UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES 504 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND [LES MA!TRES D'AUTREFOIS] BY EUGENE FROMENTIN TRANSLATED BY MRS. MARY C. ROBBINS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Cfic flrtxrsiDc press* CambriDfle Copyright, 1882, BY JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY. All rights reserved. Art Library WD G36, PREFACE. I HAVE just been viewing Rubens and Rembrandt in their own homes, and at the same time the Dutch school in its unchanging frame of agricultural and maritime life, of downs, pastures, huge clouds, and low horizons. Here are two arts, distinct, perfectly complete, entirely independent of each other, and very brilliant, which re- quire to be studied at once by an historian, a thinker, and a painter. That the work should be properly done requires the union of these three men in one ; and I have nothing in common with the two first, while as to the painter, however a man may have a feeling for distances, he ceases to be one in approaching the least known of the masters of these priv- ileged countries. I shall traverse the museums, but I shall not review them. I shall stop before certain men : I shall not relate their lives, nor catalogue their works, even those preserved by their compatriots. I shall define simply as I iv PREFACE. understand them, as fully as I can seize them, certain charac- teristic sides of their genius or talent. I shall not grapple with too great questions ; I shall avoid profundities and dark places. The art of painting is only the art of expressing the invisible by the visible. Whether its roads be great or small, they are sown with problems which it is permitted to sound for one's self as truths, but which it is well to leave in their darkness as mysteries. I shall only speak con- cerning certain pictures, of the surprise, the pleasure, the astonishment, and with no less precision of the vexation, which they have caused me. In all this I shall only trans- late with sincerity the inconsequent sensations of the mere amateur. I warn you that there will be no method, no course pur- sued in these studies. You will find here many gaps, prefer- ences, and omissions, without this want of balance detracting at all from the importance or the value of the works of which I may not have spoken. I shall often recall the Louvre, and shall not fear to conduct you thither, that examples may be nearer, and verifications easier. It is possible that some of my opinions may conflict with those generally received. I shall not seek, but I shall not avoid, any revision of ideas which may arise from these disagreements. I entreat you not to see in this any indication of a guerilla spirit, which PREFACE. V seeks to distinguish itself by boldness, and which, while trav- elling the beaten path, would fear to be accused of observ- ing nothing, if it did not judge everything differently from others. To tell the truth, these studies will be only notes, and these notes the disconnected and disproportionate elements of a book to be made in a more special manner than those which have been made up to this time, a book in which philosophy, aesthetics, nomenclature, and anecdotes will hold less place and the questions of the craft much greater place. It should be like a sort of talk about painting, where the painters would recognize their habits, where men of the world would learn to better know painters and painting. For the moment my method will be to forget everything which has been said on this subject ; my aim, to raise ques- tions, to produce a wish to think about them, and to inspire in those who would be capable of rendering us such a service the curiosity to solve them. I call these pages, The Old Masters, as I should speak of the severe or familiar masters of our French tongue, if I were speaking of Pascal, of Bos- suet, of La Bruyere, of Voltaire, or of Diderot, with this difference, that in France there are schools where respect for and study of these masters of style are still maintained, while I scarcely know where in these days the advice is vi PREFACE. given to respectfully study the ever exemplary masters of Flanders and Holland. I shall, moreover, suppose that the reader whom I address is enough like me to follow me without too much fatigue, and yet different enough to give me the pleasure of con- tradicting him, so that I can put some ardor into my at- tempts to convince him. BRUSSELS, July 6, 1875. CONTENTS. PART I. BELGIUM. CHAPTER PAGE I. THE MUSEUM AT BRUSSELS 3 II. THE MASTERS OF RUBENS 18 III. RUBENS IN THE BRUSSELS MUSEUM 28 IV. RUBENS AT MECHLIN 39 V. THE ELEVATION OF THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIXION . . 56 VI. RUBENS AT THE ANTWERP MUSEUM 72 VII. RUBENS AS A PORTRAIT PAINTER 80 VIII. THE TOMB OF RUBENS . 95 IX. VANDYCK 108 PART II. HOLLAND. I. THE HAGUE AND SCHEVENINGEN 117 II. ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL .... 123 III. THE VIJVER 141 IV. THE SUBJECT IN DUTCH PAINTING 146 V. PAUL POTTER 157 viii CONTENTS. CMArra PAGE VI. TERBURG, METZU, AND PIETER DE HOOGH AT THE LOUVRE 168 VII. RUYSDAEL 183 VIII. CUYP 196 IX. THE INFLUENCE OF HOLLAND UPON FRENCH LANDSCAPE . 203 X. THE ANATOMICAL LECTURE 218 XI. FRANS HALS AT HAARLEM 224 XII. AMSTERDAM 235 XIII. THE NIGHT WATCH 245 XIV. REMBRANDT AT THE Six AND VAN LOON GALLERIES. REMBRANDT AT THE LOUVRE 276 XV. THE SYNDICS 292 XVI. REMBRANDT . . 299 PART III. BELGIUM. THE VAN EYCKS AND MEMLING 317 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. RUBENS. PAGE THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS Frontispiece CHRIST ASCENDING CALVARY 32 THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 40 THE MIRACULOUS DRAUGHT OF FISHES 44 THE ELEVATION OF THE CROSS 66 PAUL POTTER. THE YOUNG BULL 162 REMBRANDT. THE ANATOMICAL LECTURE 220 THE NIGHT WATCH 252 PART I. BELGIUM. THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. ~>3. -'+- I BELGIUM. I. Z./0 B THE MUSEUM AT BRUSSELS. THE Brussels Museum has always had much greater value than renown. What injures it in the eyes of people whose minds in- stinctively take long flights, is its being but two steps from our own frontier, and consequently the first stage in a pilgrimage which con- ducts to sacred shrines. Van Eyck is at Ghent, Memling at Bruges, Rubens at Antwerp. Brussels possesses as its own none of these great men. She did not witness their birth ; she scarcely saw them paint ; she has neither their ashes nor their masterpieces. A pre- tence is made of visiting them at home ; but it is elsewhere that they await us. All this gives to this pretty capital the appearance of an empty house, and exposes it to being quite unjustly neglected. It is not known, or it is forgotten, that nowhere in Flanders do the three princes of Flemish painting march with such an escort of paint- ers and able men, who surround them, follow them, precede them, and open for them the gates of history, disappearing when they 4 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. enter, but still causing them to enter. Belgium is a magnificent book of art, whose chapters, fortunately for provincial glory, are to be found everywhere, but whose preface is at Brussels, and only at Brussels; and I would say to any one who should be tempted to skip the preface to reach the book, that he makes a mistake, that he opens the book too soon, and that he will read it unprofitably. This preface is very fine in itself; it is, moreover, a document whose place nothing supplies. It informs one what is to be seen, prepares for, suggests, explains everything ; setting in order the con- fusion of proper names, and works which are entangled in the multi- tude of chapels, where the chance of time has disseminated them, and classing them here without mistake, thanks to the perfect tact which has united and classified them. It is a kind of list of what artists Belgium has produced up to the time of the modern school, and really a record of what it possesses in its divers places of deposit, museums, churches, convents, hospitals, town halls, and private col- lections. Possibly she herself scarcely comprehended with exact- ness the extent of this vast national treasure, the most opulent in the world, except that of Holland, and second only to that of Italy, before she came into possession of these two equally well kept regis- ters, the museums of Antwerp and Brussels. In a word, the history of art in Flanders is capricious, even romantic. At each moment the thread is broken and found again ; one imagines painting lost, gone astray upon the great highways of the world ; it is a little like the Prodigal Son returning when he is no longer expected. If you would have an idea of its adventures, and learn what happened THE MUSEUM AT BRUSSELS. 5 to it during its absence, examine the museum of Brussels ; it will tell you all, with that facility of information which an abridgment can offer, an abridgment, complete, truthful, and perfectly clear, of a history that has endured for two centuries. I am not speaking merely of the management of the place, which is perfect. Fine rooms, good light, works choice from their beauty, their rarity, or merely for their historical value ; the most ingenious exactitude in determining the value of works coming from abroad, in fine, a taste, a care, a knowledge, a respect for the things of art, which make to- day of this rich collection a model museum. Understand, it is especially a Flemish museum, which gives it a family interest for Flanders, and for Europe an inestimable value. In it the Dutch school is scarcely seen ; you scarcely look for it. It would find here habits and beliefs foreign to its own, mystical, catholic, and pagan, with none of which it would feel at home. Here it would encounter the legends, the ancient history, and the direct or indirect memorials of the dukes of Burgundy, the arch- dukes of Austria, the Italian dukes, the Pope, Charles V., Philip II., that is to say, all the things and all the people that it did not rec- ognize or which it denied, against which it combated for a hun- dred years, and from which its genius, its instincts, its needs, and consequently its destiny, sharply and violently separated it Be- tween Moerdyk and Dordrecht there is only the Meuse to pass, but a whole world separates the two frontiers. Antwerp is the antipodes of Amsterdam, and by his good-natured eclecticism and the gay and sociable side of his genius, Rubens is more ready 6 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. to fraternize with Veronese, Tintoretto, Titian, Correggio, or even with Raphael, than with Rembrandt, his contemporary, but his in- tractable contradictor. As to Italian art, it is here only as a reminder. It is an art that is falsified by acclimation, and which alters its very nature in entering Flanders. In perceiving, in the least Flemish part of the gallery, two portraits by Tintoretto, not excellent, much retouched, but typical, one fails to understand them beside the works of Memling, of Martin de Vos, of Van Orley, of Rubens, of Vandyck, even of Antonio Moro. It is the same with Veronese ; he is out of place, his color is faded and bears traces of dis- temper, his style seems a little cold, his pomp studied and almost affected. The work is, however, a superb one in his finest manner ; it is a fragment of triumphal mythology detached from one of the ceilings of the ducal palace, one of the best ; but Rubens is beside it, and that very thing suffices to give to the Venetian Rubens a foreign accent. Which of the two is right ? In listening only to the tongue so excellently spoken by these two men, which is the better, the correct and learned rhetoric they employ in Venice, or the emphatic, grandiose, and warm incorrectness of the Antwerp speech ? In Venice one inclines to Veronese, but in Flanders Rubens is better understood. Italian art has that quality common to all strongly constituted arts, that it is at once very cosmopolitan because it has been everywhere, and very haughty because it has been sufficient to itself. It is at home in all Europe except in two countries, THE MUSEUM AT BRUSSELS. 7 Belgium, whose spirit it has visibly impregnated without ever mastering it, and Holland, which at first seemed to consult it, and finally did without it ; so that, while it lives on friendly terms with Spain, and reigns in France, where, at least in historical painting, our best painters have been Romans, it encounters in Flanders two or three very great men of lofty and indigenous race, who hold sway, and mean to divide their empire with none. The history of the relations of these two countries, Italy and Flanders, is curious ; it is long, it is diffuse. Elsewhere it is con- fusing ; but here, as I have told you, it can be read easily. It begins at Van Eyck, and ends on the day that Rubens left Genoa and returned, bringing with his luggage the cream of Italian les- sons, that is, all of it that the art of his country could reasonably support. This history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Flanders forms the medium part and the truly original founda- tion of this museum. We enter by the fourteenth century ; we end with the first half of the seventeenth. At the two extremities of this brilliant course we are struck by the same phenomenon, rare enough in such a little country, we see an art which was born of itself, on the spot ; and an art which was born again when it was thought to be dead. Van Eyck is recognized in a very fine Adoration of the Magi ; Memling is suggested by certain fine portraits ; and there, at the very end, a hundred and fifty years later, Rubens is perceived ; each time a sun rises, and then sets with the splendor and the brevity of a beautiful day without a morrow. 8 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. While Van Eyck is above the horizon, he casts gleams whiui reach to the very confines of the modern world ; and it seems as if it were these gleams, that it recognized and which illumined it, that awakened the modern world. Italy is warned of it and comes to Bruges. Thus it was, that from a visit of workmen curious to know what they must do in order to paint well, with brilliancy, with consistency, with ease, with permanence, there began between these two peoples those comings and goings which, however they changed in character and direction, never ceased. Van Eyck is not alone ; around him swarm works, works rather than names. They cannot be well distinguished either among themselves or from the German school : it is a jewel case, a reliquary, a sparkling of precious gems. Imagine a collection of painted jewel work in which is recognized the hand of the enameller, of the glass-worker, of the engraver, and of the illuminator of psalters ; whose sentiment is grave, whose inspiration is monastic, whose destination is princely ; which show already experienced handling and dazzling effect in the midst of which Memling remains ever distinct, unique, candid, and delicious, like a flower whose root is unattainable, and which has sent forth no shoots. After the extinction of this fair dawn, the fading of this lovely twilight, night descended upon the North, and Italy was seen to shine. Quite naturally the North rushed thither. Flanders was at that time at that critical moment in the life of individuals and of peoples when, if they are no longer young, they must ripen ; for when one almost ceases to believe, one must know. Flanders THE MUSEUM AT BRUSSELS. 9 did to Italy what Italy had been doing to antiquity ; she turned towards Rome, Florence, Milan, Parma, and Venice, even as Rome and Milan, Florence and Parma, had turned towards Latin Rome and Greece. The first to go was Mabuse, who went to Italy about 1 508 ; then Van Orley, at the latest in 1527; then Floris, then Coxcie, and others followed. For a century there existed on classic ground a Flemish academy, which formed excellent pupils and some good painters ; which came near stifling the Antwerp school by force of culture without greatness of soul, by lessons well or ill learned, and which finally served to sow the unknown. Do we here find the precursors ? At least these are the original stock, the intermediaries, the men who study with a will, who desire renown, who are charmed by novelty, tormented by ideal excellence. I cannot say that in this hybrid art everything was of a kind to console for what no longer existed, or to excite hopes of what was coming. But in any case they all captivate, interest, instruct us, even if we only learn from them to understand one thing, which seems common because so definitely proved, the renewal of the mod- ern by the ancient world, and the extraordinary gravitation which drew Europe towards the Italian Renascence. The Renascence was produced in the North exactly as it was in the South, with this difference, that at the time we have reached, Italy precedes, Flanders follows ; and while Italy possesses schools of rare culture and noble understanding, Flemish scholars hasten thither. 10 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. These scholars, to call them by a name which does honor to their masters, these disciples, better so named from their enthu- siasm and according to their merits, are diverse, and diversely impressed by the spirit which speaks to all of them from afar, and charms them when near, according to their natures. Some of them Italy attracts but does not convert, like Mabuse, who re- mained Gothic in mind and in execution, and brought back from his excursion only the taste for fine architecture, already prefer- ring palaces to chapels. There are some whom Italy retained and kept, others whom she sent back, freer, more supple, more nervous, even too much inclined towards moving attitudes, like Van Orley ; others she despatched to England, Germany, or France ; and still others returned unrecognizable, notably Floris, whose turbulent and cold manner, irregular style, and thin execution were hailed as an event in the school, and gave him the dangerous honor of forming, it is said, one hundred and fifty pupils. It is easy to recognize, amidst these deserters, certain rarely obsti- nate souls who, ingenuous and powerful, remain extraordinarily at- tached to their native soil, and, ploughing it, discover on the spot something new, witness Quentin Matsys, the Antwerp blacksmith, who began with the wrought-iron well, still to be seen before the portal of Notre Dame, and later, with the same honest hand, pre- cise and powerful, and the same metal-worker's tool, painted the Banker and his Wife in the Louvre, and the admirable Burial of Christ in the Antwerp Museum. Without leaving this historical hall of the Brussels Museum, one THE MUSEUM AT BRUSSELS. II might make extensive studies and discover many curiosities. The period comprised between the end of the fifteenth century and the last third of the sixteenth, that which begins after Memling, with Gerard David and the Stuerbouts, and which finishes with the last pupils of Floris, for instance, Martin de Vos, is really one of the periods in the school of the North that we can poorly understand from our French museums. Here are found names wholly unknown among us, like Coxcie and Connixloo. We can learn to understand the merit and the transitory value of Floris, and at a glance can define his historical interest ; as to his glory, it will forever astonish, but can be better explained. Bernard van Orley, in spite of all the corruptions of his manner, his mad gesticulations when he grows animated, his theatrical rigidity when he is self-conscious, his faults in drawing, his errors in taste, is revealed to us as an exceptional painter, first, by his Trials of Job, and finally, and even more surely, by his portraits. You find in him something Gothic and something Florentine, Mabuse mingled with an imitation Michael Angelo, the anecdotic style in his triptych of Job, his historical style in the trip- tych of the Virgin weeping over Christ, in one, the heavy and pasty style, the sombre color, the tiresomeness of a pale rendering of foreign methods ; in the other, the violence and the happy hits of the palette, glittering surfaces, and the glassy brilliancy appropriate to a practitioner from the workshops of Bruges. And yet such is the vigor, the inventive force, and the power of this eccentric and changeful painter, that in spite of his extravagances, he is recog- nized by an indescribably imposing originality. At Brussels he has 12 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. some surprising works. Observe that I do not speak to you of Franken, Ambroise Franken, a pure Fleming of the same epoch, who has nothing in the Brussels Museum, but who figures at Ant- werp in an altogether wonderful way, and who, if he is wanting to the series, is at least represented by analogous painters. Observe, too, that I omit those pictures poorly defined and catalogued as unknown masters, triptychs, portraits of various dates, beginning with the two life-sized figures of Philip the Fair and the Mad Joanna, two works rare from the value attached to them by iconography, charming in their execution, most instructive by their appropriate- ness. The museum possesses about fifty of these anonymous num- bers. No one expressly claims them. They recall certain pictures of better determined origin, sometimes connect and confirm them, make their relationship clearer, and better fill out their genealogical tree. Consider, moreover, that the primitive Dutch school, that of Haarlem, which is confounded with the Flemish school till the day when Holland ceased to be confounded entirely with Flanders, this first effort of the Netherlands to produce indigenous fruits of painting, is to be seen here, and I pass it by. I will only mention Stuerbout, with his two imposing panels of the Justice of Otho, and Heemes- kerke and Mostaert, Mostaert, a refractory spirit, an aborigine, a gentleman of the household of Margaret of Austria, who painted all the important personages of his time, a genre painter remarkably tinged with history and legend, who in two episodes of the life of St. Benedict represents the interior of a kitchen, and paints for us, as they did a hundred years later, the familiar domestic life of his THE MUSEUM AT BRUSSELS. 13 time, Heemeskerke, a pure apostle of linear forms, dry, angular, glaring, blackish, who cuts out of hard steel his figures vaguely imi- tated from Michael Angelo. It is easy to mistake a Dutchman for a Fleming. At that date it made very little difference on which side of the Meuse a man was born ; what mattered, was to know if such a painter had or had not tasted the troubled waters of the Arno or the Tiber. Had he or had he not visited Italy ? Everything is in that, and nothing can be stranger than this mingling, in large or small doses, of Italian culture and persistent Germanisms, of a foreign tongue and the indelible local accent which characterizes this school of Italo-Flemish mon- grels. Journeys are in vain ; something is changed, but the substratum exists. The style is new, movement is to be found in the grouping, a hint of chiaroscuro begins to dawn upon palettes, nudities appear in an art hitherto wholly clothed and costumed according to local fashions, the height of personages increases, the groups are more numerous, the pictures more crowded, fancy mingles with the myths, an unbridled picturesqueness is combined with history ; it is the moment of Last Judgments, satanic and apocalyptic conceptions, and grimacing deviltries. The imagination of the North yields with joyful heart, and gives itself over, in the whimsical or in the terrible, to extravagances which Italian art never suspected. In the first place, nothing deranges the methodical and tenacious foundation of Flemish genius. Execution remains precise, sharp, minute, and crystalline : the hand remembers having not long since manipulated polished and dense substances ; recalls the chiselling of 14 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. copper, the enamelling of gold, the melting and coloring of glass. Then gradually the trade changes, the coloring is broken, the tone is divided into lights and shades ; it becomes iridescent, preserves its substance in the folds of stuffs, evaporates and whitens at each salient point. Painting becomes less solid, and color of less con- sistency, in proportion as it loses the conditions of force and bril- liancy which came from its unity ; it is the Florentine method which begins to disorganize the rich and homogeneous Flemish palette. This first ravage well established, the evil makes rapid progress. In spite of the docility with which it follows the Italian teaching, the Flemish spirit is not supple enough to bend entirely to such lessons. It takes what it can, not always the best, and something ever es- capes it, either the method when it tries to seize the style, or the style when it succeeds in approaching the method. After Florence, Rome dominates it, and at the same time Venice. At Venice the influences which it undergoes are singular. One can hardly perceive that the Flemish painters have studied the Bellini, Giorgione, or Titian. Tintoretto, on the contrary, has visibly impressed them. They find in him something grandiose, a movement, and a muscularity, which tempt them, and a certain tran- sitional coloring, from which that of Veronese will separate itself, and which seems to them more useful to consult for '-the purpose of discovering the elements of their own. They borrow from him two or three tones, his yellow especially, with the manner of accompany- ing them. It is to be remarked that in these disconnected imitations there are not only many incoherences, but striking anachronisms. THE MUSEUM AT BRUSSELS. 15 They adopt more and more the Italian fashion, and yet they wear it ill. An inconsequence, a badly assorted detail, an odd combination of two manners which do not go well together, continue to manifest the rebellious side of the natures of these incorrigible scholars. In the full tide of the Italian decadence, on the eve of the seventeenth century, there are found still among these Italo-Flemings men of the past who seem never to have remarked that the Renascence was over and done. They inhabit Italy, and only follow its evolu- tions from afar. Whether from inability to understand things, or from native stiffness and obstinacy, there seems to be one side of their minds which resists, and will not be cultivated. An Italo- Fleming is invariably far behind the Italian time of day, which explains why during the life of Rubens his master hardly walked in the steps of Raphael. While in historical painting some are belated, elsewhere there are some who divine the future, and are in advance. I speak not only of the elder Breughel, the inventor of genre painting, a terrible genius, an original master if ever there was one, father of a school to come, who died without having seen his sons, yet whose sons are his very own. The museum of Brussels makes us recognize an unknown painter of uncertain name, recognized by sobriquets : in Flanders he is called Henri met de Bles, or de Blesse, the man with the tuft ; in Italy, Civetta, because his pictures, now very rare, have an owl in place of a signature. A picture by this Henri de Bles, a Temptation of St. Anthony, is a most unexpected work, with its bottle-green and black-green landscape, its bituminous 1 6 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. ground, its sky of light Prussian blue, its audacious and ingenious masses of color, the terrible black, which serves for background to the two nude figures, and its chiaroscuro so boldly obtained with a clear sky. This enigmatic painting, which savors of Italy, and announces what Breughel and Rubens will be later, in their landscapes, reveals a skilful painter, and a man impatient to antici- pate the hour. Of all these painters more or less disacclimated, of all these Romanists, as they were called on their return into Antwerp society, Italy not on-ly made skilful, copious artists, of great experience, of true knowledge, especially of great aptitude for diffusion and for vulgarizing (I ask their pardon for the word, it being used in its double signification), but she also gave them the taste for multifa- rious methods. According to the example of their own masters, they became architects and engineers and poets. To-day this fine fire causes a slight smile at the thought of the sincere masters who preceded them, and the inspired master who was to follow them. They were brave men, who worked for the culture of their time, and unconsciously for the progress of their school. They went away, enriched themselves, and returned home like emigrants whose sav- ings are made with a view to the fatherland. Some of them were very secondary, and local history itself might forget them if they did not all follow each other from father to son, and if genealogy were not in such cases the only means of estimating the utility of those who seek, and of understanding the sudden grandeur of those who find. THE MUSEUM AT BRUSSELS. IJ To sum up, a school had disappeared, that of Bruges. Aided by politics, war, journeys, and all the active elements which compose the physical and moral character of a people, another school was formed at Antwerp ; ultramontane beliefs inspired it, ultramontane art advised it, princes encouraged it, all national needs called for it. It was at once very active and very undecided, very brilliant, astonishingly fruitful, and almost obscure ; it was metamorphosed from top to bottom, so as to be no longer recognizable, until it arrived at its decisive and final incarnation in a man born to bend to all the needs of his age and of his country, nourished by all schools, and who was the most original expression of his own, that is to say, the most Flemish of all Flemings. Otho Vcenius is placed in the museum of Brussels immediately beside his great pupil. It is towards those two inseparable names that we must tend if we would draw any conclusion from what pre- cedes. They are seen from the whole horizon, the former concealed in the glory of the other; and if I have not named them twenty times already, you should be grateful for the effort I have made to induce you to expect them. II THE MASTERS OF RUBENS. IT is known that Rubens had three teachers, that he began his studies with a well-known landscape-painter, Tobias Verhaegt ; that he continued them with Adam Van Noort, and ended them with Otho Vcenius. Of these three professors, there are but two with whom history concerns itself, and it still accords to Vcenius almost all the honor of this great education, one of the finest from which a master has ever gained fame, because in fact Voenius directed his pupil until he attained his majority, and was not separated from him till the age when Rubens was already a man, and, at least in talent, already a great man. As to Van Noort, we learn that he was a painter of real but fantastic originality, who was very harsh with his pupils. In his studio Rubens spent four years ; but he disliked him, and found in Vcenius a master of more compatible temper. ThJ* is about all that is said of this intermediary director, who held this child in his hands precisely at the age when youth is most susceptible to impressions ; but according to my idea this hardly accounts for the influence he must have had upon this young mind. THE MASTERS OF RUBENS. 19 If from Verhaegt Rubens learned the elements, if Voenius in- structed him in the humanities, Van Noort did something more ; he showed him in his own person a character wholly individual, an unconquerable organization, in short, the sole contemporary painter who remained a Fleming when every one in Flanders had ceased to be one. Nothing is so singular as the contrast afforded by these two men, so different in character and consequently so opposite in their influence, and nothing is more curious than the destiny which led them in succession to concur in that delicate task, the edu- cation of a child of genius. Remark that by their disparities they corresponded precisely to the contrasts of which was formed this multifarious nature, as circumspect as it was bold. Isolated, they represent its contrary elements, that is, its incongruities ; together, they reconstitute, minus the genius, the whole man with all his forces, his harmony, his equilibrium, and his unity. Now, when we understand the genius of Rubens in its plenitude, and the contradictory talents of his two instructors, it is easy to perceive, I do not say the one who has given the wisest counsels, but which of the two has most vividly moved him, the man who appealed to his reason, or the one who addressed his tempera- ment ; the irreproachable painter who exalted Italy to him, or the man of the soil who perhaps showed him what he might one day be, by remaining the greatest of his own nation. In any case there is one whose action is explained but scarcely seen, and another whose influence is manifest without being explained ; and 20 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. if a man be absolutely determined to recognize some family feature in this face so markedly individual, I can see but one which has the character and persistency of an hereditary trait, and this characteristic comes from Van Noort. And now I will say what I have to express concerning Vcenius, claiming for a man too much forgotten the right to figure at Rubens's side. This Vcenius was no ordinary man. Without Rubens he would find it difficult to sustain the renown he has in history ; but at least the lustre from his disciple illumines a noble figure, a personage of distinguished mien, of lofty birth, of high culture, a learned, some- times even an original painter from the variety of his knowledge, and from a talent almost natural, his excellent education forming a part of his nature, the result being a man and an artist each as admirably trained as the other. He had visited Florence, Rome, Venice, and Parma, and certainly it was in Rome and Venice and Parma that he spent the longest time. A Roman in his scrupulousness, a Venetian in his taste, a Parmesan above all, from affinities which are more rarely revealed, but which are most intimate and true, at Rome and in Venice he had found two schools constituted like no other ; at Parma he met one isolated creator, without relations, without doctrines, who did not even pride himself on being a master. Had he, on account of his differences, more respect for Raphael, more sensuous ardor for Veronese and Titian, more tenderness at bottom for Correggio ? This I believe. His successful compositions are a little trivial, rather empty, rarely imaginative ; and the elegance he derives from THE MASTERS OF RUBENS. 21 nature and his association with the best masters as with the best company, the uncertainty of his convictions and preferences, the impersonal force of his coloring, his draperies destitute of truth and of grandeur of style, his untypical heads, his winy tones lacking in great warmth, all these suggestions, full of good breeding, would give of him the impression of a mind accom- plished, but mediocre. He might be called an excellent court master, who teaches admirably lessons too admirable and powerful for himself. He is, however, something much better than that, and as proof of it, I only need his Mystical Marriage of St. Cath- erine, which is found in the Brussels Museum on the right, above the Magi of Rubens. This picture struck me forcibly. It was painted in 1589, and is penetrated with that Italian substance on which the painter had been profoundly nurtured. At this time Vcenius was thirty-three years old. On his return to his own country he took the first rank as architect and painter to Prince Alexander of Parma. From his family picture, which is in the Louvre and which dates from 1584, to this, that is, in five years, the stride is enor- mous. It seems as if his Italian memories had slumbered during his sojourn at Liege with the Princfe Bishop, and were revived at the Court of Farnese. This picture, the best and most surprising produced from all the lessons he had learned, has this in par- ticular : it reveals a man behind many influences, it indicates at least in what direction his native inclinations lead, and we learn from it what he desired to do, while seeing most distinctly what 22 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. inspired him. I will not describe it, but, the subject seeming to me to deserve that one should pause before it, I took some run- ning notes which I here transcribe. " More opulent, more supple, less Roman, although at the first glance the tone remains Roman. From a certain tenderness of type, an arbitrary crumpling of stuffs, a little mannerism in the hands, we feel Correggio introduced into Raphael. There are angels in the sky who make a pleasing spot ; a dark yellow drapery in half-tint is thrown, like a tent with folds turned back, across the branches of the trees. The Christ is charming ; the young and slender St. Elizabeth is adorable. She has the cast- down eyes, the chaste and infantile profile, the pretty well-turned neck, the candid air of Raphael's virgins, humanized by an inspira- tion from Correggio, and by a marked personal sentiment. The blond hair which melts into the blond flesh, the grayish white linens which lead into each other, the colors shadowy or marked, which melt or are distinguished very capriciously according to new laws, and according to the author's proper fancy, all these are pure Italian blood transfused into veins capable of turning them into new blood. All this prepares for Rubens, whom it an- nounces, and towards whom ft leads. "Certainly there is in the Marriage of St. Catherine enough to enlighten and urge forward a mind of such delicacy, a tempera- ment of such ardor. From his Italian souvenirs Voenius derived these elements, this arrangement, the spots of color ; this bend- ing, waving chiaroscuro ; this yellow, no longer Tintoretto's, though THE MASTERS OF RUBENS. 23 derived from it; the pearly flesh, no longer the pulp of Correggio, although it has its savor; this thinner skin,, this colder flesh, a more feminine grace or a more local femininity ; an entirely Italian background, from which, however, the warmth has departed, and in which the red principle gives way to the green principle, with an infinitely greater caprice in the disposition of shadows, and a light more diffused, and less rigorously submitted to the arabesques of form. It is but a slight effort at acclimation, but the effort ex- ists. Rubens, for whom nothing was lost, must have found, when he went to Vcenius seven years later, in 1596, the example of a style of painting already very eclectic and passably emancipated. It is more than one would expect from Vcenius, and enough that Rubens should be indebted to him for a moral influence, if not a decided impression." As can be seen, Vcenius had more exterior than depth, more order than native richness, and an excellent education ; but he lacked ardor, and had not a shadow of genius. He gave good examples, being himself a good example of what may be produced in all things by good birth, a well-trained mind, a supple comprehension, an active and mobile will, and a peculiar aptitude for submission. Van Noort was the counterpart of Voenius. He was wanting in almost all that Voenius had acquired ; he naturally possessed what Voenius lacked. He had neither culture, nor politeness, nor ele- gance, nor style, nor submissiveness, nor balance ; but, on the other hand, real gifts and vivid gifts. Savage, hasty, violent, unpolished, just as nature had made him, he never ceased to be either in his conduct or his works. 24 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. He was a man all of a piece, of pure impulse ; perhaps an ignorant man, but a somebody, the opposite of Voenius, the opposite of an Italian, a Fleming in race and temperament, who remained a Fleming. With Vcenius he represented marvellously the two ele- ments, native and foreign, which for a hundred years had divided the mind of Flanders, one almost wholly stifling the other. In manner, and allowing for the difference of epoch, he was the last offshoot of the strong national stem of which the Van Eycks, Memling, Quentin Matsys, the elder Breughel, and all the portrait painters had been, according to the spirit of each age, the natural and vigorous product. Changed as was the old German blood in the veins of the eru- dite Vcenius, it flowed rich, pure, and abundant in this strong, uncultivated organization. In his tastes, his instincts, his habits, Van Noort belonged to the people. He had their brutality, even, it is said, their love of wine, their loud voice, their coarse but frank language, their ill-taught and rough sincerity, everything, in a word, except their good-humor. A stranger to society as well as to acad- emies, no more polished in one sense than in another, but absolutely a painter by his imaginative faculties, by the eye and by the hand ; rapid, alert, of undisturbed self-possession, he had two motives for daring all, he knew that he was capable of doing everything without any one's help, and he had no scruples about his own ig- norance. To judge by his works, now become very rare, and by the little that remains to us of a laborious career of eighty-four years, he loved THE MASTERS OF RUBENS. 2$ what in his country was scarcely esteemed longer, an action, even heroic, expressed in its crude reality apart from any ideal, whether mystical or pagan. He loved sanguine and ill-combed men, gray- beards tanned and aged, hardened by rude labor, with shining thick hair, unkempt beards, veined necks, and broad shoulders. In handling he delighted in strong accents, showy colors, great clearness in powerful and inharmonious tones, the whole but little blended, painted broadly, glowing, shining, and rippling. His touch was impatient, sure, and true. He had a way of striking the can- vas and imprinting upon it a tone rather than a form, which made it resound under the brush. He massed many stout figures in a little space, disposed them in abundant groups, and drew from numbers a general relief which added to the individual relief of things. Everything that could shine, shone, brow, temples, mus- taches, the white of the eye, the edge of the eyelid ; and by this fashion of rendering the action of vivid light upon the blood, the moisture and gleam contracted by the skin from the heat of day which burns it, by much red, intensified by much silver, he gave to all his personages a certain most pronounced activity, and, so to speak, the appearance of being in a sweat. If these traits are exact, and I believe them to be so, from hav- ing observed them in a very characteristic work, it is impossible to misunderstand what an influence such a man must have had upon Rubens. The pupil certainly had a good deal of the master in his blood. He had indeed almost everything which makes the origi- nality of his master, but also many other gifts in addition, whence 26 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. result the extraordinary plenitude, and the not less extraordinary temper of his fine mind. Rubens, it has been written, was tranquil and lucid, which means that his lucidity arose from an imperturbable good sense, and his tranquillity from the most admirable equilibrium which has perhaps ever reigned in a brain. 1 But it is none the less true that there exist between him and Van ; 'Noort evident family relations. If that were doubted, one need only look at Jordaens, his co-disciple and his substitute. With age, with education, the traits of which I speak were all to disappear in Rubens, but in Jordaens they have existed underneath his ex- treme resemblance to Rubens, so that to-day it is by the relation- ship of the two pupils that one can recognize the original marks which unite both to their common master. Jordaens would cer- tainly have been quite other had he not had Van Noort for an instructor and Rubens for a constant model. Without that in- structor would Rubens have been all that he is? and would not one accent have been wanting to him, that plebeian accent which attaches him to the very heart of his people, thanks to which he has been understood as well by them as by delicate minds and princes ? However that may be, Nature seems to have been groping when from 1557 to 1581 she sought the mould in which to melt the elements of modern art in Flanders. It may be said that she tried Van Noort, that she hesitated before Jordaens, and that she only found what she wanted in Rubens. We have now reached 1600. Henceforth Rubens had enough force to be independent of a master, but not of masters. He de- THE MASTERS OF RUBENS. 27 parted for Italy, and what he did there is known. He sojourned there eight years, from the age of twenty-three to thirty-one years. He stopped at Mantua, preluded his embassy by a journey to the Court of Spain, returned to Mantua, went to Rome, then to Florence, then to Venice, then from Rome he went to settle at Genoa. There he beheld princes, became celebrated, there took possession of his talent, his glory, and his fortune. After the death of his mother he returned to Antwerp in 1609, and made himself recognized with- out difficulty as the first master of his age. III. RUBENS IN THE BRUSSELS MUSEUM. IF I were writing the history of Rubens, it would not be here that I should compose the first chapter. I should look for Rubens in his very beginnings, in his pictures anterior to 1609, or else I should choose some marked period, and from Antwerp follow this career, which is so direct that the undulations of the widely developing nature can scarcely be perceived, as it increases its extent without the uncertainties and contradictions of a mind which seeks its way. But remember that I am only turning the leaves of an impercepti- ble fragment of this immense work. Detached pages of his life are offered by chance, and I accept them thus. Everywhere, moreover, that Rubens is represented by a good picture, he is present, I will not say in all parts of his talent, but certainly in at least one of the finest. The museum at Brussels has seven of his important pictures, a sketch, and four portraits. If this is not enough to measure Rubens, it suffices to give a grand, varied, and just idea of his value. With his master, his contemporaries, his co-disciples, or his friends, he fills the last division of the gallery, and there sheds abroad that restrained RUBENS IN THE BRUSSELS MUSEUM. 29 brilliancy, and that soft and powerful radiance which are the grace of his genius. There is no pedantry, no affectation of vain grandeur or of offensive pride, but he is naturally imposing. Give him for neigh- bors the most overpowering and contrary works, and the effect is the same. He extinguishes those which resemble him, silences those which attempt to contradict him ; from afar he makes his presence consciously felt, he isolates himself, and wherever he may be he is at home. These pictures, though undated, are evidently of very diverse periods. Many years separate the Assumption of the Virgin from the two dramatic canvases, St. Lieven, and Christ ascending Cal- vary. Not that in Rubens are seen those striking changes which mark, in the greater part of painters, the passage from one age to another, commonly called their manners. Rubens ripened too early and died too suddenly to have his paintings preserve visible traces of his first ingenuousness, or feel the least effect of his decline. From his youth up he was himself. He had found his style, his form, almost his types, and once for all the elementary principles of his craft. Later, with experience, he acquired still more liberty ; his palette, while it grew richer, became more temperate ; he obtained greater results with less effort, and his extreme boldness, when ex- amined, reveals at bottom perfect moderation, the knowledge, the wisdom, and the pertinence of a consummate master, who is as con- tained as he is free. He began by working rather thinly and smoothly and vividly. His color, pearly in surface, was more glit- tering and less resonant, the under tints were less well chosen, the 30 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. substance less delicate or less deep. He feared a negative tone, not suspecting the learned use of it that he should one day make. Even at the end of his life, in full maturity, that is, in the full effervescence of brain and method, he returned to this studied man- ner, which is relatively timid. Therefore in his little anecdotic genre pictures made with his friend Breughel to amuse his later years, there is no longer to be recognized the powerful hand, un- bridled or refined, which painted at the same epoch the Martyrdom of St. Lieven, the Magi of the Antwerp Museum, or the St. George of the Church of St. Jacques. The spirit in truth never changed ; and if one would follow the progress of age, it is the man who must be considered rather than the attractions of his thought ; his palette must be analyzed, his method studied, and above all only his great works must be consulted. The Assumption corresponds to this first period, since it would be inexact to say his first manner. This picture has been much re- touched, and though we are assured that on this account it loses a large part of its merit, I cannot see that it has lost that which I am seeking. It is a page at once brilliant and cold, inspired in render- ing, methodical and prudent in execution. It is like the pictures of that date, polished, clean in surface, a trifle glassy. The common- place types lack naturalness ; the palette of Rubens resounds already with certain dominant notes, red, yellow, black, and gray, brilliant but crude. These are its insufficiencies. As to merits entirely ac- quired, they are here applied in a masterly way. Great figures lean- ing over the empty tomb, all the colors vibrating over a black opening, RUBENS IN THE BRUSSELS MUSEUM. 31 the light spreading from a central point of brilliancy, broad, powerful, sonorous, wavy, dying in softest half-tints ; on the right and left nothing but weak points except two accidental spots, two horizontal strong points which attach the scene to the frame half-way up the picture. Below, some gray steps ; above, a sky of Venetian blue with gray clouds and flying vapors, and in this shaded azure, her feet buried in bluish fleecy clouds, her head in a glory, floats the Virgin, clothed in pale blue, with a dark blue mantle, three winged groups of angels accompanying her, all radiating with pearl and rose and silver. At the upper angle, just touching the zenith, a little agile cherub, beating his wings, shining like a butterfly in the light, mounts directly and flies through the open heaven like a swifter messenger than the others. Here are suppleness, breadth, depth of grouping, and a marvellous union of the picturesque with the grand. In spite of certain imperfections all Rubens is here, more than in embryo. Nothing can be more tender, more frank, or more striking. As an improvisation of happy spots of color, as life, as a harmony for the eye, it is perfect, a summer festival. Christ in the -Lap of the Virgin is a much later work, grave, gray, and black. The Virgin is in sad blue ; the Magdalen in a purple- black garment. The canvas has suffered much from transportation, either in 1794, when it was sent to Paris, or in 1815, when it returned. It passed for one of the finest works of Rubens, which it no longer can be called. I confine myself to transcribing my notes, which say enough. The Magi are neither the first nor the last expression of a subject 32 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. that Rubens has treated many times. In any case, in whatever rank they are classed in these versions developed from one theme, they follow that of Paris, and very certainly they precede that of Mechlin, of which I will speak further on. The idea is ripe, the arrangement more complete. The necessary elements, of which is to be composed later this work so rich in transformations, types, and personages, with their costumes and their habitual colors, are all found here, playing the rdle designed for them, occupying in the scene their destined place. It is a vast page, conceived, contained, concentrated, summed up, like an easel picture, and for that reason less decorative than many others. It has a great clearness, no tiresome neatness, not one of the chilling drynesses of the Assumption, a great carefulness, with the maturity of most perfect knowledge. The whole school of Rubens might have been instructed from this one example. With the Ascent of Calvary, it is quite another thing. At this date Rubens had made the greater part of his great works. He was no longer young ; he knew everything ; he could only have lost, if death, which protected him, had not removed him before he began to fail. Here we have movement, tumult, agitation, in form, in gesture, in countenances, in the disposition of groups, in the oblique light, diagonal and symmetrical, going from the base to the top and from right to left. Christ falling under his cross, the escort of horsemen, the two thieves held and driven by their executioners, are all marching in the same line, and seem to climb the narrow ascent which leads to the place of torture. The Christ is dying with fatigue ; St. Veronica is wiping his brow ; the Virgin in I RUBENS IN THE BRUSSELS MUSEUM. 33 tears rushes towards him, extending her arms to him ; Simon of Cyrene bears the cross ; and in spite of this tree of infamy, these women in tears and mourning, this struggling victim on his knees, whose panting mouth, moist temples, and haggard eyes excite pity, in spite of the terror, the shouts, the near approach of death, it is clear to him who can see, that this equestrian pomp, these floating banners, this harnessed centurion turning upon his horse with a noble gesture, in whom are recognized the features of Rubens, all these cause the execution to be forgotten, and give more manifestly the impression of a triumph. . And this is the individual logic of this brilliant mind. It might be said that the scene is comprehended falsely, that it is melo- dramatic, without gravity, without majesty, without beauty, without august character, in fine, almost theatrical. The picturesque, which might well ruin it, is what saves it. Fancy takes possession of it, and elevates it. A gleam of true sentiment pierces and ennobles it. Something like a trait of eloquence enhances the style. Finally, there is an inexpressible fire, an admirably inspired enthusiasm, which make of this picture exactly what it ought to be, a picture of trivial death, and an apotheosis. I find, on examination, that this picture dates from 1634. I was not mistaken in attributing it to the last and finest years of Rubens. Is the Martyrdom of St. Lieven of the same epoch ? At least it is in the same style, but in spite of something terrible in the rendering, it has more liveliness in its attraction, its method, and its color. Rubens thought less of it than the Calvary. His 3 34 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. palette was gayer at that time, the workman more rapid, and his brain less nobly disposed. Forget that this is an ignoble and savage murder of a holy bishop whose tongue has just been torn out, who is vomiting blood, and writhing in agonizing con- vulsions ; forget the three executioners who are torturing him, one with his bloody knife between his teeth, the other with his heavy pincers holding the frightful morsel of flesh to the dogs ; look only at the white horse curveting under a white sky, the golden cope of the bishop, his white stole, the dogs spotted with black and white, four or five of them black, the two red caps, the flushed faces with ruddy skins, and all around in the vast field of canvas the delicious concert of gray and azure and pale or dark silver, and you will receive only the sentiment of a radiant harmony, the most admirable perhaps, and the most un- expected that Rubens ever used to express, or, if you prefer, to excuse, a scene of horror. Did Rubens seek contrast? Did he need for the altar which it was to occupy in the church of the Jesuits at Ghent, that this picture should be at once raging and celestial, terrible and smiling, a shuddering horror and a consolation ? I think that the poetical side of Rubens adopted quite voluntarily such an- titheses. Even if he did not think of it, involuntarily his nature would have inspired them. It is well from the beginning to accustom ourselves to these contradictions which produce an equilibrium, and constitute an exceptional genius. Here are much blood and physical vigor, but a winged spirit, a man who fears RUBENS IN THE BRUSSELS MUSEUM. 35 not the horrible but has a tender and truly serene soul; here are hideousnesses and brutalities, a total absence of taste in form, com- bined with an ardor which transforms ugliness into force, bloody brutality into terror. This desire for apotheosis of which I spoke in the Calvary, he carries into all he does. If well understood, there is a glory, a trumpet call, in his grossest works. He is very earthy, more earthy than any of the masters whose equal he is, but the painter comes to the aid of the draughtsman and thinker, and sets them free. Therefore there are many who cannot follow him in his flights. There is a suspicion of an imagination which elevates him, but what is seen is only what attaches him below, to the common, the too real, the thick muscles, the redun- dant or careless design, the heavy types, the flesh, and the blood just under the skin. And yet there is a failure to perceive that he has formulas, a style, an ideal, and that these superior formu- las, this style, this ideal, are in his palette. Add to this his special gift of eloquence. His language, to de- fine it accurately, is what in literature is called oratorical. When he improvises, he is not at his best ; when he restrains his speech, it is magnificent. It is prompt, sudden, abundant, and warm ; in all circumstances it is eminently persuasive. He strikes, astonishes, re- pels you ; he irritates, but almost always convinces ; and if there is a chance for it, more than any one else he can touch you. Certain pic- tures of Rubens are revolting, but there are some that bring tears to the eyes, and such an influence is rare in all schools. He has the weaknesses, the digressions, and also the magnetic fire of the great 36 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. orators. He sometimes perorates and declaims, he beats the air with his huge arms, but there are words he can speak as no other man can. In general, his ideas are such as can only be expressed by eloquence, by pathetic gesture and sonorous utterance. Remark also that he paints for walls, for altars to be seen from the nave ; that he speaks for a vast audience ; that consequently he must be heard from afar, must strike a long way off, seize and charm from a distance, whence results the necessity of in- sisting, of enlarging methods, of increasing the volume of sound. There are laws of perspective, and so to speak of acoustics, which preside over this solemn art, of such immense range. It is to this kind of declamatory and incorrect, but very moving eloquence, that belongs his Christ coming to judge the World. The earth is a prey to vices and crimes, to conflagrations, assassinations, and violence; the idea of these human perversities being rendered by a bit of animated landscape such as Rubens alone can paint. Christ appears armed with thunderbolts, half flying, half march- ing ; and while he prepares to punish this abominable world, a poor monk in his woollen robe implores mercy, and covers with his two arms an azure globe, around which is twined a serpent. Does the prayer of the saint suffice? No. Then the Virgin, a tall woman in widow's weeds, throws herself before Christ and arrests him. She neither implores, nor prays, nor commands ; she is before her God, but she addresses her Son. Opening her black robe, she uncovers her large immaculate bosom, which she touches with her hand, displaying it to him whom it has nourished. The apos- RUBENS IN THE BRUSSELS MUSEUM. 37 trophe is irresistible. Everything may be criticised in this purely passionate picture, painted without retouching: the Christ, who is only ridiculous ; the St. Francis, who is but a terrified monk ; the Virgin, who resembles a Hecuba with the features of Helen Four- ment, even her gesture is not without boldness, if one remembers ithe taste of Raphael, or even the taste of Racine. But I believe it is none the less true that neither at the theatre nor on the tribune, and this picture recalls both, nor in painting, which is its true domain, have been found so many pathetic effects from such vigor and such novelty. I neglect and Rubens will lose nothing thereby the Assump- tion of the Virgin, a picture without a soul ; and Venus in the Forge of Vulcan, a canvas too closely related to Jordaens. I pass over likewise the portraits, to which I shall return. Five of the seven pictures, as you see, give a first idea of Rubens not destitute of interest. Supposing that he were unknown, or known only by the Medici Gallery at the Louvre, and that is an ill-chosen example, one would begin to suspect what he is in his mind, his method, his imperfections, and his power. From this, one would conclude that he must never be compared to the Italians, under penalty of mis- understanding, and judging him falsely. If we mean by style the ideal of the pure and beautiful transcribed in formulas, he has no style. If we mean by grandeur loftiness, penetration, the medita- tive and intuitive force of a great thinker, he has neither grandeur nor thought. If taste be requisite, he has no taste. If one delights in a restrained, concentrated, condensed art, like that of Leonardo 38 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. da Vinci for example, this can only irritate and displease by its habitual exaggerations. If all human types must bear some relation to those of the Dresden Madonna, or to La Joconde, to those of Bellini, Perugino, and Luini, those delicate definers of grace and beauty in woman, no indulgence can be felt for the abundant beauty and plump charms of Helen Fourment. Finally, if, approaching more and more to the sculptural manner, there should be demanded from the works of Rubens the conciseness, the rigid bearing, the peaceable gravity, that painting wore when he began, very little would be left to Rubens, except a gesticulator, a man full of force, a sort of imposing athlete, with little cultivation, in short, a bad example. In this case, as has been said, " We salute when we pass, but do not look." It is necessary then to find, apart from all comparison, a special position for this glory which is so legitimate a glory. It must be found in the world of the true through which Rubens travels as a master ; and also in the world of the ideal, that region of clear ideas, of sentiments, and emotions, whither his heart as well as his mind bear him incessantly. Those wing strokes by which he there maintains himself must be understood. It must be comprehended that his element is light, that his means of exaltation is his palette, his aim the clearness and evidence of objects. The works of Ru- bens cannot only be viewed in an amateur fashion as shocking the mind and charming the eye. There is something more to be con- sidered and to say. The Brussels Museum is the beginning of the matter, but we must remember that Mechlin and Antwerp remain. IV. RUBENS AT MECHLIN. MECHLIN is a great dreary city, empty, dead, and buried in the shadow of its basilicas and convents, in a silence from which noth- ing is able to rouse it, neither its industries, its politics, nor the controversialists who sometimes meet there. At the present mo- ment they are having processions with cavalcades, congregations, and banners, on the occasion of the Centennial Jubilee. All this commotion animates it for a day, but on the morrow the province goes to sleep again. There is very little movement in the streets, a great desert in the squares, many mausoleums of black marble, and statues of bishops in its churches ; and around the churches that fine short grass which grows in solitude among the pavements. In short, in this metropolitan, or rather I should say necropolitan city, there are but two things which survive its past splendor, its sanctuaries of exceeding richness, and the pictures of Rubens. These pictures are the celebrated triptych of the Magi at St. John, and the not less celebrated triptych of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, which belongs to the church of Notre Dame. The Adoration of the Magi is, as I have previously informed you, 40 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. a third version of the Magi of the Louvre and of Brussels. The elements are the same, the principal personages textually the same, with an insignificant change of age in the heads, and some trans- positions of equally little importance. Rubens has made no great effort to remodel his first idea. According to the example of the greatest masters, he had the good sense to live largely upon him- self, and when one rendering appeared to him fertile in variations, he simply made some slight alteration in the repetitions. This theme of the Wise Men coming from the four corners of the earth to adore a homeless infant, born one winter night in the manger of a poor and hidden stable, was one of those which pleased Rubens by its pomp and its contrasts. It is interesting to follow the development of the first idea, as he essays it, enriches, completes, and finally establishes it. After the picture at Brussels, which might have satisfied him, he was able, it seems, to treat the subject better still, with greater richness, more freedom, giving to it that flower of certainty and perfection which belongs only to works absolutely mature. This he has done at Mechlin, after which he returned to it, abandoned himself more entirely, added to it new fancies, aston- ished still more by the fertility of his resources, but did no better. The Magi at Mechlin may be considered as the final expression of the subject, and as one of the finest pictures of Rubens in this style of grand spectacular canvases. The composition of the central group is reversed from right to left, with the exception of this change, it can be almost wholly recognized. Here are the three Wise Men, the European, as at RUBENS AT MECHLIN. 41 Brussels, with his white hair minus the baldness ; the Asiatic, in red ; the Ethiopian, faithful to his type, here smiles, as he smiles elsewhere, with that ingenuous negro laugh, tender and wondering, so deli- cately observed in this affectionate race ever ready to show its teeth, only he has changed his role and his place. He has been relegated to the second rank, between the princes of the earth and the super- numeraries ; the white turban which he wore at Brussels here adorns a fine ruddy head of Oriental type, whose bust is clothed in green. Also the man in armor is here, half-way up the staircase, bareheaded, rosy, fair, and charming. Instead of keeping back the crowd by facing them, he makes a happy counter-movement, bends to admire the child, and by a gesture repels the eager multitude thronging up the steps. Remove this elegant knight of the time of Louis XIII., and it is the East. How could Rubens know that in every Mussul- man country people are so intrusive that they crush each other in order to see better ? As at Brussels, the accessory heads are the most characteristic and the finest The arrangement of color and the distribution of the lights is unchanged. The Virgin is pale, the infant Christ radiating with whiteness under his aureola. Immediately around all is white, the sage with his ermine collar and hoary locks, the silver head of the Asiatic, finally the turban of the Ethiopian, a circle of silver, shaded with rose and pale gold. All the rest is black, tawny, or cold. The heads, ruddy or of a burning brick-red, contrast with bluish countenances of a most unexpected coldness. The dark roof melts away in air. A figure in blood-red in the half-tint relieves, 42 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. finishes, and sustains the whole composition, attaching it to the vault by a knot of color, soft, but very precise. It is a composition that cannot be described, for it expresses nothing formal, nothing pathetic or moving, especially nothing literary. It charms the mind because it enchants the eye ; to a painter, the painting is priceless. To the delicate it must cause great joy, and it must confound the wise. It is wonderful to see how it all lives, moves, breathes, looks, acts, is full of color or fades away, forms a part of the frame or detaches it- self from it, melts into it by its lights, reinstates itself and maintains itself there by its force. And as to the crossing of shades, the ex- treme richness obtained by simple means, by the violence of certain tones, the softness of certain others ; the abundance of red, and yet the coolness of the whole picture, as to the laws which preside over such effects, they are things absolutely disconcerting. Analysis reveals only a few very simple formulas, two or three master colors whose purpose is explained, whose action is_ foreseen, and whose influence every man who knows how to paint to-day understands. The colors are always the same in the works of Ru- bens ; there are no secrets, to speak truly. The accessory combi- nations can be noted, his method can be expressed ; it is so con- stant, and so plain in its application, that a pupil, it would seem, would only have to follow it. Never was handiwork easier to seize, with fewer tricks and reticences, because there never was a painter so little mysterious, either when thinking, composing, color- ing, or executing. The sole secret which belongs to him, and which he never yielded even to the most intelligent or the best RUBENS AT MECHLIN. 43 informed, even to Gaspard de Grayer, even to Jordaens, even to Vandyck, is that imponderable, unseizable point, that irreducible atom, that nothing, which in all the things of this world is called the inspiration, the grace, or the gift, which is everything. This is what must be understood in the first place when Ru- bens is spoken of. Every man of the craft, or a stranger to the . craft, who does not understand the value of the gift in a work of art, in all its degrees of illumination, inspiration, or fancy, is hardly fit to taste the subtle essence of things, and I would ad- vise him never to touch Rubens nor even many others. I will spare you the doors of the triptych, which, however, are superb, not only being of his best period, but in his best manner, brown and silvery, which is the last expression of his richness. There is a St. John there of a very rare quality, and an Herodias in dark gray with red sleeves, who is his eternal woman. The Miraculous Draught is also a fine picture, but not the finest, as they say at Mechlin, in the Notre Dame quarter. The cure" of St. Jean would share my opinion, and in good conscience he would be right. This picture has just been restored, and at present it is placed upon the ground, in a schoolroom, leaning against a white wall, under a glass roof which inundates it with light, without a frame, in the crudity, in the violence, in the cleanliness of its very first day. Examined by itself, with the eye close to it, and entirely to its disadvantage, it is a picture which I will not call gross, because the handiwork elevates the style a little ; but material, if the word expresses, as I understand it, in 44 THE OLD. MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. genious but narrow construction of a vulgar character. It is wanting in that something, I know not what, in which Rubens infallibly succeeds when he touches the common, a note, a grace, a tenderness, something like a kind smile which makes an excuse for heavy features. Christ, relegated to the right, in the wing, as an accessory in this fishing picture, is as insignificant in gesture as he is in physiognomy ; and his red mantle, which is not a fine red, is sharply relieved against a blue sky, which I suspect is very much altered. St. Peter, a little neglected, but of a fine winy value, would be, if the Gospel were thought of before this canvas painted for fishermen and entirely executed from fishermen, the sole evangelical person in the scene. At least he says exactly what an old man of his class and rusticity would say to Christ in similarly strange circumstances. He holds pressed against his ruddy and rugged breast his sailor's cap, a blue cap, and it is not Rubens who would be deceived in the truth of such a gesture. As to the two naked figures, one bending towards the spectator, the other turned towards the background, and both seen by the shoulders, they are celebrated among the best academy pieces that Rubens ever painted, from the free and sure manner with which the painter has brushed them in, doubtless in a few hours, at the first painting, with the wet paint clear, even abundant, not too fluid, not thick, neither too modelled nor too rough. It is Jordaens with- out reproach, without excessive redness, without glitter ; or rather it is, in its way of seeing the flesh, and not the meat, the best lesson that his great friend could give him. The fisherman with his RUBENS AT MECHLIN. 45 Scandinavian head, his flowing beard, his golden hair, his bright eyes in his flushed countenance, his great sea-boots and red gar- ment, is overwhelming. And, as usual in all Rubens's pictures where excessive red is employed as a quietus, it is this flaming personage who tempers the rest, acts upon the retina, and dis- poses it to see green in all the neighboring colors. Note also among the accessory figures a great boy, a cabin boy standing on the second boat, leaning on an oar, dressed no matter how, with gray trousers, a purplish waistcoat, too short, unbuttoned, and open over his naked stomach. These men are fat, red, sunburned, tanned and swollen by the fierce breezes, from their finger ends to their shoulders, from the brow to the nape of the neck. All the irritating salts of the sea have exasperated whatever the air touches, have brightened the blood, flushed the skin, swollen the veins, roughened the white flesh, and in a word stained them with vermilion. It is brutal, exact, taken on the spot : all has been witnessed on the quays of the Scheldt by a man who sees largely, sees truly, both color and form ; who respects the truth when it is expressive, nor fears to express crude things crudely, for he knows his trade like an angel and fears nothing. What is truly extraordinary in this picture, thanks to the cir- cumstances which permit me to see it so near, and examine the workmanship as closely as if Rubens executed it before me, is that it seems to reveal all his secrets, and that after all it astonishes just as much as if it revealed nothing. I had already said this of Ru- bens, before this new proof of it was given me. 46 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. The embarrassment is not to know how he did it, but how he could do so well by working thus. The means are simple, the method elementary. It is a fine panel, smooth, clean, and white, on which works a hand magnificently agile, adroit, sensitive, and composed. The impetuosity supposed to be his is a way of feel- ing, rather than a disorderly way of painting. The brush is as calm as the soul is hot and ready to rush forward. In such an organization there is such an exact relation and such a rapid con- nection between the vision, the sensitiveness, and the hand, such perfect obedience of the one to the others, that the habitual ex- plosions of the brain which directs make one believe in the sum- mersaults of the instrument. Nothing is more deceptive than this apparent fever, restrained by profound calculation, and served by a mechanism practised in every exercise. It is the same with the sen- sations of the eye, and consequently of the choice he makes of colors. His colors are also very simple, and only appear so complicated on account of the results achieved by the painter, and the part he makes them play. Nothing can be more limited than the number of primary tints, nor more foreseen than the manner in which they are opposed ; nothing also is more simple than the habit by virtue of which he shades them, and nothing more unexpected than the result which is produced. Not one of Rubens's tones is very rare in itself. If you take his red, it is easy to dictate the formula ; it is vermilion and ochre very little broken, in its state of first mixture. If you examine his blacks, they are taken out of a pot of ivory black, and serve, RUBENS AT MECHLIN. 47 with white, for all the imaginable combinations of his dull or tender grays. His blues are accidents ; his yellows, one of the colors which he feels and manages least well in point of tint, except the golds, which he excels in rendering in their warm deep richness, have, like his reds, a double part to play, first, to make the light fall somewhere beside upon the whites ; secondly, to exercise in the neighborhood the indirect action of a color which changes other colors, for instance, to turn into violet, and give a certain bloom to a dull and very insignificant gray, quite neutral when viewed upon the palette. All this one may say is not very extraordinary. Brown undertones, with two or three active colors, to make one believe in the wealth of a vast canvas ; broken grays obtained by dull mixtures; all the intermediary grays between deep black and pure white, consequently very little coloring matter and the greatest brilliancy of color, great luxury obtained with small expense, light without excessive brightness, an extreme sonorousness from a small number of instruments, a key-board in which nearly three fourths of the keys are neglected, but which he runs over, skipping many notes and touching it when necessary at the two ends ; such is, in the mixed language of music and painting, the habit of this great practitioner. He who sees one of his pictures knows them all, and he who has seen him paint one day has seen him paint at almost every moment of his life. There is ever the same method, the same coolness, the same calculation. A calm and intelligent premeditation presides over his always sudden effects. Whence comes his audacity, at what moment he is carried away and abandons himself, can never be known. Is 48 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. it when he executes some violent work, some extravagant gesture, a moving object, an eye that gleams, a mouth that shouts, tangled hair, a bristling beard, a hand that grasps, foam that lashes the beach, disorder in array, a breeze in light objects, or the uncer- tainty of muddy water dripping through the meshes of a net ? Is it when he imbues many yards of canvas with a glowing tint, when he makes his red ripple in waves, so that everything around this red is spattered with its reflections ? Is it, on the contrary, when he passes from one strong color to another, circulating through neutral tones as if this rebellious and sticky material were the most manage- able of the elements ? Is it when he gives a loud cry, or when he utters a sound so feeble that one can hardly catch it ? Did this painting, which puts the beholder into a fever, burn in this manner the hands whence it issued, fluid, easy, natural, healthy, and ever virgin, no matter at what moment you surprise it ? Where, in a word, is the effort in this art, which might be called forced, while it is the intimate expression of a mind which never was forced ? Did you ever close your eyes during the execution of a brilliant piece of music ? The sound gushes everywhere. It seems to leap from one instrument to the other ; and as it is very tumultuous, in spite of the perfect harmony of the whole, it might well be believed that everything was agitated, that the hands trembled, and that the same musical frenzy had seized the instruments and those who held them ; and because the performers move the audience so violently, it seems impossible that they should remain calm before their music rests ; so that one is quite surprised to see them peaceable, self- RUBENS AT MECHLIN. 49 contained, solely attentive to watching the movement of the ebony wand which leads them, sustains them, dictates to each what he should do, and which is itself only the agent of a mind fully awake and of great knowledge. Thus Rubens wields, during the execution of his works, the ebony baton which commands, conducts, and over- looks ; his is the imperturbable will, the master faculty, which also directs very attentive instruments, I mean the auxiliary faculties. Shall we return for a moment more to this picture ? It is under my hand, it is an occasion not often to be had, and which I shall never have again. I will seize it. The painting is done at once, completely, or with very little re- touching. This can be seen by the lightness of certain lays of color, in the St. Peter in particular, in the transparency of the great flat and sombre tints, such as the boats, the sea, and all that participates in the same brown, bituminous, or greenish element ; it is equally seen in the not less rapid, though heavier execution of the parts which require a thick paint and a more sustained labor. The bril- liancy of the tone, its freshness and its radiance, are due to this. The white ground of the panel and its smooth surface give to the color, frankly applied, that vibration proper to all tinting laid upon a clear, resisting, and polished surface. If it were thicker, the material would be muddy ; if it were more' rugose, it would absorb as many luminous rays as it would reflect, and the effort would have to be doubled to produce the same result of light ; were it thinner, more timid, or less generously smooth in its contours, it would have that enamelled character, which, however admirable in certain cases, would 4 50 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. suit neither the style of Rubens, nor his spirit, nor the romantic purpose of his fine works. Here, as elsewhere, his moderation is perfect. The two torsi, finished as thoroughly as a bit of nude of this extent can be within the conditions of a mural picture, have not undergone much retouching with the brush. It might well be that in his days so regularly divided by labor and repose, that each figure was the result of an afternoon of joyous work, after which the painter, content with himself with good reason, laid aside his palette, had his horse saddled, and thought no more about it. With still better reason, in all the secondary and supporting parts, the sacrificed portions, the large spaces where the air circulates, the accessories, boats, waves, nets, and fishes, the hand runs along and does not emphasize. A vast wash of the same brown, which is brownish above and green below, grows warm when there is a reflec- tion, is gilded in the hollows of the sea, and descends from the edge of the vessels to the frame. Through this abundant and liquid material the painter has given the appropriate life to each object, or, accord- ing to the language of the studio, " he has found the lifer A few gleams, a few reflections laid on with a fine brush, and you have the sea. It is the same with the nets and their meshes, their planks and corks ; the same with the fish struggling in the muddy water, so wet that they drip with the very colors of the sea ; the same with the feet of Christ and the boots of the glowing sailor. To call this the last word of the art of painting, when it is severe, or when it seeks, with the grand style in mind, eye and hand to express ideals or epics ; to maintain that this is the true method under all circum- KUBENS AT MECHLIN. 51 stances, would be like applying the picturesque, rapid language, full of imagery, of our modern writers to the ideas of Pascal. In any case it is Rubens's own language, his style, and consequently is appro- priate to his own ideas. The real astonishment, when one thinks about it, comes from the fact that the painter has meditated so little ; that, having thought of any subject, no matter what, he is not turned aside, but can make a picture of it ; that with so little study he is never trivial, and that with such simple means he can produce such an effect. If the sci- ence of his palette is extraordinary, the sensitiveness of his agents is none the less so ; and a merit of which one would hardly suspect him comes to the aid of all the others, moderation, and even I might say sobriety, in the purely exterior manner of handling the brush. There are many things that people forget in our time, that they appear to misunderstand, and that they vainly strive to abolish. I cannot tell where our modern school found its taste for thickness of material, and that love of heavy masses of paint, which constitutes in the eyes of some people the principal merit of certain works. I have seen no authoritative examples for it anywhere, except in the painters of the visible decadence and in Rembrandt, who appar- ently could not always do without it, but who knew how to do with- out it sometimes. Fortunately in Flanders it is an unknown method ; and as to Rubens, the accredited master of transport and fury, the most violent of his pictures are often the least loaded. I do not say that he systematically thins his lights, as they did up to the middle of the sixteenth century, or that, on the other hand, he 52 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. thickens all the strong tints. This method, exquisite in its first destination, has undergone all the changes since introduced by the necessities of ideas, and the more multiplied needs of modern paint- ing. However, if he is far from the purely archaic method, he is still farther from the practices in favor since GeYicault, to take a recent example from the illustrious dead. His brush glides and does not plunge. It never drags after it that sticky mortar that accumulates on the salient points of objects, and produces the effect of high re- lief, because the canvas itself thus becomes more salient. He does not load, he paints ; he does not build, he writes ; he caresses, lightly touches, or bears heavily. He passes from an immense impasto to the most delicate, the most fluid touch, always with that degree of con- sistency or lightness, that breadth or that minuteness, which suits the subject that he treats, so that the prodigality or the economy of his paint is a matter of local suitability, and the weight or the marvel- lous lightness of his brush is a means of expressing what demands or does not demand emphasis. To-day, when divers schools divide our French school, and to tell the truth, we have only certain more or less adventurous talents without fixed doctrines, the value of a picture well or badly exe- cuted is of very little consequence. A crowd of subtle questions induce forgetfulness of the most necessary elements of expression. In carefully examining certain contemporary pictures, whose merit, at least as attempts, is often more real than is believed, we find that the hand is no longer reckoned among the agents which serve the mind. According to recent methods, to execute is to fill a form RUBENS AT MECHLIN. 53 with a tone, whatever may be the tool that performs the labor. The mechanism of the operation seems unimportant, provided the operation succeeds ; and it is wrongly supposed that thought can be as well served by one instrument as another. It is precisely the opposite of this that all the skilful painters, that is to say, the sensi- tive ones, of these countries of Flanders and Holland, have affirmed in advance by their method, which is the most expressive of all. And it is against the same error that Rubens protests, with an authority which will perhaps have a little better chance of being heeded. Take from the pictures of Rubens from this one which I am studying the spirit, the variety, the propriety of each touch, and you take from it a word which tells, a necessary accent, a trait of physiognomy. You take away from it perhaps the sole element which spiritualizes so much materiality, and transfigures its fre- quent hideousness, because you suppress all sensitiveness ; and, tracing effects to their primary cause, you kill the life and make a picture without a soul. I might almost say that one touch the less would cause the disappearance of some artistic feature. The rigor of this principle is such, that in a certain order of pro- ductions there is no thoroughly felt work which is not naturally well painted, and that any work where the hand shows itself with success or brilliancy is from that very fact a work which comes from the brain and manifests that fact. Rubens had on this sub- ject opinions which I recommend to you, if you should ever be tempted to scorn a brush stroke made in an appropriate manner. There is not in this great picture, apparently so brutal and so free 54 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. in handling, a single detail, small or great, which is not inspired by sentiment, and instantaneously rendered by a happy touch. If the hand did not move so rapidly, it would be behind the thought ; if the improvisation were less sudden, the life communicated would be less ; if the work were more hesitating or less comprehensible, the picture would become impersonal in proportion to its acquired heavi- ness and its loss of spirit. Consider, moreover, that this unequalled dexterity, this careless skill in playing with ungrateful materials and rebellious instruments, this noble movement of a well-handled tool, this elegant fashion of moving it over free surfaces, the impulse which escapes from it, the sparks that seem to fly from it, all this magic of the great performers, which in others becomes mannerism, or affectation, or purely a spirit of common alloy, in him (I repeat it to satiety) is only the exquisite sensibility of an eye admirably healthy, a hand marvellously submissive, and finally and especially, of a soul truly open to all things, happy, confident, and great. I defy you to find in the great repertory of his works one perfect work ; but I also defy you not to feel even in the manias, the faults, I was going to say the trivialities, of this noble mind, the marks of incon- testable grandeur ; and this exterior mark, the last seal placed upon his thought, is the imprint of the hand itself. What I say to you in many phrases far too long, and too often in the special jargon which it is hard to avoid, would doubtless have found a more suitable place elsewhere. Do not imagine that the picture I dwell upon is a finished specimen of the finest merits of the painter. In no degree is it that. Rubens has frequently con- RUBENS AT MECHLIN. 55 ceived better, seen better, and painted far better ; but the execution of Rubens, so unequal in results, scarcely varies in principle, and the observations made with regard to a picture of medium merit, are equally applicable, and with much better reason, to whatever he has produced that is excellent V. THE ELEVATION OF THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIXION. MANY people say Antwerp, but many too say the Home of Ru- bens ; and this way of speaking expresses still more exactly all the things which make the magic of the place, a great city, a great personal destiny, a famous school, and pictures ultra-celebrated. All this is imposing, and the imagination becomes more than usually active, when in the midst of the Place Verte is seen the statue of Rubens, and beyond, the old Basilica, where are preserved the trip- tychs which, humanly speaking, have consecrated it. The statue is not a masterpiece, but it is he in his own home. Under the figure of a man who was merely a painter, with the attributes only of a painter, in very truth is personified the sole Flemish royalty which has been neither contested nor menaced, and which certainly never will be so. At the end of the square Notre Dame is seen, in profile, drawn at full length from one of its lateral fronts, the darkest, because it is the weather side. Its surrounding of light low houses increases its size and makes it darker. With its wrought architecture, its rusty color, its blue and shining roof, its colossal tower, where shines THE ELEVATION OF THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIXION. $7 in the stone, smoky with the Scheldt fogs and the winters, the golden disk and golden hands of the clock, it gains immeasurable propor- tions. When, as to-day, the sky is lowering, the clouds add to the grandeur of its lines all the freaks of their caprice. Imagine then the invention of a Gothic Piranesi, exaggerated by the fancy of the North, wildly lighted by a stormy day, and traced in irregular spots upon the great background of a tempest-swept sky, all black or all white. No preliminary scenic effect could be combined more original and striking. In spite of coming from Mechlin and Brussels, in spite of having seen the Magi and the Calvary, and of having formed of Rubens an exact and measured idea, in spite of having familiarly examined him until you feel quite at your ease, you will not enter Notre Dame as you would a museum. It is the hour of three, the clock in the air has just struck ; hardly a sacristan makes a sound in the quiet naves, clean and bright as Peter Neefs has reproduced them, with an inimitable sentiment of their solitude and their grandeur. It rains, and the light is changing ; gleams and shadows succeed each other upon the two triptychs, attached unostentatiously, in their narrow frames of brown wood, to the cold smooth walls of the transepts ; yet these superb paintings only appear more distinct amid the glaring lights and the obscurities which struggle with them. German copyists have established their easels before the Descent from the Cross, but there is no one before the Elevation of the Cross. This simple fact expresses sufficiently the world's opinion of these two works. 58 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. They are much admired, almost without reserve, and the fact is rare for Rubens ; but admiration is divided. Great renown has pre- ferred the Descent from the Cross ; the Elevation of the Cross has the gift of touching more deeply the passionate or more thoroughly persuaded friends of Rubens. Nothing indeed can be more unlike than these two works, conceived at an interval of two years, inspired by the same effort of mind, and which yet bear so clearly the marks of his two tendencies. The Descent from the Cross is of 1612, the Elevation of the Cross of 1602. I insist upon the dates, for they are important. Rubens had just returned to Antwerp, and it was, so to speak, upon landing that he painted them. His education was com- pleted. At that time he had made an excessive amount of studies, rather too oppressive for him, of which he meant to make use openly, once for all, but of which he was to get rid almost immediately. Each one of the Italian masters whom he had consulted of course advised him differently. The violent masters advised him to dare great things.; the severe masters recommended him greatly to restrain him- self. Nature, temper, native faculties, former lessons, recent lessons, everything was prepared to divide him ; the task itself required him to separate his fine gifts into two parts. He felt the occasion, seized it, treated each subject according to its own spirit, and gave of him- self two contrary and yet just ideas, one the most magnificent example of his wisdom, the other the most astounding revelation ol his dash and ardor. Add to the personal inspiration of the painter a very marked Italian influence, and you will still better understand the extraordinary value that posterity attaches to these pages, which THE ELEVATION OF THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIXION. 59 may be considered his masterworks, and which were the first public act of his life as the head of a school. I will tell you how this influence is manifested and by what character it is recognized. It is enough at first to remark that it ex- ists, that the physiognomy of Rubens's talent loses none of its features at the very moment that we are examining it. It is not that he is positively restrained by the canonical formulas in which others would have been imprisoned. Heaven knows with what ease he moves in them, with what liberty he uses them, with what tact he disguises or avows them, according as it pleases him to permit us to see the learned man or the innovator. However, whatever he does, we feel the Romanist who has just passed years on classic ground, who comes home but has not yet changed his atmosphere. Something remains, which recalls his journey like a strange odor in his garments. Certainly it is to this good Italian odor that the Descent from the Cross owes the exceeding favor it enjoys. Those, in fact, who would have Rubens a little as he is, but very much also as they dream he should be, find here a youthful seriousness, a flower of pure and studious maturity which soon disappears and is unique. The composition does not need describing. Not one can be cited that is more popular as a work of art and as a page of religious character. There is no one who does not bear in mind the ar- rangement and effect of the picture, its great central light against a dark background, its grand masses of color, its distinct and massive divisions. It is known that Rubens got the first idea of it in Italy, 60 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. and that he makes no effort to conceal that he borrowed it. The scene is powerful and grave. It has an effect from a distance, is strongly marked upon the wall; it is serious, and produces serious- ness. When the murders are remembered with which the work of Rubens is bloody, the massacres, the torturing executioners, using pincers and exciting roars of anguish, it is evident that this is a noble suffering. Everything is as restrained, concise, and laconic as a page of Scripture. Here are neither gesticulations, nor cries, nor horrors, nor excessive tears ; scarcely one real sob bursts from the Virgin ; and thus the intense mournfulness of the drama is expressed by a gesture of the inconsolable mother, by a face bathed in tears, and reddened eyes. The Christ is one of the most elegant figures that Rubens ever imagined in order to paint a God. It has an inexpressible slender grace, pliant and almost meagre, which gives it all the delicacy of nature, and all the distinction of a fine academic study. Its mod- eration is subtle, its taste perfect, the drawing very nearly equals the sentiment. You cannot have forgotten the effect of this long body, slightly out of joint, with the little head, so thin and delicate, fallen on one side, so livid and so perfectly limpid in its pallor, neither contracted nor distorted ; whence all pain has passed away, and which falls with such blessedness for a moment into the strange beauty of the death of the righteous. Remember how heavy and how precious it is to bear, in what an exhausted attitude it glides along the wind- ing-sheet, with what affectionate anguish it is received by the ex- THE ELEVATION OF THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIXION. 6 1 tended arms and hands of women. Can anything be more touching ? One of its feet, livid and scarred with the nails, touches at the foot of the cross the naked shoulder of the Magdalen. It does not bear upon, it lightly brushes it. The contact cannot be perceived ; it is divined rather than seen. It would have been profane to empha- size it ; it would have been cruel not to let it be believed. All the furtive sensibility of Rubens is in this imperceptible contact, which says so much respecting everything, and touches all with ten- derness. The Magdalen is admirable ; it is incontestably the best piece of workmanship in the picture, the most delicate, the most personal, one of the best also that Rubens ever executed in his career so fertile in the invention of feminine beauty. This delicious figure has its legend ; how could it fail to have one, its very perfection hav- ing become legendary? It is probable that this fair girl with the dark eyes, firm look, and clean-cut profile is a portrait, and that por- trait one of Isabel Brandt, whom he had married two years before, and who also served him, perhaps during a pregnancy, as a model for the Virgin of the Visitation in the wing of the triptych. However, in seeing this ampleness of person, the blond hair, and rounded pro- portions, one thinks of what will be one day the splendid and indi- vidual charm of the beautiful Helen Fourment whom he married twenty years after. From the first to the last, a tenacious type seemed to be lodged in the heart of Rubens, a fixed ideal haunted his amorous and constant imagination. He pleases himself with it, completes it, finishes it ; he pursues it after a fashion in his two 62 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. marriages, as he does not cease to pursue it in his works. There is always something of Isabel and Helen in the women that Rubens painted from each of them. In the first he seems to put some pre- conceived feature of the second ; in the second he introduces a sort of ineffaceable memory of the first. At the date we speak of, he possessed one and was inspired by her ; the other is not yet born, and still he divines her. Already the future mingles with the present, the real with the ideal divination ; when the image appears, it has its double form. Not only is it exquisite, but not a feature is wanting to it. Does it not seem as if, in perpetuating it thus from the first day, Rubens meant that it should be forgotten neither by himself nor by any one? Moreover, it is the sole mundane grace with which he has em- bellished this austere picture, slightly monastic, absolutely evangelical, if by that is understood gravity of sentiment and manner, and the rigor be considered with which such a mind must have restrained itself. On this occasion, as you will guess, a large part of his reserve came from his Italian education, as well as the respect he accorded to his subject. The canvas is dark in spite of its brilliancy and the extraordinary whiteness of the winding-sheet. In spite of its relief, the painting is fiat. It is a picture with blackish undertones, on which are placed large firm lights, destitute of shades. The coloring is not very rich ; it is full, sustained, calculated with precision to have an effect from a distance. He constructs the picture, frames it, expresses the weak points and the strong, and does not seek to embellish, it at all. It THE ELEVATION OF THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIXION. 63 is composed of a green almost black, of an absolute black, of a rather dull red, and a white. These four tones are set side by side as frankly as four notes of such violence can be. The contact is abrupt, but they do not suffer from it. In the high light the corpse of Christ is drawn with a delicate and supple line, and modelled by its own reliefs, with no effort in the shading, thanks to imperceptible grada- tions of values. There is nothing shining, not a single division in the lights, hardly a detail in the dark parts. All this is of a singular breadth and rigidity. The edges are narrow, the half-tints simple, except in the Christ, where the undertints of ultramarine have ob- truded, and now make some useless spots. The material is smooth, compact, flowing easily and prudently. At the distance from which we examine it, the handiwork disappears, but it is easy to divine that it is excellent, and directed with perfect security by a mind inured to good habits, who conforms to them, applies himself, and is determined to do well. Rubens recollects himself, observes him- self, restrains himself, and, taking possession of all his forces, sub- ordinates them, and only half makes use of them. In spite of this constraint, it is a work singularly original, attrac- tive, and powerful. From it Vandyck will receive his best religious inspiration. Philippe de Champagne will imitate it, I fear, only in its weak portions, and will compose from it his French style. Vce- nius must certainly have applauded. What did Van Noort think of it? As to Jordaens, he waited, before following him in these new ways, for his old companion of the studio to become more decidedly Rubens. 64 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. One of the wings, that of the Visitation, is delightful in every re- spect. Nothing can be more severe and charming, richer and more sober, more picturesque and nobly familiar. Never did Flanders clothe itself in the Italian style with so much good feeling, grace, and naturalness. Titian furnished the gamut and partly dictated its tones, colored the architecture in chestnut brown, advised the fine gray cloud which gleams above the cornices, perhaps also the green- ish azure which is so effective between the columns ; but it was Ru- bens who discovered the pregnant Virgin with her curved figure, her costume ingeniously combined of red, dark blue, and fawn-color, and her great Flemish hat. It is he who designed, painted, colored, ca- ressed with eye and brush this pretty hand, so luminous and tender, which rests like a rosy flower upon the black iron balustrade ; just as he imagined the serving-woman, and intersected her with the frame, showing of this blond girl with blue eyes only her open bodice, her round head with hair turned back, and her lifted arms sus- taining a basket of rushes. In short, is Rubens already himself? Yes. Is he entirely himself, and nothing but himself? I think not. Has he ever done better ? Not according to foreign methods, but he certainly has, according to his own. Between the central panel of the Descent from the Cross and the Elevation of the Cross, which decorates the northern transept, every- thing has changed, the point of view, tendency, bearing, even a few of the methods, and the influences which the two works feel so differently. A glance suffices to convince you of this. And if one considers the period when these significant pages appeared, it can be THE ELEVATION OF THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIXION, 65 understood that if the one was more satisfying and more convincing, the other must have been more astonishing, and consequently have caused the perception of something much more novel. Less perfect, because it is more stirring, and because it contains no figure so per- fectly lovely to see as the Magdalen, the Elevation of the Cross conveys much more of the originality of Rubens, more of his im- petuosity, his audacity, his happy hits, in a word, more of the fermentation of that mind full of fervor for novelties and projects. It opens a wider career. It is possible that it is finished in a less masterly manner, but it announces a master of a very different originality, who is both daring and powerful. The drawing is stiffer, less delicate, the forms more violent, the modelling less simple and rougher; but the coloring already shows profound warmth, and that resonance which will be Rubens's great resource when he neglects vivacity of tone for the sake of radiance. Imagine the color more flaming, the outlines less hard, the setting less rough ; remove this grain of Italian stiffness, which is only a kind of knowledge of the world, and a gravity of demeanor, contracted during the journey ; look only at what is Rubens's own, the youth, the fire, the already mature convictions, and little is wanting to have before your eyes Rubens in his best days ; in fine, this is the first and last word of his fiery and rapid manner. The slightest latitude would make of this picture, relatively severe, one of the most turbulent that he ever painted. Such as it is, with its sombre amber tints, its strong shadows, the low muttering of its stormy harmonies, it is still one of those in which his ardor bursts forth even more evidently because 5 66 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND.. it is sustained by the most manly effort maintained to the very end by the determination not to fail. It is a picture of impulse, conceived around a very audacious arabesque, which, in its complication of forms displayed and con- cealed, of bent bodies, of extended arms, of repeated curves, of rigid lines, preserves throughout the work the instantaneous character of a sketch struck off with sentiment in a few seconds. The first conception, the arrangement, effect, gestures, faces, the caprice of color, the handiwork, all seem to be the sudden result of an irre- sistible, lucid, and prompt inspiration. Nrver will Rubens use greater emphasis to express a page apparently so sudden. To-day, as in 1610, there may be a difference of opinion about this work, which is absolutely personal in spirit, if not in manner. The question which must have been agitated during the life of the painter is still pending ; it consists in deciding which would have been best represented in his country and in history, Rubens be- fore he was himself, or Rubens as he always was. The Elevation of the Cross and the Descent from the Cross are the two moments of that drama of Calvary whose prologue we have seen in the triumphal picture at Brussels. At the dis- tance apart that the two pictures are placed, the principal spots of color can be perceived, their dominant tone seized, I might say that their sound might be heard. This is sufficient for briefly understanding their picturesque expression and divining their meaning. In the other we were present at the ending, and I have told THE ELEVATION OF THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIXION. 67 you with what solemn sobriety it is exhibited. All is over. It is night, or at least the horizon is of leaden black. All are silent, in tears ; receiving the august remains, they display most tender care. Hardly are interchanged those words which the lips speak after the death of those who were dear. The mother and the friends are there, and above all, the most loving and the weakest of women, she in whose fragility and grace and repentance are in- carnated all the sins of the earth, pardoned, expiated, and now atoned for. Living flesh is opposed to funereal pallor. There is a charm even in the dead body. The Christ seems like a fair flower cut down. He hears no longer those who blasphemed him. He has ceased to hear those who weep for him. He belongs no longer to man, nor to time, nor to anger, nor pity. He is beyond all, even death. Here there is nothing of that kind. Compassion, tenderness, mother and friends, are far off. In the left wing the painter has assembled all the friendliness of grief in a violent group, in lament- ing or despairing attitudes. In the right wing there are only two mounted guards, and on that side there is no mercy. In the centre there are cries, blasphemies, insults, and the trampling of feet. With brute efforts, butcher like executioners plant the cross, and labor to raise it erect in the canvas. Arms clench, ropes stretch, the cross wavers, and is only half-way up. Death is cer- tain. A Man, nailed by his four members, suffers, agonizes, and forgives with his whole being. Nothing that belongs to him is free, a pitiless fatality has seized his body, the soul alone escapes 68 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND, from it. This is thoroughly felt in this upward glance which turns from earth, and, seeking its certainty elsewhere, goes straight to heaven. All that human ferocity can express of its thirst for slaughter, and its promptness in doing its work, the painter ex- presses like a man who understands the effect of anger, and knows the workings of savage passions. And all the gentleness of human nature, the bliss in dying of a martyr who gives himself to the sacrifice, look attentively and see how he translates it ! The Christ is in light ; he gathers into a narrow sheaf almost all the lights disseminated in the picture. Plastically he is less excellent than the one in the Descent from the Cross. A Roman painter would certainly have corrected the style of the figure. A Gothic artist would have desired more salient bones, fibres more strained, ligaments more precise, the whole structure more meagre, or perhaps only more delicate. Rubens had, you know, a prefer- ence for the full health of form, which belonged to his manner of feeling, and still more to his manner of painting, and without which it would have been necessary for him to change the greater part of his formulas. With that exception the picture is beyond price. No man but Rubens could have imagined it as it is, in the place it occupies, in the highly picturesque acceptation he has given it. And as to that fine head, inspired and suffering, manly and tender, with the hair clinging to the temples, its sweat, its glow, its agony, its eyes reflecting celestial beams, and its ecstasy, who is the sincere master, even in the palmy days of Italy, who would not have been struck by what force of expression can do THE ELEVATION OF THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIXION. 69 when it reaches this degree, and who would not in it have recog- nized a dramatic ideal of art absolutely novel ? Pure sentiment came, on one day of fever and clear insight, to lead Rubens as far as he could go. Afterwards he will become more free, he will develop still more. There will be, thanks to his flowing and absolutely unfettered manner, more consecutiveness and notably more method in all parts of his work, in the exterior and interior drawing, the color, and the workmanship. He will mark less imperiously the outlines which should disappear ; he will arrest less suddenly the shadows which ought to melt away ; he will ac- quire a suppleness which does not exist here ; he will gain more agile modes of speech, a language of a more pathetic and personal turn. But will he find anything clearer and more energetic than the inspired diagonal which cuts this composition in two ; first makes it hesitate in its perpendicular, then straightens it, and di- rects it to the top, with the active and resolute flight of a lofty idea ? Will he find anything better than these sombre rocks, this faded sky, this great white figure in full brilliancy against the shadows, motionless and yet moving, that a mechanical impulse pushes diagonally across the canvas, with its pierced hands, its oblique arms, and that grand gesture of clemency which makes them balance widely opened over the blind, and black, and wicked world ? If one could doubt the power of a successful line, of the dra- matic value of an arabesque, and an effect, finally, if examples were wanting to prove the moral beauty of a picturesque concep- tion, one would be convinced of it after this. 70 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. It was by this original and masculine picture, that this young man, having been absent ever since the first year of the century, signalized his return from Italy. What he had acquired in his journeys, the nature and the choice of his studies, above all, the human fashion which he intended to use, were known ; and no one doubted his destiny, neither those whom this picture astonished like a revelation, nor those whom it shocked like a scandal ; those whose doctrines it overturned and who attacked it, nor those whom it converted and carried away. The name of Rubens was sacred at that day. Even to-day very little is wanting for that first work to appear as accomplished as it seemed, and was, decisive. There is here, too, an inexpressible individuality, like a great breath, that is rarely found elsewhere in Rubens. An enthusiast would write sublime, and he would not be wrong if he could determine precisely the signification proper to attach to that term. At Brus- sels and Mechlin have I not said everything concerning the so diverse gifts of this composer of vast compass, whose fire is a sort of exalted good sense? I have spoken of his ideal, so different from that of others, of the dazzling nature of his palette, of the radiance of his ideas full of illumination, of his persuasive force, of his oratorical clearness, of his leaning towards apotheoses which elevate him, of that heated brain which expands at the risk of in- flating him. All this leads us to a still more complete definition, to a word that I am going to say, which says everything, Rubens is a* lyric, and the most lyrical of all painters. His imaginative promptness, the intensity of his style, his sonorous and progressive THE ELEVATION OF THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIXION. 71 rhythm, the range of this rhythm, its passage, which might be called vertical, call all this lyric art, and you will not be far from the truth. There is in literature a form, the most heroic of all, that it has been agreed to call the ode. It is, as you know, the most agile and the most sparkling of the varied forms of metrical language. There never can be too great breadth, nor too much enthusiasm in the ascending movement of the strophes, nor too great light at their summit. Now I might cite for you a picture by Rubens, conceived, conducted, scanned, illuminated like the proudest verses written in Pindaric form. The Elevation of the Cross would furnish me the best example, an example so much the more striking in that every- thing here is in harmony, and the subject was worthy of being thus expressed. And I shall not merit the reproach of subtlety if I tell you that this page of pure expansion is written from one end to the other in the form rhetorically called sublime, from the leap- ing lines that cross it, the idea which becomes more luminous as it reaches its culmination, to the inimitable head of Christ which is the dominant and expressive note of the poem, the sparkling note, in the idea it contains, that is, the final strophe. VI. RUBENS AT THE ANTWERP MUSEUM. HARDLY does one set foot in the first hall of the Antwerp Mu- seum before Rubens is encountered. On the right is an Adora- tion of the Magi, a vast canvas in his rapid and learned manner, painted in thirteen days it is said, about 1624, that is, in his palmiest years of middle life ; on the left is an enormous picture, also celebrated, a Passion, called the Lance Thrust. Casting a glance along the opposite gallery to the right and left, is seen from far this unique touch, powerful and suave, unctuous and warm, Rubens and Rubens again. We begin, catalogue in hand. Do we always admire ? Not always. Do we remain cold ? Almost never. I copy my notes : " The Magi, fourth version since the one at Paris, this time with notable changes. The picture is less scrupu- lously studied than that of Brussels, less finished than that at Mech- lin, but of a greater boldness, of a breadth, a fulness, a certainty, and a self-poise that the painter has rarely exceeded in his calm works. It is truly a tour de force, especially if the rapidity of this improvised work be considered Not one gap, nor one violence ; RUBENS AT THE ANTWERP MUSEUM. 73 a vast luminous half-tint with lights not too brilliant envelops all the figures, which lean upon each other, all in visible colors, and multiply values of the rarest, the subtlest, the least studied, and at the same time the most distinct character. "Beside very ugly types cluster finished types. The African king, with his square face, his thick lips, his reddish skin, his great eyes strangely illumined, and his huge body wrapped in a pelisse with sleeves of peacock blue, is a figure entirely unprecedented, before which certainly Tintoretto, Titian, and Veronese would have clapped their hands in applause. On the left two colossal cavaliers pose with solemnity, in a very strange Anglo-Flemish style, the rarest bit of color in the picture with its dull harmony of black, greenish blue, brown, and white. Add to these the profile of the Nubian camel-drivers, the troops, the men in helmets, the negroes ; all in the largest, the most transparent, the most natural reflected lights. Spiders' webs float among the beams, and at the very bottom, the ox's head rubbed on with a few strokes of the brush in bitumen has no more importance, and is executed no otherwise than would be a hasty signature. The child is delicious, and can be instanced as one of the most beautiful of the purely picturesque compositions of Rubens, the highest expression of his knowledge of color and of his dexterity of handling, when his vision was clear and instanta- neous, his hand rapid and careful, and he was in no difficult humor ; it is the triumph of spirit and knowledge, and, in a word, of self- confidence." The Lance Thrust is a disconnected picture with great blank 74 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. spaces, sharpnesses, vast and rather arbitrary masses of color, fine in themselves, but of doubtful relation. Two great reds, too un- broken and badly supported, are astonishing in it because they are out of tone. The Virgin is very beautiful, although her gesture is conventional ; the Christ is insignificant ; the St. John very ugly, or very much altered, or else repainted. As often happens in Rubens, and other painters of the picturesque and ardent, the best parts are those where the imagination of the artist has been accidentally im- pressed, such as the expressive head of the Virgin, the two thieves writhing upon their crosses, and perhaps particularly the helmeted soldier in black armor, who is descending the ladder which leans against the gibbet of the impenitent thief, and turns around, raising his head. The harmony of the bay and gray horses relieved against the sky is magnificent. As a whole, although there are parts of high merit, characteristic of the first order, and at each instant the mark of a master, the Lance Thrust seems to me to be an incoherent work, conceived in fragments, as it were, of which portions taken sepa- rately would give an idea of the painter's most beautiful pages. The Trinity, with its famous foreshortened Christ, is a picture of Rubens's early youth, anterior to his Italian journey. It is a fair beginning, cold, thin, smooth, and colorless, which already contains the germ of his style as to the human figure, its type as to coun- tenances, and his suppleness of hand. All the other merits are to come, so that, though the engraved picture already greatly resembles Rubens, the painting gives no idea of what Rubens will be ten years later. RUBENS AT THE ANTWERP MUSEUM. 75 His Christ in the Manger very celebrated, too celebrated is not much stronger nor richer, and does not appear perceptibly more mature, although it belongs to much later years. It is equally smooth, cold, and thin. The abuse of his facility is here felt, the use of a cursive method not at all rare, of which the formula might be thus dictated : a vast grayish undertone, flesh tones clear and lustrous, much ultramarine in the half-tint, an excess of vermilion in the reflections, a painting lightly made at once upon a drawing of slight consistency. The whole is liquid, flowing, slippery, and careless. When in this cursive style Rubens is not very fine, he is no longer fine at all. As to the Incredulity of St. Thomas (No. 307), I find in my notes this short and disrespectful observation, " This a Rubens ? What a mistake ! " The Education of the Virgin is the most charming decorative fancy ever seen ; it is a little panel for an oratory or a room, painted for the eyes more than the mind, but in its sweetness, of an incom- parable grace, tenderness, and richness. A fine red, a fine black, and on an azure field, shaded with changing tones of mother-of-pearl and silver, like two flowers, are two rosy angels. Take away the figure of St. Anne and that of St. Joachim, preserve only the Virgin with the two winged figures, which might as well be descending from Olympus as Paradise, and you have one of the most delicious portraits of a woman that Rubens ever conceived and recorded in an allegorical portrait to make an altarpiece. The Virgin of the Parrot savors of Italy and recalls Venice, 76 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. both by the scale, the power, the choice, and the intrinsic nature of its colors. The quality of the background, the very arabesque of the picture, the form of the canvas, the square shape, reminds us of a Palma lacking somewhat in severity. It is a fine, almost impersonal picture. I do not know why I think that Vandyck must have been tempted to draw inspiration from it. I pass by the St. Catherine, and a great Christ on the Cross, a repetition in little of the Descent from the Cross, at Notre Dame. I will neglect even better things than these, to reach, with an emotion that I will not conceal, a picture which has, I believe, only a semi-celebrity, but is none the less a marvellous masterpiece, and possibly the one of all the works of Rubens which does most honor to his genius. I speak of the Communion of St. Francis of Assisi. The scene represents a dying man, a priest offering him the Host, and monks who surround him, aiding, sustaining, and mourning over him. The saint is naked, the priest in a golden chasuble, faintly tinted with carmine, the two acolytes of the priest in white stoles, the monks in robes of cloth, dark brown or gray. Surrounding them is a strait and sombre architecture, a reddish dais, a bit of blue sky ; and in that azure gap, just above the saint, three rosy angels, flying like heavenly birds, form a soft and radiant crown. The aspect is composed of the most simple elements, the gravest colors, a most severe harmony. To sum up the picture in a rapid glance, you perceive but a vast bituminous canvas of austere style, where everything is in low tone, and where three accidents alone are perfectly evident from afar : the saint in his livid meagreness ; the Host RUBENS AT THE ANTWERP MUSEUM. 77 towards which he leans ; and above, at the summit of that triangle so tenderly expressive, a vista of rose and silver into a happy eternity, a smile of the half-opened heaven of which we assuredly have need. Here is no pomp, no ornament, no turbulence, nor violent ges- tures, nor grace, nor fine clothing, not one lovely or useless incident, nothing which does not appertain to a cloistral life at its most solemn moment. A dying man, worn with age and a life of sanc- tity, has left his bed of ashes to be borne to the altar ; he longs to die there while he receives the sacred elements, but fears to fail before the Host has touched his lips. He makes an effort to kneel, but cannot. All his movements are over, the chill of the last mo- ments has seized his limbs, his arms make that inward gesture which is the certain sign of approaching death ; he is distorted, out of his axis, and would break at all his joints were he not supported by the armpits. The only thing living about him is his small and humid eye, clear, blue, fevered, glassy, with red lids, dilated by the ecstasy of the last vision, and upon his lips, livid with his agony, the wonderful smile of the dying, and the yet more wonderful smile of the righteous believer, who, filled with hope, awaits his end, hastens to meet his salvation, and looks upon the Host as upon his present Lord. Around the dying man there is weeping, and those who weep are grave men, robust, tried, and resigned. Never was grief more sincere or more sympathetic than this virile tenderness of men of warm blood and great faith. Some restrain themselves, others give way to grief. Some are young, stout, ruddy, and healthy, who strike 78 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND their breasts with their clenched fists, and whose grief would be noisy if it could be heard. There is one grizzled and bald monk, with a Spanish head, hollow cheeks, thin beard, and pointed mus- tache, who is sobbing gently within himself, with that tension of feature of a man who restrains himself until his teeth chatter. All these magnificent heads are portraits. The type is admirable in its truthfulness ; the design simple, learned, and powerful ; the color- ing incomparably rich in its shaded, delicate, and beautiful sobriety. Here are clustered heads, joined hands clasped fervently and con- vulsively, bared foreheads, intense glances, some reddened by emo- tion, and others, on the contrary, pale and cold as old ivory ; the two acolytes, one of whom holds the censer, and wipes his eyes with the back of his sleeve ; all this group of men, differently moved, sobbing, or masters of themselves, forms a circle around the unique head of the saint, and the little white crescent held like a lunar disk in the pale hand of the priest. It is all inexpressibly fine. Such is the moral value of this exceptional page of Rubens at Antwerp, and who knows ? perhaps of all the work of Rubens, that I should almost fear to profane it in speaking of its exterior merits, which are not less eminent. I will only say that this great man has never been more master of his thought, his sentiment, and his hand ; his conception has never been more serene or of wider range ; his notion of the human soul has never seemed more pro- found ; he has never been more noble or more healthful, richer in color without extravagance, more scrupulous in the drawing of the parts, or more irreproachable, that is to say, more surprising in his RUBENS AT THE ANTWERP MUSEUM. 79 execution. This marvel is dated 1619. What noble years ! The time in which he painted it is not given, perhaps a few days only. What days ! When this unequalled work, in which Rubens is transfigured, has been long examined, it is impossible to look at anything or anybody, neither others, nor Rubens himself, we must for to-day leave the museum. VII. RUBENS AS A PORTRAIT PAINTER. Is Rubens a great portrait painter, or merely a good one ? Had this great painter of physical and moral life, so skilful in rendering the movement of the body by a gesture, and that of souls by the play of feature ; this observer, so prompt, so exact ; this mind, so clear that the ideal of human form never for a single instant distracted him from his study of the exterior of things ; this painter of the pictur- esque, of accidents, of individualities, of personal traits ; finally, this master, the most universal of all, had he really all the aptitudes we suppose, and particularly the special faculty of representing the human being in its intimate resemblance ? Are the portraits of Rubens likenesses ? I do not think it has ever been said whether they were or not. People have confined themselves to recognizing the universality of his gifts, and because, more than any other, he has employed the portrait as a natural ele- ment of his pictures, they take for granted that a man who excelled in painting the human being under all circumstances, acting and think- ing, ought from the strongest reasons to paint him well in a portrait. The question is of some moment, for it touches one of the most RUBENS AS A PORTRAIT PAINTER. 8 1 singular phenomena of this multiplex nature, and consequently offers an opportunity for studying nearer the real organism of his genius. If one adds to all the portraits he has painted solely to satisfy the desire of his contemporaries kings, princes, great lords, doctors, abbe's, and priors the incalculable number of living beings whose features he has reproduced in his pictures, it might well be said that Rubens passed his life in painting portraits. Without dispute his best works are those where he yields the greatest part to real life ; for instance, his admirable picture of St. George, which is nothing but a family ex voto t the most curious document a painter ever left con- cerning his domestic affections. I do not speak of his own portrait, of which he was lavish, nor those of his two wives, of which he made, as is known, such continual and indiscreet use. It was Rubens's habit to use nature for every purpose, to take individuals from real life and introduce them into fiction, because it was one of his needs, a weakness, as well as a power of his mind. Nature was his great and inexhaustible repertory. What were the truths he sought to tell ? Subjects ? No. His subjects he bor- rowed from history, from legend, from the gospel, from fables, and always more or less from his fancy. Attitudes, gestures, expressions of countenance ? Not at all. The expressions and gestures issued naturally from himself, and were derived by the logic of a well- conceived subject, from the necessities of the action, almost always dramatic, which he had to render. What he asked from nature was what his imagination furnished him but imperfectly, when it was necessary to wholly constitute a living person from head to foot, 6 82 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. living as he desired him to live, I mean, in the most personal features, the most praise characteristics both as an individual and a type. His types^e 7 accepted rather than chose. He took them as they existed around him in the society of his time, from all ranks, from all classes, if necessary from all races, princes, soldiers, church- men, monks, tradesmen, blacksmiths, boatmen, especially hard- working men. He had in his own town, on the quays of the Scheldt, enough to furnish all the necessities of his great evangelical pages. He had a lively feeling for the relation of these people, continually offered by life itself, to the conventionalities of his subject. When the adap- tation is not very rigorous, which often happens, and good sense and good taste also are a little shocked, it is then that his love of individ- ualities gets the better of the conventionalities of taste and good sense. He never denied himself an eccentricity, which in his hands became an evidence of mind, sometimes a happy audacity. It was by his very inconsistencies that he triumphed over subjects most uncongenial to his nature. He put into them the sincerity, the good- humor, the extraordinary unrestraint of his free bursts ; the work was nearly always saved by an admirable bit of almost textual im- itation. In this respect he invented but little, he the great inventor. He looked, informed himself, copied or translated from memory with a security of memory which was equal to direct reproduction. The spectacle of the life of courts, of the life of churches, of monasteries, streets, or of the river, imprinted itself upon this sensitive brain with RUBENS AS A PORTRAIT PAINTER. 83 its most recognizable features, its sharpest accent, its most salient col- ors, so that beyond this reflected image of things he imagined hardly anything but the frame and the dramatic grouping. His works are (so to speak) a theatre, whose arrangements he regulates, whose decorations he prepares, while he creates the roles and furnishes life to the actors. Original as he is, affirmative, resolute, and powerful, when he executes a portrait, whether from nature or from the im- mediate memory of the model, the gallery of his imaginary person- ages is poorly inspired. Every man, every woman, who has not lived before him, and to whom he has not succeeded in giving the essential features of human life, are figures that are failures from the beginning. This is why his evangelical personages are more human than they should be, his heroic figures below their fabulous r61e, while his mythological per- sonages exist neither in reality nor in a dream ; there is a perpetual contradiction in the action of the muscles, the lustre of the flesh, and the total vacancy of the faces. It is clear that humanity en- chants him, Christian dogmas trouble him a little, and Olympus bores him to death. Look at his great allegorical series in the Louvre. It does not take long to discover his indecisions when he creates a type, his infallible certitude when he is informed, and to understand what is strong and what is weak in his mind. There are commonplace parts, there are others absolutely negative which are fictions ; the superior parts that you notice are portraits. Whenever Marie de Medici enters the scene she is perfect. The Henri IV. with the Portrait is a masterpiece. No one contests the absolute 84 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. insignificance of his gods, Mercury, Apollo, Saturn, Jupiter, or Mars. In the same way, in the Adoration of the Magi, there are principal personages who are always of no account, and supernumeraries who are always admirable. The European king does it harm. He is well known ; he is the man in the foreground who figures with the Virgin, either standing or kneeling in the centre of the composition. Rubens may dress him in vain in purple, in ermine or gold, make him hold the censer, offer a cup or a ewer, make him young or make him old, make bald his sacerdotal head or cause it to bristle with dry hairs, give him an air collected or wild, gentle eyes or the glare of an old lion, whatever he does, he is always a commonplace figure, whose only r61e consists in wearing one of the dominant colors of the pic- ture. It is the same with the Asiatic. On the contrary, the Ethi- opian the grizzled negro with his bony flat-nosed face, livid, and lighted by two shining sparks, the white of his eyes and the pearls of his teeth is invariably a masterpiece of observation and of nature, because it is a portrait, and a portrait with no alteration whatever from an individual. What would be the conclusion but that by instinct, necessity, his dominant faculties, his very infirmities (for he had them), Rubens more than any other was destined to make marvellous portraits ? It is not so at all. His portraits are feeble, poorly studied, superficially constructed, and of but vague resemblance. When he is compared to Titian, Rembrandt, Raphael, Sebastien del Piombo, Velasquez, Vandyck, Holbein, Antonio Moro, I might exhaust the list of the RUBENS AS A PORTRAIT PAINTER. 85 most diverse and great, and descend many degrees to Philippe de Champagne in the seventeenth century, and to the excellent portrait painters of the eighteenth, it is perceived that Rubens was want- ing in that attentive simplicity, at once submissive and powerful, that the study of the human face requires, to be perfect. Do you know one portrait of his which satisfies you as the result of faithful and profound observation, which edifies you with the per- sonality of its model, which instructs, and I may say reassures you ? Of all the men of age and rank, of such diverse character and tem- perament, whose portraits he has left us, is there a single one who impresses himself upon the mind as a particular and very distinct person, and whom one remembers as one does a striking countenance ? At a distance they are forgotten ; seen together, they might almost be confounded. The individualities of their existence have not clearly separated them in the mind of the painter, and separate them still less in the memory of those who only know them from him. Are they like ? Yes, almost. Are they living ? They live rather than are living. I will not say that they are commonplace, but they are not precise. I will not say either that the painter has failed to see them properly, but I think he has looked at them lightly, only skin deep, perhaps through the medium of habit, doubtless according to a formula, and that he has treated them, whatever their sex or their age, as women love, it is said, to be painted, as handsome first, and after that with a likeness. They are good for their time, and not bad for their rank, although Van- dyck, to take an example beside the master, puts them still more de- 86 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. cidedly at their date and in their social surrounding ; but they have the same blood, they have especially the same moral character, and all the exterior features modelled on a uniform type. They have the same clear eye, wide open, with a direct glance, the same com- plexion, the same mustache, delicately curled up, lifting by two black or blond slits the corner of a manly mouth, that is to say, one that is a little conventional. There is red enough in the lips, carnation enough in the cheeks, roundness enough in the oval, to proclaim, with the want of youth, a man in his normal condition, whose constitution is robust, whose body is healthful, and whose soul is at rest. It is the same for the women, a clear complexion, a round fore- head, large temples, small chins, eyes prominent, the same coloring, almost the identical expression, the style of beauty peculiar to the time, a breadth befitting the races of the North, with a sort of grace peculiar to Rubens, which is felt as the mingling of several types, Marie de Medici, the Infanta Isabella, Isabel Brandt, Helen Four- ment. All the women that he has painted seem to have contracted, in spite of themselves and in spite of him, an inexplicable familiar air, resulting from the contact of his persistent memories ; and all of them partake more or less of one or another of these four cele- brated personages, less surely immortalized by history than by his brush. They themselves have together a sort of family air which is largely owing to Rubens. Can you picture to yourself the women of the courts of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. ? Have you a very clear idea of Mesdames RUBENS AS A PORTRAIT PAINTER. 87 de Longueville, de Montbazon, de Chevreuse, de Sable, of that beautiful Duchesse de Guemene, to whom Rubens, interrogated by the Queen, dared to give the prize of beauty as the most charming goddess of the Luxembourg Olympus ; of that incomparable Made- moiselle du Vigean, the idol of society at Chantilly, who inspired so great a passion, and such a quantity of little verses ? Can you see any more distinctly Mademoiselle de la Valliere, or Mesdames de Montespan, de Fontanges, de Sevign6, and de Grignan ? And if you cannot perceive them as you would wish, whose fault is it? Is it the fault of that epoch of display, of politeness, of artificial manners, both pompous and forced? Is it the fault of the women themselves, who all sought a certain court ideal ? Have they been ill-observed, unscrupulously painted ? Or was it agreed that among so many kinds of grace or beauty, there was but one that was in good style and good taste and according to etiquette ? One hardly knows just what nose, what mouth, what oval, what com- plexion, what glance, what degree of seriousness or freedom, of delicacy or plumpness, or indeed what soul, should be given to each of these celebrated people, become so alike in their imposing roles of favorites, Frondeuses, princesses, and great ladies. We know what they thought of themselves, and how they painted themselves or how they were painted, according as they made their own literary portraits or allowed them to be made by others. From the sister of Cond to Madame d'Epinay, that is, through the whole seventeenth century and the larger half of the eighteenth, we have only fine complexions, pretty mouths, superb teeth and shoulders, 88 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. and admirable arms and throats. They undressed themselves a good deal, or let themselves be undressed, without displaying any- thing but rather cold perfections modelled on an absolutely hand- some type according to the fashion and ideal of the time. Neither Mademoiselle de Scudery, nor Voiture, nor Chapelain, nor Des- marets, nor any of the witty writers who occupied themselves with their charms, have had the idea of leaving us a portrait of them perhaps- less flattered but more faithful. It is with difficulty that one perceives, here and there in the gallery of the H6tel de Ram- bouillet, a complexion less divine, lips less purely outlined or of a less perfect carnation. The most truthful and the greatest portrait painter of his time, St. Simon, was necessary to teach us that a woman might be charm- ing without being perfect, and that the Duchesse de Maine and the Duchess of Burgundy, for instance, had many attractions of physi- ognomy, quite natural grace and fire, the one with her limp, and the other with her dark complexion, her thin figure, her turbulent expression and imperfect teeth. Up to that time the hand of the image-maker was directed by the neither too much nor too little principle. An inexpressible impressiveness, a solemnity, some- thing like the three scenic unities, the perfection of a fine phrase, had clothed them all with the same impersonal, almost royal as- pect, which for us moderns is the opposite of charming. Times changed ; the eighteenth century destroyed many formulas, and consequently treated the human countenance with no more respect than the other unities. But our age has restored, with other tastes RUBENS AS A PORTRAIT PAINTER. 89 and other fashions, the same tradition of portraits without type, and the same ostentation, less solemn, but yet more objectionable. Recall the portraits of the Directory, of the Empire and the Resto- ration, those of Girodet and of Gerard. I except the portraits of David, but not all, and a few of those of Prudhon. Form a gallery of the great actresses and great ladies, Mars, Duchesnois, Georges, the Empress Josephine, Madame Tallien, also that unique head of Madame de Stael, and even that pretty Madame Recamier, and tell me whether it lives, is as characteristic and diversified as a series of portraits by Latour, Houdon, and Caffieri. Well ! all the proportions being maintained, this is what I find in Rubens's portraits, great uncertainty and conventionality, the same chivalrous air in the men and the same princess-like beauty in the women, but nothing individual, which arrests the attention, impresses, causes reflection, and is not forgotten. Not one plainness of feature, not one meagreness of contour, not one inharmonious eccentricity of any feature. Have you ever perceived in his world of thinkers, of politicians, of men of war, any characteristic accident wholly personal, like Condi's falcon head, the wild eyes and nocturnal mien of Descartes, the fine and adorable countenance of Rotrou, the angular and pen- sive face of Pascal, and the never to be forgotten glance of Richelieu ? How is it that these human types swarmed before the great obser- vers, and not one really original type sat to Rubens ? Must I finish explaining myself at one blow by the most rigorous of examples ? Imagine Holbein with the personages of Rubens, and you see at 90 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND, once appear a new human gallery, very interesting for the moralist, equally admirable for the history of life and the history of art, which Rubens, we must agree, would not have enriched by one single type. The Brussels Museum possesses four portraits by Rubens, and it is precisely in remembering them that these reflections come to me afterwards. These four portraits represent justly enough the power- ful and the mediocre side of his talent as a portrait painter. Two of them are very fine, the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella. They were both ordered to adorn the Arch of Triumph erected in the Place de Merr, on the occasion of the entry of Ferdinand of Austria, and it is said that each was executed in a day. They are larger than life, conceived, designed, and treated in the Italian man- ner, ample and decorative, a little theatrical, but very ingeniously ap- propriate to th'eir destination. There is in them so much Veronese melted into the Flemish manner that Rubens never had more style, and yet was never more completely himself. There is here seen a way of filling a canvas, of composing a grand arabesque with a bust, two arms and two hands diversely occupied, of increasing a border, and rendering a doublet majestically severe, of giving bold- ness to the contour, of painting thickly and flatly, which is not habitual in his portraits, and which recalls, on the other hand, the best parts of his pictures. The likeness is of the kind which im- presses from afar by a few just and brief accents that might be called a resemblance of effect The work is of extraordinary rapidity, assurance, and seriousness, and, for the style, of remarkable beauty. RUBENS AS A PORTRAIT PAINTER. 91 It is quite superb. Rubens is there with his habits, on his own ground, in his element of fancy, and of very lucid, but hasty and em- phatic observation. He would not have proceeded otherwise for a picture : success was certain. The two others, bought recently, are very celebrated, and a great price is attached to them. Dare I say that they are among his weakest works ? They are two portraits of familiar order, two little busts, rather short and rather scanty, presented in full face, with no arrangement, cut in the canvas with no more preparation than if they were studies of heads. With much brilliancy, relief, and apparent life, of extremely skilful but succinct rendering, they have precisely this fault of being seen from near and seen lightly, made with application and little studied, in a word, they are treated by surfaces. The putting together is correct, the drawing insignificant. The painter has given accents which resemble life ; the observer has not marked a single trait which intimately resembles his model. Everything is on the epidermis. From the physical point of view we look for something beneath, which has not been observed ; from the moral point we seek an inwardness that has not been divined. The painting is flat upon the canvas, the life is but skin deep. The man is young, about thirty years of age ; his mouth is mobile, his eye moist, his glance direct and clear, nothing more, nothing beyond, nothing below. Who is this young man ? What has he done ? Has he thought ? Has he suf- fered ? Has he himself lived on the surface of things as he is rep- resented without consistency on the surface of a canvas ? These 92 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. are the characteristic indications that a Holbein would give us be- fore thinking of the rest, which cannot be expressed by a spark in an eye or a red touch on a nostril. The art of painting is perhaps more indiscreet than any other. It is the indisputable witness of the mental state of the painter at the moment he held the brush. What he intended to do he did ; that which he desired but feebly is seen in his indecisions ; what he did not wish for is, with even better reason, absent from his work, whatever he or others may say. An abstraction, a forgetfulness, a warmer sensation, a less profound insight, application wanting, a less hearty love for what he is studying, whether he is tired of painting or has a passion for painting, all the shades of his nature, even to the intermittent character of his sensitiveness, are manifest in the works of the painter as clearly as if he took us into his con- fidence. One can say with certainty what is the deportment of a scrupulous portrait painter to his models, and in the same way one can fancy what Rubens was to his. When one looks, a few paces from the portraits of which I am speaking, at the portrait of the Duke of Alva by Antonio Moro, he is certain that, grand nobleman as he was, and wholly accus- tomed to painting great lords, Antonio Moro was very serious, very attentive, and a good deal moved at the moment when he seated himself before this tragic personage, dry, angular, choked in his dark armor, jointed like an automaton, with an eye which looks sidelong up and down, cold, hard, and black, as if the light of heaven had never touched its surface. RUBENS AS A PORTRAIT PAINTER. 93 On the contrary, on the day when Rubens painted, to please them, the Seigneur Charles de Cordes and Jacqueline his wife, he was undoubtedly in a good humor, but absent-minded, sure of his work, and in a hurry as he always was. It was in 1618, the year of the Miraculous Draught. He was forty-one years old, in the full tide of his talent, his glory, and his success. He did everything rapidly. The Miraculous Draught had just cost him ten days' labor. The two young people had been married October 30, 1617 ; the portrait of the husband was made to please the wife, that of the wife to please the husband, so you can see under what conditions the work was done, and you can imagine the time he took for it ; the result was a painting hasty and brilliant, an agreeable likeness, an ephemeral work. Many, I may say the greater part, of Rubens's portraits are the same. Look in the Louvre at that of the Baron de Vicq. (No. 458 of the catalogue), in the same style, the same quality, almost of the same period as the portrait of the- Seigneur de Cordes of which I speak ; look too at that of Elizabeth of France, and the one of a lady of the Boonen family (No. 461), all agreeable, brilliant, light, alert works, forgotten as soon as seen. See, on the other hand, the por- trait sketch of his second wife, Helen, with her two children, that admirable sketch, that scarcely indicated dream, left there by chance or purposely ; and if you look over the three works preceding this with a little reflection, I shall not need to persist to make myself understood. To resume, Rubens, to consider him only as a portrait painter, 94 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. is a man who dreamed in his own way when he had the time, with an eye admirably true, of slight depth of insight, which was a mirror rather than a penetrating instrument, a man who occupied himself little with others, much with himself; morally, and physically a man of the exterior, and outwardly, marvellously but exclusively, fitted to seize the exterior of things. This is why it is proper to distinguish in Rubens two observers of very unequal power, of hardly com- parable artistic value, one who made the life of others serve the needs of his conceptions, subordinates his models, taking from them only what he needs ; and the other, who remains inferior to his task, because he ought, and does not know how, to subordinate himself to his model. This is why he has sometimes magnificently observed and again greatly neglected the human face. This is why his portraits are all a little alike, and a little like him ; why they are wanting in a life of their own, and in that lack moral resemblance and interior life, while his portrait personages have just that degree of striking personality which increases still more the effect of their r61e, a force of expression which does not permit you to doubt that they have lived ; and as to their mental calibre, it is evident that they all have an active soul, ardent and prompt to spring forth, just upon their lips, the one that Rubens has put into them, almost the same in all, for it is his own. VIII. THE TOMB OF RUBENS. I HAVE not yet taken you to Rubens's tomb at St. Jacques. The sepulchral stone is placed before the altar, and the inscription on the tomb reads thus : Non sui tantum saculi, sed et omnis avi Apelles dici meruit. With this approach to an hyperbole, which neither adds to nor detracts from the universal glory nor the very certain immortality of Rubens, these two lines of funereal eulogium make one remember that a few feet below these flags lie the ashes of this great man. He was placed there the first day of June, 1640. Two years later, by an authorization of March 14, 1642, his widow finally consecrated to him the little chapel behind the choir, and placed in it the fine picture of St. George, one of the most charming works of the master, a work wholly formed, says tradition, of the portraits of members of his family, that is to say, of his affections, his dead loves, his living loves, his regrets, his hopes, the past, present, and future of his house. You know, in fact, that to all the personages who compose this so-called Holy Family are attributed resemblances of priceless value. 96 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. Side by side in it are his two wives, first, the fair Helen Fourment, a child of sixteen when he married her in 1630, a quite young wo- man of twenty-six when he died, fair, plump, amiable, and gentle, en grand ctishabilti, naked to the waist. There also is his daughter, ois niece, the celebrated girl of the Chapeau de Faille, his father, his grandfather, finally, his younger son under the features of an angel, a youthful and delicious babe, perhaps the most adorable child he ever painted. As to Rubens himself, he figures there in armor shining with sombre steel and silver, holding in his hand the banner of St. George. He is growing old and is thinner, his hair is grizzled, he is dishevelled, a little worn, but superb with inward fire. Without posturing or emphasis he has conquered the dragon, and planted upon him his mailed foot. How old was he then ? If the date of his second marriage is recalled, and the age of his wife and the child born of this marriage, Rubens must have been fifty-six or fifty-eight years of age. Almost forty years before the brilliant combat had begun which, impossible for others, but easy for him who was always successful, he had waged against life. In what enterprises, in what order of activity, of struggle, and success, had he not triumphed ? If ever, at the solemn hour of self-examination, after the lapse of years and the accomplishment of a career, at that moment of ab- solute certainty, a man had a right to paint himself as a victor, it was certainly he. The thought, as you see, is most simple ; it needs not to be sought after. If the picture conceals an emotion, that emotion can easily THE TOMB OF RUBENS. 97 be communicated to any man who has any warmth of heart, who can be moved by glory, and who makes for himself a second religion of the memory of such men. One day, towards the end of his career, in full glory, perhaps in deep repose, under an august title, invoking the Virgin and the sole saint whose own image he would have permitted himself to assume, it pleased him to paint within a very small frame (about two metres) whatever there had been that was venerable and seductive in the beings he had loved. He owed this last glorification to those who had borne him, to those who had shared, beautified, charmed, en- nobled with their perfume of grace, tenderness, and excellence his noble and laborious career. He gave it to them as fully, in as masterly a way, as could be expected from his affectionate hand, his genius, and his great power. He put into it his science, his piety, his most rare carefulness. He made of the work what you know, an infinitely touching marvel as the work of a son, a father, and a husband ; forever admirable as a work of art. Shall I describe it to you ? The arrangement is one of those that a catalogue note is sufficient to indicate. Shall I tell you its par- ticular merits ? They are all the painter's qualities in their familiar acceptation, under their most precious form. They do not give of him a new or a more lofty idea, but one that is finer and more exquisite. It is the Rubens of his best days, with more naturalness, precision, caprice, richness of coloring, and power without effort ; with a more tender eye, a more caressing hand ; a more loving labor, at once 7 98 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. more intimate and more profound. If I used technical terms, I should spoil the greater part of those subtle things which should be rendered with the pure language of idea in order to preserve their character and their value. Little as it cost me to study the mechanician in such a practical picture as the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, at Mechlin, it is equally befitting to ease and purify the manner of speech when the concep- tion of Rubens is elevated, as it is in the Communion of St. Francis of Assisi, or when his manner of painting is penetrated at once by spirit, feeling, ardor, conscientiousness, affection for those he is paint- ing, and attachment to what he does, the ideal, in a word, as in the St. George. . Has Rubens ever been more perfect ? I think not. Has he been as perfect ? I have nowhere observed it. There are in the lives of the great artists these works of predestination, not the largest, nor always exhibiting the greatest knowledge, sometimes the very humblest, which, by a fortuitous conjunction of all the gifts of the man and the artist, have expressed unconsciously to themselves, the pure essence of their genius; of this number is the St. George. This picture, moreover, marks, if not the end, at least the last five years of Rubens's life, and by a sort of grand coquetry which is not unbefitting the things of the spirit, he manifests that this magnificent organization knew neither fatigue nor relaxation nor decline. Thirty-five years, at least, had elapsed between the Trinity in the Antwerp Museum and the St. George. Which is the younger of the two pictures ? At which moment had he the most fire, the THE TOMB OF RUBENS. 99 most vivid love of all things, and the most suppleness in all the organs of his genius ? His life had almost made its revolution ; it could be closed and measured. It seemed as if he foresaw the end on the day when he glorified himself and his family. He also had erected and nearly finished his monument ; he could say this to himself with as much assurance as others, without self-glorification. Only five or six years more of life remained to him. He was happy, peaceable, a little weary of politics ; retired from ambassadorial life, and more his own than ever. Had he well spent his life? had he deserved well of his country, his time, and himself? He had unique faculties ; how did he use them ? Destiny heaped honors upon him ; did he ever fail to merit his destiny? In this grand life, so distinct, so clear, so brilliant, so adventurous and yet so pure, so correct in its most astonishing events, so luxurious and so simple, so troubled and so exempt from all littleness, so divided and so fruitful, can you discover one stain that causes regret ? He was fortunate ; was he ungrateful ? He had his trials ; was he ever bitter ? He loved much and warmly ; was he forgetful ? He was born at Spiegen, in exile, on the threshold of a prison, of a mother admirably upright and generous, of a cultivated father, who was a learned doctor, but a man of slight feeling, of tolerably weak conscience, and of a character without great consistency. When Rubens was fourteen, he was among the pages of a princess ; at seventeen he was in the studios; at twenty years he is mature, and a master. At twenty-nine he returned from a journey of study 100 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. as from a foreign victory, and he entered his home in triumph. They asked to see his studies, and, so to speak, he could show nothing but works. He left behind him strange pictures which were at once understood and relished. He had taken possession of Italy in the name of Flanders, planted from city to city the marks of his passage, founding on the way his own renown, that of his country, and something more still, an art unknown to Italy. He brought back, as trophies, marbles, engravings, pictures, fine works by the best masters, and, above all, a new and national art, the most vast in surface and the most extraordinary in resources of all the arts known. In proportion as his fame increased and radiated, and his talent was noised abroad, his personality seemed to enlarge, his brain to dilate, his faculties to multiply with the demands made upon him, and those he made of them. Was he an astute politician ? His policy appears to me to have clearly, faithfully, and nobly compre- hended and transmitted the desires or wishes of his masters ; he pleased by his noble mien, charmed all who approached him by his wit, his cultivation, his conversation, his character, and seems to have been still more seductive by the indefatigable presence of mind of his painter's genius. He would arrive, often with great pomp, present his letters of credence, converse and paint. He made por- traits of princes and kings, mythological pictures for palaces, re- ligious ones for cathedrals. It can hardly be told which has the most distinction, Peter Paul Rubens pictor, or the Chevalier Ru- bens, accredited plenipotentiary ; but we have every reason to believe THE TOMB OF RUBENS. IOI that the artist was a singular help to the diplomate. He succeeded in all things to the satisfaction of those whom he served with his speech and his talent. The sole embarrassments, the sole delays, and the rare annoyances perceived in his journeys, so picturesquely divided between business, galas, cavalcades, and painting, never came from sovereigns. The real statesmen were more punctilious and less easy, witness his quarrel with Philippe d'Arenberg, Duke of Aerschot, concerning the last mission with which he was charged in Holland. Was this the only wound he received in the discharge of his delicate functions ? It was at least the sole cloud observed from a distance, that casts the slightest bitterness over a radiant ex- istence. In everything else he was fortunate. His life from one end to the other was one of those that make life lovable. In every circumstance he was a man who was an honor to mankind. He was handsome, perfectly well-bred, and cultivated. He retained from his hasty early education the taste for languages, and facility in speaking them. He wrote and spoke Latin, he was fond of healthy and strong reading ; they amused him with Plutarch and Seneca while he was painting, and " he was equally attentive to both reading and painting." He lived in the greatest luxury, in- habited a princely dwelling ; he had valuable horses which he rode every evening, a unique collection of works of art with which he delighted his hours of repose. He was regular, methodical, and cold in the discipline of his private life, in the administration of his work, in the government of his mind, in a certain way, in the fortifying and healthful hygiene of his genius. He was simple and plain, 1O2 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. of an exemplary fidelity in his relations with his friends, sympa- thetic with all talent, inexhaustible in encouragements to those who were making a beginning. There was no success which he did not aid with his purse or his praise. His magnanimity with regard to Brauwer is a celebrated episode of his benevolent life, and one of the most living witnesses that he has furnished of his spirit of fra- ternity. He adored everything that was beautiful, and never sepa- rated from it what was good. He experienced the accidents of his grand official life without being either dazzled by them, or lessened in character, or sensi- bly troubled in his domestic habits. Fortune spoiled him as little as did honors. Women no more demoralized him than princes. No well-known gallantries are attributed to him ; on the contrary, he was always seen at home, with regular habits, in his domestic surroundings from 1609 to 1626 with his first wife, from 1630 with the second, with numerous fine children, assiduous friends, that is to say, amusements, affections, and duties, all things which kept his mind in repose, and helped him to bear with the natural ease of a Colossus the daily burden of a superhuman labor. Everything was simple in his occupations ; whether complicated, agreeable, or overwhelming, everything is honest in this untroubled home. His life is in full light ; it is broad daylight there as in his pictures ; not the shadow of a mystery, not one grief, except the sincere sorrow of his first widowhood ; no suspicious circumstances, nothing which one is obliged to imply, nor which is a matter of conjecture, except one thing, the mystery of this incomprehensible fecundity. THE TOMB OF RUBENS. IOJ " He solaced himself," writes Taine, " by creating worlds ; " * in which ingenious definition I see but one word to correct. Solace would suggest tension, the malady of over-fulness, that is never to be remarked in this thoroughly healthy mind, which is never troub- led. He created, as a tree bears fruit, with no more uneasiness or effort. When did he think ? Diu noctuque incubando, such was his Latin device, which means that he reflected before painting, as can be seen from his sketches, projects, and draughts. In truth, the improvisation of the hand was the successor of improvisations of mind ; there was the same certainty and the same facility of utter- ance in one case as in the other. His was a soul without storms, or languors, or torments, or chimeras. If ever the melancholy of toil left its trace anywhere, it was neither on the features nor in the pictures of Rubens. By his birth, in the midst of the sixteenth cen- tury, he belonged to that mighty race of thinkers and men of action in whom action and thought were one. He was a painter as he would have been a soldier ; he made his pictures as he would have made war, with as much coolness as ardor, combining skilfully, decid- ing quickly, and trusting, besides, to the surety of his glance on the field. He takes things as they are, his fine faculties just as he has received them ; he exercises them as fully as a man can, pushes them to their full extent, asks of them nothing beyond, and with a clear conscience in this regard he pursues his labor with the help of God. His painted work comprises about fifteen hundred productions, * H. Taine, Philosophy of Art in the Netherlands. IO4 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. the most immense result that ever issued from one brain. To ap- proach such a figure, we must add together the lives of several of the men most fertile in productiveness. If, independently of the number, the importance, the dimensions, and the complicated char- acter of his works be considered, it is an astonishing spectacle, giv- ing of human faculties the most lofty, even, we might say, the most religious idea. Such is the teaching which seems to me to result from the ampli- tude and power of a soul. In this respect he is unique, and in every way he is one of the grandest specimens of humanity. We must in art go back to Raphael, Leonardo, and Michael Angelo, to the demigods themselves, to find his equals, and in certain things still his masters. Nothing, it is said, was wanting to him " except the very pure instincts and the very noble." It is true that in the world of the beautiful two or three spirits can be found, who have gone farther, with a more lofty flight, who consequently have seen more nearly the divine Light and the Eternal Truths. There are also in the moral world, in that of sentiments, visions, and dreams, depths into which Rembrandt alone has descended, which Rubens has not penetrated and has not even perceived. On the other hand, he has taken possession of the earth as no other man has. Spectacles are his domain. His eye is the most marvellous prism that has ever been given us, of the light and color of objects, of true and magnificent ideas. Dramas, passions, atti- tudes of the body, expressions of countenance, that is to say, the whole man in the multifarious incidents of human life, pass through THE TOMB OF RUBENS. 105 his brain, take from it stronger features, more robust forms, become amplified but not purified, and are transfigured into some unknown heroic appearance. Everywhere he stamps them with the direct- ness of his character, the warmth of his blood, the admirable equi- librium of his nerves, and the magnificence of his ordinary visions. He is unequal, and oversteps moderation ; he lacks taste when he draws, but never when he colors. He is forgetful, even careless ; but from the first day to the last, he atones for a fault by a master- piece ; he redeems a want of care, of seriousness, or of taste by the instantaneous testimony of self-respect, an almost touching applica- tion, and supreme taste. His grace is that of a man who sees grandly and powerfully, and the smile of such a man is delicious. When he puts his hand upon a very rare subject, when he touches a deep and manifest sentiment, when his heart beats with a lofty and sincere emotion, he paints the Communion of St. Francis of Assisi, and then, in the rank of purely moral conceptions, he attains the utmost beauty in truth, and in that is as great as any one in the world. He does not look back, nor does he fear what is to be done. He accepts overwhelming tasks, and accomplishes them. He suspends his labor, abandons it, lets his mind wander from it, turns aside from it altogether. He returns to it, after a long and distant embassy, as if he had not left it for an hour. One day is sufficient for him to paint The Kermis, thirteen for the Magi of Antwerp, perhaps seven or eight for the Communion, judging from the price which was paid him for them. 106 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. Did he love money as much as was said? Did he, as has also been said, commit the wrong of being helped by his pupils, and did he treat with too much disdain an art to which he has done such great honor, because he estimated his pictures at the rate of a hundred florins a day? The truth is, that at that time the craft of a painter was indeed a craft, nor was it less nobly nor less well practised because it was treated almost like a high pro- fession. The truth is, there were apprentices, masters, corporations, and a school which was very decidedly a studio, and the pupils were co-laborers with the master, while neither scholars nor master had any reason to complain of this salutary and useful exchange of lessons and services. More than any one Rubens had the right to hold to the ancient usages. With Rembrandt he is the last great head of a school, and, better than Rembrandt, whose genius is untransmissible, he has determined new, numerous, and fixed laws of aesthetics. He leaves a double inheritance of good teaching and superb examples. His studio recalls, with as much renown as any, the finest habits of the Italian schools. He formed disciples who are the envy of other schools, the glory of his own. He can always be seen sur- rounded by this bevy of original minds and great talents, over whom he exercises a sort of paternal authority full of gentleness, solicitude, and majesty. He had no wearisome old age, nor heavy infirmity, nor decrepi- tude. The last picture that he signed, and which he never had time to deliver, his Crucifixion of St Peter, is one of his very best. THE TOMB OF RUBENS. 107 He speaks of it in a letter in 1638, as of a work of predilection which charms him, and which he desires to treat at leisure. Hardly had he been warned, by some little suffering, that our forces have limits, than he suddenly died at the age of sixty-three, leaving to his son, with a very wealthy patrimony, the most solid inheritance of glory that ever a thinker, at least in Flanders, had acquired by the labor of his mind. Such is this exemplary life that I would wish to see written by some man of great learning and deep heart for the honor of our art, and the perpetual edification of those who practise it. It is here that it should be written, if possible, if it could be done, with one's feet upon his tomb, and before the St. George. Having before his eyes that part of us which passes away and that which en- dures, that which perishes and that which abides, a man might weigh with more moderation, certainty, and respect what there is in the life of a great man and in his works that is ephemeral, perish- able, and truly immortal ! Who knows, too, but that if the work were meditated upon in the chapel where Rubens sleeps, this miracle of genius, taken in himself, might not become a little more clear, and this super- natural being, as we call him, be better explained ? IX. VANDYCK. IT is thus I should imagine a portrait of Vandyck, made as it were by a rapid sketch with a broad pencil : A young prince of royal race, with everything in his favor, beauty, elegance, magnificent gifts, precocious genius, a rare education, and owing all these things to the advantages of birth ; cherished by his master, himself a master among his fellow-students, everywhere distinguished, everywhere sought for, feted everywhere, in foreign parts even more than at home ; the favorite and friend of kings, entering thus by right into the most enviable things of the world, such as talent, renown, honors, luxury, passions, and adventures ; ever young even at a ripe age, never steady even in his last days, a libertine, a gamester, eager, prodigal, dissipated, playing the devil, and, as they would have said in his time, selling himself to the devil for golden guineas, then spending them wildly on horses, in display, on ruinous gallantries ; as much as possible a lover of his art, but ready to sacrifice it to passions less noble, to loves less faithful, to attachments far less fortunate ; charming, of powerful origin, of elegant stature, such as one sees in the second generation of great VANDYCK. 109 races, of a complexion less virile than delicate, the air of a Don Juan rather than of a hero, with a flavor of melancholy and an undercurrent of sadness penetrating through the gayeties of his life ; the tenderness of a heart prompt to fall in love, and that indefina- ble disillusionment of a heart too often moved ; a nature more in- flammable than burning, with, at bottom, more sensuality than true ardor, less fire than freedom, less capable of seizing things than of being seized by them and abandoning himself to them ; a being exquisite in attraction, sensitive to all attraction, consumed by the two most absorbing things in the world, the muse and women ; a man who abused everything, his seductions, his health, his dignity, his talent ; crushed by necessities, worn out with pleasure, ex- hausted in resources ; an insatiable being, who ended, says the legend, by keeping low company with Italian knaves, and by seek- ing gold secretly in alembics ; a seeker of adventures, who at the end of his career married to order, as it were, a charming, well-born maiden, when he could no longer give her either strength, or much money, or great charm, or a secure life ; a wreck of a man who, up to his last hour, had the good fortune, the most extraordinary of all, to preserve his greatness when painting ; in fine, a mauvais sujet, adored, decried, calumniated at length, better in reality than his reputation ; a man who was forgiven for everything on account of one supreme gift, one of the forms of genius, grace; to sura up all, a Prince of Wales dying upon his accession to the throne, who was by no means fitted to reign. With his important work, his immortal portraits, his soul open 1 10 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLI.AND. to the most delicate sensations, his individual style, his personal dis- tinction, his taste, his restraint, and his charm in everything he touched, one may ask what Vandyck would be without Rubens. . How would he have seen nature, how conceived painting ? What sort of palette would he have created, what would have been his modelling, what laws of color would he have fixed, what would he have adopted that was poetic ? Would he have been more Italian, or would he have bent more decidedly towards Correggio or towards Veronese ? If the revolution made by Rubens had been retarded for a few years, or had not taken place, what would have been the fate of those charming spirits for whom the master had pre- pared the way, who only had to see him live to live a little like him, only to watch him paint to paint as none had ever painted before him, and only to consider as a whole his works such as he had imagined them, and the society of their time such as it had become, to perceive, in their definite relations henceforth bound to each other, two worlds equally new, a modern society, a modern art ? Who among them could have undertaken such discoveries ? There was an empire to found : could they found it ? Jordaens, Grayer, G6rard, Zeghers, Rombouts, Van Thulden, Cornelis Schutt, Boyermanns, Jan van Oost of Bruges, Teniers, Van Uden, Snyders, Johann Fyt, all those whom Rubens inspired, enlightened, formed, and employed, his co-laborers, his pupils, or his friends, could at the utmost divide among themselves certain provinces, small or great ; and Vandyck, the most gifted of all, deserved the finest and most important among them. Deprive them of that which they owed VANDYCK. Ill directly or indirectly to Rubens, take from them the central planet, and imagine what would remain of these luminous satellites. Take from Vandyck the original type from which his issued, the style whence he drew his own, the feeling for form, the choice of subject, the movement of mind, the manner and the method which served him for example, and see what he would lack. At Antwerp, at Brussels, everywhere in Belgium, Vandyck follows in the footsteps of Rubens. His Silenus, and his Martyrdom of St. Peter, are like a delicate and almost poetical Jordaens, that is to say, Rubens preserved in his nobility by a more curious hand. His Sanctities, Passions, Cruci- fixions, Descents from the Cross, beautiful dead Christs, fair women in mourning and tears, would not exist, or would be different, if Rubens, once for all, in his two triptychs at Antwerp, had not re- vealed the Flemish formula of the Gospel, and determined the local type of the Virgin, the Christ, the Magdalen, and the disciples. There is always more sentimentality, and sometimes even more profound sentiment, in the fine Vandyck than in the great Rubens ; but is one quite certain of that ? It is a matter of temperament and complexion. All sons like Vandyck have a feminine trait added to the father's features. It is by this that the paternal type is sometimes made more beautiful ; it is softened, altered, diminished. Between these two souls, elsewhere so unequal, there is something like this influence of the woman. In the first place there is some- thing which we may call a difference of sex. Vandyck heightens the statures that Rubens made too stout ; he indicates less muscle, less relief, fewer bones, and not so much blood. He is less turbulent, never 112 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. brutal ; his expressions are less gross ; he laughs but little, has often a vein of tenderness, but he knows not the strong sob of violent men. He never startles ; he often corrects the roughnesses of his master ; he is easy, because his talent is prodigiously natural and facile ; he is free and alert, but he never is carried away. Taking work for work, there are some that he would draw better than his master, especially when the work is choice ; an idle hand, a woman's wrist, a slender finger circled by a ring. He has more restraint, more polish ; one might say he is better bred. He is more refined than his master, because in fact his master formed himself alone, and the sovereignty of rank dispenses with, and takes the place of many things. He was twenty-four years younger than Rubens. Nothing of the sixteenth century remained in him. He belonged to the first gener- ation of the seventeenth, and that makes itself felt. It is felt physi- cally and morally, in the man and in the painter, in his own hand- some face and in his taste for other handsome faces. It is especially felt in his portraits. On this ground he belongs wonderfully to the world, the world of his day and hour. Never having created an imperious type to distract him from the real, he is true, he is exact, he sees correctly, he sees the likeness. Possibly he gives to all the personages who sat for him something of the graces of his own person, an air more habitually noble, a more elegant undress, a finer attraction and style in garments, hands more regularly handsome, pure, and white. In every case he has, more than his master, a feeling for draperies well put on, for fashion ; VANDYCK. 113 he has a taste for silky stuffs, for satins, for ribbons, for points, for plumes and ornamental swords. These gentlemen are no longer cavaliers, they are chevaliers. The men of war have laid aside their armor and their casques ; they have become courtiers and men of the world in loose doublets and flowing linen, in silk hose and loose breeches and high-heeled satin shoes, all fashions and habits which were his own, and which he was fitted better than any one to reproduce in their perfect mundane ideal. In his manner, his style, by the unique conformity of his nature with the spirit, the needs, and the elegances of his epoch, he is, in the art of painting his contemporaries, the equal of anybody. His Charles I., from its profound feeling for model and subject, the familiarity and nobility of its style, the beauty of everything in this exquisite work, the drawing of the face, the coloring, the unrivalled rarity and justness of the values, the quality of the handling, the Charles I., I say, to choose from his work an example well known in France, will bear comparison with the greatest. His triple portrait at Turin is of the same order and of the same significance. Under this head he has done better than any one since Rubens. He has completed Rubens by adding to his work portraits wholly worthy of him, better than his. He has created in his country an original art, and consequently has his part in the creation of a new art. Elsewhere he has done still more ; he has engendered a whole foreign school, the English school. Reynolds, Lawrence, Gains- 114 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. borough, I might add almost all the genre painters faithful to the English traditions, and the best landscape painters, are the direct issue of Vandyck, and indirectly of Rubens through Vandyck. These are worthy titles. Thus posterity, ever very just in its instincts, makes for Vandyck a place of his own between men of the first order and men of the second. The order of precedence which should be accorded to him in the procession of great men has never been accurately determined ; and since his death, as during his life, he seems to have preserved the privilege of being placed near the throne, and there being a distinguished presence. However, I return to my statement that, in spite of his personal genius, his personal grace, his personal talent, Vandyck as a whole would be inexplicable if we had not before our eyes the solar light from which issue so many brilliant reflections. One would seek to know who had taught him these new manners, this liberal language which bears no trace of the ancient tongue ; one would detect in him gleams from elsewhere, which did not issue from his own genius ; and finally one would suspect that somewhere in his neighborhood some mighty planet must have disappeared. No longer would Vandyck be called the son of Rubens, but to his name would be added, His master is unknown, and the mystery of his birth would well deserve to occupy the attention of histori- ographers. PART II. HOLLAND. HOLLAND. I. THE HAGUE AND SCHEVENINGEN. THE Hague is unquestionably one of the least Dutch towns there is in Holland, and one of the most singular towns in all Europe. It has just the degree of local eccentricity necessary to give it that individual charm and mat shade of cosmopolitan elegance which adapt it especially for a place of meeting. There is a little of everything, too, in this city of composite manners, and yet of very individual physiognomy, whose space, cleanness, stylish picturesqueness, and rather haughty grace seem to be a perfectly polite manner of show- ing hospitality. Here is met an indigenous aristocracy which travels, a foreign aristocracy which enjoys the place, imposing fortunes made in the depths of Asiatic colonies that establish themselves here in great comfort, finally envoys extraordinary on occasion, perhaps oftener than is necessary for the peace of the world. It is an abode that I would recommend to those whom the ugliness, the platitude, the confusion, the meanness, or the vain luxury of things, have disgusted with great cities but not with towns. And as for me, if I had to Il8 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. choose a place for work, a pleasant spot where I could be comfortable, breathe a delicate atmosphere, see beautiful things and dream of more beautiful ones, especially if I were disturbed by cares, con- tentions, or difficulties with myself, and I needed tranquillity to solve them, and something very agreeable about me to calm them, I would do as Europe does after its storms ; I would here establish my Congress. The Hague is a capital, as can plainly be seen, even a royal city ; and one might say it has always been one. It only lacks a palace worthy of its rank to have all the features of its physiognomy accord with its final destiny. One feels that it had princes for stadtholders, and that these princes were in their way De Medicis, that they had a taste for the throne, and ought to have reigned somewhere, and that it only depended upon them to have their kingdom here. The Hague is then a city royally distinguished ; it is so by right, for it is very wealthy, and by duty, for fine manners and opulence are all one when everything is as it should be. It might be dull, but it is only regular, correct, and peaceable. It might be arrogant, but it is only ostentatious and grand-mannered. It is clean, as would be expected, but not, as one would suppose, solely because it has well- kept streets paved with brick, painted houses, unbroken glasses, var- nished doors, shining coppers ; but because its waters, perfectly green and beautiful, green with the reflections of their banks, are never soiled by the muddy wake of the canal boats and the open-air cook- ing of the sailors. The Wood is admirable. The Hague, born of a prince's caprice, THE HAGUE AND SCHEVENINGEN. 119 formerly a hunting-seat of the counts of Holland, has for trees a secular passion, which comes from the natal forest which was its cradle. It promenades there, gives festivities and concerts, has races and military reviews ; and when its fine forest is no longer of any use, it has constantly under its eyes this green, dark, compact curtain of oaks, beeches, ashes, and maples, that the perpetual moisture of its ponds seems every morning to paint with a newer and more in- tense green. Its great domestic luxury the sole which it ostensibly parades with the beauty of its waters and the splendor of its parks, that with which it decorates its gardens, its winter and summer drawing- rooms, its bamboo verandas, its doorsteps, and its balconies is its unrivalled abundance of rare plants and flowers. These flowers come from everywhere, and go everywhere. Here India is accli- mated before it goes to make Europe blossom. The Hague, as an heritage of the Nassau family, has preserved a taste for the country, for drives under the trees, for menageries, sheepfolds, fine animals at large upon lawns. By its architectural style it is connected with the seventeenth century in France. Its fancies, some of its habits, its exotic adornments, and its odor come from Asia. Its actual com- fort passed to England and came back again, so that at the present time it is impossible to say whether the original type is at London or at the Hague. In short, it is a town worth seeing, for it has much without ; but what is within is worth more than what is without, for it contains besides a great deal of art concealed under its elegances. To-day I was driven to Scheveningen. The road is a long, 120 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. narrow shaded avenue, leading in a straight line through the heart of the woods. It is cool and dark, whatever may be the warmth of the sky and the blue of the atmosphere. The sun leaves you at the beginning and meets you at the end. The exit is upon the rear of the downs, a vast wavy desert, sparsely sown with thin grass and sand, such as are found at the edge of great beaches. Traversing the village, you find casinos, bath palaces, and princely pavilions, adorned with the colors and arms of Holland. You climb the downs, and heavily descend them to reach the shore. Before you, flat, gray, wind-blown, and white-capped, lies the North Sea. Who has not been there ? and who has not seen it ? One thinks of Ruysdael, Van Goyen, and of Van de Velde. Their point of view is easily found. I could tell you, as if their trace had been im- printed there for two centuries, the exact spot where they sat ; the sea is on the right ; the terraced downs grow dark upon the left, taper, grow small, and softly melt into the pallid horizon. The grass is dry, the downs are pale, the beach colorless, the sea milky, the sky silky, cloudy, wonderfully aerial, well drawn, well modelled, and well painted, as they used to paint it in old times. Even at high tide the beach is interminable. As formerly, the promenaders make upon it spots that are soft or vivid and some- times piercing. The darks are solid ; the lights, tasteful, simple, and soft. The daylight is excessive, and the picture is in low tone ; nothing can be more variegated, and the whole effect is dreary. Red is the only vivid color that preserves its activity in this as- tonishingly subdued scale, of which the notes are so rich, while the THE HAGUE AND SCHEVEN1NGEN. 121 tone remains grave. There are children playing and stamping, wading, making holes and wells in the sand ; women in light costumes, made of white shaded with pale blue or tender pink, not at all as they are painted nowadays, but much more as they would be painted, wisely and soberly, if Ruysdael and Van de Velde were there to give their advice. Dripping boats lie near the shore, with their delicate rigging, their black masts, their massive hulls, recalling feature for feature the ancient sketches colored with bistre of the best marine draughtsmen ; and when a rolling car passes by, we think of the Chariot with Six Dapple-Gray Horses of the Prince of Orange. If you remember certain simple pictures of the Dutch School, you know Scheveningen, it is now what it was then. Modern life has changed its accessories ; each era renews the per- sonages, and introduces its fashions and habits, but what of that ? It is hardly a special accent in an outline. Whether burghers of the olden time or tourists of to-day, they are only little picturesque spots, moving and changing, ephemeral points succeeding each other from age to age, between the great heaven, the great sea, the immense downs, and the ashy-white beach. However, as if better to prove the permanence of things in this grand scenic picture, the same wave, studied so many times, was beating with regularity the shore imperceptibly sloping towards it. It gathered, rolled and broke, continuing that intermittent sound that has not varied a note since this world was a world. The sea was empty. A storm was forming in the offing and circled the horizon with banks of clouds gray and fixed. In the evening there THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. would be lightning from them ; and on the morrow, if they were only alive, William van de Velde, Ruysdael, who did not fear the wind, and Bakhuysen, who expressed nothing well but the wind, might come to watch the downs at their moment of melancholy, and the North Sea in its wrath. I came home by another route, along the new canal to the Prin- cessen-gracht. There had been races in the Maliebaan.* The crowd was still standing in the shelter of the trees, massed against the sombre background of foliage, as if the perfect turf of the hippodrome were a carpet of rare quality that must not be trampled upon. A little smaller crowd, a few black landaus under the forest shade, and I could describe to you, because I have just had it under my eyes, one of those pretty pictures by Paul Potter, so patiently worked with the needle, so ingeniously bathed with light green half-tints, such as he painted in the days when he was only half working. * The mall, an open field in the Wood, where reviews are held. II. ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL. THE Dutch School begins with the first years of the seventeenth century. By taking a slight liberty with dates, the very day of its birth might be fixed. It is the last of the great schools, perhaps the most original, cer- tainly the most local. At the same hour, under the same circum- stances, are seen to appear in conjunction two events, a new state and a new art. The origin of Dutch art has often been narrated pertinently and admirably, with its character, purpose, methods, appropriateness, its rapid growth, its unprecedented physiognomy, and particularly the sudden manner in which it was born, on the morrow of an armistice, with the nation itself, like the quick and natural blossoming of a people glad to live, and in haste to under- stand itself. I will touch upon the historical part only as a reminder, so as to come more quickly to what is of import to my subject. Holland had never possessed many national painters, and possibly to this destitution she owes the fact of counting so many in later days that belonged entirely to herself. While she was confounded with Flanders, it was Flanders that undertook to think, invent, and 124 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. paint for her. She had neither her Van Eyck nor her Memling, nor even a Roger van der Weiden. She had a momentary gleam from the school of Bruges. She can congratulate herself upon having seen the birth, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, of a native genius, in the painter engraver, Lucas van Leyden ; but Lucas van Leyden formed no school, that flash of Dutch life died with him. Just as Stuerbout (Bouts van Harlem) disappeared almost, in the style and manner of the primitive Flemish school, so Mostaert, Schoreel, Hemskerk, in spite of all their worth, are not individual talents which illustrate and characterize a country. Moreover, the Italian influence had reached all who held a brush, from Antwerp to Haarlem, and this reason was added to others to efface boundaries, mingle schools, and denationalize painters. Jan Schoreel did not even leave living pupils. The last and most illus- trious of them, the greatest portrait painter of whom Holland can boast next to Rembrandt, and by the side of Rembrandt, that cosmopolitan of such supple nature, of such virile organization, of such a fine education, and so changeable a style, but of such great talent, who preserved no trace of its origin even in his name, Antonio Moro, Hispaniarum regis pictor> as he was called, had died in 1588. Those who lived were scarcely any longer Dutchmen, nor were they better grouped, nor more capable of renewing the school. They were the engraver Golzius ; Cornelis van Harlem, in the style of Michael Angelo ; Bloemaert, the Correggian ; Mierevelt, a good characteristic painter, learned, correct, and concise, a little cold, but savoring of his time, though not much of his country, ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL. 12$ the only one, however, who was not an Italian, and who was, take notice, a portrait painter. It was the destiny of Holland to love what is like, to return to it from time to time, to survive and save itself by the portrait. However, the end of the sixteenth century approached, and, taking the portrait painters as a foundation, other painters were born or were formed. From 1560 to 1597 quite a number of these new births may be observed ; already there was a half-awakening. Thanks to many dissimilarities, and consequently to many aptitudes in dif- ferent directions, the attempts were designed according to the ten- dency, and the roads to be pursued multiplied They compelled themselves to try all things and all scales ; there was a division between the light manner and the brown manner ; the light was defended by the draughtsmen, the brown inaugurated by the color- ists and advised by the Italian Caravaggio. They entered into the picturesque, they undertook to regulate chiaroscuro. The palette and the hand became emancipated. Rembrandt already had direct forerunners. Genre painting, properly so called, released itself from the obligations of history ; very nearly the final expression of mod- ern landscape was approached. Finally, a style almost historical and profoundly national was created, the civic picture, and it was with this acquisition, the most decided of all, that the sixteenth cen- tury ended and the seventeenth began. In that order of great canvases with numerous portraits, like the doelen or regentenstukken? to follow the rigorous appellation of these Corporation or Regents' pictures. T. 126 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. particularly Dutch works, other things may be found, but none better. Here, as we see, are the germs of a school, but not yet a school. Talent is not wanting ; it abounds. Among these painters on the high road to acquire and decide, were learned artists, even one or two great painters. Moreelze, issue of Mierevelt, Jan Ravesteyn, Last- man, Pinas, Frans Hals, an incontestable master, Poelemburg, Van Schotten, Van de "V^enne, Theodore de Keyser, Honthorst, the elder Cuyp, finally, Esaias van de Velde and Van Goyen, had their names on the birth register in this year 1597. I quote their names without other explanation. You will easily recognize in this list those whom history was to remember, and you will especially distinguish the attempts they individually represent, the future masters whom they foretell, and you will understand what Holland still lacked, and what it was indispensably necessary she should possess, under penalty of letting her high hopes be lost. The moment was critical. Here there was no assured political existence, and as a result everything else was in the hands of chance ; in Flanders, on the contrary, was the same awakening, with a certainty of life that Holland was far from having acquired. Flan- ders was crammed with painters ready made or nearly so. At this very hour she was about to found another school, the second in a little more than a century, as brilliant as the first, and as a neighbor quite otherwise dangerous, for it was extraordinarily novel and dominant. It had a supportable, better inspired government, old habits, a definite and more compact organization, traditions, and a society. To the ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL. 127 impulses received from above were added the needs of luxury, and con- sequently artistic needs more exciting than ever. In a word, the most energetic stimulus and the most powerful reasons were driving Flan- ders into becoming for the second time a great centre of art. It was about to have some years of peace ; and a master to constitute the school was found. In this very year 1609, which was to decide the fate of Holland, Rubens entered upon the scene. Everything depended upon a political or military accident. Beaten and submissive, Holland was subject in every sense. Why should there be two distinct arts among the same people under one rule ? Why should there be a school at Amsterdam, and what was to be its role in a country vowed henceforth to Italo-Flemish inspi- ration ? What was to become of its vocation, so spontaneous, free, and provincial, so little fitted for a state art ? Admitting that Rembrandt would have persisted in a style very difficult to practise away from its own home, can you imagine him belonging to the Ant- werp school; which had not ceased to reign from Brabant to Fries- land, a pupil of Rubens painting for cathedrals, decorating palaces, and pensioned by archdukes? In order that the Dutch people might come into the world, and that Dutch art might be born on the same day with it, it was neces- sary and this is why their two histories are so united that there should be a revolution that should be profound and successful. It was necessary, besides, and*this was the most marked claim of Hol- land to the favors of fortune, that this revolution should have for 128 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. itself right, reason, and necessity, and that the people should deserve what they wished to obtain ; that they should be resolute, convinced, laborious, patient, heroic, wise, and without useless turbulence ; and that in every respect they should show that they were worthy to own themselves. It might be said that Providence had its eye upon this little nation, that it examined its complaints, weighed its claims, became persuaded of its force, judged that all was according to its design, and performed, when the day came, in its favor a unique miracle. War, instead of impoverishing it, enriched it ; struggles, instead of enervating, forti- fied, exalted, and tempered it. That which it had accomplished against so many physical obstacles, the sea, the inundated land, the climate, it did against the enemy. It succeeded. That which ought to have destroyed it, aided it. It had anxiety on but one point, the certainty of its existence, and it signed, thirty years apart, two treaties which first set it free and then consolidated it. There only remained, to confirm its own existence and to give to it the lustre of other prosperous civilizations, the instantaneous production of an art which consecrates it, honors and intimately represents it, and this was found to be the result of the twelve years' armistice. This result is so prompt, so decidedly the issue of the political incident to which it corresponds, that the right of having a free and national school of painting, and the certainty of having it on the morrow of the peace, seem to form a part of the stipulations of the treaty of 1609. At that very moment a lull is felt. A breath of more propitious ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL. 129 temperature has passed over men's minds, revived the soil, found germs ready to burst, and made them sprout. As always happens in spring at the North, with its sudden vegetation, and quick ex- pansion after the mortal cold of its long winter, it is truly an un- looked for spectacle to see appear, in so little time, hardly thirty years, in such a small space, upon this ungrateful and desert soil, in this dreary spot, amid the rigor of all things, such a growth of painters, and great painters. They were born everywhere at once, at Amsterdam, at Dordrecht, at Leyden, Delft, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Enkhuysen, Haarlem, some- times even beyond the frontiers, like a seed that has fallen outside the field. Two alone preceded the hour, Van Goyen, born in 1596, and Wynants in 1600. rCuyjD came in 1605. The year 1608, one of the most fruitful, saw the birth of Terburg, Brouwer, and Rembrandt, within a few months. Adrian van Ostade, the two Boths, and Ferdinand Bol were born in 1610 ; Van der Heist and Gerhard Douw, in 1613 ; Metzu, in 1615 ; Aart van der Neer, from 1613 to 1619; Wouvermans, in 1620; Weenix, Everdingen, and Pynaker, in 1621 ; Berghem, in 1624; Paul Potter illustrates the year 1625 ; Jan Steen, the year 1626 ; and the year 1630 became forever memorable for having produced, next to Claude Lorraine, the greatest landscape painter in the world, Jacob Ruysdael. Is the stem exhausted ? Not yet. Pieter de Hoogh!s birth is un- certain, but it can be placed between 1630 and 1635 ; Hobbema is a contemporary of Ruysdael ; Van der Heyden was born in 1637 ; and, finally, Adrian van de Velde, the last of all the great ones, 9 130 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. was born in 1639. The verv y ear that this late shoot sprouted, Rembrandt was thirty years old ; and, taking for a central date the year in which appeared his Lesson in Anatomy, 1632, you can state that twenty-three years after the official recognition of the United Provinces, with the exception of a few tardy members, the Dutch School attained its first blossoming. Taking history from this mo- ment, we know what to expect from the aims, character, and future destiny of the school ; but before Van Goyen and Wynants had opened the way, before Terburg, Metzu, Cuyp, Ostade, and Rem- brandt had shown what they meant to do, it might well be asked what painters were going to paint at such a time, in such a country. The revolution which had just rendered the Dutch people free, rich, and prompt for all undertakings, had despoiled them of what elsewhere formed the vital element of the great schools. It changed beliefs, suppressed needs, reduced habits, stripped walls, abolished the representation of antique fables as well as the gospel ; cut short those vast enterprises of mind and hand, church pictures, decorative pictures, and large pictures. Never did a country set before artists so singular an alternative by constraining them expressly to be original, under penalty of not existing. This was the problem: Given a .nation of burghers, practical, un- imaginative, busy, not in the least mystical, of anti-Latin mind, with traditions destroyed, with a worship without images, and parsi- monious habits, to find an art which should please it, that should seize its conventionalities, and represent it. A writer of our time, very enlightened in such matters, has wittily replied that such a ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL. 131 people had but one thing to propose, a very simple and very bold thing, and moreover the only one in which their artists had con- stantly succeeded for fifty years, and that was to require that they should paint its portrait. This phrase says everything. Dutch painting, it is quickly per- ceived, was and could be only the portrait of Holland, its exterior image, faithful, exact, complete, and like, with no embellishment. Portraits of men and places, citizen habits, squares, streets, country places, the sea and sky, such was to be, reduced to its primitive elements, the programme followed by the Dutch School, and such it was from its first day to the day of its decline. In appearance nothing can be more simple than the discovery of this art of earthly aim ; but until they tried to paint it, nothing had been imagined equally vast and more novel. At a blow everything was changed in the manner of conceiving, seeing, and rendering, point of view, ideal, poetry, choice of subject, style, and method. Italian painting in its finest moments, Flemish painting in its noblest efforts, were not a sealed letter, for they were still enjoyed ; but they were a dead letter because they were to be no longer consulted. There existed a habit of high thinking, of thinking grandly, an art that consisted in the choice of things, and in embellishing and rectifying them, which lived in the absolute rather than in the rela- tive, perceiving nature as it is, but preferring to exhibit it as it is not. Everything related more or less to the human being, depended upon it, was subordinate to it, or imitated from it, because, in fact, 132 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. certain laws of proportion and certain attributes, such as grace, force, nobility, and beauty, intelligently studied in man and reduced into a body of doctrines, could be applied equally to what was not man. Thence resulted a sort of universal humanity, or humanized universe, of which the human body, in its ideal proportions, was the prototype. In history, visions, beliefs, dogmas, myths, symbols, and emblems, the human form almost alone expressed everything that could be expressed by itself. Nature existed vaguely around this absorbing being. It was barely considered as a frame which would diminish and disappear of itself when man should take his place in it. Everything was elimination and synthesis. As it was necessary that each object should borrow its plastic form from the same ideal, nothing modified it. Then, by virtue of these laws of the historical style, it was agreed that planes should be reduced, horizons abridged ; that trees should be expressed broadly ; that the sky should be less changeable, the atmosphere more limpid and equable ; and that man should be more like himself, oftener naked than clothed, more habitu- ally of lofty stature and fair countenance, to play his r61e in the most sovereign manner. Now the theme had become more simple. It was necessary to give everything its own interest, to restore man to his proper place, and at need to dispense with him altogether. The moment had come for thinking less, for aiming less high, for more closely examin- ing, for observing better, and for painting as well, but differently. It was painting for the crowd, consisting of the citizen, the working-man, the upstart, and the first comer, entirely made for them and made ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL. 133 of them. It was necessary to become humble for humble things, little for little things, subtle for subtleties ; to welcome all without omission or disdain ; to enter into their intimacy familiarly, and affectionately into their habits ; it was to be a matter of sympathy, of attentive curiosity, and patience. Henceforth genius was to con- sist of lack of prejudice, of not knowing what one knows, of letting the model be a surprise, and only asking him how he wished to be represented. As to embellishing, never ; ennobling, never ; cor- recting, never ; they would but be so many lies or so much useless labor. Was there not, in every artist worthy of the name, an in- describable something which would undertake this care naturally and without effort ? Even within the boundaries of the Seven Provinces the field of observation is unlimited. A corner of land in the North, with its waters, woods, and maritime horizon, may be called an abridgment of the universe. In its relations to the tastes and the instincts of the observer, the smallest country, scrupulously studied, becomes an inexhaustible repertory, as crowded as life, as fertile in sensations as the heart of man is fertile in ways of feeling. The Dutch School might grow and work for a hundred years, and Holland would still have enough to satisfy the indefatigable curiosity of her painters, so long as their love for her was unextinguished. There is enough there, without going out of the pastures and polders, to gratify all inclinations. There are things made for the delicate as well as the coarse, for the melancholy, the ardent, for those who love laughing and those who care to dream. There are 134 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. dark days and joyous sunshine, level and shining seas, and black and stormy ones ; there are pastures and farms, seacoasts with their ships, / and almost always the visible movement of the air through space, and ever the great winds of the Zuyder Zee, piling up clouds, bending trees, driving before them lights and shadows, and turning windmills.^ Add to these the towns and their exteriors, existence within doors and without, the fairs, intemperance and debauchery, good-breeding and elegance ; the distresses of poverty, the horrors of winter, the disarray of taverns with tobacco, pots of beer, and laughing waiting- maids, trades and suspicious places on every floor, on one side the security of home, the benefits of labor, abundance in fertile fields, the charm of living out of doors, with business affairs, cavalcades, siestas, and hunts. Add to these public life, civic ceremonies, and civic banquets, and you will have the elements of a wholly new art with subjects as old as the world. Thence comes a most harmonious unity in the spirit of the school, and the most surprising diversity yet produced in the same spirit. The school in its entirety is called the school of genre painting. Dissect it, and you will find painters of conversations, of landscapes, animals, marines, official pictures, still life, flowers ; and in each cate- gory, almost as many subgenera as temperaments, from the pictu- resque to the ideal painters, from the copyists to the arrangers, from travellers to sedentaries, from the humorists who are amused and captivated by the human comedy, to those who flee from it ; from Brouwer and Van Ostade to Ruysdael ; from the impassive Paul Potter to the turbulent and riotous Jan Steen; from the gay and ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL. 135 witty Van de Velde, to that morose and mighty dreamer, who with- out living apart had no relations with any of them, repeated none of them, but was the summing up of them all ; who seemed to be painting his epoch, his country, his friends and himself, but who at bottom painted only one of the unknown recesses of the human soul. I speak, as you must know, of Rembrandt. From such a point of view, such a style ; and from such a style, such a method. If you omit Rembrandt, who is an exception at home as elsewhere, in his own time as in all times, you perceive but one style and one method in all the studios in Holland. The aim is to imitate what is, to make what is imitated charming, to clearly express simple, lively, and true sensations. Thus the style has the simplicity and clearness of the principle. It has for law, sincerity ; for obligation, truth. Its first condition is to be familiar, natural, and characteristic, whence results a whole of moral qualities, innocent simplicity, patient will, and directness. It might be called the trans- portation of domestic virtues from private life into the practice of art, serving equally well for good conduct and good painting. Remove from Dutch art what might be called probity, and you would no longer comprehend its vital element ; it would be im- possible afterwards to define either its morality or its style. But, even as in the most practical life there are springs of action which elevate behavior, thus in this art, reputed so positive, among these painters considered for the most part as near-sighted copyists, you feel a loftiness and goodness of soul, a tenderness for the true, a cordiality for the real, which give to their works a value that the 136 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. things themselves do not seem to have. Hence their ideality, an ideal a little misunderstood, rather despised, but indisputable for him who can seize it, and very attractive to him who knows how to relish it At times a grain of warmer sensibility makes of them thinkers, even poets, on occasion, and I will tell you in what rank in our history of art I place the style and inspiration of Ruysdael. The basis of this sincere style and the first effect of this probity is the drawing, the perfect drawing. Every Dutch painter who does not draw faultlessly is to be despised. There are some, like Paul Potter, whose genius consists in taking measures, in following a feature. Elsewhere, and in his own manner, Holbein did nothing else, which constitutes for him, within and outside of all the schools, an almost unique glory, entirely his own. Every object, thanks to the interest it offers, must be examined in its form, and drawn before it is painted. Nothing is secondary in this connection. A bit of ground with its vanishing points, a cloud with its movement, archi- tecture with its laws of perspective, a face with its expression, dis- tinctive features, passing changes, a hand with its gesture, a garment with its habitual look, an animal, with its bearing, its frame, the intimate character of its race and instincts, all these, with equal rights, form a part of this levelling art, and play, so to speak, the same part in the design. For ages it was believed, and it is still believed in many schools, that it is sufficient to extend aerial tints, to shade them sometimes with azure and sometimes with gray, to express the grandeur of spaces, the height of the zenith, and the ordinary changes of the ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL. 137 atmosphere. Now, consider that in Holland the sky is often half, and sometimes the whole picture, and that here the interest must be divided or misplaced. The sky must move and transport us, lift and excite us ; the sun must set, the moon must rise ; it must be actually day, or evening, or night ; it must be warm or cold ; one must shiver, or rejoice, or meditate in it. If the drawing applied to such problems be not the noblest of all, at least we can easily be con- vinced that it is neither without depth nor without merit. And if the science and the genius of Ruysdael and Van de Veer were doubted, the whole world might be searched in vain for a painter who could paint a sky as they did, or express so many things, and express them so well. Everywhere we find the same drawing, strict, concise, precise, natural, and simple, seemingly the fruit of daily observation, which, as I have made you understand, is skilled labor, not known to all the world. The particular charm of this ingenuous knowledge, of this experi- ence without self-conscious airs, the ordinary merit and the true style of these kindly souls, may be summed up in a word. More or less skilful they may be, but there is not one pedant among them. As to their palette, it is as good as their drawing ; it is worth neither more nor less, whence results the perfect unity of their method. All the Dutch painters paint in the same way, and no- body has painted or can paint as they did. If you examine closely a Teniers, a Breughel, or a Paul Bril, it can be seen, in spite of a certain analogy of character and aim which are nearly similar, that 138 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. neither Paul Bril, nor Breughel, nor even Teniers, the most Dutch of all the Flemings, had the Dutch education. It is a painting made with application, with order, which denotes a well-poised hand, and labor executed while sitting, which presup- poses perfect composure, and inspires it in those who study it. The mind meditated to conceive it ; the mind meditates to comprehend it. There is a certain action, easy to follow, of exterior objects upon the painter's eye, and through it upon his brain. No painting gives a clearer idea of the triple and silent operation of feeling, reflecting, and expressing. Nor is any other more condensed, because none contains more things in so little space, nor is obliged to express so much in so small a frame. From that, everything takes a more precise, more concise form, and a greater density. The color is stronger, the drawing more intimate, the effect more central, the interest better circumscribed. Never do these pictures spread out, nor do they risk being con- founded with the frame or escaping from it. The ignorance or the perfect ingenuousness of Paul Potter must be possessed, to take so little care about the organization of a picture by effect, which seems to be a fundamental law in the art of his country. All Dutch painting is concave ; that is, it is composed of curves described around a point determined by the interest, circular shad- ows around a dominant light. It is drawn, colored, and lighted like an orb with a heavy base, a tapering summit, and rounded corners converging to the centre, whence result its depth and the dis- tance from the eye of the objects reproduced in it. No painting ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL. 139 leads with greater certainty from the foreground to the distance, from the frame to the horizon. It can be dwelt in, moved about in ; you look into its depths, and lift your eyes to measure its sky. Everything contributes to this illusion, the severity of the aerial perspective, the perfect relation of color and values to the plane occupied by the object. All painting foreign to this school of open sky, of aerial surroundings, of distant effects, produces pictures which seem flat upon the canvas. With rare exceptions, Teniers, in his open-air pictures with bright scales of color, derives his style from Rubens ; he has his spirit and ardor, his rather superficial touch, his work, more elaborate than intimate ; or, to force the ex- pression, it might be said that he decorates, and does not paint profoundly. I have not said all, but I must stop. To be complete, every one of the elements of this art, so simple and so complex, should be ex- amined one after the other. The Dutch palette should be studied, and an examination made of its basis, its resources, extent, and use, to know and say why it is so reduced, almost monochromatic, and yet so rich in its results, common to all and yet varied ; why its lights are so rare and narrow, the shadows dominant ; what is the most ordinary law of that lighting which is so contrary to natural laws, especially out of doors. And it would be interesting to de- termine how much this conscientious painting contains of art, of combinations, of necessary measures, of systems almost always in- genious. Finally would come the handiwork, the skill with .tools, the care, 140 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. the extraordinary care ; the use of smooth surfaces, the thinnesf of the paints, their radiant quality, the gleam of metal and precivus stones. It would be necessary to seek out how these excellent masters divided their labor, if they painted on light or dark under- tints, or if, according to the example of the primitive schools, they colored solidly or glazed. All these questions, especially the last, have been the subject of many conjectures, and have never been elucidated nor solved. But these running notes are neither a profound study, nor a treatise, nor a course of lectures. The idea that is commonly held of Dutch painting, and that I have tried to sum up, suffices to wholly distinguish it from others, and the idea of the Dutch painter at his easel is equally true and expressive in ail points. One imagines an attentive man, a little bent, with a fresh palette, clear oil, brushes clean and fine, a reflective air, and a prudent hand, painting in a half-light, and this man is an especial enemy of dust. If they may all be judged by Gerhard Douw and Mieris, that is about what they were; the picture is like. They were possibly less fastidious than is believed, and laughed more freely than is supposed. Genius did not radiate otherwise in the professional order of their good habits. Van Goyen and Wynants, from the beginning of the century, had fixed certain laws. These lessons were transmitted from masters to pupils, and for a hundred years, with no variation, they lived on this fund. III. THE VIJVER. THIS evening, weary of reviewing so many painted canvases, of admiring and disputing with myself, I took a walk along the edge of the Vijver, or Pond. Reaching it towards the end of the day, I remained until a late hour. It is a peculiar place, very solitary, and not without melancholy at such an hour, when one is a stranger abandoned by the escort of joyous years. Imagine a great basin between straight quays and black palaces, on the right, a deserted promenade shaded with trees ; beyond, closed houses ; on the left, the Binnenhof, with its foundation in the water, its brick facade, slate roof, morose aspect, its physiognomy of another age and yet of all ages, its tragic memo- ries, and, finally, I know not what, something that belongs to certain places inhabited by history. Far away is the spire of the cathedral, hidden towards the north, already chilled by night, and drawn like a light wash of colorless tint ; in the pond a green island, and two swans swimming softly in the shadow of the banks, and tracing only very slight ripples in it ; above are swallows flying high and swiftly in the evening air. There is perfect silence, pro- 142 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND, found repose, a total forgetfulness of things present or past. Exact, but colorless reflections sink to the very bottom of the slumbering water, like the half-dead immobility of reminiscence that a far re- moved life has fixed in a memory three quarters extinct. I looked at the Museum, the Mauritshuis, which forms the southern angle of the Vijver, and terminates at this point the taciturn line of the Binnenhof, whose purple brickwork is this evening full of gloom. The same silence, the same shadow, the same desolation, envelop all the phantoms shut up in the Palace of the Stadtholders, or in the Museum. I thought of what the Mauritshuis contained, I thought of what had passed in the Binnenhof. In the first were Rembrandt and Paul Potter ; but here abode William of Orange, Barneveldt, the brothers De Witt, Maurice of Nassau, Heinsius, all memorable names. Add to them the memory of the States General, that assembly chosen by the country, within the country, from those citizens who were most enlightened, most vigilant, most resisting, most heroic ; that living part, that soul of the Dutch people which lived within these walls, and there renewed itself, ever equable and constant, holding its sittings there during the stormiest fifty years that Holland ever knew, holding its own against Spain and England, dictating conditions to Louis XIV., and without which neither William nor Maurice nor the grand Pensionaries would have been aught. To-morrow, at ten o'clock, a few pilgrims will knock at the door of the Museum. At the same hour there will be no one in the Binnenhof nor in the Buitenhof, and no one, I fancy, will visit the THE VIJVER. 143 Knights' Hall, where there are so many spiders, showing how great is its ordinary solitude. Admitting that Fame, who, it is said, watches night and day over all glory, descends here, and rests somewhere, where do you think that she arrests her flight ? Over which palace does she fold her golden wings, her weary pinions ? Over the palace of the States General, or over the house of Potter and of Rembrandt ? What a singular distri- bution of favor and forgetfulness ! Why such curiosity to see a pic- ture, and so little interest in a great public life ? Here were mighty statesmen, great citizens, revolutions, coups-d'etat, tortures, martyr- doms, controversies, intestine commotions, all those things which combine at the birth of a people, when this people belongs to another people from which it tears itself away, to a religion that it transforms, to an European political state from which it separates, and which it seems to condemn by the very fact of separation. All this history recounts ; does the country remember it ? Where do you find living echoes of these extraordinary emotions ? At the same moment a very young man was painting a bull in a pasture ; and another, to make himself agreeable to a physician, one of his friends, was representing him in a dissecting-room sur- rounded by his pupils with the scalpel in the arm of a corpse. By so doing they gave immortality to their name, their school, their century, and their country. To whom then belongs our gratitude ? To what is worthiest, to what is truest? No. To what is greatest? Sometimes. To what is most beautiful? Always. What then is the beautiful, 144 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. this great lever, this powerful moving spring, this mighty magnet, that may almost be called the sole attraction of history ? Is it nearer than any ideal on which in spite of himself man has cast his eyes ? Is the great so seductive only because it is more easy to confound it with the beautiful ? It is necessary to be very ad- vanced in morals, or very learned in metaphysics, to say of a good action or of a truth that it is beautiful. The most simple man says it of a grand deed. At bottom, we naturally love only what is beautiful. Imagination turns thither, sensibility is excited by it, all hearts precipitate themselves towards it. If we seek carefully for what the mass of mankind loves most voluntarily, it may be seen that it is not what touches, nor what convinces, nor what edifies it ; it is what charms it, and excites its wonder. Thus, when an historical personage has not in his life this element of powerful attraction, we say that he lacks something. He is understood by moralists and learned men, unknown to others. If the contrary happens, his memory is safe. A people disappears, with its laws, morals, its policy, and its conquests ; there remains of its history but one piece of marble or bronze, and that witness survives. There was a man, a very great man by his lights, his courage, his political judgment, by his public acts ; but perhaps his name might not have been known if he had not been embalmed in literature, and if some sculptor friend had not been employed by him to adorn the pediment of a temple. Another was a coxcomb, light, dissipated, witty, a libertine, valiant at times ; but he is spoken of oftener and more universally than Solon or Plato, Socrates or THE VIJVER. 145 Themistocles. Was he wiser or braver ? Did he better serve truth, justice, and the interests of his country ? He had, above all, the charm of having passionately loved the beautiful, women, books, pictures, and statues. Another was an unfortunate general, a me- diocre statesman, a heedless chief of an empire ; but he had the good luck to love one of the most seductive women in history, a woman who was, it is said, beauty itself. About ten o'clock the rain fell. It was night ; the pond gleamed almost imperceptibly, like a remnant of aerial twilight forgotten in a corner of the town. Fame did not appear. I know what may be the objections to her preferences, and it is not my purpose to judge them. IV. THE SUBJECT IN DUTCH PAINTING. ONE thing strikes you in studying the moral foundation of Dutch art, and that is the total absence of what we call now a subject. From the day when painting ceased to borrow from Italy its style, its poetry, its taste for history, for mythology and Christian legends, up to the moment of decadence, when it returned thither, from Bloemaert and De Poelemburg to Lairesse, Philippe Vandyck, and later Troost, more than a century elapsed, during which the great Dutch School appeared to think of nothing but painting well. It was content to look around it, and to dispense with imagination. Nudities, which were out of place in this representation of real life, disappeared. Ancient history was forgotten, and contemporaneous history too, which is the most singular phenomenon. There is hardly to be perceived, drowned in this vast sea of genre scenes, one picture like Terburg's Peace of Munster, or some few deeds of the maritime wars, represented by vessels cannonading each other, for instance, an Arrival of Maurice of Nassau at Scheve- ningen (Cuyp, Six Museum) ; a Departure of Charles II., from THE SUBJECT IN DUTCH PAINTING. 147 Scheveningen (June 2, 1660), by Lingelbach, and this Lingelbach is a sorry painter. The great artists hardly treated such subjects. And apart from the painters of marines, or of exclusively military pictures, not even one of them seemed to have any aptitude for treating them. Van der Meulen, that fine painter, issue by Snayers of the School of Antwerp, a thorough Fleming, though adopted by France, pensioned by Louis XIV., and the historiographer of our French glories, gave to the Dutch anecdote painters a very seductive example, followed by nobody. The great civic representations of Ravesteyn, Hals, Van der Heist, Flinck, Karel Dujardin, and others, are, as is well known, portrait pictures, where the action is unim- portant, and which, although historical documents of great interest, take no place in the history of the time. In thinking of the events contained in the history of the seven- teenth century in Holland, the gravity of the military deeds, the energy of this people of soldiers and sailors in their fights, and what they suffered, in imagining the spectacle that the country must have offered in those terrible times, one is filled with surprise to see their painting thus indifferent to what was the very life of the people. There was fighting abroad by land and by sea, on the frontiers and in the heart of the country ; at home they were tearing each other to pieces. Barneveldt was decapitated in 1619 ; the brothers De Witt were beheaded in 1672 ; fifty-three years apart, the strug- gle between the Republicans and the Orangemen was complicated with the same religious or philosophical discords, here Arminians 148 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. against Gomarites, there Voetians against Cocceians,* bringing about the same tragedies. There was a permanent war with Spain, with England, with Louis XIV. Holland was invaded ; how she defended herself is known : the peace of Munster was signed in 1648 ; the peace of Nimeguen, in 1678 ; the peace of Ryswick, in 1698. The war of the Spanish Succession opened with the new century, and it can be said that all the painters of the grand and pacific school of which I treat, died, having hardly ceased for a single day to hear the cannon. What they were doing at that time, their works show. The portrait painters painted their great warriors, their princes, their most illustrious citizens, their poets, their writers, themselves or their friends. The landscape painters inhabited the fields, dreaming, draw- ing animals, copying huts, living a farm-life, painting trees, canals, and skies, or they travelled ; they went to Italy and established a colony there, met Claude Lorraine, forgot themselves at Rome, for- got their country, and died like Karel, without recrossing the Alps. Others scarcely came out of their studios but to frequent tav- erns, to prowl about places of ill-fame, to study their manners when they did not enter into them on their own account, which rarely happened. The war did not prevent peaceful life somewhere, and into that tranquil and as it were indifferent corner they bore their easels, and pursued, with a placidity that may well surprise, their meditations, * F. Gomar, a celebrated Protestant minister of Bruges, 1563-1609, founded this sect. J. Cocceius, an Orientalist and theologian of Bremen, 1603-1669, invented a very singular system for the interpretation of the Bible. Gilbert Voet, Dutch theologian and controver- sialist, 1593-1680, rendered himself odious by his persecutions of Descartes. TR. THE SUBJECT IN DUTCH PAINTING. 149 their studies, and their charming, smiling industry. And as every- day life went on all the same, it was domestic habits, private, rustic, or urban, that they undertook to paint in spite of everything, through everything, to the exclusion of everything that caused the emotion, anguish, patriotic effort, and grandeur of their country. Not a trouble, not an anxiety, existed in this world so strangely sheltered, that this might be taken for the golden age of Holland, if history did not inform us to the contrary. Their woods are tranquil, the highways secure, boats come and go along the course of the canals ; rustic festivities have not ceased ; on the threshold of beer-shops men smoke, while dancing goes on within. There is hunting and fishing and promenading. A faint still smoke issues from the roof of the little farmhouses, where nothing savors of danger. Children go to school, and within the dwellings there are the order, peace, and imperturbable security of happy days. The seasons succeed each other ; there is skating on the waters that were navigated, fire on the hearth ; doors are closed, curtains drawn ; the asperities come from the climate and not from man. It is always the regular course of things that nothing deranges, and a permanent foundation of little daily facts with which they take so much delight in composing their excellent pictures. When a skilful painter of equestrian scenes shows us by chance a canvas where horses are charging, men fighting with pistols and swords, where they are stamping, struggling, and exterminating each other quite fiercely, all this takes place in spots where war is out of place, and danger not at home. These murders savor of fantastic 150 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. anecdote, and it is perceived that the painter was not greatly moved by them himself. It was the Italians, Berghem, Wouvermans, Lingel- bach, the not over truthful painters of the picturesque, who perchance amused themselves by painting these things. Where did they see these fights ? on this side of, or beyond the mountains ? There is something of Salvator Rosa, minus the style, in these simulated skirmishes or grand battles, whose cause, moment, and theatre are unknown ; nor is it very clear who are the parties en- gaged. The titles of the pictures themselves indicate sufficiently the part played by the imagination of the painters. The Hague Museum possesses two great pages, very fine and very bloody, where the blows fall thick, and wounds are not spared. One, by Berghem, a very rare picture, astonishingly well executed, a tour de force in action, tumult, the admirable order of the effect, and the per- fection of the details, a canvas not at all historical, bears for title, A Convoy Attacked in a Mountain Pass. The other, one of the largest pictures that Wouvermans has signed, is entitled A Great Battle. It recalls the picture at the Munich Pinacothek, known as the Battle of Nordlingen ; but there is nothing more de- cided in this, and the historically national value of this very remark- able work is no better established than the veracity of Berghem's picture. Everywhere, besides, there are episodes of brigandage or anony- mous fights which certainly were not lacking among them, and yet they all have the appearance of being painted from hearsay, during or after their journeys in the Apennines. THE SUBJECT IN DUTCH PAINTING. 151 Dutch history has not marked at all or so little that it amounts to nothing the painting of those troubled times, and seems not to have agitated the mind of the painters for a single moment. Note, more- over, that even in such of their painting as is properly picturesque and anecdotic, there is not the slightest anecdote to be perceived. There is no well-determined subject, not one action that requires reflection upon the composition or is expressive or particularly signifi- cant. No invention, no scene which trenches upon the uniformity of this existence of the fields or the town, commonplace, vulgar, devoid of pursuits, of passions, one might almost say of sentiment. Drinking, smoking, dancing, and kissing maids cannot be called very rare or attractive incidents. Nor are milking cows, taking them to water, and loading haycarts, notable accidents in a life of husbandry. One is forever tempted to question these indifferent and phlegmatic painters, and to ask them, Is there then nothing new ? nothing in your barns and farms, nothing in your houses ? There has been a high wind ; has it destroyed nothing ? There has been a thunder- storm; has the lightning struck nothing, neither your fields, nor roofs, nor laborers ? Children are born ; are there no birthdays ? They die ; is there no mourning ? You marry ; are there no decent rejoicings ? Do they never weep among you ? You have all been lovers, but how do we know it ? You have suffered, you have pitied the misery of others, you have had before your eyes all the wounds, the pains, the calamities of human life ; where can it be discovered that you have had one day of 'tenderness, of sorrow, or true pity? Your time, like all others, has seen quarrels, passions, jealousies, gal- 152 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. lant intrigues, and duels ; what do you show us of all those ? Plenty of libertine behavior, drunkenness, coarseness, sordid idleness ; people who embrace as if they were fighting, and here and there fisticuffs and kicks exchanged in the exasperation of wine and love. You love chil- dren, you flog them, they do mischief in a corner, and such are your family pictures. Compare epochs and countries. I do not speak of the contem- porary German School, nor of the English School, where everything was subject, art, intention, as in their dramas, comedies, and farces, where painting is too impregnated with literature, since it lives but for that and in the eyes of certain people dies of it, but take a catalogue of a French exhibition, read the titles of the pictures, and then look over those of the museums at Amsterdam and the Hague. In France every picture which has not a title, and consequently contains no subject, runs a great risk of being reckoned as a work neither considered nor serious ; and that is not only for to-day, it has been so for a hundred years. Since the day when Greuze imagined the picture of sentiment, and with the great applause of Diderot conceived a picture as a scene in a theatre is conceived, and put into painting the homely dramas of the family, since that day what do we see ? Has genre painting in France done anything but invent scenes, compel history, illustrate literature, paint the past, paint the present but little, contemporary France very little indeed, and give us a great many curiosities of foreign manners and climates ? It suffices to cite names to revive a long series of piquant and beautiful works, ephemeral or ever celebrated, all signifying some- THE SUBJECT IN DUTCH PAINTING. 153 thing, representing all sorts of facts and sentiments, expressing pas- sions or relating anecdotes, all having their principal person and their hero, Granet, Bonington, Leopold Robert, Delaroche, Ary Scheffer, Roqueplan, Decamps, Delacroix, I stop with the dead artists. Do you remember the Francis I., Charles V., the Due de Guise, Mignon, Margaret, The Lion Lover, the Vandyck at Lon- don ; all the pages borrowed from Goethe, Shakespeare, Byron, and Walter Scott, and from the history of Venice ; the Hamlets, Yoricks, Macbeths, Mephistopheles, Polonius, The Giaour, Lara, Goetz de Berlichingen, The Prisoner of Chillon, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, The Bishop of Liege, and then The Foscari, Marino Faliero and The Boat of Don Juan, and yet again The History of Samson, The Cimbri, preceding the oriental curiosities ? And since, if we prepare a list of the genre pictures that have year by year charmed, moved, and impressed us, from the Scenes of the Inquisition, and the Colloquy of Poissy, to Charles V. at St. Just, if we recall, I say, in these last thirty years, whatever the French School has produced most striking and honorable in genre painting, we shall find that the dramatic, pathetic, romantic, historical, or sentimental element has contributed almost as much as the painters' talent to the success of their works. Do you perceive anything like this in Holland ? The catalogues are desperately insignificant and vague. The Spinner with Cattle at the Hague, of Dujardin ; of Wouvermans, The Arrival at the Inn, The Halt of the Hunters, The Country Riding School, The Hay Wagon (a celebrated picture), A Camp, The Hunters' Rest, etc. ; 154 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. of Berghem, A Boar Hunt, An Italian Ford, A Pastoral, etc. ; of Metzu, we have The Hunter, The Lovers of Music ; of Terburg, The Despatch ; and so on with Gerhard Douw, Ostade, Mieris, even with Jan Steen, the most wide-awake of all, and the only one who, by the profound or gross meaning of his anecdotes, is an inventor, an ingenious caricaturist, a humorist of the family of Hogarth, and a literary painter, almost a comic author in his facetiousness. The finest works are concealed under titles of the same platitude. The fine Metzu of the Van der Hoop Museum is called The Hunter's Gift, and no one would suspect that the Rest by the Farm desig- nates an incomparable Paul Potter, the pearl of the d'Aremberg Gallery. We know what is meant by the Bull of Paul Potter, and the still more celebrated Cow Admiring Herself, or the Cow of St. Petersburg. As to the Anatomical Lecture, and the Night Watch, I may be permitted to think that the significance of the subject is not what assures to these two works the immortality which they have acquired. It seems, then, that everywhere but in the Dutch School are to be found gifts of the heart and mind, sensibility, tenderness, gener- ous sympathy for the dramas of history, extreme experience of those of life, pathos, power to move, interest, unexpectedness, and in- struction. And the school which has most exclusively occupied itself with the real world seems the one of all that has most de- spised moral interest, and while it is also the one which has most passionately devoted itself to the study of the picturesque, it seems less than any other to have discovered its living springs. THE SUBJECT IN DUTCH PAINTING. 1 55 What reason had a Dutch painter to make a picture ? None ; and observe that no one ever asked him to do it. A peasant with a nose swollen with wine looks at you with his big eye, and laughs with all his teeth showing, while he lifts his jug ; if the thing is well painted, it has its price. With us, if a subject is lacking, there must be at least a true and lively sentiment and a percepti- ble emotion in the painter to take its place. A landscape not strongly tinted with the colors of a man is a failure. We do not know, as Ruysdael did, how to make a picture of the rarest beauty, of a stream of foaming water falling between brown rocks. An animal in the pasture which has not its idea, as peasants say of the instinct of brutes, is a thing not to be painted. A very original painter of our time, an elevated soul, a sorrowful spirit, a good heart, and a truly rural nature, has spoken of the country and its country folk, of the asperity, the melancholy, and the nobility of their labor, things that no Hollander would ever have thought of finding.* He has said them in a slightly barbar- ous language, and in formulas where the thought has more vigor and clearness than the hand. We have been infinitely grateful to him for his tendencies ; we have seen in him in French painting something like the sensibility of a Burns less skilful in making him- self understood. To sum up the account, has he, or has he not made and left fine pictures ? Have his form and his language, I mean the exterior envelope without which the works of the spirit neither are nor live, have they the qualities necessary to consecrate * Jean Franjois Millet. TR. 156 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. him as a fine painter, and assure his living for a long time ? He is a profound thinker beside Paul Potter and Cuyp, he is an attractive dreamer compared to Terburg and Metzu ; he has something in- contestably noble when we think of the trivialities of Steen, of Ostade, and of Brouwer ; as a man he can put them all to the blush, but as a painter does he equal them ? What is the conclusion ? you ask. First, is it necessary to conclude ? France has shown much in- ventive genius, but few of the truly pictorial faculties. Holland has imagined nothing, but she has painted miraculously well. This is certainly a great difference. Does it follow that we must absolutely choose between the qualities which are opposite in two peoples, as if there were between them a certain contradiction which would render them irreconcilable? I really do not know exactly. Till now the thought has truly sustained only great plastic works. In reducing itself to enter into works of medium order, it seems to have lost its virtue. Sensibility has saved some of them ; curiousness has destroyed a great number ; mind has ruined them all. Is this the conclusion to be drawn from the preceding observa- tions ? Certainly another might be found, but to-day I do not per- ceive it V. PAUL POTTER. WITH the Anatomical Lecture and the Night Watch, Paul Potter's Bull is the most celebrated thing in Holland. The Hague Museum owes to it a large part of the curiosity of which it is the object. It is not the largest of Paul Potter's canvases, but it is at least the only one of his large pictures which merits serious attention. The Bear Hunt in the Amsterdam Museum, supposing it to be authentic, and separating it from the repainting which disfigures it, was never any- thing but the extravagance of a youth, the grossest error he ever committed. The Bull is priceless. Estimating it according to the actual value of the works of Paul Potter, no one doubts that if it were put up for sale it would attain in the markets of Europe a fabulous price. Is it, then, a fine picture ? Not at all. Does it deserve the impor- tance attached to it ? Unquestionably. Is Paul Potter, then, a very great painter ? Very great. Does it follow that he paints as well as is supposed ? Not precisely. There is in this a misunderstanding that it would be well to dispel. On the day when the fictitious markets of which I speak shall be opened, and consequently one will have the right to discuss without 158 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. regard to merits this famous work, if any one dared to express the truth, he would say about what follows : " The reputation of the picture is at once very much exaggerated and very legitimate ; it results from an ambiguity. It is considered as an exceptional page of painting, which is an error. It is thought to be an example to be followed, a model to copy, in which ignorant generations can learn the technical secrets of their art. In that there is also a mistake, the greatest mistake of all. The work is ugly, and unconsidered ; the painting is monotonous, thick, heavy, pale, and dry. The arrangement is of the utmost poverty. Unity is wanting in this picture which begins nobody knows where, has no end, re- ceives the light without being illuminated, distributes it at random, escapes everywhere, and comes out of the frame, so entirely does it seem to be painted flat upon the canvas. It is too full without being entirely occupied. Neither lines, nor color, nor distribution of effect give it those first conditions of existence indispensable to every well-regulated work. The animals are ridiculous in form. The dun cow with a white head is built of some hard substance. The sheep and the ram are modelled in plaster. As to the shepherd, no one defends him. Two parts only of the picture seem made to be understood, the wide sky and the huge bull. The cloud is in its true place ; it is lighted and colored as it should be, where it is ap- propriate to the needs of the principal object, which it is made to accompany, to give value to its relief. By a wise understanding of the law of contrasts, the painter has greatly lowered the tone of the light colors and the dark shadows of the animal. The darkest PAUL POTTER. 159 part is opposed to the light part of the sky, and that which is most energetic and most trenchant in the brute to what is most limpid in the atmosphere ; but this is hardly a merit, given the simplicity of the problem. The rest is an accompaniment that might be cut out without regret, greatly to the advantage of the picture." This may seem a rough criticism, but it is exact. And yet public opinion, less punctilious or more clairvoyant, would say that the sig- nature was well worth the price. Public opinion is never wholly mistaken. By uncertain roads, often by the best selected ones, it arrives finally at the expression of a true sentiment. When it is given to some one, the motives, by virtue of which it is given, are not always the best, but there are always other good reasons found, by virtue of which it has been given wisely. It makes mistakes in titles, sometimes it takes faults for merits ; it prizes a man for his way of working, which is the least of his merits ; it may believe that a painter paints well when he paints badly, because he paints minutely. What amazes in Paul Potter is the imitation of objects pushed to an extreme. It is ignored or it is not noticed in such a case that the painter's soul is worth more than the work, and his manner of feeling infi- nitely superior to the result. When he painted the Bull in 1647, Paul Potter was only twenty- three years old. He was a very young man, and according to what is common among men of twenty-three, he was a mere child. To what school did he belong ? To none. Had he had masters ? No other teachers of his are known but his father, Pieter Simonsz 160 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. Potter, an obscure painter, and Jacob de Weth, of Haarlem, who also had not knowledge enough to act upon a pupil either for good or evil Paul Potter found then, either around his cradle or in the studio of his second master, nothing but simple advice and no doc- trines ; but, strange to say, the pupil asked nothing further. Till 1647 Paul Potter lived between Amsterdam and Haarlem, that is between Frans Hals and Rembrandt, in the heart of the most active, the most stirring art, the richest in celebrated masters, that the world has ever known, except in Italy in the preceding century. Teach- ers were not wanting ; there was only the embarrassment of choice. Wynants was forty-six years old ; Cuyp forty-two ; ferburg thirty- nine ; Ostade thirty-seven ; Metzu thirty-two ; Wouvermans twenty- seven ; Berghem, who was about his own age, was twenty-three. Many of them, even the youngest, were members of the brotherhood of St. Luke. Finally, the greatest of all, and the most illustrious, Rembrandt, had already produced the Night Watch, and he was a master who might have been a temptation. But what did Paul Potter do? How did he isolate himself in the heart of this rich and crowded school, where practical skill was extreme, talent uni- versal, the manner of rendering rather similar, and yet, an exqui- site thing in those beautiful days, the manner of feeling so very individual? Had he co-disciples? None are seen. His friends are unknown. He was born, but we hardly know the year with exactitude. He awoke early ; at fourteen years signed a charming etching ; at twenty-two, though ignorant on many points, he was of unexampled maturity in others. He labored, and produced work PAUL POTTER. l6l upon work, and some of them were admirable. He accumulated them in a few years with haste and abundance, as if death was at his heels, and yet with an application and a patience which make this prodigious labor seem a miracle. He was married at an age young for another, very late for him, for it was on July 3, 1650, and on August 4, 1654, four years after, death took him, possessing all his glory, but before he had learned his trade. What could be simpler, briefer, more complete ? Take genius and no lessons, brave study, an ingenuous and learned production resulting from attentive observation and reflection, add to this a great natural charm, the gentleness of a meditative mind, the application of a conscience burdened with scruples, the melancholy inseparable from solitary labor, and possibly the sadness of a man out of health, and you have nearly imagined Paul Potter. With the exception of the charm, in this respect the Bull at the Hague represents him wonderfully. It is a great study, too great from the point of view of good sense, but not too great for the re- search which was its object, and for the instruction the painter derived from it. Remember that Paul Potter, when compared with his brilliant contemporaries, was ignorant of all the cleverness of his trade. I do not speak of the tricks which his candor never suspected. He studied especially forms and their aspects, in their absolute sim- plicity. The least artifice was an embarrassment that would have disturbed him because it would have altered the clear sight of things. A great bull in a vast plain, a wide sky, and, so to speak, ii 162 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. no horizon, what could be a better occasion for a student to learn once for all a crowd of very difficult things, and to know them, as they say, "by rule and measure ? The movement is simple, none was necessary, the gesture true, the head admirably living. The animal shows its age, its type, its character, temperament, length, height, joints, bones, muscles, its hide rough or smooth, tangled or curled, its loose or tight skin, all in perfection. The head, the eye, the shoulders, the fore quarters, are from the point of view of a very simple and powerful observer, and are a very rare piece of work, perhaps unequalled. I do not say that the subject is beautiful, or the color well chosen ; but matter and color are here too visibly subordinate to the preoccupation of form, for much to be expected in this regard, when the draughtsman has given us almost every- thing in another. There is more ; the very tone, and the work upon those parts that are violently observed, result in rendering nature as it really is, in its relief, its shadows, its power, almost its mys- teries themselves. It is not possible to have a more circumscribed but most decided aim, or to attain it with more success. It is called Paul Potter's Bull, but I affirm that that is not enough ; it might be called trie Bull, and in my idea that would be the greatest eulo- gium that could be pronounced upon this work so commonplace in its weak parts, and yet so conclusive. Almost all the pictures of Paul Potter have the same quality. In most of them he proposes to himself to study some characteristic accident of nature, or some new part of his art, and you can be cer- tain that on that day he succeeded in knowing, and instantaneously PAUL POTTER. 163 rendering what he had learned. The Field, in the Louvre, of which the principal object, the rusty gray ox, is the reproduction of a study which was often to serve him, is also a very weak or a very strong" picture, according as it is taken for a page from a master or for a magnificent exercise by a scholar. The Field with Cattle, of the Hague Museum, Shepherds and their Flock, and Orpheus charm- ing the Animals, of the Amsterdam Museum, are, each in its own kind, an occasion of study, a pretext for study, and not, as one might be tempted to believe, one of those conceptions in which imagi- nation plays the least rdle. They are animals closely examined, grouped without much art, drawn in simple attitudes, or in diffi- cult foreshortening, never in a very complicated or very striking effect. The labor is thin, hesitating, sometimes painful. The touch is a little infantine. Paul Potter's eye, of a singular exactness, and a penetration that nothing wearies, details, scrutinizes, expresses to excess, never is fatigued, and never stops. Paul Potter ignores the art of sacrifices, and he has not yet learned that things must be sometimes understood and but half expressed. You recognize the ur- gency of his brush, and the distracting embroidery which he employs to render the compact foliage and thick grass of the fields. His talent as a painter is the result of his talent as an engraver. To the end of his life, in his most perfect works, he never ceased to paint as one works with a burin. The tool becomes more supple, and lends itself to other uses, but under the thickest paint one continues to feel the fine point, the sharp-edged notches, and the biting touch. 1 64 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND, It is only gradually, with effort, by a progressive and entirely personal education, that he learns to manage his palette like other people ; but p as soon as he succeeds he is superior. By choosing certain pictures, of dates comprised between 1647 and 1652, the movement of his mind can be followed, as well as the mean- ing of his studies and the nature of his investigations, and nearly to a moment the almost exclusive preoccupation in which he was plunged. Thus the painter may be seen separating himself little by little from the draughtsman, his color becoming more decided, his pal- ette taking on a more learned arrangement ; finally, chiaroscuro is born of itself in it, like a discovery for which this innocent spirit is indebted to no one. The extensive menagerie collected around a charmer in doublet and boots, who is playing the lute, and is called Orpheus, is the ingenious effort of a young man who is a stranger to all the secrets of his school, but who is studying the varied effects of half-tint upon the hair of animals. It is weak, but learned ; the observation is just, the workmanship timid, the design charming. In the Field with Cattle the result is still better ; the atmosphere is excellent, the method alone has persisted in its infantine equality. The Cow Admiring Herself is a study of light, of full light, made about noon of a summer day. It is a very celebrated picture, and, believe me, extremely weak, disconnected, complicated with a yel- lowish light, which, although studied with unheard-of patience, has on that account neither more interest nor more truth. It is full PAUL POTTER. 165 of uncertainty in its effect, and executed with an application which betrays difficulty. I would omit this student's exercise, one of the least successful he has attempted, if even in this unfruitful effort one did not recognize the admirable sincerity of a mind which is seeking something, which does not know everything, but wants to know everything, and becomes all the more fierce in the pursuit because his days are numbered. On the other hand, without leaving the Louvre and the Nether- lands, I will mention two of Paul Potter's pictures that are by a con- summate painter, and which are also decidedly works in the highest and rarest acceptation of the word ; and, what is remarkable, one of them is dated 1647, the very year in which he signed the Bull. I mean the Little Inn at the Louvre, catalogued under the title, Horses at the Door of a Cottage, No. 399. It is an evening effect. Two horses loosened from the vehicle, but harnessed, have stopped before a trough ; one is bay, the other white ; the white one is ex- hausted. The carter has just drawn water from the river ; he climbs the bank with one arm lifted, while the other is holding a bucket, and he is relieved in soft outline against a sky whence gleams are cast by the setting sun. It is unique in sentiment and design, in the mystery of the effect, in the beauty of the tone, in the delicious and spiritual intimacy of the work. The other, painted in 1653, the year that preceded Paul Potter's death, is a wonderful masterpiece from every point of view, ar- rangement, picturesque touches, acquired knowledge, persistent sim- plicity, firmness of drawing, force in workmanship, clearness of eye, 166 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. and charm of hand. The d'Aremberg Gallery, which owns this precious jewel, contains nothing more valuable. These two incom- parable works prove, if they alone are regarded, what Paul Potter intended to do, and what he certainly would have done with more breadth if he had had the time. This, then, is what may be said, that what experience Paul Potter acquired, he owed only to himself. He learned from day to day, every day ; let us not forget that the end came before he had done learning. As he had no master he had no pupils. His life was too short to permit any teaching. Moreover, what would he have taught ? His way of drawing ? That is an art which recommends itself, but which can hardly be taught. Arrangement and the knowl- edge of effect ? He was hardly sure of them in his last days. Chiaro- scuro ? It was taught in all the studios of Amsterdam much better than he practised it himself, for it was the one thing, as I have said, that the sight of Dutch fields had revealed to him only after a long time, and very rarely. The art of composing a palette ? It can be seen how much trouble it caused him to become master of his own. And as to practical skill, he was no better able to recommend it than his works were made to give a proof of it. Paul Potter painted fine pictures which were not all fine models ; or rather he gave good examples, and his whole life was but a piece of excellent advice. More than any painter of that honest school, he spoke of simplicity, patience, circumspection, persevering love for truth. His precepts were perhaps the only ones that he had received, certainly they were PAUL POTTER. l6/ the only ones that he could transmit. All his originality came from them, and his grandeur also. With a lively taste for country life, a soul very frank, tranquil, and unbeset by storms, no nerves, a profound and healthy sensibility, an admirable eye, a feeling for proportion, a taste for things clearly defined and well established, he was learned in the equilibrium of forms, understanding the exact relation between quantities, and pos- sessing the instinct of anatomy ; finally, he was a constructor of the first order ; in everything he showed that virtue which one of the masters of our day calls the probity of talent. He had a native preference for drawing, but such an appetite for perfection, that later he meant to paint well, and had already succeeded in painting excellently ; he showed an astonishing division in his labor, an im- perturbable coolness in effort, and was of an exquisite nature, to judge from his sad and suffering countenance, such was this young man, unique in his time, always unique whatever may hap- pen ; and thus he appeared from his gropings till he reached his masterpieces. How rare it is to surprise a genius, sometimes without talent ; and what happiness to thus admire an ingenuous being who had only one good fortune at his birth, the love of the true and a pas- sion for the best ! VI. TERBURG, METZU, AND PIETER DE HOOGH AT THE LOUVRE. WHEN Holland has not been visited, but the Louvre is well known, is it possible to form a just idea of Dutch art ? Certainly it is. With here and there a rare hiatus, a painter almost wholly wanting, and another whose best works are not present (and this list would be a short one), the Louvre offers us, concerning the school as a whole, its spirit, its character, its perfections, the diversity of its styles, with one exception, the Corporation or Regent pictures, an historical compendium nearly complete, and consequently an inexhaustible fund of study. Haarlem possesses for its own a painter whom we knew only by name before he was revealed to us, quite recently, by a hearty and very merited favor. This man is Frans Hals ; and the tardy en- thusiasm of which he is the object would hardly be understood out- side of Haarlem and Amsterdam. Jan Steen is hardly more familiar to us. He is an unattrac- tive spirit who must be visited at home, cultivated near at hand, with whom one must converse often not to be too shocked by his rough sallies and by his licenses. He is, however, less rash than he TERBURG, METZU, AND DE HOOGH AT THE LOUVRE. 169 seems, less coarse than one would believe ; very unequal, because he paints at random, after drinking as well as before. In short, it is well to know the value of Jan Steen when he is sober, and the Louvre gives but a very imperfect idea of his temperance and his great talent. Van de Meer is almost unrepresented in France ; and as he has phases of observation strange even in his own country, the journey would not be useless if one desired to be well informed upon this individuality in Dutch art. Apart from these discoveries, and several others of not much importance, there are no very notable ones to be made outside of the Louvre and its annexes, I mean by that, certain French collections which have the value of a museum in their choice- ness of names and in the beauty of their specimens. It might be said that Ruysdael has painted for France, so numerous are his works in that country, and so evident is it that he is enjoyed and respected. To divine the native genius of Paul Potter or the broad power of Cuyp, some effort of induction would be necessary, but it ' might be accomplished. Hobbema might have confined himself to painting the Mill at the Louvre ; and he would certainly gain if he were only known by this masterly page. As to Metzu, Terburg, the two Ostades, and especially Pieter de Hoogh, one might well be con- tent to see them at Paris, and nowhere else. I have also long believed and it is an opinion here confirmed that some one of us would render a great service in writing a Journey through the Louvre, or even less, a Journey through the Salon Carre", or still less, a simple Journey through several pictures, among which I/O THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. would be chosen, I suppose, Metzu's Visit, Terburg's Soldier and Young Woman, and Pieter de Hoogh's Dutch Interior. Assuredly this would be, without going very far, a curious explora- tion, and for our day important in instruction. I believe that an en- lightened critic who would undertake to reveal all that these three pictures contain would astonish us greatly by the abundance and nov- elty of his observations. We should be convinced that the most mod- est work of art might serve as a text for a long analysis, that study is a labor rather in depth than extent, that it is not necessary to enlarge its boundaries to increase its penetrating force, and that very great laws exist in a very little object. Who has ever defined, in its intimate character, the manner of these three painters, the best, the most learned draughtsmen of their school, at least as regards figures ? The German Foot- Soldier of Terburg, for instance, this stout man in his harness, with his cui- rass, his doublet of buff, his great sword, his funnel-shaped boots, his felt hat thrown on the ground, his fat face illumined, ill-shaved, and sweaty, with his sleek hair, his little moist eyes, and his large hand dimpled and sensual, offering some pieces of gold, the gesture of which enlightens us sufficiently upon the sentiments of this per- sonage and the object of his visit, this figure, one of the finest Dutch works that the Louvre owns, what do we know about it ? Certainly it has been said that it was lifelike, that the expression was most true, and that the painting was excellent. Excellent is not very conclusive, we must admit, when we want to know the why and wherefore of things. Why excellent? Is it because TERBURG, METZU, AND DE HOOCH AT THE LOUVRE. 1 71 Nature is imitated in it in such a way that one seems to surprise her in the very act ? Is it because no detail is omitted ? Is it because the painting is smooth, simple, clean, limpid, charming to see, easy to understand, and that it is faulty neither from minuteness nor by negli- gence ? How does it happen that since the beginning of the practice of painting figures costumed in their ordinary way, in a fixed attitude, and certainly posing before the painter, no one has ever drawn, modelled, or painted like this ? Where do you perceive the drawing, if not in the result, which is quite extraordinary in its naturalness, truth, breadth, and reality without excess ? Can you find a feature, a contour, an accent, a single mark, which denotes the rule or measure ? Those shoulders, diminishing in their perspective and curve ; that long arm, poised on the thigh, so perfectly within its sleeve ; that stout round body, belted high, so exact in its thickness, so vague in its exterior limits ; those two supple hands, which, increased to the natural size, would have the astonishing appearance of being modelled, do you not find that all this is poured at once into a mould which does not at all resemble the angular accents, timid or presumptuous, uncertain or geometrical, in which modern design is ordinarily enclosed ? Our time is rightly honored for possessing observers of merit who draw strongly, delicately, and well. I could cite one who character- istically draws an attitude, a movement, a gesture, a hand with its planes, its bones, its action and contraction, so that for this merit alone and he has greater ones he would be incontestably a mas- ter in our present school. Compare his sharp, clever, expressive, 1/2 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. energetic point to the almost impersonal drawing of Terburg. In the former you perceive formulas, a science thoroughly possessed, an acquired knowledge that comes to the aid of study, supports it, if necessary could supply its place, and which, so to speak, dictates to the eye what it should see and to the mind what it ought to feel. In the latter there is nothing of the kind, but an art which bends itself to the character of things, a knowledge which forgets itself before the individualities of life, nothing preconceived, nothing which takes precedence of the simple, powerful, and sensitive observation of what exists, so that it might be said that the eminent painter * of whom I speak has a design, while it is impossible to perceive at a glance what is that of Terburg, Metzu, or Pieter de Hoogh. Go from one to the other. After having examined the gallant soldier of Terburg, pass on to this thin personage, a trifle affected in his gravity, of another society, and already of another age, who presents himself with some ceremony, standing and saluting like a person of quality this delicate woman with the thin arms and nervous hands, who receives him in her house without thought of offence. Then stop before the Interior, by Pieter de Hoogh ; enter into this deep, stifled picture, so shut up, where the light sifts through, where there is fire, silence, a charming comfort, a lovely mystery ; and examine closely the woman with the shining eyes, red lips, dainty teeth, and this great boy, a sort of blockhead, who makes you think of Moli^re, an emancipated son of M. Diaforus, standing straight upon his spindle legs, awkward in his fine stiff clothes, quite unused to his rapier, * Meissonier (?). TR. TERBURG, METZU, AND DE HOOGH AT THE LOUVRE. 1/3 maladroit in his false perpendicular, occupied entirely with what he is doing, so marvellously created that he can never be forgotten. Here, too, is the same hidden knowledge, the same anonymous design, the same incomprehensible mixture of nature and art. Not a shade of preconceived ideas in this expression of things so ingenuously sin- cere that the formula cannot be grasped, no "chic" at all, which means, in studio phrase, no bad habits, no ignorance affecting knowing airs, and not one mania. Make an attempt if you know how to hold a pencil ; copy the features of these three figures, try to put them in their place, set yourself the difficult task of making from this indecipherable picture an extract which shall contain its drawing. Try to do the same with modern designers, and perhaps, without other information, you will yourself discover, as you succeed with the moderns and fail with the old masters, that there is a whole abyss of art between them. The same astonishment seizes you when the other parts of this model art are studied. The color, the chiaroscuro, the modelling of the well-filled surfaces, the play of the surrounding air, finally, the workmanship, that is to say, the operations of the hand, all are perfection and mystery. Taking the execution superficially alone, do you find that it resem- bles what has been done since ? and do you think that our way of painting has advanced or is behind that ? In our days and should I be the one to say it ? we have one of two things : either a man paints with care, and does not always paint very well ; or he puts more cleverness into it, and scarcely paints at all. The work is 174 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. either heavy and abridged, clever and careless, sensitive and very much shirked, or it is conscientious, thoroughly explained, rendered according to the laws of imitation ; and no one, not even those who practise it, would venture to declare that this painting is more perfect on account of its scrupulosity. Each one plies his trade according to his own taste, degree of ignorance or education, the heaviness or subtlety of his nature, according to his moral and physical com- plexion, his blood, and his nerves. We have execution that is lym- phatic, nervous, robust, weak, fiery or orderly, impertinent or timid, simply good, which is called tiresome, ^or exclusively sensitive, which is called without depth. In short, there are as many styles and formulas as there are individuals, as to drawing, color, and the ex- pression of everything else by the action of the hand. There are discussions of some vivacity to know which of these so diverse executions is correct. Conscientiously speaking, no one is exactly wrong, but the facts testify that no one is fully right. The truth which would harmonize us all remains to be demon- strated, and would consist in establishing that painting is a craft to be learned, and consequently can be and ought to be taught, an elementary method which also can and ought to be transmitted ; that this craft and method are as necessary in painting as the art of good expression or good writing is necessary to those who use speech or the pen ; that there is no reason why these elements should not be common to us all ; that to pretend to be distinguished by the garment, when in person people are undistinguished, is a poor and vain fashion of proving that one is somebody. Formerly it was TERBURG, METZU, AND DE HOOCH AT THE LOUVRE. 175 quite the contrary ; and the proof of it is in the perfect unity of the schools, where the same family air belonged to such distinct and lofty personalities. This family air resulted from an education, sim- ple, uniform, well understood, and, as can be seen, extremely salutary. Now, what was this education of which we have not preserved a single trace? This is what I would wish should be taught, and this I have never heard said from the rostrum, nor in a book, nor in lectures on aes- thetics, nor in oral lessons. It would be one way of professional teaching in an epoch when almost all professional teachings are given except this particular one. Let us not weary of studying together these beautiful models. Look at this flesh, these heads, these hands, these bare throats ; remark their suppleness, their amplitude, their truth of coloring almost without color, their compact thin tissue so dense and yet so little loaded. Examine in the same way their appointments, the satins, furs, cloths, velvets, silks, felts, plumes, swords, the gold, the embroideries, the carpets, backgrounds, beds with hangings, the floors so perfectly smooth and so perfectly solid. See how alike all this is in Terburg and Pieter de Hoogh, and yet how everything differs, how the hand works in the same way, how the coloring has the same elements, and yet how the subject of the latter is enveloped, receding, veiled, profound ; how the half-tint transforms, darkens, and makes distant all the parts of this admirable canvas ; how it gives to objects their mystery, their spirit, a sense still more moving, a warmer and more inviting intimacy ; while in Terburg, things pass 1/6 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. with less concealment, true daylight is everywhere ; the bed is hardly hidden by the sombre color of the hangings ; the modelling is like nature, firm, full, shaded with simple tones, but slightly trans- formed, only selected, so that color, execution, evidence of tone, evi- dence of fact, are all in accord to express that with such people as these there were necessary neither roundabout ways, nor circum- locutions, nor half-tints. And observe that in Pieter de Hoogh as in Metzu, in the most reserved as in the most communicative of these three famous painters, you can always distinguish one part of senti- ment, which is their own and is their secret, and another part of method and education received, which is common to them and is the secret of the school Do you find that they color well, though one colors principally in gray and the other in brown or dark gold ? and do you not decide that their color has more brilliancy than ours, at the same time that it is duller in hue ; that it has more richness, though it is more neu- tral ; that it has far more power, while containing much less visible force ? When by chance you perceive in an ancient collection a modern genre picture, even one of the best, and in every relation the most strongly conceived, answer me, is it not something like an image, that is to say, a painting which makes an effort to be colored and is not sufficiently so, to be painted and yet is airy and empty, to have con- sistency and yet does not attain it always, either by its heaviness when it is thick, or by the enamel of its surfaces when by chance it is thin ? On what does this depend ? for it is enough to fill with TERBURG, METZU, AND DE HOOGH AT THE LOUVRE. I// consternation the men of instinct, sense, and talent, who may be struck with these differences. Are we much less gifted ? Perhaps. Less faithful seekers ? Quite the contrary. We are, above all, less well educated. Suppose that by a miracle which is not sufficiently prayed for, and which, even if it were implored as it should be, will probably not happen in France, a Metzu or a Pieter de Hoogh should be re- suscitated among us, what a seed he would cast into the studios, and what rich and generous soil he would find to raise fine painters and good works ! Our ignorance then is extreme. It may be said that the art of painting has for a long time been a lost secret, and that the last masters who were at all expert in its practice carried off the key with them. We want it ; it is asked for, but no one has it ; we seek it, but it is not to be found. Hence it results that individuality of method is, to speak truly, but the effort of each to imagine what he has not learned ; that in a certain practical skill we feel the labo- rious expedients of a mind in difficulties ; and that almost always the so-called originality of modern processes conceals at bottom an in- curable uneasiness. Do you want me to give you an idea of the investigations of those who are seeking, and the truths which are brought to light after long efforts ? I will give but one example. Our picturesque art, whether historical, genre, landscape, or still-life, has been for some time complicated with a question much in fashion, which merits in fact our attention, for it aims to restore to painting one of its most delicate and most necessary means of expression. I mean to speak of what we have agreed to call values. 178 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. By this word, of rather vague origin and obscure meaning, is understood the quantity of light or dark which is found contained in a tone. Expressed by drawing and engraving, the shade is easy to seize ; such a black will have, in relation to the paper which represents the unity of the light, more value than such a gray. Expressed by color it is not less positively an abstraction, but it is less easy to define. Thanks to a series of observations, of no great profundity, and by an analytical observation familiar to chemists, we separate from any given color that element of light or dark which is combined with its coloring principle, and arrive scientifi- cally at considering a tone under the double aspect of color and value, so that in a violet, for instance, we have not only to estimate the quantity of red or blue which can multiply its shades infinitely, but to keep an account also of the quantity of light or strength which approaches it to the unit of light or the unit of dark. The interest of the examination is this : a color does not exist in itself, since it is, as is known, modified by the influence of a neigh- boring color. For still better reasons, it has in itself neither virtue nor beauty. Its quality comes from its surrounding, or what are also called its complementary colors. Thus by contrast or by favor- able association very diverse acceptations may be given to it. To color well I shall say this more particularly elsewhere is either to know or to feel thoroughly by instinct the necessity of these asso- ciations ; but to color well is especially and beyond all things to know how to skilfully bring into connection the values of tones. If you take from a Veronese, a Titian, or a Rubens this just relation TERBURG, METZU, AND DE HOOGH AT THE LOUVRE. of values in their colors, you would have only a discordant coloring without force, delicacy, or preciousness. In proportion as the color- ing principle diminishes in a tone, the element of values predomi- nates. If it happens, as in the half-tints, where all color grows pale, or as in the pictures of extravagant chiaroscuro, where all shading vanishes, like Rembrandt's for instance, or sometimes where every- thing is monochromatic, if it happens, I say, that the coloring element disappears almost entirely, there remains upon the palette a neutral principle, subtle and yet real, the abstract value, it may be called, of the vanished things ; and it is with this negative, color- less principle of an infinite delicacy that the rarest pictures are sometimes made. These things, terrible to announce in French, and the explana- tion of which is really only permissible in a studio with closed doors, I have been forced to say, because without that I should not have been understood. Now, this law, which we are trying to- day to put in practice, you must not imagine that we have in- vented ; it has been rediscovered, among the much forgotten por- tions, in the archives of the art of painting. Few painters in France have had a very marked feeling for it. There were whole schools who never thought of it, did without it, and were none the better for that, as has now been discovered. If I were writing the history of French art in the nineteenth century, I would tell you how this law was in turn observed and misunderstood, what painter used it, and who ignored it, and you would find no difficulty in agreeing that he was wrong to ignore it ISO THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. An eminent painter, too much admired for his technicalities, who will live, if he does live, by the depth of his sentiment, his very original impulses, a rare instinct for the picturesque, and especially by the tenacity of his efforts, Decamps, never took the trouble to find out there were values on a palette. This is an infirmity which begins to strike people who are well informed, and from which deli- cate spirits suffer greatly. I will tell you, too, to what sagacious observer contemporaneous landscape painters owe the best lessons that they have received, how by a charming state of grace Corot, that sincere spirit, a simplifier in his essence, had a natural senti- ment for the values in all things, studied them better than any one, established their rules, formulated them in his works, and day by day gave of them more successful demonstrations. Henceforth this is the principal care of all who are seeking, from those who seek in silence to those who seek most noisily and under eccentric names. The so-called realistic doctrine has no other serious foundation than a more healthy observation of the law of coloring. We must yield to evidence, and recognize that there is something good in these aims, and that if the realists knew more and painted better, there are some of them who would paint ex- ceedingly well. Their eye in general has very just perceptions, their sensations are particularly delicate, and, what is singular, the other parts of their craft are no longer so at all. They have one of the rarest faculties, but they lack what should be the most common, so that their merits, which are great, lose their worth by not being employed as they should be ; they seem to be revolutionary because TERBURG, METZU, AND DE HOOGH AT THE LOUVRE. l8l they affect to admit only half of the necessary truths, and they lack at the same time very little and very much of being perfectly right. All that was the A B C of Dutch art, and ought to be the A B C of ours. I do not know, doctrinally speaking, what was the opinion of Pieter de Hoogh, of Terburg, and of Metzu upon values, nor how they called them, nor even if they had a name to express what colors should have of shade, relativeness, sweetness, suavity, or subtlety in their relations. Perhaps coloring as a whole allows all these qualities, whether positive or impalpable. But always the life of their works and the beauty of their art result precisely from the learned use of this principle. The difference which separates them from modern attempts is this : in their time great value was attached to chiaroscuro, and there was a great feeling for it only because it appeared to be the vital element of all well-conceived art. Without this artifice, in which imagination plays the first part, there was, so to speak, no more fiction in the reproduction of things, and hence the man was absent from his work, or at least participated in it no longer at that moment of the labor when his sensibility should especially intervene. The delicacy of a Metzu, the mystery of a Pieter de Hoogh result, as I have told you, from much atmosphere around the objects, much shadow around the lights, much quietness in the receding colors, many transpositions of tones, many purely imaginary transformations in the aspect of things, in a word, the most mar- vellous use that ever was made of chiaroscuro, and also, in other terms, the most judicious application of the law of values. 1 82 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. To-day it is the other way. Every value a little rare, every color delicately observed, seems to have for an aim the abolition of chiaro- scuro, and the suppression of the atmosphere. What served to bind now serves to loosen. Every painting called original is a veneering, a mosaic. The abuse of useless roundness has driven into excess flat surfaces, and bodies without thickness. Modelling disappeared the very day when the means of expression seemed best, and ought to have rendered it more intelligent, so that what was a progress among the Hollanders is for us a step backward ; and after issuing from archaic art, under pretext of a new innova- tion, we return thither. * What shall be said about that ? Who is there to demonstrate the error into which we are falling ? Who shall give us clear and striking lessons ? There would be one sure expedient, the con- struction of a new work which should contain all the old art with the modern spirit, which, while belonging to the nineteenth century and France, should resemble a Metzu, feature by feature, and yet never permit one to see that he had been remembered. VII. RUYSDAEL. OF all the Dutch painters, Ruysdael is the one who most nobly resembles his country. He has its breadth, its sadness, its rather dreary placidity, and its monotonous and tranquil charm. With vanishing lines, a severe palette, in two grand traits expressly belonging to its physiognomy, gray and limitless horizons, and a gray heaven by which the infinite is measured, he has left us of Holland a portrait which I will not call familiar, but intimate, lovable, admirably faithful, which never grows old. By still other claims Ruysdael is, as I fully believe, the most distinguished figure in the school after Rembrandt, and this is no small glory for a painter who has painted only so-called inanimate landscapes, and not one living being, at least without the aid of some one. Remember that, taking him in detail, Ruysdael would perhaps be inferior to many of his compatriots. In the first place he is not adroit at a moment and in a style where address was the current money of talent ; and perhaps it was owing to this lack of dexterity that he owes the character and the ordinary weight of his thought. Neither is he precisely skilful. He paints well, and affects no singularity 1 84 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. in his craft What he wants to say he says clearly with truth, but as if slowly, without hidden meaning, vivacity or archness. His drawing has not certainly the incisive, sharp character, and the ec- centric accent belonging to certain pictures by Hobbema. I do not forget that at the Louvre, before the Watermill, the flood- gate of Hobbema, a superior work which has not, as I have told you, its equal in Holland, it has sometimes happened that I have cooled towards Ruysdael. This Mill is so charming a work, it is so pre- cise, so firm in its construction, so resolute in its method from one end to the other ; of such strong, fine coloring ; its sky is df so rare a qual- ity ; and everything in it seems so delicately engraved before being painted, and so well painted over this severe engraving ; finally, to use an expression which will be understood in the studios, it is framed in so piquant a fashion, and suits the gold so well, that sometimes, seeing two paces off the little Bush by Ruysdael, and finding jt yellowish, woolly, a little round in treatment, I have almost decided in favor of Hobbema, and thus nearly committed an error which would not have lasted, but which would be unpardonable if it had existed but for an instant. Ruysdael never knew how to put a figure in his pictures, and in that respect the aptitude of Adrian van de Velde would be very different ; nor an animal, and in this Paul Potter would have had great advantage over him, as soon as Paul Potter succeeded in being perfect. He has not the pale golden atmosphere of Cuyp, and the ingenious habit of placing in a bath of light, boats, towns, horses, and riders, all well drawn, as we know, for Cuyp is excellent in all points. RUYSDAEL. 185 His modelling, although most learned when applied either to vegeta- tion or to aerial surfaces, does not offer the extreme difficulties of the human modelling of Terburg and Metzu. However trained is the sagacity of his eye, it is less so on account of the subjects which he treats. Whatever may be the value of moving water, of a flying cloud, a bushy tree tormented by the wind, a cascade rolling between rocks, all these things, when one thinks of the complicated character of the undertakings, of the number of the problems, and of their sub- tlety, are not equal in difficulty of solution to the Inte'rieur Galant of Terburg, the Visit of Metzu, the Dutch Interior of Pieter de Hoogh, the School and the Family of Van Ostade, that are seen at the Louvre, or the marvellous Metzu of the Van der Hoop Museum, at Amsterdam. Ruysdael shows no liveliness, and also in that respect the sprightly masters of Holland make him appear a little morose. Considered in his normal habits, he is simple, serious, and robust, very calm and grave, almost habitually the same, to such a degree that his merits end by ceasing to impress, they are so sustained ; and before this mask which seldom is without a frown, before these pic- tures of almost equal merit, one is sometimes confounded by the beauty of the work, but rarely surprised. Certain marines by Cuyp, for instance the Moonlight in the Six Museum, are works of sudden impulse, absolutely unforeseen, and make us regret that there are not in Ruysdael some outbursts of the same kind. Finally, his color is monotonous, strong, harmonious, and not very rich. It varies from green to brown, and an undertone of bitumen is its basis. It has slight brilliancy, is not always pleasing, and in its first essence is not 1 86 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. of very exquisite quality. A painter of refined interiors would not find it difficult to reprove him for the parsimony of his means, and would judge his palette sometimes too limited. With all that, in spite of everything, Ruysdael is unique ; it is easy to be convinced of it at the Louvre, from his Gleam of Sunshine, the Bush, the Tempest, the Little Landscape (No. 474). I except the Forest, which was never very beautiful, and which he compromised by getting Berghem to paint the figures. At the Retrospective Exhibition held for the benefit of the in- habitants of Alsace-Lorraine, it may be said that Ruysdael reigned manifestly supreme, although the exhibition was most rich in Dutch and Flemish masters ; for in it there were specimens of Van Goyen, Wynants, Paul Potter, Cuyp, Van de Velde, Van der Neer, Van der Meer, Hals, Teniers, Bol, Solomon Ruysdael, and two priceless works of Van der Heyden. I appeal to the memory of all those for whom that exhibition of excellent works was a gleam of light, if Jacob Ruysdael was not there remarked as a master, and what is more estimable still, as a great mind. At Brussels, at Antwerp, at the Hague, and Amsterdam, the effect is the same ; everywhere that Ruysdael appears, he maintains himself by a manner of his own ; he is imposing, he impresses us with respect and attracts attention, which warns us that before us is a man's soul, that this man is of grand race, and that he always has something important to say. Such is the sole cause of Ruysdael's superiority, and this cause suffices ; there is in the painter a man who thinks, and in each one of his works a conception. As learned in his way as the most RUYSDAEL. 187 learned of his compatriots, as highly endowed by nature, more thoughtful and more feeling, more than any other he adds to his gifts an equilibrium which makes the unity of the work and the perfection of work. You perceive in his pictures an air of plenitude, certainty, and profound peace, which is his distinctive characteristic, and which proves that not for a single moment has harmony ceased to reign among his fine native faculties, his great experience, his always lively sensibility, and ever present reflectiveness. Ruysdael paints as he thinks, healthily, strongly, largely. The exterior quality of the labor indicates quite plainly the ordinary condition of his mind. There is in this sober, careful, rather proud painting an inexpressible, sad haughtiness, which is recognized from far, and at hand captivates by a charm of natural simplicity and noble familiarity wholly his own. A canvas by Ruysdael is a whole, wherein are felt an arrangement, a comprehensive view, and a master-intention, the determination to paint once for all one of the features of his country, perhaps also the desire to fix the memory of a moment of his life. A solid founda- tion ; a need of constructing and organizing, of subordinating details to the whole, color 'to effect, interest in objects to the plane that they occupy ; a perfect knowledge of natural and technical laws, and with all that a certain disdain for the useless, the too agreeable, or the superfluous ; great taste combined with great good sense ; a strong hand calm with the calmly beating heart, such is nearly what one discovers in analyzing a picture by Ruysdael. I do not say that everything pales beside this painting of medi- ocre brilliancy, of discreet coloring, of methods constantly veiled; 1 88 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. but everything becomes disorganized, unconnected, and empty. Place one of Ruysdael's canvases beside the best landscapes of the school, and you will at once see appear, in the neighboring works, gaps, weaknesses, digressions, an absence of design where it is ne- cessary, flashes of cleverness when none are necessary, ill-disguised ignorance, and a fading away which foretells oblivion. Beside Ruysdael a fine Adrian van de Velde is thin, pretty, studied, never very virile nor very mature ; a Willem van de Velde is dry, cold, and thin, almost always well drawn, rarely well painted, quickly observed but little meditated. Isaac van Ostade is too red, his skies too in- significant. Van Goyen is too uncertain, volatile, airy, and woolly ; one feels in him the light and rapid trace of a fine intention ; the sketch is charming ; the work did not succeed because it was not substantially nourished by preparatory studies, patience, and labor. Cuyp himself, so strong and so healthy, suffers sensibly from this severe neighbor. His perpetual gold has a gayety of which one tires beside the sombre and bluish verdure of his great rival, and as to that luxury of atmosphere which seems a reflection taken from the South to embellish the pictures of the North, one ceases to believe in it if he knows ever so little the shores of the Meuse and the Zuyder Zee. It can generally be remarked in Dutch pic- tures I mean open-air pictures that there is a determined force in the lights which gives them much relief, and, in painters' language, a particular authority. The sky plays the aerial part, that which is colorless, infinite, impalpable. Practically it serves to measure the powerful values of the ground, and consequently to designate more RUYSDAEL. 189 sharply and firmly the outline of the subject. Whether this sky be golden, as in Cuyp ; silver, as in Van de Velde and Solomon Ruys- dael ; or fleecy, gray, melting in light washes, as in Isaac van Ostade, Van Goyen, or Wynants, it makes an opening in the picture, rarely preserves a general value which is its own, and almost always fails to have a decided relation to the gold of the frame. Estimate the strength of the ground, and it is extreme. Try to estimate the value of the sky, and the sky will surprise you by the exceeding light which is its basis. I could cite to you certain pictures in which the atmosphere is forgotten, and some aerial backgrounds that might be repainted as an afterthought, without the picture, which is otherwise finished, losing anything by the change. Many modern works are in this condition. It can even be remarked, that with some exceptions, which I do not need to signalize if I am well understood, our modern school, as a whole, appears to have adopted for principle that, the atmosphere being the emptiest and most unseizable part of the picture, there is no objection to its being the most colorless and negative. Ruysdael felt things differently, and fixed once for all a very different principle, both audacious and truthful. He considered the immense vault which arches over the country or the sea as the real, compact, and dense ceiling of his pictures. He curves it, unfolds it, measures it, determines its value by its relation to the acci- dents of light sown in the terrestrial horizon ; he shades its great surfaces, models them, and executes them, in a word, as a work of 190 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. the greatest interest He discovers lines in it which continue those of the subject, arranges the masses of color in it, makes the light descend from it, and only puts it there in case of necessity. His great eye, well opened to observe everything living, that eye accustomed to the height of objects as^well as their extent, travels constantly from the soil to the zenith, never looks upon an object without observing the corresponding point in the atmosphere, and thus, omitting nothing, makes the circuit of the round field of vision. Far from losing himself in analysis, he constantly employs synthesis and makes abstracts. What nature disseminates, he con- centrates into a total of lines, colors, values, and effects. He frames all that in his thought, as he means it to be framed in the four angles of his canvas. His eye has the properties of a camera-obscura ; it reduces, diminishes the light, and preserves things in the exact proportion of their forms and colors. A picture by Ruysdael, whatever it may be, the finest are, of course, the most significant, is an entire painting, full and strong, in its principle grayish above, brown or greenish below, which rests solidly with its four corners upon the shining flutings of the frame; it seems dark at a distance, but is penetrated with light when approached ; it is beau- tiful in itself, with no vacancy, with few digressions, like a lofty and sustained thought which has for language a tongue of the most powerful kind. I have heard it said that nothing was more difficult to copy than a picture by Ruysdael, and I believe it, just as nothing is more difficult to imitate than the manner of expression of the great writers RUYSDAEL. 191 of our seventeenth century in France. Here we have the same turns, the same styles, something of the same spirit, I had almost said the same genius. I do not know why I imagine that if Ruys- dael had not been a Hollander and a Protestant, he would have been a Port-Royalist. You will notice at the Hague and Amsterdam two landscapes which are the repetition of the same subject, one large, the other small. Is the little canvas the study which served for a text for the larger one ? Did Ruysdael draw or paint from nature ? Was he inspired, or did he copy directly ? That is his secret, as it is of most of the Dutch masters, except perhaps Van de Velde, who cer- tainly painted out of doors, excelled in direct studies, and in the studio lost much of his skill, whatever people may say. But it is certain that these two works are charming, and demonstrate what I have been saying about Ruysdael's habits. It is a view taken at some distance from Amsterdam, with the little city of Haarlem, dark and bluish, visible through the trees, under the vast rolling waves of a cloudy sky, in the rainy dimness of a low horizon ; in front, for the foreground, is a laundry with red roofs, and the bleaching linen spread out flat over the fields. Nothing could be simpler or poorer than this point of departure, but nothing either could be more true. This canvas, one foot eight inches high, ought to be seen to learn, from a master who never feared to degrade himself because he was not a man to stoop, how a subject can be elevated when a man is himself a lofty spirit, to learn that there is nothing ugly for an eye which sees beauty, no littleness for a great sensi- 192 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. tiveness, to learn, in a word, what the art of painting becomes when practised by a noble mind. The River View, in the Van der Hoop Museum, is the highest expression of this haughty and magnificent manner. This picture would be better named the Windmill, and under this title no one would be able to treat without disadvantage a subject which in the hands of Ruysdael has found its incomparable typical expression. Briefly, this is the rendering. A part of the Meuse probably; on the right, terraced ground with trees and houses, and on the summit the black mill with wide-spread arms, rising high in the canvas ; a palisade against which the water of the river softly un- dulates, a sluggish water, soft and admirable ; a little corner of a vague horizon, very slight and very firm, very pale and very dis- tinct, on which rises the white sail of a boat, a flat sail with no wind in its canvas, of a soft and perfectly exquisite value. Above it a wide sky loaded with clouds, with openings of pale blue, gray clouds scaling to the top of the canvas, no light, so to speak, any- where in this powerful tone, composed of dark browns and dark- slate colors, but a single gleam in the middle of the picture, which comes from the far distance, like a smile, to illumine the disk of a cloud. It is a great square picture, grave (we need not fear to make too great use of this word with Ruysdael), of extreme sonorousness in the lowest register, and, as my notes add, marvellous in the gold. In fact, I describe it and insist upon it only to arrive at this con- clusion, beyond the value of the details, the beauty of form, the grandeur of expression, the intimate nature of its sentiment, it RUYSDAEL. 193 is a task singularly impressive to consider it as a simple deco- ration. All Ruysdael is here, his noble way of working, little charm, except by chance, a great attractiveness, an inwardness which is revealed little by little, accomplished science, very simple means. Imagine him in conformity with his painting, try to represent him to yourself beside his picture, and if I am not mistaken you will have the double and very harmonious image of an austere dreamer, of warm heart, and laconic and taciturn spirit. I have read somewhere, so evident is it that a poet reveals himself through all the restraints of form and in spite of the conciseness of his language, that his work had the character of an elegiac poem in an infinity of songs. This is much to say when we think how little relation literature bears to this art, in .which technicalities have so much importance, and where matter has such weight and value. Elegiac or not, but surely a poet, if Ruysdael had written instead of painted, I think he would have written in prose instead of verse. Verse admits of too much fancy and stratagem, prose compels too great sincerity, for this clear mind not to have preferred its language to the other. As to the depths of his nature, he was a dreamer, one of those men of whom there are many in our time, though they were rare at the epoch in which Ruysdael was born, one of those solitary ramblers who fly from towns, frequent the suburbs, sincerely love the country, feel it without emphasis, relate it without phrasing, who are made restless by far-off horizons, charmed by level expanses, affected by a shadow, and enchanted by a gleam of sunshine. 13 194 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. We imagine Ruysdael neither very young nor very old ; we do not see that he had a period of youth, nor do we feel in him the en- feebling weight of advancing years. If we did not know that he died before the age of fifty-two years, we should imagine him between two ages, as a mature man or one of precocious maturity, very serious, master of himself early, with sad memories, regrets, and the reveries of a mind which looks back, whose youth has not known the over- whelming unrest of hope. I believe he had no heart to cry, " Rise ! longed-for storms ! " His melancholy, of which he is full, has some- thing manly and reasonable, in which appears neither the tumultuous childishness of early years nor the nervous tearfulness of later ones ; it only tinges his painting with a sombre hue, as it would have tinged the thought of a Jansenist. What has life done for him that he should have for it a sentiment so bitter and disdainful ? What have men done to him that he should retire into deep solitude, and so avoid meeting them, even in his painting ? Nothing or almost nothing is known of his exist- ence except that he was born about 1630, that he died in 1681 ; that he was the friend of Berghem ; that he had Solomon Ruysdael for an elder brother, and probably for his first adviser. As to his journeys, they are supposed and they are doubted ; his cascades, mountain regions well wooded, with rocky declivities, would lead one to believe either that he must have studied in Germany, Swit- zerland, or Norway, or that he utilized the studies of Everdingen,* and was inspired by them. His great labor did not enrich him, and * A fine painter of Norwegian scenery. Alkmaar, 1621-1675. RUYSDAEL. 195 his title of burgher of Haarlem did not prevent him, it appears, from being almost forgotten. Of this we should have a truly harrowing proof, if it is true that, in commiseration of his distress, more than from respect to his genius, which was hardly suspected by any one, they were obliged to admit him to the hospital at Haarlem, His native town, and that there he died. But before reaching this point what happened to him ? Had he joys as he certainly had bitterness ? Did his destiny give him an opportunity to love anything but clouds ; and from what did he suffer most, if he did suffer, from the torment of painting well or of living ? All these questions remain without answer, and yet pos- terity would be glad to know. Would you ever think of asking as much about Berghem, Karel Dujardin, Wouvermans, Goyen, Terburg, Metzu, Pieter de Hoogh himself? All these brilliant or charming painters painted, and it seems as if that was enough. Ruysdael painted ; but he lived, and this is why it would be of so much importance to know how he lived. In the Dutch School I know but three or four men whose personality is thus interesting, Rembrandt, Ruysdael, Paul Potter, perhaps Cuyp, and this is already more than is necessary to class them. VIII. CUYP. CUYP also was not much recognized during his life, which did not prevent him from painting as he understood the business, applying himself or being negligent quite at his ease, and following his free career according to the inspiration of the moment. Besides, he shared this disfavor, natural enough when one thinks of the taste which reigned at that time for extreme finish, with Ruysdael ; he shared it even with Rembrandt, when about 1650 Rembrandt sud- denly ceased to be understood. He was, as may be seen, in good company. Since then he has been avenged, first by the English, afterwards by all Europe. In any case, Cuyp is a very beautiful painter. In the first place, he has the merit of universality. His work is so complete a repertory of Dutch life, especially in its rural surround- ings, that its extent and variety would suffice to give it considerable interest. Landscapes, marines, horses, cattle, people of every con- dition, from men of fortune and leisure to shepherds, small and large figures, portraits, and pictures of poultry yards, such are the curi- osities and aptitudes of his talent that he more than any other has CUYP. 197 contributed to enlarge the list of local observations in which the art of his country was displayed. Born, one of the first in 1605, belong- ing to his age in every respect, by the diversity of his investiga- tions, by the vigor and independence of his way of proceeding, he must have been one of the most active promoters of the school. A painter who on one side touches Hondekoeter, and on the other Ferdinand Bol, and who without imitating Rembrandt paints animals as easily as Van de Velde, skies better than Both, horses, and great horses, more severely than Wouvermans or Berghem painted their little ones ; who feels the sea keenly, as well as rivers and their banks ; who paints cities, boats at anchor, and great maritime scenes, with a breadth and authority that William Van de Velde did not possess, a painter who, moreover, had a manner of his own of seeing, an ap- propriate and very beautiful coloring, an easy, powerful hand, a taste for rich, thick, abundant stuffs, a man who expands, grows, renews himself, and is fortified by age, such a person is a very great man. If it is remembered, beside, that he lived until 1691 ; that he thus survived the greater part of those whom he had seen born ; and that during that long career of eighty-six years, with the exception of a trace of his father very strongly marked in his works, and afterwards a reflection of the Italian sky which came to him perhaps from the Boths and his friends the travellers, he remains himself, without alloy, without admixture, moreover without signs of weakness, we must admit that he had a very powerful brain. If our Louvre gives a tolerably complete idea of the diverse forms of his talent, his manner, and his coloring, it does not give his full 198 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. measure, and does not mark the point of perfection that he could attain, and which he sometimes did attain. His great landscape is a beautiful work, which is more valuable as a whole than in its details. No one could go farther in the art of paint- ing light, of rendering the pleasing and restful sensations with which a warm atmosphere envelops and penetrates one. It is a picture. It is true without being too true ; it shows observation without being a copy. The air that bathes it, the amber warmth with which it is soaked, that gold which is but a veil, those colors which are only the result of the light which inundates them, of the air which circu- lates around, and of the sentiment of the painter which transforms them, those values so tender in a whole which is so strong, all these things come both from nature and from a conception ; it would be a masterpiece if there had not slipped into it some insufficiencies which seem the work of a young man or of an absent-minded designer. His Depart pour la Promenade, and the Promenade, two equestrian pictures of beautiful form and noble workmanship, are also full of his finest qualities, all bathed in sunlight, and steeped in those golden waves which are, as it were, the ordinary color of his mind. However, he has done better, and we are indebted to him for even rarer things. I do not speak of those little pictures, too much boasted of, which have been shown at different times in our French Retrospective exhibitions. Without leaving France, there may have been seen, in sales of private collections, works of Cuyp, not more delicate, but more powerful and profound. A true, fine Cuyp is a CUYP. 199 painting at once subtile and gross, tender and robust, aerial and massive. That which belongs to the impalpable, as the background, the surroundings, the shadows, the effect of the air upon the dis- tances, and broad daylight upon the colors, all corresponds to the lighter parts of his mind ; and to render it his palette becomes volatile, and his art grows supple. As to the objects of more solid substance, of more defined contours, of more evident and consistent color, he does not fear to enlarge planes, to fill out forms, to insist upon robust features, and to be a little heavy, in order never to be weak in touch, tone, or execution. In such a case he is no longer refined, and, like all the good masters at the beginning of strong schools, it costs him nothing to be wanting in charm when the charm is not the essential character of the object he represents. This is why the Cavalcades at the Louvre are not, to my idea, the highest expression of his fine sober manner, a little gross and abundant, but wholly masculine. There is in them an excess of gilding, of sun, and of all that follows, redness, gleams, reflections, shadows cast. Add to these an inexpressible mingling of open air and studio light, of textual truth and of combinations, finally, something improb- able in the costumes and suspicious in the elegance, and it results that in spite of exceptional merits these two pictures are not abso- lutely satisfactory. The Hague Museum has a Portrait of the Sire de Roover, directing the salmon-fishing in the neighborhood of Dordrecht, which repro- duces with less brilliancy and still more manifest defects the manner- ism of the two celebrated pictures of which I speak The figure 200 THE OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. is one of those we know. He is in a deep scarlet gown embroidered with gold, bordered with fur, wearing a black cap with red plumes, and a short sword with a gilded handle. He bestrides one of those great brown bay horses, whose arching head, rather heavy body, stiff legs, and mule hoofs we know of old. There is the same golden tint in the sky, in the background, on the waters, on the faces ; the same too distinct reflections, that are seen in a vivid light when the atmosphere modifies neither the color nor the exterior edge of objects. The picture is simple and well set, ingeniously planned, original, per- sonal, full of conviction ; but, from the force of truth, the excess of light makes one believe in errors of knowledge and taste. Now see Cuyp at Amsterdam in the Six Museum, and consult the two great canvases which figure in this unique collection. One represents the Arrival of Maurice of Nassau at Scheveningen. It is an important marine work with boats loaded with figures. Neither Backhuysen, do I need to say ? nor Van de Velde, nor any one, would have had the power to construct, conceive, or color in this way a showy picture of this kind and of such insignificance. The first boat, on the left, opposite the light, is an admirable bit. As to the second picture, the very famous effect of moonlight on the sea, I copy from my notes the succinctly formulated trace of the surprise and pleasure that it caused me. " A wonder and a marvel ; large, square ; the sea, a rugged coast, a boat on the right, in front a fishing-boat with a figure spotted with red, on the left two sail-boats, no wind, a tranquil serene night, the water quite calm, the full moon half-way up the picture a little to the left, absolutely clear in a large CUYP. 201 opening of cloudless sky ; the whole incomparably true and fine in color, force, transparency, and limpidity. A night Claude Lorraine, graver, simpler, fuller, more naturally executed from a true sensation, a veritable deceit of the eye (trompe r