 
 look at a work of art in a natural human way, with 
 an open mind. Let prejudice and pedantry go hang. 
 Beauty is all. And is it not the enjoyment of beauty 
 that we are all driving at? 
 
II 
 
 Ingres: A Pilgrimage to Montauban 
 
II 
 
 INGRES: A PILGRIMAGE TO 
 MONTAUBAN 
 
 For those who revere the name of Ingres, the little 
 town of Montauban, in the southwest of France, is a 
 shrine. There he WEis born in 1780, and there, 
 since his death, in 1867, his collections have been 
 assembled, including a vast number of his works 
 and many souvenirs of a personal character. I 
 cannot coimt the times that I have pored over the 
 map and speculated as to how I might make a pil- 
 grimage to the spot, but it always seemed very re- 
 mote from Paris, and once, when I was near enough, 
 at Marseilles, to make the journey, other plans bore 
 me away to Rome. Montauban was forever rece- 
 ding into the distance, but as more and more it ap- 
 peared inaccessible the desire to go there only grew 
 the stronger. In a recent winter, traveUing down 
 from Paris to Madrid, I found it hard to avoid turn- 
 ing off at Bordeaux to follow the Garonne past Agen 
 and Moissac to where the Tarn hurries beneath the 
 walls that I longed to see. I resisted this temptation 
 and went on to the Prado, but even while I rested 
 there, content among the masterpieces of Velasquez, 
 
 25 
 
26 Ingres: A Pilgrimage 
 
 it was an ever present joy to have at the back of 
 my mind a sense of the fact that Montauban was 
 only postponed, to know that I should presently be 
 sitting at the feet of Ingres. 
 
 The transition from the Spaniard to the Frenchman 
 is easily made. It is always easy to pass from one 
 great artist to another. There are many modem 
 painters who can see only an impassable gulf between 
 Velasquez and Ingres, but then there are others who 
 are conscious of no gulf at all, a fact of which I was 
 delightfully reminded when, on the road back into 
 France, I paused at Bayonne. Leon Bonnat was 
 born in that old Basque town, and to show his grati- 
 tude for the municipal aid that had enabled him to 
 pursue his artistic studies in his youth he has given 
 to his fellow citizens a rich collection of pictxires, 
 drawings, sculptures and other objects. This dis- 
 tinguished painter has all his life long had a passion 
 for Velasquez, and has done much to foster apprecia- 
 tion and emulation of the master in France. But, 
 like Degas, he also worships Ingres, and the Musee 
 Bonnat contains some perfect souvenirs of the latter. 
 Among the paintings there is a repUca of the exquisite 
 "Mme. Devaufay," one of the triumphs of the 
 painter's earlier period in Rome. It is a study in 
 black and yellow, almost Whistlerian in the purity 
 
Ingres: A Pilgrimage I'j 
 
 of its tones and the simple effectiveness of their ar- 
 rangement. There is, by the way, a touching anec- 
 dote relating to this portrait. Many years after In- 
 gres painted it an aged lady, shabbily dressed, called 
 upon him in Paris. "You do not recognize me," she 
 said, "and yet you have painted my portrait. But," 
 she slowly added, with manifest embarrassment, "I 
 was young then, and, they said, beautiful. I am 
 Mme. Devaufay." She went on to explain that ill 
 fortune had harassed her and that she needed, to her 
 great regret, to sell the portrait he had made of her. 
 Ingres was profoundly moved, and with characteris- 
 tic energy found a purchaser for the painting. 
 
 Bonnat secured several other important replicas 
 for his collection, and he was even luckier in respect 
 to the drawings, gathering together fifteen or twenty 
 of these, among them several of the finest that Ingres 
 ever produced. It was exciting to be in their pres- 
 ence, and thus to have a foretaste of what awaited 
 me at Montauban; and the experience was repeated 
 at Toulouse. In the museum there hangs one of the 
 master's most famous compositions, the "Tu Mar- 
 cellus eris," in which he figured Virgil as reading the 
 sixth book of the .^Eneid to the Emperor Augustus. 
 In substance and in form it illustrates the very es- 
 sence of his genius as a classicist, and, though I sus- 
 pect that it has suffered a little through the "restor- 
 ing" intervention of some later hand, it has a notable 
 significance in regard to his traits as a colorist. Color 
 
28 Ingres: A Pilgrimage 
 
 was not by any means his forte, and there is a sug- 
 gestive point made by the German critic who drew 
 a parallel between the color of Ingres and the mathe- 
 matically balanced chords in an Oriental rug. It 
 would be well, however, for those who would dismiss 
 his color out of hand to look first at the Toulouse 
 picture. The flesh tints, it is true, are at once too 
 hot and too dull, but in the draperies there are some 
 fine tints of rose and yellow, and the cool but not 
 hard grays which predominate in the work give it 
 a surprising softness and depth. I was doubly glad 
 to see this picture on the threshold of Montauban. 
 It is, figuratively speaking, but a step from Tou- 
 louse to Montauban, and the brief journey takes one 
 swiftly from the present into the past. The city is 
 large and prosperous, and, though it possesses many 
 noble antiquities, its atmosphere is, on the whole, 
 determined by the business activities of to-day. The 
 town wears another aspect. According to the judi- 
 cious Baedeker, its affairs are sound, and I assume, 
 therefore, that its people are comfortable, but the 
 physiognomy of Montauban is somewhat severe if 
 not actually forbidding. It struck me as a page 
 out of one of Balzac's studies of provincial life, a 
 place of cheerless, incommunicative facades, of dis- 
 pirited streets, iU-kempt and uninviting to a degree 
 not altogether explained by the gray, wintry weather. 
 There is scarce any architecture of interest in the 
 place, the tower of the old Church of St. Jacques, the 
 
Ingres: A Pilgrimage 29 
 
 double arcades around the Place Nationale and the 
 great bridge across the Tarn being the sole monu- 
 ments having any weight or picturesqueness. The 
 ancient chS,teau of the Counts of Toulouse, which is 
 now the Hotel de Ville, has passed through many- 
 vicissitudes, and its present character, fixed in the 
 seventeenth century, is in no wise impressive. One 
 turns to the building only because it contains the 
 Mus6e Ingres. Not alone in thus sheltering his works 
 has the town sought to do honor to its great man. 
 At one end of the Promenade des Cannes he has his 
 monument, a colossal affair by Etex, one of his pupils. 
 It is a seated figure in bronze, set against a relief 
 reproducing the master's "Apotheosis of Homer." 
 The portrait is tolerable. The backgrotmd is beyond 
 description inartistic and repellent. Hand on heart, I 
 do not believe there is a more deplorable moniunent 
 in aU Europe. One regrets this the more because 
 they gave M. Etex a glorious site. The view from 
 the promenade sweeps the country for miles, and it 
 is a lovely view, which in clear weather, it is said, 
 includes the distant Pyrenees. 
 
 I foimd the museum locked and seemingly deserted, 
 but from his retreat in a corner of the huge, silent 
 courtyard I routed out the concierge, a terrific and 
 explosive personage, accompanied by an infinitesimal 
 and madly excited puppy. In an instant the noise 
 in the place was deafening, and it was with difficulty 
 that I learned that the museum was closed. I will 
 
30 Ingres: A Pilgrimage 
 
 not pretend, however, that I felt at all discouraged, 
 for there was, indeed, too much humor in the idea of 
 ending my long pilgrimage just outside a locked door, 
 so I sat down to play with the dog and give the con- 
 cierge time to finish his roars. When he had at last 
 lost his breath I told him how to go and find the con- 
 servator, and in a little while all the reverberations 
 had died away, a lean and pensive gardien had turned 
 up from nowhere, the doors had been opened and 
 shut behind me and I had begun to realize my cher- 
 ished wish. 
 
 As it turned out I was to suffer only the small- 
 est shadow of a disappointment. There are not 
 among the drawings as many of the finished portraits 
 as I had expected to find. But there were enough of 
 them, in all conscience, and besides there were thou- 
 sands of those even more personal studies which show 
 the draughtsman at his daily work, preparing for his 
 exploits with the brush. There are nimaerous paint- 
 ings also, renowned originals, and in certain cases 
 where great canvases of his have not been available 
 good copies have been substituted. In the room that 
 is first entered, containing his portrait and partially 
 embellished with decorations in relief made by his 
 sculptor father, there is a glass-enclosed alcove where 
 his desk and violin, the gold crown bestowed upon 
 him in his old age, medals, manuscripts and other 
 relics are brought together. The very spirit of the 
 man fills these quiet old rooms. His whole career 
 
Ingres: A Pilgrimage 31 
 
 is illustrated. Musing here, one follows him liter- 
 ally from his boyhood, amid the dash of Napoleonic 
 developments, to those last days in the 6o's when 
 he carried himself in Paris like an ancient Roman 
 Senator, and, as the late Alphonse Legros loved to 
 remember, his entrance into the Ecole des Beaux- 
 Arts caused all those present to rise bareheaded to 
 greet him. 
 
 His life may be reconstructed with facility, for he 
 has had more than one zealous biographer. The first, 
 and in some ways still most authoritative memoir, 
 was written by his friend, the Vicomte Henri Dela- 
 borde, whose book not only traverses the painter's 
 life, but reproduces a voluminous series of his own 
 notes and reflections, catalogues the works and adds 
 a nimiber of letters. It is curious that this precious 
 volimie, printed in 1870, has never passed into a new 
 edition, and that copies of it are stUl to be had at 
 the publisher's. One would have supposed that there 
 would have been a demand sufficient to have exhausted 
 several editions long ago, M. Boyer d'Agen has pro- 
 duced a good book, useful for the documents it con- 
 tains, in his "Ingres d'apres ime correspondance 
 inedite." Invaluable services have been rendered to 
 the fame of the master by M. Henry Lapauze. Some 
 years ago he published a monumental work on the 
 drawings, accompanying his volume of text with a 
 portfolio of six hundred facsimiles, and only last year 
 he printed a copious and well-illustrated biography. 
 
32 Ingres: A Pilgrimage 
 
 In "Le Roman d'amour de M. Ingres" he has told 
 the rather cynical story of the painter's passing in- 
 fatuation with Julie Forestier, and he has in prepara- 
 tion two volumes of the letters of Ingres, a volume 
 of hitherto unpublished documents, and a descriptive 
 catalogue of all the works. M. Lapauze, in short, 
 has made Ingres his own, and in the process has put 
 us all in his debt. But one must always turn, as I 
 have said, to Delaborde, and there is one little book 
 which is better worth having than all the rest. This 
 is "L' Atelier d'lngres," the collection of souvenirs 
 which Atnaury-Duval, one of his pupils, published in 
 1878. Amaury, as he preferred to call himself in 
 his own pages, was a disciple no less observant than 
 loving, and through his tenderly sympathetic descrip- 
 tions and anecdotes we are brought close not only 
 to the painter but to the man. 
 
 II 
 
 As a child at Montauban Ingres felt within him 
 the stirrings of his destiny. He was only twelve when 
 he saw by accident some copies after Raphael and 
 some fragments of antique sculpture. He feU upon 
 them, as he was wont to say, just as a cat falls upon 
 its prey. Delaborde tells, too, how the lad used to 
 weep with admiration as he shared with his violin in 
 the performance of some of Gluck's music, when he 
 earned his bread in the orchestra of the theatre at 
 
Ingres: A Pilgrimage 33 
 
 Toulouse. Two arts claimed him in his youth, but 
 he and his father both appear to have realized soon 
 enough that he was meant to be a painter and not a 
 musician. He was, no doubt, a fairly competent 
 violinist. As a boy he won applause at Toulouse 
 with a concerto of Viotti's, and later he liked to recall 
 that he had played the second violin part in the 
 Beethoven quartets organized by Paganini during his 
 sojourn at Rome.* But it is to be gathered from 
 Amaury that Ingres never exaggerated his musical 
 proficiency. That, as a draughtsman, he had the root 
 of the matter in him he showed when he was only 
 nine years old. M. Lapauze has in his collection a 
 drawing, from the cast, that Ingres made then, a 
 drawing astonishingly good for one so young; and 
 so far as one may infer from the earliest relics at Mon- 
 tauban his hand thenceforth never faltered. His 
 father gave him his first training, and then sent him, 
 at the age of twelve, to study under Roques, at Tou- 
 louse. He also had at this time some instruction 
 from Briant, a landscapist, remembered not so much 
 for his works as for his energy in saving many of the 
 artistic treasures of Toulouse from the vandalism of 
 '93. The student made rapid progress. At sixteen 
 
 * It is interesting to compare the drawing that he made of the vir- 
 tuoso with the portrait painted by Delacroix. There is more mys- 
 tery, more of the bizarre thrill of one of Paganini's conjuring perform- 
 ances, in the romanticist's "temperamental" impression than there 
 is in the cool linear study by Ingres; but it is by the latter that one 
 would be inclined to swear, on the point of truth, and it is, besides, a 
 very beautiful thing. 
 
34 Ingres: A Pilgrimage 
 
 he was on his way to Paris, where he entered the ate- 
 lier of David, and in five years he had won the Prix 
 de Rome. Technically he was then one of the best- 
 equipped young artists of his time, and already he 
 had begun to think for himself. 
 
 Those were long, long thoughts of his. David 
 never had a more loyal pupil, but when Ingres set- 
 tled down in Rome, yoimg, ambitious and happy, 
 his artistic character was as wax to receive the im- 
 press of Raphael's genius, and Raphael, he felt in his 
 soul, was an immeasurably greater man than David. 
 Between the two influences he proceeded to beat out 
 a style of his own, compounded of Greek ideah'sm and 
 the truth of nature as he saw it. If we are to believe 
 his detractors, and he has had many of them, he froze 
 these elements into a formula; but when you come 
 really to trace his familiar walk and demeanor you 
 find it impossible to regard him as an artist who lived 
 by any given set of rules, devised by himself or by 
 anybody else. He lived, rather, by instinct, by en- 
 thusiasm, and both were for beauty and the world 
 well lost. He had, of course, his theories, his prin- 
 ciples, but it is, I think, misleading to take them too 
 seriously. Beauty, he Hked to say, as so many others 
 have said before him, resides in truth, but when truth 
 confronted him in an ugly shape he turned his head 
 away. There was nothing in him of that scientific pas- 
 sion for the exact fact which has been so widely devel- 
 oped in modern art since his day. He knew all the 
 
Ingres: A Pilgrimage 35 
 
 muscles in the human body, but it was his boast that 
 he did not know any of them by name, and this nice 
 distinction between artistic and anatomical authority 
 was very characteristic. "In the construction of a 
 figure," he would say to his pupils, "do not proceed 
 bit by bit, but build it up at a stroke; get the en- 
 semble." And again: "Draw purely, but with large- 
 ness. Purity and largeness, voila le dessin, voild 
 Vart." Once he was prevailed upon to authorize the 
 purchase of a skeleton for the studio used by his 
 pupils. Amaury told his comrades that he would 
 give them fifteen days to retain their "property," 
 but by the end of the first week Ingres had had the 
 abhorrent thing thrown out. 
 
 That last episode might seem to suggest an incur- 
 able unwillingness to come to close quarters with na- 
 ture, and there are sayings of his which nominally 
 point to a narrow, arbitrary conception of truth. " In 
 the images of man in art," he says, "repose is the first 
 beauty of the body, just as in life wisdom is the high- 
 est expression of the soul." He chose his subjects 
 accordingly. But that surely was his right, and hav- 
 ing made his choice he proceeded on the hypothesis 
 that he could not be too faithful to the actual object 
 before his eyes. An old pupil of his, one Granger, 
 was looking at the "Edipus," and, recognizing the 
 model, remarked that it seemed to him an idealized 
 portrait. Ingres nearly lost his temper. "You may 
 think what you like," he said, "but it is my effort to 
 
36 Ingres: A Pilgrimage 
 
 copy my model as a very humble servant and not to 
 idealize it." "Idealized or not, it is very beautiful," 
 retorted Granger, and there we have the art of Ingres 
 in a nutshell. Others may see what he could not or 
 would not see himself, that his sense of beauty irre- 
 sistibly governed him. Whether he could not or 
 would not, it was idle to argue with him. "He was 
 incapable of discussion," says Amaury, and the re- 
 mark brings up a fact which is not perhaps generally 
 appreciated. The classic calm pervading his work 
 and the gravely dignified figure that Ingres presented 
 to the world, especially in his later Parisian years, 
 have withdrawn attention from the southern passion 
 of his nature. He was a true Montalbanais, fiery, 
 impatient, and having small use for consistency or 
 logic. Over and over again Amaury illustrates the 
 tempestuous habit of his master when contradicted 
 or in any way annoyed. When the conversation took 
 a turn distastefxil to him he would move imeasily in 
 his chair and beat with his fingers on the table. At 
 diimer one night M. Thiers undertook to develop the 
 thesis that the Madonnas of Raphael constituted his 
 chief title to fame. "I would give them all," violently 
 exclaimed Ingres, "yes, monsieur, all of them, for a 
 fragment of the 'Dispute' or of the 'School of Athens' 
 or of the 'Parnassus,'" and it was with difficulty that 
 his outraged temper could be soothed. 
 
 That volcanic way of his was often harmless enough. 
 There was the case of the industrious young Lefevre, 
 
Ingres: A Pilgrimage 37 
 
 who was very poor and suddenly absented himself 
 from the studio because he was in arrears with the 
 mossier. He had been missed for two whole months 
 when Ingres met him on the Pont des Arts and 
 wormed the truth out of him. "What, monsieur," 
 he exclaimed, "would you insult me? Have I given 
 you the right to speak to me in this manner? Am I 
 a shopkeeper? Do I sell my counsel? Monsieur, 
 you will come to-morrow to the studio or I shall con- 
 sider your conduct as a personal insult. Never let 
 this question arise between us again." But against 
 this noble wrath it is undeniable that we have to set 
 many an instance of almost incredible intolerance. 
 "You are my pupils," he would say to Amaury and 
 the rest, "and in consequence my friends. You would 
 not salute one of my enemies if you passed him in the 
 street. Turn then from Rubens when you pass him 
 in the museums, because if you do not do so you are 
 treacherous to my teaching and to me." When he 
 foimd Delacroix in a room containing one of his pic- 
 tures he could hardly wait for the hated Romanticist 
 to leave, so that he might open the window and purify 
 the air. It is pathetic and a little amusing to read 
 the references to him in Delacroix's journal. The 
 earliest of them is favorable enough. He goes to the 
 Luxembourg and sees there a picture, probably the 
 "Roger delivrant Angelique," and notes simply "In- 
 gres charmant." But Delacroix got over that. The 
 time came when he could say of an exhibition of his 
 
38 Ingres: A Pilgrimage 
 
 rival's work that "it is the complete expression of an 
 incomplete intelligence." Every biographer of Ingres 
 finds it necessary to apologize for his attitude toward 
 Delacroix, just as every biographer of Delacroix seeks 
 to explain away his observations on Ingres. 
 
 There is, however, a profitable suggestion in that 
 remark of Delacroix's about "intelligence." Ingres 
 painted the kind of picture with which one not unnat- 
 urally associates ideas of intelligence, of reason, of 
 carefully pondered construction. He was, emphatic- 
 ally, a man who mixed brains with his colors. But it 
 is even more important to remember that a pictorial 
 idea, with Ingres, as with Delacroix, stands for a jet 
 of emotion. He was not a native of Montauban for 
 nothing. Impulse, a sudden and swift inspiration, 
 the conviction whose springs cannot be analyzed — 
 these things were forever influencing his work. Take, 
 for example, that masterly portrait of M. Bertin in 
 the Louvre which ranks among his highest achieve- 
 ments. I have heard it contemned by no less a per- 
 son than Whistler, who met my enthusiasm for it 
 with the roxmd assertion that it was no better than a 
 figure by Meissonier, laboriously and nervelessly built 
 up inch by inch, with every button on the coat in 
 the right place, but with no life left in it. Now, as 
 a matter of fact, Ingres did work hke a slave on a 
 portrait of Bertin. The latter, telling Amaury of the 
 master's despair through sitting after sitting, said, 
 "He weeps and I pass my time consoling him." At 
 
Ingres: A Pilgrimage 39 
 
 Montauban there are a number of drawings showing 
 the false and heartbreaking steps he took toward his 
 goal. But when he reached that goal it was by a 
 leap. One night at dinner he observed Bertin in the 
 pose that we know. "Come and sit to-morrow," he 
 whispered as they parted; "your portrait is made," 
 and the next day, abandoning all that had been pre- 
 viously done, he attacked his canvas with the cer- 
 tainty of success. In less than a month the portrait 
 was finished. He could take infinite pains. He rec- 
 ognized his mistakes when he made them, crying 
 like a child as he cleaned them off the canvas and 
 started again; but at bottom it was an affair of vi- 
 sion, not of hand, that thus delayed him. He had to 
 see his subject in the right way. So far as mere dex- 
 terity went, Ingres could work miracles. Horace 
 Vernet used to say to those who thought that he 
 painted with rapidity that they ought to see Ingres 
 at work. Beside him Vernet felt that he was no 
 better than a tortoise. 
 
 One measure of his greatness is accessible in the 
 resolution with which he refused to presume upon 
 his facility. Master of line that he was, he insisted 
 upon remaining its master. No technical resource 
 would ever be brought by him into the foreground. 
 "Touch," of which some of his contemporaries were 
 prone to make so much, struck him as only an abuse 
 of execution, a quality belonging to false talents, to 
 false artists, who painted pictures merely to show 
 
40 Ingres: A Pilgrimage 
 
 their own adroitness. To magnify the function of 
 "touch" was, he maintained, to draw attention from 
 the object represented to the technical process used 
 in representing it, to make more of the painter's hand 
 than of his thought. Flippant cleverness he merely- 
 loathed, and woe betide the pupil who sought "le 
 chic." The mere utterance of that phrase in his 
 hearing was likely to provoke a storm. "Les chefs- 
 d'oeuvre," he would say, "are not made to dazzle. 
 They are made to persuade, to convince, to enter 
 into us through the pores." Well might he say in 
 that sentence of his which has been quoted, perhaps, 
 more than any other, "Le dessin est la probite de I' art." 
 If he said this as a draughtsman he said it also as an 
 artist in the fullest, most comprehensive sense of the 
 term. It is of his rectitude that one is always think- 
 ing in the museum at Montauban. You do not miss 
 there the movement which he rejects in that saying 
 I have cited about the value of repose in art. Neither 
 do you miss anything in the nature of "touch." All 
 is serene and beautiful, and the dignity of Ingres, 
 his smooth, pure surfaces, like his astounding draughts- 
 manship, seem just the right and natural expression 
 of a great original genius. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I found it very interesting to follow the construc- 
 tion of some of his pictures through the sheaves of 
 
Ingres: A Pilgrimage 41 
 
 studies made for them. Many of these are concen- 
 trated in portfolios, which somehow makes it the 
 more illuminating to study them. Turning them 
 about and about, handling them at leisure, they seem 
 to exhale his mood, to bring back in some mysterious 
 manner the hours of patient and ardent labor which 
 was not labor, after all, but the happy exercise of a 
 gift. Amid these warm personal souvenirs the very 
 last shreds of any pedantry that may have appeared 
 to cling to Ingres seem to fall away. I make no pre- 
 tence of describing the thousands of drawings in the 
 museum. What impressed me about the mass was 
 the strain of beauty, of sheer beauty, r\uming through 
 it. In drawing after drawing I could read the artist's 
 conscientious search after truth, his tireless interro- 
 gation of form, his loving research into the structure 
 of a hand, the bend in a leg, the play of a muscle. 
 But never was I conscious of the quest for truth alone. 
 Every touch recording a fact seemed also to recap- 
 ture some fleeting trait of beauty, to envelop form 
 in an exquisite, linear grace. More than ever, as it 
 seemed to me, I could appreciate the force of that 
 profession of faith which Ingres wrote when he was 
 nearing his prime: "I am for the arts what I have 
 always been. Age and reflection have, I hope, con- 
 firmed my taste without diminishing its warmth. 
 My adorations remain what they have always been, 
 Raphael and his century, the ancients and, above 
 all, the divine Greeks. In music, Gluck, Mozart and 
 
42 Ingres: A Pilgrimage 
 
 Haydn. My library is composed of a score of im- 
 mortal volumes. With all this life is full of charm." 
 He preserved down to the end that candid, well- 
 poised faith, and he had his reward. When as a youth 
 he won the Prix de Rome, his sojourn in Italy devel- 
 oped some trials. He stayed on, unwilling to tear 
 himself away from Raphael, and though he was paint- 
 ing masterpieces he found it next to impossible to 
 earn a living. That was the period of the innumer- 
 able little portraits, the drawings made for sixty francs 
 which are now fought for by the collectors. Made- 
 leine Chapelle, his first wife, whom he married at 
 that time, used afterward to tell of the straits to 
 which they had been reduced. When he was paint- 
 ing "The Vow of Louis XIII" there was not money 
 in the house to buy a ladder on which to work at the 
 upper part of the picture, and they were obliged to 
 do the best they could, piUng one bit of furnitiu-e 
 upon another. But at that very moment Ingres had 
 the courage to refuse a commission to go to England 
 and draw more portraits, a commission which would 
 have paid him well, and the gods confirmed the de- 
 cision of the distracted pair. In Paris this picture 
 made a tremendous success, and carried Ingres to 
 fortune. Thenceforth his course was clear. The ro- 
 manticist might rave, but Ingres was secure. He 
 throve in Paris until he returned to Rome to take 
 Vernet's place at the head of the Villa Medici, and 
 every day, as time wore on, his position in Italy and 
 
Ingres: A Pilgrimage 43 
 
 at home in France was that of a kind of demigod. 
 I have already quoted the reminiscence of Legros, 
 showing the veneration in which Ingres was ulti- 
 mately held. This veneration ran through many of 
 the studios, but decidedly not through them all. 
 There were artists aplenty to take their cue from 
 Delacroix, and in the world at large there were other 
 malcontents. The late John La Farge, who was a 
 young man in Paris in the 6o's, used to tell me how 
 bitter was the feud between the two camps, that of 
 Ingres and that of Delacroix, and how Chasseriau 
 had infuriated the former by breaking away from his 
 tradition and seeking an independent path. There 
 was much wild talk to and fro, there were sayings that 
 were full of passion and of malice, and there were, 
 others that were only witty and gay. Among these 
 last there was one by Laurent Jan which it is worth 
 whUe to recall. This ingenious homme d'esprit foimd 
 an anagram for the painter's name, turning Ingres 
 into engris. It was a clever stroke, and, as Amaury 
 admits, "in France a thing wittily said has soon the 
 force of a law," but, as he adds, though this was 
 amusing it was no more than that. 
 
 Ingres was not a colorist, he never pretended to 
 be one, and in his remarks on the subject it is plain 
 that he had not been initiated into its mysteries. It 
 is prettily said that one should consult the flowers to 
 find good tints for draperies, but the secret of his 
 weakness lies in that very counsel, for it points to 
 
44 Ingres: A Pilgrimage 
 
 an arbitrary mode of procedure. Studying his work 
 in color at Montauban, the most important of the 
 paintings in the museum, the large "Jesus Airiong 
 the Doctors," and his picture in the sacristy of the 
 Cathedral, that "Vow of Louis XIII" which has been 
 already mentioned, I found what I had always found 
 in his pictures at Paris and in divers provincial mu- 
 seums, that he was curiously indifferent to the play 
 of light and the absorption of light by objects in na- 
 ture. The evidence at Montauban, and at Dam- 
 pierre, that he had his moments of insight into the 
 secret of landscape, is not weighty enough to suggest 
 that he was even dimly on the track of those dis- 
 coveries in light-saturated color which the Impres- 
 sionists were to make. On the other hand, as I have 
 noted in regard to the beautiful picture at Toulouse, 
 the flat tints of Ingres are not really as hard or as 
 opaque as they seem, and, above all, they are very 
 pure and wonderfully harmonized. There is a superb 
 glow in the upper and lighter portion of "The Vow 
 of Louis XIII," a golden glow which for a moment 
 inclines you to think that the art of Ingres had in- 
 deed its sensuous aspect. And yet it would be idle 
 to say that this or any other painting by him has 
 the luminous quality which belongs to color in its 
 best estate, the transparent depths, the subtle modu- 
 lations, which make color in its penetrating appeal 
 akin to music. No, it is vain to look in Ingres for 
 what, flatly, is not there. No man can add a cubit 
 
Ingres: A Pilgrimage 45 
 
 to his stature, and Ingres, for all his greatness, was 
 deprived of one prodigiously important resource. 
 "Le iessin comprend tout," he says, "excepte la teinte," 
 and there is, perhaps, an unconscious pathos in the 
 exception that he admits. I felt its force, even under 
 the spell of Montauban. But genius is a mysteri- 
 ously potent thing. In those still rooms, consacre, as 
 his countrymen would say, by illustrious achievement, 
 it seemed fitting to murmur only those proud words 
 of his, "Le dessin comprend tout." 
 
Ill 
 
 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 I. The Old Tradition and the New 
 
 II. Rembrandt 
 
 III. Hals 
 
 IV. Vermeer of Delft 
 
 V. Chardin and Alfred Stevens 
 
Ill 
 
 THE MAGIC OF MERE PAINT 
 
 I 
 
 THE OLD TRADITION AND THE NEW 
 
 There are two great portraits in Europe which 
 because of the suggestive differences between them I 
 have often found it interesting to think of together. 
 One is the "Cardinal Mezzarota" of Mantegna, at 
 Berlin, and the other is the "^sop" of Velasquez, at 
 Madrid. The period of time that divides them, a 
 period of more than a hundred and fifty years, is as 
 nothing to the gulf that separates them in the matter 
 of method. All manner of developments have to be 
 reckoned with in the long transition from the studio 
 of the Italian to that of the Spaniard. But it is not 
 to traverse these through their infinite ramifications 
 that I would consider the two, portraits in question 
 side by side. It is, rather, for the reason that com- 
 parison of them, looking simply to the heads, affords 
 an opportunity, peculiarly convenient, amusing, and 
 fruitful, for an exposition of what I may call the 
 genius of pigment. 
 
 49 
 
50 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 If you ask an artist to tell you which of the old 
 masters, in his opinion, knew how to paint, he will 
 name, at the outside, only four or five, and perhaps 
 not so many. Ask him to explain why he thus re- 
 stricts his Ust, and he will say that the old masters 
 used, in the main, a method totally different from our 
 own; that only a scant handful of them treated pig- 
 ment with a true feeling for its character as pigment. 
 The layman has to be on his guard in these matters. 
 He has to remember that there are methods and 
 methods, and that the method of the Florentines, for 
 example, was just as valid, in its way, as that of Ve- 
 lasquez or that of Rembrandt. But the difference 
 remains and there is nothing more profitable than to 
 grasp its exact significance. We may do so the more 
 readily, I think, if, in contrasting these two portraits, 
 we study their technical aspects with reference to the 
 broad experience of each of the painters concerned. 
 
 Mantegna, trained in the midst of Squarcione's 
 collection of classical marbles, based his treatment of 
 form on principles of sculpture. His grand portrait 
 of the Cardinal is very like a carven bust out of an- 
 tiquity. Modelled with a stern feeling for plastic 
 simplicity, superbly drawn, synthesized with an ex- 
 traordinarily austere power, it seems of scarcely any 
 consequence that the artist should have introduced 
 into his color scheme a plangent note of red. What, 
 after all, is color to him? Form is what he cares for 
 in this instance and it is the form of a statue. But it 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint $ i 
 
 is not upon the sacrifice of color that I wish to dwell, 
 for as a matter of fact Mantegna shows elsewhere 
 that to color, as color, he was not by any means in- 
 different. The sacrifice I have more particularly in 
 mind is the unconscious one of that quality which 
 goes with true painted color. There is the pivot on 
 which our problem turns. There was color in Euro- 
 pean art long before Velasquez came into view, but 
 it was not the color of pigment used for its own sake. 
 The paintings of the Van Eycks glow like jewels or 
 enamels, but that is precisely what distingiiishes them 
 for the purposes of this inquiry; they have nothing 
 to tell us about the genius of paint as the modern 
 painter imderstands it. 
 
 Turn now to the "^sop " and to the frame of mind 
 in which Velasquez painted it. He had begun his 
 career as an artist in his bodegones, observing every- 
 day types in the taverns and streets of Seville. There 
 were no coldly gleaming marbles in his pupilage, to 
 fix his eye, as Mantegna's had been fixed, upon lovely 
 but still opaque surfaces. He saw men, not statues, 
 and he saw them as they were. The "^Esop," done 
 when he had got well into his stride, perfectly illus- 
 trates the inevitable result of such observation. All 
 is changed from Mantegna's Greek or at least Roman 
 generalization. The Spanish head comes out of the 
 canvas a living thing. The skin is drawn over the 
 bones as it is drawn in nature. All its little ridges 
 and inequalities, all the marvel of its texture, are 
 
52 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 there. The blood is at work. It is a porous, sensi- 
 tive integument, there are nerves at work in it, too, 
 and it is full of color. Beside this thing of flesh the 
 Mantegna, masterpiece as it is, is also a thing of 
 wood. Now a partial explanation of the Spanish 
 painter's superiority might be offered in two words, 
 life and light. His more human point of view I have 
 sufficiently indicated. I may illustrate what light 
 did for him by reference to a familiar open-air phe- 
 nomenon. Look at the forequarters of a horse in 
 full sunshine, when the thick hair is saturated in 
 light, and note how, when the animal moves a muscle 
 to dislodge a fly, there goes a wonderful ripple not 
 simply of light and shade but of many tones of color 
 across the body. Such hints as these Velasquez was 
 forever reckoning with and something analogous to 
 the subtle, richly charged effect I have Just described 
 passed into his work. But while I make much of the 
 difference between his starting-point and Mantegna's, 
 between his interest in life and the Italian's interest 
 in sculpture, the great point at issue is his possession 
 of what the earlier master lacked, an instinct for the 
 magic lying in mere paint. The historic experiments 
 in the Low Countries and in Venice, which had opened 
 to European art a new world of color, had disclosed 
 everything save that one secret. The men who after- 
 ward arose to conquer it took liberties which would 
 have shocked the Netherlandish and Italian Primi- 
 tives, treating their surfaces often with a roughness 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint 53 
 
 which would have seemed to the latter a violation of 
 all the amenities. But, paradoxically, their ruthless 
 abandonment of the old pure and suave tradition 
 meant, instead of irreverence, a new respect for the 
 instruments of artistic expression. Using paint with 
 a deeper, livelier consciousness of its intrinsic quali- 
 ties, bringing its individuality, so to say, into the 
 foreground, they extorted from it a beauty which we 
 need not call greater than that achieved before them, 
 but which we must certainly recognize as wholly dif- 
 ferent, wholly new. It is to that difference that the 
 modern artist trusts himself when, as I noted at the 
 beginning, he draws up so modest a list of the painters 
 who knew how to paint. It is a little absurd that he 
 should be so grudging and yet one can realize just 
 how he feels. Modern painting, the world in which 
 he lives, has been enormously influenced by the prin- 
 ciple which we have been discussing, and then the 
 great outstanding exemplars of it happen to be types 
 of such supreme artistic strength. Of Velasquez I 
 have spoken at some length elsewhere in this volume 
 but there are two or three others whose careers may 
 be briefly traversed in the present essay. 
 
 II 
 
 REMBRANDT 
 
 They are the more interesting, I like to maintain, 
 according as we survey them both as masters of tech- 
 
54 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 nique and as men swayed by the common circum- 
 stances of human life. Rembrandt passed through 
 the world not only that thousands of artists might 
 have to-day a better understanding of the resources 
 of their craft but that the truth might prevail in art. 
 The story of his life is not an affair of esoteric aloof- 
 ness from the world, of technique enveloped in an 
 hermetically closed studio, but of prosaic effort. This 
 miller's son was born in a comfortable house on the 
 ramparts of Leyden on July 15, 1606. His parents 
 were in easy circumstances; they appear to have been 
 kindly, sympathetic folk, quick to understand the 
 ambition which their son disclosed at an early age. 
 He experienced none of the usual difl&culties when 
 once he had made his choice of a career. The miller 
 and his wife saw no reason why they shoidd compel 
 the lad to study Latin when his heart was set on 
 handling the brush. They released him from school 
 when he was still in his teens, to enter the studio of 
 Swanenburch, and after three years under that me- 
 diocre painter of Biblical and historical compositions 
 they were content to let him leave their home and 
 proceed to Amsterdam, where better instruction was 
 available. He chose for his master Pieter Lastman, 
 who had visited Rome and had brought back with 
 him a Dutchman's version of the classical tradition, 
 which is to say, a mode of painting more interesting 
 to his contemporaries than it is to us. Rembrandt, 
 a man in advance of his time, was not long in ex- 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint 55 
 
 hausting all that his fashionable master had to teach 
 him. By the time he was eighteen he was ready to 
 return to Leyden, there, in the words of one of his 
 biographers, "to study and practise painting alone, 
 in his own fashion." 
 
 His art was founded upon nature, upon truth. 
 From the beginning he tried most of all to make his 
 picture look like the object placed before him, and 
 the people for whom he labored were just the people 
 to encourage his habit. The prosperous burghers of 
 Holland were simple-minded souls, who kept their 
 eyes upon the fact and expected the painter to do 
 likewise. They kept him busy, too, making their 
 portraits, and the well-trained artist was assured of 
 his living as was the mason or the cabinet-maker. I 
 purposely use this homely comparison because, in 
 thinking of Rembrandt, it is important to think of 
 him as working with his feet firm-fixed upon the 
 ground, called upon to paint human beings in a sim- 
 ple, straightforward fashion, and qualified by birth, by 
 breeding, and by his whole natural impulse to enter 
 into the spirit of his surroundings, and execute his 
 task in harmony with them. His time was ripe for 
 him, and he was ripe for his time. In saying that 
 he was a born draughtsman we credit him with a 
 gift which he shared with other men; and indeed, in 
 certain other broad characteristics, he was very much 
 a man of his period. Both in his tonality and in the 
 simplicity of his light and shade, he followed the gen- 
 
56 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 eral tendency of his contemporaries in Holland. But 
 what he brought to his work, even as a young man, 
 that was peculiarly his own, was an extraordinary 
 authority in the fusion of draughtsmanship, color, 
 and light and shade into a form of art marked by 
 great feeling for character, great strength of style, 
 and a notable instinct for pigment. 
 
 He began his studies in portraiture by making 
 portraits of himself, and there is a startling maturity 
 in these first efforts of his brush. There is a portrait 
 of Rembrandt, painted by himself, in the museum 
 at The Hague, which dates from about 1629 or 1630, 
 when he was only twenty-three or twenty-four. The 
 head is turned so as to face the beholder, and half 
 of it is in shadow. A steel gorget partly covers the 
 stalwart young shoulders, and just above the gleam- 
 ing metal a soft white collar appears, on which a full 
 light falls. Nothing could be simpler than this con- 
 ception. It breathes the very spirit of Rembrandt's 
 vigorous youth. The bit of armor hints at the love 
 of the picturesque which was in him, but otherwise 
 he gives us nothing of the "studio arrangement"; he 
 paints himself as he saw himself, with a clear matter- 
 of-fact eye. What does he do, in addition to all that 
 I have already indicated, to give this portrait a place 
 apart, to make us realize that he has something new 
 to tell us? He gives to the sheer paint of which the 
 portrait is made a rich, warm, sensuous quality, a 
 character in its very grain that fills us with a sense 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint 57 
 
 of individuality and beauty. The point may be made 
 the dearer if, for a moment, we compare the paint 
 of Rembrandt with the paint of an Italian, say, like 
 Raphael. When the latter has a portrait to make 
 like the famous "Young Cardinal" in the Prado, or 
 the "Baldassare Castiglione" in the Louvre, he makes 
 it one of the world's masterpieces, both as an inter- 
 pretation and as an example of draughtsmanship, 
 modelling, and style; but he does not get out of its 
 surface quite all that there is to be got of texture and 
 color. He does not make you feel the charm that 
 resides in painted surface, simply for its own sake. 
 In a sense, it scarcely matters whether he paints his 
 portrait in oils or in water-colors. 
 
 Now Rembrandt makes you feel that he could not 
 paint his portrait in anything save in oils, and that 
 he is bent upon making every inch of his canvas show 
 the intrinsic charm of oil paint. In his hands it has 
 a fat, unctuous quality, and it is saturated in light, 
 so that the paint might be described as a kind of skin 
 laid upon the canvas, following all the subtle modula- 
 tions of form in the object represented, and having 
 an organic life of its own. The bony structure in a 
 man's face is expressed in touches having a mysteri- 
 ous, life in them. They state the fact, and in stating 
 it they give you a new beauty to admire — the beauty 
 of transparent pigment — which is a beauty as indi- 
 vidualized and as haunting as the beauty of a jewel, of 
 a flower, of the sea, or of the sky. Furthermore, and 
 
58 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 this is the final element in painter's magic, a master 
 like Rembrandt cannot manipulate pigment in this 
 way without disclosing his own original quality. It 
 is like the touch of the musician; one great violinist 
 or pianist touches his instrument as no one else in the 
 world could touch it. So Rembrandt lends to those 
 rich living surfaces of his an accent which we recog- 
 nize as though it were the accent of a word falling 
 from his lips. 
 
 It was modified, of course, by the passage of time, 
 and it would be very interesting, if the process were 
 not too minute for our present purpose, to follow Rem- 
 brandt step by step through his long career, observ- 
 ing the evolution of his art from the productions of 
 his youth to those of his old age. He was always 
 learning, and there is always something to learn in 
 contemplating his passage from one stage to another. 
 But the main point is easily stated. It is true that 
 in his earlier years Rembrandt painted closely and 
 even sometimes laboriously. He is never, at this 
 time, hard and mechanical, like the mediocrities of 
 his school; but he is very patient and careful in the 
 definition of forms. Both in details of anatomical 
 construction and in matters of costume he is a pains- 
 taking reahst. But even in his formative years his 
 carefulness has more elasticity than you will find in 
 the freedom of most other men, and as time goes on 
 his art steadily broadens, until, in his prime, his works 
 are executed with superb ease and energy. In com- 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint ,59 
 
 plete command of his instrmnents, knowing just what 
 he wants to do and precisely how to do it, he builds 
 up his massive portraits as though without conscious 
 effort, deepening and enriching his color, making his 
 light and air purer and fuller, more like the light and 
 air of life itself, and altogether putting more clearly 
 and more brilliantly the stamp of greatness upon his 
 work. 
 
 Rembrandt drank in the inspiration of the Bible 
 at his mother's knee, and he left pictures of religious 
 themes to show that he could illustrate the divine 
 narrative with the highest dignity and the tenderest 
 feeling. But it is man, in all his infinite variety and 
 in all the chances of daily life, that chiefly serves to 
 stir the depths of his imagination. Character was 
 his ceaseless preoccupation. A great part of the busi- 
 ness of his life was the portrayal of his contempo- 
 raries, and when he painted them he showed forth 
 their hearts and brains, not only in their faces, but in 
 their bodies, in their hands, in all that is implied by 
 carriage and gesture. His parents occupied both his 
 brush and his etching needle; he was forever making 
 portraits of Saskia, of Titus, and afterward of Hen- 
 drickje Stoefells, and all his life long he was ponder- 
 ing his own features and telling, as he drew them, 
 far better than words could tell, of what lay beneath 
 their surface. 
 
 What manner of ideal is it that we may discern 
 there with his aid? Not an ideal of romantic yearn- 
 
6o The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 ing after beauty. Not the ideal of a poet in the 
 ordinary sense of the word, seeing visions and dream- 
 ing dreams. No, it was the ideal of a profoundly 
 sympathetic human being, fascinated by the poignant 
 meaning of the life around him, impelled to express 
 its touching beauty in terms of simplicity and truth, 
 and moved in the midst of all this to come to close 
 quarters with his technique, to feel the special quality 
 residing in mere paint. Whether, as in his earlier 
 period, he gave a smooth pure tone to his surfaces, or 
 in later years employed a thick impasto, so that some- 
 times great ridges or smears or "blobs" of paint ap- 
 pear upon his canvas, you feel in him always the man 
 who loves his medium. 
 
 Ill 
 
 HALS 
 
 Frans Hals, the contemporary of Rembrandt, 
 shares none of the latter's graver, more thoughtful 
 traits, but reveals the same passion for the materials 
 of the painter. In this he is one of the most modern 
 types to be found in the past. His latest biographer, 
 Mr. Gerald S. Davies, notes that he never painted 
 a religious, a classical, an historical, or a nude sub- 
 ject; that he never painted a subject "in which either 
 a moral motive or a pathetic motive was the raison 
 d'etre of the picture." What he did do was to set 
 upon the canvas, in moments of peaceful enjo)Tnent 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint 6i 
 
 or absolute placidity, the personalities of men and 
 women who were capable of heroic deeds on one day 
 and of contented forgetfulness of them on the next. 
 Born only twelve or fourteen years after the opening 
 of the war of independence, he was never swept into 
 the current of public events. Holland may have been 
 in eruption, but he painted Holland in repose. Even 
 the swaggering volunteers immortalized in his cor- 
 poration pieces are warriors on holiday, and, in short, 
 all of this master's work is dedicated to themes sug- 
 gestive of anything rather than the throes of a nation 
 in revolt. Nature in its wholly normal aspect was 
 the foundation of his art. 
 
 We know next to nothing of the man himself. He 
 loved the material side of life, loved it, perhaps, too 
 well, for among the few details of his private career 
 that remain to us there are some proving pretty con- 
 clusively that his habits were none of the best. If 
 his old age was dreary and he died a poor man, his 
 convivial foibles were probably the cause. It is im- 
 possible to think of Hals as a prudent man. He en- 
 joyed his food and drink, and took no thought of the 
 morrow. But in so far as we can reconstruct the na- 
 ture of the man from his work we are undoubtedly safe 
 in affirming that he loved sincerity and truth. These 
 are the qualities that shine out from all his paintings. 
 His early work has disappeared. Information about 
 his period of apprenticeship is as scarce as informa- 
 tion about his private life. At Antwerp, where he 
 
62 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 was born, and spent his boyhood and youth, he may 
 have acquired some of the artistic traits of Adam 
 Van Noort, as a regular worker in the studio of that 
 mediocrity; he may, in the same city, have been in- 
 fluenced by companionship with the young Rubens, 
 or by study of the paintings of Antonio Moro. Pro- 
 ceeding to Haarlem as a young man, he may have 
 derived something from Karel Van Mander, in whose 
 studio he is said to have labored as a pupil; and the 
 colleague of Van Mander, Cornelius Cornelissen, may 
 have taught him a little. But the first authoritative 
 evidence that we have as to the character of Hals as a 
 painter is his "Banquet of St. Joris' Shooting Guild," 
 which dates from 1616, when he was in his early 
 thirties. Then he provided the "good likeness" upon 
 which the Dutch patron strenuously insisted and then, 
 as thereafter, he added to it the fascination of con- 
 summate craft. 
 
 This thoroughly practical worker, a man wiUing 
 to please his sitter by giving him first and last a faith- 
 ful transcript of fact — and, moreover, impelled by 
 his nature to paint the truth or nothing — was a 
 "painter's painter" in the most modern sense of the 
 term. The man who to-day thinks more of the tech- 
 nical quality of his work than of his subject is, ac- 
 cording to his lights, a follower of Frans Hals. Only 
 it never would have occurred to Hals that his sub- 
 ject could be subordinated to his technique, and, in 
 fact, be treated as nothing more than a peg on which 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint 63 
 
 to hang an artistic effect. It has been left to the 
 modern painter to exalt pigment higher than it was 
 exalted by the masters who invented it and exploited 
 it with inimitable success. For Hals the human in- 
 terest was of profound importance. One cannot im- 
 agine him as having looked with indifference upon 
 his sitters. He sees character always, and expresses 
 it, in many instances, with much of Rembrandt's 
 gusto. Where he remained a painter's painter is in 
 taking equal delight in the manipulation of his in- 
 struments, and in communicating to his portraits the 
 charm that dwells in technique. He has been crit- 
 icised as one too ready to display his technique, too 
 eager to amaze the beholder. The point is hardly 
 valid. Hals did not attitudinize. If he played with 
 his brushes in a manner somewhat spectacular it was 
 only as a great musician indulges in a certain bravura, 
 because he likes that sort of thing, and has no thought 
 of tickling the ears of the groimdling. Hals must 
 have revelled in the exercise of his gifts. No one 
 could possess such gifts and not exercise them in 
 sheer delight of the occupation. The explanation is 
 simple. Gifts like his are in themselves interesting. 
 Painters rejoice in him because he paints so well, 
 because his touch is so swift and so sure, because 
 the intrinsic quality of paint is brought out in his 
 work as in the work of only one painter in ten thou- 
 sand. He was not a great colorist. His range was 
 never wide, and it is doubtful if he would ever have 
 
64 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 approved himself a master of harmony, even if he 
 had not been compelled, in his huge corporation pieces, 
 to make the best of discordant costumes and draperies. 
 Some of his portraits would look as well in monotone 
 as in color. But there are passages of color in his 
 painting which, taken by themselves, are superb, and 
 I may remark in passing that there are some blacks 
 of his, in a few of his last works, which are as fine, 
 almost, as the blacks of Velasquez. Though we may 
 miss in him the golden glow of Rembrandt, his color 
 and tone are still extraordinarily fine. After all, 
 there is no reason why we should ask Hals to be some 
 one other than himself, to paint with the palette of 
 Titian when there was nothing in his temperament 
 even remotely akin to that of the sumptuous Vene- 
 tian. We go to Hals for magnificent brushwork, 
 for powerful modelling, and these things he gives us 
 in abounding measure, along with the vitality, the 
 human truth, which we also expect of him. 
 
 IV 
 VERMEER OF DELFT 
 
 The fame of Jan Vermeer of Delft is something 
 less than half a century old. It dates from the study 
 of him published in the Gazette des Beaux Arts in 
 1866, by W. Burger, who had discovered him only 
 a few years before, and it rests upon a very small 
 body of work. The most painstaking research made 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint 65 
 
 by European experts has discovered in all the collec- 
 tions of the world only between thirty and forty Ver- 
 meers of incontestable authenticity. The literature 
 of the subject has grown to be fairly voluminous since 
 Burger's day but it has consisted very largely of crit- 
 icism of the paintings, and has thrown hardly any 
 light on the history of the man. The definitive pub- 
 lication is the book by Dr. Hofstede de Groot, printed 
 on a large scale with imposing plates, and there is a 
 good monograph by M. Gustave Van Zype. The 
 known facts about Vermeer may still be written on 
 half a page of note-paper. 
 
 He was born at Delft in 1632. In his twenty-first 
 year he was married to Catherine Bolnes, by whom 
 he had ten children before his death in 1675. In the 
 year of his marriage he was admitted to the Guild of 
 Painters and the records show that he served as Dean 
 of that body in 1662, and again in 1670. He appears 
 to have been in modest and even poor circumstances. 
 We hear of a debt to the baker which involved the 
 pledging of two of his pictures. Twenty-one years 
 after his death a number of his paintings formed part 
 of a sale at Amsterdam, and the highest figure paid 
 for one of them was that of 200 florins, paid for the 
 magnificent "View of Delft," now one of the glories 
 of The Hague. One picture in the list, the "Jeune 
 DenteUiere," to-day in the Louvre, fetched in 1696 
 the ridiculous sum of 28 florins. It is useless to ask 
 why these things were thus. We know nothing about 
 
66 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 it. The archives yield not a scrap of evidence. All 
 we know is that Vermeer, only moderately success- 
 ful in his lifetime, was neglected and forgotten soon 
 after his death and thenceforth ignored until Burger 
 brought him to light and urged his claims to enthu- 
 siastic admiration. His pictures, which were seldom 
 signed, were handed over to Pieter de Hooghe, Nico- 
 las Maes or Metsu. It is a curious reflection on the 
 connoisseurship of past generations, for Vermeer is 
 nothing if not original, a type having only superficial 
 points of contact with the men to whom his works 
 were so light-heartedly ascribed. 
 
 What were the origins of his art, studied in the light 
 of internal evidence? M. Van Zype points out that 
 he must have begun his pupilage at a golden moment. 
 Rembrandt was at his apogee. Hals, though on in 
 years, was still painting. Among Vermeer's con- 
 temporaries were men then in the full tide of activ- 
 ity like Dou, Brouwer, Ostade, Metsu, Terburg and 
 Cuyp and others nearer his own age, like Maes, De 
 Hooghe, Hobbema, Steen and Ruysdael. Who, in 
 all that busy company, was his master? It has been 
 surmised that he may have issued from the studio of 
 Rembrandt, or at least been subject to his influence, 
 but only one or two of his works give even a fanci- 
 ful warrant for this theory, and outside of the works 
 we have no data whatever. A more plausible hy- 
 pothesis would have it that he was formed by Carel 
 Fabritius, the pupil of Rembrandt, untimely lost. 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint 67 
 
 M. Van Zype plays wistfully with the idea that Ver- 
 meer may have profited by association with Leon- 
 ard Bramer, a minor artist of Delft, who had travelled 
 in France and Italy, had met Adam Elzheimer in 
 Rome, was intimate with Rembrandt, and may, as a 
 family friend, have brought into our painter's hfe a 
 certain inspiration, accounting for the elevation of 
 his art. But all this is pure guesswork. As M. Van 
 Zype is driven to conclude, Vermeer of Delft stands 
 by himself, as isolated a phenomenon as Velasquez 
 in Spain. 
 
 His originality began with his attitude toward his 
 material, the familiar life of Delft. The Little Mas- 
 ters of the Low Countries were all wont to paint that 
 life, but from a different point of view. In the first 
 place, they exploited it with a freer touch, a broader 
 hvmior. Social life at that time was honest but a 
 little coarse. The pleasures of the table were en- 
 joyed without stint. The prosperity of a jest re- 
 sided in the bluntness of its point. There was a great 
 love of rich comfort, if not of luxury, abroad, and the 
 painters who reflected the spirit of their day either 
 gave easy rein to a mood of realism rather jarring to 
 oiir modern taste, or wreaked themselves on the sen- 
 suous charm of decorative accessories. It took a 
 genius like Rembrandt's to whelm visible truth in 
 the glamour of the creative imagination, or it took 
 another kind of genius like that of Vermeer to bathe 
 the facts of life in just a pure and serene distinction. 
 
68 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 There is a painting by him at Dresden, "The Cour- 
 tesan," which stands alone among all his works as 
 having a kind of vulgar subject which was popular 
 with many of his fellows. Curiously, too, it is painted 
 on a scale larger than was usual with him and in a 
 bolder key of color; but it is significant that it is one 
 of his earlier pieces, and that it is, moreover, Uf ted by 
 the painter's essentially refined art far above the level 
 on which his countrymen were accustomed to treat 
 the same motive. I make much of this point for the 
 reason that a consummate fineness of fibre is one of 
 Vermeer's most important characteristics. 
 
 The crass technician, narrowly jealous of his paint- 
 ing as painting, and inclined to rage if you suspect 
 him of having an intellectual or a spiritual purpose, 
 would withdraw attention from everything in Ver- 
 meer save the power of his hand. The more judi- 
 cious observer will perceive in the work of this painter 
 a special mental quality, a nobility of outlook, a deli- 
 cate emotion excited by the artist's very subtle flair 
 for the beauty in his material. It is well to note the 
 exquisite equilibrium which Vermeer establishes be- 
 tween his figures and their backgroimds. He paints 
 a servant at work in her kitchen, a girl playing a 
 mandolin, or another making music at the harpsi- 
 chord. His models are prosperous ladies of Delft 
 amusing themselves, writing or reading a letter, tast- 
 ing a glass of wine or coquettishly toying with jewels. 
 Whatever they are doing he paints them with an ex- 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint 69 
 
 traordinary simplicity, and while never unduly empha- 
 sizing an accessory — a musical instrument, a chair, 
 a platter of fruit, a hanging or a picture — he extorts 
 from every detail just the amount of interest and 
 beauty necessary to the perfecting of his imit of design. 
 He sometimes went a little further afield. There is a 
 picture of "Diana and her Nymphs" by him at The 
 Hague; in a Scottish collection there is a noble relig- 
 ious painting of his, "Jesus in the House of Martha," 
 and Dr. Bredius owns a Vermeer, "The New Testa- 
 ment," which shows, by a process of suggestion, that 
 the artist had a certain feeling for sacred things. But 
 his genius would appear to have been most naturally 
 and conclusively expressed in those domestic interiors 
 to which I have alluded, those placid scenes in which 
 men and women, preferably women, are painted in 
 softly lighted rooms, just for the sake of such beauty 
 as form, color and light may jaeld. 
 
 His drawing is impeccable. His figures stand upon 
 their legs; they are solid bodies modelled with abso- 
 lute knowledge. He loves beautiful blues, yellows 
 and grays, and he makes them more beautiful by the 
 cool luminosity in which he saturates them. What 
 a painter would call the faciure of his work is incom- 
 parable. He invests his surfaces with a beauty in 
 which you recognize the very essence of perfect tech- 
 nique. A square inch cut from one of his paintings, 
 a square inch of one of those walls against which he 
 poses his figure, would by itself tell you that a master 
 
70 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 of his craft had passed that way. Yet, as has already 
 been suggested, the qualities in Vermeer that ravish 
 the eye have their source not in manual dexterity 
 alone but in the artist's temperament, in modes of 
 thought and feeling. He must have had a veritable 
 passion for beauty. If he could not give his Diana 
 an aureole of unmistakably poetic grace he could, at 
 all events, substitute a sensuous charm which is in 
 its way as beguiUng as anything a more classically 
 minded painter could have achieved. There is an 
 impressive dignity about his "Jesus in the House of 
 Martha," for all that there is nothing there of that 
 mystery and awe which Rembrandt would have im- 
 ported into the scene. In other words, though Ver- 
 meer was neither a poet nor a dramatist and had no 
 large inventive faculty, the heart and soul of the man 
 were somehow touched to a fine issue and made him 
 a great painter in more than a technical sense. He 
 raised the every-day motives of common life to a 
 higher power, glorified them by sincerity and truth, 
 and set them apart by the singular strength and 
 beauty of his style. One of the salient virtues of 
 Vermeer is the rounded maturity of his work. We 
 have nothing tentative of his, no experimental or 
 roughly finished pictures, unless we except the por- 
 trait of a yoimg girl discovered by Dr. Bredius in a 
 private collection at Brussels several years ago, and 
 the looser handling in this may easily have been in- 
 tentional. In any case, the distinguishing mark in a 
 
The Magie of Mere Paint 71 
 
 painting by Vermeer is one of a man knowing just 
 what he wants to do and doing it with equal ease, 
 force and completeness. 
 
 He was truly one of the artists who are born, not 
 made. What would we not give to know him better, 
 to realize the man in his habit as he lived! But so 
 closely were the fates destined to keep his secret that 
 even he himself would seem to have contributed to 
 our discomfiture. In the beautiful painting of an art- 
 ist at work in his studio, which is one of the gems 
 of the Czernin collection at Vienna, Vermeer — if it 
 indeed be he who sits at the easel — turns his back 
 upon the world. 
 
 CHARDIN AND ALFRED STEVENS 
 
 The collector of oddities in the history of the things 
 of the mind may find something to his hand in this 
 matter of the genius of mere paint. It appears to 
 have been very largely a Northern prerogative. Ve- 
 lasquez provides the only salient exception. There 
 are others, especially in Venice, who might seem to 
 contradict this observation, as I have thought when 
 studying, for example, a picture like Titian's great 
 "Entombment" in the Louvre. But though you 
 find brushwork in him which testifies, in a measure, 
 to a special sensitiveness to the qualities of pigment, 
 it is on the whole for its color that he values his 
 
72 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 paint. Neither in Titian nor in any other Italian 
 master do we recognize that recondite flair for pig- 
 ment which I have attempted to describe. By some 
 turn of caprice, that seems to have flourished more 
 in the North than in the South. It must have been 
 pure accident, too, an affair of individual fortime. 
 Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer have it, but for some 
 occult reason Rubens and Van Dyck miss it. This 
 is peculiarly piizzling where Rubens is concerned, for 
 he had a headlong brush and was in many ways a 
 miraculous technician. Perhaps it was some inherent 
 strain of coarseness in him that held him back. Hals, 
 who did not possess quite his glorious sweep, still knew 
 better than he did how to raise brushwork to a higher 
 power, marrying it to the indefinable magic of paint. 
 Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, another Northern 
 type, is of a characteristically French grain. Born 
 in Paris in 1699, and dying there eighty years later, 
 he spent his long life under a regime consecrated to 
 the laws of taste. His father was a maker of billiard 
 tables. There was nothing in his birth or upbringing 
 to assimilate him to an aristocratic mode of thought, 
 save that the elder Chardin practised his craft in the 
 service of the King and so was in a position to win 
 courtly patronage for his son. Jean Baptiste, trained 
 to the art of the painter from an early age, was des- 
 tined to profit in due time from exceptional social 
 opportunities, yet even when he was selling his pic- 
 tures to kings and nobles he remained the same sim- 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint 73 
 
 pie, unspoiled bourgeois. He cared nothing for the 
 frivolity of his time and sturdily resisted all that was 
 meretricious in its elegant artifice. He painted chil- 
 dren and domestic servants, he painted still life, and 
 in the art of the period he looms like some high- 
 minded, sterling provincial in a Parisian salon or bou- 
 doir. It would not be qmte just to call Chardin an 
 eighteenth-century Vermeer. He is too much his 
 own man. Nevertheless he does take us back to the 
 early Dutch school, through his wholesome human 
 tone, his manly sincerity. He painted little subjects 
 and he made them great. The painter of still life 
 often errs through being too descriptive. Like Zola, 
 piling up the details in a mass of natiiral objects, he 
 lingers too long over each apple or peach in a basket 
 of fruit. Chardin saw his subject as a whole, gave 
 it pictorial unity, and through the distinction of his 
 technique made it beautiful. Diderot, pausing before 
 his painting of some pliuns, hailed him as the great- 
 est colorist of the Salon and added that he was "per- 
 haps one of the greatest colorists in the whole realm 
 of art." Criticism long since confirmed that judg- 
 ment and it has come to regard Chardin, too, as one 
 of the skilfullest of the wizards of mere painting. 
 
 His surfaces are as delicate as Vermeer's. Suavity 
 is, indeed, Chardin's leading trait. His powerful 
 sense of form never manifested itself in any exhibi- 
 tions of rude strength. There is something which I 
 can only describe as endearing about his figures, 
 
74 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 something in the tender touch with which they are 
 outlined, something akin to the sweet sentiment per- 
 vading his subject pictures. He was an academician, 
 like every other eighteenth-century French painter 
 of ability, but he worked from no rules and allowed 
 no hardness of convention to creep into his style. 
 His conscientious method — which, by the way, has 
 contributed to the good preservation of most of his 
 works — was also an easy, supple method. He drew 
 without an atom of self-consciousness, firmly, accu- 
 rately, and in a free, sensitive manner. He drew with 
 the brush, using the breadth and the generalizing in- 
 stinct of the true painter, and line, with him, is finely 
 subordinated to the soft, almost atmospheric effect 
 of the whole composition. His paint is, for the con- 
 noisseur of such things, as subtly delicious and intox- 
 icating as some noble old vintage. It is very pure, 
 it has substance and weight, its depths have mystery, 
 and all the time it is an exquisite pearly wonder, a 
 thing of bloom, and, I repeat, of magic. There is a 
 fashionable cult for him now. The ambitious col- 
 lector must have a Chardin in his gallery, regardless 
 of expense, and of late this painter has become por- 
 tentously expensive. But this new vogue of his, re- 
 viving that which he enjoyed in the heyday of his 
 career, leaves him, just the same, the property of the 
 painter and the critic. He is one of the great models 
 of technique, one of those masters who recall us to 
 fundamental principles. 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint 75 
 
 How many of the artists of our modern times have 
 responded to his appeal? How many have taken 
 their point of departure, not, we will say, from Char- 
 din alone, but from that whole movement which in- 
 cludes the Dutchmen I have cited and Velasquez as 
 well as the eighteenth-century Frenchman? The 
 answer may justly enough be made prodigally inclu- 
 sive. This magic of mere paint has stirred unnum- 
 bered painters to ardent emulation. But from an- 
 other point of view the historian must arrive at a far 
 less complacent conclusion. A few modern painters, 
 but only a few, have come within a really negotiable 
 distance of recapturing not alone the old adroitness 
 but the old perfection. Manet, with his splendid di- 
 rectness, and Whistler, with his exquisiteness, both 
 showed that they were not unworthy of their re- 
 nowned predecessors. But the one modern man who 
 by instinct came perhaps nearer than any other to 
 reviving the ancient spell was the Belgian, Alfred 
 Stevens, who was born in 1828. He lived in Paris 
 and his environment exerted a pressure upon him of 
 a certain sort. He made himself the interpreter of 
 Parisian society in its most fashionable aspects, paint- 
 ing the frou-frou of the Second Empire with an au- 
 thority unassailed by any of his clever contempo- 
 raries. He saw at close range what was done by all 
 of the groups. Academic, Romantic, Impressionistic, 
 and so on, which went to the making of French art 
 in the nineteenth century and extended their influ- 
 
76 The Magic of Mere Paint 
 
 ence sooner or later over the world. But Stevens 
 kept himself to himself, from the beginning to the 
 end of his long career, and even the ideas which he 
 drew from Japanese art failed to swerve him from 
 the style to which he was born. That was a style 
 rooted in the honest simplicity of the old Dutch 
 school and in that same passion for paint which 
 burned in the soul of Vermeer. He is, in fact, our 
 modern Vermeer, achieving in the works of his prime 
 a beauty of surface almost if not quite comparable to 
 that of the old master. I allude specifically to the 
 works of his prime because Stevens in his later years 
 terribly declined, and numbers of his pictures painted 
 then are deplorably brittle and uninteresting. When 
 he was at his best he was a magnificent painter, a 
 man who in his technique, whether it was wreaked 
 upon the figure or upon furniture, flowers, and other 
 accessories, made pigment in and for itself a thing 
 of sensuous rapture. 
 
 Stevens thus succeeded because he had, like Ve- 
 lasquez or Vermeer, the divine gift, the zest for paint 
 that comes — and comes so rarely! — from the good 
 fairies, and never can be taught. But incommuni- 
 cable as the magic of mere paint is, it is not the appa- 
 nage of the naive, artless painter. From the biog- 
 raphies of the masters it is plain that they thought, 
 and thought hard, about what they were doing. Al- 
 fred Stevens, who quite well understood the differ- 
 ence between painting and hterature, and never in 
 
The Magic of Mere Paint 77 
 
 his life was in the smallest danger of sacrificing his 
 technique to an extraneous motive, has a saying in 
 his wise "Impressions sur la Peinture" with which I 
 like to bring these observations to a close. "Una 
 6tincelle de lumiere," he says, "posee sur im acces- 
 soire par un maitre hoUandais ou flamand, est plus 
 qu'une habilete de pinceau, c'est un trait d'esprit." 
 
IV 
 
 Contemporary European Painting 
 
IV 
 
 CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN 
 PAINTING 
 
 A GENERATION has passed since Edouard Manet 
 painted his picture of "Le Mendiant," a full-length 
 portrait of a broken-down old blouse. He was then at 
 the height of his unpopularity, applauded by a few of 
 his fellow painters and defended by one or two crit- 
 ics, but contemned by officialdom in French art, and 
 laughed at by the public. Some time ago I saw "Le 
 Mendiant," hung in a place of honor in the exhibition 
 of the Secession at BerUn. It was surrounded by the 
 works of men devoted to Manet's memory, looking 
 upon him as one of the great liberators of modern 
 painting — if not the greatest of them all — and 
 feverishly emulous of his ideal of independence. 
 With so much zeal had the yoimg Germans served 
 that ideal that they had out-Heroded Herod, and 
 made Manet look like a classic lost amongst barba- 
 rians. It was as though one had found a drawing 
 by Ingres in a sheaf of caricatures by the artists 
 of Montmartre, or a Greek bust amid a group of 
 
 Si 
 
82 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 Rodin's most audacious sculptures. It was like turn- 
 ing the pages of an anthology and finding a poem 
 of Landor's on the same page with one of Whit- 
 man's yawps. It was like a sudden change in a 
 musical programme from a quartette of Beethoven's 
 to a cacophonous symphony by Richard Strauss. In 
 short, Manet looked in this gallery like a Samson 
 among the Philistines. Under any circumstances the 
 spectacle would invite reflection as well as mirth, but 
 it kept recurring to my mind with a special point as 
 I travelled over Europe looking ever3rwhere for "signs 
 of the times" in the art of painting. Even in my 
 peaceful hours with the old masters there would 
 come back the tormenting question, — "What have 
 the schools made of the liberty of which they are so 
 boastful?" Before I offer an answer to that question 
 I must glance briefly at the situation which produced 
 Manet. 
 
 In the turmoil of the Revolution, French art lost 
 its hold on the romantic glamour and the exquisite 
 mundane charm of Watteau and his group. Pro- 
 ceeding to put its house in order imder the Napole- 
 onic regime, it accepted the guidance of David and 
 dedicated itself to his principle of classical discipline. 
 How much there is to be said for that principle was 
 shown when a man of genius arose in the person of 
 Ingres, a pupil of David's, equalling his master in the 
 exploitation of the grand style, and surpassing him 
 in draughtsmanship and feeling for beauty. But in 
 
Contemporary European Painting 83 
 
 that transitional period men of genius were rare, and 
 when, presently, in the first half of the nineteenth 
 century, they began to come to the surface, they found 
 a large body of Academicians, of very unequal merit, 
 in possession of the field. We are apt to underesti- 
 mate the value of the academic idea, and to scorn its 
 exponents as, all of them, necessarily mediocre. As 
 a matter of fact there is a distinction not to be de- 
 spised about the work of men like Flandrin, Amaury 
 Duval, Delaroche, Chasseriau and the rest, and In- 
 gres, of course, is a master. But we must not pursue 
 this tempting issue. The important point for our 
 present purpose is that a generation of artists arose 
 to whom temperament was everything, the classical 
 hypothesis a delusion and a snare, and nature a mis- 
 tress worth all the gods and goddesses in the aca- 
 demic Pantheon. Gericault turned his back upon 
 antiquity and painted " The Wreck of the Medusa." 
 Decamps saw no reason why he should sit in a Paris 
 studio, painting in a gray light, while he could go 
 and bathe in the sun-saturated colors of the Orient. 
 Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny, and Diaz, all looked for 
 a new vein in landscape, and found it. Delacroix, 
 being born a romanticist, left Greek form and repose 
 to take care of themselves and gave passion its chance. 
 Millet preferred a peasant misshapen by toil to the 
 fairest vision on Olympus. The mere eniuneration 
 of these names is enough to recall historic battles 
 fought and won. They did not, however, make fur- 
 
84 .Contemporary European Painting 
 
 ther conflicts unnecessary. On the contrary, there 
 was much work left for even more drastic innovators 
 to do. 
 
 Manet was to weary of the routine of Couture's 
 studio, and instead of adding to the statuesque fig- 
 ures painted there, was to scandalize the Academi- 
 cians by his " 01)Tiipia." Degas, who worshipped In- 
 gres and, it is said, still goes on worshipping him, was 
 to turn from admiring "La Source" and to use what it 
 taught him in the realistic delineation of laundresses, 
 ballet-girls, and jockeys. Whistler was to enter a 
 world of which Gleyre, his master, knew nothing, and 
 to develop, along Unes of his own, the tonality invented 
 by Velasquez. Monet was to show that the Barbi- 
 zon school had hardly grazed the problems of light. 
 And all these men were bent upon demonstrating 
 what, by this time, needed repeated demonstration, 
 that the great thing to do was to paint well, to prac- 
 tise a technique expressing the very soul of pigment. 
 They succeeded in their aim. They extended the 
 boundaries of modern art, indicating new ways of using 
 its instruments, and they are to-day the recognized 
 chiefs of the more progressive painters everywhere. 
 What Manet meant to the Berhn Secessionists when 
 they honored him after the fashion I have described, 
 he means to the younger generation — and to many 
 of its elders — throughout Europe, in England and 
 in America. Through him and through his compan- 
 ions the painter of liberal tendencies feels that he 
 
Contemporary European Painting 85 
 
 comes into touch with the right tradition, the tradi- 
 tion of Rembrandt, of Velasquez, and of Hals. There 
 is the crucial point, — that the hater of academic con- 
 vention, the lover of individuality and freedom, has 
 had his battle fought for him, that he is able to do 
 as he pleases in full enjoyment of the inspiration once 
 disdained, as that of 1830 had been disdained, but 
 now respected even where it is not adopted. What 
 is the result? We have been told ad nauseam how 
 the public and the critics have failed to do justice 
 to Whistler, for example. It is interesting to ask 
 what the artists have done to prove themselves worthy 
 of him and his old comrades. 
 
 In France the Salon remains, on the whole, the 
 inviolable stronghold of canonical authority. I well 
 remember the organized rebellion which led to the 
 opening of the Salon of the Champs de Mars. With 
 what jubilation it was hailed ! At the time, the con- 
 trast between the "new" and the "old" Salons was 
 really striking, and there was a thrill of excitement 
 to be got out of the quarrel. I have never been able 
 to recapture that thrill. In fact I have gone through 
 Salon after Salon only to see the "new" and the "old" 
 little by little settling down into comfortable harmony. 
 French art rubs along in the good old way, and you 
 may look at thousands of the pictures now being 
 painted, without being reminded by any of them that 
 Manet "fought, bled, and died" for the cause. If 
 one looked foolishly for little Manets he would de- 
 
86 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 serve to be disappointed; but what one looks for, 
 of course, is quite another thing, — it is the broad 
 lesson that Manet might have been supposed to en- 
 force, without robbing any man of his individuality, 
 upon those who praise him so glibly. It is never 
 through their crass imitators that the masters fertil- 
 ize the art coming after them; it is rather through 
 the estabUshment of general principles that they make 
 their influence felt. Thus it is reasonable to expect, 
 when Manet is a name to conjure with, a deep gen- 
 eral interest in simplicity, in the direct handling of 
 pure color, in the bold and truthful manipulation of 
 values. But to expect these things is to expect a 
 little too much, in Paris. I speak, of course, of French 
 art in the mass, and there is the more reason for so 
 doing as the individualities of the moment are neither 
 numerous enough nor, apparently, potent enough, to 
 leaven the lump. 
 
 Smart dexterity is at a premium, and the instinct 
 for beauty seems to have lost a good deal of its vital- 
 ity, when it has not suffered absolute atrophy. The 
 average French picture suggests that modern taste has 
 been transformed into a part of the nervous system 
 and is concerned altogether with sensation, not with 
 principle. The outcome is work of a rather vulgar 
 cast, vulgar both in substance and in style. What sur- 
 vives that is ingratiating in the bulk of French paint- 
 ing is the purely professional quality, that can be 
 acquired by reasonable application in the schools; on 
 
Contemporary European Painting 87 
 
 all sides we see the fruit of methodical teaching at- 
 tentively followed. The salonnier knows how to put 
 his great "machine" together, — his mere craftsman- 
 ship is a credit to him. But it is too often void of 
 any serious significance. I cannot see that there has 
 been any wide-spread improvement in the handling 
 of form as form, any happy loosening of the bonds 
 created as though by an impersonal goverrmient and 
 bearing a government stamp. The majority are faith- 
 ful to the immemorial, competent, but humdrum 
 method of the big overcrowded ateliers to which the 
 young idea comes, in hundreds, to be taught how to 
 shoot. Looking at one canvas after another the in- 
 qmrer murmurs, "Was it for this that the heroes of 
 the Salon des Refuses did their best to augment the 
 language of art?" Similarly he asks, in the presence 
 of most of those huge decorations which the French 
 so generously order for their public buildings, "Was 
 it for this that Puvis de Chavannes wrought out his 
 noble conception of mural painting? " 
 
 In form and in design, then, French art is station- 
 ary. Such gains as have been made have been largely 
 in respect to the treatment of light, a fact pointing 
 to the greater influence of Monet than of any of his 
 colleagues. Impressionism has filtered its way down 
 into modern painting, and the younger men have 
 learned the value of sunlight, if they have learned 
 nothing else, from the revolutionists of the sixties and 
 seventies. Not so many of them, on the other hand. 
 
88 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 have known just what to do with their new resource; 
 they do not create, they mark time. Only here and 
 there among the French has the precious lesson re- 
 sulted in a rich addition to contemporary art. It is 
 not the rule, but the exception, to find work as de- 
 lightful as that of Henri Martin, one of the most 
 engaging talents which have appeared in a long time. 
 He has a charming decorative vein, and in the lumi- 
 nous quality of his canvases, which is a chief element 
 in their appeal, you can see that he has profited in 
 the right way by the example of his seniors. He has 
 a note of his own, thus emphasizing my contention 
 that one does not need to imitate in order to make 
 use of what Monet and his colleagues brought into 
 modern painting. 
 
 Even more exhilarating testimony on this head is 
 offered by the salient figure now at work in the school, 
 Albert Besnard. He is the one man the French have 
 who not only has something to say but says it in a 
 fresh and powerful maimer. He has been the better 
 for having shared in the later impressionistic move- 
 ment, but, with the authority of the true artist, he 
 has subdued to his own purposes whatever has been 
 suggested to him by others. Many years ago a comrade 
 hurried me in a frenzy of enthusiasm half across Paris 
 to see Besnard's decorations in the Ecole de Phar- 
 macie, then recently completed. It was a dark, rainy 
 day, but one forgot the gloom in contemplation of 
 Besnard's ebullient nervous force and robust color. 
 
Contemporary European Painting 89 
 
 He was always a colorist, and as the years have passed 
 he has used the language of color with more and more 
 sinewy strength, with more and more fire. Inciden- 
 tally he has given freer play to his imagination. He 
 was a realist pure and simple when he did the panels 
 in the Ecole de Pharmade; now he is a poet as well, 
 a standing rebuke to those narrow-minded artists 
 who fancy that their technique will go to pieces if they 
 permit themselves the expression of an idea. What 
 I like best about him, though, better than his color 
 by itself, or his decorative gift by itself, or his work- 
 manship by itself, is the virility with which every- 
 thing in his art is fused into a rich, brilliant chord. 
 
 Besnard is a "first-class man," a master of form, of 
 light and air, of style. But you will look far in France 
 before you will find another Besnard. Beside him a 
 man, say, like the late Gaston Latouche, with his golden 
 glow, his vaporous stained-glass effects, seems just a 
 clever dealer in artifice. That is the prevailing note 
 in Paris. For one man whose work is, like Besnard's, 
 "of the centre," you have scores, himdreds, who are 
 facile and sometimes even accomplished, but, in the 
 grain of their work, inciurably factitious. They have 
 made no better use of the freedom from formula, won 
 by Manet and the others, than to put more formulas 
 — usually very hollow ones — in the foreground. Lit- 
 tle groups are formed, each one devoted to the un- 
 folding of a trick which some new man has made 
 temporarily popular. They wax and \yane, and you 
 
90 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 wonder why they ever flourished at all. A sensation 
 is made at the Salon, not by an honest piece of paint- 
 ing with an original accent, but by some prismatic 
 audacity having no relation to nature, by some purely 
 arbitrary scheme of chiaroscuro, or, as in one case 
 that I have in mind, by a return to the "brown sauce" 
 of certain old masters for which Manet had such a 
 loathing. There has been some provocation for these 
 pseudo-original experiments in the public success of 
 certain artists. Rodin, taking his cue from Michael 
 Angelo, seeks to make a figure emerge like an exhala- 
 tion from the marble block. His disciples immedi- 
 ately proceed to make their figures "emerge," forget- 
 ting that the main thing is to show, as Rodin has 
 shown, that as your figure comes out you must justify 
 it by strong modelling. He is apt at writhing bodies, 
 carrying the note, in his later work, to absurd lengths. 
 The writhings and contortions are accepted as hav- 
 ing something talismanic about them, and as being 
 certain to sell, and they are served up by any num- 
 ber of dabsters with an effrontery that would be dis- 
 gusting if it were not funny. 
 
 Constantin Meimier, the Belgian sculptor, having 
 done interesting work in the realistic portrayal of 
 working men, it seems to have occurred to many art- 
 ists that all they need to do in order to "make the 
 bourgeois sit up" is to model ugly types of labor, — 
 it does not matter if there is not an ounce of Meunier's 
 power in the modelling. In painting, one of the most 
 
Contemporary European Painting 91 
 
 pernicious exemplars was the late Eugene Carriere, 
 who long ago attracted favorable attention, and in 
 some quarters incited silly panegyrics, by his studies 
 of figures enveloped in a dark, smoky mist. His por- 
 traits and types of maternal sentiment were pleasing, 
 for a time. Then they wore out their welcome. He 
 overdid his formula until he left it a formula and 
 nothing more. But the mischief had been done; he 
 had helped to confirm the unthinking in the notion 
 that a picturesque surface effect may legitimately be 
 used over and over again for its own sake, that nature 
 may be forced into a pattern. France is now engaged 
 in the making of such patterns to an enormous ex- 
 tent. Clever mediocrity, the characteristic product 
 of our age, momentarily catches the eye, but leaves 
 no lasting impression. At a time when the artist is 
 nothing if not individual, there is an extraordinary 
 lack of really significant individuality. 
 
 Signor Alfredo Melani, in an article on the works 
 of art at a Milan exhibition included in my travels, 
 described them as "the triumph of the young men," 
 and spoke in fervid terms of "this artistic youthful- 
 ness which is no longer wasted in academic formulae, 
 but pursues its ways with courage, sure of the strength 
 which dwells in its independence." The italics are mine. 
 It was for that that I searched, the strength which 
 dwells in independence. I saw the Milan exhibition, 
 and, to tell the truth, I did not discover any great 
 stores of strength among Signor Melani's young men. 
 
92 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 No doubt they have, aS he says, "buried the academic 
 once for all," but the question is, What have they put 
 in its place? They have put the craze of the moment, 
 cleverness, cleverness, always cleverness, the same 
 sort of thing that reigns in other countries, the same 
 straining after effect that we have seen in Paris, the 
 same contortions of the sibyl without the oracle. 
 There is technique in the South, but it is technique 
 without style. 
 
 I was especially struck by two rooms, one occupied 
 by Ettore Tito and the other by a group calling them- 
 selves "Young Etruria." Tito has "arrived," he is 
 one of the popular leaders. I recoUect seeing at one 
 of the international exhibitions in Venice some of his 
 earlier things, and looking for his work thereafter 
 with curiosity, — it seemed likely to bring pleasant 
 surprises. But at Milan, where I encoimtered both 
 old and new paintings by him, he seemed to have 
 risen, after all, little above the ordinary level of the 
 Salon. "Yoimg Etruria," highly resolved to spurn 
 that level, had nothing more to brag of than the pi- 
 quancy of youth, and made the observer wonder very 
 hard if anything of substantial worth would come of 
 its febrile strivings. The room was prettily deco- 
 rated and furnished, — raising a point to which we 
 shall have to return, — but I could find in it no prom- 
 ise of genius. That was the trouble with the whole 
 show. It had one merit. It promised the ultimate, 
 and perhaps speedy, disappearance of the old petty. 
 
Contemporary European Painting 93 
 
 brittle style of the days when Fortuny was adored, 
 and feebly imitated, without any comprehension of 
 what really made him adorable, in Rome and Naples. 
 A broader convention is coming into vogue. Unfor- 
 tunately it does not appear to have brought out an 
 artist of the first rank. 
 
 There was in the grounds at Milan, by the way, a 
 special little exhibition of works by Segantini, that 
 painter of the Brianza who found, as Millet had found 
 before him, a poetic inspiration in the humblest mo- 
 tives of rustic life. Like every man of talent in this 
 epoch of frantic publicity, he has had some prodigious 
 eulogiums pronounced upon his art. Well, he is not 
 one of the giants. I have seen his pictures again and 
 again, and it occurred to me as I saw them in Milan, 
 as it had occurred to me when I saw them in the 
 Paris Exposition of 1900, that they do not wear any 
 too well. The hard, grainy surface of his big Alpine 
 landscapes — too big, I think, since mere bulk of 
 canvas will not suffice to express the atmosphere of 
 the mountains — throws off nothing of that impal- 
 pable charm of beauty which is the great secret of 
 eternal freshness in art. But Segantini, if only by 
 the force of contrast, seemed a grievous loss to Ital- 
 ian painting. At least he had a large way of looking 
 at his subject, a fine sincerity, and a complete inca- 
 pacity for being simply clever. There was something 
 that made for sardonic amusement in the fact that 
 Bistolfi's monument to his memory, visible in the 
 
94 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 same pavilion, showed a nude female "emerging," h 
 la Rodin, out of a huge block of marble. It is won- 
 derfully well done. Bistolfi knows his craft. But 
 one thought neither of him nor of Segantini, but of 
 the French sculptor, not of an idea or a style, but of 
 a fashion. 
 
 It is a time of small things in the North, as in the 
 South. Menzel has left no successor in Germany, nor 
 has he exercised an appreciable influence upon his 
 countrymen. The latter pay him all possible tribute. 
 You come across his works in all the museums, and 
 there has been published in Mimich a superbly illus- 
 trated volume of his productions, a monumental kind 
 of catalogue. But I wondered as I turned its pages 
 why so few of the young Germans seemed to have 
 sat at his feet. An artist like Menzel proclaims at 
 once an inimitable individual style, and broad fruc- 
 tifying principles, but for all the good he has done 
 to modern German art Menzel might Just as well 
 not have existed. A group of paintings and studies 
 by him in the retrospective wing of the Berlin Salon 
 formed as curiously suggestive an episode there as 
 was formed by Manet's picture in the show of the 
 Secession. Of course there is, in the last resort, no 
 accounting for the richness or the poverty of a coun- 
 try in great artists. A man is born a genius or a 
 journeyman, and there's an end to it. Nevertheless, 
 an influence is an influence, and it is hard to see why, 
 with Menzel in their midst, the Germans have gone 
 
Contemporary European Painting 95 
 
 on painting in a state of utter blindness to the rudi- 
 mentary lessons he was all the time teaching them. 
 There hung in the Berlin Salon a painting by him of 
 a falcon and another bird, fighting furiously in the 
 sky. It was painted in 1843, ^^^ I dare say it has 
 been seen in the long years that have elapsed since 
 then by thousands of native artists. It is a master- 
 piece of movement, of texture, of draughtsmanship, 
 and, I had almost said, of color. It is so painted that 
 he who runs may read. The simple demonstration 
 that this picture gives of the way in which to go to 
 work with your brushes might at least tell a youth 
 what, roughly, to try for. But the sense of the Ger- 
 man is sealed. He continues to fill his canvas with 
 crude garish color and turgid drawing. As for beauty, 
 for sensuous charm, for grace and subtlety, they have 
 suffered immitigated shipwreck. This is a hard say- 
 ing, yet it is borne out to the bitter end by the docu- 
 ments of the case. Go to any of the permanent gal- 
 leries. Their treasures of earlier European painting 
 have been gathered with remarkable judgment, and 
 they are splendidly arranged. The Berlin Gallery 
 is a triumph of installation and administration; no- 
 where, not in Vienna, in Paris, in London, will you 
 find the old masters more effectively assembled and 
 displayed. But enter the rooms devoted to the mod- 
 erns, the natives, and your heart sinks into your 
 boots, dismayed by the tastelessness and dulness of 
 what you see. Now and then some one has appeared 
 
g6 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 to shame the men in the ruck, — a genius li]j.e Men- 
 zel, a portrait-painter almost a genius, like Lenbach, 
 or men of talent such as Liebermann and Leibl. 
 For the rest, the mission of the German painters seems 
 to have been to set the teeth of the connoisseur on 
 edge. 
 
 It has been the proud boast of the Secessionists 
 that they have changed all this, and at Munich es- 
 pecially their large claim is upheld by sympathetic 
 foreigners to the extent of exhibiting with them. The 
 final justification of the claim is, however, another 
 matter. It is true that the Secessionists have, like 
 the young Italians, "buried the academic once for 
 all." It is true that they are broad in method where 
 the majority are niggling. It is true that they have 
 ideas, of a sort; an ambition to be imaginative and 
 poetic, if not the actual power to be the one or the 
 other; a desire to rise above the stupid painting of 
 sentimental subjects. It is true, finally, that they 
 are often very clever. But they are afflicted with a 
 deplorable earthiness, a downright coarseness, which, 
 apart from all question of subject, reacts upon the 
 whole fabric of their art. Consider again, for a mo- 
 ment, that apparition of Manet among the Berlin 
 Secessionists. His "Mendiant" is certainly not a beau- 
 tiful figure, but just for that reason it the more aptly 
 illuminates our situation. It is a beautiful piece of 
 painting. The color is fine, the facture is masterly, 
 the style is distinguished. Truth is here, if ever 
 
Contemporary European Painting 97 
 
 truth was set upon canvas, but it is truth made beau- 
 tiful by art. All around it the Secessionists riot in 
 nerveless brutal drawing, in gaudy or morbid color, 
 in thick opaque tone, and in the most dubious taste. 
 Like the Young Etrurians they are sublime in furnish- 
 ings. Whistler's notion of hanging a gallery with 
 some light stuff has taken them captive. Like him, 
 they are fastidious in frames and battens. In the 
 disposition of "aesthetic" chairs and settees, with bay- 
 trees for the middle of the room or in the corners, 
 they are beyond reproach. In some German exhibi- 
 tion I found a fountain containing water colored a 
 blue to disconcert the Mediterranean, — it was the 
 last word of decorative ingenuity. Unhappily these 
 things are as naught if the pictures on the walls are 
 poor. Not all the pearly backgrounds in the world 
 will puU an exhibition through if the painters bring 
 raucous reds and greens, unspeakable yellows and 
 blues, to the making of their pictures. 
 
 Franz Stuck, the hero of the Secessionist movement, 
 is a strange type. He has a warm imagination and a 
 remarkable pictorial faculty. You could not look at 
 his "Dead Christ" or at his "Bacchanale" without feel- 
 ing that the painter had a temperament, an outlook 
 peciJiar to himself. The "Bacchanale," a night scene 
 with the rout alone illuminated, the pUlared porch 
 in the foreground and the murk of trees in the dis- 
 tance being in romantic shadow, was in intention, 
 at least, a thing of poetic emotion. But in these pic- 
 
98 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 tures, as in many others I have seen, Stuck loses all 
 the lyric charm at which he aims, or all the tragic 
 force which is more often his ambition, through harsh 
 drawing and modelhng and through color that I can 
 only describe as Hvid when it is not blatant. He is 
 representative. After overhauling the works of the 
 Secessionists from end to end, you come to the sor- 
 rowful conclusion that they do not imderstand color 
 at all. Neither, for that matter, have they any true 
 sense of form. In both respects it is a coarseness of 
 fibre that seems to tell against them, a coarseness 
 that belongs alike to the weakest and the strongest 
 of the technicians among them. Their nudes are the 
 nudest things in modern art. It does not matter with 
 what dainty idea they start. Like Arnold Bocklin, 
 the Swiss painter, whose overrated work is much liked 
 in Germany, they will invent a good design, with a 
 delicate idea at its core, and then keep it from ma- 
 king its full effect by using colors brilliant but without 
 quahty, and making their contours as inelastic as lead. 
 Secession and Salon alike are thus heavy-handed. It 
 is the national trait in art. There was reason enough 
 for the outcry in Berlin over the statuary of Kaiser 
 Wilhelm's Sieges-Allee. It is fearsome stuff. But 
 there is nothing exceptional about it. You find stat- 
 uary like it all over Germany. 
 
 Enghsh art, ofi&cial EngHsh art, stands just where 
 it has stood these many years, and the Royal Acad- 
 emy is lucky inasmuch as it can count upon the work 
 
Contemporary European Painting 99 
 
 of one foreign master for its annual exhibitions. I 
 once met an artist friend on the steps of BurUngton 
 House. Each wondered what in the world the other 
 was doing there, — if he was in search of pleasurable 
 artistic sensations. I had just been in to see Sar- 
 gent's contribution. He was going in for the same 
 purpose. I thought of him on the pilgrimage I am 
 describing when I saw once more that without Sar- 
 gent the Academy would be an overwhelming bore. 
 What is it made of ? Furlongs of canvas without 
 any elements of interest whatever. Laboriously built- 
 up compositions, historical, sentimental, "conscien- 
 tious" beyond words, and ineffably flat. Gaudy, 
 pompous portraits. Commonplace landscapes. At 
 long intervals a creditable piece of painting, strayed 
 in as if by accident, but in general a disheartening 
 mass of mediocre routine work. Criticism beats in 
 vain against that fortress of reaction. There is some- 
 thing pathetic and droll about the efforts made to 
 disturb its inertia. One thinks of Sidney Smith and 
 the boy who scratched the turtle's back to give it 
 pleasure. "You might as well stroke the dome of 
 St. Paul's to please the dean and chapter." What 
 does the Academy make of Mr. Sargent? What did 
 it make of the late Charles W. Furse, who was an 
 Associate when he died? Such artists must be very 
 embarrassing. Furse, like two or three others, seems 
 an anomaly in the Tate Gallery, where two of his 
 pictures hang, one of them having been purchased 
 
lOO Contemporary European Painting 
 
 under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest since his 
 death. This large picture, "The Return from the 
 Ride," gives an excellent idea of what the new school 
 in England has been doing. It represents a young 
 man on horseback, with a woman in flowing light 
 modern dress walking by his side. The group is set 
 against a landscape backgroimd, loosely painted and 
 full of light and air. The canvas breathes energy 
 and a passion for fresh, outdoor beauty. It is painted 
 with knowledge and ease, and it discloses an original, 
 sincere temperament. There are not many painters 
 in England to-day who give, as Furse gives, the im- 
 pression of having taken advantage of the best de- 
 velopments in nineteenth-century art, and of having 
 "found themselves" into the bargain. But there are 
 enough of them to raise lively hopes of Enghsh art, 
 unofficial Enghsh art. 
 
 If it is a question of hopes rather than of present 
 realization, it is because the school seems to be going 
 through a period of transition, and in so eclectic a 
 mood as to be a little imcertain as to its best course. 
 It has been learning from Manet and from Monet; 
 one of its most interesting figures, Charles Shannon, 
 appears to have started under the influence of Legros, 
 and to have since ranged pretty freely among the old 
 masters; and then there are, of course, the adherents 
 of Whistler. These last, to be sure, Uke so many of 
 their fellows in America, and, for that matter, through- 
 out Europe, have often an odd way of missing the 
 
Contemporary European Painting loi 
 
 point. Mr. A. Ludovid, describing that quaint epi- 
 sode in Whistler's career, his presidency of the Society 
 of British Artists, tells how seriously the veterans of 
 Suffolk Street took their new leader's reforms in the 
 matter of hanging. Instead of being happy because 
 pictures were confined to the line, they murmured at 
 the financial loss they saw in mere empty space. 
 They calculated that the square feet wasted around 
 one of Whistler's own pictures were potentially worth 
 £400 to the Society. The anecdote js not out of 
 date. Many of Whistler's followers, who fondly be- 
 lieve they are treading in his path, are as busy over 
 trifles and as blind to essentials as were the malcon- 
 tents of the British artists. They "go in" for Whist- 
 lerian "arrangements," for the careful spacing of the 
 composition, for an esoteric disposition of light and 
 of accessories. Meanwhile, they overlook the one 
 thing of transcendent importance that Whistler had 
 to teach them, the beauty to be got out of consum- 
 mately manipulated tone. That is a thing absolutely 
 independent of the design, the motive, of a given pic- 
 ture. With it Whistler would still have been Whistler 
 though he had made the famous portrait of his mother 
 as anecdotic a painting as any that ever drew crowds 
 in the Royal Academy. It is the quality of his sur- 
 face that counts first, the quality of his color and 
 tone. He chose to adopt the kind of composition 
 that we see in his portraits and nocturnes, because it 
 was suited to his character as an artist. His disciples. 
 
I02 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 to whom it is often not natural at all, go on using it 
 with a childlike confidence in its efl&cacy, and very 
 rarely reveal any flair for his tonal virtues. It is the 
 old story of borrowing a formula for the sake of a 
 formula, to which I have had to allude more than 
 once. The surface idea is caught; the central inspi- 
 ration is missed. Sargent's example is misunderstood 
 in the same way. A trick of brushwork is all that is 
 developed by the innumerable portrait-painters who 
 try to follow his lead. Yet it is precisely his freedom 
 from mere trickery that accoimts for his eminence. 
 Sargent's big group portrait of Dr. Osier and three 
 of his colleagues, for Johns Hopkins University, 
 loomed in the Royal Academy as a giant looms 
 among pygmies. It is a masterpiece worthy of the 
 historical periods. Painted largely in blacks and on 
 an imposing scale, it involved the solution of a prob- 
 lem beset with heartrending difficulties, yet there was 
 not an inch of it that hinted at hesitancy or effort. 
 The simple broad surfaces have a splendid quality, 
 which time will only improve. The interesting heads 
 are modelled with a combination of learning and spon- 
 taneity almost unique in contemporary painting. 
 Sargent is, indeed, the master of them all, towering 
 above the painters of his time everywhere. But how 
 many of his juniors listen to what he has to tell 
 them? How many, looking at this wonderful piece 
 of portraiture in the Academy, paused to think of 
 the hard work concealed beneath the stately unity? 
 
Contemporary European Painting 103 
 
 How many, in the effort to profit by the inspiration 
 to be found in the work of a great leader, go really 
 to the heart of the matter? 
 
 I suppose the foregoing pages have something of 
 the air of a jeremiad, and that they could be "an- 
 swered" by an interminable list of Europeans who 
 paint, as painting goes, very well. I could compose 
 such an answer myself. But it would be beside the 
 point. When all is said, it is not sufficient that a 
 man should paint very well, as painting goes, if we 
 are to take him seriously. It is not sufficient that a 
 clever student, having won golden opinions from his 
 instructor, should go on indefinitely producing clever 
 student's work. The brilliantly executed morceau, no 
 matter how brilliant, is, after all, only a morceau; 
 it may be the beginning, it is certainly not the end 
 of art. What we want is work with brains and in- 
 dividuality in it, new minted work, alive and beauti- 
 ful, and quivering with emotion. It is comforting to 
 know that hundreds of painters can win their way 
 into the exhibitions. The great thing is that, having 
 got there, each of them should be able to present 
 a really interesting reason for his presence. 
 
 II 
 
 In modern painting new "movements" are invented 
 overnight. How few of them have any staying power, 
 or do anything really to change for the better those 
 
I04 ■" Contemporary European Painting 
 
 systems and groups that have long held the field! I 
 have recently been checking up in Europe the impres- 
 sions of contemporary painting noted in the first chap- 
 ter of this essay. I could not discover that anything 
 constructive, anything truly progressive had been done. 
 On the contrary, in Paris, the vaunted clearing-house 
 of new artistic ideas, destruction and stagnation seemed 
 the prevailing influences. There was, for example, an 
 exhibition of the Italian "Futurists." It packed the 
 Bernheim-Jeune gallery from day to day, and though 
 the talk there was loudly satirical, there was in the 
 whole affair an element to set one thinking on the 
 ambiguous condition of art matters in France. The 
 astonishing thing to me was that these Futurists had 
 got themselves exhibited at all, and that people were 
 willing to write and talk about them with more or 
 less seriousness, to attempt explanations of them. 
 They deserve no explanation. Surfaces covered with 
 chaotic smears of paint, in which with an effort 
 you may make out fractions of a face or of an arm, 
 are not, strictly speaking, explainable at all. A rag 
 carpet covered with paint of many colors does not 
 make a picture. The show suggested nothing more 
 than a colossal bluff by which a group of impossible 
 theorists actually persuaded people to come and look 
 at so many square yards of colored canvas set within 
 frames. I wondered why it had " come off," wondered 
 what the Parisian state of mind was that could per- 
 mit the audacity, and this, of course, led to specula- 
 
Contemporary European Painting 105 
 
 tion as to what the French painters themselves were 
 doing. 
 
 Studio talk revealed the promise of some reaction 
 against the Futurists, the Cubists, and all the other 
 freakish innovators. I learned that the Ingres exhi- 
 bition at the Georges Petit galleries in the spring of 
 19 1 1 had made a profound impression, and that there 
 was promise of a return to his sobriety if not to emu- 
 lation of his methods. Meanwhile, it is plain that 
 something needs to be done. It is late in the day to 
 point out the xmprofitable nature of the conventions 
 which have ruled the official exhibitions for years. 
 But I saw a quantity of pictures in Paris which made 
 it worth while to look closely once more into an old 
 subject. There were two exhibitions in the Grand 
 Palais which brought out in sharp relief the bank- 
 ruptcy of the contemporary French school apart from 
 a few individual types. One of these shows was held 
 by the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, an 
 organization founded in 188 1 and officially recognized 
 as of "public utiUty." Painstaking examination of 
 that show, the contributors to which devoutly follow 
 the good old rules of the Salon, failed to discover a 
 single really fine work of art, and there were hun- 
 dreds of pieces from which to choose. 
 
 It gave one a comforting and very pleasant emo- 
 tion of pride to think of what would have happened 
 if these ladies had invited a few of their American 
 sisters in art to bear a hand, giving them a small 
 
io6 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 room to themselves. I could imagine in that room 
 some portraits by Miss Beaux and Miss Emmet, 
 some flower studies by Mrs. Dewing, some landscapes 
 by Mrs. Coman and Mrs. NichoUs, some miniatures 
 by Miss Hills, and some sculptures by Miss Scudder 
 and Miss Longman. They, it may be said in all 
 moderation, would have made the exhibition. For 
 genuine artistic force as distinguished from soulless 
 routine, for depth of feeling as contrasted with triv- 
 iality and convention, for good taste as against next 
 to no taste at aU, they would have put the Union des 
 Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs to shame. The irrev- 
 erent might assert, and not unjustly, either, that the 
 sex has not produced anywhere large numbers of great 
 painters, but it seemed incredible that even on this 
 hypothesis the collection in question should be so uni- 
 formly mediocre, that it should nowhere offer even 
 a modest spurt of efficient and distinguished energy. 
 No, it is not a matter of sex. I, too, momentarily 
 developed some cynical reflections on the feminine 
 genius in France, but I quickly realized how irrele- 
 vant they were when I penetrated to another part of 
 the building and saw what a certain number of men 
 had been doing. 
 
 They ought to have been doing great things, for 
 theirs was the third quinquennial exhibition of the 
 "Prix du Salon et Boursiers de Voyage," and the 
 very legend, on a clever poster displayed outside, 
 whetted anticipation. Back in the 70's M. de Chen- 
 
Contemporary European Painting 107 
 
 nevieres, then Minister of Fine Arts, was looking about 
 him for a means of encouraging young artists. The 
 establishment of the Prix du Salon and of the Bourses 
 de Voyage assured to the winners the advantages of 
 a couple of years of foreign travel, part of the time to 
 be spent in Italy. Naturally, this beneficent scheme 
 would encourage men of talent to their best efforts. 
 Naturally, one would expect an exhibition of works by 
 the winners to be fuU of good material. Should not 
 painters and sculptors who had once deserved well of 
 their fellows go on justifying the honor bestowed upon 
 them? I went to the exhibition already mentioned, as- 
 suming that it would be, as a matter of course, a good 
 one, and I foimd the deadening trail of the Salon over 
 everything in it. There was M. Rochegrosse, who 
 won the Prix de Salon in 1882. He made, for some 
 time, a prodigious splash. I recall the Salon in which 
 he 'exhibited his "Fall of Babylon," the immense can- 
 vas which at last foimd its place in a New York 
 restaurant. On its first appearance, placed at the top 
 of a broad staircase, it set Paris agog. Rochegrosse 
 was a man to reckon with. As he appeared in the 
 show to which I am now referring he seemed inconse- 
 quential — merely one more maker of totally unin- 
 spired compositions. There were other noted names 
 in the catalogue — Brouillet, Cormon, Cottet, Fri- 
 ant, Gorguet, Muenier, and so on. Of course, these 
 painters displayed due competence — a proper abil- 
 ity to put a picture together in workmanlike fashion. 
 
io8 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 But to think of their reputations and then to realize 
 the appalling dulness of the collection, its poverty in 
 anything like genius, was to suffer a rueful quarter 
 of an hour. It does not do to say "Why should 
 one expect anything different from the Salonnier?" 
 Surely one is justified in expecting a large group of 
 Parisian prize-winners, seasoned by years of experi- 
 ence, to show some qualities above the average. That 
 was the depressing thing, that everybody represented 
 on the walls had settled down to a dead level. They 
 differed among themselves. The light, shimmering 
 tones of M. Paul Chabas were no doubt nothing like 
 the "brown sauce" of M. Charles Cottet. But at 
 bottom these artists and their colleagues all seemed 
 to me to be working on the common ground of the 
 Salon, making pictures keyed to the exigency of a 
 great annual exhibition and possessing no personal 
 charm whatever — no faintest trace of originality. 
 
 The Salonnier not only lacks genius but is in bliss- 
 ful ignorance of the fact that, wanting it, he is wasting 
 his time. I got absorbed in the problem and followed 
 it up with an exploration of collections outside of 
 Paris. Such an exploration enables one to put the 
 matter to the test in a peculiarly illuminating way. 
 As you study the popular figures in nineteenth-cen- 
 tury French art in the provincial museums you are 
 struck by two important points. In the first place, 
 you observe that they are at a serious disadvantage. 
 In Paris the Luxembourg is their salvation, for there 
 
Contemporary European Painting 109 
 
 they are to be compared only with themselves. I 
 speak, of course, of the men outside the group which 
 has been admitted to the Louvre — Ingres, Delacroix, 
 or Millet, for example, are, in our present inquiry, 
 hors concours. The rank and file of the Salon are 
 spared that test in Paris. But in the provinces they 
 are hung with the old masters, for every little town 
 has its Louvre, and there they are tried as if by fire. 
 This brings us to our second point, which is the utter 
 powerlessness of method, as method, to carry anybody 
 into port. It is only individual force that can meet 
 the test to which I have referred. This immemorial 
 truth was only too sadly confirmed as I turned one 
 provincial museum after another inside out. It was 
 pathetic to meet, years after I had well-nigh forgotten 
 them, pictures that I had seen triumphantly flaunting 
 themselves in old Salons. How trebly mechanical 
 they looked! How flat, or how gaudy, was the color 
 in them, and how cold the Hght! But the cruellest 
 exposure was that of the Salonnier's way of painting 
 form. It is a way so thoroughly instructed and so 
 adequate from a conventional point of view that at 
 times it commands a very nearly fervid respect. You 
 find yourself wishing that certain American artists of 
 imdeniable gifts could possess a share of the French- 
 man's mere every-day efi&ciency. But in the next in- 
 stant you find yourself praying that American art 
 may never crystallize as an immense amount of mod- 
 ern French art has crystallized. The virtue of a 
 
no Contemporary European Painting 
 
 sound mechanism in painting is beyond argument, 
 and it woiild be foolish to disdain the Salonnier be- 
 cause he is so neat a journeyman. But in the prov- 
 inces it is hard, much harder than at Paris, to take 
 him without impatience. 
 
 The only case in which he seemed to me happily 
 to hold his own was that of Bonnat, at Bayonne. 
 That celebrated painter has produced portraits and 
 pictures which look as though they had been cut 
 out of steel, and his color often sets one's teeth on 
 edge. But Bonnat is a master, he knows form, and 
 he knows how to draw. Finally, he has the personal 
 quality which is worth an age of training, and it was 
 fine to see how in the Httle museum which he himself 
 created at Bayonne his own works sustain compan- 
 ionship with the old masters, the drawings and paint- 
 ings by Ingres, and the many other treasures of art 
 that he has given to his native town. This gift of 
 his, by the way, extraordinarily rewards a pilgrimage. 
 The paintings include some exquisite early Italian 
 pieces, Spanish, Flemish and Dutch paintings of 
 great value, and a rare collection of drawings. Some 
 of the most renowned drawings of Leonardo, Michael 
 Angelo, Mantegna, Pisanello, Raphael and Titian are 
 at Bayonne. There are some superb Diirers and Rem- 
 brandts, and among the moderns Delacroix and In- 
 gres, especially Ingres, are richly represented. Then 
 there are beautiful ancient and renaisssance sculptures, 
 and the collection includes important bronzes and 
 
Contemporary European Painting 1 1 1 
 
 ivories. Presumably Bonnat will still further enrich 
 the museum. As it stands it is a little gem. The 
 things in it are the things that a painter has loved. 
 Other museums of far greater pretensions cannot 
 claim an equal charm. All that one can regret about 
 it is that it should be tucked away in a far corner of 
 France, where travellers on the way to Spain too 
 seldom pause. 
 
 Apropos of Bonnat's generosity, allusion may well 
 be made here to the service rendered by the state to 
 all the provincial museums. Everybody knows how 
 the govermnent encourages painters and sculptors by 
 purchasing their works and distributing these over 
 the coxmtry. Incessantly in the museums I would 
 read the legend on a frame, "Given by the State." 
 It is a splendid policy, which one observes with height- 
 ened appreciation on tracing the result of it in many 
 towns. The stimulus it gives to pubKc interest in art 
 is realized then more keenly than ever. And yet we 
 come back to the other side of the medal, to the con- 
 viction that no government policy but only heaven- 
 sent genius will fill museums with the works that 
 really leaven taste and give people the right ideas. 
 At Bayonne it was Bonnat alone who had anything 
 interesting to say, and there, too, in his museum, 
 room has been found for the popular Salonnier. At 
 Toulouse, where there is a most portentous array of 
 huge Salon canvases, it was only Benjamin Constant 
 who could stand association with the older masters. 
 
112 Contemporary European Painting 
 
 and he is saved by virtue of a gorgeousness of 
 color not, after all, very serious in its appeal. At 
 Dijon the museum contains many beautiful old pic- 
 tures and a generous number of modern works. The 
 latter struck me as, on the whole, negligible, imtil 
 I encountered the gravely beautiful "Ex Voto" of 
 the late Alphonse Legros. The museum at Lyons is 
 well provided with Salon "masterpieces." But they 
 shrivel into nothingness beside the decorations that 
 Puvis de Chavannes painted for the upper walls of 
 the staircase leading to the picture gallery. And so 
 the tale continues. The government has flooded the 
 provinces with paintings, and thereby given to the 
 French school an immeasurable amount of, no doubt, 
 very desirable and even precious "encouragement." 
 But the searcher who follows the trail of the govern- 
 ment's good deeds preserves memories of but a hand- 
 ful of men who painted greatly because they could 
 not help themselves. It is genius, and again genius, 
 the personality, the man born to paint, and only that 
 man, who can pit against the record of the past the 
 record of the present. 
 
 It is the dearth of personality that is lowering the 
 vitality of contemporary French art. The last time 
 I had "swung roimd the circle" of all the great Con- 
 tinental exhibitions, endeavoring to run to earth the 
 European painters who seemed to be active in the 
 van, the net result of the inquest was that it appeared 
 to be a case of Besnard first, and the rest nowhere. 
 
Contemporary European Painting 113 
 
 In France at least, he still holds precisely the same 
 position. In Paris every one was waiting to see the 
 results of his tour in India. No recent work done in 
 Paris can quite compare with his decorations in the 
 dome of the Petit Palais, or with his sumptuous panel, 
 "L'Isle Heureuse," in the Mus6e des Arts Decoratifs. 
 Of the former work he is prouder than of anything 
 else he has done. "C'est moi," he says to his friends. 
 But anything of Besnard's, whether it is a vast mural 
 decoration or a trifling sketch, is immediately arrest- 
 ing, because in every inch of it you feel the vibration 
 of his original character. He knows how to paint, 
 and he has something to say. There is organic life 
 in what he does. But I could not discover that Bes- 
 nard has developed or is promising to develop a fer- 
 tilizing current of ideas. 
 
V 
 
 A Note on French Military Painting 
 
A NOTE ON FRENCH MILITARY 
 PAINTING 
 
 It is a curious paradox in the history of French 
 art that amongst the thousands of men who have 
 built up the school there have been no great paint- 
 ers wholly dedicated to the commemoration of battle- 
 scenes. In a country peciiliarly jealous of its mili- 
 tary fame the brush of genius has been wreaked only 
 incidentally on warhke themes. Under the old r6- 
 gime these were treated with the formalism in vogue 
 at court. Baron Gros derived from the shock of the 
 Revolution an impetus which gave to his Napoleonic 
 pictures a certain invigorating significance, but with 
 all his merits and aU his constructive influence he 
 nevertheless remains a minor t3^e. Gericault, who 
 breathed a new fire into the tradition of Gros, died 
 too soon to realize all his ambitions, and, besides, 
 was a military painter only at intervals. So it was 
 with Delacroix. In his long career he sought his ma- 
 terial in a hundred directions and always with the 
 instinct of a romantic and even poetic genius. From 
 the clash of arms he got more than once a memorable 
 inspiration, and there are paintings of his that are 
 
 "7 
 
Ii8 French Military Painting 
 
 indeed terrible as an army with banners; but they 
 are of subjects which he took, so to say, casually, 
 between an illustration to Shakespeare and one to 
 Scripture. Charlet and Raffet alone interpreted with 
 fulness and abiding authority the legend of the Em- 
 pire — and they were lithographers. It was not until 
 the nineteenth century was well advanced that a 
 group of French painters spedaKzed in military sub- 
 jects, and it so happened that they remained detached 
 from the progressive movements in modern art. 
 
 Meissonier was the leader in this group. Bom in 
 1 8 14, he came to manhood and to his artistic maturity 
 early enough to catch in all their poignancy some 
 echoes of Napoleon's campaigns, and down to the 
 day of his death he loved to draw his motives from 
 the great man's career. It was through his Napo- 
 leonic pictures that he largely won his world-wide 
 repute and his considerable fortune. There was a 
 time, not so very long ago, when Meissonier could be 
 counted upon to make a prodigious stir in the auction 
 room. But when Degas said of one of his noted battle- 
 pieces that everything in it, except the swords, was 
 made of steel, he foreshadowed the fate that has since 
 overtaken the painter of "Les Cuirassiers," "1814" 
 and a dozen other popular tableaux. He was an 
 accurate costumier and he had an extraordinarily pol- 
 ished technique. His httle interiors, with picturesque 
 figures smoking, reading or playing cards, are so well 
 done, in their way, that they will long be preserved 
 
French Military Painting 119 
 
 wjth respect. But the way of Meissonier was not the 
 way of a great painter. His junior, Alphonse de Neu- 
 ville, who was born in 1836 and died in 1885, had in 
 him more of the true stuff of military art. Though 
 he was unfitted to share to any serious extent in the 
 conflict with Prussia, he was an alert looker-on, and 
 his pictiu-es have unquestionably put heart into the 
 French patriot. They have done this through the 
 energy in them, through their thoroughly dramatic 
 illustration of well-chosen episodes. De Neuville 
 could always be relied upon to tell an effective story, 
 to bring out the heroism or pathos of this or that 
 action in the war, and to do it with an easy skill. 
 He had little of Meissonier 's diaboHcal "finish," but 
 he was just as careful in matters of nice detail, and 
 he had greater breadth and freedom. His anecdotes 
 have a vitality, a gusto, which the more renowned 
 painter never knew. Yet he, too, like Meissonier, 
 was first and last the clever Salonnier. That is the 
 designation which befits also Edouard Detaille. 
 
 Detaille was Meissonier's favorite pupil and in 
 some respects he bettered his master's example. He 
 worked, generally, on a larger scale, drew with more 
 flexibility, and got a little more elan into his studies 
 of movement. He painted mural decorations as well 
 as easel pictures, and in a very accomplished but 
 rather prosaic fashion he satisfied to perfection what 
 we may describe as the officially accredited taste of 
 his time. It is one of the delightfullest phenomena 
 
I20 French Military Painting 
 
 of French life, frequently commented upon in appre- 
 ciative books of travel, that both in the Louvre and 
 in the Salon one is always rubbing shoulders with 
 the peasant and bourgeois. "Every one in France," 
 we are told, "takes an intelligent interest in art." 
 This is quite true, but it is well to distinguish, some- 
 times, where the intelligence and the interest are con- 
 cerned. Both reach, on the whole, a remarkable 
 average, but it is also true that France is full of folk 
 who are beguiled, like myriads all over the world, by 
 very ordinary appeals to their emotions. Detaille 
 was an adept in reaching the hearts of his big audi- 
 ence. He put his soldiers truthfully upon canvas, in 
 the right uniforms, with every buckle and button in 
 the right place. The hero steps out with all the air 
 of one carrying the baton of a future marshal in his 
 knapsack. The flag is exalted proudly in the breeze. 
 We hear the rattle of the drums. Victory lies ahead. 
 And even defeat loses something of its sting when 
 Detaille paints it. He could profit by the immortal 
 lesson of "The Surrender of Breda," in which Velas- 
 quez shows how vanquished and conqueror could meet, 
 like gentlemen. I recall from some old Salon a no- 
 table instance of DetaiUe's s3Tnpathy for a subject 
 of the sort, a huge picture of a beleaguered fortress 
 opening its gates to a successful but gallant and ex- 
 quisitely courteous foe. There was nothing in it to 
 irritate the amour propre of even the most irreconci- 
 lable of patriots. But in the mind of the disinterested 
 
French Military Painting ill 
 
 foreigner there would obtrude the thought that there 
 was an element of complacency in the picture, a com- 
 placency reacting upon the whole fibre of the painter's 
 work. 
 
 Like any other work of art that is really to touch 
 us, a great military picture must proceed, after all, 
 out of imagination and passion. Detaille, at bottom, 
 was as cold as a stage carpenter. Consciously or un- 
 consciously, he did more to flatter the national vanity 
 than to minister to our sense of beauty. His was 
 the photographically realistic ideal of Meissonier, en- 
 hanced, as I have said, by a bolder nervous force, 
 but never quite released from the influence of a me- 
 chanical method. The zest disclosed in some of his 
 casual, spontaneous drawings, evaporates when he 
 works out a composition upon canvas. Then his fig- 
 ures seem to become standardized, in the manner of 
 so much modern illustration, and to exercise the 
 functions of the theatre rather than those of life. The 
 colors, hke the forms, are faithfully set down, and 
 they are judiciously harmonized \mder the cold gray 
 light of a Parisian studio. But we are not trans- 
 ported to the battle-field. We know all the time that 
 we are in the Salon, looking at a -good, tj^pical Salon 
 picture. By itself the fact is not, perhaps, deserving 
 of any very serious or minute comment. But in its 
 representative significance the work of Detaille com- 
 mands attention and provokes some surprised re- 
 flections. Is it not an odd, arresting circumstance 
 
122 French Military Painting 
 
 that he, who did so much and did it so well, should 
 nevertheless have failed to make himself a really 
 brilliant master of his craft? Is it not equally strange 
 that so many of his fellows, laboring ardently in the 
 same field and supported, as he was, by the military 
 enthusiasm of a great nation, should have failed to 
 carry the soul of that nation into French art? The 
 museums and other public buildings of the land are 
 full of battle-pictures, and nowhere do these souvenirs 
 of heroic deeds match their substance with their ar- 
 tistic form. This is surely one of the curiosities of 
 painting. 
 
VI 
 
 The Post-Impressionist Illusion 
 
VI 
 
 THE POST-IMPRESSIONIST 
 ILLUSION 
 
 It is said that when the former President of the 
 French Republic, M. Fallieres, went to the opening 
 of the autumn Salon of 19 12, he looked long at the 
 paintings of the Cubists and Futurists. " Charming! " 
 he murmured to the Under-Secretary for Fine Arts, 
 who stood at his elbow, and then he added anxiously, 
 "But you won't have to buy any for the state gal- 
 leries, will you?" I know perfectly well how that 
 anecdote must have been received whenever it was 
 repeated in Post-Impressionist circles. "Oh, Fal- 
 lieres! But he was always a bourgeois, anyway." 
 It so happens, however, that the solicitude of the 
 French functionary has been shared by all kinds of 
 people, including some quite competent artists; and 
 I note this fact at the outset because the confusion 
 in which the whole subject of Post-Impressionism 
 has been enveloped has been rendered worse con- 
 founded by much foolish recrimination. 
 
 The Post-Impressionists themselves have not made 
 most of the noise. This has been developed largely 
 in print, and the hierophants of the "movement," 
 
 I2S 
 
126 The Post-Impressionist Illusion 
 
 which, as I shall presently endeavor to show, is not, 
 strictly speaking, a movement at all, have made tre- 
 mendous play with one of the favorite devices of those 
 who traffic in the freakish things of art and letters. 
 "Behold this masterpiece!" they say. "What! you 
 see nothing in it? You find it ugly? Well, well, 
 what a besotted idea of beauty you must have! Re- 
 pose yourself before this canvas. It is saturated in 
 beauty. You do not see it because you have the 
 Philistine eye; but with patience and reverent study 
 you may hope to unlock the secret of our great man." 
 And so on, with many a delicate suggestion of com- 
 passionate good-will. It is an old trick. The play- 
 goer who does not like dirty plays is denounced as a 
 prude; the music-lover who resents cacophony is told 
 he is a pedant; and in all these matters the final 
 crushing blow administered to the man of discrimina- 
 tion is the ascription to him of a hidebound prejudice 
 against things that are new because they are new. 
 If he declines to be convinced of this, he is trium- 
 phantly reminded that all revolutionaries in the do- 
 main of thought, from Galileo and Columbus to 
 Wagner and Manet, have been for a time persecuted 
 and derided. Ergo, since the Post-Impressionists have 
 provoked a vast amount of scornful mirth, they are 
 necessarily great men. 
 
 It is not my purpose to laugh at them, nor do I 
 wish to swell the flood of recrimination of which I have 
 spoken. In the foregoing remarks I have sought 
 
The Post-Impressionist Illusion 127 
 
 merely to clear the groiind of the cant which often 
 encumbers it. Let us look at Post-Impressionism 
 for what it is, regardless alike of its acolytes and its 
 equally furious opponents. I said just now that it 
 was not a movement at all. A movement, I take it, 
 represents in art, at all events, what men do when 
 they are pretty closely allied by strong sympathies 
 and by fidelity to a body of principles susceptible of 
 some sort of definition. Such a group need not be 
 wedded to a formula, but it cannot well avoid sub- 
 scribing to a fairly definable scheme of ideas. Now, 
 the best light that I have been able to extract from 
 the vast welter of pronouncements made in and about 
 the Post-Impressionist world lies in a saying of Emile 
 Bernard, the intimate of Vincent van Gogh and, for 
 a time, of Paul Gauguin. Bernard, himself a Post- 
 Impressionist, modified to some extent by study of 
 the old Venetian masters, has not only painted pic- 
 tures, woven tapestries, and made architectural de- 
 signs, but has written both poetry and prose. He 
 published for about five years a periodical of his own, 
 called La Renovation Esthetique, and it bore this 
 device: "There is neither ancient art nor modern 
 art. There is art, which is to say the manifestation 
 of the eternal ideal." Could anything be more com- 
 prehensive — or more vague? However, we must 
 find out what the Post-Impressionists are driving at, 
 and before we turn to the only conclusive documents 
 in the case, namely, the works they have produced. 
 
128 The Post-Impressionist Illusion 
 
 I may pass over a sea of ecstatic but muddled expo- 
 sition and cite from Mr. Roger Fry, an English critic 
 who has done much to further the propaganda in 
 London, these not unhelpful words: 
 
 All art depends upon cutting o£E the practical responses 
 to sensations of ordinary life, thereby setting free a pure, 
 and, as it were, disembodied function of the spirit; but, 
 so far as the artist relies on the associated ideas of the 
 objects which he represents, his work is not completely 
 free and pure, since romantic associations imply at least 
 an imagined practical activity. 
 
 There is a touch of mumbo-jumbo here, but there 
 is a little aid in the passage, as I have said, inasmuch 
 as it points to a queer kind of symbolism lurking at 
 the bottom of the Post-Impressionist hypothesis. It 
 is, I frankly confess, a difficult, if not an impossible, 
 task to explain that hypothesis in terms that will be 
 acceptable to the zealots, who, moreover, have always 
 the easy retort that one has not imderstood their 
 sublime mystery. But I must take the risk and state 
 what, after careful study, I have gathered to be the 
 Post-Impressionist aim. It is to eschew such approxi- 
 mately accurate representation of things seen as has 
 been hitherto pursued by painters of all schools, and 
 to cover the canvas with an arrangement of line and 
 color symboKzing the very essence of the object or 
 scene attacked. For some occult reason it is assumed 
 that a portrait or picture painted according to the 
 familiar grammar of art, understood of all men, is 
 
The Post-Impressionist Illusion 129 
 
 clogged with irrelevant matter. The great masters 
 of the past, to be sure, are not invalidated, and they 
 need not be sent to the lumber-room; but their day 
 is done, and with the Post-Impressionists we must 
 slough off a quantity of played-out conventions be- 
 fore we can enter the promised land. 
 
 The temptation to go deeper into the metaphysics 
 of the subject is not, I admit, very strong, for I do 
 not like to chew sawdust, nor do I enjoy going down 
 into a cellar at midnight without a candle to look 
 for a black cat that isn't there, as the metaphysician, 
 according to the witty Lord Bowen, is so often wont 
 to go. And I have the best of reasons for refusing 
 thus to weary either the reader or myself. The cat, 
 I maintain, is not there. That is the nubbin of the 
 whole argument. Post-Impressionism as a move- 
 ment, as a ponderable theory, is, like the cat, an 
 illusion. The portentous things we hear about it are 
 not the adumbrations of an intelligible and precious 
 truth, but are mere ex-parte assertions. This, I may 
 be told, is itself no more than an assertion; but I do 
 not offer it without the support of facts, and with 
 these I am well supplied by the Post-Impressionists 
 themselves. 
 
 To do them justice, I cannot discover that the 
 "onlie begetters" of this curious affair in modern 
 painting have bragged overmuch about harboring an 
 authentic feline in their cellar. Mark how the pres- 
 ent misunderstanding all began with the late Paul 
 
130 The Post-Impressionist Illusion 
 
 Cezanne, who was born in 1839, the son of a Pro- 
 vencal banker. Duret tells about him in his book 
 on Manet and the French Impressionists: how when 
 he came up to Paris he fell into the arms of Zola; 
 how he oscillated between Romanticism and Impres- 
 sionism; and how, being a man of means, a comfort- 
 able bourgeois, he spent his life painting to please 
 himself. He was an industrious man and covered 
 many canvases. Light interested him, but he cared 
 most for color. His style was rough to the point of 
 brutality. Sometimes the object is clearly and hand- 
 somely realized in his work. More often it is lost 
 in an obscurity of coarse, unlovely pigment. He is 
 one of those types who convey the impression that 
 they are feeling their way toward something large 
 and beautiful, but never have fully mastered a sound 
 technical method. Looking at Cezanne qiiietly and 
 disinterestedly, one would recognize in him a rather 
 crotchety man of talent, many of whose pictures should 
 have been discarded as crude attempts. About none 
 of them, good or bad, is there really any esoteric 
 mystery. The mystery lies in the fuss that has been 
 made over them, as over the tablets of a new evangel. 
 Cezanne was simply an offshoot of the Impression- 
 ist School that we know, who never quite learned his 
 trade, and accordingly, in his dealings with landscape, 
 still hfe, and the figure, was not unaccustomed to 
 paint nonsense. Nothing here to explain the Post- 
 Impressionist furore. But Cezanne, the link be- 
 
The Post-Impressionist Illusion 131 
 
 tween Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, does, 
 through his complacency, give us some suggestion of 
 the egotism and self-indulgence which were presently 
 to set the Post-Impressionist ball rolling in good ear- 
 nest. 
 
 These are the days of impossible beliefs, but not 
 of lost causes, and the first belief engendered in the 
 Post-Impressionist is an immeasurable belief in him- 
 self. What chiefly impresses me about him as a type 
 is his conviction that what he chooses to do in art is 
 right because he chooses to do it. This egotism is 
 doubtless compatible with some engaging qualities. 
 I have read the volume of letters written by Van 
 Gogh to his friend Bernard, and I have read the 
 latter's introductory pages. It is plain that these 
 two were full of a candid enthusiasm for painting, 
 keenly interested in the masters, ancient and modern, 
 and ardently desirous of solving technical problems. 
 But of each it may also be said that he had "too 
 much ego in his cosmos," and in the case of Van 
 Gogh, the result was disastrous. He, too, like Ce- 
 zaime, made his lucky hits. Passionately in love 
 with color, and groping toward an effective use of it 
 in the expression of truth, he gives you occasionally 
 in his thick impasto a gleam of sensuously beautiful 
 tone. But as he grew more and more absorbed in 
 himself, which is to say more and more indifi^erent 
 to the artistic lessons of the centuries, his pictures 
 receded further and further from the representation 
 
132 The Post-Impressionist Illusion 
 
 of nature, and fulfilled instead an arbitrary, capri- 
 cious conception of art. The laws of perspective are 
 strained. Landscape and other natural forms are 
 set awry. So simple an object as a jug containing 
 some flowers is drawn with the vmcouthness of the 
 immature, even childish, executant. From the point 
 of view of the Post-Impressionist prophet, all this 
 may be referred to inventive genius beating out a 
 new artistic language. I submit that it is explained 
 rather by incompetence suflused with egotism. The 
 man was imbalanced. Once, when he was staying at 
 Aries, a girl of his acquaintance received from him a 
 packet which she opened, expecting it to reveal a 
 welcome present. She found that it contained one 
 of the painter's ears, which he had that morning cut 
 off with his razor. The incident is too horrible, in- 
 trinsically and in its suggestion of the most tragic of 
 human ills, to be lightly employed for purposes of 
 argument. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to affirm 
 that the hero of this anecdote, who spent some time 
 in an asylum and ultimately committed suicide, was 
 imlikely to think straight. That has been the trouble 
 with all the Post-Impressionists. They have not 
 thought straight. 
 
 The thinking they have done, and they have done 
 much, has been invertebrate and confusing. Stead- 
 ily, too, it has led them to produce work not only in- 
 competent, but grotesque. It has led them from com- 
 placency to what I can only describe as insolence. If 
 
The Post-Impressionist Illusion 133 
 
 these seem hard words, let me recall an incident of 
 the Post-Impressionist exhibition in London two years 
 ago. Mr. Roger Fry, writing in defence of the proj- 
 ect, cited various persons who were in sympathy 
 with it, and named among them Mr. John S. Sargent. 
 In the course of a letter to the London Nation, that 
 distinguished painter said: "Mr. Fry may have been 
 told — and have believed — that the sight of those 
 paintings had made me a convert to his faith in them. 
 The fact is that / am absolutely sceptical as to their 
 having any claim whatever to being works of art, with 
 the exception of some of the pictures by Gauguin that 
 strike me as admirable in color, and in color only." 
 The italics are mine, and I hope I may be pardoned 
 for using them, for it is important, I think, that the 
 testimony in this case of a master like Sargent should 
 not be overlooked. There is another great painter 
 to whom I like here to refer, the late John La Farge. 
 In a letter of his which I have printed elsewhere, 
 a letter to Mr. Henry Adams, he speaks of "that wild 
 Frenchman — I should say stupid Frenchman. I 
 mean Gauguin." He was, I know, interested in the 
 painter, partly because Gauguin has been, like him- 
 seK, in the South Seas. In this letter he speaks of 
 the Frenchman's "wild" ways there, and adds, "All 
 that seemed natural enough, stupid enough; and yet 
 there was something of the man who has found some- 
 thing." Yes, Gauguin "found something." We have 
 seen Sargent glancing in friendly wise at his color. 
 
134 T^^ Post-Impressionist Illusion 
 
 But La Farge, like Sargent, knew how to distinguish 
 and he goes on to speak of "the peculiar shows which 
 some of those good people indulge in," and dismisses 
 the "tedious subject" with the remark, "They are 
 driven to do something to attract attention, even 
 their own attention." 
 
 It was not so with Cezanne, nor was it so with 
 poor, tormented Vincent van Gogh. But Gauguin, 
 with his raucous South Sea nudes and the later, more 
 "symbolical," products of his brush, is not imdeserv- 
 ing of La Farge's caustic and perhaps cynical com- 
 ment. As for Matisse, and Picasso the Spaniard, with 
 whom the more pronounced humors of Post-Impres- 
 sionism come into view, their entanglement in the 
 eccentricities of a kind of Barnumism is visible at a 
 glance. These gentlemen have their predilections. 
 Gauguin, whose imagination was touched by the noble 
 bronze figures of the models he found in Tahiti and by 
 the glow in their tropical background, has been all for 
 form "grandly" and symbolically treated. Matisse 
 has a kindred flair. In painting and sculpture he 
 treats the nude with some particular resolution, so his 
 high priests say, to get out of it beauty of line and 
 rhythm. In rhythm, I am told, he is very strong. 
 George Eliot speaks in one of her novels of the cre- 
 dulity in a guard which permits an interloper to get 
 past him on the flimsiest of pretexts, and she adds, 
 "There are some men so stupid that if you say, 'I am 
 a buffalo,' they will let you pass." I have thought of 
 
The Post-Impressionist Illusion 135 
 
 this when I have gone hunting for the line and rhythm 
 of Matisse, and have marvelled at those critics who 
 have, so to say, let them pass. It is, I believe, a 
 matter of history that he has learned how to draw. 
 But whatever his ability may be, it is swamped in the 
 contortions of his misshapen figures. The fact is that 
 real genius in these matters will out. Degas, who has 
 been all his life a disciple of Ingres, uses a magic of 
 draughtsmanship akin to that of his idol, though the 
 style and spirit of his work are wholly his own. If 
 Matisse were the demigod he is assumed to be, there 
 would be at least some hints of an Olympian quality 
 breathed through his gauche puerilities. Picasso, too, 
 the great panjandrum of the Cubist tabernacle, is 
 credited with profound gifts. Why does he not use 
 them? And why must we sit patient, if not with awe- 
 struck and grateful submissiveness, before a portrait 
 or a pictiire seemingly representing a grotesque object 
 made of children's blocks cut up and fitted together? 
 This is not a movement, a principle. It is unadulter- 
 ated "cheek." 
 
 Recently in Paris I saw an exhibition made by 
 the Italian Futurists at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery. 
 I had long before been prepared in a measure for this 
 experience by a wild and whirling "manifesto" sent 
 out from Milan. But the most violent propositions 
 of Signer Boccioni were surpassed by the phantas- 
 magorias I was at last privileged to see for myself. 
 These painters — and again I protest that I cannot 
 
136 The Post-Impressionist Illusion 
 
 answer for the correctness of my report of their pro- 
 gramme, for one cannot dissect a catharine-wheel in 
 motion — appear to have got it into their heads that 
 they could liquefy a subject in a picture into its emo- 
 tional constituents. (The repetition of this phrase 
 three times, by moonlight, may help the reader a 
 little.) The Bernheim-Jeune gallery was thronged 
 every day with people who came to see how the 
 trick was done. What they saw was a series of can- 
 vases bearing intelligible titles, but otherwise resem- 
 bling patchworks of color. In the strange mosaic of 
 crude reds, blues, yellows, and so on, one could make 
 out part of a head, the smoke-stack of a locomotive, 
 a man's hand and cuff, the legs of a table, or some- 
 thing that might have been a flower or a fruit. One 
 of the pictures — one of Boccioni's own, was called 
 "Laughter," and in it there was something that, for 
 a Futurist, made a fairly credible head; but the rest 
 was chaos. 
 
 The name of these "revolutionaries" is legion, and 
 many of them have their distinctive absurdities, but 
 they are all imited on one point. Post-Impressionist, 
 Cubist, or Futurist, however they may be designated, 
 their cue is to turn the world upside down. One in- 
 teresting outcome of their common foible is a curi- 
 ous family likeness running through their productions. 
 That sterling painter, beloved of painters, the Bel- 
 gian Alfred Stevens, once asked a dryly satirical ques- 
 tion. "Why," he said, "have those persons who im- 
 
The Post-Impressionist Illusion 137 
 
 agine they invented Impressionism nearly all the same 
 impression before Nature? It seems to me that it 
 should be the contrary." The reflection may justly 
 be applied to Post Impressionism and the allied ab- 
 errations of contemporary painting. Gauguin and 
 Bernard quarrelled as to who "got there first." But 
 the point is negligible, for if the whole dreary business 
 is deficient in anything, it is deficient in individuality. 
 I make no excuse for ignoring a mtiltitude of names 
 in this brief survey. Why dwell upon names that 
 mean nothing? 
 
 It is the dull sterility of this so-called "movement" 
 that offers the chief point of attack for those who 
 resent its intrusion into the field of art. Let the 
 Post-Impressionists and their loquacious friends wax 
 eloquent among themselves as to what constitutes 
 beauty and what they may mean by the theories 
 through which they assume to develop its secret. 
 Their debatings are worthless so long as they go on 
 producing flatly impossible pictures and statues. The 
 oracular assertion that the statues and the pictures 
 are beautiful and great is merely so much impudence 
 and "bounce." It is, after all, a little cool for ill- 
 equipped experimenters to take themselves so seri- 
 ously. The dabster in music or the drama or Ktera- 
 ture is usually expected to acquire some proficiency 
 in his medium before he vmdertakes to speak out. 
 By some mysterious dispensation, which no one yet 
 has accounted for, the artist, and especially the 
 
138 The Post-Impressionist Illusion 
 
 painter, is early let loose upon the world, whether he 
 has acquired a decent training or not. 
 
 Here, from the incomplete, halting methods of 
 Cezanne, there has flowed out of Paris into Germany, 
 Russia, England, and to some slight extent the United 
 States, a gospel of stupid license and self-assertion 
 which would have been swept into the rubbish-heap 
 were it not for the timidity of our mental habit. 
 When the stuff is rebuked as it should be, the Post- 
 Impressionist impresarios and fuglemen insolently 
 proffer us a farrago of supersubtle rhetoric. The 
 farce will end when people look at Post-Impression- 
 ist pictures as Mr. Sargent looked at those shown 
 in London, "absolutely sceptical as to their having 
 any claim whatever to being works of art." 
 
VII 
 
 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
VII 
 A MEMORABLE EXHIBITION 
 
 There was an exhibition in New York, held from 
 the middle of February to the middle of March, 1913, 
 in the Armory of the 69th Regiment, which deserves 
 a place by itself in the history of such matters. Un- 
 precedented thousands went to see it and of these 
 some said that its effect, if it had any, would quickly 
 pass, others that it marked a crucial turning-point 
 in oxir artistic afifairs if not in American art. Time 
 alone can show which was the correct view, but the 
 very nature of the episode, its significance as a chal- 
 lenge, inclines me to give some account of it here, 
 with a few notes on what the exhibition contained. 
 The Association of American Painters and Sculptors, 
 which was responsible for the undertaking, did far 
 more than provide the public with a novel entertain- 
 ment; it set everybody to thinking of current condi- 
 tions in art, and that alone is an achievement worth 
 remembrance. Fully to appreciate the point it is 
 necessary, perhaps, to glance at the circumstances 
 leading up to this event. 
 
 Miscellaneous exhibitions, and more particularly 
 141 
 
142 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 those for which artists are asked to submit their works 
 to a jury, are in art very much what small, local 
 campaigns are in politics. They disturb neighborly 
 calm. Men's souls are tried, not tragically, perhaps, 
 but in little ways that are sometimes more irritating 
 than a real crisis could be. It is difficult, very diffi- 
 cult, to philosophize the subject. That the emotions 
 and opinions of A, whose picture is himg on the 
 line, of B, who is "skied," and of C, who is politely 
 requested to take his masterpiece away, are all de- 
 termined by personal considerations, is a manifestly 
 superficial view of the situation to take. We may 
 be sure that A, at any rate, looks at it wholly in the 
 dry light of reason. He knows that juries are infal- 
 lible. Be that as it may, we are certain of one thing, 
 and that is that the story of all such exhibitions as 
 I have in mind is but one long sequence of secessions, 
 and in this regard New York has in no wise differed 
 from Paris, London, Munich and every other Euro- 
 pean capital. Indeed the historian curious in dates 
 might even hope to demonstrate that we were leaders 
 in the fashion. It was in the seventies that the So- 
 ciety of American Artists was created, out of protest 
 against the Academy of Design (only to be reabsorbed 
 into that body, in the fulness of time) and it was 
 because the Society didn't measure up to their ideals 
 of administrative perfection that the Ten American 
 Painters went off to exhibit by themselves. There 
 have been other instances of revolt, and in recent 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 143 
 
 years certain of the younger men have in one way or 
 another contrived to have their little fling, "by their 
 wild lones," untrammelled by pontifical juries. I 
 need not pause on their grievances or on what, pre- 
 cisely, they have hitherto done to redress them. It 
 is enough to say that these "Independents," keen 
 upon having their own way, have done a good deal 
 to put into the air the idea that "freedom" is not as 
 wide-spread in the world of American art as it ought 
 to be, and that something should be done clearly to 
 establish a more liberal, more open-minded and sym- 
 pathetic attitude toward every "new" thing. It was 
 toward the advancement of this principle that the 
 Association of American Painters and Sculptors, itself 
 a new body, directed its efforts when it set out to 
 make what soon came to be known simply as the 
 Armory show. For the sake of the record I like to 
 give here the names of the members, as printed in 
 the catalogue. 
 
 Karl Anderson Walt Kuhn 
 
 George Bellows Ernest Lawson 
 
 D. Putnam Brinley Jonas Lie 
 
 J. Mowbray-Clarke George B. Luks 
 
 Leon Dabo Elmer L. MacRae 
 
 Jo Davidson Jerome Myers 
 
 Arthur B. Davies Frank A. Nankivell 
 
 Guy Pene Du Bois Bruce Porter 
 
 Sherry E. Fry Maurice Prendergast 
 
 William J. Glackens John Sloan 
 
 Robert Henri Henry Fitch Taylor 
 
 E. A. Kramer Allen Tucker 
 
 Mahonri Young 
 
144 -^ Memorable Exhibition 
 
 The best thing that these artists could do to enlist 
 public support for their enterprise they did a month 
 or more before the Armory doors were opened when 
 they authorized their president, Mr. Arthur B. Davies, 
 to issue the following statement: 
 
 On behalf of the executive committee I desire to explain 
 the general attitude of the association. . . . This is not 
 an institution, but an association. It is composed of per- 
 sons of varying tastes and predilections, who are agreed 
 on one thing — that the time has arrived for giving the 
 public here the opportunity to see for themselves results 
 of new influences at work in other countries in an art way. 
 In getting together the works of the European modems 
 the society has embarked on no propaganda. It proposes 
 to enter on no controversy with any institution. Its sole 
 object is to put the paintings, sculptures and so on on 
 exhibition, so that the intelligent may judge for themselves 
 by themselves. Of course, controversies will arise, just as 
 they have arisen under similar circumstances in France, 
 Italy, Germany and England. But they will not be the 
 result of any stand taken by this association as such. 
 On the other hand, we are perfectly willing to assume full 
 responsibility for providing the opportunity to those who 
 may take one side or the other. Any individual expres- 
 sion of opinion contrary to the above is at variance with 
 the official resolution of this association. 
 
 This candid and dignified declaration would have 
 been welcome anywhere. For the time, and place, it 
 was ideal. Some of the exhibitions of foreign art 
 which ha,ve been brought to the city have been intro- 
 duced with sickening outbursts of utterly uncritical 
 laudation. The spasmodic school is out of date. 
 New York is not Little Pedlington, and the numerous 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 145 
 
 people who take a serious interest in works of art 
 should not be affronted by the bland assumption that 
 they have not the intelligence to judge for themselves 
 but must unquestioningly swallow whole, as precious 
 masterpieces, whatever is put before them. Further- 
 more, indiscriminate praise is not only impertinent 
 but helps to expose the more painfully the weakness 
 of the given case. The discreet words used by Mr. 
 Davies promised both to win a friendly reception for 
 his cause and to further right thinking on the whole 
 subject. And they were made good. 
 
 It was a fine and stirring exhibition. The collec- 
 tion of about a thousand examples of modem art in- 
 cluded some of the most stupidly ugly pictures in 
 the world and not a few pieces of sculpture to match 
 them. But while these undoubtedly made the "sen- 
 sation" of the affair it was plain that the latter was 
 organized with no sensational purpose, and it was 
 not freakish violence that gave the collection as a 
 whole its tone. That tone was determined by noth- 
 ing more nor less than a healthy independence in 
 most of the types represented. The merely eccen- 
 tric artists occupied a comparatively subordinate po- 
 sition. If at first this did not seem to be so it was 
 only because things that are bizarre naturally make 
 themselves conspicuous. When one came to explore 
 the vast acreage of wall space one was struck by the 
 large proportion of works which, whether good or 
 bad, had nothing subversive about them. I lay stress 
 
146 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 upon this sanity prevailing in the show because I 
 would do justice to the disinterested aim of the men 
 responsible for it and because, after all, one likes to 
 testify to the truth. A great deal of the criticism 
 directed against the exhibition had its origin in the 
 distress and wrath of those who saw the silly pictures 
 and sculptures there — and flatly ignored everything 
 else. I saw the rubbish and hated it. But I know 
 the show included much else. 
 
 The first broad impression received was deeply 
 interesting. The huge floor space in the Armory was 
 admirably utilized by the erection of partitions form- 
 ing fifteen or eighteen octagonal rooms, some larger 
 than others, but all of generous dimensions. Cov- 
 ered with burlap the ample spaces thus made avail- 
 able provided a good background which the hanging 
 committee employed to excellent advantage. So far 
 as the ensemble was concerned the pictures were well 
 hung. In one respect the arrangement might have 
 been improved. A rough principle of grouping was 
 followed, so that in many instances the works of a 
 given exhibitor were kept together, but this system 
 was not rigidly enough applied. There were some 
 unfortunate dislocations of individual effect, and I 
 wished, too, that the historical part of the collection 
 had been more carefully isolated, with particular ar- 
 tists assigned to more clearly defined sections. But 
 all this amounted to no more than a really unimpor- 
 tant question of practical convenience. 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 147 
 
 Chronologically the exhibition began with Ingres, 
 and since he was to be included it was a pity that the 
 Association did not get hold of some more represent- 
 ative things of his. His share in the show was, as 
 it happened, practically negligible, and it would have 
 been interesting, from the educational point of view 
 which the organizers had in mind, if the public could 
 have been shown just what was the situation in which 
 he marked the parting of the ways nearly a himdred 
 years ago. First a follower and then a critic of David, 
 he illustrates a partial modernizing of the classical 
 tradition; in his art we sense the first breath of the 
 new life which was to animate French painting. 
 Then, in his time the Romanticists arise, properly 
 represented at the Armory by his great rival, Dela- 
 croix, and after their peculiarly personal conflict comes 
 the general war. At this point the show weakened 
 a little. Courbet was present but Millet was missing, 
 and the whole Barbizon group suffered a curious neg- 
 lect. I surmise, however, that to the men who 
 gathered aU these pictures together the landscape- 
 painters of 1830 did not seem quite revolutionary 
 enough. They were at greater pains to bring the Im- 
 pressionists into their scheme, Manet, Monet, and the 
 rest, not forgetting Degas. It was where those 
 painters left off that the American contingent may be 
 said to have begun on this occasion, artists hke Mr. 
 Alden Weir, the late John H. Twachtman and Mr; 
 Childe Hassam heading the native list. Thence the 
 
148 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 lines of development set forth were for some time con- 
 servative enough and the visitor realized that prevail- 
 ing tone of intelligent workmanship to which I have 
 referred above. It was, indeed, only as the chronolog- 
 ical sequence brought us fairly close to the present 
 day, and so up to the verge of to-morrow, that wrong- 
 headed nonsense came into view. 
 
 Be it said to the credit of our coimtrymen that 
 their indulgence in egotistical fatuity has as yet been 
 slight. A few of them swagger about, so to say, 
 making portentous use of their new-foimd "independ- 
 ence," but, frankly, it is not to them that the show 
 owed such fantasticality as it possessed. This was 
 to be ascribed to the French Post-Impressionists and 
 Cubists, with a few of their Spanish, German, ItaUan 
 and Russian fellows. Those whirling dervishes, seek- 
 ing, like the Fat Boy in "Pickwick," to make our 
 flesh creep, succeeded only too easily amongst some 
 observers, though it is hard to see why they should 
 have been taken so seriously. The Cubist agglom- 
 erations of line and color possess, sometimes, expres- 
 sive qualities. It is like the monstrous potato or 
 gourd which the farmer brings to the village store 
 to see if his cronies can make out in certain "bumps" 
 which he indicates the resemblance that he has found 
 to General Grant or the late P. T. Barnimi. It is 
 even more like what one would contemplate if a per- 
 fectly respectable wombat, finding himself in the 
 midst of one of those gigantic colored vessels which 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 149 
 
 stand in a druggist's window, should suddenly go 
 quite mad, thrashing about him and causing great 
 havoc. "We are all going to heaven," said the dying 
 Gainsborough, "and Van Dyck is of the company." 
 The Post-Impressionist and the Cubist, with their ec- 
 static acolytes, would emulate in their way this note 
 of proud conviction. But before the evidences they 
 offer of their right to be called artists, and original 
 creative artists at that, I am only reminded of the 
 Western lady who, for the first time, showed her new 
 drawing-room, a tragic jumble of tawdry decoration, 
 to one of her friends, saying, "This is our Louis 
 Quinze room." Quoth the friend, "What makes you 
 think so?" 
 
 II 
 
 There was so much that was good in this exhibition 
 that it was vexatious to be delayed on the way to it 
 by a quantity of worse than meretricious material; 
 but I must say something about the latter, and about 
 the "gush" that promptly set in when it appeared. 
 The Association made one slip. It reprinted Mr. 
 Davies' statement, which I have already quoted, in 
 the catalogue, but this time there were added some 
 remarks from another hand, and among them this 
 one: "The foreign paintings and sculptures here 
 shown are regarded by the committee of the Associa- 
 tion as expressive of the forces which have been at 
 work abroad of late, forces which cannot be ignored 
 
150 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 because they have had results." The italics are mine. 
 Why, I wonder, was it deemed necessary to raise an 
 issue? One could only remind the writer that a 
 bull in a china shop is also notoriously productive 
 of "results." A straw to show which way the wind 
 was blowing in other quarters was provided by 
 another commentator, writing of what he had ob- 
 served at the press view. "I never heard a crowd 
 of people," he said, "talk so much about meaning 
 and about life, and so little about technique, values, 
 tone, drawing, perspective, studies in blue, in white, 
 etc." That bit of concrete evidence beautifully ex- 
 posed the fallacy which misled and completely obfus- 
 cated many too confiding observers. It touched 
 the crux of the whole problem. To go to any exhibi- 
 tion with a solicitude "about meaning and about 
 life" at the expense of matters of technique is not sim- 
 ply to beg the question; it is to give it away with 
 both hands. In art, elements of "meaning" and 
 "life" do not exist until the artist has mastered those 
 technical processes by which he may or may not have 
 the genius to call them into being. This is not an 
 opinion. It is a statement of fact. To exclude tech- 
 nique from art is no more possible than it is to dispense 
 in architecture with ponderable substances. If I em- 
 phasize the point it is because we have here the one 
 chief source of danger. What the student of these 
 strange "isms" needs to be warned against is the 
 specious argument that he cannot test them by any 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 151 
 
 principles of criticism hitherto known to him, but 
 must look at a picture as though it were something 
 else, and admire it for qualities which he cannot see 
 in it but must take on faith. There are numbers of 
 nominally intelligent persons who seem really to be- 
 lieve that such an hypothesis is defensible. 
 
 That there is no mystery about Post-Impressionism 
 and the like students were helped to realize at the 
 Armory by the scope of the exhibition. All they 
 needed to do was to approach the subject with some 
 system, looking first at the examples of Impressionism 
 as it was imderstood by Manet, Monet and their 
 circle. Such an experience is very simply instructive. 
 It is not alone old f amiharity with the works of these 
 men which makes the inquirer feel at peace in their 
 presence. He sees at once that, while they changed 
 their manner of handling pigment from that com- 
 mon to the members of the Barbizon school, their 
 principal innovation, which was that of giving the 
 light of the open air its full value in a picture, in- 
 volved no departures from the broad grammar of art. 
 In composition, in form, in matters of hiiman expres- 
 sion, they sought, as generations of their predecessors 
 had sought, to record the truths of nature. Now let 
 us turn from their paintings to those in which a new 
 philosophy of art is supposed to have been announced; 
 let us turn to the paintings of Cezanne. This well- 
 to-do Frenchman, who, as I have shown elsewhere in 
 this volume, had no pot-boilers to paint, but could 
 
152 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 use his brush for his own amusement, had in him, 
 despite wholesome personal traits, the taint of the 
 amateur. He had some feehng for landscape and the 
 figure. He groped toward an expressive treatment 
 of form, and in his nudes you can dimly make out 
 some rather handsome intentions, just as in his land- 
 scapes you can just discern the aims of a colorist and 
 a designer. But Cezanne's dreams didn't "come 
 true" and this not because he was in the throes of 
 some new, abstruse conception of art, but because 
 he simply did not know his trade. There are no 
 esoteric glories about Cezanne, hidden from the vul- 
 gar. He was merely a second-rate Impressionist who 
 had now and then fair luck in painting a moderately 
 good picture, but would never have come into fame 
 at all if the dealers had not taken him up and there 
 had not been the usual band of scribes ready to ap- 
 plaud something new. Calverley, in one of the droll- 
 est of his poems, celebrates the casual organ-grinder, 
 and chooses this theme, so he quaintly tells us, "for 
 a change." Something of this sort happened to 
 Cezanne. The only mystery we have to reckon with 
 in his case lies in the fuss that has been made about 
 him. With Vincent Van Gogh, the Dutch painter 
 whose mind gave way and who died by his own 
 hand, we are still more or less in the sphere of simple 
 Impressionism, but in his technic he diverges a little 
 into paths of his own, using a heavy impasto and 
 handling his color in masses. He continues Monet's 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 153 
 
 theory of light, but in his treatment of form he has 
 nothing of that master's skill. His figures, like his 
 flowers or his trees, are brutally painted. Perhaps 
 the best piece of his in this exhibition was the land- 
 scape called "Moulin de Montmartre." It was a 
 simple impression of nature, it contained good light 
 and color, and the style, or, rather, the slow, solid 
 method of laying on the paint, made the work amu- 
 sing to the student of technique. There was, too, a 
 study of poppies which showed that he was capable 
 of expressing the character of a flower and of getting 
 in the process some good tone. But having made 
 these few remarks there is, in aU seriousness, nothing 
 further to be said about Van Gogh. No doubt if we 
 were to discuss the personality of the man, his adven- 
 tures, his ideas on old and modern methods and so 
 on, he would prove a mildly interesting topic. The 
 volume of his letters pubhshed in Paris by his old 
 comrade Emile Bernard, and the similar collection 
 which has been brought out in English, are well worth 
 reading. But do not let us be distracted from the 
 main issue. That was clearly presented in the group 
 of some twelve or fifteen paintings in the Armory ex- 
 hibition, paintings which were excellently representa- 
 tive, and, I repeat, all that they had to tell us was 
 that Van Gogh was a moderately competent Impres- 
 sionist, who was heavy-handed, had little if any sense 
 of beauty and spoiled a lot of canvas with crude, quite 
 unimportant pictures. 
 
154 -^ Memorable Exhibition 
 
 Gauguin is in practically the same case. The point 
 to remember here, too, is that we have no concern 
 with Gauguin's adventures in the South Sea Islands 
 or elsewhere, with his more or less elaborated "prin- 
 ciples," with any "movement" to which he has given 
 impetus, or with any of the high-erected "thoughts" 
 that some of the critics have had about him. The 
 bald question is, "Does he know how to paint? " The 
 answer, if not absolutely in the negative, is hardly 
 more encouraging. He, like Paul Cezanne and Van 
 Gogh, interested himself in landscape and in form, 
 and he brought to the treatment of them some tech- 
 nical aptitude, some sense of color. But he did not 
 complete his education. There is, I insist once more, 
 nothing mysterious here. Gauguin is nothing more 
 or less than the mediocre technician, trying to do 
 something which he cannot quite accomplish. Of 
 course, he has passages of modelling, of draughtsman- 
 ship and of rich warm color. Why not? These are 
 within the reach of any man of fair talent. But no 
 serious work of art was ever yet based on a few scat- 
 tered passages. Why, then, must we take Gauguin 
 seriously? The truth is that there is no reason why 
 we should do anything of the sort. There lies the 
 key to the whole absurdity. The spectator who uses 
 a little common sense and disdains to be browbeaten 
 by the Post-Impressionist hierophants will simply 
 face things as they are, recognize a poorly painted 
 picture when he sees one and let it go at that. He 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 155 
 
 will do this, moreover, even when the plot thickens 
 and he follows the development of Post-Impression- 
 ism into its last stages and beyond. As matters grow 
 worse he will note, too, that what is chiefly promoting 
 the declension upon artistic chaos is so every-day a 
 thing as egotistical impudence. Cezanne and Van 
 Gogh paint as poorly as they do, one surmises, be- 
 cause they cannot help themselves. Gauguin's va- 
 garies seem to a considerable extent wilful. Those of 
 Matisse are unmistakably attributable to an indurated 
 complacency. 
 
 It was once said of a young fellow who thought a 
 little too well of himself that he coxildn't have been 
 born with his "cheek"; he must have acquired it. 
 It is not credible that Matisse has not known just 
 what he was about. There is a legend to the effect 
 that the man had some academic ability, and it is 
 easy to believe that once, at all events, he knew 
 how to draw. Vaguely, beneath what is monstrous 
 in the paintings by him in this exhibition, one dis- 
 cerned the grasp upon form and movement which a 
 man has when he has been trained in the rudiments 
 and has used his eyes. But first going after some 
 will-o'-the-wisp leading him into ways of wanton 
 ugliness, and then, I infer, persuading himself that 
 he had a "mission," Matisse proceeded to paint his 
 nudes and his studies of still life not with the naivete 
 of a child, but with the forced simplicity of an adult 
 playing a trick. In the process he would appear to 
 
156 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 have relinquished all respect for technique, all feeling 
 for his medium, to have been content to daub his 
 canvas with Unear and tonal coarseness. The bulb- 
 ous, contorted bodies in his figure pieces are in no 
 wise expressive of any new and rationalized canon of 
 form. They are false to nature, they are ugly as the 
 halting efforts of the veriest amateur are ugly, and, 
 in short, their negation of all that true art implies is 
 significant of just the smug complacency to which I 
 have alluded. Whether through laziness or through 
 ignorance, Matisse has come to the point where he 
 feels that in painting an interior like his "Panneau 
 Rouge," or nudes like "Les Capucines" or "Le Luxe," 
 he is exercising the function of an artist, and, of course, 
 there are crowds of half-baked individuals who are 
 ready to tell him that he is right. As a matter of 
 fact, these things are not works of art; they are feeble 
 impertinences. To those who would forthwith prate 
 of some hidden virtue in them I would give counsel 
 similar to that proffered by the host whose guest had 
 dined a Uttle too flamboyantly, and at the moment of 
 departure was asking where he could find a cab. 
 "You will find two cabs at the corner," was the reply. 
 "Take the first one. The second one isn't there." 
 The types thus far traversed, though steadily re- 
 ceding from the technical propriety which I noted 
 as characteristic of the Impressionists who gave us 
 our point of departure, have been willing to subscribe 
 to the axiom that form is form. Cezanne, Van Gogh, 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 157 
 
 Gauguin and Matisse, each marking a further drift 
 away from the facts of the visible world, have yet 
 confessed to the dominance of fact as fact to the 
 extent of making a man, say, look more or less like 
 a man. But I have warned the reader of how the 
 plot thickens, and especially of the effect that "cheek" 
 has had upon the process. When we bid farewell to 
 Matisse, whose nudes, preposterous as they are, yet 
 suggest the forms of men and women, we find our- 
 selves in the company of "revolutionaries" who are 
 not dealing with form as we understand it at all. 
 With them a man begins to look Uke something else, 
 preferably Kke some mass of faceted or curved little 
 bodies thrown together in a heap. The Cubist steps 
 in and gives us not pictures but so many square yards 
 of canvas, treated as though they were so many 
 square yards of wall-paper. But the Cubist wants to 
 eat his cake and have it, too. He paints you his 
 riddle of line and color, and then, as in the case of 
 M. Marcel Duchamp, calls it "Nude Descending a 
 Staircase." In other words, he has the effrontery to 
 assert that his "picture" bears some relation to hu- 
 man life. Who shall argue with him? For my part 
 I flatly refuse to offer him the flattery of argument. 
 According to the Spanish proverb it is a waste of 
 lather to shave an ass, and that criticism of the 
 Cubists is thrown away which does not deny at the 
 outset their right to serious consideration. Are we 
 to be at great pains to explain that a chunk of marble 
 
158 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 is not a statue? Are we elaborately to demonstrate 
 that a battered tin can is not in the same category 
 with a goblet fashioned by Cellini? Are we to ac- 
 cept these Cubists as painters of pictures because 
 they have covered canvas with paint? Are they in- 
 deed "forces which cannot be ignored because they 
 have had results"? These "results" have nothing 
 to do with art. Why should they not be ignored? 
 Every one knows how easy it is to gather a crowd 
 in a city street. All you have to do is to stand on 
 a corner and look up at the chimney-pot on a tall 
 building. In five minutes you are the centre of an 
 eager, curious throng. It is no new thing for the 
 artist to profit by this expedient. Years ago the 
 clever Frenchman learned how to paint the big sen- 
 sational picture which "made a hole in the wall" and 
 caused everybody to stop and gape. Post-Impres- 
 sionism saw the efficacy of this trick and decided to 
 "go it one better." Cubism has merely carried the 
 thing to its logical conclusion. And the crowd on 
 the corner has swelled to astonishing dimensions. It 
 requires no profoimd initiation to see the wisdom 
 of passing on and leaving the crowd to waste its time. 
 I cannot too often repeat the statement that there is 
 really nothing grand, gloomy and peculiar about these 
 freak pictures. Conscientiously I examined them all, 
 and, frankly, could not even find reason for distin- 
 guishing between one exemplar of the new "move- 
 ment" and another. Why, indeed, should we pay 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 159 
 
 M. Duchamp the compliment of detaching him from 
 the company of M. Paul Picasso? There is no essen- 
 tial difference between M, Dunoyer de Segonzac's 
 "Une Bucolique," a study of nudes from which one 
 would omit the "bu," and the "Improvization" of 
 M. Wassily Kandinsky, which reminded me of noth- 
 ing so much as of some fragments of refuse thrown 
 out of a butcher's shop upon a bit of canvas. To 
 say of Mme. Jacqueline Marval's "Odalisques au 
 Miroir" that the nude figures in it looked like so 
 many wax dolls badly drawn, to note the resemblance 
 between M. Georges Rouault's study of a nude woman 
 and a bunch of overripe plums, is surely not to indi- 
 cate any really interesting artistic development. To 
 go step by step through the long list would be a weari- 
 some and unprofitable task. It is the weariness that 
 is peculiarly significant. After all, the chief trouble 
 about Post-Impressionism and Cubism is that they 
 are such a bore. There is for a moment a little fun 
 in them. A first glimpse of a piece of sculpture like, 
 say, Archipanko's "Family Life" inevitably provokes 
 a smile. But enough is as good as a feast. There 
 was a parlous lot of this sort of thing in the exhibi- 
 tion, and it soon lost its power to amuse. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Armory show, as I indicated at the beginning, 
 was nothing if not a source of stimulus, a challenge 
 
i6o A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 to criticism, and one of the most helpful things it 
 did was very urgently to invite us to take stock, so 
 to say, of American art in so far as it was there rep- 
 resented. Native work filled most of the space and 
 quite apart from this physical fact it was obvious 
 that we had to reckon with the Independents; with 
 those of our artists who are working, or at all events 
 believe they are working, in the van. What, then, 
 are they doing and what is it worth? These were 
 the really pressing questions developed by the show. 
 In seeking to answer them it is well to begin, as in 
 the preceding notes, at the beginning, which is to say 
 with French Impressionism. There were some fine 
 examples of the school on the walls, from which the 
 student could easily see what it was that set some of 
 our own painters upon a new path. Manet showed 
 them the virtues of pure color, applied in bold, direct 
 fashion, but at the outset Monet is the more suggest- 
 ive type. He it was who taught us the vibration 
 of color under the light of the open air, and it was 
 in emulation of his broken tones and his pervasive 
 luminosity that our latter-day innovators found their 
 account. Several of them were represented on this 
 occasion, and on the whole Mr. Alden Weir was the 
 hero of the group. They are all tj^^es of high ability. 
 It is interesting to note how the pictures by the late 
 J. H. Twachtman and the late Theodore Robinson 
 held their own in the company of masters like Manet, 
 Monet, and Whistler. Mr. Childe Hassam, too, richly 
 
A Memorable Exhibition i6i 
 
 exemplified the ease and effectiveness with which the 
 Impressionistic hypothesis was adopted here. But 
 without drawing up anything so futile as a class list 
 or making any invidious comparisons I may never- 
 theless choose Mr. Weir as a peculiarly helpful source 
 of light on our problem. 
 
 What was the value of French Impressionism to 
 American art? Its value could only be that of a 
 means to an end, of an influence fertilizing individu- 
 alized work. Mr. Weir's pictures gave the perfect 
 proof. I can well remember this artist's earlier ex- 
 periments in the open air, how indecisive they were, 
 and how poor a substitute for the method he had 
 previously employed. As time went on and succes- 
 sive exhibitions revealed the steps in his progress it 
 seemed as if he would never conclusively master the 
 new principles. Then, through sheer "keeping at it," 
 he demonstrated his essential authority. The old 
 hesitations fell away, the note of imitation absolutely 
 disappeared, and it was obvious that Weir was not to 
 be designated even as an Impressionist, but Just as 
 an original painter. He had made his Impressionism 
 a means to an end, a means of expressing himself. 
 That is why the panel containing four or five of his 
 pictures in this exhibition enforced perhaps the best 
 lesson that the latter afforded. 
 
 He exercises the true function of the artist, which 
 is to learn his trade and then produce beautiful pic- 
 tures. He does not make a fetich of his method. He 
 
1 62 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 is not enslaved by his pigment. Impressionism was 
 not with him a formula to be trotted out again and 
 again for its own sake. It was simply one more 
 string to his bow, or, if I may change the figure, a 
 kind of unconscious accretion, enriching his talent 
 without altering its fundamental direction. That di- 
 rection in the work of Alden Weir is steadily toward 
 beauty, toward charm. And observe how his assimi- 
 lation and control of the Impressionist idea as part, 
 not the whole, of his equipment has left him his free- 
 dom. He does not repeat himself nor is his range in 
 any way restricted. In his little group of paintings 
 there was a flower-piece, there was a landscape, there 
 were a couple of portraits. In each one of these 
 works he made you feel that he had been really stirred 
 by his theme and had managed to express its very 
 spirit. To each one he gave a distinctive character. 
 What was the result? You marked him at once as 
 not only a man of technique but a man of style. It 
 was in the latter capacity more particularly that he 
 provided an invaluable touchstone wherewith to test 
 quantities of other things in the show. It was not 
 the new method, freakish or otherwise, that drew one 
 to this or that episode; it was the use made of a given 
 method, the development out of it of those finer, more 
 personal effects which spell not a factitious "move- 
 ment" but a creative force. 
 
 Pursuing the search for this precious phenomenon 
 one was conscious at the back of his mind of a good 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 163 
 
 deal that had happened prior to the opening of this 
 exhibition. One remembered certain shows and the 
 talk that went on about them, the assertion of indi- 
 viduality outraged by academic ill-treatment, the cry 
 for wider liberty, for more generous encouragement. 
 Back of all this one understood there struggled a 
 band of artists, most of them still young, who were 
 dissatisfied with prevailing traditions and insisted 
 upon speaking out in their own way. We have seen 
 how Weir, Hassam and others profited by the example 
 of Monet when that was comparatively fresh. They 
 have gone on in sedate mood toward their broadened 
 horizon, and unnumbered American artists have fol- 
 lowed their leadership. But the Independents, com- 
 ing later upon the scene, have sought an even more 
 advanced tradition. I wonder if to them a man like 
 Weir now seems old-fashioned? This would seem 
 not imlikely, for the newer school is out of sympathy 
 with his fastidious taste. It cares nothing for beauty 
 as he imderstands it and nothing for suavity of sur- 
 face. It reverts to Impressionism, inasmuch as it 
 takes a leaf from Manet's book, but, as it happens, 
 that is only the leaf which relates to directness of 
 statement. In borrowing that motive the Independ- 
 ents, as though bent upon a kind of wilful defiance, 
 brutalize it to an extraordinary extent. The key-note 
 to the current mode is nothing more or less than an 
 exaltation of manual dexterity, accompanied by what 
 I can only describe as a gross flouting of the artistic 
 
164 -A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 convenances. It is as though the artist wanted you 
 to understand that he knew how to use his brushes, 
 but had no nonsense about him and would not be 
 caught permitting a trace of sensuous or spiritual 
 beauty to creep into his work. 
 
 There is no link between our earlier Impressionism 
 and these recent outcroppings of rebellion. The lat- 
 ter have no place in any sequence of artistic events, 
 in any evolution of ideas. They simply stand for a 
 sharp and, on the whole, sudden break with the ex- 
 isting order of things. So to consider them is in no 
 wise to disparage them. A swift, violent change is 
 not in itself necessarily harmful. But neither is there 
 anything talismanic about it; neither is it necessarily 
 a cause of good art, and in saying this I come pretty 
 close to the secret of our Independents, and, by the 
 same token, to an understanding of what they fail 
 to do. Consideration of what they have failed to 
 do has been rather forced upon us by the general 
 drift of all that agitation which has been going for- 
 ward for the last few years. One assumes that a new 
 movement has tangible things to say for itself, that 
 the men behind it, being unmistakably in revolt 
 against constituted authority, have principles of their 
 own to put in the place of those which they regard 
 as outworn. Now, it is not clear that the Independ- 
 ents have any constructive campaign laid out or 
 that they are doing anything to impugn the validity 
 of wh^t has gone before them. On the contrary, in 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 165 
 
 going back into the studio and practically abandon- 
 ing the magic of sunlight they would seem to have 
 retrograded from the point at which modem art was 
 left by the French Impressionists. Instead of ex- 
 tending and enriching the gamut of color they have 
 cramped it within narrower limits. Their pure tints 
 are often also ugly, opaque tints. A surprising num- 
 ber of the pictures in the Armory show were either 
 swamped in dull black or brown tones or went to 
 the other extreme and split the welkin with the rau- 
 cous row of their high-pitched crudities. Yet every- 
 body was terribly in earnest. One could not help 
 feeling that they had put their heart into their work. 
 These are artists passionately convinced that they are 
 going somewhere, that they are going forward. What 
 is it that they have unconsciously done, then, to make 
 the spectator doubtful? In a vague tremor lest they 
 descend upon prettiness they have shunned beauty. 
 Fearful of drawing like Academicians they draw like 
 navvies. Suspicious of the lure of poetry, which they 
 imagine must have something "literary" about it, 
 they give themselves up to the baldest kind of prose. 
 There is no denying that this "rough and ready" 
 conception of art promotes at once a feeling of dis- 
 appointment, and even of distress. It is painful to 
 have to admit that the Independents have brought 
 nothing really new into the field, that they have no 
 alluring dreams to share with us, that they are prac- 
 tically innocent of the gift that is so precious in art, 
 
1 66 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 the gift of invention. But it is just at this point 
 that criticism must be on its guard against the insidi- 
 ous temptation to ask an artist to be something that 
 he was never intended to be. Could anything be 
 sillier or more unjust than to blame a Sargent, say, 
 for not being a Botticelli? The foregoing remarks, ex- 
 posing what the Independents lack, have been of- 
 fered with a purely descriptive purpose. Having thus 
 cleared the ground, one is free to express the warmest 
 appreciation of the two highly important virtues 
 which do most to stiffen their back-bone, the virtues 
 of energy and truth. As regards the second of these, 
 I must add, to be sure, a certain qualification. That 
 prosaic mood to which I have just referred leads to 
 a quaint misconception as to subject. The Independ- 
 ents are too exclusively absorbed in the delineation of 
 every-day, and even squahd, types. It is wise for the 
 artist to paint what goes on about him, but New 
 York life, for example, is not confined to the East 
 Side or to Bohemia. Velasquez began by painting 
 the humble figures of his bodegones, the peasants and 
 water-carriers of Seville, but it was not long before 
 he dedicated himself to the portrayal of kings. The 
 fact that we are interested in a caterpillar need not 
 prevent our delighting in a butterfly. But this I note 
 in passing. Once we have granted the Independents 
 their preoccupation with not very attractive models, 
 we may admire the zest and the skill with which they 
 do their work. There we have the final source of 
 
A Memorable Exhibition i6j 
 
 the genuine pleasure that was extracted from this ex- 
 hibition. It was inspiriting to come in contact with 
 a company of artists so sincerely desirous of keeping 
 their eyes upon the object, to paint it with unflinch- 
 ing fidelity to nature, and so manfully willing to let 
 themselves go. 
 
 It hardly matters at aU, from this point of view, 
 that they have added nothing to our store of artistic 
 ideas. To be genuine is to be of some significance in 
 the world, and the honest robust vigor of these men 
 is by itself enough to inspire sympathy. Further- 
 more, to note their poverty of invention is not by 
 any means to say that they are bankrupt of person- 
 ality, that indispensable ingredient of good art. 
 Though it is impossible here to traverse the show in 
 detail, minutely appraising picture after picture in a 
 portentously large collection, I must pause if only 
 for a moment on one or two leading types. I cannot 
 ignore the distinction and the power which Mr. Davies 
 showed in his "Design: Birth of Tragedy," and in 
 another drawing of a seated figure which hung near 
 by. In him, for once at least, we meet a man of 
 ideas and a man with distinction of style. There was 
 good reason, too, for lingering before the four or five 
 paintings by George Bellows. His "Docks in Win- 
 ter," his "Polo Crowd" and his "Circus" stamped 
 him as an artist with an outlook of his own, a power- 
 ful technique, the makings of a style, and a dynamic 
 force which stirs us as we are stirred by some trium- 
 
1 68 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 phant masculine gesture. In his work, too, as in 
 much else that the exhibition contained, we find the 
 note of character. Human beings are portrayed as 
 such by him. If the Independents accomplish any 
 reform in contemporary American art, it promises to 
 be the abolition of the lay-figure and the ruthless 
 sweeping away of a vast amount of studio rubbish, the 
 irrelevant accessories which are dragged into so many 
 pictures as by main strength. They are not masters 
 yet, these painters such as Bellows, Luks, Glackens, 
 Sloan, Myers, and a dozen others, and if it had any- 
 thing to do with my present purpose, I could without 
 any difficulty indicate errors in this or that painting. 
 But no matter how many mistakes are made, we rarely 
 encounter amongst the works of these men the disas- 
 trous mistake of painting men and women as so much 
 stiU life. 
 
 Of tJiat pitfall the Independents scarcely need to 
 be wary. Their avoidance of it is instinctive. There 
 is no necessity of warning Mr. Guy Pene Du Bois 
 against the manikin. His little studies of New York 
 types, full of technical promise, also show that he 
 has the root of the matter in him and is feeling his 
 way toward the very essence of character. But there 
 is one danger to which many if not all of the Independ- 
 ents are exposed, and that is the danger of scorning 
 one formula, only to become hidebound in the cultiva- 
 tion of another. The reflection is invited especially 
 by a painter like Mr. Robert Henri. In his re- 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 169 
 
 vival of the mode of Manet he has done a good quan- 
 tity of prodigiously clever work. Technically he is 
 one of the most sophisticated and able of our painters, 
 and when he is in precisely the right mood, as when 
 he made the portrait of a child called "The Red 
 Top," he gives us a lasting satisfaction. This is tech- 
 nique that is worth while, technique wreaked upon 
 a little slice of life and somehow endued with the 
 breath of individuality. But when we contemplate 
 this artist's "Figure in Motion," a full-length nude, 
 it is in no spirit of paradox that we think automat- 
 ically of a chef d'ecole like Bouguereau. At bottom 
 this motive, like the motive characteristic of the 
 French Academician, savors of the well-worn studio 
 mechanism. It is professorial work, sound in its way, 
 like Bouguereau's, but still professorial. One divines 
 the proficient teacher, sure of his recipe, knowing so 
 well how to draw and model in just that way, but in 
 the long run transmitting to the pupil only a certain 
 uninspired adroitness. There is no personality here. 
 Neither is there any style. The figure lives and moves, 
 no doubt, and yet as a work of art the canvas seems 
 empty. That, I repeat, is what the Independents 
 have to fear. The artist cannot live by manual dex- 
 terity alone. He must think and feel, and, above 
 all, he must strongly individualize what he does. 
 Whether this memorable Salon is to prove a really 
 helpful and constructive influence or is presently to 
 be forgotten as having provided no more than the 
 
ijo A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 passing sensation of a winter, depends altogether upon 
 the seriousness of the changes flowing from it. Are 
 the Independents to repeat, each man in his own way, 
 Mr. Weir's deeply significant experience? Are they 
 to use their technique in the highest service of that 
 truth and energy in which they are so rich, and prove 
 that they have something to say to which people of 
 discrimination are willing to listen? They cannot 
 burke these questions, and, if the wholesome atmos- 
 phere of the exhibition goes for anything, they will 
 not try to. 
 
 IV 
 
 It was a pleasant thing to be released from a sys- 
 tematic examination of this exhibition, to drift about 
 and enjoy certain pieces for themselves, regardless of 
 their relation, if they had any, to a school or a move- 
 ment. My final sheaf of impressions, thus gathered, 
 embraced works of art old and new, some of which 
 wore an almost classical air and others which, if in 
 no wise revolutionary, were at any rate significant 
 of progressive ideals. Among the familiar friends the 
 first and most arresting was Puvis de Chavannes, who 
 was represented by some beautiful paintings and 
 drawings. It was good to see again his famous "La 
 Decollation de Saint Jean-Baptiste," that perfect sou- 
 venir of his state of mind in 1869, when his predilec- 
 tion for the naive simplicity of the Italian Primitives 
 was not incompatible with a certain rude dramatic 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 171 
 
 force and a rich quality in his pigment. There was, 
 too, in his little "Femme Nue," another delightful 
 page from his earlier history, a page in which simple 
 realism is faintly touched but not yet transmogrified 
 by the grand style to which he was ultimately to 
 dedicate his genius. Puvis steadily simplified as he 
 went on, fixing himself in that solemn, heroic mood 
 which we know in his great mural decorations. More 
 and more he sought the monumental motive, and as 
 he did so allied his work with those majestic types of 
 creative art the special note of which has something 
 abstract and imiversal about it. In the paintings at 
 the Armory he was more intimate, more personal, 
 more artlessly human. They were curiously refresh- 
 ing. 
 
 It was interesting to turn from them to our own 
 imaginative painter, Albert P. Ryder, and to the 
 French symbolist, Odilon Redon. Ryder is akin to 
 Puvis in the elevation of his ideas and in his inde- 
 pendence of convention, but if I may compare the 
 two in terms of poetry — and both are strongly poetic 
 in temperament — I may say that Puvis moves on the 
 vast plane of the epic and Ryder is all for the jet of 
 lyrical emotion and the world well lost. The Ameri- 
 can is wonderful in his color, using a thick, "fat" im- 
 pasto and turning his pictiire into a kind of deep, 
 clouded opal. He is romantic and he is spiritual. 
 He paints his poetic or religious themes with great 
 depth of feeling and at the same time with a sensu- 
 
172 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 ous, mundane passion. He, too, like Puvis, "washes 
 the eyes" and gives us a refined, exquisite pleasure. 
 Redon is a singular figure. He shares the disposi- 
 tion of Puvis to look beyond the sphere of every-day 
 familiar things; but Puvis was never dehumanized, 
 and Redon, going fairly over the rim of the world 
 for his themes, ends by suggesting not so much im- 
 agination as fancy. He is a kind of Gustave Moreau 
 manque, playing with an inspiration that is always 
 promising something strange and beautiful, but not 
 quite fulfilling itself. He is too s3Tnbolical by half, 
 painting dreams that are altogether too insubstantial, 
 dreams of which you are inclined to say not that 
 they might mean anything but that they mean noth- 
 ing at all. In his design, and, in fact, in all the mi- 
 nutiae of his technique, he repeats this suggestion of an 
 art not sufficiently sure of itself. His one outstand- 
 ing virtue is an undeniable beauty of color, though 
 this, too, crops out in the isolated passage rather 
 than in any well-organized harmony. It is amusing 
 to reflect on what Redon might do if he had some 
 of the dogged force characteristic of Moreau, just as 
 it is amusing to think of a Moreau exchanging his 
 turgid surfaces and his morbid color for the piercing 
 yet suave tones which from time to time come within 
 Redon's scope. 
 
 There were divers other French painters whom it 
 was good to encounter in this exhibition. Manet's 
 "Portrait," an easy spontaneous study in dark tones, 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 173 
 
 proved one of the most fascinating bits of painting 
 by him I had seen in a long time. There were good 
 examples of Monet, Renoir and others of their circle. 
 From the modern Dutch school we had a superb 
 group of pictures by Matthew Maris, and in the 
 American wing one could apprehend Whistler, not 
 only in a characteristic portrait, but in a copy of 
 the "Andromeda" of Ingres, full of interest as a relic 
 of his youth. I may allude with warm sympathy also 
 to the picturesque screens painted by Mr. Robert 
 L. Chanler, novel schemes remarkably well exe- 
 cuted. But of all the painters not hitherto touched 
 upon in my survey of this collection the one upon 
 whom it is perhaps most inviting to pause is the 
 Englishman, Augustus John, simply because he is the 
 newest of recent reputations having a serious basis. 
 In London he is already a legend. The more esoteric 
 reviewers of artistic affairs have there been wont to 
 deal cavalierly enough with the average exhibition, 
 xmtil they have come upon this master of a lately 
 formed school or group. Then they say that the 
 show contains "an Augustus John," as who should 
 say, "it contains one of the rarest of the old masters." 
 A few of his drawings have strayed over to the United 
 States and left a fine impression, but we had not be- 
 fore had the chance to see here what the man's art 
 is really like. 
 
 It is distinguished art. You feel at once that Mr. 
 John has an inborn gift and an individual habit of 
 
174 -^ Memorable Exhibition 
 
 using it. At the same time he is momentarily 
 puzzling. It was not clear upon this occasion that 
 he was getting all that might be got out of his 
 natural resources, and presently one began to see 
 why. It was because he is a realist by instinct, 
 mistakingly trying to be something else. The picture 
 called "The Way Down to the Sea," the largest, most 
 important work he showed, aptly illustrates the point. 
 In attitude and gesture, as well as in the broad lines 
 of the composition, he unmistakably endeavors to in- 
 vest his subject with some peculiar meaning, as though 
 he would imaginatively enhance the significance of a 
 quite ordinary act. In the faces, too, he would ap- 
 pear to be expressing some recondite mood. But in 
 the upshot all this remains dark to the observer, who 
 wonders why a group of peasants descending to the 
 shore should proceed as upon some ritualistic business. 
 The specious, mixed purpose of the design reacts upon 
 the artist's technique. He is hard and stilted where 
 one surmises a healthier, more direct conception of 
 the whole subject would have encouraged him to 
 paint better. Now if only this picture had been 
 brought over, we fear that the fervors of Mr. John's 
 London critics would have remained more mysterious 
 than ever. But these were at least partially explained 
 by his other works. 
 
 The drawings were very beautiful, and in them 
 there was none of the stiffness which is so distressing 
 in the painting just traversed. Mr. John's line is deli- 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 175 
 
 cate and free. In some of his heads he seems a Burne- 
 Jones raised to a higher power; in others just a clever 
 disciple of Leonardo, with a shrewd aptitude for that 
 witchery of waving hair which so often beguiled the 
 great Florentine. But in the main this English 
 draughtsman has a style of his own and employs it 
 with equal strength and charm. Decidedly his draw- 
 ings prove that he is worth knowing, and appreciation 
 grew on examination of his smaller works in color, 
 studies of peasants, British and Continental, which 
 were full of character and movement, full of subtle ex- 
 pression, and had into the bargain technical originality 
 and power. There were other British painters rep- 
 resented — the graceful, amusing Conder, and Mr. 
 Nathaniel Hone, whose two coast scenes were ingrati- 
 ating in their robust yet fine grays. But in this sec- 
 tion it was really a case of Augustus John first and 
 the rest nowhere. 
 
 There were two departments in which the show 
 was, on the whole, disappointing. The sculptors did 
 not by any means make a strong contingent. Bour- 
 delle was the most interesting of the foreigners. He 
 has a large and even impressive sense of form, and 
 in design is not without some faculty of invention. 
 "Une Muse," a piece in high relief, contained some 
 fine linear passages, it was decorative without triv- 
 iality and left altogether an impression of vitalized 
 simplicity. The pseudo-mediasvalism of Wilhelm 
 Lembruch was only ephemerally attractive. Among 
 
176 A Memorable Exhibition 
 
 the American sculptures there were some small pieces 
 of value, notably the closely studied, sensitive and 
 very personal animal subjects by Arthur Putnam, and 
 Mr. J. E. Eraser's group of plaques. Mr. George 
 Gray Barnard admirably asserted himself, too, and 
 there were some clever things by Mr. Mahonri Young. 
 Nevertheless, when one had scrutinized these few 
 examples of plastic art one had comprehended the 
 whole story. The sculpture as a whole left the spec- 
 tator terribly cold. So likewise in respect to the 
 black-and-white contributions. A few of the older 
 draughtsmen saved the day, Ingres, Puvis and Rodin, 
 with Toulouse-Lautrec and one or two other for- 
 eigners upholding their hands. Then there were, of 
 course, the three or four drawings by Mr. Davies. 
 But for the rest it can hardly be said that the innu- 
 merable drawings in ink, pencil, chaUc and so on at 
 all justified the space assigned to them. It would be 
 beside the mark to lay stress upon the interest which 
 attached to some of them because of their humor or 
 of their fidelity to fragments of life observed at our 
 doors. Here if anywhere we want style and freshness, 
 the exceptional and brilliant stroke. Average sketch- 
 book stuff has no place in a Salon of the Independents. 
 But it did not seriously matter; there was so much 
 in the show that was worth while. As I took leave 
 of it I had but one thought, and that was of gratitude 
 to the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. 
 And I could not but smile over the hysterical denunci- 
 
A Memorable Exhibition 177 
 
 ations of what this body of artists had done, by alarm- 
 ists in terror of Cubist and kindred influences. Is 
 American art so wanting in American energy and in- 
 telligence that it is bound supinely to succumb to 
 every deleterious movement that swings into view? 
 Are the youths studying to be painters and sculptors 
 so impressionable and, withal, so mindless and un- 
 stable, that they cannot be trusted to look upon things 
 new and strange, even monstrous, without fear of col- 
 lapse? The questions answer themselves. If the day 
 ever comes when American art cannot subsist save 
 in wrappings of cotton-wool, then it will behoove 
 American art to put up the shutters. 
 
VIII 
 
 Whistler 
 
VIII 
 WHISTLER 
 
 Who was Charles Gleyre? To ask and to answer 
 that question in approaching the art of the late James 
 McNeill Whistler is to draw much nearer, I think, to 
 what is interesting in the genesis of that art, than if 
 we seek to learn where and when the American painter 
 and etcher was born, who his parents were, and all 
 the other things that are supposed to count, and usu- 
 ally do coimt, in the development of a man's genius. 
 In Whistler's case they do not count at all, and only 
 the compilers of reference-books need trouble them- 
 selves about the vexed question as to whether he was 
 born in 1834 or 1835, in Baltimore or St. Petersburg. 
 He was, himself, always rather mysterious on these 
 points. Perhaps he realized their unimportance, and, 
 in his quizzical way, amused himself by evading the 
 importxmities of the intrusive biographer. No, the 
 first salient fact by which we are confronted in his 
 record is his entrance into Gleyre's studio in 1856, 
 and so I return to my question. 
 
 Gleyre was a born classicist, a devoted conservator 
 181 
 
1 82 Whistler 
 
 of those principles upon which Ingres had placed his 
 imprimatur, — the only principles, as they thought, 
 which it was rational for French art to follow. Ob- 
 viously they were, in a measure, wrong. Gericault 
 proved it, Delacroix proved it, the works of all the 
 Romantic and Naturalistic painters, both figure com- 
 positions and landscapes, remain an irrefragable proof 
 that Ingres and Gleyre went too far in their academic 
 fury against all things not academic. Less obviously, 
 perhaps, but conclusively enough, they were, in a 
 measiu'e, right. At least they were in harmony with 
 the French genius; at least they preached, in their 
 gospel of "the rectitude of art," the truth that is at 
 the bottom of the most characteristic things in the 
 Salon to-day. But Gleyre, as Whistler's master, 
 ceases for the moment to represent the continuity of 
 French practice — he becomes a protagonist in the 
 great artistic quarrel of the nineteenth century, that 
 between tradition and temperament. Looking back 
 at the pair in those early days, both men are perceived 
 in a peculiarly interesting light. Gleyre stands for 
 everything that has been formulated and accepted. 
 Whistler, a mere youth, is already bent upon revolu- 
 tion, and the odd thing is that all his resources for 
 the struggle were accimiulated in his own nature; he 
 drew nothing from the comrades who, like himself, 
 sought an outlet from the stifling atmosphere of the 
 Academy. That is why his period of pupilage is so 
 important to remember. Even then he was a kind 
 
Whistler 183 
 
 of solitary, the influence of Gleyre only serving to 
 accentuate his detachment from the reigning school. 
 Never in later life did he more vividly demonstrate 
 his title to a place apart in modern art than when he 
 defied the very representative of ofl&cialdom to whom 
 he had come to be taught. 
 
 I have said that he drew nothing from his more 
 independent comrades. Degas was among them; he 
 knew other Frenchmen since become celebrated, like 
 that painter, for successful rebellion against routine, 
 and he shared in their high erected talk. He did not 
 share in any of their new movements to the extent 
 of trying to do what they were trying to do, save for 
 a brief emulation of Courbet. If he suffered rejec- 
 tion with Manet, for example, from the Salon, and 
 thereupon sought recompense, with that artist, in the 
 Salon des Refuses, it was by virtue of qualities en- 
 tirely his own, and bearing the stamp of no school, 
 impressionistic or what not, that he was scorned in 
 the one place and welcomed in the other. I name 
 Manet at this point because the contrast between his 
 work and Whistler's in their time of trial is especially 
 suggestive. The Frenchman's great sensation in the 
 Salon des Refus6s of 1863 was made with his now 
 famous — then merely notorious — "Le Dejeuner sur 
 I'Herbe." The American sent La Femme Blanche," 
 the first of his three early Symphonies in White. The 
 position taken by both painters amounted in effect 
 to this: that they cared nothing for subject as sub- 
 
184 Whistler 
 
 ject, but were soKcitous solely for the charm to be 
 got out of the sheer manipulation of paint. The dif- 
 ference between them, beginning in temperament, 
 ended in something like a total separation of their 
 ideals. To Manet the incongruity of his nude bather, 
 grouped, beneath the trees near a stream, with two 
 men in the coats and trousers of modern Hfe, was of 
 no earthly consequence. He was not painting an 
 anecdote, he was painting an effect of light and air. 
 But he really gives us more than this, he puts life 
 into his figures and his scene, the life of the world we 
 live in, something that moves and breathes and has a 
 very human interest. Brilliant as a technician, Manet 
 was most briUiant in putting his technique at the ser- 
 vice of truth. What Velasquez and Hals taught him 
 he used in a large, robust spirit. The scales had fallen 
 from his eyes. The world was intensely real to him. 
 His eyes devoured the substance of life, and his hands 
 thrilled with a sense of power as he seized it and trans- 
 ferred it to canvas, its vitality heightened rather than 
 diminished, and its appeal directed to the layman, 
 caring for mankind, hardly less than to the dilettanti 
 of "pure painting." 
 
 Whistler had felt the magic of Velasquez, and he 
 was weary, as Manet was, of the cold, sapless fruits 
 of the Academy. But it was no more in his nature 
 to face the truth as Manet faced it than it was in his 
 nature to emulate his contemporary's prodigious vigor. 
 "La Femme Blanche" is not, like any one of Manet's 
 
Whistler 185 
 
 figures, a being whose humanity cannot be denied. 
 One sees in this canvas simply the graceful wearer of 
 a white dress which the artist has wanted to paint 
 against a white curtain, and the same atmosphere as 
 of technical experimentation hangs about "The Little 
 White Girl " of 1864, and the third of the "symphonic" 
 studies, painted in 1867. These canvases are all in- 
 teriors. Not for him the luminosity, which, for Manet, 
 Monet, and all the rest of the Impressionists, meant a 
 new and indispensable factor in art. He sought cooler 
 tones, in a still, sequestered world of his own; un- 
 troubled by the nervous tension of familiar life; vmlit 
 by anything so garish as the sun,— detached, in a 
 word, from ordinary reality. Long afterward, allu- 
 ding to his great portrait of his mother, which he called 
 an "Arrangement in Grey and Black," he protested 
 that while its personal associations were interesting 
 to him, the public could have no legitimate concern 
 with that side of the work. "It must stand or fall," 
 he asserted, "on its merits as an arrangement." This 
 was his attitude in the sixties, when he was feeling 
 his way toward the expression of his ideal, and he 
 never abandoned it. He was furious with Mr. Ham- 
 erton for complaining, in The Saturday Review, that 
 there were more varieties of tint in the "Symphony 
 in White, No. Ill," than could be squared with a lit- 
 eral interpretation of the title. "Bon Dieu!" he ex- 
 claims, "did this wise person expect white hair and 
 chalked faces? And does he then, in his astounding 
 
1 86 Whistler 
 
 consequence, believe that a symphony in F contains 
 no other note, but shall be a continued repetition of 
 F, F, F? . . . Fool!" 
 
 The critic had certainly committed a Mtise, but 
 this is not to say that Whistler deserved no criticism 
 at all in those earlier days. On the contrary, it is 
 very easy to exaggerate the value of the three paint- 
 ings I have named. They are immensely interesting 
 as illustrations of a kind of art unlike anything that 
 had previously been done, and in the middle member 
 of the trio particularly, the note struck is not simply 
 so new, but so charming that it is, at first blush, a 
 little difficult to understand why Paris was so slow 
 in applauding the painter. The truth is that the 
 absence in Whistler of that power which we have 
 seen in Manet was destined, not altogether unjustly, 
 to keep him for a long time out of his own. Preoc- 
 cupied with the nuance of tone, trying to achieve in 
 painting an effect which finds its parallel in, say, the 
 music of Chopin, or the poetry of Verlaine, he neg- 
 lected to so perfect himself in the handling of his 
 brushes that one would see his effects and nothing 
 else. As a matter of fact one sees a great deal else, 
 a point which Whistler's thick and thin admirers are 
 absurdly imwilling to concede. "The work of the 
 master," he somewhere says, "reeks not of the sweat 
 of the brow, — suggests no effort, — and is finished 
 from its beginning." Consider the want of limpidity 
 in the surfaces, the want of elasticity in the lines, of 
 
Whistler 187 
 
 the three Symphonies in White, and judge if there 
 is no sign of effort in those works. Of masterful ease 
 there is assuredly no suggestion. Some charm of 
 tone is there, and the savor of genius is unmistakably 
 present, but it is tone that needs to take on a purer 
 transparence; it is genius that is not yet in full pos- 
 session of itself. What Whistler himself thought of 
 his first essays in paint is shown by an episode taken 
 from a much later period in his career. He foimd, 
 in an English collection, a picture he had painted, 
 and painted so badly that he longed to destroy it. 
 So anxious was he to do this that he offered to paint 
 a full-length portrait of the owner, and another of his 
 wife, in exchange for this ghost from his past! 
 
 If from the start he had been only a painter, the 
 explanation of his deficiencies could the more speedily 
 be found, but it is one of the interesting things about 
 Whistler that, just as he makes his debut in painting, 
 and starts the critic on an analytic pursuit, the latter 
 is brought athwart the etchings, and, for the moment, 
 must see his subject in a very different light. Again 
 the name of Gleyre presents itself. Looking simply 
 to the three Symphonies in White one would say 
 that he, to whom draughtsmanship was as the soul 
 of art, had not taught his pupil to draw. Not down 
 to the end of his career was Whistler to draw with 
 the brush as most other masters have drawn, — mas- 
 ters as unlike one another as Velasquez, Titian, Raph- 
 ael, Mantegna and Ingres. But with the etching 
 
1 88 Whistler 
 
 needle in his hand he drew as only Rembrandt had 
 drawn before him, with a precision, a dehcacy, a 
 power, which, perhaps, after all, not Ingres and Gleyre 
 together could have taught him. These qualities ap- 
 peared in his first etchings, the French Set of 1858; 
 and when the Thames Set was finished a year or so 
 later, he had developed his art to a remarkable point 
 of self-possession and force. Altogether he produced 
 nearly four hundred plates, and, while they vary in 
 excellence, there is not one in the collection which is 
 without some touch disclosing the great artist. 
 
 For convenience these etchings may be roughly 
 divided into four groups. The first two have just 
 been named. In them, and in the etchings of the 
 sixties, brilliance both of line and tone is the predom- 
 inating characteristic. Then, around the early sev- 
 enties. Whistler modified his manner, sketched the 
 figure with a freer point, and often substituted for the 
 rich tones, the velvety blacks and deep browns of his 
 earlier plates, a grayer and more impalpable veil of 
 color, approximating more to the key of certain of his 
 paintings. Several years passed, and in Venice he 
 entered upon a new phase, exchanging the full firm 
 line of his first plates for a looser, more stenographic 
 form of expression. Thereafter, in plates done in 
 France, Belgium and Holland, and in some delight- 
 ful notes of a British naval review, he adhered to 
 much the same method. The point of view from which 
 he made all his etchings is well exhibited in one of 
 
Whistler 189 
 
 his letters to a friend who "happened to be staying in 
 Stuttgart at the time, and had written him of the 
 picturesqueness of that place. It all sounded delight- 
 ful to him. He had never visited Stuttgart but im- 
 agined its fascinations, and wondered if it wasn't fxill 
 of "quaint little daintinesses" for him to carry off. 
 That was ever his mood, one of immediate sympathy 
 for dainty picturesqueness, and what makes the inci- 
 dent I have cited doubly characteristic is its indica- 
 tion of his tendency to look for that quality in what 
 I may call the immobile aspects of a city. If he seeks 
 movement at all, it is in the lines of shipping on the 
 Thames, or it is in the men and women who enliven 
 a street or square, — and over these idlers or pass- 
 ers-by he pauses only long enough deftly to summa- 
 rize them, and to furnish his composition with some 
 sign of life. 
 
 Why did he not make more of the human figure in 
 his etchings? He was not altogether without resource 
 in this direction. In fact, some of his portraits, like 
 the " Drouet," for example, or several others of men, 
 women, and children, show a fine sense of form. I 
 think the reason why we find among his plates none 
 of the dramatic figure subjects that we find in the 
 etched work of Rembrandt, whom he equals other- 
 wise, is that he was not interested in human nature 
 for its own sake; indeed, I sometimes wonder if he 
 was interested in it at all, if the passion and poetry 
 of life were not, to him, a sealed book. In his Ten 
 
I go Whistler 
 
 O'clock lecture Whistler speaks of Art being selfishly 
 occupied with her own perfection only, having no de- 
 sire to teach; and in illustration of her disposition to 
 seek the beautiful in all conditions and in all times, 
 he cites "her high priest" Rembrandt, who, he goes 
 on, "saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in 
 the Jews' Quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not 
 that its inhabitants were not Greeks." The point is 
 well taken, yet we can imagine Rembrandt protesting 
 to Whistler, — if they are now somewhere talking to- 
 gether of their earthly experiences, — protesting that 
 his position in the matter had been understated; that 
 he saw a good deal more than picturesque grandeur 
 and noble dignity in the Jews' Quarter at Amsterdam 
 and wherever else he sought his models; that he saw, 
 and felt, the emotions by which the faces of those 
 models were marked, by which their frames had been 
 made significant of the soul's travail. We cannot 
 imagine Whistler illustrating the Scriptures as Rem- 
 brandt illustrated them. To have done so he 
 would have had to suffer a transformation of his 
 whole nature, to have learned that there is more in 
 mankind than the materials for an "arrangement" 
 in line or color. Furthermore, even if he had had an 
 impulse toward Rembrandt's way of looking at things, 
 it is probable that he would have failed through his 
 lack of anatomical knowledge. His portraits, I re- 
 peat, are often masterly, but to put forth elaborate 
 compositions he needed an even greater command over 
 
Whistler 191 
 
 the secrets of the figure than they reveal. I note the 
 fact with httle or no regret, however, for in his chosen 
 field Whistler made such beautiful etchings that it 
 would be fooUsh to wish that he had done something 
 else. 
 
 Architecture, seemingly so fixed a phenomenon, 
 nevertheless presents itself to different eyes with the 
 most drastic differences. To Meryon it is again and 
 again a symbol of mystery and of eerie, even tragic 
 beauty. To a man of the Hght temperament of La- 
 lanne it is an affair of grace and elegance. To Whis- 
 tler it meant a picturesqueness from which now and 
 then a certain romantic glamour might seem insep- 
 arable, but which he sought to express quite unemo- 
 tionally. We know what he could see in the Thames : 
 "The evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry 
 as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves 
 in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become cam- 
 panili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, 
 and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairy- 
 land is before us." But it was as the colorist, as the 
 painter, that he wrote these words. As an etcher it 
 was not fairyland that he saw, whether on the Thames 
 or in Venice, it was simply a world of picturesque 
 buildings and boats, dim arches that held subtle beau- 
 ties of hght and shade, dehcate traceries of stone or 
 metal that made in his plates an effective "pattern." 
 There is poetry in it, the sensuous poetry that appeals 
 solely to the eye. It has none of the deeper impUca- 
 
192 Whistler 
 
 tions of the art produced by a man looking, involun- 
 tarily, beneath the surface. But let us have done 
 with qualifications. In his own sphere of etching 
 Whistler is incomparable. 
 
 Edmond de Goncourt, in that amazing journal 
 which preserves so much of the gossip he and his 
 brother loved, quotes Legros as saying to him, in 
 1882, "Whistler, oui, c'est pas mal . . . c'est de la 
 jolie eau-forte d'amateur!" How, I wonder, could 
 an artist as accomplished as Legros was himself utter 
 a remark like this! If there is one thing more than 
 another which is demonstrated by Whistler's etchings 
 it is that in them he enjoys absolute control of his 
 needle; that here he is a master from whom no se- 
 crets of technique are hid. It is not simply that he 
 is letter-perfect, so to say, that he abides by every 
 canon of the art. It is that from beginning to end 
 his style seems to have been so sinewy, so strong, so 
 wonderfully buoyant. At the outset his line is forcible 
 and clear. It is often deeply bitten, and while he 
 knows well what to omit, he gives one an impression 
 — notably in the Thames set — of objects patiently 
 observed and very carefully noted. In his later Ve- 
 netian studies he skims the copper with a lighter 
 hand, leaves out a great deal more detail, secures the 
 tenderest atmospheric effects, and, in brief, refines 
 his art without losing any strength. All through the 
 long succession of plates he enchants us with his fac- 
 ulty for extorting from his material the loveliest webs 
 
Whistler 193 
 
 of line, the loveliest passages of tone. He is superb 
 in composition, whether he be etching the old tene- 
 ments that line the Thames, with rocking masts and 
 the delicate lines of rigging to break the monotony of 
 their homely fagades, or is commemorating some in- 
 finitely more romantic theme in France or Venice. 
 He is always sufficiently pictorial, no matter what his 
 subject may be, and always conscious of the special 
 quality of the etcher's art, knowing how to adjust 
 his material to it, seeking the lines that will best 
 form an interesting arabesque. His style is unique. 
 No etcher in the past, not Rembrandt or Claude; no 
 one in his own time, not Meryon or Haden, ever saw 
 his subject quite as he saw it, or handled it quite as 
 he handled it. All those masters have qualities which 
 he lacked. We have observed how Rembrandt out- 
 soars him in intellectual and spiritual grasp. Whis- 
 tler could never interpret landscape as Haden has in- 
 terpreted it. But in strength and beauty of line, in 
 brilliance of style, Whistler's etchings form a body of 
 work with which the masterpieces of Rembrandt and 
 Haden are alone worthy to be grouped. I have seen, 
 written by him on a proof of one of Rembrandt's 
 noblest portraits, these words: "Without flaw. 
 Beautiful as a Greek marble or a canvas by Tintoret. 
 A masterpiece in all its elements, beyond which there 
 is nothing." The familiar butterfly affixed to this 
 tribute carried a discomfiting suggestion with it. 
 Could any of the works of art bearing that dainty 
 
194 Whistler 
 
 emblem deserve such heroic praise? Perhaps not. 
 Whistler never rose, like Rembrandt, to the heroic 
 plane. Nevertheless, so far as they go, his etchings 
 are "without flaw." 
 
 In all the years from which they date he was stead- 
 ily painting portraits and pictures. Finding no en- 
 couragement in Paris he soon went to live in London, 
 where he made his home for many years. He could 
 hardly expect to find in Chelsea a more sympathetic 
 environment than he had found in Paris, but too much 
 has been made of what his surroundings may have 
 signified to him in either place. For a painter of his 
 predilections the only things needful were a studio 
 and an occasional patron. He did not paint French 
 life when he was in France. He never thought of 
 painting English life when he came to England, but 
 went on along the lines laid down in those Sym- 
 phonies in White to which I have already referred. 
 Some commentators have been astonished at his inti- 
 macy with Rossetti. It was entirely natural. The 
 fact that they did not paint in the same fashion is 
 beside the question. Where they were absolutely 
 united was in preferring, as artists, a kind of cur- 
 tained existence, in which they could ignore the claims 
 of the schools and the world in general, and make 
 pictures as far removed from the joys and troubles 
 of mere humanity as so many pieces of Oriental por- 
 celain. Rossetti, embracing with enthusiasm the pre- 
 Raphaelite ideal of fidelity to nature, never took the 
 
Whistler 195 
 
 trouble to learn how to paint, so that he might put 
 the truth on canvas with some degree of accuracy. 
 He cared not for the scenes outside his house and 
 garden, but for the scenes in the poets. He dreamed 
 iridescent dreams, and, reflecting them in his work 
 after his own self-willed esoteric fashion, was con- 
 tent. He and Whistler must have been vastly pleased 
 with themselves as they stood aloof from everything 
 that was making the history of their time, and, with 
 scornful chuckles, cultivated each his hidden plot of 
 ground. Whistler was the surer of remaining com- 
 paratively undisturbed in his seclusion because of his 
 rare gift for quarrelling. He was a difficult man 
 to get on with, and the wrecks of friendships were 
 scattered through his career in appalling profusion. 
 It is said that there still survives somewhere a por- 
 trait he painted of the late Mr. Naylor Leyland, 
 after he had decorated the famous Peacock Room 
 in that gentleman's London house, and had parted 
 from him in a rage. In this portrait the mild-man- 
 nered collector is given horns and hoofs, and is trans- 
 formed into a ramping devil. The tale does no in- 
 justice to Whistler, who loved the fray, and, when 
 offended, was capable of taking a stinging revenge. 
 He made himself feared, in short, and, even in the 
 midst of society, that must have helped to create a 
 spiritual loneliness for him. If he suffered any loss 
 thereby he never knew it. Supremely self-centred, 
 he threw himself into his work and exploited his own 
 
196 Whistler 
 
 ideas with an absorption and a conviction of right 
 which we cannot but admire. 
 
 The results of his labors, portraits, marines, and pic- 
 tures like the Fireworks at Cremorne," which proved 
 such a memorable stumbling-block to Mr. Ruskin, 
 were, in general, slow in forthcoming. Was it his early- 
 distaste for rudimentary instruction that left him 
 handicapped, as it were, and caused him to proceed 
 upon a canvas, as a rule, with the greatest delibera- 
 tion? Or was it that the subtlety of tone he was 
 always seeking could not be attained at a stroke? 
 There are stories of the miraculous facility with which 
 he could paint a picture, of the consiunmate skill with 
 which he could brush in a detail, without a moment's 
 hesitation, leaving it perfect. It will be remembered 
 that at the Ruskin trial he testified that he had 
 painted the "Fireworks at Cremorne" in "about a 
 day." The point, he thought, was immaterial, for 
 in asking two hundred guineas for the picture he ar- 
 gued that he was asking to be paid, not for the work 
 of a day, but for "the knowledge of a lifetime." The 
 question, however, of whether he was a rapid or a 
 slow painter, a sure or a hesitating one, is interesting, 
 for it really bears upon the essential character of his 
 art. 
 
 It is not, in respect to technique, with the grand 
 masters that he is to be grouped. One of the traits of 
 those masters is a certain momentum, as of a creative 
 force passing through the world, boldly, majestically, 
 
Whistler 197 
 
 and leaving landmarks in its wake. It is not Rubens 
 alone who suggests this idea of propulsive energy and 
 great weight, or Michael Angelo, or Hals. The serene 
 Velasquez also suggests it. We have all heard a 
 great deal about Whistler's resemblance to the Span- 
 iard, and it is there, but not where the central springs 
 of action, the very divine spark of genius and its free 
 fruitful movements, are concerned. The greatest art, 
 no matter how complex in design it may be, is unmis- 
 takably spontaneous. Whistler's art was not of that 
 highest order; it is more apt to suggest the slow and 
 painstaking building up of an effect. Where you find 
 the resemblance between him and Velasquez is in the 
 gradations that he gets out of blacks and grays and 
 whites; in the simplicity with which he poses a figure 
 against a neutral background; in the texture of his 
 color throughout. We may go further and say that 
 he had a sense of values akin to that of Velasquez 
 himself. But if we keep in mind what Whistler was 
 driving at, and what he actually accomplished, we 
 must admit that a meaning he never intended can 
 easily be read into his much-quoted retort, "Why 
 drag in Velasquez?" For one thing, Velasquez, as 
 Whistler himself pointed out, "made his people Uve 
 within their frames, and stand upon their legs." That 
 was not precisely Whistler's own aim, except in a few 
 rare instances. His figures are not so much human 
 beings, living within their frames and standing upon 
 their legs, as they are lovely apparitions, alluring vi- 
 
198 Whistler 
 
 sions of charming women gliding through some place 
 of dim lights and hovering shadows. The portrait 
 of Lady Meux, known as the "Harmony in Pink and 
 Gray," may or may not be a good portrait. There is 
 no mistaking its beauty as a piece of color, a har- 
 mony really musical in its purity and sweetness. 
 Again, in lower keys, the portrait of Miss Rosa Corder, 
 "Arrangement in Black and Brown, " and the study in 
 the same colors known as "The Fur Jacket," a simi- 
 lar impression of something faint, elusive, and most 
 delicately sensuous is conveyed. There are other 
 portraits which recur to me, particularly La Dame 
 au Brodequin Jaime," and the dainty portrait of Miss 
 Alexander, "Harmony in Gray and Green," a pic- 
 ture of childhood, which has no parallel in modern 
 art save Mr. Sargent's "Little Miss Beatrice Goelet." 
 But I pass over all these studies of blooming feminin- 
 ity; I pass over such delightfully decorative schemes 
 as "The Balcony," "The Music Room," "The Gold 
 Screen," and "The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks," 
 to reach the two most renowned canvases that Whis- 
 tler painted — his portrait of his mother, which now 
 hangs in the Luxembourg, and the portrait of Carlyle 
 in old age, which, in recent years, has been acquired 
 by the Corporation of Glasgow. 
 
 The bulk of his work is charming. The "Portrait 
 of the Artist's Mother" and the "Thomas Carlyle" 
 are much more than that. To realize the differ- 
 ence is to see the unwisdom of being stampeded by 
 
Whistler 199 
 
 a man's fame into accepting everything he does as 
 necessarily a triumph of genius. It is well to acclaim 
 the genius of Whistler. We only darken counsel when 
 we grow hysterical over it. For my own part I be- 
 lieve that his numerous portraits of women, while 
 sure to survive as paintings of great individuality, and 
 of a very delicate beauty, would not carry Whistler's 
 name unquestioned down to posterity if he had not 
 also painted his portrait of his mother, and the Car- 
 lyle." Those rank him with the old masters. The 
 others, if they formed his sole legacy to the galleries 
 of the world, would keep him among the men just 
 below the best. The reason is obvious the moment 
 one puts prejudice aside and looks at things as they 
 are. The mark of the great picture in every epoch 
 has been a mark of organic balance. The painter 
 has realized his conception with absolute felicity. 
 Nothing could be added. Nothing could be taken 
 away. Everything in the picture — composition, 
 drawing, modelling, color, the personality of the sitter, 
 when the picture is a portrait — contributes to one 
 end, and that is a imit of beauty. Can it be said of 
 any of Whistler's portraits of young women that they 
 fulfil these conditions as the portrait of his mother 
 fulfils them ? He may have denied a thousand times 
 our right to interest ourselves in his mother's person- 
 ality. Long after her name and his, perhaps, have 
 vanished from the frame, men will look on this 
 canvas and prize it as the portrait of an individual. 
 
200 Whistler 
 
 It will be the same with the "Carlyle"; characteriza- 
 tion is of immense importance in both works. But it 
 is the rounded perfection of them that I would chiefly 
 emphasize, the noble simplicity with which, in each 
 case, Whistler has given form to his idea. 
 
 The curtain and framed picture which figure in the 
 background of the portrait of his mother, the two 
 pictiu'es and the butterfly introduced for the same 
 decorative purpose in the Carlyle," give us no sense 
 of artificiality, of painfully sought effect, that we feel 
 in looking at so many of what I may designate as 
 his minor achievements. In his two imqualifiedly great 
 paintings he rises to a seriousness which he was only 
 too seldom disposed to cultivate. In them he shows 
 the "noble dignity" which he attributed to Rem- 
 brandt. Survey his work as a figure-painter from 
 beginning to end and it seems as if all his life he were 
 trying for something wholly fine, came near it again 
 and again, but only twice, when he painted the por- 
 traits I have chosen, saw his heart's desire satisfied. 
 I say "his heart's desire" because at bottom he is just 
 as faithful to himself in his pair of masterpieces as 
 in his other paintings. He attempted nothing new. 
 He did violence to none of his cherished theories. 
 The two portraits are as much "arrangements" as 
 anything he ever painted, — only they are more com- 
 pletely successful as such. He is the butterfly here 
 as elsewhere. This, indeed, ought never to be for- 
 gotten, for even when he holds his own among the 
 
Whistler 201 
 
 old masters, it is through his possession of a quality 
 quite different from that to which they, in the main, 
 owe their pre-eminence. He is not strong as they 
 are strong, he has not their conquering might. Some 
 one has defined taste as the feminine of genius, and 
 Whistler is the incarnation of taste. Once, talking 
 with a companion about the energy and skill shown 
 by certain painters conspicuous in modern art, he re- 
 marked, with a gentle deprecating humor that robbed 
 his words of all complacence, that while he admired 
 the men in question, he could not but feel that he had 
 put something into his own work which theirs lacked. 
 He called it distinction, and the epithet is a happy 
 one. Whistler's figure-pieces may not carry us off 
 our feet, but with a quietude and a persuasiveness 
 that, in these days especially, are above rubies, they 
 exert the spell of high distinction. There have been 
 more masculine painters; but none has surpassed 
 him in expressing on canvas the quintessence of re- 
 finement. 
 
 The dangers to which an exemplar of this kind of 
 art is exposed I have emphasized in glancing at Whis- 
 tler's minor portraits, those curiously "precious" pro- 
 ductions that so narrowly escape imreality, because 
 in portraiture an excessively decorative and too ex- 
 quisite method is the more seriously to be questioned. 
 In his Nocturnes, on the other hand, and in his other 
 daring variations on themes provided by scenes out- 
 of-doors, Whistler has far less to fear. In them he is 
 
202 Whistler 
 
 untroubled by any question of form, he is not handi- 
 capped by the necessity of giving even an approxi- 
 mately clear statement of facts. Returning again to 
 his testimony in the suit he brought against Ruskin, 
 we find him admitting, as to the famous Fireworks 
 picture, that "if it were called a view of Cremome, 
 it would certainly bring about nothing but disap- 
 pointment on the part of the beholders." On the same 
 occasion, when his "Nocturne in Blue and Silver" 
 was produced in court, he said, "It represents Bat- 
 tersea Bridge by moonlight," but when Baron Hud- 
 dleston asked him if he would describe the picture as 
 a correct representation of the subject, he replied, 
 "I did not intend it to be a 'correct' portrait of the 
 bridge. It is only a moonlight scene, and the pier in 
 the centre of the picture may not be like the piers 
 at Battersea Bridge as you know them in broad day- 
 light. As to what the picture represents that depends 
 upon who looks at it. To some persons it may rep- 
 resent all that is intended; to others it may represent 
 nothing. . . . My whole scheme was only to bring 
 about a certain harmony of color." With such an 
 ambition it is clearly imnecessary for a painter to 
 give any such place to the truths of nature as was 
 given to them by, for example, the members of the 
 Barbizon school. Nature, in fact, merely provides 
 him with an excuse for the exercise of his virtuosity. 
 Whistler is not the only modern painter represent- 
 ing this principle. Monticelli, in his studies of syl- 
 
Whistler 203 
 
 van glades obscurely peopled with shapes that might 
 be those of fair women or fairer wraiths, invented 
 chromatic splendors which, at their best, are as dis- 
 tinguished in their way as Whistler's elegiac har- 
 monies. Other men of lesser ability have worked in 
 the same vein. The special value of Whistler's Noc- 
 turnes resides in the ravishing beauty of their color, 
 the poetry of their sentiment, and the piquancy of 
 their style. He could, when he chose, paint a spark- 
 ling little water-color of the sea, not only beautiful 
 but true; he could paint a picture like his " Thames in 
 Ice," as realistic as a work of Courbet's. But he was 
 happiest in those paintings, like the "Crepuscule in 
 Flesh Color and Green," "Valparaiso"; or the "Noc- 
 turne, Gray and Gold, — Chelsea, Snow," in which 
 our appreciation of the scene is altogether subsidiary 
 to our enjoyment of the color in which he has envel- 
 oped it. The two pyrotechnical Nocturnes, " The Fire 
 Wheel" and "The Falling Rocket," though not per- 
 haps his finest works in this field, are certainly the 
 most instructive, for in them he carried his theories 
 to their ultimate conclusion, eschewing all tangible 
 facts, and aiming at his effect ahnost as though he 
 had no pictorial intention at all, but were covering a 
 panel with color as an Oriental craftsman powders a 
 box with gold. Painting these Nocturnes and Sym- 
 phonies and Harmonies, he gave to art a new sensa- 
 tion, one in which the more esoteric charm of his 
 genius is extraordinarily beguiling. 
 
204 Whistler 
 
 Incidentally he showed to the world his rare ver- 
 satility. But still he was not satisfied, and having given 
 his measure in painting and etching, he insisted upon 
 being recognized as a writer. He was a witty man, 
 and he wrote like one. Two books stand to his credit. 
 "The Gentle Art of Maldng Enemies," which he pub- 
 lished in 1890, contains his account of the Ruskin 
 trial, his Ten O'Clock lecture, and a quantity of squibs 
 and letters indited in scorn of his critics and other 
 persons who had annoyed him. In "The Baronet 
 and the Butterfly: a Valentine with a Verdict," 
 which dates from 1899, he set forth at considerable 
 length the details of the litigation in which he was 
 involved with Sir William Eden over a portrait he 
 had painted of the baronet's wife. This second book 
 has no serious claim upon the reader. It records an 
 episode in which the artist shone with a good deal 
 less than his accustomed brilliance, and it shows him, 
 to tell the truth, in no very engaging mood. "The 
 Gentle Art of Making Enemies," however, is sure to 
 be preserved, for it contains many of Whistler's ideas 
 on art, and is, to boot, abundantly amusing. The 
 ideas signify, first and last, that the artist is an isolated 
 phenomenon, seeking beauty for its own sake, and 
 quite beyond the understanding of the Philistine, who 
 should merely bow before his work and be thankful 
 for the privilege. The critic, by the way, is always a 
 Philistine. "There never was an artistic period. 
 There never was an Art-loving nation." In all ages 
 
Whistler 205 
 
 the artist has been an unexplainable gift of God to 
 mankind, — though from the way in which Whistler 
 leaves mankind out of the question it might perhaps 
 be more accurate to interpret him as arguing that the 
 artist simply "happens," and is his own sole reason 
 for existing. Art, he says, "is a goddess of dainty 
 thought, — reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusive- 
 ness, pxurposing in no way to better others." Her 
 leading principle in the pursuit of beauty is one of 
 selection. "Nature contains the elements, in color 
 and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains 
 the notes of all music. ... To say to the painter 
 that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the 
 player, that he may sit on the piano." In aphorisms 
 like these Whistler threw light on his own work, and 
 restated elements in the broad philosophy of art 
 which any one might learn from intelligent study of 
 the masters, but which it was well to have expressed 
 as deftly and pungently as he expressed them. The 
 Bible of Art, he once called his book, in half-mocking, 
 half-proud humor. It is not that, but it is unques- 
 tionably a stimulating volume. 
 
 The epigrams it contains, the steel points on which 
 he impaled his enemies, are glittering and sometimes 
 venomous, but though Whistler had a malice all his 
 own, his humor is so delightful that even his victims 
 must have enjoyed many of his thrusts. He had a 
 rare gift for repartee. When he talked of the "shock 
 of surprise that was Balaam's when the first great 
 
2o6 Whistler 
 
 critic proffered his opinion," and a commentator in 
 "Vanity Fair," turning to the Scriptures, gleefully 
 pointed out that "the Ass was right, although, nay, 
 because he was an Ass," it took him but a moment 
 to send this retort: "I find, on searching again, that 
 historically you are right. The fact, doubtless, ex- 
 plains the conviction of the race in their mission, but 
 I fancy you will admit that this is the only Ass on 
 record who ever did 'see the Angel of the Lord!' and 
 that we are past the age of Miracles." In the cata- 
 logue for the exhibition of etchings which he held in 
 London in 1883, he created much mirth by placing 
 under the titles quotations from his critics, and very 
 comical was the result. One of the gentlemen cited, 
 Mr. Frederick Wedmore, complained that he had been 
 misrepresented, that he had been quoted as using the 
 word "understand" when he had really written 
 "understate." Whistler promptly apologized. "My 
 carelessness is culpable," he said, "and the misprint 
 without excuse; for naturally I have all along known, 
 and the typographer should have been duly warned, 
 that with Mr. Wedmore, as with his brethren, it is 
 always a matter of understating, and not at all one 
 of imder standing." How many more instances of his 
 readiness and ruthlessness might be given! The list 
 is endless, for not only is "The Gentle Art of Making 
 Enemies " packed with sharp sayings, but all his life 
 Whistler barbed his words, and hundreds of his witti- 
 cisms have been widely circulated, either in print or 
 
Whistler 207 
 
 in the talk of those who have known him. Naturally 
 his diabolical instinct for the vitriolic phrase has re- 
 acted upon the public estimate of his character as a 
 man, and in many quarters the accepted view is that 
 which Degas is said to have once expressed to his face, 
 that one would hardly suspect from his talk and de- 
 meanor that he was a great artist. 
 
 II 
 
 In one of those brief and biting disquisitions upon 
 which Whistler lavished as much pains as he gave to 
 the painting of a picture, and in which he found as 
 much pleasure as he gave to his readers, he paid his 
 satirical compliments to the critics who could not 
 understand why he called his works "symphonies," 
 "arrangements," "harmonies" and "nocturnes." "l 
 know," he went on, "that many good people think 
 my nomenclature fimny and myself 'eccentric' Yes, 
 'eccentric' is the adjective they find for me." That 
 adjective was foimd for him long before he wrote the 
 words just quoted, which were first published in 1878. 
 He was considered eccentric when he was a young 
 man in the studio of Gleyre, and he was considered so 
 down to the day of his death. Yet the Whistler of 
 fact was not altogether like the Whistler of legend. 
 If he was eccentric and a poseur, if he was fond of 
 talking for effect, and willing, on occasion, to sacri- 
 fice a friend merely for the pleasure of making an 
 
2o8 Whistler 
 
 epigram, there was, at all events, a fine consistency 
 about his character. He never pretended to be any- 
 thing save what he was; he exposed his foibles to the 
 world with the most charming candor, and the war 
 he waged against the Philistines in his youth he waged 
 so long as he Uved. He was a man who conveyed at 
 the outset an unsatisfactory impression, and ended 
 by endearing himseK to you as one of the most delight- 
 ful of human beings — when he did not happen to 
 end by transforming a friend into an enemy. 
 
 The first time I saw him, in his studio in the Rue 
 de Bac, he entered the room at a mincing gait, carry- 
 ing a straw hat in one hand and a bird-cage in the 
 other. As he moved about, talking at the top of his 
 shrill voice, he seemed anything but an embodiment 
 of artistic greatness. Half an hom: later, when he 
 had got rid of the bird-cage and the hat, and had sub- 
 sided into a chair, one's first impression wore off, and 
 in every succeeding encounter with him it receded 
 further and further into obscurity. He has been ac- 
 cused of thinking, and talking, eternally of himself, 
 in season and out of season. Scores of anecdotes 
 commemorate his vanity. In that imfortunate pas- 
 sage which Du Maurier introduced into "Trilby," 
 attacking his old comrade under the name of Joe Sib- 
 ley, he said of Whistler that "he was a monotheist, 
 and had but one god," and continued: "For forty 
 years the cosmopolite Joe has been singing his one 
 god's praises in every tongue he knows and every 
 
Whistler 209 
 
 country — and also his contempt for all rivals to this 
 godhead — whether quite sincerely or not, who can 
 say? Men's motives are so mixed!" But even Du 
 Maurier has to confess, in this selfsame passage (which, 
 by the way, it will be recalled that he had to with- 
 draw), that Whistler did this "so eloquently, so wit- 
 tily, so prettily, that he almost persuades you to be 
 a fellow worshipper." The truth is that Whistler 
 had a way with him that made it impossible for any 
 one who knew him well to resent his vanity. 
 
 Writing to an old friend from Ajaccio, where he 
 had gone early in the winter of 1901 to mend his 
 health, he begged his correspondent not to be sur- 
 prised at his address, adding, "It's all right — 'Na- 
 poleon and I,' you know." During the occupation 
 of Paris by the allied troops, the Duke of Wellington 
 lived in the palace of Napoleon, and in a note to 
 Admiral Malcolm, at St. Helena, he said: "You may 
 teU 'Bony' that I find his apartments at the Elysee 
 Bourbon very convenient, and that I hope he likes 
 mine at Mr. Balcom's. It is a droU sequel enough to 
 the affairs of Europe that we should change places of 
 residence." Could any one with a sense of humor 
 accuse Wellington of being colossally conceited be- 
 cause he liked his little joke? Whistler always liked 
 his little joke. In another letter to the same friend, 
 alluding to some document relating to his own work, 
 he remarks that he should of course be much inter- 
 ested in all that concerned himself. Speaking of a 
 
2IO Whistler 
 
 public oflScial with whom he had had some legal 
 transactions, he explained that he quite imderstood 
 how the person in question had been torn between 
 care of Whistler and care of the state. One could 
 not serve the republic — and Whistler. 
 
 In 1897 some one in Italy sent a circular addressed 
 to him at "The Academy, England." The post-office 
 authorities added "Burlington House," but it was de- 
 clined there, and ultimately the circular reached him 
 indorsed "Not known at the R. A." He promptly 
 sent it to The Daily Mail, saying, "In these days of 
 doubtful frequentation, it is my rare good fortune to 
 be able to send you an unsohcited, official and final 
 certificate of character." As a Kfelong friend of his 
 once said to me: "Whistler must have some excite- 
 ment in his daily hfe, and if he cannot meet with it 
 in the natural course of events he must create it for 
 himself." The observation is just, but, I repeat, one 
 only had to know Whistler in order to put this foible 
 of his in its proper perspective. Things that would 
 have sounded grotesque on the lips of another man 
 seemed somehow inoffensive enough when they came 
 from him. Thus in conversation he resented contra- 
 diction, and was disposed to meet it with a vehe- 
 mence that was alarming, but I have known him to be 
 inimitably amiable afterward, in atonement for his 
 hasty speech. He was a captivating host at dinner, 
 consummate in politeness, and entertaining beyond 
 measure. 
 
Whistler 211 
 
 There was a good deal about Whistler's personal- 
 ity to recall the insolent exquisites of the eighteenth 
 century on both sides of the Channel. He had their 
 capacity for almost brutal cruelty in speech, and he 
 had their deftness and grace of demeanor. While he 
 could inflict a deep wound with a sort of debonair 
 indifference to the sufferings of his victim, no one 
 knew better than he how to observe the punctiho of 
 an occasion — and he did not always require pomp 
 and circiunstance for the exercise of his suavity. He 
 called once at an obscure lodging-house in the Latin 
 Quarter to return the visit of two friends. One of 
 them, a burly Enghshman, had come in only ten 
 minutes before from a long tramp in the rain, and 
 sat in his shirt-sleeves with his feet in a tub of hot 
 water when there was a tap at his door. Thinking 
 it was his comrade from across the landing, he called 
 to him to enter. The door opened and in walked 
 Whistler, to the consternation of his host. Did the 
 great painter smile, or show embarrassment or amuse- 
 ment in any way? He took in the situation at a 
 glance, helped himself to a chair, and in five min- 
 utes, by his charm of manner and his wit, he had 
 driven all sense of annoyance and hiuniliation from 
 the mind of the man he had so inopportunely sur- 
 prised. 
 
 It was amusing to hear Whistler declaiming against 
 the British in the South African War. For our own 
 conflict with the Spaniards he had nothing but ad- 
 
212 Whistler 
 
 miration. I remember his speaking with enthusiasm 
 of the dignity of this coimtry in the entire affair, and 
 especially of the high breeding shown by our officers 
 in their attitude toward the enemy. He was eloquent 
 over our treatment of Admiral Cervera. The occa- 
 sion seemed appropriate and I asked him why he did 
 not come over to visit us, teUing him what a welcome 
 he would be sure to receive. Whistler was always a 
 man of singularly upright carriage, but he seemed to 
 stand more erect than ever as he stopped in the mid- 
 dle of the pavement, and, tapping it with his stick, 
 looked me straight in the face and earnestly declared, 
 "I shall come to America when the duty on works of 
 art is abohshed!" His tight-fitting coat was but- 
 toned around him as he spoke, the tall silk hat, with 
 its straight brim, which he always wore, added to the 
 piquant grimness of his appearance, and as he gave 
 me his terse ultimatum, he seemed a fighter, every 
 inch of him, hurhng defiance at the lawgivers of his 
 native land. 
 
 Du Maurier, anxious to prove that Whistler was 
 an egoist, speaks of the "one god" he worshipped, 
 and adds, "No stodgy old master, this divinity, but 
 a modern of the moderns." The truth is that even 
 in his youth he frequented the old masters with a 
 grave appreciation not to be completely hidden by 
 his merriment and his ardor for all the fantastic ad- 
 ventures of an art student in Paris. "What is not 
 worthy of the Louvre is not art," he has been quoted 
 
Whistler 213 
 
 as saying. We have seen his judgment on a plate 
 of Rembrandt's. He thought that "The Milky Way " 
 of Tmtoretto, in the National Gallery, was the great- 
 est picture in the world. He was not a devotee of 
 Turner, but he yielded to no man in appreciation of 
 certain of the works of that painter. Some of his 
 sa3dngs, though with a grain of truth in them, have 
 immistakably the speciousness of things uttered for 
 effect. One evening in London he stormed pictu- 
 resquely for an hour on what he regarded as the limi- 
 tations of Ingres, whom he persisted in calling a bour- 
 geois Greek. On another occasion, writing a postal 
 card which he was making as decorative as a picture 
 with his dainty penmanship, he paused to tell me 
 what he thought of Aubrey Beardsley. "We-e-U," 
 he drawled, "he strikes me as one of those men stand- 
 ing about ia the market-place because no man hath 
 hired them." He would see nothing, even in the 
 young draughtsman's diaboHcal cleverness, to admire. 
 Later, by the way, he is reported to have reconsid- 
 ered his views about Beardsley; but he was not lavish 
 of praise where his contemporaries were concerned. 
 Though he could say pleasant things about them in 
 a rather vague way, caUing some young painter "a 
 good fellow" and so on, words of explicit admiration 
 he did not promiscuously bestow. The truth is, there 
 was an immense amount of stuff which he saw in the 
 exhibitions which he frankly detested. Yet conver- 
 sation with him did not leave the impression that he 
 
214 Whistler 
 
 was a man grudging of praise. It was rather that 
 a picture had to be exceptionally good to excite his 
 emotions. One point is significant. It was not the 
 flashy and popular painter' that he invited to share 
 in the gatherings for which his Parisian studio was 
 noted, it was the painter like Puvis de Chavannes, 
 the man who had greatness in him. 
 
 His fame as an artist — if not his exact rank — 
 is already fixed, though he liked to keep up the fic- 
 tion that the world was unworthy of him, and there 
 are quaint admirers of his who persist in talking, and 
 writing, as if, after all his efforts, he had made no 
 impression upon his time. He was never popular as 
 Leigh ton or Bouguereau was popular. It was not 
 vmtil late in his career that he received high prices 
 for his pictures. But Whistler is the last artist in 
 the world for us to consider with reference to what 
 ordinarily constitutes popularity. He did not paint 
 for the many; he painted, if ever a man did, for the 
 few; and he never lacked the appreciation which 
 must have been dearer to a man of his stripe than any 
 material benefit. As far back as 1872, when he sent 
 his portrait of his mother to the Royal Academy, and 
 it was threatened with rejection. Sir William Boxall 
 declared that he would withdraw from the council if 
 it were not accepted. He was destined always to 
 have both material and artistic success. Why should 
 we bewail his fate, talking of him as a man who had 
 suffered much? If he had times of privation, so have 
 
Whistler 215 
 
 other great men had them. Others have known what 
 it has meant to have the bailiff at the door. 
 
 On the whole, Whistler's career was a singularly 
 rich and happy one. He did the work he wanted to 
 do, and did it in his own way. He had hosts of friends, 
 — when he lost them it was usually through his own 
 fault; and he did not have long to wait for the ap- 
 proval of his fellow-painters. For a generation his 
 influence has been acknowledged in the studios, and 
 probably no artist of his time has received more fre- 
 quently the sincerest form of flattery. His etchings 
 have long been prized by connoisseurs and assidu- 
 ously collected; the moment it was announced that 
 he had taken up lithography, his sketches in this 
 medium were at once eagerly sought. His paintings 
 found owners reasonably soon enough, as the experi- 
 ence of almost any artist of genius goes, and to-day 
 many of the best of them are where all the world 
 may see them. His two finest portraits hang, as I have 
 noted, in the Luxembourg and in the Public Gallery 
 at Glasgow respectively. The "Duret" and the full- 
 length of "Irving as Philip" are in the Metropolitan 
 Museum in New York; the "Sarasate" is at Pitts- 
 burg; the Boston Museiun of Fine Arts has his 
 "Blacksmith" and one or two other things, and else- 
 where in America numbers of his pictures may be 
 found in public and private galleries. The critics he 
 contemned may in some cases, at the outset, have 
 undervalued him. But there has never been anything 
 
2i6 Whistler 
 
 visible in the public prints even remotely resembling 
 the general ignorance of his art, and the foolish dis- 
 taste for it, which he liked to attribute to the critics, 
 pretending that they were arrayed in a conspiracy of 
 dulness and fatuity against him. He was eulogized 
 everywhere when he died. He had been eulogized 
 for years before the end came. 
 
 He passed from the scene full of years and honors, 
 secure of the applause of his peers and of that of a 
 much larger section of the multitude than, with his 
 strange temperament, it would have suited him to 
 admit. He leaves no school, but that is natural 
 enough. His art is inimitable. He could help greatly 
 to purify the taste of his time, he could give to painters, 
 and to laymen too, some valuable hints on color, and 
 he made the "arrangement" in portraiture popular. 
 But his influence, though wide, as I have said, has 
 been more a corrective than a constructive force. 
 Imitation of him has led to nothing more than — 
 imitation. His is not the kind of art that, imposing 
 itself upon men, starts an evolutionary movement. 
 He meant it to exist in and for itself alone, and so 
 it does, like some rare orchid that has no prototype 
 and can have no successor. 
 
IX 
 
 Sargent 
 
IX 
 SARGENT 
 
 Sargent's princely rank in modem painting was 
 conferred upon him at his birth. In his career, which 
 already has entered into the history of art as some- 
 thing singular and important, every condition has 
 been favorable. All things, from the start, conspired 
 to make him a painter, and even in his student days 
 he possessed the instinctive authority over his brushes 
 which, in an age of technicians, is nevertheless rare. 
 The point means more than is immediately obvi- 
 ous. Scores of modern painters paint so well that in 
 any exhibition, until the self-confessed amateurs are 
 reached, a certain workmanlike standard is taken as 
 a matter of course. But look beneath the surface 
 in any collection of contemporary pictures, and a sur- 
 prising mmaber of celebrated names are found to spell 
 one of two things — mechanism or effort. Sargent's 
 name does not spell either. Bred in the studio of a 
 Parisian of the Parisians, he has never adopted any 
 of the hollow tricks of the Salonnier, who reduces exe- 
 cution to a science, and calls it art; and, paradox- 
 ically, while "the way in which he does it" is a mat- 
 
220 Sargent 
 
 ter of perpetual interest to his critics, he offers in his 
 work the proof of Mr. Whistler's maxim, that "a 
 picture is finished when all trace of the means used 
 to bring about the end has disappeared." 
 
 I am aware of the danger in approaching Sargent 
 in this cheerful mood. For some years he tyran- 
 nized over the Royal Academy in a way well calcu- 
 lated to make a great many excellent mediocrities 
 hate the sight of his productions. It has been a case 
 of Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere. One show in 
 particular at Burlington House — it was, I think, in 
 1900 — I vividly remember. The vast wall space 
 was, as usual, more than well covered. I scrutinized 
 every inch of it with care, and an open mind. Liter- 
 ally, every canvas that had anything profitable to 
 say for itself was a Sargent. His peers have accepted 
 the situation with amiability. But a mild reaction 
 has recently set in, and as Sargent is not able, any 
 more than any other man, to strike twelve every time 
 he paints a picture, he has been terribly taken to 
 task for his failures; divers critics have been finding 
 out that he hasn't really any genius at all, but is 
 simply one more " talent " — of a rather imusual order, 
 to be sure, but still only a talent. For my own part, 
 the shock of one of his failures has always been espe- 
 cially distressing; it has come with a weight in pro- 
 portion to its source. But why in the world it should 
 set any one to a solemn shaking of the head over the 
 painter of the "Carmencita," or the "Miss Beatrice 
 
Sargent 221 
 
 Goelet," or the "Asher Wertheimer," it is difficult 
 to perceive. Most of the jeremiads intoned over 
 him, apropos of an unsuccessful portrait, actually 
 amount to this : that he does not paint like somebody 
 else, like Titian, or Rembrandt, or Gainsborough, or 
 Degas. Better a hundred failures than the one most 
 humiliating of all — the failure to paint like himself. 
 He has been his own inspiration from the outset, 
 a fact doubled in interest when his early environ- 
 ment is considered. He was born in Florence (in ! 
 1856), and I suppose the future historian will accord- 5 
 ingly look for traces of Italian art in his development. 
 They lurk, presumably, in the copies of Venetian por- 
 traits which he is said to have made, and, doubtless, 
 in boyish sketch-books thus far hidden from the pub- 
 lic. Certainly, too, the scenes of his youth must be 
 counted among those favorable conditions to which 
 aUusion has been made above. No one with the ar- 
 tistic temperament could live, at the most impres- 
 sionable of all ages, among the masterpieces of the 
 Southern schools, and not experience a fertilization 
 of his nature, a purification of his taste. But what- 
 soever he may have derived, in the way of stimulus 
 or suggestion, from the linear charm of the Tuscan 
 Primitives, the plastic power of the North Italians, 
 or the sensuous beauty of the Venetians, he has kept 
 to himself. When the time for his apprenticeship ar- 
 rived he gravitated to Paris as naturally and, from all 
 we know to the contrary, as little encumbered with 
 
222 Sargent 
 
 prejudice, as any American leaving New York or Bos- 
 ton for the artistic workshop of the world. He found 
 there the one teacher, as it seems to me, best fitted 
 to his own aptitudes — Carolus-Duran. Not the 
 Carolus-Duran of that specious virtuosity which of 
 late years has glittered in the Salon with the gaudy 
 pride of fashionable vulgarity itself, but the Carolus- 
 Duran of the "Croizette," the "Sabine," and other 
 memorable canvases of the seventies and thereabouts. 
 These were among the first fruits of a reorganized 
 state of affairs, and, it may be remarked in passing, 
 Sargent is inconceivable save as a follower of the 
 new, essentially modem regime. 
 
 It is interesting to consider the situation in Paris 
 as he confronted it on his arrival twenty or twenty- 
 five years ago. By that time the Barbizon painters 
 had begun to reap the rewards of their long struggle 
 with adversity, and impressionism had made some 
 of its most violent incursions into the enemy's coun- 
 try. But the enemy was not by any means to be 
 ejected in a day from his Academic citadel, and, more- 
 over, to the young painter then feeling his way, the 
 official exhibitions presented appeals which it would 
 have required some courage and more stupidity for 
 him to disdain. The truth is that there was a good 
 deal going on in the Paris of Sargent's salad days 
 which did not need a novel label to recommend it. 
 Academic ideals were waning, but not all the Acad- 
 emicians, or all their fellow-believers in the artistic 
 
Sargent 223 
 
 principles handed down by the fathers, were com- 
 mitted to a soulless routine. If Cabanel was paint- 
 ing his correct and cold presentments of the grande 
 dame of his day, Bonnat was modelling, with a kind 
 of brutal energy, portrait after portrait of the states- 
 man, the poet, and the soldier, and making them any- 
 thing but cold. Degas himself, creating a new school, 
 was not immindful of an old one. He emulated, in 
 his independent way, the classicist he adored — In- 
 gres. There appeared in a New York gallery not long 
 ago a souvenir of Degas in this backward-glancing 
 mood of his, a portrait of a woman, which was a little 
 sermon in itself against always looking for the vir- 
 tues of change where change is most manifest. In 
 some of its aspects this painting might pass for a 
 page from the ante-impressionistic era. It has in it 
 the sobriety and the rectitude of Ingres himself, and 
 draws near to the "finish," while it assuredly possesses 
 the solidity, characteristic of many an Academician. 
 The note in the thing, of an aim new at that time, 
 lies altogether in the quality of its execution, in the 
 personal treatment of a scheme entirely impersonal, 
 in beauty of modelling and tone. 
 
 It is the fashion to enhance applause of an inno- 
 vator by contempt of the men he has risen to sup- 
 plant. As a matter of fact there were capable painters 
 before Manet, and contemporary with him, who had 
 no impulse toward his subversive tendencies, and the 
 formation of Sargent's style is the more interesting 
 
224 Sargent 
 
 to observe if we see it going on, not amid the har- 
 monious teachings of a single school, but in a time 
 of many movements and in one of transition into the 
 bargain. The choice of a definite line of action at 
 such a time involves the use of so much the more 
 judgment and individuality. One point it is impor- 
 tant to remember. Sargent, studying under the wing 
 of Carolus-Duran, was in an atmosphere sympathetic 
 to new ideas, but not at all inhospitable to old ones. 
 While he emerged from his master's studio a mod- 
 ern in the best sense of the term, it was with a vein 
 of conservatism in him which has never disappeared. 
 Of how many modern painters, endowed, as he has 
 been, with superabundant technical brilliance, could 
 it be said that they have never exceeded a certain 
 limit of audacity? I know of no canvas of his which 
 could fairly be called sensational.' One of the least 
 conventional of painters, his art nevertheless remains 
 adjusted to the tone and movement of the world in 
 which he lives — surely a fine example of genius ex- 
 pressing its age. Like Degas, in the portrait afore- 
 said, he has poured new wine into an old bottle with- 
 out breaking the bottle. 
 
 Thus far I have taken it for granted that it is of 
 Sargent the portrait-painter we are speaking, yet his 
 predestination to that role, which has since been made 
 unmistakable, is not clear in the opening incidents of 
 his career. He painted portraits, but he painted other 
 more casual things, notably some Spanish and Vene- 
 
Sargent 225 
 
 tian subjects out of which he got all the charm of 
 Southern picturesqueness, without any of its facti- 
 tious and theatrical elements. I say "casual" advi- 
 sedly, for some of the most characteristic of the earlier- 
 works I have in mind are, if not exactly unstudied, at 
 all events chiefly admirable for the spontaneity and 
 almost artless vivacity with which they record im- 
 pressions of things seen. One of them is "A Street 
 in Venice," in which two cloaked idlers watch a girl 
 who passes them, her shawl drawn close about her, 
 her face toward the spectator. "Venetian Bead 
 Stringers," which dates apparently from the same 
 period, is a shadowy interior with three figures. It 
 is a long time since I have seen either of these paint- 
 ings, but I retain as clearly as though I had seen them 
 yesterday, a sense of the vitality in them; of their 
 charm as of motives taken from common life and 
 lifted at once out of the commonplace. The figures 
 are so effectively placed, the light and shade playing 
 about them are so skilfully directed, the touch is so 
 fresh and So sure. Here is, in short, what Sargent, 
 as the painter of such subjects, always gives us — a 
 sane and winning naturalism. 
 
 Sometimes it has taken a delicately romantic tone. 
 In a volume of "Spanish and Italian Folk-Songs," 
 published by Miss Alma Strettell in 1887, six of the 
 twelve illustrations are by Sargent. The frontispiece 
 is a sketch of a gypsy dance, with figures thrust forth 
 from, or almost buried in, mysterious gloom. One 
 
226 Sargent 
 
 of the plates in the body of the book is of a quaint 
 image of the Madonna such as Southern peasants 
 worship. In a second a woman draws back in ter- 
 ror from the mystic message of the cards whose power 
 she has invoked; in a third a dancer, with superb ges- 
 ture, is drawn with wonderful feeling for rhythmic 
 motion; the next subject is a dainty garden scene, 
 and the last is a Crucifixion. In all the drawings there 
 is an emotion not of the surface, a hint that the painter 
 has caught the strain of macabre poetry in his material. 
 But even in these one cannot but feel that his salient 
 faculty is that of the artist who labors most fruitfully 
 "with his eye on the object," not with his imagina- 
 tion hovering around its inner secrets. How secure 
 he has ever been from drifting, through this purely 
 .visual preoccupation, into the cruder naturalism of 
 the French school — the influence of which was in 
 the air in his younger days — is shown, even more 
 than in these fugitive smaller essays, by_the large 
 picture of a Spanish dance^"El Jaleo," which he sent 
 to the Salon of 1882 and which was for some years 
 lent to the Fine Arts Museum of Boston by the gen- 
 tleman in that city to whom it belongs. 
 
 I can imagine Sargent contemplating an inroad 
 upon the Salon, remembering the conditions imposed 
 by that storm-tossed arena upon the contributor who 
 does not want to be swamped, and speciolating as to 
 whether this painting of his, in subject, scale, and 
 treatment, would "do." Decidedly it would do. 
 
Sargent 227 
 
 "El Jaleo" is the kind of picture that woxild hold its 
 own amid a host of machines. But I cannot imagine 
 Sargent allowing anything of the machine to creep 
 into it. He must know the language of the Parisian 
 studios, but he does not speak it in his work. Per- 
 haps it is his Florentine upbringing, steadying his 
 taste; perhaps it is his effortless originality. What- 
 ever the safeguard, he is as free from the cliche — 
 and from vulgarity — in "El Jaleo" as he is, say, in 
 his portrait of "Miss Beatrice Goelet," a painting in 
 which the innocent sweetness of childhood unfolds 
 itself like a flower. "El Jaleo," though it was in the 
 Salon, was not of it. Like the Venetian studies just 
 cited, it is a piece of naturalistic painting; every in- 
 gredient of visible passion, grace, and Spanish glamour 
 which belongs to the famous dance, as I have seen it 
 again and again in Seville and Madrid, is reflected as 
 in a mirror; but there is no tincture of the photo- 
 graph there. Merely as a realistic record of facts this 
 makes the numerous studies of the same theme which 
 have passed through the Salon, look forced and 
 garish, its realism being of the higher order. Put its 
 veracity aside and you still have what is, after all, 
 the thing most worth having in the circumstances, — 
 a beautiful work of art, beautiful in its rich darks, its 
 luminous yet restrained yellows, its grouping of some 
 eight or ten figures in a design which seems simplicity 
 itself — until you take the trouble to analyze the 
 balance of its movement, and the subtle co-ordination 
 
228 Sargent 
 
 of its values. What holds one, moreover, in this pro- 
 duction of a young man still in his twenties, is its 
 astonishing aplomb; the ease and keen unhackneyed 
 "attack" with which the thing is done, proclaim a 
 painter who has "arrived" and with whom modern 
 art will henceforth have to reckon. It has been reck- 
 oning with him ever since, now breathless with admi- 
 ration, now full of impatience and indignation over 
 some ill-considered piece of work, but never indifferent. 
 One way of emphasizing this point is to face the 
 fact that for years Sargent sent scarcely anything save 
 portraits to the exhibitions. A great portrait is one 
 of the greatest things in the world, but it is not, to-day, 
 the portrait-painter of whom one would ordinarily 
 hear most. The subject-picture has a way of taking 
 the centre of the stage, and for years after "El Jaleo" 
 was painted, Sargent did nothing save the charming 
 "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," to follow up the suc- 
 cess of that work. His decorations for the Boston 
 Public Library occupy a place apart in his activity, 
 and form in no sense a sequence to his early triumph. 
 Possibly we have lost by his abstention, though it 
 may be that he gives us all that it is really delightful 
 to have, outside of his portraiture, in such studies 
 and sketches as those with which he amuses himself 
 when on his travels, and in the intervals of painting 
 portraits at home. At any rate, a good portrait by 
 him has an interest quite as potent as that of a sub- 
 ject-picture. This, which is so true of him to-day, has 
 
Sargent 229 
 
 never been truer than it was when he was only near- 
 ing the threshold of his present extraordinary vogue. 
 I might cite in evidence that noted portrait which he 
 painted, in 1879, of his master, in worthy requital of 
 all that Carolus-Duran had done in teaching him the 
 rudiments of his profession. But an apter illustra- 
 tion is provided by the full-length he made of a famous 
 Parisian beauty, Madame Gautreau. That inspiring 
 personality we may see also in a brilliant half-length 
 by Courtois, and it is most instructive to compare the 
 two. The Frenchman's work is a polished piece of 
 draughtsmanship. He has handled his motive some- 
 what in the vein of an old Florentine or Milanese 
 profile, and has achieved a pure distinction in the 
 contour, a delicacy in the tone, by virtue of which 
 he has carried the panel through one exhibition after 
 another, undiminished in its prestige. Sargent's 
 much larger portrait, which he sent to the Salon two 
 years after "El Jaleo," is inferior to it^in linear aus- 
 terity, and in atmosphere,as of something sculptur- 
 esque and fragile. But in everything else it is a much 
 more striking performance. I need not pause upon 
 the technique, save to note that it has a good deal of 
 the characteristic Sargent effulgence, and an elastic- 
 ity and breadth to which Courtois could lay no claim. 
 What is important is the conception, which is as mod- 
 ern and personal as the other is neo-Italian and aca- 
 demic; and in addition there is the masterful accent 
 of the man born to paint portraits, born to draw from 
 
230 Sargent 
 
 each of his sitters the one unforgettable and vital 
 impression which is waiting for the artist. 
 
 People complain that Sargent violates the secret 
 recesses of human vanity, and brings hidden, because 
 unlovely, traits out into the light of day; that his 
 candor with the brush is startling, to say the least, 
 and sometimes even perilous. He is accused not 
 simply of painting his sitter, "wart and all," but of 
 exaggerating the physical or moral disfigurement. If 
 this is true there is something humorous in the spec- 
 tacle, which is constantly being presented, of men 
 and women running the risk. But the risk is not so 
 great as it seems. Take the portrait of Madame 
 Gautreau. It is no encroachment upon the privacy 
 of that lady to consider both portraits of her with 
 brief reference to their original, and to observe that 
 while Courtois gives us an enchanting variation on 
 his theme, Sargent's canvas vibrates with the exqui- 
 site quality of the theme itself, in all its integrity. 
 
 Xh at is h is great ^ift. He does not betray Jiis sitter 
 
 He takes his or her essential traits and makes them 
 the stuff of a kind of pictorial demonstration, inter- 
 esting us in them profoundly. Few of his sitters 
 seem, as we see them on the canvas, to have been 
 passive in his hands. The electric currents of a duel 
 are in the air. Character has thrown down its chal- 
 lenge, the painter has taken it up, and the result is 
 a work in which character is fused with design, playing 
 its part in the artistic unit as powerfully, and almost 
 
Sargent 23 i 
 
 as vividly, as any one of the tangible facts of the por- 
 trait. Where Madame Gautreau has received a hap- 
 pier commemoration at Sargent's hands than at those 
 of Courtois, has been in the greater extent to which 
 the American has allowed her to co-operate, as it 
 were, with him. Her style, her atmosphere, the last, 
 most evanescent perfume of her individuality, help 
 enormously to make this portrait appealing not simply 
 as a portrait, but as a painting. I cannot see in this 
 any of the "risk" to which I have just referred. 
 Complaint is apt to come, I fear, from those who 
 cannot imderstand that the business of the portrait- 
 painter is to tell the truth. That the truth happens 
 to strike Sargent as a factor in portraiture of no less 
 constructive importance than form or color is simply 
 one of the proofs of his adequacy. 
 
 There is a good story of the late Coventry Pat- 
 more and the portrait of him by Sargent which now 
 hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Mr. Basil 
 Champneys, in his biography of the poet, relates that 
 when the work was finished and he went down to 
 L3anington to see what the original declared to be 
 "the best portrait which Sargent, or probably any 
 other painter, had ever painted," it struck him as 
 inclining toward caricature. Patmore asked for his 
 opinion. "I told him," says Mr. Champneys, "that 
 if the picture had been extended downwards there 
 must have appeared the handle of a whip, and that 
 he woiild then have been fully revealed as a sort of 
 
232 Sargent 
 
 Southern planter on the point of thrashing his slaves 
 and exclaiming, 'You damned niggers!'" Patmore 
 was pleased. "He always delighted in any tribute 
 to his grasp of active life, and prided himself on his 
 power of dealing blows to the adversary." Sargent 
 had missed the aspect of "seer," which in later years 
 had alone seemed to Mr. Champneys characteristic 
 of his friend. Is posterity the loser? Will it receive 
 a false impression of Patmore? I doubt it. 
 
 In the light of the long procession of portraits which 
 he has put to his credit, it seems to me that if there is 
 a living painter in whose interpretations of character 
 confidence can be placed, it is Sargent. His rang e is 
 apparently_iuilimited. He has painted Carmencita 
 in all the pomp and insolence of her mimdane beauty; 
 and not only in the "Miss Beatrice Goelet," but in 
 the "Hon. Laura Lister," the "Homer St. Gaudens," 
 the "Master Goodrich," and "The Boit Children," 
 he has treated adolescence with the most searching 
 understanding. He has painted men and women in 
 their prime and in their old age, and in whatever 
 walk of life he has found them, he has apprehended 
 them with the "seeing eye" that is half the battle. 
 Actors, actresses, lawyers, architects, soldiers, painters, 
 statesmen, poets, noblemen, commoners, men of af- 
 fairs, and nobodies, all these has he painted and 
 painted well, and, besides, he has portrayed the 
 woman of fashion, in her infinite variety, with in- 
 comparable elegance and penetration. 
 
Sargent 233 
 
 When the historic representative exhibition of his 
 works was given in Boston some years ago, I remem- 
 ber with what human interest the hall seemed filled. 
 It was as though one were witnessing a great levee 
 or other ceremonial, crowded with beautiful and dis- 
 tinguished personalities, and murmurous with living 
 voices. Nowhere in that assemblage did the note 
 seem forced. It was an irresistible play upon words 
 in which Mr. Whistler indulged when he looked at 
 the "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," and said, "Darna- 
 tion Silly, SUly Pose," but it was not criticism. It is 
 worth noticing that it is not in his portraits of men, but 
 in his portraits of women, who illustrate far more his- 
 trionically the nervous tension of the age, that Sargent 
 has painted his most unconventional compositions. 
 And when his subject has permitted him to exchange 
 nervousness for repose, with what felicity he has seized 
 his opportunity! There is not in modern portraiture 
 a more satisfactory study in dignity and noble state- 
 liness than his "Mrs. Marquand." On the other 
 hand, the quality which is so well expressed in this 
 canvas, while evidently accessible to Sargent when 
 he is painting a single figure, escapes him on some 
 other occasions when his task is more complicated. 
 He could repeat the quiet pose of the "Mrs. Mar- 
 quand" in his portrait of Lady Agnew, one of the 
 most refined works he has ever painted, but in his 
 group portraits, where poise is most needed, it is 
 markedly absent — save in one monumental instance, 
 
234 Sargent 
 
 to be traversed below. Sometimes it hardly matters. 
 The "Mrs. Carl Meyer and Children," for example, 
 is so captivating in its Gallic lightness of feeling, 
 so dazzling in its technique, that it were futile to 
 quarrel with its composition — an application to por- 
 traiture of the principle of spontaneity which we have 
 seen in action in his early Venetian sketches. "The 
 Misses Vickers," which was painted in the middle 
 eighties, some ten or twelve years before the "Mrs. 
 Carl Meyer," also justifies itself through the sheer 
 charm of the effect which the painter has secured from 
 his lawless arrangement of forms. But what of "The 
 Three Graces," as by common consent it was called, 
 the big canvas (representing Lady Elcho, Mrs. Ten- 
 nant, and Mrs. Adeane, the daughters of Mrs. Wynd- 
 ham) which created a furore in the Academy? The 
 uneasy balance of the thing was, in my opinion, only 
 thrown into clearer relief by the presence of Watts's 
 portrait of Mrs. Wyndham in the background, where 
 Sargent had dimly indicated that fine souvenir of 
 a modern exemplar of the grand manner. What of 
 the other large group which he executed later, "The 
 Misses Hunter"? 
 
 They are interesting paintings. Sargent could not 
 be dull if he tried. But they do not seem, like his 
 single portraits, or even like one of his double por- 
 traits, "The Daughters of Asher Wertheimer," to be 
 — there is no other word — inevitable. There is 
 work in them finer than anything any of his contem- 
 
Sargent 235 
 
 poraries could do — and there is the sense of artifice 
 and effort, of lines teased into relations to one an- 
 other which, when he is himself, Sargent never dis- 
 closes. The trouble, I take it, is that he is groping 
 through the intricacies of a formula, a thing foreign 
 to his genius, and, what is more, foreign to his time. 
 The only artists who have ever succeeded in doing 
 the sort of thing Sargent has latterly been trying to 
 do in these groups of his, have been painters like 
 Mignard, Rigaud, Largilliere, and the rest, in France, 
 or like Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, and their school in 
 England — men who have been born to a tradition 
 half social and half artistic, and have therefore moved 
 within its boundaries with unconscious ease. In his 
 endeavor to reconcile the mode of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury with the spirit of the twentieth, Sargent has 
 "gone against nature," and, for once, his consum- 
 mate ability has been set at naught. In other words, 
 in these groups he is not himself; and in being him- 
 self, as cannot be too often reiterated, resides a great 
 part of his strength. 
 
 He is himself in his reading of character, in his 
 design, and in his style. To say this is not to forget 
 his indebtedness, where style is concerned, to other 
 painters, even to Carolus-Duran. I think there is 
 something of Carolus-Duran in his mere cleverness, 
 which, like so much that is fluent and self-possessed 
 in modern craftsmanship, could have been developed 
 in Paris and nowhere else. The broad, slashing 
 
236 Sargent 
 
 stroke of Hals has taught him something, it is fair 
 ,jto assume, and the influence of Velasquez in his 
 work is sufl&dently obvious. Yet there is not in 
 ;all his painting the ghost of what it would be 
 I reasonable to call an imitative passage. The rapid- 
 ity and bravura of Hals he recalls often enough, 
 but never the Dutchman's blunt simplicity. The 
 temperament of the racy old master and that of the 
 cosmopolitan modern are poles apart. He revives 
 sometimes, in terms of brushwork, the tradition of 
 Velasquez, but it is not by brushwork alone that style 
 is made; with the painter of "Las Meninas" and "Las 
 Hilanderas," color is peculiarly important, and be- 
 tween color as he understood it, and Sargent's color, 
 there is no connecting link. One is all limpidity and 
 sober charm, even when it is in its higher keys. The 
 other is sharp, vibrating, and, though always in good 
 taste, never deep or tender. To see the point in a 
 nutshell, compare the plangent brilliance of the cos- 
 tume in the portrait of Carmencita with the melting, 
 bloomlike beauty of a dress worn by one of the In- 
 fantas of the Prado. The clear titnire of the older 
 colorists, resonant and haunting, has always struck 
 me as lying outside the scope of Sargent's art, if not, 
 perhaps, incompatible with so militant and pyrotech- 
 nical a phenomenon. The differences between him 
 and his illustrious predecessors go to the very root 
 of the matter. He is no more a modern Hals or 
 Velasquez than he is a modern Rembrandt or Botti- 
 
Sargent 237 
 
 celli, for he looks at life and art from a totally 
 different point of view; not simply, or grandly, or 
 tragically, or imaginatively, but with the detached, 
 intellectual curiosity of a man of the world. He paints 
 with a dexterity that is of the same modem, eclectic, 
 and yet intensely individualized origin as his mental 
 attitude. Of course he has profited by the great/ 
 exemplars of technique. As a great technician hel 
 could not have done anything else. 
 
 He has his place in the hierarchy, and it is the 
 place of a portrait-painter, for aU that his pictures 
 have such rare merit. To the latter he has given, of 
 late, a large proportion of his energy, being weary, 
 it is said, of portraiture. In the museums of Boston 
 and Brooklyn there are large collections of his water- 
 colors, showing with what maestria he has employed 
 one of the lightest and most difficult of mediums; 
 and it is common nowadays, too, for him to produce 
 in oils such overwhelmingly brilliant paintings as the 
 forest study called "The Hermit" in the Metropoli- 
 tan Museum. His authority, indeed, in almost any 
 field, would seem beyond cavil. Let him paint such 
 an interior with figures as his "Diploma" picture at 
 Burlington House — the grand sala of the Palazzo 
 Barbaro in Venice — let him sketch a tangle of Vene- 
 tian boats against an architectural background, or a 
 gleaming marble quarry, or a scene in the Holy Land, 
 or a Scotch salmon stream, or the courtyard of an 
 old Spanish tavern, and so on through an interminable 
 
238 Sargent 
 
 list of subjects, and he is always uncannily compe- 
 tent, interesting to the point of being fairly exciting. 
 And yet I doubt if any of these achievements will 
 lessen the predominating significance in his career of 
 that little cosmos which is composed of his portraits. 
 What a varied world it is, ranging from that early 
 profile of a girl of Capri which, by the way, is one 
 of the finest things he ever did, to the great canvas 
 of "The Four Doctors," presented to Johns Hopkins 
 University in 1907. I have already alluded to that 
 as the moniunental exception to Sargent's compara- 
 tive incertitude in the painting of group portraits. 
 He put the masterpiece together with impressive 
 knowledge. The grouping of the figures, which is so 
 natural, is also so wisely managed that it makes an 
 interesting picture. Consider the way in which the 
 heads and hands are treated, how simply, how accu- 
 rately, with what grasp of anatomical structure. Con- 
 sider the quality of the color. Black is one of the 
 hardest colors in the world to use in a painting, for 
 it may so easily be left merely black, and dull, but 
 Sargent, using a great deal of it, rises above himself 
 as a colorist, and, for once, gives us many modula- 
 tions of tone, which are nowhere opaque, but every- 
 where have a semi-transparent vitality. And consider 
 the style, how the brushwork shows, on every inch of 
 the canvas, a kind of energy and strength, a quality, 
 too, that is new and fresh, individual, as much Sar- 
 gent's own as is his signature. It is a great portrait 
 
Sargent 239 
 
 because of its sound workmanship and the stamp of 
 originality that is upon it; and there is another rea- 
 son for calling it a great portrait, one linking it with 
 the great portraits of the past and at the same time 
 bringing us back to the actuality, the modernity, the 
 sense of character, which I have already indicated as 
 being so important in his art. 
 
 There hangs in the public gallery of The Hague in 
 Holland one of the world's renowned pictures, Rem- 
 brandt's "The Lesson in Anatomy." Why is it that 
 that painting is so famous? Partly because it is a good 
 piece of workmanship, partly because of the strength 
 of Rembrandt's style. But is it not also because those 
 old doctors, leaning over toward the corpse in the 
 foregroimd, and listening so eagerly to the words 
 that we can almost hear as they fall from the lips of 
 Dr. Tulp, are human beings, individuals who look at 
 us across the gvdf of time as though they lived and 
 breathed? Those seventeenth-century figures are 
 men like ourselves and we greet them with sym- 
 pathy. It is because Sargent has done in this paint- 
 ing what Rembrandt did in his that it is a great por- 
 trait. It is a great portrait because, through the 
 magic of Sargent's brush, future generations will look 
 at the doctors in this painting, and greet them with 
 sympathy. I caimot but feel that the painter exer- 
 cised there a function higher than that whose action 
 is to be discerned in other works of his, no matter 
 how masterly, in other domains of art. The decora- 
 
240 Sargent 
 
 tions in the Boston Public Library, some of them in 
 place long since and the rest now the object of his 
 keenest solicitude, can but serve, in my opinion, to 
 confirm this hypothesis. The new paintings when 
 they appear may invite new reflections, but it seems 
 incredible that they should utterly transcend the old 
 ones. These represent a high ambition, they fill given 
 spaces with imposing ideas eloquently expressed; but 
 as decorations, in the strict sense, they want the vuiity 
 which elsewhere Sargent so easily achieves. Some of 
 the strongest elements in them are elements of por- 
 traiture — powerful characterization and bold, simple 
 handling of forms in the now celebrated frieze of 
 Prophets, and certain specific embodiments, like the 
 Astarte or the Moloch, in the upper sections of the 
 scheme at either end of the hall. 
 
 It is, then, as a portrait-painter that he stands head 
 and shoulders above all his contemporaries, even his 
 failures possessing an interest denied to many a clever 
 artist's successes. Those failures he would probably 
 be the first to acknowledge and deplore, and I dare 
 say that they have been due to want of sympathy 
 more than to anything else. In the Boston exhibi- 
 tion I have mentioned there were fifteen or twenty 
 portraits executed during a visit paid to this coun- 
 try not long before. The good works and the bad 
 ones in the lot were clearly those which had been 
 done with enthusiasm and those which were perfunc- 
 tory. If he had failed to wreak himself to good pur- 
 
Sargent 241 
 
 pose upon some of his subjects it was because they 
 had given him no such inspiration as that by which 
 he was moved when he painted, for example, the 
 large portrait of Colonel Higginson for the Harvard 
 Union. To the making of that he had brought warm 
 feeling, and he lifted it to an almost heroic plane. 
 When he paints pot-boilers he is lost. Not his most 
 elaborate portrait of a gorgeous personage, set in the 
 most luxurious surroundings, has, if he has put noth- 
 ing but mere workmanship into it, anything like the 
 interest which attaches to some such a sincere frag- 
 ment as his sketch of the painter Helleu, working in 
 the open air. His pencil portraits are uneven. They 
 are only worthy of him when they reveal that caress- 
 ing instinct for delicacy of linear effect which a long 
 time ago he showed to such beguiling purpose in 
 the sketch he painted of the wax bust at Lille at- 
 tributed to Raphael. Yet in recalling the great mass 
 of Sargent's work, I have been impressed by the 
 comparative scarcity of portraits to which the word 
 failure might in justice be applied — and by the dis- 
 position, moreover, of most of his successes to not 
 merely fill the moment with their eclat, but to "wear 
 well." Fortunate is the generation that is privileged 
 to be painted by him! 
 
 The individual, I may add, is doubly fortunate in 
 the experience, for to sit to Sargent is to receive pre- 
 cious light on the subject of the painter's art. Though 
 I have no first-hand information on the point I can 
 
242 Sargent 
 
 nevertheless append here some authentic notes upon 
 it. When the painting of "The Four Doctors" was 
 unveiled at Johns Hopkins I had the privilege of 
 speaking there on the art that had produced it and 
 in the course of the evening I heard some remarks 
 from one of the men in the group which struck me as 
 of high value to the student. Dr. William H. Welch 
 described his meetings with Sargent and what went 
 on in the studio as he came back again and again 
 to pose, and to me, as a critic, what he said gave 
 precisely the little personal touches which help the 
 historian to elucidate the manner in which a great 
 portrait is made. I endeavored at the time to sum- 
 marize the Doctor's words and with his permission I 
 repeat their substance here. 
 
 •' His sketch of Sargent's personality was wonder- 
 fully true and vivid. He spoke of the painter as a 
 tall, strong, altogether virile type; very agreeable to 
 meet; a widely cultivated man, able to talk well on 
 any subject that might be brought up. For example, 
 Dr. Welch pointed out that the book he is supposed 
 to be reading in the portrait is a seventeenth-century 
 edition of Petrarch. He had alluded to a line in the 
 writings of the poet, whereupon Sargent had brought 
 out the volimie, and had proceeded to talk in the 
 most interesting manner about Petrarch and the 
 Renaissance in general. He more than once tried 
 to draw Sargent out on the subject of art, and al- 
 ways with suggestive results. Hals and Velasquez 
 
Sargent 243 
 
 were evidently the painter's most cherished masters. 
 He talked so inspiringly about Hals, when Dr. Welch 
 told him he had been looking at "The Laughing 
 Cavalier," in the Wallace Collection, that, as soon as 
 the Doctor was free to do so, that summer, he trav- 
 elled to Haarlem to see the Dutch painter's great 
 corporation groups there. He recalled a saying of 
 Sargent's about Gainsborough — that having painted 
 a thing he left it finished or unfinished, for good or 
 ill, and did not try coldly to work it over and make 
 it academically satisfactory after the fashion of Reyn- 
 olds. It was impossible to listen to Dr. Welch with- 
 out being made to realize the genuineness and attract- 
 iveness of Sargent's character and personahty. 
 
 Speaking of the making of the portrait. Dr. Welch 
 described Sargent as grouping his four sitters, over 
 and over again, before he was satisfied. Sometimes 
 he requested two of the doctors to stand, and then 
 only one of them. He changed their positions, con- 
 stantly. Before he began to paint, however, he 
 settled upon the grouping that is shown in the com- 
 pleted portrait, and this, as Dr. Welch said, disposes 
 of the assertion made by some critics that the com- 
 position had taken its form by accident and as the 
 work proceeded. Dr. Welch also noted that the en- 
 largement of the canvas by a piece joined at the side 
 and another at the top was not unforeseen, but was 
 mentioned by Sargent at the outset as a thing he 
 expected to have done. The grouping, then, and the 
 
244 Sargent 
 
 scale of the portrait were fixed by the artist when he 
 began, and so the sitters went on to do their part. 
 They were sometimes all together in the studio, but 
 not often. Sometimes three of them sat, sometimes 
 two of them, but more often each doctor was posed 
 by himself. Dr. Welch's head was painted practically 
 in one sitting. He was struck by Sargent's unobtru- 
 sive way of studying him; he never felt that he was 
 being closely scrutinized. Sargent talked constantly 
 while he was at work, smoked innumerable cigarettes, 
 and was always walking to and fro. When Dr. Welch 
 asked him about this exercise, he said laughingly that 
 he had once estimated that he walked about four 
 miles a day in his studio. Though Dr. Welch's head 
 was painted so quickly, the painter was not equally 
 swift in his treatment of all the other sitters. Dr. 
 Osier, especially, had to give sitting after sitting. 
 
 The work went forward, on the whole, with great 
 smoothness. There were some difficulties, as when 
 the portrait of Dr. Osier struck them all as a failure 
 and Sargent painted it out and did it all over again. 
 But then everything seemed to move swimmingly. 
 Just at this time Sargent himself suddenly grew dis- 
 couraged. He paused one day, and knitting his brow, 
 and lifting his hand with a gesture of bewilderment, 
 he said: "It won't do. It isn't a picture. I cannot 
 see just what to do, but it isn't a picture." He stood 
 for a little while thinking it over, and presently the 
 clouds seemed to pass. He asked if there would be 
 
Sargent 245 
 
 anything incongruous about the introduction of a 
 large, old Venetian globe into the background. It 
 was in his other studio, he said, and he would have 
 it brought around if it were permissible. Of course 
 it was; and a day or two after, the globe was there. 
 It was so large that he had to have the doorway 
 chopped to get it into the room. (That was very 
 like Sargent; he would have had an entire wall re- 
 moved if it had been necessary in making the por- 
 trait a perfect work of art.) When they sat again 
 with the globe in the background, Sargent studied 
 the group with anxious interest, and then, in a swift 
 stroke, drew the silhouette of the object on the can- 
 vas. "We have got our picture," he said, and the 
 portrait as it stands shows with what unerring in- 
 stinct he had thought of the one thing fitted to serve 
 his purpose. 
 
 Dr. Welch had some very interesting things to say 
 about the color scheme. He asked "Sargent if he 
 could wear his Yale robe, and the painter immedi- 
 ately acquiesced; but when Dr. Osier spoke of wear- 
 ing his red Oxford robe, Sargent himiorously forbade 
 it, saying: "No, I can't paint you in that. It won't 
 do. I know all about that red. You know they gave 
 me a degree down there, and I've got one of those 
 robes." Musingly, he went on. "I've left it on the 
 roof in the rain. I've buried it in the garden. It's 
 no use. The red is as red as ever. The stuff is too 
 good. It won't fade. Now, if you could get a Dub- 
 
246 Sargent 
 
 lin degree? The red robes there are made of differ- 
 ent stuff, and if you wash them they come down to 
 a beautiful pink. Do you think you could get a 
 Dublin degree? — No, I couldn't paint you in that 
 Oxford red! Why, do you know they say that the 
 women who work on the red coats worn by the 
 British soldiers have all sorts of trouble with their 
 eyes," etc., etc. 
 
X 
 
 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 I. 
 
 The Prado 
 
 II. 
 
 The Prado Revisited 
 
 III. 
 
 Velasquez at the Hispanic Museum 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Rokeby Venus 
 
 V. 
 
 El Greco and Goya 
 
 VI. 
 
 Four Modern Spaniards : 
 
 
 Fortuny 
 
 
 SoroUa 
 
 
 Zuloaga 
 
 
 Vierge 
 
X 
 
 SPANISH ART IN SPAIN AND 
 ELSEWHERE 
 
 THE PRADO 
 
 There is a kind of artistic mastery so rare that the 
 great painters of the past to whom it belongs form a 
 small group apart, and even among those few there 
 are fewer who have the gift untrammelled. By that 
 gift is meant a control over the instrimients of ex- 
 pression so absolute and so effortless that there seems 
 to intervene between the conception of a design 
 and its execution no more hesitancy than will be 
 observed between the impulse of a bird to soar and 
 its pause at the apex of its flight. Such mastery con- 
 veys the impression of an almost musical sequence 
 in the evolution of a picture. In Velasquez it is 
 found developed with positively classic symmetry. 
 In his work the science of the composer, the instinct 
 of the colorist, the intellectual and emotional inten- 
 tion of an observant thinker, and the imperturbable 
 refinement of a man of taste, seem to have travelled 
 
 249 
 
250 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 on simultaneously and in perfect harmony to the at- 
 tainment of a common end. It is this more than any- 
 thing else that makes him the most powerful artistic 
 magnet south of the Pyrenees, if not the most elo- 
 quent oracle in Europe for whoever wishes to know 
 the law of art as dictated, not by the dreamer, the 
 poet, the dramatist, the moralist, but pre-eminently 
 by the painter. It is this that makes the Prado a 
 shrine. 
 
 Just how much of the potency of Madrid as an 
 artistic Mecca is dependent upon works other than 
 those of Velasquez it is necessary to state with some 
 care. The city is one of the minor capitals of Europe 
 architecturally, and the enviroimient provided by na- 
 ture for such monimients as it possesses is none of the 
 best. The surrounding landscape is monotonous and 
 bare. The few parks are pretty in themselves, and 
 the famous promenade known as the Prado is broad 
 and pretentious; but these attractions are insufficient 
 to counterbalance the shabbiness of dusty, ill-kept 
 streets, and dwellings in a dull, nondescript style. 
 Life in Madrid is rendered diverting upon occasions 
 of public rejoicing by the presence of the court, other- 
 wise it is the same as in other large modern cities, 
 hke New York or London, only not so bright. The 
 bull-ring alone may claim to be better managed in 
 Madrid than anywhere else. This and the ball game 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 251 
 
 called peloia, which was brought recently from the 
 Basque provinces, are the only important national 
 spectacles, or old and picturesque institutions, which 
 survive in the centre of Spanish political life. 
 
 There is little in Madrid itself, then, which makes 
 it a temptation to wander from the highways of Eu- 
 ropean travel. Very few of the buildings and collec- 
 tions, aside from the great museum, are worthy of a 
 capital city. The most that can be said for the royal 
 palace, an enormous building designed by a Pied- 
 montese architect, Sacchetti, is that it has more sim- 
 plicity than was usual in the late Renaissance period 
 from which it dates, and that xmder one of the rav- 
 ishing skies of which Spain is prodigal in spring and 
 summer it has a regal dignity which is impressive, if 
 the purely artistic features of the scheme are not. 
 Of the armory attached to the palace it is possible 
 to speak more cordially. It contains a marvellous 
 collection of antique mail and weapons, and has the 
 virtue, moreover, of being very well arranged. The 
 Academy of San Ferdinand has some good pictures; 
 and in the square before the royal palace there is a 
 fine equestrian bronze of Philip IV, by the Florentine 
 Tacca. In naming this slender body of creditable 
 things I have fairly simimarized, I believe, those 
 monuments in Madrid which do not, at any rate, 
 conflict with the glory concentrated in the Museum 
 of the Prado. They are few enough. 
 
 But in the Royal Museum there exists a treasure 
 
252 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 which might make the reputation of any capital. 
 The actual building, lacking as it is in the first essen- 
 tial of an art gallery, well-hghted chambers, is yet in 
 all other respects worthy of its contents. Charles 
 III began it in the last century as an Academy of 
 Natural History. The portrait of his architect, Juan 
 de Villanueva, painted by Goya, hangs in the Acad- 
 emy of San Ferdinand. It shows a man of quick, 
 intelligent faculties, but with the formal placidity of 
 his time, the very man from whom a design with 
 the stately lines of the musevmi was to be expected. 
 He produced an excellent building for his royal pa- 
 tron; commonplace, perhaps, but in good taste and 
 dignified. It was long in coming to completion. The 
 death of its foimder saw it unfinished. Charles IV, 
 who aimed to carry out the plan of his predecessor, 
 was no more expeditious in the erection of the edifice. 
 Early in this century it narrowly escaped being put 
 in shape by the French as a picture-gallery. Joseph 
 Bonaparte entertained some such idea, and would 
 doubtless have put it into execution had not the 
 peninsular wars diverted this as well as many an- 
 other ambitious project. 
 
 When Ferdinand VII was re-established upon the 
 throne of Spain the building was much in need of 
 repairs. These were made under the advice of his 
 wife, Maria Isabel of Braganza. She advocated the 
 use of the structure as a museum of art, and in the 
 fall of 181 9 three rooms were hung with three hundred 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 253 
 
 and eleven pictures. Another gallery was opened in 
 1821; others followed in 1828, 1830, and 1839 respect- 
 ively; and in 1892, under the regency, the most sat- 
 isfactory room in the building was redecorated and 
 rearranged. This is the Sala de la Reina Isabel, a 
 spacious gallery, which corresponds in relative signifi- 
 cance to the Salon Carre of the Louvre and the Tri- 
 buna of the Ufl&zi. It was used as such, which is to 
 say for the display of the choicest gems of all the 
 schools, until 1899, when, in celebration of the third 
 centenary of the birth of Velasquez, it was conse- 
 crated solely to his works. The pictures are chiefly the 
 property of the crown, having been drawn from the 
 palace in Madrid, from the Escorial, from other royal 
 residences, and from the monastic bodies whose prop- 
 erty was confiscated to the state early in the thirties. 
 At the present time there are over two thousand pic- 
 tures sheltered in the Museiun of the Prado — so 
 called from the prado or meadow extending along the 
 eastern side of Madrid, which was transformed by 
 Charles III into the promenade now celebrated in 
 the history of the city. 
 
 It is a splendid patrimony that is enshrined in the 
 Prado. Beginning with Isabel the Catholic, in the 
 fifteenth century, the older Spanish sovereigns had a 
 passionate taste for art and abundant means where- 
 with to gratify it. Isabel was a generous collector of 
 the religious art of her epoch. Charles V, the Em- 
 peror, was the patron of Titian, and accumulated 
 
254 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 among many precious pictures by other artists a 
 large number from the hand of Antonio Moro, one of 
 the first of Dutch portrait-painters. Philip II inher- 
 ited his father's enthusiasm for the great Venetian, 
 and added also numerous Italian and Flemish works 
 to the collection of his house. The royal ardor for 
 collecting was abated in the reign of PhiHp III, but 
 it was resumed in the most earnest dilettante of them 
 all, Philip IV, himself a painter, a tireless seeker after 
 the masterpieces of Italian painting, and, what is more 
 particularly to our purpose, the friend and patron of 
 Velasquez. Philip's interest in art knew no bounds. 
 It was for him that the Spanish ambassador in London, 
 Alonso Cardenas, attended the sale of the pictures of 
 Charles I and paid £2000 for the "Perla" of Raphael. 
 Foreign powers knew that no gifts were more welcome 
 than pictures by noted artists, and to their friendli- 
 ness we owe some of the best things in the Prado. 
 In Flanders the King's brother and Viceroy, Don 
 Ferdinand, secured him dozens of valuable pictiures 
 by the masters of that region. When Rubens came 
 on an embassy to the King he remained for nine 
 months, during which time his activity in the service 
 of the court was prodigious. Philip had finally the 
 harvestings of two Journeys which Velasquez made to 
 Italy, partly in the King's interest and partly in his 
 own. Truly the ruler so pliant under the crafty hand 
 of his minister Olivarez was an indefatigable amateur. 
 Philip was the finest horseman and the most culti- 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 255 
 
 vated connoisseur in Spain. No one is known to have 
 equalled him in either field. There have been costly 
 additions to the royal collection since his death, but 
 it may justly be said that Philip IV and Velasquez 
 set the capstone to the Museirai of the Prado. 
 
 II 
 
 When Velasquez was appointed court painter and 
 came to live in Madrid, in 1623, there was no musemn 
 there, but, as I have shown, there had been gathered 
 together by the kings of Spain, and scattered among 
 their palaces, hundreds of the pictorial triumphs of 
 Italy and Flanders. Philip was adding to them as 
 rapidly as he could. It is possible to study in the 
 Prado to-day much that contributed to the atmos- 
 phere into which Velasquez was thrown, and in which 
 for the rest of his life he lived. It affected him in no 
 positive way, but it is worth examination for its own 
 sake. It was an Italian atmosphere chiefly, and it 
 was warm with the sensuous tones of the Venetian 
 school. Until the rise of Velasquez there was no great 
 art indigenous in Spain, and the only eminent painter 
 born in the coimtry, Ribera, had early migrated to 
 Italy, and developed his art under the naturahstic 
 influence of Caravaggio. Ribera had also, without 
 knowing it, something of the mechanism of Rem- 
 brandt — something of his sleight of hand in placing 
 a figure in such an arrangement of light that its sa- 
 
256 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 lient points of anatomy and expression were brought 
 into sharp relief. We shall see how Velasquez prof- 
 ited by his example. The Spaniards were fond of 
 Ribera's melodramatic style; his persistent choice 
 of harrowing subjects from the martyrology of the 
 Chiurch appealed to a race nurtiured on the horrors 
 of the Inquisition, and his works abound in Spain. 
 But the court was anxious for some contrast to the 
 sombre tones of the Escorial and the Alcazar, and 
 it happened that this major period of Spanish con- 
 noisseurship synchronized with the rich afterglow of 
 the ItaKan Renaissance. Circumstances thus com- 
 bined to bring to Madrid before all other works the 
 sunny canvases of the colorists in the north of Italy, 
 Veronese, Tintoretto, and Titian. The three were 
 masters in a period of decline, but their decadence 
 was ablaze with the magic of a thousand sunsets. 
 
 Titian is superb in Madrid. There may be appre- 
 hended the poetic passion of his bacchanalian "Ari- 
 adne," the sweep and majesty of his "Charles V on 
 Horseback," the bewitching, supple grace of his "Sa- 
 lome," the quaintness and mediaeval fancy of his 
 "Venus-Worship," the distinction of his portraiture 
 in some of its best manifestations, and in all the 
 twoscore works the glow of his matchless palette. 
 Nowhere in Europe can the compass of the art which 
 brought forth his easel paintings be more adequately 
 measured than in Madrid. To estimate his work as 
 a mural painter it is necessary to visit Padua, but as 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 257 
 
 a portrait-painter, and as a designer of compositions 
 on a moderate scale, he is, through the liberality of 
 the monarchs of Spain, as much the property of their 
 country as of his own. Though the scope of Vero- 
 nese, on the other hand, is better ascertained in Venice 
 than in Madrid, there are nevertheless some priceless 
 works of his in the Prado, among them a "Jesus 
 Disputing with the Doctors," which recalls the great 
 banquet scene in the Academy at Venice in the sym- 
 metry and architectural character of its grouping. 
 Veronese is most victoriously himself, most dazzling, 
 and most a designer of original genius in the Vene- 
 tian picture and in his ceihng decorations, yet he fig- 
 ures brilliantly in the Spanish collection, being one 
 of its principal pillars. 
 
 So also is Tintoretto, little as there is in the Prado 
 to rival the stupendous decorations of the Ducal 
 Palace and the Scuola di San Rocco. There is at 
 least a gorgeous sea-fight of his, there are some of his 
 most successful portraits of Venetian noblemen, and 
 in two compositions in the same vein as much of his 
 Italian work — a " Death of Holof ernes " and a " Rape 
 of Lucretia" — he touches his topmost level as a de- 
 signer and a strenuous, energetic brushman. In the 
 latter capacity, in fact, Tintoretto shines so conspic- 
 uously, and he was so sure, therefore, to be one of 
 the first favorites of the Spanish court, that it is 
 somewhat surprising to find not more than nine or 
 ten of his important works in the Prado. The brio 
 in his execution, the easy, virile movement of his 
 
258 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 brush, were precisely in the spirit of Philip IV, as 
 may further be inferred from the regard in which the 
 latter held Rubens — a painter of remarkably kin- 
 dred style. 
 
 Over threescore works by Rubens adorn the Prado, 
 some of them collected prior to his nine months' em- 
 bassy to Madrid in 1628-9, but most of them dating 
 from that period. For the student of this painter 
 they render the Spanish capital a second Antwerp, 
 or, indeed, a more important city than that on the 
 Scheldt. Great as tKe master's "Descent from the 
 Cross" in the Cathedral of St. Jacques may be, it 
 expresses less concisely than the niunerous works in 
 the Prado the peculiar cachet of his talent, the blend 
 of courtly, artificial refinement with the coarse tem- 
 per of the Low Countries that not aU his experiences 
 in noble society fitted him to shake off. Van Dyck 
 was the only Fleming who could ever paint a gentle- 
 man, or throw over sitters of less fortunate birth an 
 air of good breeding drawn from his own nature. To 
 prove this is an easy task in the Prado, where some 
 half-dozen of his finest portraits are assembled, where 
 the tenderness of his "Pieta" may be set against the 
 robust materialism and shallow sentiment of Rubens's 
 treatment of the same theme, where the buxom fines 
 of the latter's "Marie de' Medici" may be viewed 
 in the fight of the imsurpassed elegance of Van Dyck's 
 "David Ryckaert," one of the really distinguished 
 portraits in the world. 
 
 The naturalism of Rubens was florid, even a trifle. 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 259 
 
 vulgar. He lacked reticence and equability of spirit. 
 Side by side with the theatricality and ornamental 
 conceit which embroidered with the most curious 
 accessories of costume and etofage those pictures of 
 "Andromeda," "The Garden of Love," "The Judg- 
 ment of Paris," "The Three Graces," and so on, 
 which give the Prado its principal memorials of a 
 princely, luxurious, rococo point of view — side by 
 side with those elements of decorative power goes 
 an impenetrable coarseness, which at times might be 
 given a coarser name. Yet it is in Rubens, more than 
 in any of the Venetians, that the student of Velas- 
 quez begins to find himself on familiar ground, for 
 Rubens had in one of its phases the mastery which is 
 the property and fame of his Spanish contemporary. 
 His elaborate equestrian portraits of Philip II and 
 the Infante Don Ferdinand foreshadow even more 
 pointedly than Titian's "Charles V" the masterpieces 
 by Velasquez in the same field that were destined to 
 eclipse them all. That Rubens had an actual influ- 
 ence, more or less deep, upon Velasquez is often as- 
 serted, but it is hard to prove, and is much easier 
 confuted. He prefigured the well-known second man- 
 ner of Velasquez, it is true, but in no sense that might 
 imply imitation or emiilation on the part of the Span- 
 iard, and it is well to make a careful comparison of 
 the two. They were in sympathy on certain points, 
 especially on the question of an elastic, flowing method 
 of execution, but there is no evidence in the pictures 
 
26o Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 of Velasquez that his intimacy with Rubens at the 
 time of the latter's visit to Madrid, in 1628, resulted 
 in the expansion of his style which soon after became 
 noticeable. The events came very near to each other 
 in point of time, but it was a coincidence of chronol- 
 ogy, nothing more. 
 
 It is far more likely that Velasquez changed his 
 style under the influence of the masters whom Rubens 
 himself adored, and whom he studied on his visit to 
 Italy in 1629, though this hypothesis is also entirely 
 gratxiitous. As will presently be shown, the art of 
 Velasquez had no antecedents. It appears the more 
 improbable, moreover, that he should have been 
 touched to any higher efforts by the example of 
 Rubens, when the temperaments of the latter and 
 himself are considered. He was the very antithesis 
 of the Fleming. Both were courtiers, but one was 
 an hidalgo from his infancy, and the other was a 
 child of circumstance, a favorite of fortune, who rose 
 from obscurity to renown, carrying with him the in- 
 stincts of his commoner origin. Little as Velasquez 
 had of the religious sensitiveness which distinguishes 
 the Italians of the golden age, he was far more likely 
 to be stirred in the very heart of him by those medi- 
 tative men than by the poorly disguised sensuality 
 of Rubens. As a matter of fact, not even the thrill- 
 ing sweetness of the primitives, whose works he must 
 have seen in Rome and Florence, entered into the 
 composition of his style, and there are paintings in 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 261 
 
 the same lofty mood by the later Italians in the Prado, 
 paintings with which he was presumably familiar, that 
 not in the slightest degree colored his style or altered 
 his outlook. 
 
 There is something curious and baflaing in this aloof- 
 ness. One wonders how so delicately perceptive a 
 painter could have resisted the appeal of the more 
 elevated Italians. There is a magnificent group of 
 Raphaels in the Prado. But had these pictures any 
 drastic effect upon Philip's great painter? Was he 
 touched by the divine abstraction in the Urbinate's 
 Madonnas? Did he feel the intellectual power, if not 
 the spiritual significance, of the "Christ Bearing the 
 Cross," a work that within its comparatively small 
 dimensions rivals in constructive perfection the great- 
 est frescoes of the master? On the contrary, it is 
 recorded that in a conversation with Salvator Rosa, 
 the Spanish painter expressed a frank distaste for the 
 Academic art of Raphael, and a strong preference for 
 the Venetians. He could appreciate the masterly 
 draughtsmanship which renders Raphael's portrait of 
 Bibbiena in the Prado a miracle, but it is only nec- 
 essary to compare that keen performance with the 
 portrait of another Italian prelate by Velasquez, the 
 " Innocent X " of the Doria Palace in Rome, to see 
 how far removed the fiery directness of the Spaniard 
 was from the cool, calm subtlety of the Italian. I can- 
 not imagine, either, Velasquez pausing with any great 
 contentment before the few other spiritualized Italian 
 
262 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 works now brought together in the Prado — the ex- 
 quisitely pathetic "Virgin" of Giovanni BelHni, Lo- 
 renzo Lotto's charming "Betrothal," or the "Ma- 
 donna with Saints," once attributed to Giorgionebut 
 now to Titian, which seems to me the most rare and 
 beautiful foreign gem in the entire collection. Del 
 Sarto and Correggio did not, it is safe to say, interest 
 him in the least. Nor could he have had much taste 
 for the patient, austere, and polished art of Van der 
 Weyden, Memling, and Van Eyck, three masters who 
 are represented in Madrid at their best. He would 
 have given them all for some glittering figure from 
 Titian's imperious brush. Even that he would have 
 held on his own terms, as an inspiration, and not as 
 a model. 
 
 m 
 
 That Velasquez was the most isolated of artists is 
 the first and last conviction enforced upon the mind 
 by a search for anticipations of him through the for- 
 eign art of his time, and the conviction deepens as 
 the art of his own country is explored. That he had 
 no successors is a commonplace of history, and that 
 he had no precursors is equally certain. The first 
 fruits of pictorial art in Spain, produced in the fif- 
 teenth century by a number of painters, were thin 
 echoes of the primitives of Italy and the Low Coun- 
 tries. Juanes and Morales, who came later, were un- 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 263 
 
 worthy followers of the Roman school, founded partly 
 on the basis of his Umbrian training by Raphael; and 
 Sanchez Coello, who died a decade earlier than the 
 birth of Velasquez, cultivated and handed on to his 
 pupil Pantoja de la Cruz an excessively minute but 
 admirable style of portraiture, which he had himself 
 derived from Moro. Coello's best two portraits in 
 the Prado, those of Don Carlos and Dona Isabel 
 Clara Eugenia, the son and daughter of Philip II, 
 show that he understood well the careful, dry method 
 of the Dutchman; but there is no more in these than 
 there is in Moro's own beautiful "Queen Mary of 
 England," or in any other of his pictures in the Prado, 
 to suggest the artist soon about to assume the sceptre 
 in the peninsula. 
 
 It was the same with the contemporary countrymen 
 of Velasquez. At the time of his birth — he first saw 
 the light on June 5, 1599 — there was httle art of 
 a good quality native to the Spanish soil, and a 
 master with the seeds of his own splendid style within 
 him was utterly unknown. The parents of Velas- 
 quez, Juan Rodriguez de Silva and Geronima Velas- 
 quez, were well born, and of suf&cient means for their 
 son to be given the best of teachers, yet when his 
 apprenticeship was begim their choice was confined 
 to a small handfiil of men of whom not one had de- 
 cided power and originality. They placed him for a 
 time, it is believed, with Francisco Herrera, a painter 
 whose turbulent mannerisms may be seen at their 
 
264 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 worst, or best, as you choose, in the huge "San Her- 
 mengilda" of the Prado. Later, when in about his 
 thirteenth year, Velasquez entered the atelier of Fran- 
 cisco Pacheco, an ingenious critic and theorist, but a 
 poor painter in an academic style, which is illustrated 
 by his four pictures of saints in the Prado. If he 
 taught Velasquez anything, we may judge from these 
 laboriously executed panels that he grounded his pupil 
 well in the rudiments of drawing. All this it is nec- 
 essary to state with emphasis, because one of the 
 things that most make Velasquez interesting is the 
 detachment to which I have already referred. Else- 
 where in Europe the effect of the Renaissance was as 
 universal as it was deep. In Italy the great wave 
 of culture on which the painters were borne brought 
 not two or three, but a whole race of artists to the 
 enrichment of a wider civilization. In Spain the 
 broad sea of insularity was only rippled by a current 
 that flowed near its surface from Italy. The more 
 important names that were lifted above the horizon, 
 Zurbaran, Cano, and even the sentimental Murillo, 
 were not of the first magnitude, and Velasquez emerges 
 from the depths, unheralded, solitary, and command- 
 ing, one of the unique phenomena in history. Full 
 five years he is thought to have labored under 
 Pacheco, but the most for which we have to thank 
 the latter is that he gave Velasquez his daughter in 
 16 18, when the student was nineteen, and that he 
 was his constant friend and admirer, smoothing his 
 
Spanish Art in Spam and Elsewhere 265 
 
 way to the court with letters of introduction that 
 were of substantial service. 
 
 The first visit paid to the capital by Velasquez, 
 soon after the accession of Philip IV, then a mere 
 youth, in 162 1, was futile in so far as his dearest 
 wish was concerned. He hungered for a place at 
 court. In 1623 a portrait of his friend Fonseca, an 
 influential oflScer in the royal household, obtained 
 him a sitting from the King, and the equestrian por- 
 trait of the latter which he executed then won him 
 his appointment in the same year. This portrait of 
 Philip, which has long since disappeared, brought him 
 the special interest of the King and the protection 
 of OUvarez, who was daily growing in power. From 
 this time on Velasquez remained at court, his life 
 being vmmarked by any episodes more striking than 
 a visit to Venice, Rome, and Naples in 1629, and 
 another to Italy twenty years later. These journeys 
 were made for purposes of study and for the pur- 
 chase of works of art for the King. In 1660, when 
 Velasquez was in his sixty-first year and his master 
 was a man of fifty-four, the court made a tedious 
 journey to San Sebastian to meet Louis XIV. Velas- 
 quez, who during his entire sojourn at court held 
 numerous offices, attended the King upon this occa- 
 sion as a kind of chamberlain, arranging fetes and 
 accommodations for Philip and his suite. The exer- 
 tion brought him back to Madrid in a state of ex- 
 haustion, and a month after his arrival home he was 
 
266 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 smitten with a fever which ended his life on Friday, 
 August 6, 1660. He was a Knight of the Order of 
 Santiago when he died, and the most celebrated 
 painter of his nation. These are the outlines of his 
 career. His pictures tell the rest. 
 
 IV 
 
 There are more than sixty paintings by Velasquez 
 in the Prado, a collection comprehending the greater 
 proportion of his work, all of his most famous com- 
 positions, and, in fact, everything that is needed for 
 a complete survey of his genius. If the earliest of 
 these pictures bring us at once back to the question 
 that has been touched upon above, the external forces 
 that may have gone to the formation of his style, it 
 need at least be considered but momentarily. The 
 expatriated Ribera alone, of all the artists with whose 
 works Velasquez ever came in contact, exercised any 
 influence upon him, and that influence was slight. 
 He confirmed in Velasquez a quality native to the 
 latter — a tendency to employ chiarosciuro as a prime 
 factor of artistic expression. In the first works of 
 Velasquez his resolution to obtain an artistic effect 
 by means of more or less artificial light is clearly 
 visible. The "Bacchus" is an eloquent testimony to 
 this. The "Adoration of the Kings" is another, and 
 the two full-length portraits of the youthful Philip 
 and his brother the Infante Don Carlos are both 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 267 
 
 based on the assumption that a figure costumed in 
 black, thrown against a neutral background and with 
 the light concentrated on the hands and wristbands, 
 face and collar, will detach itself from its surround- 
 ings readily and with clearness. Something in the 
 studied arrangement in these pictures, something in 
 the deft fashion of illumination used in them all, may 
 have been the outcome of the regard in which Velas- 
 quez is known to have held Ribera's work. But his 
 fibre is already his own, and it is just here that one 
 of the most remarkable ingredients in the art of Ve- 
 lasquez is approached. 
 
 In all his works, from the "Bacchus," painted 
 within a few years of his arrival at court, to "Las 
 Hilanderas," which marks the culmination of his art, 
 Velasquez seems endowed with a delicacy of poise, a 
 serene refinement of feeling, which excluded every- 
 thing that savored of roughness in the texture, tur- 
 bidness in the color, or eccentricity in the design of 
 a work of art» This characteristic of supreme dis- 
 crimination, a characteristic of impeccable taste, was 
 one of the things that in Velasquez took the place of 
 high imagination. For he was not imaginative in 
 the creative sense. This is plain from the absence 
 of any poetic felicity in his few sacred and mytholog- 
 ical compositions. There is no more ideality, there 
 is no more religious inspiration, in the "Coronation 
 of the Virgin," which stands at the termination of his 
 career, than there is in the "Adoration of the Kings," 
 which stands at the beginning, or in the " Crucifixion," 
 
268 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 which comes between. It is useless to look in "The 
 Forge of Vulcan," done in the surcharged atmosphere 
 of Rome, or in the "Mars" and the "Mercury and 
 Argus," both much later works, for such a sym- 
 pathetic realization of remote, poetic personalities as 
 exists in Raphael's Farnesina decorations, for example, 
 or in Botticelli's "Primavera." What Velasquez did 
 have, however, that enabled him to exert a lasting 
 fascination, was that critical imagination which at its 
 best amoimts to clairvoyance. He could not body 
 forth a scene from Biblical history or profane litera- 
 ture and shed over it the supernatural air by which 
 it is to be most truly identified. He most assuredly 
 could group his models in such a way as to produce 
 a marvellous balance of lines and masses, of light 
 and shade, and then he could divine in each figure 
 all the significance, less than poetic, with which that 
 material symbol could be credited. 
 
 It must be remembered that Velasquez was prima- 
 rily a portrait-painter, and that his first aim was to 
 penetrate to the core of his model's individuality. 
 This he did with unerring intuition, and on this plane 
 his range was boundless. It embraced the winning 
 charm of the two little girls whose portraits in the 
 Prado are said to represent the daughters of Velas- 
 quez, Ignacia and Francisca; and at the other ex- 
 treme he was capable of producing such a strange 
 compound of senihty and bilious intelligence as is 
 illustrated in the "^sop." The companions of that 
 incarnation of buoyant adolescence which we have in 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 269 
 
 the portrait of "Prince Balthasar on Horseback" are 
 the equestrian portraits of Philip and Olivarez — 
 the one showing a man who, on horseback at least, 
 was the virUe, kingly commander Velasquez has rep- 
 resented him to be; the other a commentary on the 
 Machiavelian, underhand character of the King's 
 prime minister, which all the records of the time 
 unite to indorse. Every type seems to have been 
 approached with equal sympathy by this shrewd, 
 thoughtful painter, and he passes with inimitable ce- 
 lerity and sureness from the open, rugged features of 
 his friend Montanes (erroneously known from this 
 portrait as Alonso Cano) to the truculence of "Per- 
 nia," the shallow slyness of "Don Juan of Austria," 
 and the nervous declamatory habit of "Pabhllos," 
 giving to each of Philip's three buffoons a character 
 that once apprehended is impossible to banish from 
 the memory or to confuse with any other. In the 
 figure of Spinola, which fills the centre of "Las 
 Lanzas," a veritable ideal of martial dignity is 
 preserved, and in the five portraits of the court 
 dwarfs — "El Primo," " Sebastian Morra," "ElBobo 
 de Coria," "El Nino de VaUecas," and "El Ingles" 
 — there is expressed with more searching analysis, 
 with more appalling fidelity, than you will find in 
 the grotesques of Diirer, Signorelli, or Leonardo, the 
 curiously sinister combination of puerility and eerie 
 wisdom which science and superstition alike discover 
 in the malformed nature. 
 
270 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 Velasquez was no dramatist. He neither sought 
 nor devised a situation in which some momentous 
 electrifying occurrence was accomplished. In "The 
 Forge of Vulcan" and in "The Surrender of Breda" 
 he comes nearest to the representation of a serious, 
 moving crisis, and even in these the predominating 
 impulse is not one of action suddenly liberated. But 
 in this very connection he reveals his extraordinary 
 skill in seizing the appearance of nature and fixing 
 it still palpitating upon the canvas. Mpdern painters 
 talk of motion in art as though it were worth recogni- 
 tion only in representations of impetuous action, like 
 the charge of a cavalry regiment or the leap of an 
 acrobat. Velasquez saw that all life is necessarily 
 movement, that repose is only movement suspended, 
 and his figures are not arrested in space, they are but 
 pausing of their own volition, a distinction upon 
 which the whole theory of motion in art may be said 
 to hinge. Breathing, thinking, alive with all the sen- 
 sations of concrete beings, his kings and councillors, 
 huntsmen and enanos, buffoons and soldiers, hesi- 
 tate there on the canvas ere they step from their 
 frames with something of the weird immobility which 
 De Quincey has. described in his essay " On the Knock- 
 ing at the Gate in Macbeth." The spectator is aware 
 in the painting of Velasquez, as the English writer was 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 271 
 
 aware in the great scene of the tragedy, of a mo- 
 ment's veil between the petrifaction of a deathhke 
 solitude and the ringing sounds of a world thickly 
 peopled. No painter ever surpassed Velasquez in 
 this poignancy of realism, and I am inclined to say 
 that no one ever equalled him. No one, at any rate, 
 ever presented his interpretation of nature with so 
 little of subjective annotation, with so little rhetoric 
 of technique. The Spaniard was content if he set 
 down what he divined in the man before him. He 
 divined much, a great deal more than would have 
 been yielded to most other men, yet he leaves the 
 King, or whoever else it may be, to make his own 
 confession, as it were, to the interlocutor of posterity. 
 And the confession, so far as it can be so on canvas, 
 is complete. Where it Justifies itself, too, where it 
 demonstrates its veracity, is in never telling too much. 
 A false note is never struck. A lesser man — the Ri- 
 bera, for instance, from whom he may have imbibed 
 some of his early ideas; the Rubens with whom his 
 name is to be coupled only with the utmost care — 
 inevitably pitches the key too high. Velasquez never 
 rose above a certain resonant. Judicious chord, a 
 chord which grew richer, fuller, and mellower as he 
 progressed, but never passed the limits of harmony, 
 taste, and nature. 
 
 This is apparent in every relation of his. art. It may 
 be observed in the attitudes and actions of his per- 
 sonages, in the heroic but entirely normal lines of 
 
272 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 his horses, which are as interesting, very nearly, as 
 the riders bestriding them. It is proclaimed in the 
 current of animation which pervades "The Surrender 
 of Breda," a picture that is monumental, commemora- 
 tive, without being in the faintest degree "built up" 
 or conventional; in the delightful, intimate grouping 
 of "Las Meninas"; in the spontaneity of "Las Hi- 
 landeras," which in the beauty of its design seems the 
 invention of an artist, and in the uninterrupted music 
 of its talk and work carries the close effect of a pho- 
 tograph. Everywhere there is freedom from any hint 
 of mechanical composition exceeding the decorum of 
 life; everywhere there are revelations of nature studied 
 and transferred to the canvas with its gait still quiv- 
 ering. But it was not only in the mysteries of mo- 
 tion that Velasquez was deeply versed. He was the 
 first of the Impressionists, taking the epithet in its 
 bearing upon problems of lighting. The illunaina- 
 tion of his pictures was one of the most pressing ques- 
 tions involved in the unfolding of his style. In his 
 first period, which was characterized by a dry and 
 rather Academic style of draughtsmanship, and in 
 which his color sense was satisfied with tints few 
 and subdued, the lighting is accomplished by means 
 which, though not mechanical and unduly arbitrary, 
 have still a certain slightly artificial precision about 
 them. The light and shade in the "Bacchus," so far 
 as can be perceived in the present sad condition of 
 the canvas, are handled obviously as parts of a pre- 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 273 
 
 arranged scheme. In ' ' The Forge of Vulcan, ' ' painted 
 when the artist was about thirty years old, he arrived 
 at the point of transition between this cautious method 
 of his early manhood and the authoritative freedom 
 of his prime. With the "Vulcan" he began the 
 broadening of his brushwork, which was continued to 
 the end, making his execution ever more free and 
 rapid, his touch lighter, and at the same time more 
 crisp and forcible; and parallel with this develop- 
 ment of his handling grew a richer and deeper scheme 
 of color. But most of all does the beauty of his light- 
 ing grow more in the likeness of the beauty of nature. 
 In the group of equestrian portraits belonging to his 
 second period, in "Las Hilanderas" and "Las Me- 
 ninas," the crowning glories of the third style, color 
 and design are brought to a high degree of perfection, 
 but they would have little effect were not the pic- 
 tures suffused by a light so natural that all thought 
 of the studio, of artistic sophistication, instantly dis- 
 appears. 
 
 This point makes a convenient corollary to the 
 summary of the painter's three periods, which might 
 be given as follows: The second period, typified best 
 by "The Surrender of Breda," the equestrian portraits, 
 and the portraits of the three huntsmen, is differenti- 
 ated by a greater flexibility of style and by a height- 
 ening of color from the earliest period, which produced 
 the "Bacchus" and the standing portraits of PhiUp IV 
 and his brother Don Carlos. In the third period, 
 
274 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 that of "Las Hilanderas," Velasquez achieves a subt- 
 ler gradation of tone, and restricts himself, on the 
 whole, to a narrower scale of color, while loosening 
 more than ever his brushwork and drawing. The 
 development of his lighting is from first to last in a 
 rising scale. 
 
 The relapse of Velasquez from the blues, russets, 
 and carmines of his "Prince Balthasar on Horseback" 
 to a scheme of color so much less brilliant in "Las 
 Memnas" that that product of his maturity is, in 
 respect to warmth, hardly more pronounced than his 
 first works, does not by any means lower his rank as 
 a colorist. Velasquez was never a colorist in the 
 modern sense — never a colorist like Monticelli, Diaz, 
 or John La Farge — loving color for its own sake. He 
 had instead the most complete command of any artist 
 who ever lived over that part of a colorist's province 
 which is signified in the word "value." He under- 
 stood the relation of one color or tone to another, 
 the relation of the lowest blue to the highest, of the 
 highest white to the lowest red. "Las Meninas," 
 with its masses of silvery neutral tone, its simple 
 blacks and whites, with a few touches of green and 
 red in the costumes, is not merely a masterpiece of 
 design, perspective, and portraiture. It is, without 
 exaggeration, the most perfect study of color, of 
 values, in the world. The opinion is freely expressed, 
 for the march from the first great pictures of Velas- 
 quez to the last is so unswerving and in such a swell- 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 275 
 
 ing measure that the superlative degree is unavoid- 
 able at the end. Each one of the numerous pictures 
 in the Prado contains if anything a little more pleas- 
 ure than the last. Bacchus, with his merry compan- 
 ions, drawn from a race as Spanish as his own; Apollo, 
 standing in his tawny robe beside the swarthy Vul- 
 can; the young prince on his pony, prancing in a 
 landscape as fresh and as lovely as though painted 
 yesterday; Philip himself, at half a dozen stages of 
 his specious, ill-starred existence; and all the other 
 figures of an era never to be forgotten; the warriors 
 of "The Sturrender of Breda," and the peaceful 
 women of "Las Hilanderas" — come back from the 
 past wearing an aspect that can never fade, for, in 
 so far as vitality is concerned, every generation will 
 say, as this one must, that they come with the last 
 accent of modernity. 
 
 One can never be quite certain that the personal 
 equation is not affecting one's judgments, and it may 
 be an old and deep sympathy for the haunting beauty 
 of the Italians of the Renaissance which would make 
 it impossible for me to enter the gallery where "Las 
 Hilanderas" hangs without going first to certain 
 Venetian masterpieces which hang in other rooms 
 near by. Yet I must add that while they touch the 
 imagination more subtly, more passionately, the 
 impression that remains upon the mind in the 
 clearest, sharpest outlines is of "Pablillos"; it is of 
 the girl winding the wool in the foreground of "Las 
 
276 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 Hilanderas"; it is of the haughty irresolute King; or, 
 most unforgettable of all, it is of his glorious young 
 son, the Prince Balthasar, linking one's thoughts by 
 an unmistakable association of ideas with the words 
 of Vernon to Hotspur: 
 
 "I saw young Harry — with his beaver on, 
 His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd — 
 Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury, 
 And vaulted with such ease into his seat 
 As if an angel dropp'd down from the clouds 
 To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus, 
 And witch the world with noble horsemanship." 
 
 To evoke such an image, and with such rhythm and 
 felicity, required the pen of a Shakespeare or the brush 
 of a Velasquez. 
 
 II 
 
 THE PRADO REVISITED 
 
 To see a foreign country for the first time is surely 
 one of the great sensations of life, but to revisit it, 
 especially after a long absence, is even more interest- 
 ing, though not perhaps so exciting. When you dis- 
 cover Italy — and every traveller discovers Italy for 
 himself — it is next to impossible to co-ordinate your 
 impressions. It is a world in itself and it must be 
 explored again and again, in the Hght of devoted 
 study, before its treasures are seen in a really man- 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 277 
 
 ageable perspective. It is as though one familiarized 
 himself little by little with the contents of an incred- 
 ibly vast museum. In other lands it may be other 
 things that matter, things having nothing to do with 
 the mere mass of stuff to be seen but with the genius 
 of a people. The fact has been brought home to me 
 by a return to Spain. Some sixteen or seventeen 
 years ago, when I visited that country for the first 
 time, chance took me through its southern gateway. 
 Nothing could be more delightful, but I have since 
 learned that if you want to plimge straight into the 
 spirit of Spanish art the best approach is from the 
 North, and it is best made with some swiftness in the 
 heart of winter. 
 
 Spanish art is grave, austere, the fruit of a civiliza- 
 tion which was dominated by a rigidly formal court 
 and penetrated to its very core by the discipline of 
 the Roman Church at the height of its power. There 
 was nothing blithely sensuous about it in the heyday 
 of its development. Its masters were no light-hearted 
 adventtirers, pursuing beauty for its own sate, but 
 sober craftsmen, obediently filling the orders of royal 
 and clerical patrons. Moreover, climatic and social 
 conditions and certain harsh racial traits played into 
 the hands of Church and State. Now one is scarcely 
 put into the mood to realize the full significance of all 
 
278 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 this by summer wanderings in Andalusia. When I 
 went slowly up to Madrid, after indolent days in the 
 Alhambra and in towns like Cadiz and Seville, I was 
 quite ready to believe forever in the "simny Spain" 
 of countless books of travel, and I was the less pre- 
 pared to readjust my point of view because I had been 
 absorbed in the suave traditions of Italian art. Span- 
 ish pictures seen in England and in the various gal- 
 leries of Europe had not quite prepared me for the 
 revelations of the Prado, where alone the art of the 
 coimtry is to be studied at full length. My first in- 
 timation of the atmosphere I was to find there came 
 in the course of a long ride by diligence to Jaen. I 
 began then to taste the quality of the Spanish land- 
 scape in its dustier, stonier aspects, to forget orange- 
 trees and gypsy dancers in the presence of barren 
 hillsides and sombre, brown-cloaked shepherds, stand- 
 ing lonely against the sky. Later, as I came to see 
 more of Spain, I understood that when she is barest 
 and bleakest she is most herself, most the Spain of 
 Velasquez. If there is one spot on which more than 
 on any other in the whole country you get the key 
 to the problem it is beneath the cold walls of the 
 Escorial, on a day of drifting mist or when the wind 
 comes down like a knife from the Guadarrama. En- 
 ter the grimly solemn church and look up at the 
 royal worshippers on either side, kneeling in bronze 
 with their faces turned to the high altar. The soul 
 of Spain is there. 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 279 
 
 It took time to find it out, but travelling in win- 
 ter, down to Madrid from San Sebastian, I seemed 
 hardly to have crossed the threshold before the Span- 
 ish characteristics which had once been so elusive 
 fairly leaped to the eye. You recognize them as the 
 fertile valleys give way to rock-strewn plains, and 
 you pass widely scattered farms and huddled ham- 
 lets, the latter shutting all their doors and windows 
 in the winter twilight, and seeming, beneath the in- 
 evitable church tower, as though in a deathlike sleep. 
 The sky is intensely blue, and, with a stupendous 
 round moon floating in it, it is ineffably cold. Trains 
 are none too rapid in Spain, and you get a good sense 
 of the coimtry from yoiu: car window. It looks a 
 ghostly and forbidding land. Some stretches of it, 
 past which you glide in an imearthly light, might be 
 abandoned Golgothas, scenes of imbearable tragedy. 
 When you have reached Segovia in the night and 
 have driven to your hotel imder the old Roman aque- 
 duct you have been initiated into Spanish art. The 
 initiation continues next day, when the cold is still 
 terrific, but when a blazing sun makes the weather 
 endurable, and, besides, makes the prospect clear for 
 miles around. On a spur of the hill on which the 
 town is built there stands the ancient Alcazar, and on 
 the terrace at its base there are stone benches where 
 one may sit and gaze over the country. It is all 
 bare and brown, with stone walls marking out many 
 of the fields, the houses Ijdng far apart, flat and yel- 
 
28o Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 low structxires, with their red tiled roofs faded to a 
 soft rose, and mile on mile of high-road travelling 
 snakily past them toward the church-crowned village 
 on a distant hill. It is a strange sight, and that in it 
 which most touches the imagination is its calm and 
 irresistible assertion of an ancient, unchanged char- 
 acter. Revery at Segovia may be colored by all 
 manner of rich and romantic associations drawn from 
 innumerable chapters of history, but at bottom the 
 one motive which persists is that which cries aloud 
 from the immemorial countryside, the hardness and 
 the patience, the melancholy and the courage, which 
 have gone to the making of the Spanish genius. 
 
 II 
 
 It is good to get back to the Prado. There is no 
 other museum quite Hke it in the world. For one 
 thing it has been in exceptionally safe hands. The 
 craze for picture cleaning which has done so much 
 harm in so many European galleries has left Madrid 
 untouched. There are paintings in Vienna and Ber- 
 lin which look as though they had had their faces 
 washed once a week for years; they shine with an 
 abhorrent "spruceness." The masterpieces of the 
 Prado have had their feelings respected. As an Amer- 
 ican artist once said to me, "they have enjoyed a 
 long and beautiful neglect." Discretion and absten- 
 tion were the watchwords of old Seiior Madrazo, the 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 281 
 
 former director. He used to let me come into his 
 studio to see Titian's great equestrian portrait of 
 Charles V, which he had by him on an easel while 
 it was undergoing some repairs to its back, and I 
 never heard from him or from any of the Spanish 
 artists with whom I used to foregather that "resto- 
 ration " was a popular amusement in Madrid. Sefior 
 Villegas, the present director, uses the same prudence. 
 He lets the pictures in the Prado alone. He is con- 
 servative, too, about their arrangement. I foimd that 
 some paintings had changed their places, but in the 
 main the grouping was much as I had known it so 
 many years before. 
 
 There are modern painters who are prone to in- 
 sist that Velasquez is the sole type of perfection in 
 art. It is a false view to take, but it is the easiest 
 thing in the world to imderstand how it has got into 
 vogue. There is something about Velasquez which 
 momentarily persuades you that nothing else in the 
 history of painting quite matters, and I suppose it 
 is the easier to surrender to this idea because the 
 master is so simple, so straightforward in his way of 
 taking you captive. The American artist I have 
 just cited told me how his wife had gone for her first 
 visit to the Prado, and after an hour or two with 
 Velasquez had come back and tried to explain just 
 how he had struck a mind making no pretence to 
 artistic experience. "I think," she said, "it's the 
 way he makes a leg look like a leg." That sajang is 
 
282 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 worth many a page of overwrought analysis. The 
 late John La Farge, who knew the mysteries of paint- 
 ing if ever a man knew them, has a passage on "Las 
 Meninas" in his "One Himdred Masterpieces" which 
 shows the importance which he, too, gave to the 
 painter's sheer truth. "Its workmanship and all that 
 side of painting which copies nature for illusion," he 
 says, "has reached here the highest level known; not 
 attempting to deceive by special points of accuracy, 
 but so that each accuracy depends upon the others and 
 that the whole has that impression of nature which 
 does not surprise us, which does not look clever or 
 particularly wonderful or difficult to understand." 
 That is one reason why you are tempted to accept 
 unquestioned his pre-eminence, his isolation. These 
 tremendous works of his seem such entirely natural 
 affairs, to have been produced with so artless a ges- 
 ture, in a manner so efifortless and so magnificently 
 right. To doubt the eternal efficacy of the hypothe- 
 sis on which Velasquez labored seems like doubting 
 the multiplication table. If two and two make four 
 then this man's way of painting is the whole art of 
 painting. It is with a kind of wrench that you have 
 to remind yourself that "there are other dreams." 
 But what a very different thing from all the math- 
 ematical certainties of the academies is the method 
 of Velasquez! In his early period, the period of the 
 bodegones, those interiors in which he portrayed the 
 humbler folk of Seville, you can track his genius 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 283 
 
 through what may be adequately enough described 
 as clear and steady drawing, smooth brushwork, pure 
 color, and an obviously artificial play of light and 
 shade. But when Velasquez comes to maturity, and, 
 to use Whistler's happy phrase, dips his brush in 
 light and air, you lose the last dew to his magic. 
 And all the time he seems to be reminding you, in 
 his calm, half-disdainful way, that he is using no 
 magic at all, that these glorious achievements of his 
 are based upon the simplest possible craft, that the 
 magic, if it is there, is all in the day's work. It is 
 hopeless to interrogate him, yet in another way it is 
 very much worth while to go over his canvases inch 
 by inch. As you look the marvel grows. The paint 
 is dashed on from a fluid brush in a quick, steno- 
 graphic sort of way, a touch here and a touch there, 
 in suggestion rather than Uteral notation. That much 
 any eye can gather. But what are you to say of the 
 synthetic vision determining the exact relation of 
 each one of those touches to the others? What are 
 you to say of the creative power which takes all this 
 stuff of form and color, light and air, and fuses it 
 into a living whole of beauty? I have gone day after 
 day, for weeks on end, to the paintings of Velasquez 
 and tried to dissect their technical traits. There are 
 masters of infinitely more subtle characteristics who 
 make a task of the sort nothing like so obscure. And 
 life, in his case, is always creeping in to make the 
 search more difficult. I used to study the marvellous 
 
284 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 "Innocent X" at Rome, and oscillate between two 
 totally different hypotheses as to the manner in which 
 the paint had been laid on. While I balanced the 
 two the eyes of the old Pope would take hold of me, 
 and I would forget the spell of art for that of hiunan- 
 ity. It is so in that miraculous room in the Prado. 
 You are always turning from Velasquez to the men 
 and women he painted, to the leg that looks hke a leg. 
 It is there, I think, that he allies himself with the 
 greatest of the great painters, and it is there, too, 
 that he rebukes the narrow-mindedness of those very 
 disciples of his who in our modern times would turn 
 the sentient, breathing world into an affair of "still 
 life" and make a dexterous turn of the brush the end 
 and aim of art. If there is one thing more than an- 
 other which Velasquez makes you feel it is that he 
 was passionately interested in the substance of his 
 art. His portraits were not achieved through mere 
 sleight of hand. There is thought in them and there 
 is, above all, a profound sympathy. Those were wise 
 words of La Farge's about the workmanship "which 
 does not look clever or particularly wonderful or dif- 
 ficult to understand." It is just the kind of work- 
 manship to subject itself to a high purpose, to serve 
 as a means of expression. And you soon enough dis- 
 cover, by the same token, that Velasquez is not, after 
 all, "the whole show." Momentarily, I repeat, you 
 are inclined to think he is. Never shall I forget the 
 shock that it was to come to the Prado after several 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 285 
 
 summers in Italian galleries. For a little while I saw 
 the whole Renaissance awry, with only Velasquez 
 playing the technical game as it ought to be played. 
 But these misapprehensions have a way of righting 
 themselves. One learns, and nowhere better than at 
 the feet of Velasquez, that the painter cannot live 
 by technique alone; and it is but a step from this fun- 
 damental truth to the one making it clear that there 
 are all kinds of technique, all kinds of genius. The 
 Prado peculiarly enforces that point, for although 
 Velasquez holds the centre of the stage he is sur- 
 rounded by Titian, Veronese, Rubens, Van Dyke, 
 Moro, the early Netherlandish painters and divers 
 other masters, all at their best. Nothing could be 
 more profitable than to turn from him to them, for 
 to do so is to be reminded of some of the other things 
 that count in art, things of imagination, of drama, of 
 religion, that Velasquez knew nothing about. 
 
 Coming back to him with these convictions, I won- 
 dered what the result would be, how he would look 
 after all those years, and especially what his relation 
 to the other "kinds" would be. What surprised me 
 was to find that there were no surprises, that I could 
 not see him differently, that I missed nothing and 
 that nothing had been added, save, for me, a deeper 
 sense of his serene and limpid truth. There were 
 no depths which had become clearer, there were no 
 mysteries, there was just the candid, perfect painter, 
 flinging no dust in one's eyes, but doing his work 
 
286 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 like a gentleman. Of one thing I am sure: He is 
 one of the greatest tonic forces in painting. To go 
 back to him is to go back to an invigorating spring. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There is so much else to go back to in the Prado, 
 but I have no intention of rehearsing an old story. 
 It would be tempting to make a dozen excursions 
 through the galleries — to talk, for example, about a 
 picture like the wonderful little landscape by Goya 
 which hangs near the entrance, a glittering view of 
 the river, with multitudes of people in the foreground 
 and the walls of Madrid beyond. The story of Goya's 
 art is half untold without the introduction of a deli- 
 cate, blond landscape like this. But there is only 
 one painter after Velasquez of whom I would speak 
 in any detail and that is Mazo, his pupil. Mazo is 
 the man to whom the late Aiireliano de Beruete, the 
 great authority on Velasquez, thought it necessary to 
 give a considerable number of paintings that had pre- 
 viously been coimted among the authentic works of 
 the master. The Spanish critic made good most of 
 his attributions, but there were one or two which 
 were always hard to accept. The "Admiral Pulido 
 Pareja," of the National GaUery, and the "Lady 
 with a Mantilla," which the Duke of Devonshire 
 lent to the famous exhibition at the Guildhall in 190 1, 
 were long unchallenged as the works of Velasquez. 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 287 
 
 Beniete preferred to give them both to Mazo, and 
 his son, in his valuable book on "The School of Ma- 
 drid," takes the same view. That neither picture 
 illustrates the master's art in its finest estate may 
 readily be admitted. But for my own part I cling 
 to both portraits, and to the "Lady with a Man- 
 tilla " even more than to the other. 
 
 It seemed interesting on revisiting the Prado to 
 overhaul Mazo with particular care, as I had over- 
 hauled him elsewhere, and to see if I could what it 
 was that justified the critic's appraisal of him at so 
 high a value. The man who was clever enough for a 
 quantity of his paintings to be taken for works by 
 Velasquez must certainly have been diabolically clever. 
 For the life of me I could not see that the Mazos in 
 the Prado lent any aid to Beruete's contention. He 
 figures there, it is true, chiefly as a landscapist, and 
 in the upper room where a number of his scenes are 
 gathered together he makes a decidedly good impres- 
 sion. But come to him fresh from Velasquez, go to 
 and fro between the two day after day, and you are 
 driven to the conclusion that the painter of the land- 
 scapes never had it in him to paint the "Admiral" 
 or that adorable "Lady with the Mantilla." If Ve- 
 lasquez did not paint them then they were done by 
 some one worthier of him than Mazo. There is a 
 famous "View of Saragossa" in the Prado, in which 
 the town and the river were painted by the pupil, 
 while Velasquez did the figures in the foreground. 
 
288 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 You have only to weigh the two parts of the picture, 
 one against the other, to see the gulf dividing the 
 men who made them. It is all in the touch, the in- 
 describable, autographic, vitalizing touch. It is eas- 
 ier, it seems to me, to believe that Velasquez some- 
 times nodded and produced a painting below his 
 average than to believe every such painting to be 
 necessarily by Mazo. Even the second-best of the 
 master was too good for the man. 
 
 Ill 
 
 VELASQUEZ AT THE HISPANIC MUSEUM 
 
 There is a miniature Prado in New York. It is 
 called the Hispanic Museum. The compact little 
 building of that institution was overrun by thousands 
 of visitors during the special exhibitions made there 
 of the works of SoroUa and Zuloaga; but then every- 
 thing else was necessarily hidden away. I dare say 
 that comparatively few people in the city are aware 
 of the extraordinary collection of Spanish pictures 
 which is hung in the upper gallery, when this 
 museum is given over to its regular functions, to 
 the still air of delightful studies. The place is full 
 of precious books and manuscripts, of magnificent 
 pieces of old Hispano-Moresque pottery, of objects 
 in wrought metal, and other souvenirs of a great his- 
 toric past. Forming a kind of crown to the whole 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 289 
 
 is the collection of pictures ranging from the Primi- 
 tives down to Goya, and including valuable examples 
 of Murillo, El Greco and other masters, not forget- 
 ting Moro's superb portrait of the Duke of Alba. 
 Set like jewels in the mass are three portraits by 
 Velasquez, and, as at Madrid, they dominate their 
 surroundings. That is why I call the Hispanic Mu- 
 seum a miniature Prado. 
 
 The chief of these three paintings is the famous 
 full-length of the Count-Duke of Olivares, which was 
 formerly at Dorchester House, in London, the prop- 
 erty of Major Holford. It was purchased, it is said, 
 for an "almost fabulous sum," by Mrs. C. P. Hunt- 
 ington, and presented by her to the Hispanic Museum 
 in memory of her husband. It is the most revealing 
 of the portraits painted by Velasquez of King Philip's 
 ill-omened minister. The equestrian portrait at Ma- 
 drid, painted at a later date and perhaps more gen- 
 erally known, is technically a glorious thing, but, as 
 Beruete says, "the personage represented was never 
 imder fire," and as a study of character this is ac- 
 cordingly, if not precisely disingenuous, at all events 
 a work more courtly than exact. The early full-length 
 prefigures something of that psychological penetra- 
 tion which you observe, for example, in the wonder- 
 ful "Don Diego del Corral y Arellano," which in 
 certain traits it resembles. Olivares in this canvas 
 is not quite so much "on parade" as in the equestrian 
 portrait, and though Velasquez does not catch him 
 
290 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 absolutely unmasked he certainly seems to have foimd 
 him in more of his characteristic mood. The sleek 
 nature of the man is mercilessly disclosed. 
 
 In the pages of the late Martin Hume, better, per- 
 haps, than anywhere else, the reader may trace the 
 true character of this courtier, so cruelly inimical to 
 the interests of his master. Like many obstinate 
 people, Philip could be craftily led, and Olivares was 
 the last statesman in the world to have had the post 
 of authority at Philip's vacillating elbow. States- 
 manship, indeed, of any serious calibre, he plenti- 
 fully lacked. His cue was deftly to play on the least 
 creditable impulses of the King, to minister to his 
 levities, and, in a word, to bemuse Philip out of any 
 proper sense of what really needed to be done for 
 the welfare of his dominions. Even if Major Hume 
 had not given us chapter and verse for this hypothe- 
 sis, and if no other historians had touched upon the 
 baseness of Olivares, could it not all be divined from 
 this marvellous portrait? It is marvellous not only 
 as it mirrors a sinister personality, but as it illus- 
 trates the habit of a great painter, not yet risen to 
 his full stature, but already the unmistakable pos- 
 sessor of genius. There is genius in the simple and 
 solid placing of the figure, and then you see it every- 
 where manifested, in the beautiful modelling of the 
 head and hands, in the definition of the draperies — 
 so fluid and yet so precise — and in the perfect so- 
 briety, the pure glow, the incomparable distinction, 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 291 
 
 of the tone. The color scheme, dark almost to black- 
 ness in the dress of the count-duke, but given a greater 
 warmth and sonority in the red cloth that covers 
 the table, makes what might fairly be described as 
 a massive chord, but Velasquez, be he never so force- 
 ful, is at the same moment exquisitely suave. In his 
 leading masses of color, as in the neutral background, 
 he is the master of pure transparent tone, so fine, so 
 softly luminous, that while you are seized by the 
 strength of the portrait you are gently beguiled by 
 its sheer charm. To see the master at full length 
 the student must go to Spain, but if that is not pos- 
 sible he may find ample consolation in New York. 
 In this portrait he may draw near to the secret of 
 Velasquez and drink deep of the beauty of his work. 
 Moreover, it is not in the "Olivares" alone that he 
 may find these sensations of pleasure and this in- 
 struction. Near at hand hang two smaller portraits, 
 neither of them of equal "importance," as that word 
 is employed in the jargon of the day, but both bril- 
 liantly characteristic examples. One is the portrait 
 supposed to be of that Cardinal Pamphili who, Ber- 
 uete tells us, on the authority of M. Niccolle, resigned 
 his high state in the Church in order to marry. It is 
 more freely painted than the "Olivares," and the 
 reds, based on a higher key than those in the latter 
 portrait, have a rosier, sweeter glow. The loose but 
 eloquent brushwork would by itself declare the au- 
 thenticity of the piece. The last member of the trio 
 
292 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 is a bewitching "Portrait of a Girl," which I recall 
 seeing in the memorable exhibition at the Guildhall 
 some t-en or twelve years ago, and have never been 
 able to forget, its fragrant character is so clearly pro- 
 claimed. Velasquez never painted a more delicately 
 haunting type than this little flower of Spanish child- 
 hood. Beruete has this interesting note on the prob- 
 able sitter: 
 
 The model is not one of the princesses of the House of 
 Austria, who are of such a different type; on the other 
 hand, one cannot help noticing its resemblance to some 
 of the grandchildren of Velasquez to be seen in the pic- 
 ture at Vienna, "The Family of Mazo," which leads me 
 to believe that the child is probably the same as the one 
 depicted standing in this picture, who appears to be be- 
 tween fourteen and sixteen years of age. If, therefore, 
 this is the case, the date of the work would be about 
 1642 to 1643, at which time the eldest daughter of Mazo 
 and Francisca Velasquez would be about seven or eight 
 years old, which is the age at which she is represented. 
 If we take into account the characteristics and technique of 
 the work, this is the date at which this picture was painted. 
 
 The scholarly critic's supposition is further borne 
 out by the inner significance of the portrait. It is 
 indubitably the memorial of a domestic sentiment, 
 the unaffected portrait of a merely human type. 
 When Velasquez painted a young Infanta of Spain 
 he performed prodigies of art, and on a fall of lace 
 over rose-colored silk, for example, would wreak such 
 technical magic as holds the connoisseur of mere 
 painting to this day enchanted. But the face of his 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 293 
 
 little princess, set in the mould of Spanish court eti- 
 quette, probably the most rigid formula ever known 
 in the history of manners, would somehow approxi- 
 mate to the chill immobility of a waxen doll. The 
 child in this portrait is an individuality, an art- 
 less, happy little girl, known intimately and loved. 
 Through the ennobling touch of the master's brush 
 she bears herself composedly and bravely in the com- 
 pany of his wily courtier and his very mundane 
 churchman. The three portraits together make an 
 invaluable boon for the lover and student of Velas- 
 quez. Decidedly, the searcher after artistic inspi- 
 ration will henceforth count the Hispanic Museum 
 among the shrines of great paintings. 
 
 IV 
 
 THE ROKEBY VENUS 
 
 Doubts vainly cast upon the authenticity of a great 
 picture ordinarily receive at the hands of the historian 
 no more consideration than is implied in the scant 
 courtesy of a brief footnote. Yet there are occasions 
 on which it seems legitimate to record at greater 
 length some particularly salient instance of critical 
 error. It is perhaps worth while to set down here 
 the remarkable case of Mr. James Greig and the 
 "Venus with the Mirror," better known as the 
 Rokeby Venus. It was in the early summer of 1910 
 
294 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 that cable despatches from London reported how Mr. 
 Greig, the art critic of The Morning Post, had at- 
 tempted circumstantially to deprive Velasquez of the 
 credit of having painted the renowned nude in the 
 National Gallery. Twice previously he had demon- 
 strated his acuteness in penetrating to the source of 
 an old picture. Upon a painting ascribed to Rem- 
 brandt in one of the winter exhibitions at Burling- 
 ton House he had discovered the signature of Ferdi- 
 nand Bol, and he had shown that a work in the Sal- 
 ting Collection, given to Pieter de Hoogh, was really 
 signed by Samuel van Hoogstraeten. Since these 
 disclosures of his had been accepted as conclusive it 
 was not unnatural to pay him some attention when 
 he advanced the h3T)otliesis that the "Venus," long 
 believed to be by Velasquez, bore the cipher of Juan 
 Bautista Del Mazo, the son-in-law of the court 
 painter of Philip IV. His claim was that he had 
 found in the lower left-hand corner of the picture, 
 about twelve inches under the left foot of the recli- 
 ning figure, a signature which, as he reproduced it in 
 The Morning Post, clearly revealed only a "B" and 
 an "M." The cipher suggested rather than actually 
 exhibited the full initials of Mazo. Against this claim 
 Sir Charles Holroyd, the director of the National Gal- 
 lery (himself an artist), set the fact that after ta- 
 king off the glass he had obtained a certificate from 
 eight experts that there was no signature visible. 
 Nevertheless the affair made a prodigious sensation, 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 295 
 
 promoting floods of argument in the press every- 
 where, and so it seems, as I have said, interesting to 
 return to the subject and to examine into the history 
 and character of the picture. 
 
 It is related by Beruete to the period following 
 tlie second of the painter's two Italian journeys, the 
 period of the "Mercury and Argos," the "Mars," 
 and several other mythological subjects produced 
 toward the end of his career. These included a 
 "Psyche and Cupid," an "Apollo and Marsyas" and 
 a "Venus and Adonis," which adorned the Hall of 
 Mirrors in the Alcazar at Madrid and were destroyed 
 by fire in 1734. Traversing the history of the "Venus 
 with the Mirror," Beruete says: 
 
 The first mention made of it is by Don Antonio Ponz 
 in his "Viaje de Espana," published in 1776, wherein he 
 describes the paintings in the house of the Duke of Alba. 
 Don Pedro de Madrazo in an article published in the 
 "IlustracionEspanolay Americana," 8th November, 1874, 
 presumes that "Venus with the Mirror" is none other 
 than "Psiquis y Cupido," which appears in the inven- 
 tory of the year 1686 of the Royal Alcazar, and adds 
 that, owing to the fire in the Alcazar in 1734, it must 
 have been removed to the house of the Duke of Alba. 
 Professor Justi, and Curtis, in agreement with Madrazo, 
 ascribed the same origin to the picture which I admitted 
 as being correct in the French edition of my book. 
 
 Recently I have been able to determine the true origin, 
 and clear up the confusion existing between this picture 
 and that of "Psiquis y Cupido," the subject and meas- 
 urement of which are different from those of the "Venus 
 with the Mirror." The latter figures in the inventories of 
 
296 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 the collections of Don Caspar Mendez de Haro, son of 
 the famous Don Luis Mendez de Haro, Marquis of Car- 
 pio and Heliche, minister and favorite of Philip IV from 
 the time of the fall of his uncle, the Conde-Duque de 
 Olivares in 1643. The inventories were made, one in 
 Rome in 1682, and another in Naples in 1688. In these 
 inventories there appears the picture of the "Venus" 
 mentioned in the following terms, "A life-size Venus, re- 
 clining nude and a child holding a mirror in which she 
 sees herself. The picture of the Venus is an original of 
 Don Diego Velasquez." The picture of the Venus there- 
 fore did not belong to the Alcazar Palace as Madrazo 
 thought but to the Mendez de Haro family. 
 
 By the marriage of Dona Catalina de Haro y Guzman, 
 daughter of Don Caspar, with the Duke of Alba, in 1688, 
 the property of the Haro family reverted to the House of 
 Alba, and with it the picture of the Venus of Velasquez. 
 In 1802, at the death of the renowned Duchess of Alba, 
 whose portrait was so often painted by Coya, at the 
 court of Charles IV, by testamentary disposition of this 
 lady part of her property was bequeathed to personal 
 friends, who were therefore not her legitimate heirs. This 
 brought about a lawsuit at the instance of the successor 
 to the title and estate of the House of Alba, who was the 
 Duke of Berwick, Liria, and Jerica, and during the law- 
 suit the King, Charles IV, issued an order that the three 
 pictures in question should be sold to his prime minister 
 and favorite Don Manuel Codoy, Principe de la Paz. 
 These three pictures were "The Madonna of the House 
 of Alba," by Raphael, "The School of Love," by Cor- 
 reggio, and the "Venus with the Mirror." 
 
 After the fall of the Principe de la Paz in 1808, the 
 Venus was sold to Mr. Wallis, the agent of the well- 
 known dealer in pictures, Mr. Buchanan, in 1813, and on 
 the advice of Sir Thomas Lawrence it was bought from 
 Mr. Buchanan by Mr. Morritt for £500. From that time 
 up till October, 1905, this picture has held the place of 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 297 
 
 honor in Rokeby Park [the home of Mr. Morritt], with 
 the exception of the two occasions on which it has been 
 exhibited to the public, in 1857, and in Burlington House 
 in 1890 at the exhibition of Old Masters. 
 
 The rest of the story is briefly told. A few years 
 ago it was "in the air" that the picture might be 
 bought, and the present writer, by the way, so far 
 succeeded in interesting one buyer in the subject, 
 that he promised to go down to Rokeby Park and 
 see if he could not obtain it for the American market. 
 A few months later, in 1906, came the news that it 
 had been sold under an order of the Court of Chan- 
 cery for £30,500, and that the purchasers were the 
 dealers, T. Agnew & Sons. They exhibited it for a 
 couple of months, and there was much excitement 
 over the chance of its passing to America. There- 
 upon the National Arts Collection Fund raised the 
 sum of £45,000 and presented it to the nation. The 
 episode had its obscure side. Some observers won- 
 dered why the price had soared so high, and one of 
 them, Mr. Edmund Gosse, wrote to the press as 
 follows: 
 
 A very large sum has changed hands over the Rokeby 
 Venus and we have no statement of the name or the in- 
 tention of the person or persons who made this payment 
 necessary, nor of any other facts regarding the early his- 
 tory of the transaction. I ask for an exact historical ac- 
 count of the offer and the obtaining of the Rokeby Venus 
 with all the names and all the dates and all the pay- 
 ments. 
 
298 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 Mr. Gosse never got what he wanted, though it is 
 said that there was "a confidential statement to the 
 Conunittee of the National Arts Collection Fund 
 which appears to have satisfied that body." Mean- 
 while, the authenticity of the picture had not gone 
 unchallenged, though it should be added that close 
 watch upon the fortunes of this canvas was not re- 
 warded by any public revelations carrying any par- 
 ticular weight. The Morning Post, which was of 
 course keen upon backing up its critic, editorially 
 observed that "a number of men eminent in art and 
 letters always cast doubts on the aesthetic and mone- 
 tary value of the picture," but when it went on to 
 give names all it could say was that "among these 
 may be mentioned Sir William Richmond, Mr. Ed- 
 mund Gosse, and Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower." 
 The trio is not precisely imposing. Sir William Rich- 
 mond is the artist whose decorations in St. Paul's 
 aroused a storm of protest, and I know nothing in his 
 work as a painter or in his record otherwise to Justify 
 the assumption that he has esoteric insight into the 
 art of Velasquez. In a recent lecture he informed 
 the students of the Royal Academy that there were 
 two pigments used in the painting of the Venus which 
 were not in existence in the time of Velasquez. What- 
 ever the force of this argument may be it scarcely 
 bolsters up the idea that the picture was painted by 
 Velasquez's son-in-law, unless we are to assume that 
 the latter was privately inventing new colors. As 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 299 
 
 for Mr. Edmund Gosse, he has, so far as I can see, 
 no standing whatever in a court adjudicating an ar- 
 tistic case. His suspicions as to the sale do not sig- 
 nify that he is an expert on Velasquez. Lord Ronald 
 Sutherland Gower has written some interesting artis- 
 tic biographies, but neither in these nor in the work 
 of sculpture which he erected in Stratford has he sug- 
 gested that he is possessed of rare powers of artistic 
 divination. 
 
 I would not, however, lay undue stress upon the 
 character of Mr. Greig's witnesses — though it is a 
 fair point — because it is, in the circumstances, of no 
 great consequence. As regards the documentary evi- 
 dence adduced by Beruete it seems to me convincing, 
 but in any case we should turn with confidence to 
 the picture itself. It is not, I fear, what it once was. 
 In the process of cleaning it has lost something of its 
 bloom, and, in fact, it is impossible not to feel fairly 
 indignant over the scrubbing it would appear to have 
 received. But not even the scrubbing could rob it of 
 its essential charm, the essential charm of Velasquez. 
 Beruete aptly notes that it is painted in exactly the 
 same tones as the "Mercury and Argus" and the 
 "Mars," and he finds in it also a certain preponderance 
 of purple tones allying it to the master's " Coronation 
 of the Virgin." He goes on to describe it as one of 
 the principal works of Velasquez, one of the most im- 
 portant by him outside the Prado — and he might 
 have added that it is one of those in which you most 
 
300 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 subtly and most quickly feel the indefinable magic of 
 his touch. The flesh painting is superb and partic- 
 ularly well illustrates the strong purity of the mas- 
 ter, that quality in tone and in brushwork which does 
 so much to give him his place apart. Even if the 
 initials cited by Mr. Greig had been demonstrated to 
 exist — and the manner in which they revealed them- 
 selves to some observers and not to others imported 
 an element of humor into the situation — it would 
 still have been left to the doubting critics really to 
 make good their case. If Velasquez did not paint 
 this exquisite picture then it must have been executed 
 by another master of the same name. 
 
 EL GRECO AND GOYA 
 
 El Greco is one of the painters who have lived by 
 ideas. The melodramatic aspect of much of his work 
 has obscured this fact. Criticism has been baffled 
 by the eccentric elongation of form which generally 
 marks his treatment of the figure, by his strange and 
 even sinister traits as a colorist, and by his sometimes 
 unduly forced effects of hght and shade. The im- 
 pression he conveys, as of a genius lying in a sort of 
 penumbra, outside the traditional lines of develop- 
 ment in European painting, has been happily sum- 
 marized by a clever English artist and writer, Charles 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 301 
 
 Ricketts. The works of El Greco, he has said, look 
 as if they had been painted by torchlight in a dun- 
 geon of the Inquisition. The saying is perfect save 
 for the implication it carries of an atmosphere harsh 
 and cruel. M. Barres takes us nearer to the painter's 
 secret in his ingenious hypothesis making El Greco 
 simply the predestined interpreter of the spirit of To- 
 ledo. A mystic in the last, subtlest ingredients of his 
 being, he threw in his fortunes with a centre of mys- 
 ticism when he made the old cathedral town the scene 
 of his labors. Man of the world though he was, and 
 vividly alive to all things touching the eye and the 
 mind, his genius as an artist was still in harmony 
 with the sentiment of the church. This view of the 
 matter may not be conclusive, but at all events it 
 affords a profitable clew, inasmuch as it directs at- 
 tention to El Greco's more spiritual qualities. 
 
 The coimoisseur of technic will linger appreciatively 
 over his portraits, but if he is wise he will go on to 
 consider not only the powerful execution but the sym- 
 pathy with which El Greco painted the princes and 
 minor servants of the church, and a host of laymen 
 too. In his studies of character, no less than in his 
 religious subjects, and in pictures like the famous 
 "Burial of Count Orgaz," where devout ecstasy and 
 the realistic traits of secular portraiture are com- 
 mingled, there is something mysteriously poignant, 
 a sombre emotion, a point of view which is not that 
 of a painter merely, but of a man sunk in half-pain- 
 
302 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 ful revery. His amazing "View of Toledo," almost 
 the sole souvenir of his interest in landscape, is re- 
 markable for much more than its dramatic sky, its 
 intense "picturesqueness." What chiefly impresses 
 us is its character as a spiritual record. The theatri- 
 cality of the piece is due to no misreading of nature, 
 but to the fact that the scene has been observed with 
 some indefinable "inner vision." Was that vision 
 notably inspired? Do we owe to its operation pic- 
 tures of extraordinary moment? Despite the fervor 
 with which El Greco is appraised in some quarters, 
 one may be permitted to doubt. The recent craze for 
 the old masters has promoted varied developments. 
 When the dealers, ransacldng Europe anew, turned 
 their attention to Spain, El Greco came in for an 
 astonishing and not altogether rationalized popular- 
 ity. His present rather esoteric vogue is not neces- 
 sarily going to last. When the dithyrambic cease 
 from troubling and the scoffers are at rest, apprecia- 
 tion of El Greco will probably be found somewhere 
 between acceptance of him as a great master and re- 
 jection of him as a morbid eccentric. 
 
 The contrast between El Greco and Goya is pro- 
 found. One used in his pictures a light that never 
 was on land or sea. The other used the familiar 
 hght of the world in which he lived. The genuine- 
 ness of El Greco's mysticism we cannot question, 
 however we may speculate as to its ultimate value. 
 Goya's religious emotion, when he brought it into 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 303 
 
 play, was not precisely insincere, but it certainly had 
 no depth, no real force. He too, like El Greco, lived 
 by ideas, but they were the ideas of a satirist, and an 
 ineffably worldly-wise satirist at that. His art is sat- 
 urated in intelligence. It is as modern in feeling 
 as it is in technique. All his sitters were "subjects." 
 That is why his work has such tremendous vitality. 
 It interested him to the point of passion. Style in 
 art is of personality all compact. You can read a 
 man's character in the play of his brush. Goya's 
 history is writ plain across the surfaces of his por- 
 traits. 
 
 He was an eager, militant creature. The period of 
 social decadence in which he lived enraged but could 
 not disgust or depress him. He looked upon the vi- 
 cious court with a scorn he would not pretend to 
 disguise, but he painted it with delight and gratitude. 
 For a man of his moods and sardonic, inquiring mind 
 what could have been more welcome than such a mass 
 of raw material? And besides the bad and the weak 
 there were so many figures in Goya's Spain that were, 
 on the surface, merely beautiful. Look at one of his 
 portraits of the great court ladies of his time and 
 observe the delicacy with which the painter caresses 
 an exquisite motive. Watch him as he renders the 
 elusive charm of texture in a fashionable dress or gives 
 himself up to the sensuous grace of "The Famous 
 Bookseller of the Calle de las Carretas." Beauty of 
 form and of color, the magic of light, the dramatic 
 
304 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 significance of movement — these things find in him 
 truly "the devouring eye" and a hand itching to 
 translate the thing seen into terms of paint. Goya 
 is of his time, of course, and his portraits are Span- 
 ish to the core. His faculty for blending the ease 
 of every-day actuality with a certain stiffness attrib- 
 utable to courtly modes carries us straight back to 
 eighteenth-century Madrid. But in their: ruthless 
 psychology and in their peculiar technical brilliancy, 
 which is wreaked upon human nature as in a fury of 
 artistic passion, his portraits might have been 
 painted yesterday. 
 
 VI 
 FOUR MODERN SPANIARDS 
 
 FORTUNY 
 
 Was Fortuny a man of genius, and, if so, in what 
 does his genius consist? There are commentators 
 who barely admit that he had more than a cheap 
 talent. I have heard an artist, himself possessed of 
 at least a streak of genius, disparaging the young 
 Spaniard, untimely lost, as though he had a personal 
 and somewhat mean little grudge to satisfy. Well, 
 I know that Fortuny's vogue is not what it once was, 
 but neither is it plain that he is on the way to be 
 forgotten. The genius, I think, is there. It consists 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 305 
 
 in impeccable draughtsmanship, dazzling color, and 
 aboimding sunlight, all fused with the rapidity and 
 sureness of instinct into works of brilliantly original 
 styi^ The Impressionists might protest that For- 
 tuny had no atmosphere, and it is true that his out- 
 door work lacks the subtle vibrations which the Bar- 
 bizon men first introduced into their pictures and 
 which the Impressionists have since made the chief 
 object of their study. But Fortuny's landscape is 
 nevertheless true, his light and air are unmistakably 
 drawn from an intimate acquaintance with nature, 
 and though he is pre-eminently a magician of nine- 
 teenth-century painting, pre-eminently a master who 
 gets out of the palette such coruscating effects as 
 we look for in the art of a musical virtuoso, he is 
 one of the most accurate and one of the most hu- 
 man painters of his time. 
 
 Somewhere in his correspondence Henri Regnault 
 speaks of Fortuny's having robbed him of his sleep 
 through the tremendous effect of his art. It is easy 
 to understand how the young Frenchman must have 
 been overwhelmed. Coming from Paris, where aca- 
 demic precept has always held such sway, he must 
 have felt that as a matter of course good drawing 
 was the product of study as well as of genius. ' In 
 Fortuny he saw it spring on the canvas as though 
 by legerdemain. Fortuny studied, studied all his life 
 long, and in a number of sketch-books which his 
 widow still possesses in her palace in Venice there 
 
3o6 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 are pages and pages of drawings which reveal the 
 most ardent search after the last details of structural 
 truth. The painter never wearied of verifying his 
 impressions. He labored with well-nigh as much 
 assiduity as Meissonier showed, and that is say- 
 ing much. But he never fell into Meissonier's rigid 
 methods of drawing. On the contrary he went on 
 handling his brush and pencil and etching-needle with 
 the freedom and dexterity of one for whom difficul- 
 ties did not exist. 
 
 It is surprising to find how soon he arrived at 
 this freedom. Born at Reus, in Catalonia, in June, 
 1838, his modest circumstances kept him for a while 
 unable to pursue his artistic studies to advantage. 
 And when, in his teens, he labored at the Barcelona 
 Academy, he won the Prix de Rome without doing 
 anything that clearly foreshadowed the triumphs of 
 his manhood. When I took a long journey to look 
 up the memorials of that early time I was some- 
 what disappointed by the little collection preserved 
 at Barcelona. But in 1859, when General Prim was 
 carrying on military operations in Morocco, the young 
 painter was sent to the front to make studies of the 
 campaign. He made them. Ultimately, after vex- 
 atious delays and negotiations too complicated to be 
 touched upon at length in this place, he produced 
 "The Battle of Tetuan," a large canvas which may 
 be seen in the Barcelona museum. It is an inter- 
 esting picture, and shows that the artist had found 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 307 
 
 his style. But still more eloquent are the small 
 studies made by Fortuny at this time. If he had felt 
 the witchery of the sun in Spain he had not yet car- 
 ried it into his art. Arriving in Morocco the sun took 
 him captive forever, and the bizarre character of the 
 landscape and people settled the direction of his 
 genius. From that epoch he became the Fortuny 
 that we know. A few years later he was in Paris: 
 then he visited Madrid and married Senorita Madrazo, 
 daughter of the director of the Prado; and in a little 
 while he proceeded to Rome, living there until his 
 death in 1874. Neither in Paris nor Spain nor Italy 
 did he let go of the Moorish inspiration. That had 
 saturated his nature, and his entire work shows him 
 the master of those exquisite effects of color and light 
 which he first saw on the campaign with General Prim. 
 Even in such pictures as "The Spanish Marriage" or 
 " The Academicians of Saint Luke Choosing a Model," 
 which are far removed in their fastidious elegance from 
 the blaze and brilliancy of Moorish scenes, he is true to 
 the old point of departure. The sparkle which be- 
 longs to his sketches of Tangiers still plays about 
 his drawing-room scenes and his studies of rococo 
 figures, furniture, costume and manners. 
 
 His critics have sometimes averred that it was all 
 a matter of trickery, a skilful appHcation of the pyro- 
 technical ingenuities of Goya, whom he had certainly 
 studied with much devotion. But one way of prov- 
 ing the fallacy of this judgment is to compare 
 
3o8 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 Fortuny with any of his numerous followers, espe- 
 cially in Paris, Madrid and Rome. His methods 
 become trickery and jugglery in lesser hands. With 
 him they were the spontaneous and artless expression 
 of his nature. Hence his paintings glitter without 
 being artificial, they are Hke jewelled canvases, but 
 they are never hard or mechanical. Furthermore, 
 they have, for all their daintiness and fragile charm, 
 a peculiar strength and even dignity of composition. 
 Few cautious and thoughtful Academicians have had 
 a finer gift for filling a canvas than Fortuny pos- 
 sessed. The great picture of "The Academicians of 
 Saint Luke Choosing a Model" is one proof of this, 
 "The Spanish Marriage" is another; but, indeed, 
 Fortuny's smallest and most casual sketch was apt 
 to have this balance and this beauty of proportion. 
 I recall the arrangement of the accessories in a httle 
 sketch of the artist's daughter, the relation of the 
 white table to the dark background and the just 
 proportions of the two contrasting spaces. Instinc- 
 tively Fortuny put his figures in the right part of the 
 canvas or paper, instinctively he introduced or omit- 
 ted just the things that would make or mar his 
 design, and if "The Academicians of Saint Luke 
 Choosing a Model" and "The Spanish Marriage" 
 are more remarkable in one way than another it is 
 in their illustration of sumptuousness combined with 
 perfect simplicity of design. There is a water-color 
 of Fortuny's which represents a Kabyle chief stand- 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 309 
 
 ing on a prayer-rug in a mosque in Tangiers, his 
 picturesque figure set boldly against a massive wliite 
 pillar. In the background the broad walls of the 
 mosque, with their bands of arabesques, are drawn 
 with great breadth and force. It is Just such a 
 composition as would reduce most artists to despair, 
 the materials are so hopelessly simple. Fortuny 
 keeps each detail in exactly the right relation to 
 the next and makes a symmetrical picture where it 
 would have seemed impossible to make more than an 
 ephemeral sketch. 
 
 There is nothing ephemeral about his work. Gay 
 as it is, light-hearted and vivacious as is the senti- 
 ment which nms through it, there is still a remark- 
 able solidity about this master's art. Whatever he 
 did he did so well, whatever vein he cultivated he 
 forced to yield such beautiful and original results, 
 that the one law of experience which promises to harm 
 him is really suspended in his honor. He glitters, and 
 the artist who glitters is almost invariably tiring. 
 But Fortuny does not tire. 
 
 II 
 
 SOROLLA 
 
 A long time ago, in Madrid, the painters and sculp- 
 tors I met there were unanimous on the question of 
 what one of their fellow-artists would ultimately do 
 
3IO Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 to astonish the world. They maintained that Joa- 
 quin SoroUa, a painter then still in his young man- 
 hood, was going sooner or later to revolutionize the 
 school to which they belonged and to win European 
 fame. At first it was a little difficult to understand 
 this enthusiasm. A picture by him, much in favor 
 at the time, the one called "Another Marguerite" 
 (which is now, by the way, preserved in St. Louis), 
 made its impression rather through its pathos than 
 through any special qualities of technique. Later, 
 certain open-air studies of his provided an explana- 
 tion of the emotion of his friends. They showed that 
 he was achieving remarkable mastery over effects of 
 light and air, and that he was developing also great 
 adroitness as a draughtsman. Since then Sorolla's 
 progress has been phenomenal, and I was interested 
 to observe, at the large exhibition which he opened in 
 the Georges Petit gallery, in Paris, several years ago, 
 that he had more than fulfilled old expectations. 
 This exhibition was repeated at the Grafton galleries, 
 in London, and more recently, early in 1909, the 
 artist made a similar appearance in New York. 
 Three hundred and fifty of his paintings and studies 
 were hung in the building of the Hispanic Society of 
 America. 
 
 Sorolla's significance as a figure in modern Spanish 
 art is the better appreciated if the student considers 
 the traits of his more salient predecessors. With the 
 death of Goya, in 1828, Spain bade farewell to an 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 311 
 
 artistic vitality which, in fact, he alone had kept 
 going for a long period. Even Goya had but fitfully 
 revived gleams of that sacred fire which had burned 
 with so steady a glow in the art of Velasquez, and it 
 is especially important to note that he founded no 
 school. The Spaniards following him were, to tell the 
 truth, a rather mediocre company, painting in dull, 
 academic fashion. The first man of consequence to 
 rise amongst them was Mariano Fortuny. He was 
 a type of what is familiarly known as diabolical clev- 
 erness. He manipulated his pigments with the skill 
 of a conjurer taking a rabbit out of a hat. But, as 
 I have already shown, he was not a mere producer 
 of jeweller's work, of bric-a-brac in paint. Unfor- 
 tunately, it was his sleight-of-hand that appealed to 
 the men who gathered around him in Rome, and 
 that they made popular there and in Spain. A 
 vast quantity of Spanish art was presently all aglit- 
 ter. To the credit of some of its makers, be it said, 
 they had talents strong enough to triumph over the 
 besetting temptation. Pradilla, for example, was 
 quick to perceive that man cannot live by bric-a-brac 
 alone, and his individuality pushed its way through 
 the web of filigree and sparkle which Fortuny had 
 made so bewitching. Yet Pradilla remained a sharer 
 in his clever countryman's love of detail, of pictur- 
 esque costume and so on, and this predilection caught 
 any number of other Spaniards in its net. Villegas 
 is perhaps the most conspicuous of these, but a long 
 
312 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 list might be made of men who were bound to give 
 to any miscellaneous exhibition of Spanish art a gen- 
 eral air of artificial light used to bring out the sheen 
 of rich stuffs and metals, of pictures worked up in the 
 studio rather than based upon frank contact with 
 nature. A man of genius, following a legitimate in- 
 spiration, might turn this motive of technical leger- 
 demain to good purpose, as the late Daniel Vierge did 
 in the formation of his brilliant style as a pen draughts- 
 man, but in the field of painting it was certain to be 
 superseded. SoroUa has done more than any other 
 Spaniard of his time to put it in its proper place. 
 
 There are other reyolutionists in the school, and 
 one or two of them, like Zuloaga and Anglada, have 
 won high repute, but neither of these painters pro- 
 duces work that is, as the saying goes, "of the cen- 
 tre." They see nature as through a very arbitrarily 
 fabricated veil. Anglada blends the note of the 
 Salon with that of Goya and leaves an impression 
 of meretricious artifice. Zuloaga is a master of 
 the tour de force; and though that need not neces- 
 sarily spell anything undesirable, it means, in 
 his case, work that somehow fails to carry con- 
 viction. Sorolla's strength lies in his genuine- 
 ness. He does not follow either Fortuny or Velas- 
 quez. He faces nature and endeavors to put her 
 truths upon canvas precisely as he sees them. "En- 
 deavors" is, perhaps, hardly the word. If there is 
 one thing more than another suggested by his work, 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 313 
 
 it is that he paints a picture as a man might write 
 a note — setting down what he has to say with pos- 
 itively appalling fluency and aplomb. I remember 
 a picture of his of a girl in white at Biarritz, a girl 
 painted in full light. She was using a small photo- 
 graphic camera, and he called the picture "Instan- 
 tanea." The legend might go with the mass of his 
 work. His exhibition in Paris was much frequented 
 by artists, and one of them, standing in amazement 
 before a certain study of children running against 
 the wind near the surf, paid a striking tribute to 
 SoroUa's faculty for depicting action. "Listen," he 
 said to me, this painter himself famous throughout 
 Europe for an almost uncanny skill, "I have had years 
 of experience in dealing with problems Uke these, 
 and I doa't know how he does it! I would have 
 thought one needed a camera to get the truth in such 
 shape as that." 
 
 It is not with light and air alone, with a broad 
 swift vision of things," that he gains his success. It 
 is with a decisive grasp upon form, and a power 
 of drawing that sometimes leaves one breathless. He 
 has been described, with overwrought zeal, as "apart 
 from, and superior to, the modern French Impres- 
 sionists." He is not superior to Manet, for example, 
 or to Degas, for art, as the too fervid advocates 
 should remember, embraces many qualities. It will 
 be time to talk of Senor SoroUa's superiority when he 
 has surpassed such masterpieces, say, as that portrait 
 
3 14 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 of a lady in black, by Degas, which is one of the gems 
 in Mrs. Gardner's collection in Boston and Fortuny's 
 superb portrait in the same key in the Metropolitan 
 Museum. Neither of these, by the way, it may be 
 said in all courtesy, has he yet even approached. 
 Probably Senor Sorolla himself would be quick to 
 recognize the fact. But there are imdoubtedly points 
 of difference between this Spaniard and the French- 
 man whose passion for the open air is likewise his 
 own. His draughtsmanship is closer, he "follows form 
 with a simpler, more confident, and, above all, more 
 flowing touch. The odd thing is that he charms, 
 gives you the sense of a certain personal quality in 
 his drawing, for all that his style might be roughly 
 described as more photographic, more scientific, than 
 artistic. I may cite his "Sea Idyll," a picture of a 
 boy and a girl l3ang in wet sand with the water just 
 touching their legs. The boy wears nothing save an 
 old straw hat with a wide brim. The girl wears a 
 bathing dress of some thin material, and this, sat- 
 urated with water, clings to her body. It would be 
 impossible to beat the sheer technical proficiency 
 shown in this painting, and, as has been said, there 
 is an odd savor of individuality, of style, to be ap- 
 prehended, fused with the clever brushwork. 
 
 It is with such motives as the one here described 
 that Sorolla is at his best. Over and over again he 
 paints his young bathers, scampering along the sands, 
 enfolded in the towel brought by a nurse, just plung- 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 315 
 
 ing into the waves, or, as in one beautiful example, 
 "Swimmers," showing their lithe brown bodies in 
 the very element itself and taking on therefrom a new 
 beauty. His "Oxen Ready to Beach Fishing Boats, 
 Valencia," the picture with well-filled white sails bil- 
 lowing above the boats and cattle, is known every- 
 where through reproductions. It admirably illus- 
 trates his bravura. It is a picture painted for the 
 Salon that is, nevertheless, not wholly a "Salon 
 picture." That is to say, Sorolla boldly arrests your 
 attention, yet puts not a trace of sensationalism into 
 his work. His drawing is as soimd, his color is as 
 well managed, his spirit is as sincere as when he is 
 making one of his smaller studies or even painting 
 one of his innumerable little snap-shots. 
 
 You would say, on observing the uniform authority 
 of this painter, exerted alike in a great "show-piece" 
 and in a casual note of movement and color, that his 
 resources could never fail him; but it must be con- 
 fessed that, with all his gifts, he still has certain 
 clearly defined limitations. Let him work in a flood 
 of sunlight and he is at his ease, but ask him to paint 
 nature in one of her tenderer, more poetic aspects, 
 and he is not so sure. His science does not forsake 
 him. He paints his ground forms truthfully enough. 
 But he brings no emotion to his task, no sub- 
 tlety, and to note this fact in his landscape work 
 is presently to note it elsewhere with even greater 
 regret. 
 
3i6 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 As a portrait-painter Sorolla is, one may be sure, 
 a master of the likeness. You are impressed by the 
 firmness with which he models a head, the nimble- 
 ness with which he passes swiftly over the features, 
 and, above all, the vitality with which he invests his 
 sitter. But while his grasp of form and his sense of 
 character may be demonstrated in these heads, and 
 while he may paint the bodies of his men and women 
 with understanding, the want of sunlight seems to 
 react upon his temperament and to make him cold, 
 to deprive his style of most, if not all, of its Uan. 
 Furthermore, his portraits show, even more than his 
 open-air pictures — and these are by no means devoid 
 of significance in the matter — that while his color is 
 true it never possesses a fine quality. About nothing 
 that he paints does there hang the charm of beautiful 
 surface. He uses his pigments not sensitively, not 
 with a loving feeling for them, but with a kind of 
 brutality. His pictures, especially when seen in large 
 numbers, have an almost blinding effect. They do 
 not beguile, they dazzle. They bring vividly into 
 the foreground the fact that Sorolla is not an imag- 
 inative painter, not a man of dreams or of complex 
 emotions. He is simply a marvellously equipped 
 technician, born to paint human beings breathing 
 and moving in a world of light and air. Though 
 his works do not "wear well," having no creative 
 inspiration in them, their immediate, momentary 
 appeal is irresistible. 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 317 
 III 
 
 ZULOAGA 
 
 The exhibition at the Hispanic Museum of the 
 works of SoroUa was followed by one of some thirty- 
 five or forty paintings by his countryman, Ignacio 
 Zuloaga. This artist, like the other, has made some 
 stir in Paris and elsewhere, though he has not in his 
 own land enjoyed quite the same popularity as 
 Sorolla. The explanation is simple. The methods 
 of Sorolla are of special importance to existing con- 
 ditions in Spanish art. The example of his direct 
 dealing with open-air subjects has been needed by the 
 school to which he belongs. Zuloaga, a very different 
 type, has no invigorating inspiration to transmit to 
 contemporaries already predisposed to excessive ar- 
 tifice. He is himself of artifice all compact, one of 
 those painters who retire to a world of their own, 
 consulting Nature only in order to clothe her truths 
 in a specious garment. The commotion aforesaid 
 which he has produced is not, of course, to be cava- 
 lierly dismissed. A reputation like that of Zuloaga 
 must rest upon some more or less substantial foun- 
 dation. It would seem to have its basis in novelty 
 or rather in the exploitation of old ideas by a piquant 
 personality. 
 
 This painter derives, in substance, from Goya. 
 He is interested in national t3^es of a picturesque 
 
3i8 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 or even grotesque order, and delineates them in 
 somewhat sombre mood. The women in one of his 
 pictures, "The Sorceresses of San Millan," are just 
 such bleak old witches as Goya loved to draw. It is 
 not the mere subject that hints at a sympathy be- 
 tween the modern painter and the eighteenth-cen- 
 tury master. There are subtler points of identifi- 
 cation, points of temperament. In his studies of 
 familiar Spanish life Zuloaga also recalls the early 
 hodegones of Velasquez, but there is really nothing in 
 common between him and the great court painter. 
 Velasquez had an instinct for beauty. Zuloaga 
 would seem to have nothing of the sort. Velasquez 
 was a supreme exemplar of style. Zuloaga is a man- 
 nerist if ever there was one. His manner, like every- 
 thing else in his art, points to an external influence, 
 suggests work done from without rather than pro- 
 duced out of true creative energy. He reproduces 
 the accent of Manet, without its freshness and fire. 
 His figures are painted in broad and heavy masses 
 of flat color, not precisely opaque, but scarcely trans- 
 parent. He is fond of the silhouette. Though his 
 figures do not lack relief, but are, indeed, very solidly 
 and even boldly modelled, they leave the impression 
 of having been painted in outHne and then filled in 
 with color. The result is arresting. Few eclectics 
 are so successful as Zuloaga has been in fusing di- 
 verse influences and adding a suggestion of individ- 
 uality. You feel that he has looked sympathetically 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 319 
 
 at the old Spanish painters, interested himself in the 
 types of the Spanish countryside or the bull-ring, 
 taken a leaf out of the book of French Impressionism, 
 and then set himself down in the studio to work it all 
 up into an effective picture for the Salon. There he 
 would be bound to attract attention, but it is difl&cult 
 to see how criticism could have ignored the unin- 
 spired character of his work and its very grave 
 specific defects. 
 
 His surfaces are cold and inert. They are, in fact, 
 positively claylike. It is almost incredible that a 
 painter so clever should deal in tones so hard and 
 lifeless. Nowhere in his work is anything hke elas- 
 ticity to be discerned. His leathery, unmodulated 
 color is matched by his dogged, nerveless crafts- 
 manship. Of the documentary value of some of his 
 paintings there can be no question. He is a faith- 
 ful illustrator. There are paintings by Zuloaga which 
 vividly revive memories of stony Spanish hill-towns, 
 bathed in cold, crystal-clear light. They are very 
 Spanish, and so is he — racy, without nuance, abso- 
 lutely tangible. The direct statement characteristic 
 of this painter is as forcible, as uncompromising, as 
 the heavy mass of a Spanish wall, and pigment as it 
 is used in his mode of expression has something of 
 the same density. Why is it, I wonder, that the 
 latter-day Spanish painter, like Zuloaga or Sorolla, 
 seemingly makes no effort to study that pure beauty 
 of surface which meant so much to the Velasquez 
 
320 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 whom doubtless they adore? Their color may be 
 never so brilliant, and yet it is without quality and 
 very nearly opaque. The best of Zuloaga's pictures 
 is never anything more than a tour deforce, as sharply 
 vivid in its definition of form as a merely honest, in 
 no wise "touched-up" photograph might be, and 
 with every note of color in it given its full value. 
 This color, too, is kept well together, and it tells 
 effectively against a somewhat factitious but still 
 very skilfully painted background. The figure is full 
 of life, and in the strongly modelled head and face, 
 brimming over with character, the artist provides 
 just the right climax to his vitalized, pictorial mo- 
 tive. Only a powerful and original craftsman could 
 do this thing. What is it, then, that disturbs our 
 impression? 
 
 The excess of detail in the painting of the costume, 
 the forced simplicity of the background, which too 
 obviously, too trickily, throws out the figure; the 
 savor of studio pose which underlies the indubitable 
 reality of the piece; — all these things might conceiv- 
 ably fall into subordination to the artist's main pur- 
 pose and even appear negligible if it were not for one 
 cardinal limitation. This is Zuloaga's blunt indif- 
 ference to the genius of his medium. I have called 
 his color brilliant, but it is a hot and heavy brilliance. 
 His drawing, though not precisely turgid, is unques- 
 tionably wanting in ease, and, by the same token, in 
 distinction. He is an able painter, and yet the con- 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 321 
 
 viction will not down that he paints, so to say, by- 
 main strength. His work is full of interest and it 
 has not an atom of charm. Zuloaga is one of those 
 painters who excite in us a kind of wistful revery. 
 We speculate as to what achievements might have 
 been theirs if only their gifts had been a little better 
 balanced. We look at a picture by him, so well 
 composed, so masterfully done, and wish that the 
 composition had been a little more artlessly framed, 
 that he had got into it something of the spontaneity 
 of life instead of the immobility of a good tableau. 
 We wish for more atmosphere, for tones more subtly 
 broken; in a word, for less of brute force and more 
 of creative mystery. He can paint a boldly asser- 
 tive portrait, working on the surface. He cannot 
 paint the soul of things, for amongst all his rich re- 
 sources we find neither imagination nor taste. 
 
 IV 
 
 VIEEGE 
 I 
 
 Paris paid a handsome tribute to the memory of 
 Daniel Vierge in the late winter of 191 2. I saw 
 then, in the Pavilion de Marsan, a voluminous and 
 impressive array of his drawings and other produc- 
 tions, brought together in recognition of the fact 
 that his genius needed to be, in the characteristic 
 
322 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 French phrase, definitively established and conse- 
 crated. For this purpose the organizers wisely chose 
 as their most desirable souvenir of the great draughts- 
 man the series of illustrations for "Don Quixote" in 
 which he fulfilled the ambition of a lifetime; but 
 there were scores of other things to affirm his fame. 
 And it was high time for him to be thus commemo- 
 rated. When he died, some seven years prior to this 
 exhibition held in his honor, I remember noticing 
 with chagrin how little attention was paid to the 
 event by the world at large. And yet public indif- 
 ference to the termination of a remarkable career 
 was perhaps to be expected. 
 
 When this born draughtsman left Madrid, his na- 
 tive town, in his nineteenth year, and went to Paris, 
 he reached there just in time to make sketches of 
 the siege for the Monde Illustre. His work was so 
 good that he had thereafter no difficulty in obtain- 
 ing commissions. He poured forth illustrations for 
 periodicals and books with apparently inexhaustible 
 fertility, and in the midst of his miscellaneous labors 
 contrived to produce a masterpiece in the shape of a 
 series of drawings for the famous picaresque novel of 
 Quevedo, " Don Pablo de Segovia." He had won fame, 
 and fortune also was almost within his grasp. When 
 he was stricken with paralysis his right side was 
 rendered useless, and though he trained himself to 
 work with his left hand, he necessarily dropped, in a 
 measure, out of the race. He was only thirty years 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 323 
 
 old. He was not without honors or prosperity dur- 
 ing the remaining twenty-three years of his life, but 
 he was as modest as he was proud, and worked on 
 contentedly in a retirement which explains, in some 
 sort, the slight attention paid to his death. 
 
 Strolling one day on the outskirts of Paris with the 
 late Philip Gilbert Hamerton, I spoke to him of 
 Vierge, whose "Pablo" illustrations, in a copy of the 
 book I had picked up in Spain, had excited my ad- 
 miration, and he burst into enthusiastic eulogy of 
 the artist, who had long been his friend. Hamerton 
 praised him as one of the most extraordinary tech- 
 nicians he had ever known, but he was almost warmer 
 in his tribute to Vierge as a man. "Be sure you go 
 to see him," he said. "You will find him one of the 
 gentlest and sunniest of afflicted men." Soon after 
 I had the privilege of spending a couple of hours 
 with him in his home at Boulogne-sur-Seine. He 
 lived in a little house set back in a narrow garden, 
 with vines clambering everjrwhere, even across the 
 old iron gate through which one passed on ringing the 
 far-off, tinkling bell. As I walked up the gravel path 
 I saw on the right a wicker enclosure occupied by a 
 number of aristocratic fowls. On the left, further 
 on, was the house, and behind it the studio in which 
 he spent most of his time. It was a comparatively 
 bare room, with few of the luxurious appointments 
 familiar in the studios of Parisian artists. Vierge 
 found it agreeable to rub along with a few pictures, 
 
324 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 a few cupboards, a few well-filled bookcases, an old 
 table, with one or two chairs, and a screen hung with 
 dilapidated costumes. There were no rugs on the 
 floor. It was, in fact, a very Spanish interior, char- 
 acteristic of a race capable of being gorgeous to a 
 degree, or equally austere. Vierge himself provided 
 the best key to his surroundings. He seemed sim- 
 plicity itself, a tall and stalwart man who must have 
 been commanding in the old days, before paralysis 
 overtook him. It was pathetic to see this fine artist 
 compelled to move with hesitation across the room, 
 compelled to rely upon his wife's interpretation of 
 the almost soundless movement of his hps for the 
 understanding of his every wish. Madame Vierge, a 
 kindly, matronly woman, as simple in her manners 
 as was her husband, was his right hand in everything 
 save his drawing. It was good to see the two to- 
 gether, Vierge as full of gayety as though he were in 
 the best of health, and laughing over his own jokes 
 with the spontaneity of the true humorist. 
 
 They told me of what had happened when the 
 paralysis came. His memory failed then, he lost his 
 power to remember the significance of the printed 
 word; but, read aloud to him, everything became 
 vivid in his mind. The slightest jottings in his old 
 sketch-books gave him sufficient material for elab- 
 orate drawings, for when once facts of architecture, 
 scenery or costume were brought back to him by 
 visual suggestion, he never forgot them again. His 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 325 
 
 talk was naturally limited, but what he said was in a 
 modest and generous strain. He expressed his ad- 
 miration for Abbey, Pennell and one or two other 
 Americans, and spoke cordially of the illustrative 
 work in American magazines. When he referred to 
 his own performances it was with the intonation and 
 gesture of a man regarding himself as the least im- 
 portant practitioner of his craft. When we talked of 
 the folio edition of "Pablo," which had been brought 
 out in English, with his illustrations, he was wholly 
 good-humored over the fact that no one had up to 
 that time thought it worth while to send him a copy. 
 There was something touching in his sweetness. Life 
 had used him hardly. The paralytic stroke from 
 which he suffered was doubly tragic, considering his 
 profession. But he did not murmur. The atmos- 
 phere in his almost sequestered home was as cheery 
 as the sunny suburb in which he had made it. 
 
 II 
 
 Vierge long since saved his critics the trouble of 
 "placing" him by the simple process of seizing the 
 chief position in modern pen draughtsmanship and 
 holding it. It is the purity of his method that makes 
 him unique. In the sphere of pen draughtsmanship, 
 by which is meant, of course, that of the book and 
 magazine illustrator, he is what Velasquez is in the 
 sphere of painting, or Rembrandt in the sphere of 
 etching, a man of genius whose technical practice 
 
326 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 constitutes a kind of law. Fortuny, his gifted coun- 
 tryman, made some brilliant pen drawings, but not 
 even in the best of them did he so "Uve by line" as 
 it was Vierge's habit to live. Neither Menzel nor 
 Keene, his two greatest contemporaries, had quite his 
 way of giving the beholder a sense of delight in pen 
 drawing for its own sake. Phil May might have 
 approached him in this, but Phil May, pace Mr. 
 Whistler, had not an atom of Vierge's distinction of 
 style. That is the Spanish artist's great virtue. His 
 technique is not merely impeccable, but has quality 
 • — is an affair of manual dexterity enriched by tem- 
 perament. 
 
 He was, indeed, temperamental or nothing, a man 
 for whom study could do no more than superficially 
 affect the fruits of instinct. I suppose he had some- 
 thing of the modern artist's j^a^V for "documentation," 
 and frequented the paths of historical research enough 
 to make sure of his facts when he was dealing in the 
 costumes and accessories of bygone social epochs. 
 But there was nothing in him of the pedantic ar- 
 chaeologist. What would he have done with the in- 
 numerable properties and authorities on which some 
 artists of to-day lean so heavily? Perhaps he would 
 have cherished them, if he could have fitted them 
 into his modest studio, but I prefer to believe that 
 having once devoured them with his eyes he would 
 have let them go. That, at all events, is the impres- 
 sion I get from his innumerable designs, every one 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 327 
 
 of which has the spontaneity of an improvisation 
 though it is "all of a piece," a work more convincing 
 than the most elaborate Academical reconstruction 
 is apt to be. His people wear their clothes as though 
 they had a right to them, and move about in scenes 
 to which it is obvious that they were really born. 
 They always move — a fact which must have done 
 almost as much as Vierge's style to commend him 
 to the publishers and editors he sought on coming 
 up to Paris from Madrid in search of work. The 
 military painters, men like De Neuville and Detaille, 
 might have envied him the facile truth with which 
 he sketched the stirring incidents of the Commune. 
 He loved action, if we may judge from his personal 
 tastes before the paralytic stroke that practically 
 chained him to his studio in his prime, and a mobile 
 subject called forth his best efforts. He handled it 
 with ease and swing. In my collection of his illus- 
 trations there is a gouache of a refectory at the 
 Salpetriere in which the note of movement in the 
 central figure, a nurse walking rapidly down the 
 room, is caught up and repeated in the attitudes 
 and fantastic gestures of all the surrounding patients. 
 The scene has a horrible reality, the more horrible 
 because nothing in it is exaggerated — Vierge seems 
 to have seized in a flash the most natural aspects 
 of his unnatural theme. 
 
 He used the same insight when he turned — as he 
 was always turning — to more romantic material. In 
 
328 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 romance as in reality, in books as in city streets, 
 hospitals and theatres, or wherever else his insati- 
 able eyes carried him, he looked for the things that 
 mean not glamour but actual life. I miss the glamour, 
 sometimes. There are moments in which I wish 
 that Vierge had put more tenderness and atmosphere 
 into his work, had shown more feeling for sensuous 
 beauty. But pursuit of these less tangible things 
 might have diverted him from his true aim, which was 
 to make his figures look simply human and natural, 
 to portray, above all else, character. This most ex- 
 pert of technicians was never content with tech- 
 nique alone. He had something to say as a great 
 portrait-painter has something to say. Looking at 
 some of his little nude studies you would infer that 
 he had no desire to improve upon his model, to make 
 her the symbol of an idea; they are imcompromising 
 renderings of fact. His pictures of Arabs are noth- 
 ing more than impressions of the picturesque. In 
 neither case is any imaginative intention visible. 
 But the moment he drew a figure to accompany an 
 author's text, or noted one in the highways for its 
 human interest, he made it a distinct creation, giv- 
 ing it features, demeanor and a gait which could not 
 possibly be confused with the attributes of any other 
 figure in his crowded gallery. His fecundity in this 
 matter has not yet been widely enough recognized. 
 There has been too much talk of his technique, and too 
 little about what he did with it. Thus his "Pablo 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 329 
 
 de Segovia" is commended to the student as a mas- 
 terpiece of pen draughtsmanship. I would commend 
 it to him also as a masterpiece of illustration. 
 
 The book offers a crushing rebuke to those popular 
 illustrators who work, evidently, each from a single 
 formula, and, having taken the town with a new 
 type of pretty girl, fit her into any environment, 
 any period, any situation, regardless of whether she 
 belongs there or not. Vierge never repeated him- 
 self. Every personage and every episode in Que- 
 vedo's curious novel he drew with a freshness dis- 
 closing the liveliest mental activity. In nothing does 
 the artist show his sympathy for his author more 
 than in his humor. It takes here and there a Rabe- 
 laisian turn, but mostly it is of the grim sardonic sort 
 characteristic of the Spaniards. Moreover, though 
 Vierge delighted in a passage of comedy involving 
 several actors, he could give as free play to his humor 
 in the delineation of a single tj^e. He could draw 
 you a pious matron or a mischievous soubrette with 
 equal whimsicality. His beggars are superb, the 
 finest in European art since Callot or Hogarth. In 
 fact he seems to have had a special feeling for the life 
 of the vagabond; he relished the grotesque elements 
 in it, and sketched it in "Pablo" with so racy a touch 
 that the story gains new vitality from his embellish- 
 ment of it. Yet so wide was his scope that it may 
 be doubted if the figures in his compositions are any 
 more effective in preserving the illusion than are the 
 
330 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 architectural or landscape backgrounds against which 
 they are placed. 
 
 In his treatment of these things he used great re- 
 straint. Indoors or out, he looked only for the essen- 
 tials, and put them in their proper place with a judg- 
 ment that is by itself a joy to the connoisseur of the 
 art of omission. One of his "Pablo" drawings has 
 always seemed to me to illustrate this point partic- 
 ularly well. It is the sketch of Pablo in converse 
 with a pedestrian beneath the shadow of the old 
 Roman aqueduct at Segovia. Who but Vierge, I 
 wonder, could have introduced that cyclopean struc- 
 ture into a design, the picturesqueness of which is 
 so hght in hand, with such aptness and such skill? 
 He indicates the great mass of masonry with lines 
 of the utmost delicacy, keeps the motive in due sub- 
 ordination to the two figures in the foregroimd, yet 
 there you have El Puente del Diablo in all its stark 
 weightiness — an instance, if ever there was one, of 
 "local color" judiciously applied. Vierge was chary 
 of his blacks when distributing his light and shade. 
 The richest in tone of all his "Pablo" drawings is 
 the night scene in which the hero has his encounter 
 with the alguazils, and this is chiefly remarkable for 
 its subtly manipulated greys. Fortuny, executing 
 this design with brush or pen, but especially with the 
 pen, would have shattered the darkness of the cavern- 
 like street with violent strokes of light, and would 
 have turned the shadows into pools of inkiness. 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 331 
 
 Vierge liked the quieter key. Even when his scenes 
 are bathed in light he keeps them, somehow, cool; 
 there is no glare, there is no shock in the transition 
 from sunshine into shadow. He knew all that there 
 is for the pen draughtsman to know about values 
 and rendered a Spanish street or square, or open 
 landscape, with a truthfulness that evades many a 
 painter using a varied palette. Still further to dem- 
 onstrate his fertility and his deftness of hand, he 
 threw in, as though for good measure, head and tail 
 pieces as truly decorative in conception as they are 
 polished in execution. He was a master of the vign- 
 ette as he was a master of the full-dress composi- 
 tion; his still life is as effective in its way as his most 
 ambitious studies of action are in theirs. 
 
 All this he had shown in the pages of "Pablo" and 
 elsewhere when paralysis deprived him of the use of 
 his right hand, and he had to begin life all over again 
 imder a terrible handicap. Training himself to draw 
 with his left hand, however, he became proficient 
 enough not simply to carry on his work as before, 
 but to vmdertake an heroic task — and to finish it. 
 This was the illustration of "Don Quixote," which 
 he undertook for the Scribners and completed on 
 the eve of his death. Going slowly over the plates 
 in this book as the four volumes went through the 
 press, a process which, as it happened, I was priv- 
 ileged to follow from the beginning to the end, I 
 marvelled anew that an artist situated as he was 
 
332 Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 
 
 could have had the courage to embark upon such an 
 enterprise, to say nothing of seeing it through. When 
 I saw him in his studio not long before he started this 
 series, it was with difficulty that he could write his 
 name. These designs make it plain that, having 
 once conquered his physical disability, he recovered 
 all his brilliancy of style, and, in power of invention, 
 made a stride forward. 
 
 They reveal him as an extraordinary illustrator 
 of Cervantes, following the immortal narrative with 
 unerring perception for the right passage to illustrate, 
 and with as sure a faculty for giving the right form 
 to his illustration. His inspiration never flags; there 
 is not a perfunctory drawing in the whole collection. 
 The gaunt hero of the Spanish classic carries himself 
 throughout with a kind of galliard austerity, but his 
 expression is never stereotyped. The broad humor 
 so well exploited in illustrating Quevedo is exchanged 
 for a kindher sense of fun, and at the same time, in 
 setting forth those wonderful adventures, Vierge em- 
 ployed all his old vivacity, all his dramatic point. 
 As you turn the pages you will note the artist's free- 
 dom in grouping, his readiness in characterization, 
 his veracious and picturesque touch in the handling 
 of landscape and architecture, and his adroitness in 
 the fabrication of head and tail pieces. You note, 
 in addition, that the work as a whole possesses a 
 richer significance; that Vierge truly rose to the 
 height of his theme and, responding to the finer ap- 
 
Spanish Art in Spain and Elsewhere 333 
 
 peal in Cervantes than that which he had found in 
 Quevedo, produced a masterpiece greater even than 
 his "Pablo." The "Don Quixote" drawings are 
 lighter in tone than their famous predecessors; I sup- 
 pose because long confinement to the studio had 
 unconsciously adjusted the artist's vision to a more 
 subdued key. But this only heightens the charm 
 of his designs, making the delicacy of his line more 
 apparent. The publication of the book, marking 
 the crowning achievement of a well-spent life, was a 
 memorable event in the history of illustrated litera- 
 ture. 
 
XI 
 
 Secular Types in Italian Mural 
 Decoration 
 
 I. Pintoricchio 
 
 II. Ghirlandajo 
 
 III. Carpaccio 
 
 IV. Tiepolo 
 
XI 
 
 SECULAR TYPES IN ITALIAN 
 MURAL DECORATION 
 
 PINTORICCHIO 
 
 Of Bernardino di Benedetto di Biagio, called il 
 Pintoricchio, or the Little Painter, Vasari says that 
 "although he performed many labors, and received 
 aid from many persons, he had nevertheless a much 
 greater name than was merited by his works." Mod- 
 ern criticism has refuted Vasari, but has, on the whole, 
 made reservations leaving the Umbrian painter in a 
 somewhat ambiguous position. Those who love him 
 rank him with Perugino. Those who view him with 
 more temperate feelings are constrained to admit 
 that he stands somewhere below the atrabiHous yet 
 exquisitely lyrical painter of Citta della Pieve. The 
 exact truth Hes, of course, between the two extremes, 
 with this interesting point to be remembered: that 
 Pintoricchio, for all his declinations from this stand- 
 ard or that in some of the elements of his art, had 
 nevertheless a distinction in one field which he made 
 
 337 
 
338 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 peculiarly his own. One begins by comparing his 
 decorations with those of Carpaccio and Raphael, his 
 Venetian and Roman contemporaries, but one ends 
 by perceiving that his work was in some respects 
 essentially different from theirs, and therefore to be 
 approached by a different canon of criticism. In- 
 terest in his art, perennial for all close students of 
 Italian painting, was revived for the public at large 
 when those chambers in the Vatican in which for 
 many years some important decorations of his had 
 been hidden, were opened in 1897. They were ex- 
 ecuted for the Borgian Pope, Alexander VI, and in 
 more ways than one they glorify the sinister family 
 to which that Pontiff belonged. Not only is Alex- 
 ander himself portrayed in one of the frescos, but 
 in the design representing St. Catherine before the 
 Emperor the latter is impersonated by Caesar Borgia, 
 and Lucrezia, of edifying memory, figures as the 
 Saint. The five apartments in which the surviving 
 members of Pintoricchio's scheme exist make part 
 of a suite of six which belong to the Vatican library 
 and have always been specially designated as the 
 Borgia apartments. Pintoricchio completed them 
 in 1498. It was Pope Leo XIII who made himself 
 responsible for the comparatively slight restoration 
 they needed and had the rooms put in appropriate 
 condition. 
 
 Pintoricchio was born at Perugia in 1454. He 
 died at Siena in 1513, according to Vasari, from 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 339 
 
 ignoble vexation, but, on other testimony, from hun- 
 ger and neglect, his wife and her lover having shut 
 him out of the house when he was already ill. Vasari 
 states that Perugino was his master, but it has been 
 pointed out that Perugino was only eight years older 
 than Pintoricchio, and that the latter was more prob- 
 ably a pupil of Bonfigli or Fiorenzo di Lorenzo. Be 
 this as it may — and the hj^othesis of Pintoricchio.'s 
 having studied vmder Fiorenzo di Lorenzo seems to 
 me particularly plausible — it is plain from internal 
 evidence that he must have profited by Perugino's 
 example, and that he must also have obtained in- 
 spiration from companionship with the young Ra- 
 phael, whom he would have met in Perugino's bottega. 
 These points, however, cannot be traversed minutely 
 here, nor can I go over the old controversy about 
 the share which Raphael may or may not have had 
 in the Piccolomini frescos at Siena. Vasari, with 
 his genial recklessness in playing ducks and drakes 
 with another man's reputation, has been responsible 
 for so many fruitless burrowings among the records 
 of Italian art that his irmuendoes about the Siena 
 decorations may be ignored in this brief essay, at 
 least. What is more important is to observe that in 
 Siena, as in the Vatican and in the Church of Santa 
 Maria del Popolo, at Rome, the work left by Pin- 
 toricchio is of a sort to justify him against all the his- 
 torians, from Vasari down, who are disposed to im- 
 pugn his originality. In these three places, and in 
 
340 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 some others, Pintoricchio can afford to snap his fingers 
 at this kind of criticism. He had quaUties akin to 
 those of Perugino and Raphael and was, in fact, as I 
 have indicated, strengthened in his art by their ex- 
 ample, but he never leaned upon them, he stood on 
 his own feet. One more citation from Vasari and 
 I have done with that indispensable but sometimes 
 exasperating chronicler. "Bernardino was much in 
 the habit," he says, "of decorating his pictures with 
 ornaments in rehef covered with gold, for the satis- 
 faction of persons who understood but httle of such 
 matters, to the end that they might have a more 
 showy appearance, a thing which is most unsuitable 
 to painting. Having depicted a story from the life 
 of Santa Caterina in the above-named apartments 
 [in the Vatican], he executed the triumphal arches of 
 Rome, therefore, in relief, and painted the figures in 
 such a manner that the objects which should dimin- 
 ish are brought more prominently forward than those 
 others which should be larger to the eye, a grievous 
 heresy in our art." 
 
 Making due allowance for Vasari's offended ortho- 
 doxy in this passage, we reach in it, nevertheless, 
 one of the crucial elements in Pintoricchio's genius. 
 Other Italians had employed raised details in their 
 work, in easel pictures, as well as in decorative panels. 
 Pintoricchio used them as an important factor in 
 work executed on a large scale, depending upon them 
 for much of his effect. His gilding was devised as 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 341 
 
 though by inspiration for that splendid pageant which 
 was his aim and for the creation of which he is to 
 be regarded as apart from all his countrymen. The 
 Borgia rooms being somewhat similar in construc- 
 tion to Raphael's famous "Stanze," and possessing 
 surfaces, curved and flat, that are comparable to the 
 surfaces of the latter, they have sometimes been men- 
 tioned in the same breath with them. They are poles 
 apart. Raphael had essentially a philosophic mind, 
 he unfolded symbolic compositions upon the walls of 
 the Vatican, and the philosophers, almost as much 
 as the artists and critics, have pondered his work. 
 Pintoricchio threw himself into what might be called 
 ecclesiastical metaphysics in the Borgia frescos — 
 probably because Pope Alexander ordered him to do 
 so — but the key to the work is not metaphysical, it 
 is one of narration purely. Our artist was a born 
 story-teller. He had proved this before he came to 
 Rome, when painting the Piccolomini frescos at 
 Siena. He proceeded to elaborate all kinds of lofty 
 schemes in the Vatican. The decorations celebrate 
 solemn religious themes, saintly martyrdoms and 
 even more esoteric ideas of a classical and learned 
 nature. But while it would no doubt be legitimate to 
 appraise the Borgia designs as imaginative schemes 
 imperfectly done, it seems more just to regard them 
 — as one regards the walls of the library at Siena — 
 as forming a fragmentary pageant. This was the 
 thing that Pintoricchio, consciously or unconsciously, 
 
342 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 always aimed at; this is the thing which he unmis- 
 takably secures. He paints a procession, he paints 
 the movements of picturesque groups, and he still 
 quivers with the life of his ornate time. Just what 
 the groups are doing, just what they signify, we can- 
 not always tell. The frescos of the Vatican will not 
 yield to the analysis which sets the decorations of 
 Siena before us as a sort of historical document. I 
 have called him a born story-teller. In so far as his 
 meaning is obscure he belies the epithet. But he 
 has all of the story-teller's vividness, all his skill in 
 making companies of men and women concrete, plau- 
 sible, human. We can fancy him appalled at the 
 Pope's request for one symbolical design or another, 
 and then blithely going to work with no other thought 
 than to put the personages demanded by his master 
 into natural, genial attitudes, as so many actors in a 
 beautiful and picturesque scene. He lacks imagina- 
 tion, yes, and there is rarely a hint of dramatic inge- 
 nuity in his work, but he is a modern of the moderns 
 in the spontaneity of his accent, in the naturalness 
 of his crowds. 
 
 Having decided to set forth his group, having laid 
 out his background of landscape and architecture, 
 having evolved, as it were, another page of his pic- 
 ture-book, Pintoricchio drew upon those resources 
 which Vasari thought so heretical. He had others. 
 He had brilliant coloring — some of it among the most 
 brilliant of the Renaissance — and he had draughts- 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 343 
 
 mansliip, fortifying, in its turn, a happy gift of char- 
 acterization when it came to the introduction into 
 his design of such tangible t)^es as Lucrezia or Cffisar 
 or the Pope himself. But the raised details were 
 necessary to him, they helped him to get that warmth 
 and even that splendor which are as the crown and 
 finish to his art. The eye lingers over the individual 
 figures in his compositions as it lingers over those 
 in the pictures of the BelHni, of Carpacdo, of dozens 
 of Italians from Botticelli to Tiepolo and Longhi. 
 But most of all the spectator is aware of a broad and 
 beautiful impression as of something gorgeous pass- 
 ing by, of glimpses into a quaint and yet majestic 
 world where amazing people jostle one another on 
 their way to the execution of some business or other 
 — one does not quite know what it is and does not 
 quite care. Of course, this purely sensuous appeal 
 of Pintoricchio's has its drawbacks. A little of Ra- 
 phael's intellectuality would be welcome. Something 
 of Perugino's tender Umbrian charm would transmog- 
 rify the whole work. But tenderness in Pintoricchio 
 was always limited. It comes to the surface fitfully 
 in some of his smaller paintings, but when he is work- 
 ing as at Siena and in the Vatican the essential spirit 
 of the man dominates him and puts the lyrical note 
 into the background while a frankly material feeling 
 comes to the front. Fortunately the materiaUsm 
 is never gross. On the contrary, there is a touching 
 naivete about Pintoricchio even in his most superb 
 
344 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 flights of courtly pride. He may have remained more 
 or less insensible to the ecstatic fascination of the 
 Umbrian landscape which Raphael found it hard to 
 forget in the midst of his Roman triumphs; he may 
 have missed the last secret of that feminine witchery, 
 that pensive beauty, which the business-like Peru- 
 gino knew and worshipped, for all his hardness and 
 sordid, jealous passion. But he was an Itahan liv- 
 ing in the time of the Renaissance, he was quick, 
 receptive, full of hvely feeling, and sensitive to the spell 
 of beauty in all but its most poetic relations. The 
 upshot of it all is that he is neither a major nor a 
 minor painter, but one of those rare individualities 
 who through the richness of their merits and the 
 qualities of their defects become inexplicably en- 
 deared where greater men are regarded with not half 
 so much affection. The Siena frescos would alone 
 have kept him famous. The opening of the Borgia 
 apartments, the decorations of which are in very 
 nearly as perfect a state of preservation as those of 
 the Piccolomini library, have heightened and ex- 
 tended his renown. 
 
 Some artists are disposed to regard the decorations 
 of the fifteenth century as spent forces, with nothing 
 in them for modern emulation, but, as a matter of 
 fact, they are full of living inspiration. Puvis de 
 Chavannes recognized this, going even further back 
 than to Pintoricchio and profiting by the example of 
 the Giotteschi. I have referred to Pintoricchio's 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 345 
 
 modernity of spirit. He had also, and so had Car- 
 paccio, Mantegna, Raphael, SignoreUi, Sodoma, Mi- 
 chael Angelo, and Perugino, extraordinary modernities 
 of design. That is to say, these painters exercised 
 exactly the arts of composition which are require4 
 to-day in decorative painting. Moreover, since mod- 
 ern mural painting — as the French have shown much 
 mor-e than the Americans — must concern itself with 
 the narration of historical events and with the rep- 
 resentation of scenes from actual life, there is obvious 
 benefit to be derived from men who were above all 
 things skilful in the adaptation of virile themes to 
 architectural spaces. Raphael was a philosophic 
 painter, but in the famous scene of the conflagration 
 in the Borgo he handled prosaic material as effect- 
 ively as he did the figures of his "Parnassus." Pin- 
 toricchio had remarkable ability in this grouping of 
 unimaginative subjects with appropriateness to the 
 form of his wall. The Siena decorations glorify the 
 travels of ^neas Piccolomini, and some of the epi- 
 sodes treated are of the most matter-of-fact descrip- 
 tion, but the figures are disposed between the divi- 
 ding pilasters with as much regard for the general 
 effect of the whole chamber as though they were parts 
 of a conventional design. In his strictly conven- 
 tional work, too, Pintoricchio has much to teach the 
 moderns, just as Raphael has much to teach them in 
 the "Loggie" of the Vatican. Both men appreciated 
 the value of arabesques and of geometrical patterns 
 
346 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 skilfully applied. In the Vatican the attention is 
 naturally concentrated upon Pintoricchio's paint- 
 ings, but his stucco ornamentation and his laying 
 out of the ceilings will be recognized as equally char- 
 acteristic of his genius. He, with all his astonishing 
 facility in purely pictorial directions, was, neverthe- 
 less, incapable of the loosely scattered effects to 
 which the modern mural painter is so prone. He 
 devised a picture-book at Siena and another one in 
 the Borgia apartments, but in both cases he bound 
 the pages together so symmetrically, with so pene- 
 trating a sense of their interdependence, that, while 
 he falls far short of the grandeur of Raphael, he is 
 comparable to him in the unity of his work with the 
 architecture in which it is set. 
 
 n 
 
 GHIRLANDAJO 
 
 Amongst the Florentine painters of the Renais- 
 sance Ghirlandajo occupies a position indubitably 
 honorable, yet not to this day permanently fixed. 
 Like Pititoricchio he has his rather grudging critics. 
 For one who will whole-heartedly laud him there are 
 generally several who will patronize his art, if they 
 do not dismiss him with something like contempt as 
 "a mere illustrator." Well, as we have seen in our 
 brief survey of the work of Pintoricchio, illustration, 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 347 
 
 according to the hypothesis of the old Italian mural 
 decorators, could take on a not by any means neg- 
 ligible significance. In the hands of Domenico Ghir- 
 landajo it was made extraordinarily beguiling. 
 
 This painter, who was born in 1449 and died forty 
 years later, was the son of Tommaso Bigordi, a gold- 
 smith, who was known as "del Ghirlandajo" from 
 the gold and silver garlands made in his workshop 
 for the Florentine ladies to wear in their hair. The 
 lad was apprenticed to his father's craft, but he soon 
 turned to painting, under the instruction of Baldo- 
 vinetti. He was quick and clever and readily made 
 a career for himself. As this developed he showed 
 that he had profited by study of the works of men 
 greater than his chosen master. In his earlier pro- 
 ductions the influence of Masacdo has been traced, 
 as well as that of Verrocchio. He was not to disclose 
 a genius comparable with that of either of those two 
 great painters, and this not simply because he lacked 
 their power in respect to style, but because he had 
 nothing like their subtler resources. He was not a 
 high-souled creative genius, and, in fact, if you begin 
 to compare him with this or that Renaissance type 
 of the noblest calibre you steadily expose his limita- 
 tions. He has not an atom of the linear strength 
 and felicity of Botticelli. He has none of the Roman 
 austerity and power, none of the plastic grace of 
 Mantegna. But it would be manifestly unfair to 
 dwell on the things which Ghirlandajo lacked. The 
 
348 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 important point is to apprehend him for what he 
 was. The most recent and on the whole the most 
 favorable of his biographers, Mr. Gerald S. Davies, 
 concisely and accurately describes him as "the sim- 
 ple, straightforward historian of the outward ap- 
 pearance of the life of the Renaissance as he saw it 
 and knew it in the town which he knew best and loved 
 best — his own Florence." In this character he dis- 
 tinguished himself with a sympathy and a skill ma- 
 king him invaluable to the student of his time, and, 
 what is more, delightful to the lover of Renaissance 
 painting who is not obsessed by a desire to distribute 
 pedagogic marks of merit among all the members of 
 the Florentine school. 
 
 He was an adept at pictorial narrative, and he had 
 a passion for portraiture, as well as a kind of loving 
 flair for the details of costume and what we may call 
 the furniture of pictures. His frescos in the Sistine 
 Chapel and elsewhere are dignified performances, 
 imbued with sincere if not profound emotion. Mr. 
 Davies, discussing the question of what his painter 
 made of the figure of Christ, is perhaps uimecessarily 
 analytic. He finds in Ghirlandajo's ideal "more of 
 manhood than in the sweet and feminine beauty of 
 Perugino, but far less of sorrowful dignity and depth 
 of feeling, far less of the Divine, than in his great 
 contemporary Leonardo." He goes on to bring 
 Piero della Francesca and Melozzo da Forli into the 
 argument. All this is beside the point. It is better 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 349 
 
 to face the fact that Ghirlandajo had no great spir- 
 itual inspiration and have done with it. One may 
 grant, also, with the same promptitude, that he was 
 no more the master of composition than he was the 
 master of line; but his work has the vitality of work 
 that is founded on life. Though he was not a draughts- 
 man or a designer of genius, he drew and designed 
 well enough, he put his compositions together in hfe- 
 like fashion and bodied forth his figures not only 
 truthfully but with some breadth and nervous force. 
 He was a competent craftsman, a painter who knew 
 how to fill a given space in such wise that you can- 
 not pass his decorations by, but must pause and look 
 with ever-growing sympathy upon his intimate scenes 
 and friendly, human personages. 
 
 Witness, for example, that fresco of his in Santa 
 Maria Novella, "The Birth of the Virgin Mary," 
 which shows him at his best. Could anything be 
 more beguiling than this interior, in which St. Anne 
 and the women about her are put before us with no 
 pretence whatever that they have not been studied 
 from Ghirlandajo's contemporaries in a Florentine 
 palazzo? The maiden who advances toward the 
 nurses and their little charge is believed to be Lodo- 
 vica Tornabuoni, but even if her name had never been 
 surmised we would know that in this figure, as in 
 every other included in the composition, the painter 
 had made a portrait. That, in fact, was what he was 
 always doing, and in the mass of his work any num- 
 
3 so Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 ber of personages have been identified. In the fresco 
 of "Zacharias and the Angel," for example, also in 
 Santa Maria Novella, we may see not only divers 
 members of the Tornabuoni and Tornaqiiinci families, 
 but the noted humanists, Cristoforo Landini, Poli- 
 ziano and Marsilio Ficino. 
 
 Because Ghirlandajo was content to bring these 
 people into his paintings, grouping them adroitly and 
 with animation, but showing no poignant emotion 
 and no rare inventive faculty, and because, finally, 
 his style is not far above the pedestrian order, he is 
 frequently dismissed, as I have said, as just an il- 
 lustrator. But are not his illustrations charming? 
 Was he not an accomplished painter according to his 
 hghts? Could he not, on occasion, fashion a Ma- 
 donna full of matronly dignity and touched with a 
 grave sweetness? Moreover, is not that portraiture 
 of his something in itself altogether captivating? No 
 merely bourgeois hand could have produced that lov- 
 able portrait of an old man and his grandson which is 
 preserved in the Louvre, or that exquisite profile, in 
 Mr. Morgan's collection, of Giovanna degli Albizzi. 
 Ghirlandajo is one of those painters who we know 
 perfectly well are not demigods, like Michael An- 
 gelo or Leonardo, but whose lesser gifts are equally 
 authentic and whose services to us it is fooHsh to 
 underestimate and vulgar to scorn. 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 351 
 
 III 
 CARPACCIO 
 
 When Pompeo Molmenti and his friend Gustav 
 Ludwig were writing their fine biography of Vittore 
 Carpaccio they delved deep into Venetian history 
 and brought to light all the facts about their hero 
 that are likely ever to be known. But the prettiest 
 "find" in their volume is a passage of modern origin, 
 a fragment of a letter by Burne- Jones. "Of all 
 things," he writes to Lady Lewis, "do go to the little 
 chapel of S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, where the Car- 
 paccios are. The tiniest church that ever was, like 
 a very small London drawing-room — but with pic- 
 tures!!! And whenever you see him give him my 
 love." It is in Just this spirit that it is well to ap- 
 proach the work of the old Venetian painter. If he 
 is anything he is lovable, a type of peculiarly sweet 
 and winm'ng art. 
 
 Carpaccio, born in the middle of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury, touches hands, so to say, on one side with the 
 tradition of the Venetian primitives, and on the other 
 with that of the golden age. He preserved in his 
 work much of the naivete of the formative period in 
 the history of the school. We read of him as being 
 summoned in company with his master, Lazzaro 
 Bastiani, to appraise Giorgione's paintings on the 
 fajade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and this episode 
 
352 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 vividly brings home to us the fact of his contact with 
 the movement which owed so much to the painter 
 of Castelfranco and to Titian. Yet Carpaccio never 
 developed the glowing tones which were ultimately 
 to dominate Venetian painting. His color, which is 
 sometimes exquisite, is, on the whole, restrained. 
 Indeed, the whole character of his work is that of an 
 artist in no wise impassioned, but trusting always to 
 careful observation of the world in which he hved. 
 
 The fates conspired to give him precisely the op- 
 portunities calculated to be favorable to the develop- 
 ment of his gifts. We know that he was employed 
 with Gentile and Giovanni Bellini and others to dec- 
 orate the Hall of the Great Council in the Ducal 
 Palace with historical compositions, but even if his 
 contributions to this vast scheme had not been des- 
 troyed by the great fire of 1577 we would have the 
 essentials of his art in those works which he produced 
 for one or another of the fraternities conspicuous in 
 the social and religious life of his day. These or- 
 ganizations wanted a painter of picture-books, and 
 such a painter they found in Carpaccio. 
 
 It was customary in old Venice for men and women 
 to form themselves into schools or societies dedicated 
 to the observance of religious duties and to the for- 
 warding of good works. Always these bodies en- 
 rolled themselves beneath the standard of some saint. 
 Thus the "Scuola of Devotion of St. Ursula" framed 
 its statutes and rules at once in the service of the 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 353 
 
 Madonna and in that of the martyred Ursula. These 
 were also mutual-benefit societies, as may be seen 
 from the decree of the Council of Ten relating to the 
 Dalmatian Scuola officially recognized in 145 1. 
 
 Having heard the devout and humble petition of cer- 
 tain Sclavonian sailors, resident in this blessed city of 
 Venice, moved by piety, knowing and observing the in- 
 finite variety of men of their nation . . . stricken to death, 
 or sickness, who perish of necessity and hunger, having 
 no support, nor help from any one in this world because 
 they are aliens . . . leave was implored by the said Scla- 
 vonians to form in Venice a Brotherhood, otherwise a 
 Scuola, according to the manner of the other small Scuole 
 in honor of Messer S. George and Messer S. Tryphonius 
 in the church of Messer S. John of the Templars ... by 
 means of which the said supplicants can receive and hold 
 alms for the support of such of their brethren, and besides 
 that the said brethren can go and carry to burial the said 
 brethren for the Love of God, and can place their corpses 
 in the vaults of the said Scuola. 
 
 As these Scuole waxed the more popular and pros- 
 perous they built their places of meeting the more 
 luxuriously, and, of course, sought the aid of art. 
 Carpaccio appears to have become a kind of painter 
 in ordinary to the Scuole. For the brethren of St. 
 Ursula he painted the canvases which were originally 
 placed on the walls of a building erected beside the 
 church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, but which are now 
 housed in the Academy. For the Dalmatians afore- 
 said he made the series which may still be seen at S. 
 Giorgio degli Schiavoni. For the Albanians in Yen- 
 
354 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 ice he produced the series, now scattered, illustrating 
 the hfe of the Virgin. He painted other pictures, and 
 some of them, like the "Presentation" for the Church 
 of San Giobbe, now in the Academy, are superb mon- 
 uments to his genius, but you get the fullest sense of 
 his character as an artist from the "picture-books" 
 he made for the Scuole. 
 
 I call them picture-books, because in each set 
 of decorations that he painted he gave himself up 
 to narrative, telling his story in a succession of scenes, 
 which might have, now and again, a certain mystical 
 significance, but which he always interpreted as 
 closely as possible in terms of ordinary Venetian life. 
 He copied the gait and demeanor of his contempo- 
 raries, reproduced their costumes with minute care, 
 and in his accessories, as in his broad effect, sought 
 an intimately realistic impression. There is an al- 
 most domestic note in his religious designs. His St. 
 Ursula asleep in bed might be a kinswoman in his 
 own house, and the picture he made of St. Jerome in 
 his study was doubtless based on a room familiar 
 to the painter in its every detail. Carpaccio had a 
 fine sense of composition, which comes out magnif- 
 icently in a painting Kke the St. Giobbe altar-piece 
 mentioned above, but in his Scuole pictures his feel- 
 ing for design is subordinated to his eager desire to 
 tell a straightforward and artless story. This is 
 where his naivet6 comes in. He is too keen on his 
 narrative to worry overmuch about questions of form 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 355 
 
 and balance. Some time ago Mr. Sidney Colvin 
 pointed out resemblances between episodes in works 
 by Carpaccio and drawings made by one Reuvich for 
 Breydenbach's "Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam," 
 printed at Mayence in i486. If he plagiarized it 
 was only in the most innocent and childlike fashion 
 and with no sacrifice of his individuality. He simply 
 took what would help him to build up his simple tale, 
 making it the more natural and picturesque. There 
 was, in fact, a good deal of the ingenious craftsman 
 about Carpaccio. 
 
 There was also a good deal of heart, of warm and 
 tender feeling for religious things. His spirituality 
 was none the less genuine because he expressed it in 
 pictures reflecting Venetian types and ways. He was 
 profoundly sincere. The criticism which would pig- 
 eon-hole and label every manifestation of art would 
 assign to him a modest place in the hierarchy of 
 Venetian painting. But it is wiser to take him for 
 .what he is; to rejoice in his simple reahsm and his 
 unworldly spirit, and ignore the question as to his 
 relative value. 
 
 IV 
 
 TIEPOLO 
 
 It is a long step from Carpaccio to Tiepolo. In- 
 deed, a great gulf stretches between the naive illus- 
 trator of fifteenth-century manners, with his simple 
 but sincere religious sentiment, and the worldly, even 
 
356 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 pagan artist who gayly decorated the churches, pal- 
 aces and villas of Venice in her decadence. But that 
 gulf is easily bridged where types of authentic power 
 are concerned. The transition from Carpaccio to 
 Tiepolo is, after all, that from one true artist to 
 another, a transition never impeded by differences 
 of temperament. To sit for a quiet hour in that little 
 church of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, with mind 
 and heart attuned to the pure and almost childlike 
 inspiration of Carpacdo's paintings there, and to 
 plunge immediately afterward into Tiepolo's hectic 
 monde is to feel, momentarily at least, that a rather 
 unedifying descent has been made. But the observ- 
 er's mood is soon changed. He sees that Tiepolo's 
 violence, after Carpacdo's tranquillity, may be the 
 sign of a lower nature, but is also compatible with the 
 exercise of great artistic gifts. Indeed, his impres- 
 sions of the older master threaten to fade, for he per- 
 ceives that, as a technidan, as a painter, Carpacdo 
 was scarce qualified to grind Tiepolo's colors. The. 
 eighteenth-century decorator may not have had a 
 great soul, he may not have had the faintest spiritual 
 emotion, but he was a prodigious man of his hands. 
 Without underestimating his mentality, we may still 
 see in him just the consummate and prohfic crafts- 
 man. We recognize in him, too, that central virtue 
 of sane vigor which will lend a kind of dignity even 
 to an artist not exceptionally dowered with intel- 
 lectual or imaginative power. 
 There is a curious contrast between the man and 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 357 
 
 his time. When Tiepolo was born, late in the seven- 
 teenth century, the glory of Venice had begun to 
 wane. Elements of corruption were at work in her 
 political and industrial life. Manners were deterio- 
 rating. The old heroic traits of the people had prac- 
 tically disappeared and an enfeebled populace had 
 only the artists it deserved. The splendid tradition 
 of Veronese was seemingly as dead as nail in door. 
 Mediocrity triumphed. Trivial feeling and mechan- 
 ical facility could no further go than in the crowded 
 yet strangely empty compositions of a Bastiano Ricci 
 or a Gregorio Lazzarini. Then appeared Giovanni 
 Battista Tiepolo, like a portent in the sky, and eight- 
 eenth-century Venetian art was conclusively rescued 
 from its sad estate. There were other painters who 
 were to make the period memorable — Canaletto and 
 Guardi, with their pictures of the lagoons and the 
 monuments of the city; Rosalba, with her bewitch- 
 ing portraits, and, in the later years of the century, 
 Pietro Longhi, with his vivacious souvenirs of every- 
 day familiar life. But it was only Tiepolo who pos- 
 sessed positive genius; he alone it was who revived 
 something of the splendor of an earlier day. 
 
 It is a pity that we cannot know more about the 
 man, about his personality and private life. Signor 
 Molmenti, his efficient biographer, is zealous in re- 
 search, but he has very little to communicate on the 
 more intimate side of Tiepolo's career. We know 
 that he came from an humble and even obscure 
 
358 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 family, for all that he bore a name illustrious in the 
 annals of the Venetian nobility. We know that he 
 received instruction from Lazzarini and that he mar- 
 ried a sister of Guardi's. But, for the rest, his story 
 is no more than a record of his work. One fact is 
 made plain by that record — his energy as a traveller. 
 He moved to and fro on Venetian territory and else- 
 where in Italy executing commissions, and profes- 
 sional engagements also carried him to Germany 
 and to Spain, if not further afield. Another revela- 
 tion lying upon the surface of his work bears upon 
 his whole character as an artist. His productivity 
 was enormous. If there is one thing more than an- 
 other that impresses the student it is his rapid execu- 
 tion, the miraculous ease with which he fills vast 
 spaces. 
 
 Tiepolo's art is fairly electrical in its note of 
 animation. The mythological and religious subjects 
 abounding in his work are not by any means pro- 
 foundly conceived — but then one does not go to him 
 for ideas. His genius is decorative, in the strictest 
 meaning of the term. It is important, however, to 
 distinguish in this matter. The decorative tradition 
 of Raphael is one essentially formal. That of Tin- 
 toretto is turbulent with the vitality of life itself. 
 Tiepolo abides by the laws of neither the one nor the 
 other. He does not depend upon the scientifically 
 fixed balance so indispensable to the Roman master. 
 He does not seek the poignant dramatic effect always 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 359 
 
 characteristic of the great Venetian. He frames an 
 ideal of his own, an ideal of aerial space in which 
 figures are piled helter-skelter upon billowing clouds, 
 or wanton in the empyrean with an almost birdlike 
 freedom. He knew, of course, how to order his re- 
 sources, how justly to fill a given space; he is entirely 
 rational beneath his seeming airs of reckless improvi- 
 sation. But the broad impression received from his 
 work is that of a joyous riot of form and color, light 
 and air, of wonderfully poised movement. There is 
 something about him that suggests a great master of 
 the ballet, a man with a gift for deploying his figures 
 in the most intricate fashion, creating a thrilling 
 atmosphere of spontaneous action, but always pre- 
 serving control over his forces, always adhering more 
 or less to a well-pondered pattern. It is one of the 
 paradoxes of artistic history that this mundane 
 painter, who lightly sentimentalized nearly every 
 religious motive that he touched and turned the gods 
 and goddesses of mythology into operatic figurantes, 
 nevertheless had the largest possible way with him 
 when he tackled a spacious ceiling in church or pal- 
 ace. He was as lavish of thrones as Napoleon him- 
 self. It would be amusing to count the number of 
 them reared amid his clouds, or set against the archi- 
 tectural backgrounds he was wont to use on vertical 
 walls or in many of his smaller pictures. He liked 
 the regal type, whether it was Cleopatra or some 
 divinity on Olympus, and he would trick it out with 
 
360 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 the most gorgeous habiliments. Did he thereby 
 make it the more convincing? The question is em- 
 barrassing for a lover of Tiepolo. 
 
 He knows well enough that he could not for a mo- 
 ment believe in his painter's imaginings. They are 
 not, indeed, imaginings at all. Tiepolo could not 
 pull himself up by his boot-straps. He was a child 
 of his time, and he had the fancy of a clever man 
 rather than the creative imagination of a poet. Com- 
 pare him, for a moment, with Watteau. The ro- 
 mance of the dainty melancholy Frenchman is thin 
 enough, but in his "Embarkation for Cythera," for 
 example, you can still hear, faint but true, the music 
 of faery. Tiepolo is all for the theatre. His paintings 
 of martyrdoms cause no shudders. There is nothing 
 tragic about his Iphigenia, though he paints that mar- 
 ble heroine at the moment of sacrifice. He gives you 
 cunningly arranged tableaus, not scenes vibrating 
 with passion. It is with a certain amazement that 
 one pauses .before his "Supper at Emmaus," in the 
 Louvre. By what stroke of fortune, you ask, did he 
 obtain the illumination which led him to the paint- 
 ing of that picture— not a great picture, but not, on 
 the other hand, one without a note of feeling? Ordi- 
 narily his sacred compositions leave the spectator 
 cold and sometimes they very nearly move him to a 
 smile. There is an "Annunciation" of his in a pri- 
 vate collection at Madrid which is positively comic. 
 The Virgin, standing in her humble room, is dignified 
 
Italian Mural Decoration 361 
 
 enough, but her winged visitant is literally flopped 
 down upon the floor, and is as grotesque as a figure 
 in a pantomime. It is only when he is illustrating 
 some love-story, like that of Rinaldo and Armida, 
 or is painting scenes of secular pomp, as in the deco- 
 ration of the Palazzo Labia, or is sketching some 
 episode of Venetian life, as in the "Carnival" which 
 belonged to the late Princess Mathilde, that he is on 
 firm ground as regards the substance of his work. 
 In the main his figures are merely so many bodies to 
 be played with for pictorial and decorative effect. 
 But how superbly he plays with them! 
 
 He used them in two ways. Either he flimg them 
 with magnificent gesture upon his luminous ceilings, 
 or, as in the Palazzo Labia, the Villa Valmarana 
 and a score of other places, he disposed them with 
 much elegance — and occasionally some humor — 
 against doorways and window-casings, between cool, 
 stately pillars, or in the reposeful attitudes invited 
 by a convenient bench or balustrade. Wherever he 
 painted his grandly robed gods, his nude nymphs, or 
 his ladies and cavahers in the latest Venetian velvets 
 and ruffles, he drew his models with incomparable 
 sureness and grace and lavished upon them the colors 
 of a palette in which you find reflected the pinks and 
 whites of roses, the blues of heaven and the pearly, 
 glowing flesh tints of Aphrodite fresh risen from the 
 sea. Tiepolo put forth, as has been indicated, an 
 immense amount of work, and an astonishing propor- 
 
362 Italian Mural Decoration 
 
 tion of it shows him at his best, but if his very es- 
 sence is to be found anywhere it is to be found in 
 the study of "The Car of Venus," a sketch for a ceil- 
 ing, which hangs in the Prado. The light charm of 
 the design is alone captivating, but over it all is 
 thrown the glamour of exquisite color. Never were 
 there purer, more flowerlike effects; never was sen- 
 suousness nearer to getting itself turned into some- 
 thing subtly poetical. That, then, is Tiepolo's su- 
 preme gift, a gift for covering a surface with gay 
 and lovely forms, with color as soft and pleasing as 
 the down on a peach, and so skilfully organizing 
 this entrancing frou-frou of his that it becomes 
 magnificently decorative. In the eyes of some en- 
 thusiasts he is not imworthy of Veronese, and, indeed, 
 when you think of the wholesome, robust way in 
 which Tiepolo developed his art you cannot deny his 
 right to a place in the great hierarchy of Venetian 
 painting. He had not Veronese's weight and gran- 
 deur. But he had the master's sincerity and he was, 
 like Veronese, an artist of genius. 
 
XII 
 
 Rodin 
 
XII 
 
 RODIN 
 
 What immeasurable good luck has followed this 
 artist! No doubt he has had his vicissitudes, in the 
 distant past, but for some years now the Fates have 
 been more than kind to him, bringing him honors 
 and prosperity and everywhere placing his art con- 
 spicuously before the world. In fact, Rodin's career 
 as a spoilt child of fortime makes a story by itself. 
 An article in Le Temps not long ago represented 
 him as saying that on a visit that he had made to 
 Rome he was scrupulously left alone by the mem- 
 bers of the French diplomatic circle there and the 
 people of the Villa Medici, in which neglect he saw 
 an official condemnation of his works. However this 
 may be, it is to be noted that the government com- 
 naissioned his gigantic — and still imfinished — "Porte 
 de I'Enfer" as far back as 1880, and it has generously 
 entreated him ever since. You positively stumble 
 upon his scvdptures in the Luxembourg, there are so 
 many of them in that museum, and elsewhere in 
 Paris they turn up. His "Victor Hugo," in mar- 
 ble, has been placed in the gardens of the Palais 
 Royal. He has contributed to the inside of the 
 
 36s 
 
366 Rodin 
 
 Pantheon, and one of his most important mon- 
 uments, "Le Penseur," occupies a position directly 
 in front of that building. It is true that the Sodete 
 des Gens de Lettres rejected his ' Balzac," but there 
 was never any occasion for regarding that incident 
 with sorrow, the truth being that in so far as it made 
 a martyr of Rodin it also stimulated to frenzy the 
 enthusiasts who have long made it their business to 
 see that he was not left to toil in obscurity. 
 
 There is already in existence a large literature re- 
 lating to the sculptor. LSon Maillard published a 
 book about him in 1899 — a book especially valuable, 
 by the way, for its illustrations. Another volume, 
 by Camille Mauclair, appeared in an English transla- 
 tion in 1905. Two years later Mr. Frederick Lawton 
 brought out an exhaustive biography, and in 1908 
 there appeared in Brussels the monumental folio by 
 Judith Cladel. There is a booklet in the "Lang- 
 ham Series" devoted to Rodin, a brief study by Ru- 
 dolf Dircks, and, unless memory fails me, there is a 
 second monograph by a German author. As for 
 articles in magazines and newspapers, they are as 
 the sands of the seashore. Multitudes of writers 
 have found good "copy" in Rodin. Finally he has 
 taken to letters himself. Grasset, the Paris pub- 
 lisher, recently issued, under the title of "L'Art," a 
 volume in which the sculptor's conversations with his 
 friend Paul Gsell are, by the latter, piously reported 
 and, more recently, this work has been put into Eng- 
 
Rodin 367 
 
 lish. Never was an artist kept more devotedly in 
 the public eye. The sentimentalists have risen en 
 masse to declare his fame, and it is perhaps no wonder 
 that he is to-day one of the most fashionable makers 
 of portraits in the world and the object of a cult. 
 Neither is it surprising that he has become a little 
 oracular in his sayings and a little complacent in his 
 work. 
 
 What does it all amount to, and how are we really 
 to regard this man of genius, who is also the hero of 
 a preposterous reclame? It is indispensable, at the 
 outset, to lay hold of the fact that the genius is there, 
 or at all events was there when Rodin was in his 
 prime. Nor is there anything at all esoteric or baf- 
 fling about it. His hierophants, of course, would 
 have it that there is something about him grand, 
 gloomy and pecuKar, and quite beyond the scope of 
 ordinary canons of appreciation. They are the peo- 
 ple who in an earlier generation would have stupefied 
 themselves making guesses at the Correggiosity of 
 Correggio. Now they occupy themselves with the 
 Rodinesquerie of Rodin. Of this it is enough to say 
 that "there ain't no sich thing." Rodin is not a 
 mystic, thinking profoxmd thoughts and embodying 
 them in puzzling forms. Take, for example, his 
 group called "Pygmalion and Galatea." Rodin 
 once showed Gsell the first ebauche for that com- 
 position, wherein he represented the embrace of 
 a nymph and a faun. Naturally, his interlocutor 
 
368 Rodin 
 
 was astonished, and wondered if subject, as sub- 
 ject, meant anything to the sculptor. It did not 
 do, the latter replied, to give too much importance 
 to the themes that he interpreted. Doubtless, he 
 added, they had their value and helped to interest the 
 public, but the great anxiety of the artist, he main- 
 tained, should be to get the play of living muscle 
 into his work; the rest mattered little. That carries 
 us quickly to the point with Rodin. It is merely 
 life that has interested him, and, with life, character 
 and expression. His genius has been for these things, 
 and for these things alone. It is an old story that 
 when he sent "The Age of Brass" to the Salon in 
 1877 the jury accused him of having put before them 
 nothing more nor less than a cast from life. They 
 could not have paid him a juster compliment. 
 
 Gsell, describing his master's method of work, 
 tells us that Rodin is wont to have several nude 
 models, men and women, moving about in the studio. 
 He is always watching them, training his eye, and 
 presently, when he notes a good pose, he arrests 
 the model and sets to work. Gsell could see that 
 there might be something in this more favorable to 
 spontaneous effect than the mode followed in most 
 studios, where the model takes an attitude fixed by 
 the sculptor, but he wondered if Rodin's system did 
 not put him, so to say, at the orders of his models. 
 "No," replied the artist, "I am not at their orders, 
 but at those of Nature." He qualifies the principle 
 
Rodin 369 
 
 there laid down, however, by observing that every- 
 thing still depends upon the eye of the artist. The 
 mediocre craftsman, interpreting a pose thus observed, 
 would not get out of it that which is accessible to the 
 man of genius. Thus it is interesting to note in pass- 
 ing that Rodin has no patience with those contem- 
 poraries of his who complain that they cannot make 
 a good portrait unless they have a sitter with an 
 interesting head and face. He, I gather, would un- 
 dertake to find almost any sitter worth while, and ac- 
 cordingly one is not surprised when in his talks with 
 Gsell he brushes aside the idea that the Greeks 
 were luckier than ourselves in their models. The 
 Frenchman is not in the least dissatisfied with the 
 men and women who pose for him, and, in fact, 
 grows quite ecstatic over certain of his types, bitterly 
 regretting, as he looks over some of his drawings, 
 that he has not done justice in them to quite obvious 
 traits. We see him, then, in the r61e of the realist, 
 if we must find some convenient designation for his 
 mode of procedure, and this view of the matter is 
 easily confirmed by reference to his works. Look 
 at such sculptures as the statues of Adam and Eve, 
 the grim study of aged and broken-down woman- 
 hood, "La Vieille Heaulmiere," the statues of "Le 
 Penseur" and "The Age of Brass," and the busts of 
 Dalou and Puvis de Chavannes. Their first merit is 
 that of truth, clearly grasped and simply expressed. 
 It is, too, a truth having a poignant human origin. 
 
370 Rodin 
 
 ''La Beaule, c'est le caractere et V expression," he says, 
 and you do not find character or expression existing in 
 lifeless shells. The best of Rodin's figures seem to 
 have been realized by him from within outward and 
 hence they possess extraordinary individuality. On 
 the other hand, one has unquestionably seen things 
 more beautiful, and that raises the point as to how 
 far Rodin's genius "carries," how far it justifies the 
 vast claims of his admirers. He loves the Greek 
 masters. He collects their works when he can get 
 hold of them, he is always stud)dng them, and some- 
 thing, a faint something, of their exquisite strength 
 has just touched his own artistic character. The 
 hierophants to whom I have already alluded make 
 an easy mouthful of the assumption that in emula- 
 ting the Greeks he has quite recaptured their power. 
 The disinterested onlooker can hardly see this. Gsell 
 paints us a charming picture of an evening in the 
 studio at Meudon, with Rodin hovering around his 
 antiques, lamp in hand, and exposing with delight 
 the effects of "color" thus extorted from the old 
 marbles. Throwing a gleam upon one antique torso, 
 he asks, "Is there not there a prodigious symphony 
 in black and white?" Unconsciously, as it seems to 
 me, Rodin was thus exposing the Httle rift within the 
 lute, he was thus marking his essential detachment 
 from the spirit of Greek art. It is the insidious 
 element of "le pittoresqtie" lurking in the point of 
 view revealed by Gsell's anecdote that promptly 
 
Rodin 371 
 
 brings Rodin down to his own level, and careful 
 scrutiny of his art soon gives the measure of his fall. 
 
 His sculpture is full of "holes," spots where deep 
 shadows play their indubitably effective part. Bodies 
 are flung about at any angle, Umbs are entwined or 
 lifted in nominally sublime gestures to heaven, and 
 one immediate result of this contortion is an amazing 
 play of light and shade. In unskilful hands a pro- 
 cedure of the sort instantly gives itself away, but 
 Rodin is, among other things, imcannily clever, and 
 there is nobody like him for disguising a meretricious 
 habit beneath an air of primitive simplicity. "Prim- 
 itive" is, to be sure, the very word. How many 
 times has it not been apphed to figures of Rodin's 
 like the "Adam," say, in which muscular arms and 
 legs and gnarled extremities recall, as the elect 
 would express it, some early race, heaved up out of 
 the caverns of the earth by the sheer force of nature? 
 Only this primitiveness does not wear well, especially 
 if you happen to turn back from it to the serene 
 might of Greek or Egyptian sculpture or to the 
 heroic t3^es of Michael Angelo. What is it that first 
 wakes a doubt? It is that these large contours in 
 Rodin's art speU not so much style as manner. The 
 dictionary explains the word "mannerism" after a 
 rather formidable fashion. "Monotonous," it says, 
 "formal or pedantic adherence to the same manner; 
 uniformity of manner, especially a tasteless uniform- 
 ity without freedom or variety: excessive adherence 
 
372 Rodin 
 
 to a characteristic mode or manner of action or treat- 
 ment." Let us by all means eschew pedantry and 
 commit no such sin as that of hurling the dictionary 
 at Rodin's head. And yet — there is appositeness in 
 that outrageous definition. Repetition has nearly 
 killed Rodin; not repetition of specific types of com- 
 position, though that has been his tendency, but of 
 that very "effect" of his which he founded, in the 
 beginning, so successfully on truth. 
 
 It is, after all, rather narrowly the truth of the flesh, 
 endued, as we have seen, with character and expression, 
 but primarily and too exclusively an affair of bone and 
 muscle, blood and skin. Over and over again it 
 comes out in the conversations reported by Gsell 
 that what enthralls Rodin is the body, as the body. 
 Steadily, as time has gone on, he has played with it 
 as with a medium, imtil a bony plane, a leg full of 
 sinews, a soft voluptuous curve, has come to mean to 
 him what a theme means to the musician improvi- 
 sing upon an instrument. Whither does it all tend? 
 The genius who preserves undimmed an authentic 
 inspiration is constructive while he plays, and pro- 
 duces, one after the other, organic fabrics of design. 
 By those works of his you know him for the great 
 creative artist. The lesser man does not fail us in 
 quantity, nor is he necessarily without a certain pass- 
 ing charm, but he remains inchoate and capricious, 
 and by his works you know him, not for the great 
 creative artist, but for the diffusive, unstable "tem- 
 
Rodin 373 
 
 perament." Rodin began by suggesting that he 
 might, perhaps, range himself in the first category, 
 and there are among his earlier works pieces so fine 
 that it is idle to imagine their ever falling into obliv- 
 ion. But for years he has been unmistakably the 
 man of the smaller gift, consummate in his exploita- 
 tion of that gift, but none the less a man on the wrong 
 track. He aimed at grandeur, as witness the as- 
 tounding pell-mell of figures in the "Porte de I'Enfer " 
 and the massy conception of "Les Bourgeois de 
 Calais," but grandeur was not in him in any deep, 
 spiritual and lasting sense. He figured to himself 
 Victor Hugo, listening to the voices of nature, and 
 if we are to believe the nonsense of his acolytes the 
 poet as he portrayed him is truly rapt by the murmurs 
 of the sea, but, as a matter of fact, he shows us only 
 an old gentleman looking absurd in the absence of his 
 clothes. He has had any number of noble intentions, 
 which we are told he has fulfilled, but he may design 
 an Apollo in a violent attitude, and we get only atti- 
 tude; he may depict for us Ugulino and his sons, 
 but we have simply some sprawling bodies, instead 
 of that figure of freezing horror whose words Mat- 
 thew Arnold put among the touchstones of great 
 poetry — 
 
 I wailed not, so of stone grew I within, 
 They wailed. 
 
 That instinct of his for character and expression 
 
 is searching, so far as it goes, and he moves you 
 
374 Rodin 
 
 when he wreaks it upon subjects that lie well within 
 his scope. With the mere human animal he never 
 fails, but gets always intense reality and movement. 
 Some of his portraits, too, have a rich vitality, but it 
 is significant that while he immensely admired Puvis 
 de Chavannes it has been one of the bitterest regrets 
 of his career that his bust of the latter did not please 
 the great painter, who thought it, in fact, a carica- 
 ture. The episode sheds a little Hght on the question 
 of Rodin's ability to rise with his theme. He faced 
 in Puvis de Chavannes a type of great intellectual 
 force, a calm and lofty soul. He could model the 
 stately head and express the physical life in it, but 
 he could do no more. What was subtlest and most 
 precious in his friend's character escaped him. Apro- 
 pos of this faltering touch of his when he is moving 
 about in worlds not realized, one may profitably com- 
 pare the first study for the head of hie "Balzac" with 
 the head of his statue as it was finally modelled. The 
 earlier version is the conception of the realist pure and 
 simple. We owe the other to the realist doubled with 
 the would-be "interpreter," the would-be dealer in 
 truth heightened by imagination. In neither does he 
 portray the true Balzac, but he is at least on safer 
 ground in the first mask, which is an affair of mere flesh 
 and blood. Extend this criticism from the field of por- 
 traiture into that of symbolism and of those poetic 
 myths from which Rodin has drawn so many of his mo- 
 tives, and you fall upon even greater dubiety. Despite 
 
Rodin 375 
 
 the vaultings of his ambition he does not impress us 
 in his works as a man of ideas, calling new and won- 
 derful things out of the void and animating them 
 with a life stronger than that of poor human clay. 
 
 Rodin's obvious handicap has been the quality 
 of his mind and imagination. His is a profoundly 
 sensuous art, sensuous to the core, and while he has 
 been attacking high erected themes these have not, 
 on his own confession, really mattered to him; it has 
 been enough for him to caress in his marble or bronze 
 a Kving form. And all the time he has been betrayed 
 by his immense technical resource. It is a by- 
 word among sculptors that Rodin, as a modeller, 
 takes their breath away. His is a fatal facihty if 
 ever an artist had that afiOiction. One of Gsell's 
 most interesting chapters describes the sculptor mod- 
 elKng in his presence a statuette after the principles 
 of Pheidias, and then doing another a la Michael An- 
 gelo. The old fingers worked Hke magic; almost in 
 a moment the statuettes were there. It is interest- 
 ing to know that, and delightful into the bargain. 
 One rejoices in skill so swift and so sure, so respon- 
 sive to the movement of a fine intelligence. And 
 among Rodin's works one would have to be much of 
 a pedant and philistine to remain insensitive to that 
 marvellous modeUing of his, which is just one endless 
 succession of subtleties pleasing and true. How they 
 soothe the eye! How you kindle to the mere tender- 
 ness of form that they express! It is amusing, for 
 
376 Rodin 
 
 a moment, to remember in their presence one achieve- 
 ment of another French master of form, "Le Bain 
 Turc" of Ingres. The picture is a wonderful bit of 
 drawing, but it has no warmth, no glow. There is a 
 burning life in Rodin's nudities. But it is a life in- 
 voked through mechanical skill and through a very 
 earthy passion, if through passion at all. It is per- 
 haps the most conclusive of all testimonies to the 
 truth of this impression that there is no one above 
 the ruck in modern sculpture who is less haunting than 
 Rodin. We observe his work with interest and enjoy- 
 ment, but it leaves no mark. 
 
 That seems, perhaps, a risky thing to say of the 
 man who bulks so largely not only in French but in 
 other museums, who has had so many imitators all 
 over the world, and has stimulated such a horde of 
 eulogists to unceasing effort. When one has ac- 
 coimted for all the ignorance and sentimentality that 
 have gone to the promotion of the Rodin legend one 
 is still confronted by a body of opinion, among artists 
 as well as among laymen, which is bound to command 
 respect. It is still permissible to believe, however, 
 that Rodin has been vastly overrated, that his great 
 merits lie within clearly defined and, on the whole, 
 rather narrow boundaries, and that when the imita- 
 tors and the panegyrists have gone down the wind 
 they will be accompanied by a considerable number 
 of his works. By that time there may be, too, a 
 more general recognition of the fact now so curiously 
 
Rodin 377 
 
 overlooked, that Rodin came in an epoch not over- 
 whelmingly rich in great sculpture, and by virtue of 
 that very fact secured a not unprofitable salience 
 which might not have been his in other circumstances. 
 The modern French school has been characterized 
 since Rude by thoroughly academic traits, and its 
 leaders, save for a rare type like Dubois, have lacked 
 in distinction what they have possessed in manual 
 dexterity. Rodin, with his truth to nature, his skill 
 in reproducing the surface beauty of nature, his light 
 and shade, and his freedom, has seemed dowered 
 with a greater originality than he actually could 
 claim. He has been the "new" man, the one type 
 that was "different," and in their longing for reaction 
 against the rules of the Ecole des Beaux- Arts and the 
 Salon crowds of his contemporaries have hailed him 
 as a kind of Moses, destined to lead them into the 
 promised land. Poor Rodin! He never dreamed of 
 doing anything of the sort. Sometimes, in the quie- 
 tude of reflection among his beloved antiques, he must 
 think with a sort of mild astonishment of all the 
 bother that has been made about his art. 
 
XIII 
 
 Four Leaders in American 
 Architecture 
 
 I. H. H. Richardson 
 
 II. Richard Morris Hunt 
 
 III. Charles F. McKim 
 
 IV. Daniel H. Burnham 
 
XIII 
 
 FOUR LEADERS IN AMERICAN 
 ARCHITECTURE 
 
 Architecture is the most richly vitalized of the 
 arts in America to-day, more closely allied than any 
 other to national needs and taste. In the mere bulk 
 and scope of our building operations we have made, 
 in the last twenty-five or thirty years, such heroic 
 strides that if we had not possessed resourceful de- 
 signers we would have had to invent them. Imagina- 
 tion boggles at the thought of what the United States 
 would now look like if something like an efficient 
 school of architecture had not been developed to keep 
 abreast of a stupendous material expansion. Indus- 
 trial prosperity, the growth of railroads, civic and 
 State pride — all these things have played royally into 
 the hands of the architects, and with the stern, prac- 
 tical demands made upon them there has gone an ex- 
 traordinary artistic stimulus. There are more clever, 
 ambitious men in the profession than ever before in 
 our history, and one has only to take a swift bird's-eye 
 view of what they are doing, from New York to Cal- 
 ifornia, to see how high the average of merit is every- 
 where. The first question raised by such a survey 
 
 381 
 
382 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 concerns, however, not the men now active but their 
 immediate predecessors. How was this Renaissance 
 brought about? Who were the givers of the new dis- 
 pensation? 
 
 The striking thing about the field of inquiry thus 
 opened before us is the narrowness of its bounda- 
 ries in respect to time. It is within a comparatively 
 few recent years that American architecture has been 
 made over, and made over, as we shall see, almost as 
 though in a vacuum, with no help from our own his- 
 toric past. To the casual observer, recalling the Capi- 
 tol at Washington, certain other public buildings 
 there, the Boston State House, and the New York 
 City Hall, it might seem that there had been carried 
 over from the eighteenth century, well into the nine- 
 teenth, a classical tradition quite inspiring enough 
 for any school to go on with in a fairly vigorous frame 
 of naind. Some of the heroes in that austere but 
 fruitful period died a long time ago: Latrobe in 1820 
 and Bulfinch in 1844, but others, like McComb, who 
 designed our beautiful City Hall, and lived imtil 1853, 
 seem to touch hands with the present generation. 
 Isaiah Rogers, who built the old Custom House in 
 Wall Street, was ahve in 1869. Of course, one super- 
 ficially reflects, they left a school behind them. They 
 did nothing of the sort. When these architectural 
 masters of ours — for they were masters, in their grave, 
 academic way — retired from the scene, the Muse 
 strayed off into the wilderness. The Civil War, 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 383 
 
 doubtless, had something to do with her sulky with- 
 drawal. It took time for the artistic atmosphere to 
 clear after that upheaval, and economic as well as 
 less ponderable conditions had to suffer readjustment. 
 The buildings waiting for the genius that was to give 
 them form had also to wait for old fortunes to be re- 
 stored, and new ones to be made, in order that money 
 might be forthcoming to pay for them. Meanwhile, 
 for several decades, say from the thirties into the 
 seventies and even into the eighties, such architecture 
 as appeared on this continent, apart from that pro- 
 ceeding from the old school, was wont to be a fearful 
 and wonderful thing. I would not frame its elegy. 
 The less said about those well-meant aberrations, the 
 Queen Anne cottage, the brown-stone front, the "or- 
 nate" public building, etc., the better. "His name 
 was Dennis," says one of the talkers in Kipling's " Con- 
 ference of the Powers," when tactless inquiry is made 
 as to some incompetent, "and we'll let it stay so." 
 All that we need note at this point is that when the 
 new men arose, the leaders to whom in one way or 
 another we owe our present status in architecture, 
 they were offered a clean sheet of paper. The horrors 
 around them were, perhaps, not unhelpful either, for 
 at least they showed the adventurers in strange 
 seas what to avoid. 
 
384 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 H. H. RICHARDSON 
 
 They were contemporaries, the architects with 
 whom I am here specially concerned, and hence there 
 is no strict chronological sequence in which to view 
 them; but in the matter of influence for good or for 
 ill, of the broad relation of each man in the group to 
 their common period of architectural history, we may 
 safely range them in a certain order, beginning with 
 Henry Hobson Richardson. Born in 1839, he was a 
 younger man, younger by ten years or more, than 
 Hunt, but his course was run quicker and earlier than 
 was that of his friend; and when I say this I am glan- 
 cing not so much at the date of his untimely death, 
 1886, as at the curiously swift and circumscribed na- 
 ture of his rule. It was a rule, while it lasted. There 
 was a time when Richardson's vogue was tremendous. 
 The man himself was robust and inspiriting, a type of 
 bold, afl5rmative force; his loyal disciples "backed" 
 him not only for what he did but for what he was. 
 La Farge, who used to visit him in old days at his home 
 on Staten Island, before he had "arrived" with his 
 design for Trinity Church and had made his definitive 
 removal to Boston, told me of his ample ways. "Like 
 many other great men he was a mighty eater and 
 drinker — a pitcher of milk, a pitcher of champagne, 
 a pitcher of water — everything was done on a large 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 385 
 
 scale and his work is of that kind." A Southerner by 
 birth, he began life in New Orleans, but he was edu- 
 cated at Harvard and on his graduation proceeded 
 to Paris, where he entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts 
 and fitted himself for the architectural profession. 
 
 In one of the letters of this formative period, 
 printed by Mrs. Van Rensselaer in her biography of 
 Richardson, there is a brief, arresting sentence. "To 
 Athens and Rome I must go, coilte que coUte" he ex- 
 claims. Curiosity is piqued, but as a matter of fact 
 whether he went or not is beside the point. The in- 
 teresting thing is that he came back to America in 
 1862 neither the Renaissance man that he might have 
 been made by the one journey nor the classicist that 
 he might have been made by the other. Nor had 
 the Ecole made him an Academician. His first com- 
 mission, the Church of the Unity in Springfield, was 
 an essay in English Gothic! That was built in 1866. 
 Within three or four years he was designing the Brat- 
 tle Square Church, in Boston, and modelling its tall 
 tower on an Italian campanile of the earlier type. 
 Other instances might be cited to show an eclectic 
 tendency. But even at this period, in the early sev- 
 enties, he was feeling his way toward the idiom which 
 was ultimately to distinguish him and when he at- 
 tacked the problem offered in the competition for 
 Trinity Church, he had this idiom sufficiently under 
 control to use it with a flourish. The Gothic influ- 
 ence persisted, but the Romanesque prevailed. Later 
 
386 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 he was to develop still another manner, but his genius 
 was at bottom Romanesque, and so it stayed until 
 he died. It is with the Richardson of Trinity Church 
 that we have to reckon in the perspective of our 
 subject. 
 
 There is a great building lying about in it, a mas- 
 terpiece struggling to be born. The huge central 
 tower, so strongly reminiscent of Salamanca, would 
 alone challenge interest and admiration. Perhaps 
 it is in its too proud predominance that we have 
 a clew to Richardson's predestined failure as a lasting 
 influence; it marks him the creator of the fine episode 
 rather than of the organic, full-rounded, great design. 
 But I think there is a more conclusive explanation 
 of the fact that most if not all of the enthusiasm 
 he once excited has gone down the wind. Pas- 
 sionately as he cared for his warm Southern inspira- 
 tion, profoundly as he studied it, he was nevertheless 
 on the wrong track. While admirers everywhere 
 cheered him on, while clients testified to the faith that 
 was in them by storming him with commissions, while 
 pupils drank in his stirring gospel and presently went 
 forth to practise in offices of their own what he had 
 preached, no one fallen under the Richardsonian spell 
 took account of the little disintegrating force even 
 then working at its centre. This was the too exotic 
 nature of the architect's inspiration. All our styles 
 have been brought from overseas, but this one, I think, 
 was the hardest to acclimatize, the one most alien to 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 387 
 
 the genius of the country. When we are flamboyant 
 we are prone to be shrill. Our fervor does not visit 
 us in a vague, cloudy, solemn way — it flickers. There 
 are no mysterious reverberations about our artistic 
 romanticism. When we are at our worst our utter- 
 ance is thin and hard. When we are at our best we 
 are above all things glittering and lucid. There, I 
 believe, is the significant element, a certain sharp, 
 sane, and perhaps somewhat prosaic lucidity which 
 goes with our very blood and tells in our style. And 
 because Richardson quarrelled with it, without hav- 
 ing the last imperious power to put a spiritually in- 
 congruous, unwelcome inspiration in its place, he re- 
 mained at the height of his fame, and still remains, 
 a kind of exotic, a mistaken interpreter of his time 
 and his opportimity, a great artist manque. 
 
 In expressing himself, or perhaps I should say in 
 expressing a misdirected zest, he pleased himself, and, 
 by the same token, countless others. But you get 
 some idea of his irrelevance and thereby of his failure 
 when you note, for example, his resemblance to a 
 painter like Watts, the English idealist who tried to 
 recapture the grand manner of the old Italians and 
 did great work, leaving a great name, but without 
 convincing us that either belongs amongst the things 
 that really endure. Both men tried to pull them- 
 selves up by their boot-straps. It can't be done. 
 Full-bodied romance like Richardson's needs an older, 
 more composite, more generous soil than ours. Trin- 
 
388 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 ity is a magnificent effort, but it shows the strain. 
 I may risk an appeal to another art. "For poetry," 
 says Matthew Arnold, "the idea is everything; the 
 rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion." Rich- 
 ardson had the idea; but the illusion escaped him; and 
 to architecture such as he strove to make the illusion 
 is indispensable. His art needs depth, warmth, color, 
 and an atmosphere both of ebullient tangible hfe and 
 of shadowy, even mystical, beauties. It needs illu- 
 sion, charm. Trinity is stark, muscle-bound, one of 
 the coldest piles in architecture anywhere. Richard- 
 son had weight, too much weight. For the burgeon- 
 ing grace of Romanesque, which enchants even while 
 it gravely impresses, he was heavy-handed. The best 
 monuments to his genius, though not the most char- 
 acteristic of his ambition, or, imfortunately, the most 
 fertile in influence, are those later public buildings, 
 like the City Hall at Albany and the Court House and 
 Jail at Pittsburg, in which his exuberance is tamed, 
 his style is simplified, and he comes back to plain 
 prose. That, too, he overdid. "A pitcher of milk, 
 a pitcher of champagne, etc." He would make a 
 warehouse, or, for that matter, a private dwelhng, look 
 like a fortress. Whenever he was content to be sim- 
 ple he had, to be sure, his reward. The Richardson 
 who bixilt Sever Hall at Harvard and certain modest 
 libraries and railroad stations in New England will 
 be not ungratefully remembered. Neither, on the 
 other hand, will he be lauded as he once was lauded. 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 389 
 
 and the imitation of him which raged for a time is 
 vmlikely ever to be revived. 
 
 And yet his place as one of our leaders is secure, 
 for reasons highly germane to the present inquiry. 
 Richardson's work, diverging from the permanent 
 channel of American art and carrying us for a while 
 into a sort of backwater, nevertheless was allied to a 
 pure stream of ideas and made for a fine standard. 
 He helped to abolish a meretricious regime. He made 
 buildings which if not perfect or in harmony with 
 the true spirit of the age still called men to a higher 
 plane of aesthetics. He cleansed taste. Through him 
 architecture was brought nearer to re-establishment 
 as an art. What he did reacted upon the minds of 
 laymen and architects alike, waking new and nobler 
 desires, stimulating new and more intelligent am- 
 bitions. His energy reached far. He communicated 
 precious elements of life to a movement needing just 
 the burly impetus that he was qualified to give it. 
 It was his misfortune, not his fault, that he encour- 
 aged exoticism, redundancy, and an inexpressive, 
 florid kind of swagger, at a time when the one thing 
 we needed was discipline. 
 
390 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 II 
 RICHARD MORRIS HUNT 
 
 Richardson's magnificent sincerity and the sheer 
 creative ability of the man gave an astonishing weight 
 to his influence, and there can be no doubt at all that 
 if this had remained unchallenged he might have im- 
 posed the tour de force upon us, as the popular solu- 
 tion of our architectural problems, for a number 
 of years on which it is distinctly uncomfortable to 
 reflect. The challenge was to come, however, from 
 at least two powerful quarters, and in both instances 
 it was to drive at that weak point in his armor upon 
 which I have laid stress. Strengthened by European 
 precedent, it was nevertheless to make clear that not 
 everything in Europe is suited to our conditions, that 
 there are traditions infinitely more to our purpose 
 than the Romanesque. Of McKim's pure style I 
 shall speak later. It worked mighty changes when 
 it came fully into play. But before then Hunt was 
 quietly doing much to redress the balance, and he 
 was doing it because the difference between him and 
 Richardson went to the root of the matter. Richard- 
 son was an absolutely idiosyncratic type, a man whose 
 individuahty would not down. Hunt abandoned the 
 personal bias at the outset of his career. He was 
 from first to last an academic artist, rich in character, 
 in strength of temperament, but scholastic to the 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 391 
 
 core. To any one who meditates on the progress of 
 architecture in America at the crucial period of which 
 I speak it is fascinating to watch the two influences 
 working side by side, and to see in the longer survival 
 of Hunt's another proof of the cosmopohtan, eclectic 
 nature of our art. Richardson's style was too per- 
 sonal to himself to be communicable, and so it bred 
 only ephemeral imitation. Hunt was all for abstract 
 principles, and these he could and did teach to his 
 coimtrymen. He did not make them mould their 
 styles on his. But he drilled them in the logic of 
 architecture, in its rectitude, in those elements of it 
 which are independent of temperament and might 
 even be described as independent of time and place. 
 In the light of these ideas he looms as one of the 
 most remarkable artists of his time. 
 
 One link he had with Richardson, the dominating, 
 enkindling power of the master, and I cannot forbear 
 pausing for a moment on the personality of this fa- 
 mous leader as I used to know him. As a man Rich- 
 ard Morris Hunt was the antithesis of his architectu- 
 ral self. He was a picturesque figure, stalwart for his 
 inches (he was not tall), and with something in his 
 carriage as well as in his manner of speech that made 
 you suspect the military officer rather than the artist. 
 His head was handsome; it conveyed even an im- 
 pression of stateliness, at times, under the gray hair. 
 But the air of stateliness was fleeting. In the main, 
 Hunt was prodigiously vivacious, almost a French- 
 
392 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 man in some of his quick passages of talk, and the 
 talk itself was explosive. He liked pimgency and 
 never failed to introduce it into his discourse, no 
 matter what the occasion. At a public dinner, no 
 less than in private conversation, he was fond of ac- 
 centuating what he had to say with that tempestu- 
 ous rhetoric in which old Mr. Hardcastle indulged, 
 and yet there was no sting of wrath in Himt's fiery 
 speech. If he damned a thing he did it genially, and 
 with a touch of humor that somehow made the objur- 
 gation seem almost a form of approval. He would 
 grow apocalyptic sometimes, piling up his denuncia- 
 tion in heroic masses; but all the time there was the 
 twinkle in the eye that prepared you for the harmless 
 conclusion, and it was usually odds that you would 
 burst into laughter with the crash of the wordy climax. 
 And Hunt laughed with you. He was helpful and 
 sympathetic by nature. To the veriest stranger he 
 was accessible and cordial so soon as he saw that his 
 interlocutor was seriously interested in the question 
 at issue. For in the great question for him, in the 
 question of architecture, his own interest was inex- 
 haustible. 
 
 As a man he was impulsive, quick-tempered, ebul- 
 lient, picturesque always. As an architect this unflag- 
 ging enthusiast, fighting always for what he believed 
 to be the best, could do nothing hasty or ill-consid- 
 ered. The study which engrossed his life was begun 
 when he was only fifteen. At that age he left Bos- 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 393 
 
 ton, where he had been pursuing his education in the 
 High School and the Latin School, and went with his 
 mother to Europe. She took him to Geneva, where 
 in 1843 ^6 entered the architectural atelier of Samuel 
 Darier. From Geneva he proceeded to Paris and 
 continued his studies. Hector Lefuel was his master. 
 Hunt studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts for some time 
 and then went off to Egypt and Asia Minor. Re- 
 turning to Paris in 1854 he was made Inspecteur des 
 Travaux by the Government, the appointment direct- 
 ing his energies upon the construction of those new 
 buildings which connected the Tuileries with the 
 Louvre. Lefuel was in charge of this work and he 
 gave Hunt the Pavilion de la Bibliotheque for his 
 province. It meant priceless experience to him. It 
 gave him practical training in exactly the school which 
 pleased him most — the French school of academic 
 architecture, a school in which splendor, and a cer- 
 tain monumental dignity, are the indispensable in- 
 gredients of style. 
 
 When Hunt was engaged upon the Louvre he was 
 still in his twenties. In fact he was only twenty- 
 seven when he returned to America, with a foreign 
 experience behind him probably imique in the annals 
 of our school. His powers were soon recognized. He 
 had scarcely settled here before he was invited to 
 share in the completion of the Capitol at Washington. 
 He served for six months as assistant to Thomas U. 
 Walter, the architect in charge, and then returned to 
 
394 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 New York to found the practice which he carried on 
 to the day of his death in 1895. He established him- 
 self also as the master of an office — in Paris it would 
 have been called an atelier — to which the young ar- 
 chitects of the coimtry were eager to gain admittance. 
 It was at this time that his influence was perhaps most 
 definite and potent. He drew any number of clever 
 men to his side, and, while no one of the group copied 
 his style, they were all immensely benefited by the 
 soimd principles he taught. These were, that archi- 
 tecture to be good must be good in construction, that 
 every factor in a design must be in its proper place; 
 that the architect must be above all things moderate, 
 respectful of well-ascertained rules, true to the golden 
 mean of taste marking the school from which Hunt 
 came. A building with him was a problem to be 
 solved with strict reference to the necessities of the 
 situation, and with even stricter reference to laws of 
 proportion, of balance. In a word, he was healthily 
 academic. His genius was not creative and he did 
 not strike out on a new line, but he was brimming 
 over with vitaUty; there was nothing crassly conserv- 
 ative about him, and he kept his work within almost 
 severe bounds without ever making it barren or coldly 
 conventional. Richardson triumphed over Hunt in 
 the Trinity competition, but the loser there won else- 
 where a longer and a truer victory. His tonic influ- 
 ence, keyed perfectly to the American spirit, was of 
 incalculable value in coimteracting the spread of that 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 395 
 
 Romanesque fallacy whose ravages we have consid- 
 ered. And he proved, too, what it was important to 
 know, that the classical tradition, filtered through 
 the French, was not incompatible with artistic free- 
 dom. 
 
 How far Hunt could go in the direction of mere 
 picturesque charm, for example, when he chose, in 
 the direction of mere elegance and sensuous beauty, 
 he showed in the house for Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt at 
 Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street in New York. 
 It is perhaps less characteristic of him than many 
 other designs which might be cited. It is his tour 
 de force, and its revival of old French motives in the 
 environment fixed for it may seem open to question. 
 But it is an enchanting revival, standing alone in all 
 America. There has never been anything to equal 
 it here for grace, for exquisite finish, for a daintiness 
 reminding us of some French chateau with its roman- 
 tic background rather than of Fifth Avenue. It has 
 often been said that the house needed a park around 
 it. This is very true. It would be greatly enhanced 
 by slight distance, by avenues of trees and by ade- 
 quate terracing. But just as it is it is a brilHant per- 
 formance. The outlines are ravishingly picturesque. . 
 The ornamentation comes as near to being lace-work 
 in stone as architectural decoration has a right to 
 come. And for a fairly princely effect, for the sug- 
 gestion of that organized, highly wrought luxury 
 which we associate with European social life, the 
 
396 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 spacious portal has always seemed to me an achieve- 
 ment by itself. Hunt was possibly aware that he 
 had produced a masterpiece in this building, that he 
 had done something in the glittering casket of pin- 
 nacles and fretwork which neither he nor any one 
 else in America would surpass, or even rival. He had, 
 for once at least, been a poet as well as an architect, 
 and he caused himself to be represented in stone upon 
 the roof of the house. You may see the statue there 
 any day as you pass along Fifth Avenue, a little fig- 
 ure clothed as an artisan. It is a pleasant conceit, 
 and one which fits the building as it would have fitted 
 no other designed by Hunt. The French chiteau 
 which he built for Mr. George Vanderbilt in the South 
 has advantages which this city house lacks, a beauti- 
 ful site and unlimited free space aroimd it. But that 
 design is not, to my mind, half so sympathetic as its 
 urban predecessor. 
 
 The difference is significant, reviving that question 
 of personality to which I have more than once re- 
 ferred. Himt's instinct was always for restraint, for 
 a subordination of personal feeling to reasoned prin- 
 ciple. Turn from the W. K. Vanderbilt house to the 
 J. J. Astor house in Fifth Avenue, facing the Park, and 
 the Gerry house near by. There is less charm in 
 them than in the miniature chateau. But they are 
 admirable illustrations of what can be done for Amer- 
 ican architecture with French ideas, when these are 
 employed as ideas and not as mechanical formulae. 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 397 
 
 They make for dearly articulated and interesting 
 design, for a well-bred elegance, for a quality which 
 may not be startlingly original but is neither, on the 
 other hand, mediocre nor colorless. Hunt's predi- 
 lections made him, on the whole, more successful 
 with city houses than with country dwellings and, 
 in fact, the best things he did in country architecture, 
 apart from the Southern chateau just mentioned, 
 were modifications of his accustomed style. The 
 Cornelius Vanderbilt house at Newport presents more 
 than a modification. It was really based on the 
 buildings of the Italian Renaissance in many of its 
 most important features. But even here the design 
 is brought together under the influence of a spirit 
 closely related to Hunt's earliest training. You can 
 tell in a moment that the designer of this work was 
 taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. There are indi- 
 cations of it in the grouping, in the massing of the 
 different parts. Working toward the close of his ca- 
 reer Hunt may have tried to move freely in the style 
 of the Renaissance, but he could not quite cast off the 
 academic mode he had been following for years. 
 
 Better than either his city houses or his country 
 houses were Himt's public buildings. There the old 
 worker on the Louvre came back to the problems 
 that interested him most and that were worthiest of 
 his faculties. The Lenox Library, swept not so long 
 ago by the march of time from its beautiful site op- 
 posite the Park in New York, had no charm at all; 
 
398 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 but it was never meant to have any, and at the risk 
 of seeming to labor the point I must reiterate that 
 just here we come again upon this architect's shining 
 virtue. The Lenox Library, repellent as it was, was 
 also superbly soimd, a piece of rigorous scholarship. 
 I used to shiver before its bleakness, but I used to 
 rejoice in its finality — at the sureness and repose dis- 
 cernible in its imified proportions. It had the gran- 
 deur of some ancient monoUth. In its majestic sim- 
 plicity it read American architects an unforgettable 
 lesson. And at this point it is delightful to recur 
 to Hunt's flexibiUty, his demonstration of the fact 
 that that discipline which he had himself obeyed and 
 loved to impose meant no handicap whatever to the 
 true architect. I would cite now the Administration 
 Building at the World's Fair at Chicago, wherein he 
 struck the note that was peculiarly his, the grandiose 
 note of a kind of formal magnificence, of academic 
 and official dignity. There was no building at the 
 fair more precisely adapted to its position and pur- 
 poses, more perfect in its field, than the splendid 
 structure at the entrance to the grounds. It was bril- 
 liant, as befitted the place and the occasion, but it 
 was also designed with the right formality. It was 
 as picturesque as could have been desired, yet it was 
 obviously academic. Its proportions were good, its 
 details were good, it fell judiciously into its given 
 space, and yet it dominated, as was intended, every- 
 thing that surrounded it. Hunt did much for the 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 399 
 
 artistic side of the fair. His energy flowed every- 
 where and was of endless service to the army of 
 workers concentrated in Jackson Park. But his best 
 service was rendered in showing how a public build- 
 ing could be designed with originality and yet with 
 reserve; independently, and yet in a sort of worldly- 
 wise taste; with an American vivacity in its outline, 
 and yet with a dignity that makes even the most 
 festal of buildings impressive. It was this building, 
 coming near the end of a career which had through- 
 out been fruitful of fine results, that brought Hunt 
 the gold medal of the Royal Institute of British Ar- 
 chitects, an honor conferred by the Queen through the 
 great professional society of England and regarded 
 as one of the chief prizes of architectural merit in 
 the world. He was always being thus recognized by 
 the professional bodies of his own country and of 
 Europe, and not simply because he had designed this 
 or that good building but because the wholesomeness 
 of his broad influence came more and more to be real- 
 ized. His genius worked like a leaven, the leaven of 
 wise authority. In his work men could see the virtue 
 of careful, impersonal training; from it they could 
 iiifer the absolute necessity of some ordered principles 
 to the development of a work of art with consistency 
 as well as with flexibility. Richardson heightened 
 our architectural enthusiasm. Hunt did much to 
 chasten and organize it. 
 
400 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 III 
 CHARLES F. McKIM 
 
 As we have seen, it was not so very long ago, as 
 years are counted, that our architecture was flung 
 into the melting-pot, but the moment now seems his- 
 torical. The artist in building was coming into his 
 own. It was good to be alive and in the midst of 
 tremendous changes, which seemed none the less tre- 
 mendous because the public at large was hardly aware 
 of what was going on. I was there, in my youth, and 
 I know. Architecture was more important than any 
 other human interest, and in New York at all events 
 it was tempting to believe that its fortunes for the 
 entire country were largely in the hands of one group 
 of men. Everybody knew and honored the two pio- 
 neers whose careers I have sketched, and everybody 
 knew that certain other brilliant men were at work. 
 There was, for instance, a memorable stir when Babb, 
 Cook and Willard built a warehouse in Duane Street 
 placing a new and beautiful stamp upon commercial 
 architecture. But the rising tide was dominated by 
 one firm, that formed when Charles F. McKim, Wil- 
 liam Rutherford Mead, and Stanford White settled 
 down in the later seventies to work in harness. They 
 were foreordained to be associated together, each con- 
 tributing something that the others lacked, while all 
 three moved naturally to a common end. Young 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 401 
 
 men of talent, many of whom now occupy command- 
 ing positions in their profession, came trooping into 
 the old oflSice, which was an office in name but had the 
 character of a studio. The first of our modern sky- 
 scrapers, a modest enough affair, had just gone up 
 on lower Broadway, but problems of steel construc- 
 tion then gave little if any concern to McKim and 
 his followers. If they had dealings with engineers, 
 their associations were more intimate with painters 
 and sculptors, and the men in the allied professions 
 who were part of their circle were men like La Farge 
 and Saint-Gaudens. The artistic temperament, pure 
 and simple, had everything its own way. The im- 
 portant thing was just to make a building beautiful. 
 It was inspiring to observe the manner in which Mc- 
 Kim showed how this was to be done. The task of 
 exhibiting the play of his influence is a little difficult, 
 but it is full of interest. 
 
 In a work of collaboration, two or more men may 
 so skilfully fuse their identities as to puzzle even 
 themselves, to say nothing of the public; but sooner 
 or later the world comes to know just what each 
 brought to the study of a given problem. Character 
 will out. You cannot hide individual genius behind 
 a firm name. In discussion of the buildings designed 
 by McKim, Mead and White, it has been customary 
 to recognize the exceptional unity of that partner- 
 ship, and to leave unanswered the question as to 
 which one of the three may have determined this or 
 
402 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 that element in the style practised by them all. Re- 
 serve in the matter has been very natural. An anal- 
 ysis of their work which seeks to carry the inquiry 
 thus far soon threatens to entangle the critic in a clas- 
 sification of specific buildings, and that is not only in- 
 trusive but full of peril. For example, the faculty 
 of Stanford White was romantic, and even playful. 
 He had some of the gifts of the painter, as certain 
 brilliant drawings of his attest, and he would have 
 been a painter if La Farge, to whom he went for ad- 
 vice on the subject, had not urged him to be an 
 architect instead. But White, who could be decora- 
 tive to the point of the rococo, could also express 
 himself in the purest, most classical, of architectural 
 terms. I remember a talk with him about the fine 
 cornice of the Tiffany building, in which the point 
 of view he disclosed was that of an architect engaged 
 upon a positively austere conception. It is idle, 
 then, to attempt to parcel out the achievements of 
 the firm. On the other hand, it would be equally 
 foolish, in speaking of McKim, to evade the detach- 
 ment of his personality from the working scheme to 
 which he contributed so much. To any one famihar 
 with the subject he must remain as clearly defined a 
 figure in our architecture as any of the leaders in our 
 sculpture or painting. 
 
 An artist in the strictest sense of the term, an 
 artist of fresh and original traits, he was also a 
 type of intellect driving at beauty, and deep re- 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 403 
 
 flection went to the making of his work. His prin- 
 ciples were thought out, not emotionally improvised. 
 They started with the organic character of a build- 
 ing, whose functions were to find not only charming 
 but right expression. Thus he never did anything 
 merely for effect; his facades might be never so orig- 
 inal but you would recognize always their absolute 
 fitness. His buildings unmistakably belonged to their 
 sites. This fact has been obscured for some commen- 
 tators by the not infrequent modelling of one of 
 those buildings upon some historic European monu- 
 ment. Argument has gone off at a tangent, confu- 
 sing the question of policy involved with the question 
 of the artist's pure constructive purpose. Ignore for 
 a moment this matter of the adaptation of foreign 
 designs and look simply to the inquiry as to whether 
 McKim did not work out his problem from the cen- 
 tre, giving his buildings an ineffaceable stamp elo- 
 quent of their purpose. I cheerfully make the reader 
 a present of the fact that more than once in the great 
 mass of work to be considered he is bound to come 
 across a design frankly taken from the past. The 
 debts thus to be discovered leave McKim wholly 
 solvent. His occasional reproduction of particular 
 models did not conflict with a vital fashion of han- 
 dling practical issues. His genius worked in the stuff 
 of American life. He took our social and civic needs 
 into his mind and proceeded to satisfy them, not as 
 a dilettante erecting handsome screens upon the high- 
 
404 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 way but as a creative builder, and, in the process of 
 leaving a library or a church, a clubhouse or a State 
 Capitol, a building with a soul, he framed for us 
 something like a new architectural language. 
 
 He could do this, for one reason, because he began 
 at the beginning. He was never one of those designers 
 content to rest satisfied with work of the sort that 
 merely looks well on paper. Building materials were 
 to him what pigments are to the painter; he handled 
 them with the same intensely personal feeling for 
 their essential qualities that a great technician of 
 the brush brings to the manipulation of his colors, 
 and he left upon his productions the same auto- 
 graphic stamp. Stanford White had no keener pas- 
 sion for the effectiveness, as decoration, of a rich 
 Flemish tapestry or a twisted and gilded old Spanish 
 column, than McKim had for the structural character 
 of a well-laid course of stone. I recall an incident 
 typical of his solicitude for material, for the effect of 
 an idea embodied in the disposition of just so much 
 substance. It was at the time of the building of 
 the Boston Public Library. Certain sheets of marble 
 were to be put up in the entrance-hall — Numidian, I 
 think they were — and their dimensions were deter- 
 mined by McKim with the utmost care. He regarded 
 those dimensions as essential to the ensemble, but 
 when the marble was dehvered it was found that 
 they had not been rigidly followed. Forthwith the 
 sheets were rejected. The contractor argued at tre- 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 405 
 
 mendous length and almost wept, but McICim was 
 harder than the Numidian itself. He was dealing in 
 marble, I repeat, as an artist deals in paint, and he 
 would no more submit to a change in the appearance 
 of the surfaces he had planned than a painter would 
 allow his color-man to dictate the final condition of 
 his picture. The joints were to come where he 
 wanted them. I make much of this episode because 
 it stands for temperament, for an inborn gift. You 
 caimot learn fastidiousness like that. The right di- 
 mensions of a piece of material for a given position 
 in a building can no more be figured up and com- 
 municated by a pedagogue than the secrets of color 
 and texture, to be similarly applied, can be formu- 
 lated in the schools. To think of McKim is to think 
 of a genius expressing itself through the stuff of ar- 
 chitecture as creative genius expresses itself in all 
 the other arts, somehow identifying itself with the 
 very grain and fibre of that in which it works. 
 
 The instinctive character of McKim's gift comes 
 out in the earliest pages of his biography. When, as 
 a lad of nineteen, he began his professional studies 
 at Harvard, in 1866, the drift of his artistic nature 
 would appear to have been fixed. It was, in the 
 strict sense, a constructive gift. They say that he 
 could draw even then with uncommon facility, but 
 I have never heard of his having passed through that 
 sketch-book stage in which a young architect is be- 
 trayed into bizarre performances by the ease with 
 
4o6 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 which he can use his pencil in Europe and bring 
 back scores of supposedly adaptable "motives." 
 Later in Kfe, when he came to give much thought to 
 the training of his Juniors, he was wont to enforce 
 upon them the excellence of the Ecole des Beaux 
 Arts as a source of instruction — and to warn them 
 against its dangers as a source of patterns. He had 
 been there himself and knew what he was talking 
 about. Leaving Harvard for Paris he entered the 
 Ecole and stayed three years, but if its lessons had 
 imposed any pedantic rules upon him his subsequent 
 travels in Europe and his innate tendencies amply 
 protected him from returning to America with a cut- 
 and-dried hypothesis for the solution of his problems. 
 In the formation of his own style it was by the 
 spirit, not the letter, of the old law that he allowed 
 himself to be controlled, and this it was that he de- 
 veloped in himself, and poured into the work of his 
 firm. He developed it slowly, and very thoughtfully. 
 He did not learn the value of the Italian Renaissance 
 as one learns a lesson, but gradually absorbed it as 
 he absorbed classical ideas and some French influ- 
 ences. Little by little he came to do his work in a 
 kind of dry Hght, steadily getting rid of all that was 
 superfluous in detail, steadily expressing himself in 
 larger and simpler terms. He used the style of the 
 Renaissance just as the late J. F. Bentleyused that 
 of Byzantium, when he designed perhaps the most 
 remarkable piece of pure architecture in our epoch, 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 407 
 
 the superb Roman Catholic cathedral in London. 
 He used it, that is to say, as an instrument which he 
 had made entirely his own. That accounts for the 
 reaction of his work upon his "young men" and upon 
 the work of many of his contemporaries. He was 
 effective in this way, because he handed on no aca- 
 demic axioms, but a habit of mind. When he realized 
 the dream of his life and founded the American Acad- 
 emy at Rome it was not to substitute an Italian for 
 a French formula, but to lead the young student, al- 
 most insensibly, into a nobler, more disciplined, and 
 yet freer way of thinking and working. Thus he 
 himself thought and worked, a steadying force in 
 American art. If he had a genius for rule and hence 
 waxed in severity as he progressed, he had also a 
 genius for beauty and hence never ceased to charm. 
 That was what his disciples felt, and it was through 
 that that he helped them. It was once my privilege 
 to go with him through the sculpture galleries of the 
 Vatican, making notes of the statues that seemed 
 suitable for a decorative plan then in the air. There 
 had been talk of reproducing a quantity of classical 
 sculpture in plaster casts, to be distributed through 
 the groimds of the Chicago Fair, and together we pre- 
 pared a long list. The experience was one to remem- 
 ber with gratitude. McKim saw those sculptured 
 episodes, as he intended them to be, in all their pos- 
 sible relations. If he accepted or rejected a sugges- 
 tion, his comments bore partly upon the intrinsic 
 
4o8 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 qualities of the statue, but more upon its probable ef- 
 fect against the background at Chicago. He would 
 pause before some piece, and in a few words explain 
 its fitness or its uselessness. I vividly remember how 
 the man at whose feet I sat enlarged my horizon, 
 and put the whole question of sculptural decoration 
 into a new perspective. 
 
 When in his early manhood he came back to his 
 own land to make a career he worked for a time under 
 Richardson, and I know no better testimony to his 
 artistic poise than you may find in his emergence un- 
 scathed from the influence of that brilHant man.* 
 Sometimes it has seemed surprising to me that he 
 was not, at least in his formative years, brought 
 more tmder subjection to the designer of Trinity. 
 Yet, on a moment's reflection, one always remem- 
 bers the importance of sheer taste in the history of 
 the three partners and how much this matter meant 
 to McKim. Naturally he swerved aside from the 
 broad and luxuriant path along which Richardson 
 
 * It is interesting, by the way, to compare the Higginson and 
 Whittier houses built side by side in Beacon Street, years ago, re- 
 spectively by Richardson and by McKim's firm, the latter then in its 
 first "period." The two designs were produced in the most amicable 
 rivalry. It was intended that they should harmonize. Unquestion- 
 ably they go well together. Obviously, too, both are the work of 
 artists. Let us not look for elements of superiority in either the one 
 or the other. But in looking for the points of difiference, and this is 
 surely legitimate, may we not note that the Whittier design is much 
 lighter in hand than its neighbor, that the makers of it were willing 
 to leave a certain weightiness to Richardson, preferring grace, ele- 
 gance, and a delicate linear charm? All that was very characteristic 
 of McKim. 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 409 
 
 moved at such a generous gait. If we imagine a 
 Whistler sojourning for a little while, interestedly 
 enough, in the atelier of a Rubens, but presently 
 going forth to develop, as a matter of course, a totally 
 different style of his own, we can form a fair work- 
 ing idea of what McKim did when he and White 
 and Mead set about making their mark. To say 
 that they began to make it with a kind of cleverness 
 would be to understate the case, and at the same time 
 there is something justly descriptive in the phrase. 
 Certainly there is no occasion for critical solemnities 
 on the buildings through which they felt their way 
 toward a style of their own. I am thinking especially 
 of things Uke the Casino at Newport and divers cot- 
 tages that they built there in the '8o's. I am think- 
 ing, too, of the little music hall at Short Hills in New 
 Jersey, which I used to see at the end of a long walk 
 every Sunday one summer. There was positive re- 
 freshment in coming upon that modest bit of coxm- 
 try architecture; it was so original, so picturesque, 
 and, withal, so perfectly adapted to its site. You 
 saw at once that here was a new conception of what 
 needed to be done with an old problem, a new art in 
 place of an old sort of journeyman's craft. The nov- 
 elty sprang, of course, from the brains of McKim 
 and his colleagues, but it is, perhaps, worth while to 
 note here another quarter whence the new move- 
 ment got part of its impetus. 
 Very little, if anything, has been said about the 
 
4IO Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 social developments which synchronized with the 
 early progress of this firm. It is in no uncompli- 
 mentary sense that they may be described as the 
 fashionable architects of their time. On the con- 
 trary, the designation is to be employed in all seri- 
 ousness and honor. It was their good fortime to 
 come upon the scene just at a time when people of 
 wealth were taking a new interest in the beautifica- 
 tion of their environment. Private collections of pic- 
 tures and other works of art were not only increas- 
 ing in number, but were being formed with reference 
 to higher critical standards. In the furnishing of 
 houses a more lavish expenditure was accompanied 
 by a desire for a better scheme of decoration. Modes 
 of social entertainment grew richer and more com- 
 plicated as they grew more costly. It is flattering to 
 our self-esteem to beUeve that we were always at 
 home in palaces, but, as a matter of fact, the splen- 
 dors of American social life date from the last quar- 
 ter of a century, an educational period if ever there 
 was one. At Newport and elsewhere a type of dwell- 
 ing was in demand such as had not got itself created 
 since long before the war. Moreover, prior to the 
 sixties. North or South, the owner of a prosperous 
 house let himself go chiefly in respect to scale, and 
 while his taste at the best aimed in the safe direction 
 of simphcity he gave little thought to art as art. 
 McKim's cKents were quite wilUng that he should 
 think of nothing else. There, I venture to say, you 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 411 
 
 have the secret of his opportunity and one key to 
 what he made of it. Men of means wanted new 
 houses and were as keen on having these made beau- 
 tiful and distinguished as though they were acquir- 
 ing the paintings and sculptures of foreign masters. 
 The Casino at Newport is possibly the most repre- 
 sentative of the country buildings erected by McKim, 
 Mead and White, at this period. It is representative 
 alike in its fitness for the purpose to which it was 
 assigned and in what I can only describe as its re- 
 strained picturesqueness. In breaking with a tradi- 
 tion of dulness the firm did not consider it necessary 
 to turn violent or bizarre. Nothing could be fresher, 
 more unconventional, than this Casino, or the house 
 for Robert Goelet at Newport, or the Osborne house 
 at Mamaroneck; but then, on the other hand, nothing 
 could be more judiciously studied, more refined, more 
 delicately expressive of a luxurious but beautiful ideal. 
 What McKim did in the country he did in the city, 
 in such houses as the one for Mr. Whittier, which I 
 have already cited, or those for Mr. Drayton, Mr. 
 Cutting, and Mr. Phoenix in New York. He suc- 
 ceeded in the difficult task of blending dignity and 
 repose with a certain piquancy. A design framed by 
 him and his partners was always a serious work of 
 art, and it was always amusing, to use the word with 
 the implication it carries in French criticism. De- 
 cidedly McKim, Mead and White were the archi- 
 tects for an expanding social era, as were those mas- 
 
412 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 ters who built the city palaces and country villas of 
 the rich Romans and Florentines of the Renaissance. 
 If they had stopped there they would still be re- 
 membered, but they were bound to press further and 
 win a wider fame — bound both by the conditions of 
 American life and by the nature of their resources. 
 Everything conspired to lead them on from archi- 
 tecture that was charming to architecture that 
 was monumental, and, on occasion, in the grand 
 style. Here, I think, is where we cannot but 
 recognize the steadily ripening influence of McKim. 
 The genius that was so easily and so happily exer- 
 cised upon the problems of dwelling-houses in city 
 and country inevitably craved a larger outlet. The 
 firm has for years gone on designing private houses, 
 but it is significant that most of these have latterly 
 been very stately affairs, on an imposing scale. The 
 essential history of McKim is to be traced in a long 
 succession of heroic buildings, starting with the Vil- 
 lard block in New York and the Public Library in 
 Boston, and coming down to the Pennsylvania Sta- 
 tion in New York. In the contemplation of these 
 edifices we abandon all thought of those "amusing" 
 qualities to which I have alluded, and think of graver 
 things; but before touching upon the purely mon- 
 umental aspects of McKim's work I must glance 
 again, in passing, at that /air of his for materials and 
 at a friendly, intimate quality which he carried from 
 his earlier experience on into larger fields. As he at- 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 413 
 
 tacked more ambitious themes he did not lose touch 
 with the sentiment of the hfe around him, sacrifi- 
 cing personal feeling to scholarship. To see how 
 tactfully, how sympathetically he could deal with 
 subjects apart from ordinary private life and yet 
 untouched by the heavy hand that governs the pur- 
 poses of the average public building, one has but to 
 look at such things as the Harvard Club in New York, 
 the Harvard Gates at Cambridge, the big building 
 for the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, the 
 Women's Building for the University of Illinois at Ur- 
 bana and the buildings for the Army War College at 
 Washington. In the first place, the work done in 
 these designs shows invariably with what Judgment 
 and taste McKim could use brick, when he chose, a 
 material for which the firm long ago declared its ef- 
 fective appreciation. (The vast chateau-like house, 
 built for Mr. C. L. Tiffany in New York, when the 
 firm was coming into repute, is alone impressive evi- 
 dence of a truly artistic faculty for the treatment of 
 this material.) Furthermore, the buildings I have 
 named and the gates at Cambridge are remarkable 
 for their possession of a dignity that is not too aus- 
 tere. You are impressed but you are not overpow- 
 ered. Something gracious and even beguiling appeals 
 to you through the very serious scheme of design that 
 is in each instance worked out. 
 
 McKim knew how to take a high view of his sub- 
 ject. He did not know how to be harsh or bleak. 
 
414 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 Was it not just his gift for beauty that kept him 
 thus on the warm, human side of things, the same 
 joyously creative impulse that had caused him to 
 play so ingeniously with the little fabrics the firm 
 put together at Newport? By all the rules of the 
 Academy a style' so pure as his should have culmi- 
 nated at a point spelling mere coldness for the ordi- 
 nary observer, but McKim had a way of softening 
 his severities when he felt that it was required. See 
 how he modified the rather gaimt lines of the Italian 
 palace he built for the University Club in New York 
 by the decorative touches which balconies and 
 carven seals give to the facades. I remember, too, 
 the brilliant New York State Building at the Chicago 
 Fair in 1893. He made it a better building, a better 
 piece of pure architecture, than the Villa Medids at 
 Rome, on which he modelled it. But what made it 
 so extraordinarily successful was nothing more nor 
 less than the festal urbanity with which he tempered 
 the majestic character of the design. The building 
 was unmistakably monumental, but it was a cheerful, 
 welcoming structure, fitting with absolute precision 
 into the holiday picture made by the exposition at 
 large. We know how devotedly he and his numer- 
 ous associates in the great undertaking at Chicago 
 strove to preserve a classical sobriety amongst the 
 main exposition buildings, how earnest they were in 
 their plans for a really noble sky-line, and, in short, 
 how one of the most popular of modem demonstra- 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 415 
 
 tions was charged with an artistic lesson. No one 
 there was more exacting than was McKim, no one 
 there was more steadfast in the advocacy of a lofty 
 architectural standard. But no one, I may add, was 
 a subtler adept in the process of enveloping serious 
 ideas in garments of winning loveliness. 
 
 At the bottom of all his studies was not only that 
 gift for beauty which I have mentioned, but a pro- 
 foimd conviction of the place of character in archi- 
 tecture. The purpose of a building, the use to which 
 it was destined, was something more than a practical 
 condition enforced upon him by a client; it was an 
 appeal to his imagination, stimulating his powers of 
 design Just as a proposal for a statue will set a sculp- 
 tor's fingers tingling to press the clay. McKim was 
 not, any more than any other great artist, infallible, 
 and he had to learn some things by experience. The 
 Public Library in Boston has been criticised as fall- 
 ing short of perfection in respect to its utilitarian 
 function. Perhaps it is not impeccable. I confess 
 that while I was in and out of it frequently at the 
 time of its erection, and have since explored it more 
 than once, I have never gone broodingly about the 
 testing of its every corner. It is possible, no doubt, 
 that there are rooms in which the reader might 
 wish for a little better light. But, when all is 
 said, where, in this coimtry, will you find a nobler 
 library building, a nobler library building of the 
 same scale and put to the same popular uses? I 
 
4i6 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 know that McKim and his partners gave unend- 
 ing study to the problem, and I can see him in 
 Rome, years ago, poring over its monuments as one 
 turns the pages of a book, looking for further inspira- 
 tion. He had one of his draughtsmen with him, on 
 whom he would call to sketch one detail or another 
 that interested him. Was it in order that he might 
 slavishly reproduce that detail? Not for a moment. 
 It was rather as though he were yielding himself to 
 the play of ideas as he interrogated the old mas- 
 ters, and wanted to jot down suggestive points de- 
 veloped in the process. These were not so much 
 co-ordinated with his central scheme as they were 
 subtly absorbed into it, to fertilize and enrich it. 
 He was a striking instance of the artist who consults 
 the past for a kind of broad invigoration, never as a 
 methodical copyist. 
 
 In the presence of buildings like the one at Boston, 
 or the State-House at Providence, or the Pennsyl- 
 vania Station in New York, or Mr. Morgan's inimi- 
 table little library, the student feels that he is down 
 to the bed-rock of pure architecture. Nothing ex- 
 perimental is visible, you find nothing irrelevant, 
 nothing that is understated or overdone. The bones 
 of the design, so to say, are faultlessly articulated, 
 faultlessly with reference to the practical idea at the 
 heart of the problem, and to this unit of construction 
 there is given an envelope of beautiful simplicity. If 
 there is decoration to be reckoned with you scarcely 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 417 
 
 notice it; it is made part and parcel of the mass with 
 such imerring taste. What you notice above all is 
 the achievement of something like grandeur with a 
 singularly elastic touch. Take, for example, the pil- 
 lared facades of the Pennsylvania Station. For S, 
 positively Roman weight and majesty it would be 
 impossible to beat that building in modem architec- 
 ture. But neither could you find it anywhere sur- 
 passed for a beauty that I can perhaps best indicate 
 as a beauty brimming over with nervous force, really 
 vitalized, as though the thing which we call style 
 were fairly singing in stone. The march of those 
 columns is superb, luring the eye until it forgets the 
 immobility of walls, cornices, and so on, and is lost 
 in sensuous dehght. It is a huge structure, and, for 
 the mind sensitive to the great pageant of our ma- 
 terial progress, it is fraught with ideas of tremendous 
 and even ruthless power. After all, a building like 
 this is symbolical of one of the forces of our national 
 Ufe, and a poet might reasonably linger before it, 
 presently translating into words the thought it raises 
 of an irresistible might. But the right poet would 
 turn what is severe and terrible about such a concen- 
 tration of energy into terms of pure beauty, and this 
 is what has been done by the genius of architecture di- 
 rected upon so seemingly prosaic a thing as a vast rail- 
 way station. The building is true in its very essence 
 to the railway's need. It is also supremely beautiful. 
 We think in large terms in this country. Our area 
 is immense, our population is enormous; politically. 
 
41 8 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 socially, and in our industrial relations we are inces- 
 santly affected by the unprecedented width of our 
 horizon. It is a commonplace of satirical criticism 
 that "bigness" is an American foible. . Neither the 
 painter nor the sculptor is ordinarily required to come 
 to close quarters with that foible. The architect 
 alone is forever confronted by it, and therefore ex- 
 posed to a cruel temptation. McKim mastered it. 
 He liked, I think, to tackle heroic issues. In the 
 latter part of his career he threw himself with gusto 
 upon the solution of problems like the one presented 
 in the Pennsylvania Station. His genius had an even 
 more extensive range, as one may gather from the 
 share he. took in the evolution of the scheme for the 
 beautifying of the city of Washington. Who could 
 have blamed him if, in the prosecution of campaigns 
 so portentous in scope, he had completely lost sight 
 of those ideals of exquisiteness, of charm, of deUcately 
 fervid art, with which he had begun his work? He 
 never lost sight of them but went on, as the years 
 passed, rising to greater opportunities with increasing 
 firmness of grasp and with increasing feeling for 
 beauty. He was always a builder in the truest, 
 manUest sense of the term, and he was always an 
 artist. It is in this dual character that McKim re- 
 mains a shining figure in our annals. 
 
 I have tried to portray him in relation to his time 
 and especially to the friendly rivalry in which he and 
 his colleagues were involved with Richardson and 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 419 
 
 Hunt. These men overshadow practically all the 
 others on the stage. But before passing to the one 
 conspicuous exception, the one who played in his 
 way a part equally effective, I have to speak of a man 
 of genius imknown to the outer world and, indeed, 
 no more famihar to many of the younger generation 
 in his profession. This was Joseph M. Wells, who 
 died more than twenty years ago. He was a quiet, 
 meditative man, too shy in his demeanor to strike 
 one as being eccentric and yet with something about 
 him of the odd individuality which that epithet con- 
 notes. There is a remarkable portrait of him painted 
 by his friend Dewing, a portrait of really extraordi- 
 nary interest because of its interpretation of excep- 
 tionally subtle traits. Wells was a bundle of subtle- 
 ties — and of contrasts. I remember his lending me 
 two first editions; one was of "The Vision of Judg- 
 ment," the other of "The Rose and the Ring." The 
 collocation of Byron in his bitterest mood and Thack- 
 eray in his sweetest was just the paradox to expect 
 in Wells. At one moment his cynical humor would 
 vent itself in a saying rendered doubly mordant by 
 the malin chuckle going with it. And in the next, 
 as I knew from many an occasion when we went to 
 hear music together, he would talk about Beethoven, 
 his idol, with a grave enthusiasm and a sympathy in- 
 dicative only of the loftiest feeling. He had the re- 
 flective, critical mind. His life was an intellectual 
 revery. 
 
420 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 Such a man made an ideal coadjutor for McKim 
 and White, confirming, clarifying, and extending the 
 austerer inspiration of the one, aiding while restrain- 
 ing the impulses of the other. That he exercised 
 this half-admonitory, collaborative function in their 
 office, those two hberal artists would have been the 
 first to admit. They loved him for his strange, her- 
 mit-Uke self. They admired and deeply respected 
 him for his unique abilities. He adored Bramante and 
 I have often wondered what he would have said to 
 the research which has endeavored to deprive that 
 master of some of his noblest triumphs. Wells had 
 tacked up on the wall above his draughting-table a 
 big photograph of the court of the Cancelleria, and 
 sometimes he would take it as his text when he dis- 
 coursed to me in his short, halting sentences on the 
 sanctities of architecture. As he regarded them they 
 were the sanctities of balance and proportion, of per- 
 fect line, of mouldings reverently pondered, of deco- 
 ration most sparingly appUed. Like McKim he saw 
 not the work on paper but the completed edifice. At 
 the time of his death there were some wrought-iron 
 grilles to be made for which he had supplied only 
 rough drawings, marking on these, though, the exact 
 figures to be followed. When the iron-worker ques- 
 tioned the figures as unprecedented White told him, 
 nevertheless, to obey them, loyally remembering that 
 Wells always knew what he was about. In the up- 
 shot the grilles only gave another proof of this. I 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 421 
 
 cannot name a single work" of architecture as pure 
 Wells, but the group of houses known as the Villard 
 block when it was erected in Madison Avenue back 
 of the Cathedral has in it perhaps more of him than 
 could be traced without difficulty anywhere else. It 
 reveals, of course, his cult for Bramante, for the 
 Renaissance both in Rome and in Florence, but it 
 reveals also his freedom from anything like pedantic 
 imitation. Where he and McKim were utterly at 
 one was in the employment of Italian ideas in a 
 thoroughly creative spirit. Without him McKim 
 would as surely have been the great architect that 
 we know; but with him he was on that much more 
 fertile ground. Lost to the general view as he is, 
 behind the works of his friends. Wells will still be 
 held in honor, by those who knew him, as one of the 
 prime contributors to our Renaissance. 
 
 IV 
 DANIEL H. BURNHAM 
 
 The leaders with whom we have thus far dealt had 
 all much the same opportimity; their chance was to 
 make, if they could, beautiful buildings. All the 
 time there was another chance coming and this was 
 seized by Daniel H. Burnham, who was bom at Hen- 
 derson, New York, in 1846, and early taken to 
 Chicago. There he worked until he died in 191 2. 
 
422 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 The gods were kind to him. He came to maturity 
 at just the time and in just the place favorable to 
 the development of his special gifts. In partnership 
 with the late John Wellborn Root, he practised his 
 profession under conditions giving him a imique 
 problem to solve. They were not aesthetic condi- 
 tions; they were business conditions; and they were, 
 perhaps, a little more closely identified than any 
 others with the daily movement of American life. 
 It is customary when dealing with American htera- 
 ture or painting to talk about the growth in this 
 country of intellectual interests and of the love of 
 beauty. We take account of progress made. We 
 speculate as to possible gains in the future. If archi- 
 tecture is our theme, we reflect more particularly on 
 the evolution of an American style. Meanwhile the 
 genius of the American people has fully and conclu- 
 sively expressed itself, if anywhere, in the domain of 
 practical things, and it has given to architecture not 
 a style but a species — the office building fifteen, or 
 fifty, stories high. It was Burnham's part to illus- 
 trate this species, to do something in America that 
 had never been done elsewhere. I do not mean that 
 he invented it, for the entire profession has been oc- 
 cupied, more or less, with the construction of tall 
 buildings ever since the steel-cage principle was es- 
 tablished. It was to his partner, John Root, too, 
 that much of the character in the earlier work of the 
 firm was due. But from the start Burnham was a 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 423 
 
 builder of sky-scrapers, and it was in that r6Ie that 
 he achieved special distinction. Though he put to his 
 credit other work of rich significance, as will be seen 
 below, his office buildings belong in the forefront of 
 his biography. 
 
 Consider the need put before him when he under- 
 took to design them. It was not, in the first place, 
 that they should be beautiful. It was that they 
 should contain so many square feet of well-lighted 
 space for renting purposes, the amount of space that 
 would yield the owner a certain return on his invest- 
 ment. Owners vary in temperament. Some of them 
 realize that a building is the more profitable as it is 
 the more attractive to look upon. But in essentials 
 the demand framed above is the demand made upon 
 all designers of tall office buildings. When they set- 
 tle down to work, they have to create a little cosmos, 
 finding space for more things than go into any other 
 type of building, with the possible exception of a 
 great modern hotel. Take a typical building designed 
 by Burnham. First come engine-rooms that in them- 
 selves embody interesting ideas of construction. 
 Then come safe-deposit vaults. On a higher level 
 you will find shops and elaborately planned banking 
 quarters, a restaurant, a rathskeller, and a cafe. 
 Eight or ten elevators — some of them expresses — 
 rise past hundreds of offices to club-rooms that lie 
 just under the roof, where a garden puts the last 
 touch to the building. In the marble-lined corridors 
 
424 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 there are faucets supplying filtered ice-water. There 
 is hot as well as cold water in the lavatories. Cor- 
 ners for the telegraph companies are not forgotten. 
 Facilities for mailing letters are on every floor as a 
 matter of course. The man who chose to sleep in 
 his office could live in a building like this all the year 
 round. Obviously, the architect who serves his inter- 
 ests must be a master of humdrum detail. But he 
 must be more than that if he is to satisfy his profes- 
 sional instinct, which is to make the outside of his 
 building expressive of its inner character. Here arises 
 a question which has been getting itself discussed for 
 years, but which still remains on debatable ground. 
 
 The architect is an artist quite as much as the 
 painter, the sculptor, or the musician, and he is loath 
 to abdicate his artistic functions simply because he 
 is confronted by a problem apparently insoluble on 
 a strictly artistic hypothesis. Two elements in that 
 problem drive him almost to despair. His building 
 must be so much greater in height than in depth or 
 breadth that it seems impossible, to begin with, that 
 his composition should have rational proportions. Of 
 course if he could conceive of his building simply as 
 a tower, all might go well; but he is generally hemmed 
 in by other buildings on three sides, and, what is 
 worse, there is his second cruel element to be reck- 
 oned with — ■ the necessity for piercing the facade on 
 every floor with the greatest possible number of win- 
 dows. There is something grimly humorous about 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 425 
 
 his predicament. Fate, grinning maliciously over 
 his shoulder, drives him into an impasse, insisting 
 that his is an engineering problem, not an artistic 
 one, and urging him to make the best of a bad bar- 
 gain. It is odds, however, that he will kick against 
 the pricks, and move heaven and earth to show that 
 where others have failed he will triumph, turning a sky- 
 scraper into a work of art. There is something touch- 
 ing about the resolution with which the architects 
 of America have held to this view of the matter. I 
 have heard many of them arguing about it, and sug- 
 gesting one new way or another out of the impasse 
 just mentioned. At a dinner of the Architectural 
 League, a few years ago, the walls were covered with 
 drawings and photographs of sky-scrapers, and all the 
 speeches of the evening were devoted to the subject. 
 One member had some interesting things to say about 
 the use of steel externally as well as internally. He 
 thought that if the cage were permitted to declare 
 itself in the faf ade instead of being hidden in a shell 
 of stone or brick, the result would at least be sincere 
 and might even be made picturesque. There was 
 talk, too, of using sheets of metal decoratively, and, 
 of course, the claims of color were duly advocated. 
 Polychromatic fagades have been built in Europe, 
 and some of them are charming, but then they have 
 been executed on a very modest scale. The experi- 
 ment of treating the sky-scraper in color from top to 
 bottom has not yet been tried. There is a chimney- 
 
426 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 like building in Chicago over which I believe Mr. 
 Root used to let his color sense play in imagination, 
 but his dream was never realized. I could not help 
 feeling at the League dinner to which I have referred 
 that all ideas of lending an artistic significance to the 
 sky-scraper are akin to such stuff as dreams are 
 made of. After all, do they not resolve themselves 
 into a principle which would transmogrify the sky- 
 scraper into something else, making it a hybrid in- 
 stead of the clean-cut symbol of American business 
 life that it can be made so long as the architect recog- 
 nizes his limitations and plays the game? 
 
 Burnham played the game. That is what made 
 him a conspicuous and valuable figure in Ameri- 
 can architecture. All that despair of which I have 
 spoken is reserved for the designer who will not look 
 facts in the face, but doggedly goes on evading them 
 and producing sky-scrapers which are impressive, if 
 at all, by virtue of their bulk alone. Burnham went 
 to the root of the matter. Perceiving that the sky- 
 scraper rests upon a principle of prosaic simplicity, 
 he made simplicity the keynote of his work. He 
 made no effort to disguise the fact that such a build- 
 ing is just a succession of so many layers of cubicles, 
 all calling for light and air. He gave those cubicles 
 the value belonging to them in the composition, only 
 endeavoring, as he multiplied windows, to break up 
 their monotony by the most judicious means. He 
 was, as a rule, sparing of decoration. To lighten 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 427 
 
 the appalling masses with which he had to deal, he 
 looked rather to modifications, at a few points, of the 
 broad structural lines. Thus, in the Railway Ex- 
 change at Chicago, a building seventeen stories high 
 on a space 171 feet square, he gained relief for his 
 facades, and a measure of light and shade, by throw- 
 ing out shallow bays at regular intervals, and carry- 
 ing these bays from the third floor to the twelfth. 
 Just beneath the cornice the windows were made cir- 
 cvilar, and the surface around them was enriched with 
 sculptured ornament. Otherwise the building is as 
 bald as the packing-cases with which so many sky- 
 scrapers have been compared, and, save that it has 
 a cornice lacking in weight and that the entrances 
 want emphasis, the building is a success. That is, 
 it looks like an office building; it is dignified and in 
 good taste. Elsewhere Burnham used with admir- 
 able effect a system of classical columns, two stories 
 high, at the bottom of his building, with a similar 
 system of colunans or pilasters supporting arches be- 
 neath the cornice. The First National Bank and 
 Commerical National Bank Buildings in Chicago, 
 the Ford Building in Detroit, the Frick Building in 
 Pittsburg, all bear witness to the usefulness of this 
 motive. In the Frick Building still further variety 
 is gained by the division of the facades, from the lower 
 system of columns to the upper system, into arched 
 sections, the arches resting on long, slender piers. 
 But it cannot be said that the physiognomy of any 
 
428 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 one of Burnham's sky-scrapers is radically differen- 
 tiated from that of another. Every one of them is 
 simplicity itself. Are any of them beautiful, in the 
 strict interpretation of the word? Hardly that. 
 Theirs is the beauty of fitness. They are beautiful as 
 a great war-ship is beautiful. If they have a grace, 
 it is the grace of refinement, but that is all. Now 
 this is not to say that Burnham, in leaving beauty to 
 take care of itself, left out something without which 
 his work is lifeless. On the contrary, it is to say 
 that he got at the secret of his problem and magni- 
 ficently triumphed. 
 
 There is one sky-scraper of his which, more than 
 any other, has provoked discussion — the Fuller Build- 
 ing on Madison Square, better known as the Flatiron, 
 It has been denounced as merely hideous. Some 
 people maintain that it is beautiful, either because 
 they like to entertain views which they are pleased 
 to regard as original, or because they have observed 
 the building looming in the fog, late on a winter's 
 night, with lights in many of its windows. For my 
 own part, I believe that its considerable merit lies 
 in nothing more nor less than its consummate ex- 
 ploitation of the eccentric site as a business invest- 
 ment. Every inch of the space available is put to 
 profitable purpose. Corridors, elevators, lavatories, 
 and staircases are concentrated in the centre of the 
 building, with the result that every oflSce has an 
 abundance of light and air. As for the fajades, they 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 429 
 
 are inferior to others by the same designer chiefly 
 because their surfaces are rather more freely teased 
 with expedients meant to secure decorative effect 
 and relief. One adverse commentator on the build- 
 ing, criticising it at the time of its completion, neg- 
 lected to ascertain the name of its designer, and 
 gravely stated in print that the misguided man might 
 have done better if only he had gone to sit at the feet 
 of Burnham. That blunder was an oblique testimony 
 to the fundamental strength of Burnham's work. 
 He accustomed his critics to simplicity and mass. 
 Striving, for once, in the Flatiron, for an impossible 
 lightness, he gave some ground for the assumption 
 that the building had been done by some one else. 
 For once he lost his hold on his best resource, the 
 resource that marks him as so much an American, a 
 masterly kind of common sense. 
 
 Is that quality incompatible with the artistic 
 sense? Was Burnham any less the artist because he 
 designed his sky-scrapers from a rigidly practical 
 point of view? The best answer to these questions 
 lies in the record of his work on great civic improve- 
 ments. He showed something of what he could do 
 m this direction in 1893, when, as chief architect and 
 director for the World's Columbian Exposition at 
 Chicago, he bore a fruitful part in that extraordinary 
 architectural ensemble. Later he was identified with 
 various public schemes of importance. He was made 
 Chairman of the National Commission established 
 
430 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 for beautifying the city of Washington, and he served 
 in the same capacity on a similar commission formed 
 in Cleveland. Chicago and San Francisco claimed 
 his ability for work along these lines, and some years 
 ago he submitted reports to the Secretary of War on 
 proposed improvements in Manila and Baguio, in the 
 Philippines. It is impossible to traverse here in de- 
 tail any of these schemes, but that, indeed, is not 
 really necessary. The important thing is the general 
 character of the inspiration he brought to his gran- 
 diose tasks. His first thought, after looking over the 
 ground, was for the every-day necessities of the city. 
 His report on the improvements proposed at San 
 Francisco, before the earthquake, accounted for pub- 
 lic and private buildings, looking boldly to the future, 
 but at the same time showing a proper solicitude for 
 the situation then existing and the adjustment of a 
 poHcy of adaptation and slow change to one of ulti- 
 mate creation. Beauty was sought — beauty in archi- 
 tecture and in vistas; but convenience was constantly 
 remembered, as was so unpoetic a thing as sanita- 
 tion. Turning then to the lovely natural surround- 
 ings of the city, Burnham worked out a heroic plan, 
 contemplating the bringing of something like unity 
 out of the vast area, and the linking of the city 
 through landscape-gardening, monumental terraces, 
 and so on with the wild panorama stretching beyond 
 its limits. 
 The report on proposed improvements at Washing- 
 
Leaders in American Architecture 43 1 
 
 ton framed by Burnham in collaboration with his 
 fellow-architect, McKim, the sculptor, Saint- Gaudens, 
 and the landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, 
 Jr., makes, with its maps, diagrams, plans, and other 
 illustrations, a stout volume. In a nutshell, it ad- 
 vocates the extension and perfection of L'Enfant's 
 famous plan, and the creation of a symmetrical whole, 
 embracing balanced groups of pubhc buildings, with 
 parks, monuments, and foimtains all contributing to 
 one superb effect. The classical motive has already 
 been fixed at Washington as the one which should 
 control, and how well Burnham understood this is 
 shown by the Union Station, which is his personal 
 contribution to the architectural scheme. But what 
 is bound especially to impress the reader of this re- 
 port is the deeper and broader conception it reveals, 
 a conception transcending that of architectural style. 
 The point to the whole document lies in its presenta- 
 tion of a city made beautiful not only with builded 
 stone but with water, earth, and sky. A glorious 
 avenue of trees is made as important to the plan as 
 the Capitol itself. The object aimed at is not a mu- 
 seum of monumental buildings for the architectural 
 student, but a beautiful city for men to live in. A 
 passage in Burnham's report on improvements sug- 
 gested for Manila recommends the development of a 
 certain section along the water-front with a view to 
 fostering the social life of the city; and in a foot- 
 note the architect says: 
 
432 Leaders in American Architecture 
 
 The delightfulness of a city is an element of first im- 
 portance to its prosperity, for those who make fortunes 
 will stay and others will come if the attractions are strong 
 enough; and the money thus kept at home, added to that 
 freely spent by visitors, will be enough to insure continu- 
 ous good times. The aim should be to make Manila 
 really "The Pearl of the Orient." 
 
 That note is characteristic of Burnham, character- 
 istic in its feeling for things "delightful," and in its 
 sterling common sense. Washington, San Francisco, 
 Cleveland, Chicago, and the cities of the Philippines 
 will be, if his ideas are supported, places of beauty. 
 Also they will be healthful, convenient places, good 
 to live in. It is a great thing that the artist should 
 dream dreams, but it is equally important that he 
 should know and sympathize with the world in which 
 he lives. Burnham's work, whether it took the shape 
 of a sky-scraper or of a city clothed in new beauty, 
 was first and last a demonstration of this truth. 
 
 That is what allies him to Hunt and McKim, and 
 that is why his leadership, like theirs, meant progress 
 where Richardson's threatened to land us in disaster. 
 American architecture is still subject to insidiously 
 harmful conditions. The feverish demands of fashion, 
 for example, have fostered the growth of parasitical 
 talents, undeniably clever but too often content to 
 turn a f agade into an article de Paris, masking an in- 
 terior all finickin luxury and decoration. But our 
 school, as a school, has its face set toward the light. 
 
XIV 
 J. Pierpont Morgan as a Collector 
 
XIV 
 
 J. PIER PONT MORGAN AS A 
 COLLECTOR 
 
 In his r61e of collector Mr. Morgan was something 
 of a mystery to the world at large. Every one knew 
 that he had vast artistic possessions, and in the very 
 nature of things it was inevitable that a wide pub- 
 licity should have followed many of his transactions. 
 The cables were always busy with his campaigns 
 among the purchasable art treasures of Europe. 
 Some one was always sure to let us know what they 
 had cost him. But it was never Mr. Morgan who 
 had anything to say on these subjects, and his friends, 
 if they happened to be in the secret of any of his 
 doings, were wont to respect his reticent habit. 
 Others who were in a position to talk about his pol- 
 icy as a collector, if I may so describe it, were taught 
 to keep their own covmsel. There is a pretty legend 
 of one agent whose loquacity was summarily quenched 
 by a telegram more picturesquely terse than polite. 
 The upshot of all this was that the personality of 
 J. Pierpont Morgan as a collector remained practi- 
 cally unknown, and I make no pretence of giving a 
 full and conclusive account of it. The precise range 
 
 43S 
 
436 /. Pierpont Morgan as a Collector 
 
 and significance of his different tastes could only be 
 set forth by one of his intimates and advisers, like 
 Mr. Fitz-Henry, who, by a pathetic coincidence died 
 but a very short time before the decease of his old 
 friend. But no one could play the part that Mr. 
 Morgan played in the accumulation of works of art 
 without exposing here and there some of his methods, 
 and the mere results of these throw a certain light on 
 the subject. 
 
 In one important point the commentators who have 
 been busy since Mr. Morgan's death have done him 
 a little less than justice, not so much through what 
 they have said as through what they have, perhaps 
 imconsciously, implied. Everywhere it has been re- 
 marked that he was not a connoisseur in the strict 
 sense, not one of those collectors who put a personal 
 stamp upon their collections. Dr. Bode pubKshed 
 in Berlin an article full of appreciation but decisive in 
 its assertion that Mr. Morgan was not an expert. 
 Now, while these statements are doubtless to 
 be accepted as true, it is perhaps as well to 
 remind the layman that they do not denote any 
 singularity in the man to whom they refer. As a 
 collector Mr. Morgan was, indeed, fully represent- 
 ative of his time, at least in the United States. 
 Very few of our best-known collectors have been 
 connoisseurs and experts. Quite as much as Mr. 
 Morgan they have profited by the aid of dealers and 
 other counsellors. An amateur like Mr. John G. 
 
/. Pierpont Morgan as a Collector 437 
 
 Johnson, of Philadelphia, who not only knows what 
 he Hkes but knows why he likes it, and pursues an 
 essentially independent path, is the rarest of types, 
 here or abroad. Most observers of artistic affairs 
 are aware of this fact, but in print and in conversa- 
 tion I have often noted a disposition to place an em- 
 phasis upon Mr. Morgan's want of special knowledge 
 which has seemed just a shade unfair. If he con- 
 fided in others he did not, at any rate, do so any 
 more than dozens of his contemporaries, whose com- 
 parative freedom from the same criticism constitutes 
 half my point. And, it may be added, he knew where 
 to get good advice, and, having got it, followed it. 
 Furthermore, there could be no question of his en- 
 jojTnent of the things which he thus procured. 
 
 Some years ago, in the house at Prince's Gate, so 
 richly stored with masterpieces, I had an opportu- 
 nity to witness the disclosure of both these traits. 
 A representative of one of the dealers turned up, 
 bringing a parcel which contained a rare old French 
 enamel. Mr. Morgan silently watched the man as he 
 unwrapped the precious object, looked it over sym- 
 pathetically and then ordered it wrapped up again. 
 He made no comment revealing what he thought, 
 but simply asked the messenger why he had brought 
 the enamel to his house. On being told that it was 
 ofifered to him for purchase he said that the dealer 
 sending it must have known perfectly well that he 
 wished things of the kind submitted to So-and-So 
 
438 /. Pierpont Morgan as a Collector 
 
 and So-and-So, naming two recognized experts, one of 
 them an ofl&cial in the British Museum. Dismissing 
 the matter in this way, he turned to his visitor for a 
 stroll among the pictures. Thereupon the curt, busi- 
 nesslike tone disappeared, giving place to one of sheer 
 pleasure in the things around him. From time to 
 time he would be called away, but in a few moments 
 he would be back again, evidently forgetful in a trice 
 of practical affairs and quietly happy with his works 
 of art. It was interesting to note, by the way, that 
 while his remarks on one painting or another revealed 
 no predilection for any particular school, a peculiar 
 enthusiasm did seem to awaken in him when he sat 
 down to the miniatures and fairly beamed over their 
 beauties. Merely from the way in which he handled 
 them it was plain that they had a favored place in 
 his heart. Mr. Fitz-Henry was there, and they talked 
 about the little portraits, recalling how one or another 
 of them had been secured. Later, too, it developed 
 that where miniatures were concerned he would some- 
 times range, regardless of the expert, and come home 
 to take a gem or two out of his pocket and smilingly 
 add it to the collection. There, in one field of art, 
 at all events, he suggested a very personal ardor. 
 
 In the main, however, he would seem to have 
 brought to his dealings with the world of art much 
 the same temper and swift organizing authority which 
 characterized his work in finance. It was like him to 
 buy whole collections at a stroke when once he had 
 
/. Pierpont Morgan as a Collector 439 
 
 satisfied himself that they were worth buying. Inci- 
 dentally, it might be pointed out that there is noth- 
 ing intrinsically to be deprecated in this practice. 
 Probably he would have bought the objects contained 
 in these collections piece by piece if they had been 
 brought in that way to his attention. As it hap- 
 pened, he had the money to buy a mass of treasure 
 at a time when it offered, and, besides this, one does 
 not need to be very imaginative in order to see that 
 for a man devoting himself to this hobby so late in 
 life purchases of extraordinary magnitude were really 
 necessary. It is said that he was a collector, after 
 his fashion, from his young manhood if not from his 
 youth, but during most of his career he was a busy 
 banker. If, as we seem justified in assuming, he 
 fostered in his later years the idea of rendering a great 
 artistic service to his countrymen, there can be no 
 question of his having gone the right way about it 
 when he turned the market upside down and bought 
 collections as he bought steel plants or shipping lines. 
 There is a touch of cant in the disparagement of his 
 exercise of what has been called the brute power of 
 the purse. Every successful bidder in the auction- 
 room, whether his prize be valued in the hundreds 
 or in the thousands, uses that power. And if it is 
 any consolation to the wiseacres who shake their 
 heads over his "ruthlessness" it may be recorded 
 that he did not always get what he wanted. 
 One of the most amusing of the stories that have 
 
440 /• Pierpont Morgan as a Collector- 
 
 been told about him relates to a glorious masterpiece 
 of the eighteenth-century French school which was 
 on view one beautiful spring day in the gallery of a 
 Parisian dealer. Mr. Morgan came in, saw it, liked 
 it, but not being in a very talkative mood went away 
 without saying anything save that he would be in 
 again with a friend. He had scarcely disappeared 
 when a wealthy French collector visited the place, 
 fell in love with the picture, paid for it then and 
 there and took it away with him in a cab. The next 
 morning Mr. Morgan returned, this time bringing 
 his friend, and said: "I want to see my picture." 
 According to the story, when the cruel facts had been 
 laid before him, it took some time to appease his be- 
 wildered wrath. Apropos of this episode with one 
 dealer, it may safely be surmised that members of 
 the fraternity could report many others. All over 
 Europe they knew him, and, as was shown by the 
 crowds of people with things to sell besieging him at 
 his hotel in Rome as he lay dying, all manner of com- 
 mercial hopes and fears revolved around him. The 
 few firms that especially catered to him and satisfied 
 him could not keep a multitude of venders from try- 
 ing their luck. The humors of the fray must some- 
 times have been exquisite. Were there also less en- 
 gaging developments? Are there many works of art 
 in Mr. Morgan's immense collection which are not 
 quite what they pretend to be? For my own part I 
 doubt if there are any at all, and this for two rea- 
 
/. Pier font Morgan as a Collector 441 
 
 sons. In the first place, as I have indicated above, 
 he was an incessant seeker after expert advice. 
 Secondly, it is hard to see why anybody who had his 
 own interest to serve should have tried to swindle 
 the one man who, more than any other, was buying 
 all kinds of works of art and generously paying for 
 them. That dealer would have needed to be a fear- 
 ful fool who was willing to carry frauds to a collector 
 whose counsellors could so quickly set him right and 
 whose insistence upon honesty would thenceforth 
 have made further profitable transactions flatly im- 
 possible. The very scope of Mr. Morgan's artistic 
 operations protected him against deception. In this 
 matter he carried, as it were, his own insurance. On 
 the other hand, it is probably true that extravagant 
 prices were inseparable from his mode of procedure. 
 He had to pay the penalty of his renown as a buyer 
 and of his haste. The same collection, slowly formed 
 during a long Hfetime, by a bargainer saturated in 
 the lore of his subjects, would no doubt have cost 
 but half of what Mr. Morgan paid for it, if it had cost 
 that much. 
 
 What, when all is said, remains salient and most 
 characteristic when we consider the presumable re- 
 action upon Mr. Morgan of the prodigious adventures 
 which he crowded within a few short years of collect- 
 ing? Can we, from the wilderness of objects he as- 
 sembled, divine some one prevaihng note of taste? 
 The question seems almost unanswerable in view of 
 
442 /. Pierpont Morgan as a Collector 
 
 the portentous variety of his possessions. In that 
 London house where we have seen him delighting in 
 his miniatures there hung his numerous and beauti- 
 ful portraits of the English school, and in other rooms 
 there were Dutch and Spanish masterpieces. One 
 room was dedicated by itself to that celebrated and 
 enchanting set of decorative panels which Fragonard 
 painted in his safe retirement at Grasse while the 
 Terror raged in Paris. The series was marvellously 
 installed in its twentieth-century home amid the 
 London fogs. Everything, the walls and woodwork, 
 the mantel-piece with its appropriate eighteenth-cen- 
 tury statuettes, the glass-covered tables fuU of minia- 
 tures and snuff-boxes, the chairs, and the very carpet 
 on the floor, had been so chosen that Fragonard and 
 the Du Barry herself would have wept for joy if they 
 could have seen the perfection of the ensemble. Only 
 a collector definitely in love with the school and the 
 period, one would have said, could have achieved 
 that beautiful harmony. But was Mr. Morgan in 
 love with it? I do not know. If he could have a 
 cult for Fragonard, so likewise could he have a cult 
 for Holbein, for Oriental porcelains, for Italian bronzes 
 and other sculptures, for old watches of every age 
 and country, for rare books and manuscripts, for so 
 many things, in short, that it is idle even to attempt 
 the most summary of lists. And yet I would hazard 
 the speculation that there was one sphere in which 
 his mind received a notable and perhaps predomi- 
 
/. Pierpont Morgan as a Collector 443 
 
 nant stimulus. It was that of the Italian Renais- 
 sance. 
 
 The many roads he traversed on his annual Euro- 
 pean journeys sooner or later all led to Rome. Ital- 
 ian art is forever cropping out in his collection. He 
 obtained an amazing body of Renaissance bronzes 
 and marbles; his collection of drawings includes many 
 fine ItaKan examples, and he secured a number of 
 ItaKan paintings, among which I must particularly 
 mention the fascinating portrait of Giovanna degli 
 Albizzi, by Ghirlandajo, which he got out of the 
 Rodolphe Kann collection. But most significant of 
 all was the atmosphere in which he chose to be en- 
 veloped in that building next door to his New York 
 home which was designed as a library by the late 
 Charles F. McKim. He gave that great architect 
 a free hand. All that he asked for was a consum- 
 mate work of art. McElim gave it to him in the shape 
 of a flawless little Renaissance palazzo. Exquisite 
 in its simplicity and in. the balance of its proportions, 
 it was planned with an ideal of both structural and 
 decorative unity. It has been complained of Mr. 
 Morgan that he did not buy modern American pic- 
 tures. In this library he found room for no Ameri- 
 can decorations. Naturally, neither he nor McKim 
 dreamed of bringing an incongruous note into the 
 scheme. They turned, instead, to the style of Pin- 
 toricchio, the one master of the Renaissance who was 
 bound to come to mind. His inspiration had been 
 
444 /• Pierpont Morgan as a Collector 
 
 caught by Mr. H. Siddons Mowbray when he was dec- 
 orating the beautiful hbrary of the University Club 
 for McKim, and Mr. Morgan, mounting to the scaf- 
 folds there, saw how well the American artist was 
 equipped to do just what he wanted. Whereupon 
 Mr. Mowbray and Mr. J. W. Finn tackled the ceil- 
 ing in the collector's library and felicitously rounded 
 out McKim's Italianate conception. It was imques- 
 tionably the genius of McKim that was thus ex- 
 pressed, but there, too, I believe, Mr. Morgan's taste 
 "found" itself. He had shown his feeling for Italy 
 in divers ways. He had been one of the keenest 
 supporters of that American academy at Rome which 
 McKim had cherished as his dearest dream and had 
 worked for with infectious zeal. When he had at 
 last made for himself the space of quietude and 
 beauty that he wanted among his books it was one 
 expressive in its every detail of the spirit of the 
 Renaissance. Surely this could not have been due 
 to any accident of circumstance. The whole artistic 
 character of the library must have had its origin in 
 a strong predilection. 
 
 The full tale of his energies as a collector will not 
 for some time be known. The treasures on which 
 he spent sixty milhon dollars or more are so numer- 
 ous that when ultimately they are concentrated in 
 one place they will make by themselves one of the 
 notable museums in the world. Whatever that mu- 
 seum may express in revelation of Mr. Morgan's 
 
/. Pierpont Morgan as a Collector 445 
 
 make-up as a collector, the one outstanding fact to 
 which it will always clearly point is his public gener- 
 osity. First and last, he was extraordinarily gener- 
 ous with his works of art, lending them for public 
 exhibition, and sometimes for long periods, both in 
 New York and abroad. The great Hoentschel col- 
 lection of decorative art, which has a whole wing to 
 itself, and the grand array of the Garland porcelains 
 would alone rank him as a memorable benefactor 
 of the Metropolitan Museum. But as you go through 
 that institution there is scarce any department in 
 which you will not, over and over again, come upon 
 the label signifying that the object bearing it was 
 given or lent by Mr. Morgan. And the help which he 
 thus rendered at home he rendered not infrequently 
 to foreign museums. If he knew how to acquire he 
 knew also how to give. That is the fine thought 
 which is bound to dwell with us as we reflect on the 
 life of J. Pierpont Morgan as an art-collector. He 
 spent a lot of money in the world of precious rarities, 
 and he had his own way. In the long run what he 
 did has worked, as all the time he would seem to have 
 meant it to work, for the benefit of his countrymen.