Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2018 with funding from 
 Getty Research Institute 
 
 https://archive.org/details/expositionuniver01walt_0 
 

 
 
 
 
 I 
 
ixixoi~i.fr rm 
 
 
 I.ADELPHIA 
 
 AJU* 
 
CHEFS-D’OEUVRE 
 
 OF THE 
 
 EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE 
 1900 
 
INDIA-PROOF EDITION 
 
 IMITED 
 
 TO ONE THOUSAND COMPLETE NUMBERED COPIES 
 
 No. 281 
 
 
 PRINTED FOR 
 
 Mrs. J. H. SOMERS, Cleveland, Ohio 
 


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THEODORE RIVIERE 
 
 THE SUNNA VIRGIN 
 
 Statuette of Ivory, Onyx, Gold, and Precious Stones 
 
 ETCHED IN FOUR PLATES BY CHARLES-R. THEVENIN 
 
EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE, 1900 
 
 THE 
 
 CHEFS-D'OEUVRE 
 
 APPLIED ART, BY V. CHAMPIER ; CENTENNIAL AND RETROSPECTIVE, BY A. SAGLIO 
 ART AND ARCHITECTURE, BY W. WALTON 
 
 VOLUME I 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 GEORGE BARRIE & SON, PUBLISHERS 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 THE GETTY CENTER 
 LIBRARY 
 
THE ART OF FRANCE 
 
 FIX-MASSEAU. THE SECRET 
 
 STATUETTE OF WOOD AND IVORY. LOANED BY THE LYONS MUSEUM 
 

 <5 
 
 1 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 M 
 

 
 
 
HENRI-JEAN-GUILLAUME MARTIN 
 
 CLEMENCE 1SAURE APPEARS TO THE TROUBADOURS 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Any attempt to arrive at a just appreciation of the Art of France of 
 the century just ending may be likened to an attempt to take cognizance 
 of the fields of human knowledge, plus those of the imagination. In 
 no other land or age has this extraordinarily comprehensive aesthetic 
 research been pushed so far, and if it has very frequently strayed into 
 fields that are alien or evil, the manifestation of human intelligence is 
 none the less remarkable. The province of the commonplace daily 
 observer, that of practical and empirical science, that of the historian, of 
 the man of letters, and those vast and shadowy ones tenanted only by 
 bodiless visions, are all included,—painters and modellers have endeav¬ 
 ored to realize and to present the tritest details of our usual existence 
 and the mysteries of all the shadows in which the ghosts walk. It has 
 not been considered enough to endeavor to give the figure of Humanity. 
 Many workers have striven earnestly in that search for beauty and eleva¬ 
 tion of type which is laid down in the old formulas, and with infinite 
 variations of this beauty: others, it must be confessed, have as frankly 
 undertaken to present the sordid, the pathological, the pestilential, and 
 even the infernal. The Fiend has had more than one able artist in his 
 service; and the cunning with which good and evil have been inter¬ 
 mingled—good and evil in art and in morals, the skilful hovering on 
 the border—in art and in morals, the fine wit, much perverted, which 
 
VI 
 
 ART OF FRANCE 
 
 has frequently served to confuse the simple by its intelligent misuse of 
 good technique and good aims, have largely characterized this school. 
 Neither the sacred enclosure of the Church nor that of the lawful (and 
 there is such a field as the latter), wide as they are, has sufficed these 
 practitioners. 
 
 And yet, in these very wide domains how many corners have been 
 explored, how many delicate phases of extreme beauty and grace, which 
 should have sufficed to open the spiritual eyes of the dullest observer, 
 have thus been presented by this extraordinary art. There seems to be 
 no spiritual message of the beauty of the physical world which the 
 astonished pigments, dull and opaque as they are, have not been com¬ 
 pelled by this magic into portraying, at one time or another, by some of 
 the more modern landscape-painters,—impalpable and flitting visions 
 of glory on land and sea done into permanence by the painters for the 
 good of their fellows. There are charmingly subtle graces of form and 
 movement, momentary, the touch of a second, the glance of an eye, a 
 little feminine mannerism, a little air of the eighteenth century, which 
 French sculptors have known how to seize and to perpetuate in sense¬ 
 less calcareous stone. By the side of the most brutal, of the most vivid 
 rendering of the most violent expression—and not infrequently by the 
 same artist—may be seen these marvels of lightness wrought by one of 
 the most artistic temperaments and by one of the most perfect techniques 
 of the world. 
 
 About Art everything has already been said, and constant repetition 
 leads to triteness. One of these trite observations is that the impor¬ 
 tance which, it has been agreed, shall be attached to the artist’s work 
 is due to the quality of the ideas with which he meddles and to his 
 faculty as a creating agent. Out of nothing palpable he makes some¬ 
 thing; out of the intangible which pervades space around us he 
 congeals definite images in form and colon He is able to evoke, and 
 to evoke in the precise, as has been said. The historical painters, 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Vll 
 
 the moderns, are able to revive a past age, costumes, countenances, 
 and atmosphere. At least it seems so to us,—the vividness, the 
 plausibility of the presentation are such that we are convinced that it 
 was in this guise and none other that Napoleon rode and that Madame 
 de Pompadour sparkled. No one can verify, but that is not the point,— 
 here is a scene from another world presented to our senses,—it is as 
 though we made a journey to the moon. In no art is this apparently 
 absolute creation, this fire and spirit in a most learned taste for the arts, 
 more convincing than in the French. It is not the restoration of the 
 statistician or of the photographer, it is not the first handful of antique 
 materials seized, by any means,—there is a selecting and an embellishing 
 and a more intelligent presentation arrived at by means of a synthesis 
 that is very largely a matter of intelligent personal “taste.” In re-creating, 
 so to speak, an historical episode, as in the presentation of the landscape 
 or the sitter actually before him, the artist does not merely reproduce 
 nature. It has been said a great many times, but it is the most important 
 thing to be said about him. As Byron sang of Canova’s “ Helen,”—now 
 forgotten: 
 
 “ In this beloved marble view, 
 
 Beyond the works and thoughts of man, 
 
 What Nature could, but would not, do, 
 
 And Beauty and Canova can.” 
 
 Another of the characteristics of this modern school is the expres¬ 
 sion of that craving for constant progress, if not for mere novelty, which 
 has been considered the peculiar manifestation of the age,—as it has 
 been of several ages preceding. It is a natural reflex from the activity 
 of the material and scientific world, exaggerated but not altogether un¬ 
 founded,—why should not “ this march of mind ” extend as well to 
 aesthetic conceptions and methods of execution ? Hence, a vast amount 
 of revolutionary doctrine—and some anarchistic—preached nowhere 
 more vehemently than in this school. Hence, both excesses and real 
 
ART OF FRA ACE 
 
 viii 
 
 discoveries,—frequently extravagant and ill-considered applications of 
 new technical methods and hardy excursions over the old border-lines 
 from which have been brought back both carrion and fresh food for the 
 mind. In extent of field covered, in ability and audacity and saving 
 grace from on high and occasional porcine wallowing, the contemporary 
 French school is still unrivalled. In the fine old matter of blank human 
 stupidity, it occasionally does well, but can claim no preeminence. 
 
 Paris, Julv, igoo. 
 
/ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
■'/iW/4/- -j. -O'l/fi" 
 

 
 
 
 > 
 
 
EDOUARD DETAILLE 
 
 THE GARRISON OF HUNINGUE 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 
WILL I AM-ADOLPHE BOUGUEREAU. ADMIRATION. 
 
 CONTEMPORARY ART OF FRANCE 
 
 It would seem that the nineteenth century is to be recognized in 
 history as having been much more fortunate than its immediate prede¬ 
 cessor in that it has succeeded in getting itself recognized and depicted in 
 its art and literature. Never, it is now declared, were these twin hand¬ 
 maidens of civilization more completely in disaccord with the society 
 which they pretended to represent than in the age which terminated 
 with the French Revolution, and as it was French art and French litera¬ 
 ture which largely dominated the culture of the continent of Europe, the 
 responsibility must be laid at the door of that people. Watteau has been 
 
2 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 declared to be the most original painter of his nation, as having drawn 
 less from the actual world around him, and more from himself, than any 
 other. The Embarquement pour Cythere is not in any sense of the word 
 a record of contemporary history,—not even of the inner and unseen 
 history of the period, of its visions, its aspirations, its ideals. However 
 this may be, it seems to be evident that the nineteenth century has been 
 exhaustively portrayed, from every point of view, and that the future 
 historians will have abundant material for its reconstruction. 
 
 The record of the various phases through which French art has 
 passed in the last hundred years is sufficiently well known; these mani¬ 
 festations have been defined as Classicism, Romanticism, Idealism, Real¬ 
 ism, Naturalism, and, at present, various forms of a mysticism which it 
 is difficult to include under one comprehensive title, and which extends 
 even to articles of household furniture and personal adornment. Realism 
 and Naturalism, so called, gave rise to various subdivisions, Impression¬ 
 ism, Prismaticism, and so forth, founded on certain theories more or less 
 scientifically correct and on diverse peculiarities of technique. The 
 transit from one to the other of these phases has sometimes been 
 effected with remarkable promptness; and two or three of them have 
 more than once been contemporary, dwelling together with more or less 
 friction. There have been frequent reversals of opinion not only during 
 the artist’s life-time, but later,—and these posthumous judgments have 
 been in many cases reversed by a later and more liberal or more en¬ 
 lightened age. This has been seen notably in the case of some of the 
 later artists of the eighteenth century,—Watteau, Fragonard, Clodion; 
 and, still later, of “Monsieur” Ingres, as he was long called—as the 
 representative of the severe and respectable classic, the poucif ', the 
 pompier. These complete facings-about have been so remarkable that 
 the commentators have been forced to ask of themselves as to whether 
 there was something in the national character peculiarly favorable to 
 them. Moreover, though the theories on which these various schools 
 
JULES-ALEXIS MUEN1ER 
 
 A SUNDAY AT FRIBOURG 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
 
 
 
-ZSOOjby $ ^a/pU* 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 3 
 
 have been founded have been defined with sufficient clearness, it has 
 been found that in practice the methods sometimes ran together, there 
 have been romanticists who could draw, and classicists who could 
 paint, and the latter had been inspired by all the themes of the 
 former, legends and incidents both Christian and profane, modern 
 history, Oriental subjects, and even the mouthings of Ossian. 
 
 At the present day, though the variety of opinions is as great as ever 
 and the strength of feeling probably as strong, it is to be noticed that 
 there is no systematic suppression. There are distinguished officials in 
 the Louvre and professors in the Ecole who consider the works of 
 Gustave Moreau as puerile, false as paintings and as conceptions; not 
 even Manet’s Olympia evoked a more furious storm of contempt than 
 did Rodin’s statue of Balzac; M. Gerome walks through the galleries 
 hung with Manets, Monets, and Sisleys, and with a sweeping gesture ex¬ 
 presses his “shame” that his countrymen should exhibit such “ saletes ,”— 
 but a collection of Moreau’s paintings is accepted by the Luxembourg 
 and hung with honor, Rodin maintains his position as one of the first 
 sculptors of his time, and Caillebotte’s bequest of his impressionist 
 paintings has a special gallery in the Luxembourg. With three or four 
 exceptions, there is no artist before the public who has not his bitter 
 detractors, but there is none, apparently, who does not secure his fair 
 share of favor and sunshine. Falguiere’s seated figure of Balzac was 
 denounced by the critics (voicing the general opinion) as “a piteous 
 failure” and as “ agressivement banale ct desesperement sotte ,” but it 
 was accepted by the Societe des Gens de Litres in the place of the 
 one by Rodin, and the sculptor was lauded in his funeral oration 
 by the Minister of Public Instruction, speaking in the name of the 
 Government, as “ one of the most illustrious representatives of French 
 art,” and as “one of the Frenchmen who had best served France.” 
 It is doubtful if there could be to-day any of that complete ostracism 
 which for so long a period closed the doors of the Salon against Millet 
 
4 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 and the landscape-paint¬ 
 ers of Fontainebleau,—if 
 the Salon be too obdu¬ 
 rate, the painter or the 
 sculptor joins some so¬ 
 ciety of the Epatants, or 
 the Incoh events, and as¬ 
 serts himself. 
 
 It has been gener¬ 
 ally the excesses of the 
 school of the day that 
 have led to its forfeiting 
 its share of the popular 
 and artistic interest and 
 seeing itself gradually 
 superseded by some 
 rival. The Romantic 
 school, being somewhat 
 less absurd even in its 
 
 maximilienne guyon. the toilet. extravagances than the 
 
 WATER-COLOR. 
 
 Classicism of David, is 
 
 much less dead,—and Delacroix is still a name to conjure with. But, after 
 its overflowings and its outpourings, of imagination and of sensibilite, there 
 came into the mode the cold and dispassionate observation of nature for 
 the purpose of scientific artistic record, clearness of vision, sureness of 
 hand, an impersonal impeccability of design, of modelling, and of color. 
 The impersonal quality was an inseparable adjunct of Beauty. Conse¬ 
 quently, there appeared in this approximately cold and exact painting, 
 more or less photographic in effect, but little evidence of selection, of com¬ 
 position, of synthesis, or of “that powerful emotion which, alone, can, in 
 re-creating them, animate living things.” Peculiarly was this so for the 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 
 lesser men, in literature and art, once in possession of their technical 
 training, relieved from any necessity of inventing, almost of thinking, 
 able to dispense with any pretence of mystery, of poetry, of visions, 
 they proceeded to multiply their works, most of them without charm 
 or individuality, until they had brought about a wholesome reaction. 
 With the introduction of ideas, emotions, and expression, the attempt 
 to revivify realism by the breath of idealism, the substitution of the 
 interpretation for the copy, the school of Millet, the art of France and, 
 more or less, of Europe and America, took on a new reason for being. 
 The painters, no longer content with being painters only, became also 
 philosophers and poets,—with a greater or lesser endowment of intel¬ 
 lect or inspiration. Their great, and most laudable, effort was to avoid 
 the commonplace in the representation of the real, to endow this repre¬ 
 sentation with thought and emotion, to “demand of it an invitation to 
 imaginings,” and, very naturally, they frequently drifted into obscurity 
 and melancholy and, in some cases, into that philanthropic, or demagogic, 
 or simply perverse mannerism which identifies “ Humanity ” with the 
 poor, the ignorant, and the debased of the species. This manifestation 
 is, however, more obvious in the writings of the commentators than 
 on the walls of the galleries; there are a few painters and sculptors, 
 French and Flemings, who devote themselves to the sordid life of the 
 laboring classes, with especial emphasis upon the sordidness and un¬ 
 loveliness, but they do not constitute a very important factor in the 
 contemporary school. 
 
 This turning away of art from its more decorative forms, from the 
 mere pursuit of beauty, takes on another form in the works of such 
 painters as Henri Martin and Eugene Carriere, who are thought to be 
 haunted by the anxieties of the age, the unrest and doubt, “la melancolic 
 et le denil modernes ,” “the bitter joys of sorrow and of sacrifice.” If this 
 heavy burden of Care should sometimes be perverted into morbidness 
 or affectation, it need not surprise, as in Carriere’s determined swathing 
 
6 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 in arbitrary gloom of all possible themes, from a Crucifixion to a scene in 
 a modern theatre, including all the personalities of his sitters, tender 
 infancy and wrinkled age. It is true that he is quite within his legal 
 rights in so doing, and that under this fog of uncertainty is displayed a 
 wonderful skill in modulated colors, with, for accents, the beady black 
 eyes that occasionally pierce the obscurity,—but it is also true that any 
 persistent mannerism ends by wearying and by being accepted as a sign 
 of limitation. The technique of M. Martin has also the quality of irritation 
 occasionally,—“thin and puerile,” says a recent admirer; “why this 
 obstinacy in a method that forbids all synthesis, while the moral signifi¬ 
 cation is always admirably noble?” In his larger canvases, however, as 
 in his Serenite of the Salon of 1899, this painting in laches or patches of 
 pigments contrives to give a wonderful warmth and luminousness 
 of color to a design that frequently appears to be in the photographic 
 reproduction curiously pinched and realistic in execution. This bare little 
 “ clearing ” in the forest, these honest peasants and tradesmen sitting and 
 lying uncomfortably on the grass in their night-gowns, the general, 
 and awkward, absence of real fatness and comfort and “serenity” in 
 the whole situation, which—were it not for the floating figures—might 
 readily be taken for a photograph from nature of arranged “ models,” is 
 redeemed in the painting by such a glow and beauty of rich and mellow 
 afternoon light that the painter abundantly justifies himself. But in other 
 of his more important works ,—Ch acini sa chi mere, Vers I’Abhne, the 
 figure of the mourning woman veiled in crape traversing the obscurity 
 of this same forest of saplings and lifting above her bowed head a 
 flaming and bleeding heart,—the artist constitutes himself the recorder of 
 human grief and the accuser of human folly,—and is probably a more 
 faithful exponent of some of the aspects of his age than Watteau and 
 Fragonard and Lancret were of theirs. Very much broader than Carriere, 
 he displays in other works—as in the apparition of the mythical Cle- 
 mence Isaure to the troubadours—a breadth and style of composition 
 
JACQUES WAGREZ 
 
 A CHAPEL-MASTER OF SAINT MARK’S, VENICE, 
 FIFTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 

CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 7 
 
 and design that lift themselves to the level of the theme and are most 
 happily married to very great beauty of color. 
 
 It is rather by the intensity and comprehensiveness of this sympathy, 
 this artistic appreciation of the accord between certain aspects of nature 
 and certain states of the mind, than by the discovery of these very old 
 qualifications of the artist, known since the beginning, that the contem¬ 
 porary school of painting is distinguished. It has been sometimes said 
 that there is positive emotion displayed in these oeuvres de sensibilite, 
 “painted with the soul and which speak to the soul;” the lofty indiffer¬ 
 ence, the aloof serenity, which characterize the best imaginative and 
 contemplative work of an earlier generation and of which it was justly 
 proud, would now be considered as either puerile or culpable. The artist 
 must be filled with human, social instincts, he must thrill and suffer with 
 his models who are themselves deeply occupied either with thought or 
 action whether they be actual peasants and fishermen or abstract per¬ 
 sonifications. M. Martin’s Serenite is not exactly “ serene ” in the English 
 sense of the word, neither the light nor the atmosphere nor the attitudes. 
 There is doubt and aspiration and longing, the very trees and the little 
 stream are too slim to be quite complete and self-resolved and self- 
 poised. Carriere’s figures are wrapped in mental as well as in material 
 gloom; in the work of Gustave Moreau, which is now recognized offi¬ 
 cially as representative in this “ moral world,” the mysticism is nearly 
 always troubled, the Salomes and the Helens, the corpses, the despairing 
 poets, David on his throne and the Siren at the botton of her sea; in his 
 easel paintings and in many of his larger decorations—some of them 
 pushed quite to the artistic limit of poignancy and of physical detail— 
 Besnard’s work displays every quality but sang-froid; M. Cottet, who is 
 one of the newest arrivals, made his fortune with one of the darkest and 
 most hopeless of fisherman’s interiors, the Repas d'Adieu, now in the 
 Luxembourg. The allegorists and the realists are alike bitter or cynical 
 or despairing,—in the figuring of the insane passions of humanity, its 
 
8 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 greed, its covetousness, its frantic pursuit of wealth or of glory, its mur¬ 
 derous instincts, its ignorant and brutal revolt, its despairing misery. 
 Either in careful and analytical detail or in abstract rendering, the motto 
 is always that which Gustave Moreau gave to his pupils: “The thing 
 to be afraid of, is, not the ugly, but the inexpressive.” These painters, 
 and many of the sculptors, could never dwell in peace in Tennyson’s 
 Palace of Art,—“the riddle of the painful earth” is with them too 
 constantly. 
 
 In one of the lower galleries of the great decennial exposition of 
 French art in the Grand Palais of the Paris Exposition of 1900 hangs an 
 early painting by Gerome, apparently the only one exposed by that 
 master, and one which may very well serve to illustrate the distance 
 between the older contemporary art and the newer. At opposite sides of 
 a well overgrown with broad-leaved plants and presided over by a carved 
 Cupid seated in a circular niche stand a youth and a maiden, and a 
 spotted fawn comes up to the latter. The pavement is laid with Roman 
 bricks and the idyl is of some undetermined date, but the young man 
 and the young woman are quite nude, “and not ashamed,” and it is 
 impossible to locate occasion or time or place. The light is clear and 
 soft, the color is somewhat gray and thin, according to modern prac¬ 
 tices,—there is no moral, no significance, no relation whatever with 
 contemporary human events, there is not even any title to be found for 
 it,—excepting some such imbecility as “ Innocence ” or “ Idyl.” Needless 
 to say, the design and the simple and somewhat formal composition, 
 being Gerome’s, are nearly impeccable,—and the style, the quietness, the 
 dignity and reposefulness of this work of pure imagination are doubly 
 appreciable after all the sensibilite of the newer works in the gallery 
 above. Here, unhappy Man, hurried, worried, tilled with care for himself 
 or his fellows, or both, and having largely lost all his faith, comes to Art 
 and, instead of finding a noisy repetition and aggravation of all his daily 
 burdens, suddenly enters a new world, very still and gray and beautiful! 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 9 
 
 PAUL GERVAIS. THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS 
 
 It would seem that this was quite permissible; and that the moderns did 
 not know everything. 
 
 M. Gerome says of M. Besnard, contemplating one of the latter’s 
 canvases: “Ce pauvre Besnard! if he only knew how to draw!” And 
 Besnard rejoins: “Le pauvre Gerome! if he only knew what drawing 
 was!” In this interchange, it is evident that the younger man had the 
 better of it,—it being a more intelligent operation to secure your correct 
 dessin and then modify it or dissimulate it in the interests of other quali¬ 
 ties—action, color, the impression to be produced—that may be more 
 important, rather than to insist upon demonstrating at any cost your 
 absolute science of design. The legs of Madame Rejane in Besnard’s 
 celebrated portrait which first appeared in the Salon of 1898—and simi¬ 
 larly those of Balzac in the even more celebrated statue by Rodin—have 
 given rise to much discussion,—the faithful asserting stoutly that these 
 
IO 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 useful members, in both cases, were actually there, anatomically and 
 artistically correct, and the scoffers maintaining that if they were, they 
 gave but little evidence of their being. In both instances, it would 
 appear, the artist, after having carefully established these organs of loco¬ 
 motion, caused them to take a subordinate role in favor of something 
 which he thought more important in his work—concealing them in the 
 well-nigh formless folds of the novelist’s dressing-gown, and in the flying 
 and blazing rose satin skirt of the actress. In a general way it may be 
 said that an artist of the older school would not have been willing to 
 thus render his science liable to impeachment in order to secure a greater 
 forcefulness of interpretation, a deeper and more spiritual meaning. 
 
 Sometimes, fortunately, these fEsops are willing to present their 
 fables without the everlasting “Moral” or “Application,” tacked on at 
 the end. M. Besnard has executed canvases—as in his best portraits 
 and in many of his decorations—in which a loftier ideality and a purer 
 sense of beauty reign, in which there is neither statistical, nor patho¬ 
 logical, nor minatory, nor intellectual art,—or, at least, only such inof¬ 
 fensive intellectuality as is required in personifying Reverie by a nude 
 female figure reclining by the side of a peacock along the edge of some 
 shrubbery, the vegetable life being the enemy of action. Some of 
 Gustave Moreau’s classic incidents, as Apollo slaying the Stymphalides, 
 or Europa galloped away with by her beautiful white bull, are likewise 
 untormented by any modern significance; the mellow and golden 
 twilights of M. Rene Menard’s landscapes, or the ineffable and tender 
 afternoon light of his Arc-en-ciel seen at the Exposition of 1900, are 
 works of pure art, in the best sense of the word, serene and uplifting, 
 —unless, indeed, there be something troubling in everything that is 
 beautiful. Another of these inspired interpreters of the face of nature— 
 who succeed, possibly, somewhat better than the English painters in 
 the same line not because they feel more deeply but because of a 
 superiority of technical rendering—J.-A. Muenier, contrives to render also 
 
AUGUSTE-FRANCOISE-MARIE GORGUET 
 ) 
 
 GARDEN OF THE HESPERIDES 
 
 Loaned by the Beyiers Museum 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
$ofiyt‘^.Ac -1360 /Ay ^ ZfietA-Use- > 
 

 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 11 
 
 the very great beauty of landscape, frequently with a note of still more 
 absolute quietness, in a somewhat cooler and clearer color. It would 
 be difficult to imagine anything more charming, more restful, more a 
 pure delight to the eye, than the Dimanche a Fribourg of the Salon of 
 1898. In these admirable canvases may be felt all that “faculty 
 of electing the moments and the localities most propitious for the 
 evocation of the au-dela ” which the French critics claim—with con¬ 
 siderable justice—as characteristic of the best of their contemporary 
 art, and, in these cases, unmixed with any disturbing, and possibly 
 foreign, humanitarian considerations. “Ah! the blessed falsehood,” 
 sighs M. Roger Marx, “ and how grateful we should be to these painters 
 who compel us to follow them, somewhere out of the world, into the 
 quietude of a happy Tempe!” 
 
 Nor are these all of those who do not think it necessary to mix 
 their art with polemics, and who disagree with M. Dujardin-Beaumetz, 
 presenting the budget of the Beaux-Arts for 1900: “Nothing is more 
 inexact than this formula: Art has no country; . . . Art is asso¬ 
 ciated with the life of the country: it translates its emotions, it speaks 
 its hopes and its mournings, and French democracy will always require 
 of it, with the expression of its generous passions, the emphatic affir¬ 
 mation of its grandeur.” Nothing, apparently, concerns less such 
 painters as Aman-Jean, Levy-Dhurmer, Agache, and such a sculptor as 
 Carries, than the triumph of French democracy; nor among the older 
 men, Fantin-Latour. Of a certain painting of Siegfried by the latter, 
 an English critic said that it had every artistic quality except that of 
 being the Siegfried of Wagner; and of others of his canvases, “ visions 
 de musicien," M. Paul Desjardins says in the Gagette des Beaux-Arts: 
 “Do not ask what these pictures represent or what they signify; 
 know only that they smell of jessamine and of summer nights.” Of 
 that remarkable sculptor, Jean Carries, dead too early, a recent biogra¬ 
 pher, M. Armand Dayot, gives these characteristics: “It is, above all, in 
 
12 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 his incessant and learned researches, in his ardent preoccupations, in his 
 conceptions so peculiarly individual, that we shall endeavor to follow 
 and observe this extraordinary artist whom the triumphs of each day 
 seemed to discourage, to whom the creation of a chef-d’oeuvre brought 
 only troubling anxieties, and who, with a species of unhealthy passion, 
 a mortal passion, sought obstinately to crystallize his visions of the 
 night in the absolute beauty of the material and in the most intimate 
 union of this material with the motif, profoundly analyzed. For Carries, 
 every work of art should be decorative, but it should always impose 
 itself upon the attention and attract the regard anew by precious exte¬ 
 rior qualities of translation, whilst underneath the formula should appear 
 clearly the life of the subject. . . .” In a surprising degree, are 
 these qualities evident in his work,—the vitality of his figures under 
 the apparently ungrateful material of his choice, the gres, “ that mate 
 de porcelaine ,” “ that noble material which no one can dominate if he 
 be not a master-workman,” as he described it. In this grayish por¬ 
 celain, colored, enamelled, given a new life of warm tones and subtle 
 modellings, the sculptor presented his motifs with wonderful variations 
 of “the Human Comedy,”—beggars and vagabonds, his Desoles, with 
 lamentable, ruined countenances; grinning and goat-eared fauns, with 
 wrinkled noses; wonderful heads of little babies asleep, with trian¬ 
 gular open mouths; Frans Hals, caught to the life, jovial, radiant, capable, 
 valiant drinker and royal painter; a statuette of the Parisienne in gray 
 touched up with carmines, the face framed in long blond curls and 
 femininely intent and unquiet in this sentimental and romantic framing. 
 All the modern tenseness and force of sympathy appear in these works, 
 without any confining modern limits of time or environment. 
 
 Concerning the painters MM. Aman-Jean, Levy-Dhurmer, and 
 Agache, selected from among those most in evidence in the contempo¬ 
 rary school as exploiting the “ privilege dit sentiment," it is somewhat 
 more difficult to second the eulogies bestowed upon them by their 
 
CONTEMPORARY ARP 
 
 A 
 
 appreciative countrymen. The last-named is distinguished by having no 
 peculiarities of technique at allhis painting is solid and conventional, 
 well lit and well modelled, his mysticism—which is not very mystical— 
 asserting itself courageously in open day. On certain lofty estrades and 
 thrones are seated grave figures in contemplation or in abstraction, 
 
 JULES-ALEXIS MUENIER. SEA-URCHIN FISHER. 
 
 aged philosophers and scholars or young women in black with laurel 
 wreaths, long swords, and other appurtenances,—the whole dignified, 
 sane, imaginative to a certain degree, quite acceptable. Aman-Jean, on 
 the contrary, has a peculiar method, as has Levy-Dhurmer,—and the 
 cases are rare in which a set and determined manner of painting, 
 regardless of times and seasons, the fall of empires and the theme to 
 
i4 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 be presented, does not end in becoming an able-bodied affectation 
 which finally seizes and carries off its foster-father, like the goblin in 
 the mediaeval tale. Even the admirers of De Chavannes were obliged 
 to admit that in some of his later decorations they seemed to find less 
 of his genius, while the process remained; M. Henner redeemed him¬ 
 self from a very positive decadence by his Lcvite d’Ephraim of the 
 Salon of 1898; of the great school of the Impressionists, there are in¬ 
 numerable canvases which are but empty semblances, void and deserted 
 shells out of which the living inmate has departed as completely as 
 does a locust or one of the Crustacea. Likewise, the flat and low- 
 toned paintings of Aman-Jean and the mere atmospheric envelope which 
 partially shrouds Levy-Dhurmer’s graceful figures do not always appear 
 to have a sufficient reason for being. Of the former, one of the best 
 works is his well-known portrait of Jean Dampt, the sculptor, seated 
 in deep meditation, his hands in the lap of his workman’s apron, and 
 appropriately framed in carved and stained oak, decorated with little 
 painted panels which further present the phases of the artist-sitter. 
 Some of the painter’s decorative female heads, personifications of cities, 
 or of states of the mind, are also very distinguished in their subdued 
 harmonies of color. 
 
 It is believed by the most competent observers among their coun¬ 
 trymen that the influence of the chiefs of this ecole nouvelle extends 
 every year, without too much running to pasticcio, and that the evo¬ 
 lution proceeds in complete accord with the aspirations of the day. 
 As the field of the imagination, of sensitiveness and sympathy, is 
 much too vast to be covered by any one group of artists, we find 
 them divided into various groups, according to their affiliations,—and 
 the number and importance of these groups, larger than in any other 
 country, give much of its distinguishing character to contemporary 
 French art. There are still some of these writers who cite as 
 the leader of these revolutionary temperaments, marching toward the 
 
EMILE-CH ARLES DAMERON 
 
 END OF THE HARVEST 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURh 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 A 
 
 conquest of the independence of art, Manet,—a species of Moses, able 
 to point out the way to the Promised Land but not permitted to attain 
 it himself. And this revolutionary movement followed the methods 
 of most others,—incited and led at the outset by fiery iconoclasts, 
 with the courage to rebel against the established order of things but 
 without that deliberation and weight of judgment necessary to regulate 
 their conquests, then followed and assimilated and brought into order 
 by the less adventurous and the more discreet. The few leaders now 
 left, unwilling to thus settle down and disarm, have gone off in search 
 of new revolutions, followed by the turbulent and the unregulated; 
 these are the “ revolittionnaircsT who have even founded a new asso¬ 
 ciation, the Societe Noiivelle de pci litres et dc seulpteurs, under the presi¬ 
 dency of M. Gabriel Mourey, in the winter of 1899-1900, but whose 
 first exhibition was nevertheless not entirely of dynamite. The more 
 conservative of these pioneers, and the more numerous, occupied in 
 organizing their newly acquired liberties, are the “ repuUicains liberaux 
 de Vesthetique —but the distinctions are not very striking. The fire 
 and fury of the original Impressionistic movement have singularly died 
 out; M. Besnard is now probably the most advanced representative 
 of this movement among the painters now most prominently before 
 the public, but the great multitudinous average art production in Paris 
 differs very considerably from M. Caillebotte’s gallery in the Luxem¬ 
 bourg. Nowhere is this discrepancy more obvious than in the annual 
 Salons,—that of 1900, held in the Place Breteuil, had never heard of 
 this new discovery in the art of painting and was generally thin, dry, 
 flat, and conventional to a disgraceful degree. 
 
 Needless to say, the foreigners are apt to view these things with 
 alien eyes. Mr. M. H. Spielman, the English critic, in a recent “Appre¬ 
 ciation of Modern French Art,” after praising “ the fine poetic works of 
 style (yet how different!)” of Puvis de Chavannes and Fantin-Latour, 
 goes on: “ But even this art has its drawbacks. The very tenderness 
 
i6 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 of its tones has helped to lead to that colorless school which M. Zola 
 so bitterly bewails. M. Zola proclaims himself the originator, the very 
 Frankenstein, of the plein-air Monster, which has ended in the worship 
 of Nature and the neglect of Art. In the attempt to render air, artists 
 have forgotten the color in the things and scenes they paint, and in 
 their modern anxiety about light, tone and value have lost the greatest 
 charm of all. ‘Go to Nature!’ cried M. Zola at a time when Nature 
 was represented to him by Manet’s celebrated nude and impossible 
 cat. The artists hearkened and obeyed; but forgot the Art they left 
 behind. And now the prophet, horror-stricken at his own falsity,— 
 or perhaps half-truth,—cries out aloud that he ‘ is scared by the mon¬ 
 strosities ’ he has called into being. The ‘ reflected lights ’ he pleaded for 
 have become daubs of primary colors, laid on with a skill that often routs 
 the objections of the observer of green skies, violet country-sides, ‘orange 
 horses and multicolored women.’ M. Rochefort deplores the over- 
 mysterious, nebulous school, in the faces of whose portraits the feat¬ 
 ures are lost and the noses unattempted, reminding one of Mr. Whistler’s 
 drawing of his portrait of Mrs. Cassatt for the old Pall Mall Gazette. 
 These things, even the ‘sexless beings’ of the new mysticism, are 
 doubtless more amusing than La Source, Femme Couchee, Reverie, Le 
 Bah /, and so forth, of which so many even now proclaim the mental 
 barrenness of their authors. But what else do these gentlemen expect ? 
 They forget that out of a natural tendency to exaggeration the pendulum 
 of fashion, which has swung periodically from Art to Nature and back 
 again, needs but the incentive of a crusade of novel ‘ theory ’ to oscillate 
 between fantastic extremes. So at last we have the sight of a whole 
 school, leaders and all, exclaiming: ‘Nature is played out! We must 
 go back to Art ’— their Nature and their Art!” 
 
 The “ mental barrenness ” of the average Salons for the last few 
 years has evoked cries of alarm nearer home. At the distribution of 
 awards of that of 1898, the president of the Societe dcs Artistes Francis, 
 
CONTEMPORARY ARP 
 
 17 
 
 HENRI BIVA. VILLENEUVE-L'ETANG : EVENING. 
 
 M. Jean-Paul Laurens, notwithstanding the character of the occasion, did 
 not hesitate to utter words of warning. “ Beware of the false artist,” he 
 said, “ beware of that formidable trespasser who but too often thrusts 
 his works upon our walls. Drive him out without pity, for it is of the 
 commonplace, dull and gray, that the Salons may perish!” There are 
 many other indications of a general concern at this substitution of the 
 feigned for the true in the works of the artists of the day, of the ac¬ 
 quired for the natural instinct, and the very thoroughness of the technical 
 education has been held to be responsible, as enabling the productions of 
 mere talent to suggest their authors being divinely called to the vocation. 
 The methods of instruction of the national Ecole des Beaux-Arts have 
 long been bitterly assailed as totally at variance with the spirit and ten¬ 
 dencies and requirements of the present day (which are all considered 
 
i8 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 in the ateliers of masters like Gustave Moreau); the pupils are taught 
 “to copy the old masters in dishonoring them,” says Degas. The envois 
 of the students in the Academy in Rome are declared to deteriorate year 
 by year; the movement in favor of the total abolition of this costly and 
 now useless institution in the Villa Medicis was openly advocated by the 
 Figaro and others of the Parisian journals in 1899, and in the present 
 year of the Exposition the Roman correspondents declare the annual 
 exhibition to be worse than ever. 
 
 The painters of the new generation are connected with those of the 
 older by artists of very different talents, “ eclectics ” as it were, who 
 respect at once the traditions of “ the glorious past ” and the substantial 
 acquirements of the modern innovators. One of the most talented and 
 industrious of these is M. Francois Flameng, the son of the celebrated 
 engraver, Leopold; one of the most illustrious is M. Dagnan-Bouveret, 
 who has even been classed as an Impressionist by some of the least 
 exact or most impudent of the followers of that movement. The painter 
 of the Accident and of the Benediction was awarded his first Salon medal 
 twenty-two years ago, yet his work is still among the most important of 
 the day, and it includes, in this supposed age of scoffing and realism, 
 very large and important religious subjects, received with due respect and 
 accepted as representative and most eminent works of the contemporary 
 school. Of the largest and perhaps the most valuable of these, the Cine 
 of the Salon du Champ-de-Mars of 1896, it was declared by such an 
 authority as the Journal des Debats that “the work is none the less one 
 of the most important, we would say, not only of the Salons of this 
 year but also of this period, and quite worthy of the young master who, 
 by the seriousness, the conscientiousness, and the elevation of his art, 
 has furnished in our school, at an hour in which his intervention has 
 been particularly useful and desirable, a so fortifying and encouraging 
 example.” The “ none the less ” of the quotation refers to the de¬ 
 tails of placing the figure of the Saviour in the exact centre of the 
 
JULIEN DUPRE 
 
 IN THE SHADE 
 
 Loaned bv the State 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 1 
 
 
 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 19 
 
 composition and of causing all the light of the scene to proceed from 
 His person, as from a patent gas-burner, in the words of an irreverent 
 caricaturist; against these borrowings from old traditions the critic sets 
 the modern conception of presenting the Apostles as receiving the 
 words of the Master in perfect quietude. There are no gestures, no 
 rising from the seats, no upseting the salt-cellar, as in Leonardo’s famous 
 version; John puts his hand to his head, with a movement which may 
 be intended to signify bewilderment and consternation, but which has 
 rather the effect of being the one thing needed to complete the com¬ 
 position and action of the scene. 
 
 It sometimes happens that the artist can make a more impress¬ 
 ive work of art by departing from the strict letter of his text. The 
 intelligent spectator is of two minds in looking at this large and truly 
 imposing canvas; and the subtlety and intensity of the modern school 
 may find here their most characteristic exemplification, from, perhaps, 
 either of the two points of view. It would, at first, seem obvious that 
 the disciples would never receive in such absolute quiescence the 
 announcement just made to them, that they would not sit, all of them, 
 bathed in this mysterious light while their leader rose solemnly with 
 the glass of red wine like a great jewel in his hand, unless they were 
 indeed too stunned and bewildered to move and protest. But the 
 painter’s figures do not seem to be so stunned; rather do they sit in 
 great silence and awe, like men assisting at some solemn mystery; 
 or, the painter may have desired to express that these were not mere 
 fishers and peasants, divinely called and yet acting humanly; or, he 
 may have wished to paint, not an illustration of the incidents of the 
 Last Supper as it occurred in all probability, but a presentation, a syn¬ 
 thesis, an abstraction, as when, in an altar-piece, the saints stand at the 
 foot of the Virgin’s throne adoring the Infant still an infant. Certain 
 it is, that the absolute quietude of this scene is most impressive; the 
 painter has exhausted his utmost skill in portraying the strange soft 
 
20 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 light which fills the chamber, is reflected back from the white cloth 
 and reveals the stilled, intent, awe-struck faces watching the speaker, and 
 the character and quality and variety of these human countenances. 
 The head of the Christ is very solemn and very beautiful; if it be 
 not altogether divine, it is probably because no painter can paint the 
 divine. 
 
 Of a very different quality, much more worldly, cheerful, and varied, 
 is the work of Francois Flameng, who may be accepted as the type of 
 the historical painter of the new school, excellently grounded in his 
 science of dates, customs, costumes, and styles of the epochs, with a 
 prodigious facility of arrangement, a science of composition and that 
 peculiarly modern infinite ingenuity and skill in design, never taking 
 himself too seriously and thereby falling into heaviness, and yet capable 
 of rising to real heights of dramatic intensity, as in his Waterloo of 
 the Salon of 1898. To all these qualities M. Flameng adds a very good 
 color sense, but in his portraits, generally marked by the same ingenuity 
 and sense of distinction, there is felt a certain absence of the color qual¬ 
 ities of a first-class painter. In his well-known decorations in the 
 Sorbonne the artist emphasized in a peculiar degree some of the break- 
 ings-away from the old traditions which characterize the newer school, 
 and some of which would seem to be more ingenious than logical,— 
 as the relegation to the second plan, or even to the background, of the 
 dignitaries and officials, and the thrusting into great prominence, under 
 the nose of the spectator of the workmen, the rank and file, the pro¬ 
 letariat. This, of course, is in consonance with the spirit of the age, 
 etc., and a revolt against the old pompous, official art of Louis XIV. and 
 the First Empire. M. Flameng is nevertheless sufficiently of a hero- 
 worshipper, and has devoted a number of important works to Napo¬ 
 leon,—one of his most recent being a series of paintings, reproduced 
 in large engravings, of the Etapes or successive stages in the career of 
 that conqueror, Isold Bella, the vanquisher of Italy in the year V of the 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 21 
 
 JEAN-CHARLES CAZIN. MESNIVAL. 
 LOANED BY THE CITY OF PARIS. 
 
 Republique; Malmaison, the First Consul; Fontainebleau, Compiegne , and 
 Saint-Cloud, the Emperor. In these, and in his other historical or quasi- 
 historical canvases, as in the very decorative and amusing scene—unsup¬ 
 ported by documents—of a number of eighteenth-century beauties 
 bathing together, the artist separates himself from the truth just enough 
 to allow the admission of taste, of artistic skill of presentation, and 
 thereby secures more forcibly the appearance of truth. Accuracy of 
 design, and accuracy of historical exactness, for which we hear the 
 critics so frequently extolling the painters, are but relative terms,—our 
 own observation, or the instantaneous photograph, will reveal the 
 innumerable minor departures of the designer from absolute nature, 
 and in no museum or history of costumes will we find exactly the 
 
22 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 trappings and appurtenances of the past age with which the historical 
 painter presents us. In M. Flameng’s works, this is true also of his 
 compositions, nearly always marked by a certain balance and feeling 
 for decorative effect, a style, —which is generally more acceptable to 
 our eyes than the chance combinations of Nature, though it must be 
 admitted that Nature is constantly presenting us with admirably com¬ 
 posed arrangements. With regard to the quality of “style,” that 
 undefinable but very positive artistic quality, it is probably true, as the 
 conservatives assert, that the older school preserved much more of it 
 than the younger one,—the greater men of the Academie, and the 
 Institut and the Pantheon, Gerome, Lefebvre, Delaunay, Baudry, Cha- 
 vannes, Henner, possessing it and never wilfully throwing it away as 
 do the men of the day frequently, M. Henri Martin, in his Chacun sa 
 chi mere and Vers PA In me, M. Besnard in his celebrated Roneys kicking 
 away the flies, or in his putrescent corpse on the walls of the Sorbonne 
 with the milk of life flowing from her breasts. 
 
 Perhaps it is the complete absence of this quality in the paintings of 
 Jean Beraud which gives them their strongest characteristic, their evident 
 insincerity, their meretricious air of smartness. “As to M. Beraud,” says 
 the Revue Bleue, “it becomes more and more impossible to neglect him, 
 since he is undoubtedly the painter the most noticed of the two Salons, 
 the manner which he inaugurated a few years ago, of making an effect 
 at any price and the search for the scandalous, has conducted him to a 
 point which is no longer within the domain of the critic of art.” Such 
 an unworthy device as transferring the scene of the Crucifixion to the 
 heights of Montmartre and of representing the Biblical personages, the 
 Virgin, Joseph of Arimathea, and the Magdalen under the types of that 
 locality, would indeed seem to merit reprobation. An earlier sensational 
 picture, the Madeleine chc{ ie Pharisien, is much more dignified and far 
 less vulgar,—indeed, it might seem to be a logical continuation of the 
 primitive method of representing Scriptural scenes in the costumes of 
 
JEAN-MARIE-ALFRED PARIS 
 
 AN INTRUSION 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 
 the artist’s time, a practice revived in our day by the Saxon painter 
 Von Uhde and imitated from him by Lhermitte, Melchers, and others. 
 M. Beraud is more ingenious in his scheme, and the Pharisee’s house is a 
 modern Parisian one and his guests modern Parisians, selected and pre¬ 
 sented with great skill,—the artist’s cleverness, in fact, defeating itself, so 
 that the spectator in his admiration of the means employed quite over¬ 
 looked the effect intended to be conveyed, or which should have been 
 intended to be conveyed, of enforcing the Scriptural lesson anew by this 
 modern transformation. Less than any other of these modern painters 
 of sacred history in this guise has M. Beraud an air of believing in his 
 theme, and the less, consequently, does he convert his audience. 
 
 Raphael Collin, pupil of Cabanel, in a very different method, preserves 
 many of the traditions of the older generation and breathes into them 
 some of the breath of the new. But it is possible that he lacks some¬ 
 what of that of which M. Beraud has too much, and indeed his large 
 canvas, Ail Bord de la Mer, painted several years ago and exhibited in 
 America at the Chicago Exposition of 1893, seems to remain still one of 
 his most acceptable works. The composition is of the simplest, but the 
 color problem presented is of the most difficult, to represent very youth¬ 
 ful and white-skinned nude figures on a shining beach in almost the 
 highest possible scale of luminous tones. Never to fall below the key, 
 never to admit a discord, and yet to preserve the semblance of the in¬ 
 finite gradations in this elevated range, this constitutes a very difficult 
 technical problem, quite in the spirit of the times and yet tempered by 
 the temperance of the older school. A certain solidity of the figures 
 is the most obvious quality that the painter has had to sacrifice, but he 
 has so well mastered his problem that the result is very beautiful in 
 color, tone, and atmosphere, very graceful and pleasing in design, and— 
 what is not altogether unimportant—dignified, simple, and chaste. In 
 later and smaller canvases the painter has attempted to repeat these har¬ 
 monies in pale tones, generally, in his easel pictures, frequently simple 
 
24 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 garden landscapes and fig¬ 
 ures, always with a pleasant 
 summer air of refinement 
 and grace. 
 
 Cazin is more difficult to 
 class, if, indeed, it be neces¬ 
 sary to classify him,—com¬ 
 pared with the older masters 
 of landscapes, Harpignies and 
 Frangais, or even with more 
 modern ones, such as Binet 
 and Tanzi, he is indeed of 
 the moderns, if we apply the 
 modern touchstone of in¬ 
 tentness of sympathy. He 
 has also that peculiarly mod¬ 
 ern quality, of being sen¬ 
 sitive to the harmonies of 
 nature at the decline of the 
 day, the passages en sour¬ 
 dine, “the sober charm and 
 
 EDOUARD TOUDOUZE. AUTUMN FLOWER. 
 
 LOANED BY THE STATE. the human melancholy” of 
 
 the landscape. “ Intimacy is 
 the proper domain of Cazin,” says one appreciator of his work, in the 
 Revue de Paris. “ He has a manner soft, fine, and tender of saying 
 things, never forcibly, never in excess. He speaks of Nature in the 
 hours of introspection, in soft mornings, in dreamy evenings; she 
 replies to him, and it is these confidences spoken under the breath 
 that he repeats to us. . . . Light, fine and attentive, retaining of 
 nature less her strength than her delicacy, not her grandiose aspects 
 but her natural sweetness and mildness and her familiar elegance, 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 his pictures have an exquisite simplicity, a penetrating accent. . . . ” 
 
 This is true, but less true is the judgment of M. Paul Desjardins in 
 the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, that his rare merit consists in having “no 
 parti pris in his visions, no conventions, no peculiar manner;” it is a 
 certain parti pris in all his canvases that interferes with the spectator’s 
 enjoyment of them, a very familiar arrangement of tones that renders 
 his canvases recognizable at almost any distance, and a certain similarity 
 of texture, quite apart from the local color, that applies more or less 
 evenly to skies, chaumieres, foliage, and foreground. This is peculiarly 
 noticeable when a number of his works are brought together in one 
 exhibition,—generally a most unwise thing to do for any painter, and 
 especially so for any one who plays persistently in a minor key. In fact, 
 it is one of the practical disadvantages of this modern school of painting, 
 as it is of any subtle, refined, sensitive form of art that appeals only to 
 certain moods and natures, that long and continuous manifestations, 
 practical, workaday exhibitions of it, as a large collection of pictures in 
 a gallery or even a too-long Wagnerian opera, end by fatiguing all but the 
 most faithful. Art carries with it its own Nemesis in that the more it 
 perfects itself, the higher and purer its quality, the more completely 
 removed from the dross of the earth, the smaller the audience to which 
 it can hope to appeal, and the sooner wearied even that audience. The 
 reason for this ordinance of the Fates is obvious,—nowhere, excepting 
 possibly in theology, is it intended that virtue shall inevitably be re¬ 
 warded, that cakes and ale shall be necessarily distributed to him who 
 has done the best. 
 
 It may also be said of the work of this painter, as it may, alack 1 
 of so many others, that a certain fatigue, or at least a certain unwilling¬ 
 ness to greatly dare, as in his youth, seems to manifest itself in his later 
 canvases. From the painter of the Judith of some fifteen or twenty 
 years ago more might have been expected than the present series of 
 admirable repetitions of minor themes. It may well be that the genres 
 
26 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 of to-day are as good painting as the much larger and more learned 
 canvas in which the Biblical scene was repeated with curious modern 
 variations and annotations, but they are at least less enterprising and 
 ambitious,—and Michelet’s text seems still to hold good for French art 
 as for all others: “Invent, or perish!” 
 
 On the other hand, there is M. Roybet, who received his first medal 
 in 1866, and the medaille d’honnmr at the Salon twenty-seven years 
 afterward, and who seemed to have renewed his youth and made his 
 fortune with two or three great canvases, painter's canvases, in which, 
 it was averred, Frans Hals lived again. The very subjects were Flemish 
 and of the time of Frans Hals, buxom and opulent commeres serving 
 in kitchens and cellars, roystering, broad-brimmed soldiers of fortune, 
 swaggering and love-making. In theme and composition and design 
 these canvases were distinguished by an admirable savoir, brio, and 
 never were there any which seemed more vehemently to reclaim all 
 the charm of fat and Rubenesque color, and they were accordingly 
 accepted as being all that they should be. But, in the words of an 
 English critic, “this color suggests rather tints over black and white 
 than pigments honestly employed with vigor and knowledge in imi¬ 
 tation of Nature.” It would be difficult to describe more accurately 
 the peculiarly disappointing quality of this painting: and it would be 
 regrettable if the modern French school were forced to rely upon these 
 canvases for its rivalry with the Flemings and the Venetians. In a still 
 larger and more ambitious canvas, M. Roybet essayed the great historical 
 art,—at the Salon of 1893, he appeared with his Charles le Temeraire a 
 Nesles, the scene of the pillage and massacre in the church of the little 
 town of Picardy on its capture by the Burgundians, in June, 1472. The 
 painter is said to have greatly exaggerated this massacre for his own 
 pictorial purposes, and the complete suit of tilting armor in which the 
 duke appears is said to be later in date and quite different in destina¬ 
 tion from this siege and this use of it. However, the painter is able 
 
LIONEL ROYER 
 
 MARBAUX; EYLAU, FEBRUARY 8, 1807 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
 
 
 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 
 to quote the words of Charles himself, that in the nave of the church 
 “ il voyoit moult belle chose et quT'l avoit avec lui moult bons bouchers." 
 From the triforium above, the fugitives who had sought shelter there are 
 precipitated to the pavement below; and the next day all those who 
 have escaped will be hanged or mutilated. In the midst of this scene 
 of horror and confusion the duke sits impassive on his great black 
 war-horse; the struggling multitude in the immediate foreground affords 
 the painter abundant opportunity to display all the resources of his 
 invention and of his palette. But, as was objected at the time, the 
 work lacks unity, “ that sacred unity without which there is no per¬ 
 fection in the arts, which conciliates all the various parts, legalizes 
 them, sets them in their best light, gives them all their value . . .” 
 
 It is not necessary to accept the current statements of the deca¬ 
 dence of the present schools of painting in France to bear witness to 
 the supremacy of modern French sculpture. Never since the Renais¬ 
 sance has been seen such a revival of the art of the statuary; in it 
 all the peculiar qualities of the race seemed to find their most apt 
 aesthetic expression. To the long list of glories achieved since the 
 days of Louis XIV, if not indeed since the Gothic, it would seem diffi¬ 
 cult to add a new demonstration, a new and revivifying influence, and 
 yet this it is claimed has been done,—by the art of Rodin and by the 
 revival of sculpture in color, tinted in the marble or by a combination 
 of various colored marbles, of marbles with bronze or other metals, 
 or even with precious and semi-precious stones. The leader, and so 
 far much the most distinguished of the practitioners of this latter form 
 of the art is M. Gerome, the veteran; the controversies that rage over 
 the work of the author of the Porte d'Enfer and the Balzac have been 
 among the most vehement in history, and though the official victory 
 seems to rest with the artist, it will probably be found—as on various 
 previous occasions—that the official decision was based on intemperate 
 judgment. At present, however,—fanned by the opposition to the 
 
28 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 formulas of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts which is very much the vogue,— 
 the general verdict is decidedly adverse to that of the Societe des gens 
 de lettres in the matter of the Balgac. Much too great a master to be 
 catalogued and classified with the ordinary, it was proposed to give 
 M. Rodin a special garden and a pavilion of his own in the grounds 
 of the Exposition; but as this would have mutilated the sculpture 
 exhibition, this Exposition was transferred to a convenient locality in 
 the Place de l’Alma, just outside the enclosure, and officially inaugurated, 
 like the other. In conjunction with two other seekers after “the direct 
 inspiration of nature,”—“ Desbois, the signer of marvellous pewters, and 
 Bourdelle, a poet whose sculpture is harmonic,”—M. Rodin opened in the 
 spring of 1900 an Academie in the Boulevard Montparnasse, and spread 
 consternation in the Rue Bonaparte. “ Under the conduct of this tri¬ 
 umvirate of men of talent, a generation of artists will mount, we do 
 not doubt, to the assault of the ancient statuary formulas of that art, 
 cold, dull, official, conventional, which still triumphs somewhat too much 
 in the flanks of the new palaces of the Exposition. 
 
 “In a few years, thanks to the initiative of the master, Rodin, 
 modern sculpture, definitely set in the direction toward life, will give 
 to matter, intelligently dominated, the thrill of the flesh, sorrow or joy.” 
 (Louis Gaillard.) The best work of the artist is so excellent, so subtle, 
 refined, and truly living, that it presents a most extraordinary contrast 
 with much of his later, larger, and more monumental work in which 
 these rhapsodists mistake for the “ thrill of the flesh ” various affec¬ 
 tations and monstrosities. M. Rodin has need to be defended from 
 his friends, for, the mot d'ordre having been given, the feeble protes¬ 
 tations of his few critics have been swept away and overwhelmed 
 in such a torrent of indiscriminating and extravagant, and frequently 
 ignorant, eulogy from the whole tribe of litterateurs, essayists, and 
 journalistes of every degree, as probably no other living artist has 
 received. 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 29 
 
 No such measures are taken with regard to the painters who, 
 some twenty years ago, were recognized as the chiefs of French art, 
 and who had received at the hands of an appreciative government 
 and of their admiring fellow-artists all the honors which this art had 
 to bestow. Most of these still exhibit, but, it may be said, are to-day 
 judged on their merits, and are compelled to listen to condemnatory 
 judgments which would formerly have not been uttered and which— 
 it must be asserted—are too frequently founded upon facts. It would 
 
 EMILE BOULARD. STUDY. 
 
 be easy to multiply quotations in which this freedom of speech runs 
 into intemperateness, to the great injury of the portion of undoubted 
 truth which it contains,—it arriving only occasionally that the scribe 
 speaks according to the Gospel. We have already given the summary 
 condemnation of two of M. Falguiere’s most important works; M. Bonnat’s 
 
FRANCE 
 
 1 ° 
 
 decorations in the ceiling of the new Hotel de Ville were judged with 
 equal severity (and justification); the painting of M. Gerome and M. Bou- 
 guereau has long been an offence to the literary men (and is not alto¬ 
 gether approved of by the painters); M. Gervex is thus disposed of in 
 the Revue Bleue in an article on the Salon of 1896: “Here is a whole 
 panel devoted to M. Gervex. Up to the present time, he has offered 
 us only isolated portraits. This time, his ambition has exalted itself 
 to the point of presenting us with a group of figures assembled in 
 the same frame. Also, nothing can equal the insignificance of this 
 family scene in which he who painted it has certainly displayed less 
 inventive effort than the cheapest of photographers. The latter, at 
 least, would have taken the trouble to vary the attitudes a little. It is 
 quite necessary to say it, however harsh it may seem, we are unable to 
 see here anything but the work of a house-painter, and the materials with 
 which it is executed would suffice to suggest the resemblance. . . .” 
 That liberal and enterprising journal, L'Aurore, in the course of an 
 article on the Decennale exhibition of French art at the Exposition of 
 1900, began by commenting upon a certain feature of the general 
 arrangement of the art galleries which had previously not passed 
 unnoticed in other quarters: 
 
 “ Thirty-six safes, some of which are immense, on the ground-floor 
 and on the first floor of the Grand Palais, enclose that which the princes 
 of French Art have judged to be the most worthy among the works 
 painted within the last ten years to be exposed to the admiration of the 
 world. 
 
 “ It is necessary to declare bluntly that the princes of French Art 
 have, under these circumstances, demonstrated themselves to be the 
 most finished vulgarians [out fait preuve d'l/ne goujaterie parfaitef which 
 fact is in nowise excused or ameliorated by the eminent superiority of 
 the canvases with which they have loaded the walls. These messieurs 
 have taken for themselves, and for a few privileged ones whom they 
 
EDOUARD-BERNARD DEBAT-PONSAN 
 
 CHRIST ON THE MOUNT 
 
 (SAINT JOHN XIII, 34) 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
yfiy/S&Oy/ty-$ 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 A 
 
 have deigned to favor, three-quarters of the space devoted to the fine 
 arts in this Exposition to which all the nations have been invited. The 
 foreigners have at their disposal only the fourth quarter. Germany, the 
 United States, Great Britain, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, 
 Austria, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Russia, Japan, etc., can, therefore, hang 
 proportionally two or three paintings where France hangs a hundred. 
 Our artists have a singular fashion of comprehending and practising 
 hospitality. They have thought, doubtless, that, in excluding the others, 
 they would be able to demonstrate irrefutably that they alone existed 
 and that they alone were endowed with genius. Alas! they have dem¬ 
 onstrated irrefutably only the boorishness of their great minds [la mufflcrie 
 de lears grandes antes].” 
 
 With regard to this, it may be said that these artists have only fol¬ 
 lowed the example of other great International exhibitions, in which the 
 nation giving the festival, so to speak, always reserves the largest space 
 for itself, and that, in this case, they had more justification in the fact of 
 the recognized greater importance of the French school. But the critic 
 goes on: 
 
 “ M. Benjamin-Constant has assurance, that is well understood, and 
 no one better than he is able to give to the commonplace an air of brio 
 and of cheap mastery. But is that a sufficient reason for him to take 
 possession of square kilometres of wall space? His Urbain II a Tou¬ 
 louse takes up nearly an entire panel. And the immensity of its dimen¬ 
 sions constitutes the whole of its merits. It has been said that this Pope 
 with a figure in brick-work, mounted upon a horse in brick and certainly 
 incapable of taking a step, for he is not living,—it has been said that this 
 pompous procession, under a burning sun, is a fine work. It is not true. 
 It has been said that the aged Reine cl'Auglctcrre, painted in the same 
 note, seated like a heavy stone idol, loaded with tinsel and tawdry orna¬ 
 ments, in a hall of her palace at Windsor, is a superb canvas, and the 
 journals of the day, if I remember rightly, lamented, some time ago, that 
 
3 2 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 the disrespectful sea had caused it, in the course of the voyage, some 
 damage, 1 forget what. The sea did not commit so great a crime! These 
 enormous machines are but trickery, deceivings of the eye and colored 
 humbug,—just the same as these portraits of women a grand flafia by 
 the same artist, in which there are dresses and stuffs, but no women. 
 Apart from the portrait of his son and a canvas in which may be seen 
 a good example of his former work, M. Benjamin-Constant exhibits to 
 us nothing which does much honor, either to him or to any one. 
 
 “ And this is true of other machines kilometriques which have already 
 appalled the hardy and made pause the brave in the annual Salons. 
 For example,—the Lady Godiva, of M. Jules Lefebvre; the Charles le 
 Temeraire, of M. Roybet; the Distribution des recompenses , of M. Gervex; 
 the Pout Alexandre III, of M. Roll; two or three canvases of crowds 
 and of massacre, by M. Tattegrain; the pretentious and untrue imagi¬ 
 nations in which M. Henri Martin exhausts himself in endeavoring un¬ 
 successfully to imitate and take to himself the work of Puvis de 
 Chavannes and the neo-impressionists; the Cine, melodramatic, turgid 
 and with improbable lighting, of M. Dagnan; the great bedevilment of 
 Saint Francois a la charnie, of M. Chartran; and his hideous Leon Kill; 
 the Mouton de Toulouse , upset in the clouds, of M. J.-P. Laurens; and, 
 above all, the militaircries of M. Detaille, the painter of the army. It is 
 evident that the latter has wished to prepare his own apotheosis. He 
 has unpacked all his baggage,—the Czar, the Czarine, Felix Faure, the 
 generals, the grand-dukes, the foot-soldiers and the horsemen of all 
 colors, the Academicians, the firemen, M. Poubelle and M. Lepine, all this 
 is on parade, filling canvases without end and which, notwithstand¬ 
 ing the overloading, seem empty, so much are these people and these 
 animals hollow, paralyzed, in wood, so much does this painting / . . . 
 le camp, as the duchesses say.” 
 
 As will be seen, it is no longer considered necessary to speak re¬ 
 spectfully of the great names in contemporary French art. Rather 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 
 curiously, M. Henner seems 
 to escape from this reviling 
 better than any of his im¬ 
 mediate contemporaries, and 
 after him probably Harpignies, 
 
 Jules Breton, and Fantin-La¬ 
 tour. These would scarcely 
 be thought to be names to 
 find honor in the camp of 
 the iconoclasts, and indeed the 
 iconoclasts, for all their noise, 
 represent only a section. Their 
 enthusiasm, in the new sculpt¬ 
 ure, is reserved for Rodin, but 
 the more impartial judgment 
 of posterity will probably pre¬ 
 fer the saner and far better 
 balanced work of Gerome. 
 
 Few things in the history of 
 art have been more remarka¬ 
 ble than the prodigious activ¬ 
 ity, invention, and sense of 
 style of this painter whose 
 Combat de Coqs in the Luxem¬ 
 bourg is dated 1846, and who, at an age when men much his juniors 
 content themselves with endeavoring to repeat their past successes, 
 flings himself into a comparatively new art, inventing, experimenting, 
 finding new uses for his materials, and new materials and more ac¬ 
 ceptable, dignified, classic themes for sculpture in a year than most of 
 the eminent sculptors, at home and abroad, do in a life-time. It is 
 rather curious that this artist whose painting, like that of his very first 
 
 P.-FRANC LAMY. PORTRAIT, 
 
FRANCE 
 
 34 
 
 picture, has remained “thin,” and consequently contemned, should be 
 the first to revive successfully the introduction of color into statuary, 
 and that this logical, academical scholar, preserver of the classic tradi¬ 
 tions, should lend his countenance to an art which, notwithstanding 
 the great example of the Greeks, certainly remains somewhat illogical 
 and either barbaric or decadent. Pure sculpture, which contents itself 
 with the reproduction of form alone, is a legitimate mode of expres¬ 
 sion ; painting on the flat surface, which undertakes to represent form, 
 color, atmosphere, and perspective, is another,—either of these, within 
 their respective limits, may be pushed to the utmost perfection of 
 representation. But the sculptor who introduces color is legally bound 
 not to push his truthfulness of representation too far, under penalty 
 of falling into “wax works” and thereby becoming offensive; his art, 
 more or less tentative and decorative, oscillates between two extremes 
 without venturing to approach either too nearly. The antique Roman 
 busts in marble, porphyry, and bronze, works of a later and baser art, 
 do not commend themselves to modern imitation; the modern crafts¬ 
 men are much less violent in their contrasting materials, but are still 
 pursued by problems which are not merely literary and sophisticated 
 but of actual artistic importance as having to do with the actual artistic 
 success of the work. 
 
 In his famous Bellonc, the life-size statue of the goddess of war, 
 Gerome has pushed his simulation of nature very far, but he has not 
 been able to avoid the inevitable inconsistencies. The dilated eyes and 
 the open mouth are treated very carefully and realistically,—the former 
 especially, the bluish-white surrounding the dark eyeballs and fringed 
 above and below with black lashes, were it not for its fixed expression, 
 might readily be taken for the human orb. But the flesh of the face, 
 arms, hands, and feet is represented by the nearly uniform tint of ivory; 
 the metal of the sword, and apparently of the helmet and buckler, is 
 real metal, while the silver under-garment and the reddish overmantle 
 
JULES-JOSEPH LEFEBVRE 
 
 LADY GODIVA 
 
 FACSIMILE WATER-COLOR 
 
alyl 
 
 
 R t iJ 
 
 

CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 are only approximately resembling. The sculptor has displayed his ar¬ 
 chaeology in restoring the antique casque, buckler, and glaive,—the latter 
 having a double barb like a fish-hook in the blade near the guard; he has 
 called upon all the resources of his art and his science to aid him in sum¬ 
 moning from the mists of antiquity, in giving her again life and breath, 
 the terrible figure of the Roman goddess, and he has added, at her side, 
 with a fine disregard for his archaeology, the hooded Indian serpent. 
 Nevertheless, these are but minor details, and the criticism that has been 
 put forth by the conventional souls—that there is “ too much grimace ”— 
 is even less valid; the discretion with which the expression is arrested 
 when it is on the point of exceeding bounds, but not before it has been 
 carried to a surprising degree of intensity, is remarkable. It would have 
 been easy to represent a screaming virago,—indeed modern French 
 sculpture is responsible for at least two or three figures of this descrip¬ 
 tion, quite as offensive and void of any quality of art as the sculptors’ 
 original models; in this statue, the study is fine and subtle, the fierce 
 eyes, the fury and indignation to which the mouth gives utterance, 
 the thin, nervous arm brandishing the blade, the straining feet and the 
 hissing snake, all combine to give fire and life to a figure which yet 
 remains fine and imposing in its “ clamorous silence.” The beauty and 
 richness of the materials, it is needless to say, add very greatly to 
 the effect of this figure, and are curiously appropriate to the theme, 
 which would have been but lifeless in the pallid marble or in the 
 monotonous tone of bronze. In this choice of a subject on which to 
 exercise his new methods, Gerome’s intellect once more asserted its 
 superiority. 
 
 In the beautiful statue, also life size, of M. Barrias, Nature se devoilant, 
 which in the crowded nef of the Grand Palais of the Exposition of 1900 
 attracts more popular attention than any other work of sculpture, the 
 use of the materials is less elaborate and the imitation of nature carried 
 much less far. Here, the flesh is represented by the white marble, the 
 
FRANCE 
 
 eyeballs are slightly tinted blue and the lips pink. This can scarcely be 
 said to be satisfactory, but is rendered necessary by the strong contrast 
 of the veined red porphyry of the heavy clinging drapery, confined under 
 the breasts by a ceinture with a great green scarab, and the heavy veil 
 of onyx which the figure lifts with both arms. As the theme is much 
 less intense than Gerome’s, the slighter and more strictly decorative 
 workmanship seems more appropriate. 
 
 A third representative work, and one in which these methods are 
 more artistically and satisfactorily carried out than in the two preceding, 
 is one of the later productions of Jean Dampt, the Paix an Foyer. In 
 this truly charming statuette, one of the most complete works of the new 
 decorative school, and one in which the artistic quality is of the highest, 
 the slight variation in the materials employed and the exquisite taste 
 of the sculptor combine to render the pretty, graceful theme with a com¬ 
 pleteness of interpretation which is remarkable. The figure sits smiling 
 faintly and very peacefully in the chimney-place, the family dog nestling 
 beside her, and the family cat asleep in her lap, her chin on the sitter’s 
 hand. In her hair, on each side, are great open flowers, softly tinted; 
 the dress, of white ivory, like the flesh, is spotted with little iridescent 
 spangles which make fl owers; the overrobe, the dog, and the cat are in a 
 gray. Back of the seat rises a tall panel enamelled in bluish greens in 
 delicate relief, with the title on a scroll; the seat, the footstool, the floor, 
 the niche in which the group is placed and which may be closed in with 
 folding-doors, duly bolted with little bolts, are all in admirably finished 
 wood-work in which the fullest advantage is taken of the beauty of the 
 material. The exquisite finish of everything, the very happy combina¬ 
 tion of the materials, the dulcet charm of the subtle, smiling, pretty head, 
 are all delightful. In this work, the sculptor has abundantly redeemed 
 the shortcomings of some of his earlier productions, as the Melusine, 
 in which the inharmonious combination of steel and marble is not 
 compensated for by any grace of interpretation. 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 To return to Gerome and the older men of the contemporary school, 
 now liable to such inconsiderate treatment. The sculptor of the Bellone, 
 notwithstanding his seventy-odd years, and his multitudinous work in 
 sculpture, still sends frequently to the annual Salons paintings marked 
 by all his old sense of style and balance, of the dignity of his theme, 
 
 JEAN-PAUL SINIBALDI. MANON LESCAUT 
 LOANED BY THE AMIENS MUSEUM. 
 
33 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 and by his old science of composition and design,—the Saviour riding 
 in Jerusalem over the palm-strewn road, Daphnis and Chloe leading 
 their herds, of black goats and white sheep, through a well-ordered 
 Arcadian valley. But it is in his numerous bronze statuettes and by 
 some of his monumental work, as the life-sized equestrian statue of the 
 Due d’Aumale, inaugurated at the Chateau at Chantilly, ijth October, 
 1899, that he has most distinguished, not only his own later years, but 
 the national art. Of the great variety of subjects which these include, 
 four are devoted to the great conquerors, Bonaparte, Frederick the Great, 
 Caesar, and Tamerlane, and of these equestrian figures, two at least are 
 of an extraordinary originality. The Bonaparte, riding triumphantly into 
 Cairo, may be seen in the Luxembourg,—a most beautiful specimen 
 of the bronze-founder’s art, as indeed are all his recent works, the great 
 establishment of Siot-Decauville bringing to the reproduction of these 
 sculptures a completeness of finish, a knowledge of patines, of all the 
 infinite possibilities of the metal, which give it a new life and a new 
 field of art. In the Luxembourg statuette, the youthful general, riding 
 an Arab horse gorgeously caparisoned in the Oriental manner, and with 
 his slender figure dignified and supported by a silk cloak which falls 
 from his shoulders, doffs his hat to the plaudits with an easy and 
 proud air. All the innumerable details of this figure, the heavy em¬ 
 broidery of the saddle-cloth and the headstall, the metal-work of the 
 scabbard and stirrups and holster, even the silk lining of the interior 
 of the chapeau, are finished with a perfect care which, it would seem, 
 would inevitably degenerate into finicalness and affectation, but which, 
 in this as in other instances, is redeemed by a certain elevation, by a 
 largeness of style which demonstrates its perfect compatibility with 
 exceeding finish of workmanship. 
 
 The Frederic ie Grand , equally spirited,—but far less serene,— 
 attentive, masterful, almost querulous, is completely different, though 
 a companion piece. The heavier, Prussian horse paws the ground 
 
GABRIEL FERRIER 
 
 THE,FLOWER OF THE SERAGLIO 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
 
 
 
(y,o/iy'f/tp/i f, 4900,0^ -J 9c/w- 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 39 
 
 impatiently; the king, grasping his inseparable crutch-cane, thrusts his 
 head forward, a little on one side,—all the Frederick of Voltaire. The 
 Tamerlan, first exhibited at the Salon of 1898, is an extraordinary nov¬ 
 elty in the way of an equestrian figure,—startling in the statuette, it 
 would be almost appalling in the life-size bronze. The armor of the 
 rider and the multitudinous trappings of the horse are of an unheard-of 
 strangeness; the conqueror, short and most unheroic in figure, rides 
 with very short stirrups, carries his bow in his hand, his round buckler 
 slung at his back, and an Oriental quiver full of arrows at his side; 
 under the shadow of his heavy helmet, he opens his mouth with a 
 curious and ferocious air, and the horse, stretching out his armored 
 head and neck, repeats this action as though he, too, yearned for more 
 slaughter. By his side is the standard, struck into the ground and stand¬ 
 ing upright, and under him a great pile of severed heads, of warriors, 
 women, and children, many of them with frightful wounds, and all of 
 them wrought with infinite care and endless variety. All this gro¬ 
 tesqueness and horror do not destroy the sculptural quality of the 
 work, the sense of form and balance of proportions and action,— 
 the monstrous uncouthness and affectation that a lesser artist would 
 have made of this theme are not to be thought of without a shudder. 
 
 In the Jules-Cesar, M. Gerome undoubtedly has been guilty of a 
 piece of “ literary ” art. With that genius for “ subjects ” which is 
 one of his most striking characteristics, the sculptor has represented 
 the conqueror of Gaul at the moment of his crossing the Rubicon, 
 mounting the farther bank, horse and rider and the very reeds on the 
 shore pushed forward by the irresistible wind of Destiny! The master 
 of many legions, in his uncomfortable Roman costume, bare-legged 
 and bare-armed, stirrupless, crouching on the back of his great horse 
 and almost overwhelmed by his cloak which blows over his head, does 
 not present an imposing figure, and, indeed, would seem to have been 
 sacrificed to the incident. But what an addition to the poverty-stricken 
 
40 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 list of available subjects for sculpture! In the field of sacred his¬ 
 tory may be cited two or three of this artist’s groups,—the Saviour 
 (from his painting of the entry into Jerusalem) and the Virgin, in the 
 Flight into Egypt. In the former,—which might be classed as a work 
 of pure decoration, so curiously well are the perfectly natural and real¬ 
 istic features treated,—the Lord, simply draped and holding a great 
 branch of palm upright in his left hand, sits on the croup of the 
 she-ass and lifts his right hand in benediction. In the original paint¬ 
 ing, the sculptural qualities of this group were very striking, and the 
 white ass and her droll little foal following would alone have been 
 considered a trouvaille by most anecdotic painters. In the second of 
 these statuettes, the Virgin sits sideways on her donkey, her bare feet 
 drooping by his side, and with the Infant sheltered in the heavy folds 
 of her mantle. 
 
 To contrast with these, the artist has to show a group of softer 
 feminine subjects, Dos Aphroditales, in which an even greater ingenuity 
 has been displayed, as in reviving such threadbare subjects as dancing 
 figures. One of the most admirable of these is the charming figurine 
 in the hand of his slightly tinted marble statue in the Luxembourg, 
 the Tanagrn. This little dancer, a worthy sister to her Boeotian ances¬ 
 tors, and beautifully colored in the marble, poises herself on one foot, 
 holds a gilded ball behind her, and thrusts her pretty head through a 
 golden hoop held in the other hand. Gerome, rightfully enamored of 
 her, has reproduced her in bronze, slightly enlarged, and in the very 
 best of the bronze-founder’s workmanship, but she does not seem to 
 have gained by the transformation. (It is worthy of remark that the 
 sculptor-painter has reproduced on canvas the execution of this statue 
 of Tanagrn, in his own atelier, the living model sitting stiffly in the 
 required pose by the side of the nearly completed marble, and the vet¬ 
 eran artist on the platform in front of them giving a finishing touch to 
 the thighs with his gloved hands. Among the numerous articles in the 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 4i 
 
 workroom is a larger figure of the dancer, behind the principal group.) 
 In another of these statuettes of La Danse, and in which the beauty 
 of the finish of the gilded and toned bronzes supplements admirably 
 the grace of the sculptor’s conception, a novel effect is obtained by the 
 lifting of the heavy overskirt to show the clinging inner robe of dif¬ 
 ferent material. This dancer also has a golden ball, which she holds 
 in front of her, her breasts, her arms, and her feet are bare, and she 
 balances neatly on one foot and advances the other. Still another is 
 a Danseuse Mauresque, thrumming on a species of Oriental lyre as she 
 balances and sways. Then there is a nude Bacchante, in bronze and 
 also in tinted marble, steadying upright her thyrsus up which a very 
 little Cupid or faun struggles, as up a tree; a nude Bcthsabee, at her 
 
 PAUL-LOUIS BOUCHARD. HOUSE OF THE ROMANOFFS, MOSCOW. 
 
42 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 bath, swaying over backward to sponge the back of her shoulder, and 
 which is interesting only from the novelty of the pose; a Plaudite 
 Gives , in which the grinning gladiator bows and smirks beside the dead 
 lion which he has just vanquished in single combat, etc., etc. A noble 
 baggage to add in this later day to all that illustrious in ancient history, 
 the Combat de Coqs, the Ave Caesar , the Mod de Cesar, the Eminence 
 Grise! 
 
 M. Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, Prix de Rome in 1861, no longer paints 
 Diana and her nymphs with a grace, a savoir, and perhaps an air of 
 self-satisfaction, that irritated the Intransigentes; in his later days he has 
 confined himself mostly to portraits, and it is by a collection of some 
 half-dozen of these that he has elected to be represented at the Paris 
 Exposition of 1900, adding only his large canvas of Lady Godiva. In 
 this important painting, the restoration of the deserted mediaeval street is 
 the most important thing, and is exceedingly well rendered; the heavy 
 gray horse that carries the lady, the anxious attendant who leads him by 
 the bridle, and the nude figure of the rider, are rendered with M. Le- 
 febvre’s old skill, but it may be thought that the uplifted head and set 
 expression of the latter are somewhat more conventional than reasonable. 
 M. Leon Bonnat, who received his first medal forty-nine years ago, has 
 of late endeavored to relieve the monotony of his interminable series of 
 portraits by such diversions as his landscape study, Pays Basque, of the 
 Salon of 1899, and his somewhat earlier animal study, of an eagle swoop¬ 
 ing on a hare. In the former, nearly all the peculiarities of the peinture 
 lourde and the blackness of tones of M. Bonnat disappear, and we have 
 a sufficiently literal and solidly painted rendering of a pleasant French 
 by-road. But it is by such portraits as those of Renan and Taine that 
 this artistic reputation will be handed down to posterity. M. Henner, as 
 has been said, is one of the very few chiefs of the older school who has 
 maintained his authority without in the slightest degree modifying his 
 principles and practices, and to those who began to regret the apparent 
 
JEAN-JACQUES HENNER 
 
 THE LEVITE OF EPHRAIM 
 
 (JUDGES XIX) 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

/960,ly £ 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 4} 
 
 failing of this wonderful brush he replied by his admirable Levite 
 d'Ephraim, which in 1898 secured him the medaille d’honneur at the 
 Salon and the grade of Commandeur in the Legion d’Honneur. There 
 is something curious in this long and steadily maintained triumph, so 
 universally recognized at home and abroad, and maintained by apparently 
 the simplest means. Yet no imitator has ever caught the trick of this 
 luminous flesh-painting; and no imitator can, naturally, ever hope to 
 catch the style, the sense of poetry, the expression of mystery, which 
 make of a painter an artist. Few themes would be thought to be less 
 promising for a poetical and mysterious rendering than this unpleasant 
 Biblical story; but it is quite possible that the painter, casting about for 
 a title for his canvas, should have welcomed this so plausible one. A 
 previous work, the Christ ait Linceul , was less favorably received as 
 being less of a complete theme; and the many presentations of auburn¬ 
 haired nymphs in wonderful twilights will long be counted as among 
 the artistic treasures of the age. 
 
 The Paris Exposition of 1900 presents in the galleries of fine arts, 
 as do all other exhibitions of paintings, a somewhat disproportionate 
 number of portraits, generally much less interesting to the average 
 visitor than any other class of paintings, and yet for which the expla¬ 
 nation is obvious,—the much greater number produced, the desire of 
 the painters to advertise themselves in this most useful and universal 
 method of bread-winning, and the very considerable number of sitters, 
 past, present, and prospective. The portrait art of France is justly con¬ 
 sidered as one of the national glories, from the time of the Clouets; 
 even those most completely estranged from the methods, the concep¬ 
 tions, the very end and aim of the art of such leaders as David and 
 Ingres, are obliged to recognize in some of their presentations of their 
 contemporaries a mastery which it is idle to dispute. The English— 
 with that fine assurance which is sometimes thought, quite errone¬ 
 ously, to be a peculiarly English trait—nevertheless maintain that in 
 
44 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 this particular branch of art their superiority over their neighbors 
 south of the Channel is incontestable; not only did the work of Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds and of his contemporaries and immediate successors 
 rise far above that of Nattier, Mignard, Largilliere, Boucher, and the rest, 
 “ by virtue of their color, execution, observation, and style,” but also is 
 the best French portraiture of the present day far inferior to the best 
 Anglo-Saxon work. Especially is this true since the appearance of 
 “the debacle which appears to be threatening the Art of France,”—a 
 debacle which, it must be confessed, the French themselves discuss 
 largely. But the English critics—with their fatal and incurable habit of 
 importing alien considerations into their technical judgments—find such 
 facts as that, e.g., one of M. Jean-Paul Laurens’s sitters, in a recent London 
 exhibition of French paintings (very possibly one of the artist’s sons) 
 is “an extremely affected, neurotic, and uninteresting young man,” 
 legitimate ground for art criticism. 
 
 M. Laurens, like all his contemporaries, paints portraits, and as he 
 is an artist with an, apparently at least, much wider range than many 
 of them, MM. Lefebvre, Bonnat, Henner, Bouguereau, Carolus-Duran, 
 he infuses into these human studies a much greater vitality. At the 
 Salon of 1900, he is represented by a portrait of the former president 
 of the Conseil Municipal which is considered to be at once one of 
 the most vigorous and most severe representations of a citizen of the 
 present age, one which, says M. Arsene Alexandre, “ certainly those who 
 come after us will regard with the curiosity which we ourselves feel 
 before the great portraits of the past.” At the Exposition Universelle 
 he exhibits three or four of these portraits, two of them being those 
 of his two sons, and, in addition, four or five of his most important 
 recent historical and decorative works, including the very striking 
 canvas of the Salon of 189^—the Saini Jean Chrysostome. 
 
 Certainly this presentation of history does not lack in vigor. A 
 less courageous artist would have hesitated before presenting the saint 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 45 
 
 with the “golden mouth” in such a tempest of brazen, or iron, oratory, 
 and with such an accentuation of sinewy, claw-like hands and disgrace¬ 
 ful bare skull-cap. The very lofty tribune or pulpit from which he 
 denounces, so lofty that no sign of the congregation below appears, is 
 perhaps but a slight exaggeration of those of the ancient churches; 
 this interior is that of the Constantinian basilica of Byzantium, and 
 the most interested auditor of the very few visible is the Empress 
 Eudoxia, wife of the Emperor Arcadius, and who is thus denounced 
 to her face for her ambition, her cupidity, and her other sins. At the 
 back of the species of loge in which the royal party appear may be 
 perceived a glimpse of the Imperial palace; the church itself has not 
 been yet embellished and decorated by the sovereign munificence, and 
 
 EUGENE BULAND. BRETONS PRAYING. 
 LOANED BY THE CITY OF QU1MPER. 
 
46 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 its sombre bareness corresponds with the dramatic nature of the theme, 
 and with the forceful and yet restrained execution of the painting, it 
 is small wonder that the empress, irritated at the eloquence of this 
 uncourtly court preacher, ended by sending him into that exile in which 
 he died, it was said, of fatigue. 
 
 This painting is the property of the city of Toulouse, and to the 
 Museum of that city belongs also the artist’s large decoration of Tou¬ 
 louse contre Montforf , symbolizing the victory of the municipality over 
 Simon de Montfort, intended for the ceiling of the Salle des Illustres, 
 and first exhibited at the Salon of 1899. The conception and com¬ 
 position of this work, in its combination of realism and allegory, is 
 of the most hardy,—below appear the walls of the mediaeval city, 
 with the mediaeval engines of war that defend it rising high against 
 the sky, this sky being peopled with figures of saints, muses, and 
 other personifications, the Virgin in glory and, nearer in the clouds, the 
 lion of Montfort overthrown, pierced by a shaft and trampled down 
 the sky by the lamb of Toulouse. All this is rendered with sufficient 
 vigor and distinctness of brush-work. M. Laurens has learned some¬ 
 thing of the commonly accepted requirements of decorative painting 
 since he first painted the death of Sainte Genevieve on the walls of 
 the Pantheon (and nearly demolished the stone wall in so doing); his 
 ceiling in the Odeon Theatre is much more decorative, in every sense 
 of the word, and is, moreover, one of the very few perfectly success¬ 
 ful attempts in these plafonds to recognize the spectator’s point of view 
 from below. This he does by representing his figures floating horizon¬ 
 tally across the ceiling, just as they would appear if seen from below, 
 and without any unpleasant perspective of converging upright lines. In 
 the Toulouse ceiling he reverts to the ordinary upright composition, as 
 though the painting was to remain in a perpendicular position. 
 
 The belle prose, as it has very neatly been termed, of M. Laurens’s 
 art has nearly always found its most congenial themes in the history 
 
PAUL CHABAS 
 
 HAPPY FROLIC 
 
 Loaned by the State 
 
 ETCHED BY A. ARDALL 
 

 
 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 47 
 
 and legends of the Dark Ages, and in some of his most recent deco¬ 
 rative designs, executed for the tapestry-weavers of the Gobelins, this 
 mediaeval accent is well imitated. The best of these is probably the 
 large upright cartoon exhibited at the Exposition, Le Tournoi, giving 
 with a naivete and plausibleness of detail that is quite in the spirit 
 of the theme the preparations for the tournament. In the distance is 
 seen the end of the listed field, surrounded by the benches of spec¬ 
 tators ; nearer, the attendants and esquires are waiting, with the horses, 
 lances, and shields of the champions, and on a draped table at the 
 right are ranged their great tilting helmets. Down a long stairway 
 at the left they come themselves, armed at all points except their 
 heads, each one holding in his gauntleted fist the slender fingers of 
 his lady, who walks beside him, the foremost one lifting her right hand 
 in encouraging speech. This design is interesting, as are all intelligent 
 attempts to restore or imitate a vanished art, in the points of departure 
 from the original,—M. Laurens has thought, very justly, that it was not 
 necessary to follow closely all the eccentricities of mediaeval design, 
 while preserving certain of the necessary mannerisms; a kind of hie¬ 
 ratic stiffness, a great seriousness, a certain dramatic tenseness, a 
 Gothic absence of grace and prettiness. Much less fortunate is the 
 design exhibited at the Salon of 1900 for another of these tapestries, 
 Jeanne d’ Arc ,—Jeanne and her companions come riding out of the 
 skirt of a wood to find a saint all in white, standing with his sword 
 and his foot on the throat of the overthrown dragon, and pointing 
 to them the way, with the legend: “ Ton cliemin cst prepare.’' This 
 seems to have no distinction either as mediaeval or modern; and even 
 the stout Dunois might be expected to manifest some emotion upon 
 coming suddenly upon this unexpected roadside incident. 
 
 It has been said of this painter that his qualities, good and bad, 
 were the direct result of his fixed resolution to add nothing to his 
 personal vision, to render the theme as it presented itself to him. 
 
4 8 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 Upon this rule of artistic conduct volumes have been written; the 
 result is, evidently, to confine the practitioner strictly to his own 
 resources, without any outside aid, and it may be that to this are due 
 the imperfections of M. Laurens’s technique,—as in his important land¬ 
 scape study of a few years ago, the Lauraguais , a theme almost 
 imposing in its sombre simplicity and restraint, and yet rendered with 
 a poverty of technical execution that was curious. 
 
 M. Benjamin-Constant is one of the older men who are most 
 vehemently accused of participating in the decline of the contemporary 
 art. It does appear to be demonstrated that his work is inferior to 
 that of his prime, and that his present canvases, as compared with the 
 
 HENRI GERVEX. PORTRAIT OF MLLE. S— 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 49 
 
 Oriental subjects of twenty years ago, with which he made his repu¬ 
 tation, and which he later abandoned through weariness of the themes, 
 are comparatively thin and poor. In some of his later portraits, as in 
 the richly and solidly painted heads of his two sons, bearded young 
 men sitting together, nearly all his old qualities seem to assert them¬ 
 selves,—the character of the figure, its construction, an almost too rich 
 color, an ease of composition. In others, as in the important full- 
 length of Madame Serge Von Derwies of the Salon of 1899, and in 
 the circular one of Madame Emile Fourton, this desire for pomp of 
 color reappears, and in the latter, accompanied by a vividness of char¬ 
 acterization that is striking. But it is to be noticed that color may be 
 both brilliant and thin; and that this accomplished painter, who knows 
 all the tricks of glazing and scumbling and overloading, of preparing 
 his canvas with solid darks over which to drag his lights, and lights 
 over which to pull his dark tones, can yet paint a figure high in color 
 that shall be quite as thin and flat as any in the despised, “ licked,” 
 painting of Bouguereau or Gerome. The orange velvet skirt of the 
 handsome Madame Von Derwies—who deserves a better fate—and 
 the lower part of her body under it, resolve themselves into the flat¬ 
 ness and thinness of a sheet of pasteboard, and the marble balcony 
 and the park landscape behind her are not much deeper. A portrait 
 of Calve, in red velvet, suffers in the same way; and even the huge 
 presentation of Queen Victoria, the property of the Illustrated London 
 News, crowned and throned in all her state, seems to lack substance 
 and quality and ponderability. The theme is an imposing one, and 
 the color scheme very ingenious, the stray sunbeam touching up all 
 this royal and imperial splendor with a still higher accent. Also, the 
 painter has permitted himself no flattering tricks with his sitter,—he has 
 employed no false arts of embellishing beyond the few legitimate ones. 
 
 Much the same may be said of the great decorative painting of 
 Urbain II, which we have seen unjustly accused of being in brick-work. 
 
FRANCE 
 
 S° 
 
 On the contrary, the Pope and all his cortege have rather the ap¬ 
 pearance of being but gorgeous fragments of a vision, lacking in 
 avoirdupois and in cubic dimensions. The procession enters the arched 
 gate in the brick city wall, pursued by the golden rays of the after¬ 
 noon sun and half enveloped in a golden cloud of dust. Hence the 
 extraordinary scheme of color, which at first glance suggests that of 
 a conflagration. Perhaps the painter sought to convey some symbol¬ 
 ism in this flaming light,—the occasion being the visit of the sovereign 
 pontiff to the city to preach the first Crusade, in the year 1097, and 
 his triumphal reception by the Comte de Toulouse, Raymond de Saint- 
 Gilles, the clergy, and the people. 
 
 Among the most ancient of these veterans is M. Bouguereau, he 
 having won the Prix de Rome exactly half a century ago, and though 
 his peculiar technique has suffered less in the course of time than 
 that of some of his contemporaries, the spirit has gone out of it largely, 
 leaving little but outward semblance. If his imagination was never 
 very deep or very tender, it yet frequently rose to very graceful and 
 pretty themes, and occasionally to such serious ones as his Vierge 
 Consolatrice in the Luxembourg, painted in 1877, and in commemora¬ 
 tion, it was said, of the death of his first wife. He still paints the 
 Virgin,—a large canvas, dated 1900, representing her rising from her 
 throne, in her glory, to receive the adoration of the angels. A noble 
 theme, but the painter brings but little to it but good intent, a skill 
 in drawing and the representation of heavenly-clean flesh. If his work 
 do nothing else, it at least suggests to us the infinite possibilities of 
 this scene—the Mother and the Son, and the files of fair-faced young 
 angels rising on each side of her high into the tender light. 
 
 But Cupid, singular and plural in number, is M. Bouguereau’s 
 favorite subject, and concerning one of his peculiar versions of Eros 
 it is difficult to speak well. The leering, malicious, half-grown youth 
 of the modern painters is but an unpleasant perversion of Anacreon’s 
 
HUBERT-DEN1S ETCHEVERRY 
 
 LES NOUNOUS 
 
 (NURSES OF ARIEGE AND BRETAGNE) 
 
 Loaned by the State 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 infant, so little and helpless and appealing in his mendacity that the 
 poet takes him in his arms, so very little that his mother appealed 
 to the Fates to know if he would ever grow out of babyhood. 
 Around this too big and far too knowing youth, this painter gathers 
 a group of very foolish young women,—with the most insipid of 
 results. He has by no means always been so commonplace,—it was 
 only a few years ago that he was rendering such amusing themes 
 as the stirring-up, as of a wasp’s nest, of a whole swarm of these 
 winged infants by a pretty maid going heedlessly through a wood, 
 or the obsession of another, dark-eyed and very pretty, sitting in 
 another of these pleasant groves, by two of these Erotes, one at 
 each ear. 
 
 It has so long been the custom in art publications and in the talk 
 of the painters’ ateliers and classes of instruction to speak slight¬ 
 ingly of the work of this painter, notwithstanding his great and constant 
 success with the public, of foreign nations as well as of his own, that 
 it may be interesting to recall the fact that he at least enjoys all the 
 official honors in his own country which an artist can win, even to 
 being a member of the Institut, and that there are by no means want¬ 
 ing set eulogiums of his art, by competent writers. M. Bouguereau is 
 a member of the official jury of Class 7 (paintings, cartoons, and de¬ 
 signs) of the Exposition; and this jury, we are assured in the official 
 catalogue, carried out its labors with the conviction that “ the Exposi¬ 
 tion of 1900 being a State Exposition, it was consequently their duty 
 to consider the French school in its unity, without taking into con¬ 
 sideration individual groups, and that, in the friendly rivalry which ex¬ 
 ists between the artists of all countries, united as they are, moreover, 
 by the common bond of the same ideal and frequently of the same 
 instruction, the success of the French school could be assured only 
 by the exercise of an equitable severity.” In the course of a recent 
 article on the life-work of M. Bouguereau, apropos of the Decennale 
 
FRANCE 
 
 exposition, M. Frederic Masson thus pays his respects to some of the 
 painter’s critics: 
 
 “ M. W. Bouguereau shares with M. Gerome the honor of certain 
 attacks. As decided and as combative as his neighbor in the adjoin¬ 
 ing fauteuil [of the Institut], he is no more than he the man to allow 
 himself to be intimidated, and he knows how to retort by assuming 
 the offensive. Better than by words can he reply to the destroyers 
 of French art, to the anarchists of painting, by presenting to this mul¬ 
 titude, which from all parts of the world is attracted to Paris by the 
 Exposition Universelle, his own work, pursued through fifty years with 
 the same religion, that of Beauty, with one sole object, that of discover¬ 
 ing its regulations and rendering its spirit. And this work is such that, 
 on a review of it comprehensively, it will be readily understood why 
 it is that M. Bouguereau is particularly odious to those who, with¬ 
 out genius and without labor, imagine that they will attract the public 
 by firing at their canvases pistols loaded with pigments. . . . The 
 figures which he imagines, and in which he searches in nature for 
 the accent of Beauty which will make them divine, do not hinder him 
 from obtaining as a portrait-painter one of the most envied of positions. 
 If he pleases himself and if he excels in giving, of the woman idealized, 
 an image always graceful and seducing; if he exerts himself to contrib¬ 
 ute the very type in which the ancients would have recognized the 
 race of the gods; if he knows how, better than any other, to group in 
 radiant allegories the joyous and tender swarm of the conquering Loves; 
 if, in the series of his religious compositions, he remains truly in the 
 classic line, while at the same time introducing in his choice of sub¬ 
 jects, in the expression of the physiognomies, in the design of the 
 draperies, a personal note which rejuvenates the whole, he can, as well 
 as others, better than others, place himself before nature and humanity 
 and render them as they are. There are some of his portraits of men 
 which will remain among the best that have been painted, and if 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 S3 
 
 JULES MACHARD. LA REVE D'EROS. 
 
 M. Bouguereau would consent to it, and if he would exhibit his studies, 
 it would be seen by what an obstinate seeking for Truth he succeeds 
 in subliming it into Beauty.” 
 
 Hebert, the painter of the Malaria in the Luxembourg, outranks even 
 Bouguereau and Gerome in length of artistic career,—he was a pupil of 
 David d’Angers and Delaroche, and won the Prix de Rome in 1839, in 
 the concours for historical compositions. To-day, he is still painting, 
 and what is very remarkable, still painting in that thin, pretty, delicate, 
 slightly melancholy tone which characterizes the picture which made 
 him famous just fifty years ago. It is extraordinary that a charm 
 apparently so frail should endure so long, practically without breaking, 
 —that the painter should neither drop through into mere prettiness, 
 nor lose his hold upon his audience, nor rise to sterner heights. 
 M. Hebert’s work is to-day as it has been, apparently founded on all 
 the old-time recipes for securing conventional prettiness,—even to the 
 
FRANCE 
 
 S4 
 
 enlargement of the eyes and the diminution of the mouth in drawing 
 the head. It would be thought that in this age of Manets and Roche- 
 grosses and Tattegrains this obsolete and sentimental art would not 
 last for six months. On the contrary, it is still in high honor; in the 
 great Exposition of 1900, the veteran painter is given the centre of a 
 wall for his group of works, in the company of the most distinguished 
 of his juniors, and no discrepancy whatever is discernible. This is 
 evidently the result of the undeniable fact that the canvases of the 
 old painter—the pretty, big-eyed, little Saviour on his mother’s knee, 
 the impossible Lavandara with her fair skin, her gracefully dishev¬ 
 elled costume, her tapering hands, the portrait of the little Mile, de 
 S. A. . . ., composed according to all the rules of the Book of 
 Beauty—are, all of them, delicate and truly charming. Great is art, that 
 it is thus possible with the most divers and opposing means to arrive 
 at the same success! And how excellent must be the quality of the 
 artist who is thus able continuously, through sixty years of labor, to 
 preserve undiminished and unimpaired this delicate sensitiveness, the 
 quality of youth, the one soonest rubbed off in daily contact with an 
 unbelieving world. It is one of the most brilliant of the character¬ 
 istics of the contemporary French school of art that it thus compre¬ 
 hends such widely different manifestations and appreciations, and that 
 room is found on its records and in its galleries for works that range 
 through every known method. 
 
 M. Hebert’s figures naturally preserve a certain similarity, whether 
 they are Muses, or Vierges, or even portraits of women and children. 
 In all of them is preserved the same delicacy of conception and 
 rendering, the same discreet harmonies of color, the same real refine¬ 
 ment which might be a little more virile, but which never becomes 
 merely pretty and sentimental. There is no search for novelty, or 
 originality,—as has been said of him, he does not consider that Woman 
 is something new, nor painting, nor the idea of deifying maternity in 
 
PAUL-JOSEPH JAM1N 
 
 LE BRENN AND HIS SHARE OF THE BOOTY 
 
 Loaned by the Museum of La Rochelle 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
 
 
 
JiC 4 '/Oo jftf ~$f $ctAA**r P cf&*\ 
 

CON TEMPO RA R Y ART 
 
 K 
 
 the figure of the Virgin. His touch of melancholy he has not borrowed 
 from modern pessimism and disbelief, since, as we have seen, it is the 
 note which he first struck in the Malaria, painted in i8jo. In some 
 
 of the best of his portraits, as in that of Madame Veuve G . . ., 
 
 this quality takes on an accent that is sympathetic and almost intimate. 
 In the Vierge an Chasseur, the Infant refuses the little dead bird that 
 the hunter brings Him, because He does not wish that any killing 
 
 whatever shall be done for Him. Fancy M. Manet or M. Beraud or 
 
 M. Rodin rendering this theme! 
 
 At the Salon of 1898 appeared the last of the envois sent by 
 Puvis de Chavannes, who died in October of that year, at the age 
 of seventy-four. Destined to complete his great decoration in the 
 Pantheon, which, though not the first of his monumental decorations, 
 was that by which he first solidly established his reputation, and 
 which, it is possible, he never excelled, this canvas was dedicated to 
 the patron saint of Paris. In a tall, upright panel he represented 
 Genevieve standing on her terrace in the night-time, under the light 
 of the full moon, watching over the sleeping capital which she so 
 much loved, and in a formal, well-balanced composition, characterized 
 by a sort of poetic austerity and almost, if not entirely, devoid of those 
 certain formalities of design which sometimes seemed pushed too far. 
 Bellum and Concordia were first exhibited in 1861; the Pauvre Pecheur, 
 now in the Luxembourg, was not painted till twenty years later, and 
 in the Salon of 1884 it excited the derision of the spectators that 
 gathered in front of it. This incident is quoted as something extraor¬ 
 dinary, as one more count in the great indictment which Art has against 
 popular prejudice and ignorance,—but in reality nothing is more natural 
 than the hostile reception which works that thus violate all the pre¬ 
 viously received traditions—most especially if they have a quality of 
 greater refinement, of more subtle message to deliver—receive at the 
 hands of an untechnical, untrained audience. How could it be otherwise? 
 
FRANCE 
 
 5 6 
 
 In this case, the audience was sufficiently quick to comprehend,—only 
 five years later the painter was Commandeur in the Legion of Honor, 
 and long before his death, as president of the Societe Nationale des 
 Beaux-Arts, as one of the most dignified and honored representatives 
 of the national art, he could point to his complete recognition, at home 
 and abroad, as one of the evidences of a very genuine artistic instinct 
 
 in the age in which he lived. 
 The death of his wife, nee 
 Princesse Cantacuzene, only 
 some two months before his 
 own, is said to have been to 
 him a blow from which he 
 could not recover. 
 
 One of his most recent 
 biographers, M. Marius Va- 
 chon, relates that he main¬ 
 tained that the first rule of 
 art is that the painter should 
 never paint but when he has 
 something to express, and he 
 appears to have hesitated a 
 little at the beginning of his 
 career before deciding on the 
 methods of expression which 
 for him were the most sym¬ 
 pathetic. In 18^0, he exhib¬ 
 ited at the Salon a “ Dead 
 Christ,” and in 1859, a “Re¬ 
 turn from the Hunt,” a mural 
 painting now in the Marseilles 
 Museum. His success, once 
 
 PIERRE CARRIER-BELLEUSE. DANSEUSE RECOVERING 
 HER SLIPPER. 
 
 PASTEL, 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 SI 
 
 assured, was complete; Meissonier, not a very comprehensive or genial 
 critic, said, after seeing the Sainte Genevieve in the Pantheon: “There 
 is no one but Puvis de Chavannes who stands alone; all the rest 
 of you will have to gild the building.” That this great painter in 
 miniature nevertheless seriously contemplated at one time undertak¬ 
 ing one of these great mural decorations himself does not neces¬ 
 sarily impeach the sincerity of this utterance; M. Meissonier probably 
 made distinctions. His subject, the deliverance of Paris besieged 
 from the horrors of famine, by the action of Genevieve, was, however, 
 executed by Chavannes, and was his last great work. The smaller 
 panels of the frieze, left unfinished at his death, are at the present 
 writing being completed by Cazin, who has for some months been 
 engaged on this work, in the Pavilion La Tremoi'lle at the Louvre. His 
 task is much lightened by the sketches and careful color notes left 
 by Chavannes, so that the work consists largely in carefully copying 
 these sketches and supplying the color from the indications. These 
 esqnisses will then be placed in the Luxembourg, to be transferred to 
 the Louvre when the regulation ten years after the painter’s death shall 
 have elapsed. An important collection of his drawings and sketches 
 has already been bequeathed to the Musee du Luxembourg, catalogued 
 and arranged, including those for the great decorations at Amiens, those 
 at Marseilles, Poitiers, Lyon, Rouen, and those of the Pantheon, the Sor- 
 bonne, the Hotel de Ville, and the Boston Public Library. 
 
 With regard to the great series of paintings in the Pantheon illus¬ 
 trating the life of Sainte Genevieve, M. P. de Chennevieres, to whom 
 is due the honor of securing the commission for Chavannes, declared 
 it to be a “great poem to the glory of the saint who will always be 
 the most ideal figure of the early youth of our race, when the legend 
 of the patron saint of Paris was one with the wonderful tale of primi¬ 
 tive Christianity in France.” On the occasion of the banquet offered 
 to the artist in the winter of 1894-1895", M. Paul Guigon, the poet, 
 
FRANCE 
 
 & 
 
 published from notes taken down from Iris conversation certain principles 
 of his aesthetic creed which are interesting as giving a closer knowl¬ 
 edge than could be obtained elsewhere. “ It has always pleased me,” 
 he said, “ to go off on adventures, abandoning myself to my own taste 
 and giving ear only to my own instinct. With the exception of three 
 months passed in the atelier of Couture, I have always worked alone. 
 I admire the old masters, certainly; but I have not grown old in the 
 museums, you may believe it, neither in the libraries. I was too much 
 in a hurry to give full liberty to that which was stirring within me, 
 and I had confidence in my Demon. This has not in the least pre¬ 
 vented its being said many times that I have a false sincerity, that I 
 imitate persistently the awkwardness of the Primitives, that I have 
 copied the Pompeiian coloring, I know not what else. As though it 
 were not a thousand times more simple to suppose that certain anal¬ 
 ogies in the execution—if, indeed, there exist as many as has been 
 said—might not proceed from a common manner of feeling. But, bah! 
 let them talk, let them talk! . . .” 
 
 With respect to the peculiar symbolism which characterizes his 
 work, he explained: “You would say to me that the artist rearranges 
 the things according to his visions; I would rather say, orders things 
 according to his visions. For, I am convinced that the best-ordered 
 conception, that is to say, the simplest and the clearest, will be found 
 to be at the same time the most decorative and the most beautiful. 
 
 “ 1 love order, because 1 passionately love clearness. In all cases, 
 clearness, clearness before everything! I hate nothing so much as 
 the vague and the nebulous. Obscurity is good only to conceal de¬ 
 formity. 
 
 “ For all clear and well-defined ideas, there exists a plastic formula 
 which translates them. But most frequently our ideas come to us con¬ 
 fused and intermingled. It is then necessary to disengage them at first, 
 in order to be able to consider them, pure, in the inward light. 
 
FERNAND CORMON 
 
 THE MARRIAGE OF HASSAN-BADREDDINE 
 
 (ARABIAN NIGHTS) 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 S9 
 
 “A work is born of a species of confused emotion in the midst 
 of which it is contained, like an animal in the egg. The thought which 
 lies at the heart of this emotion I turn it about, I turn it about until it 
 is elucidated in my eyes and until it appears with the greatest possible 
 clearness. Then I seek for a spectacle which will translate it with ex¬ 
 actitude, but which shall be at the same time, or which at least could be, 
 a real spectacle. There is symbolism, if you like, but as little arbitrary 
 as possible. 
 
 “Art is not an imitation of the reality: it is a parallelism with 
 Nature! 
 
 “ Yes, for myself, I endeavor to paint real spectacles, but which 
 have a general sense. Of all my compositions, there is not one, 1 
 think, which could not be represented the most easily in the world. 
 That would be impossible if I were entirely deserving of the reproach 
 which has been sometimes addressed to me, of painting abstractions. 
 I search for synthesis, but I endeavor constantly, with all my power, 
 to avoid making my art abstruse.” 
 
 Of the great Barbazon painters of landscape, Harpignies and Frangais 
 may be considered to be the last, and M. Frangais died in 1897, at the 
 age of eighty-two. In the same year, the medal of honor at the Salon 
 was awarded to Harpignies, after a somewhat long interregnum,—his 
 last previous medal (of silver) had been given him at the Exposition 
 Universelle of 1878, and his latest honor, of promotion to the rank of 
 Officier in the Legion of Honor, in 1883. The necessary gossip and 
 conjecture which each year attend the bestowal of this supreme award 
 were enlivened in the present instance by a report that this honor 
 thus somewhat unexpectedly bestowed upon the veteran was intended 
 as a courteous but indignant protest against the action of the Royal 
 Academy of that year in rejecting one of his paintings, sent over for 
 exhibition. It was explained in London that M. Harpignies had not 
 probably been really rejected, but that his canvas had been accidentally 
 
6o 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 overlooked in the mass of “ doubtful ” pictures. This, however, was 
 by no means the first time that a similar indignity had been offered 
 distinguished French works of art that had fallen into the hands of a 
 British jury; and, on the other hand, the same juries have been at 
 times reproached at home with admitting to the crowded line of the 
 R. A. exhibitions unworthy foreign canvases by distinguished painters 
 to the exclusion of worthy native works. It is probable, however, that 
 the medaille d’honneur was thus bestowed, on this occasion, because 
 no younger competitor established a better claim to it. M. Harpignies’s 
 methods are well known; a certain dryness of color, a certain sober 
 and distinguished rendering of the features of the landscape, with great 
 consideration for tones and values, without any special searching for 
 effects, for the sentiment or the message to be conveyed by the 
 particular aspect of nature, but rather—it might be said—with a serene 
 confidence that the message would deliver itself if only the facts in 
 the case were clearly presented. He has been a constant exhibitor at the 
 Salons since 1873, finding his subjects generally in the neighborhood 
 of Fontainebleau, in the Bourbon country, and in Auvergne. In the 
 Luxembourg, he is represented by three paintings, one of them being 
 an early view of the Colosseum in Rome; in the Exposition of 1900, lie 
 has no less than sixteen canvases and water-colors, and even to the 
 Salon of 1900, not largely favored by the artists of repute, he contributed 
 a study of olive-trees and live oaks in the maritime Alps. 
 
 The work of Frangais is marked by a somewhat greater freedom, 
 a livelier sense of color and light, and a certain human sentiment and 
 grace. A characteristic work of his best manner is the Daphnis et Chloe 
 in the Luxembourg, painted as far back as 1872, in the conventional 
 methods that obtained before the revolutionary doctrines of the plein 
 air school were adopted, and yet a very beautiful and satisfactory 
 rendering, darkened as it is somewhat by time, of midsummer greenery. 
 On a rock by the side of a little stream brawling through this oasis 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 61 
 
 of verdure, the youthful figures are seated and kneeling, nude and 
 innocent, Daphnis with one arm around his companion and fishing with 
 the other with a primitive rod and line. There is a real charm of 
 Arcady in this old picture, and it has been justly celebrated, having been 
 
 JEAN-FRANCOIS RAFFAELLI. SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRES. 
 
 PASTEL. 
 
 twice engraved and also reproduced in Gobelin tapestry. Frangais was 
 a member of the Institut, and was elected a member of the Academie 
 des Beaux-Arts in 1890, in the place of Robert-FIeury. 
 
 Among the most distinguished of the cattle-painters, enamored of 
 the technical problems presented by the velvety pile of the coats 
 of these useful quadrupeds, are Julien Dupre and Roll, the first also a 
 
62 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 landscape-painter of mark, with a fondness for sunlit effects and 
 a great skill in representing the fat and luscious color of the fertile 
 French meadows and pasture-lands as it appears tempered by the 
 grayish film of the atmosphere, on gray cloudy days, and even on 
 sunny ones. There is also always a certain style and finish of com¬ 
 position in his painting, whilst Roll sets up his bull in a patch of 
 greenery, possibly with a single attendant, and is content to make a 
 good portrait. 
 
 M. Roll is, moreover, otherwise distinguished,—“whilst his fellow- 
 soldiers, renouncing all effort, gradually sink into a sluggish decline, he 
 has been seen manifesting all his energy and displaying, as ardent as 
 ever, the determination of his research and his eagerness for constant 
 progress.” It is somewhat difficult to accept the theory of his great 
 decoration, les Joics de la Fie, for the Hotel de Ville, with its grotesque 
 juxtaposition of very naked allegory and realistic contemporary, and its 
 undoubtedly sensuous interpretation, but his somewhat smaller official 
 canvas, representing the official ceremony of laying the first stone of 
 the new Pont Alexandre III, in the presence of their Imperial Russian 
 Majesties, is a brilliant example of difficulties eluded and overcome, 
 and a lively contrast with Detaille’s treatment of his commission on the 
 same occasion. The latter was to paint, on a very large scale, for 
 the State, the review of the troops at Chalons by the Czar,—the artist, 
 for all his knowledge and experience, fell promptly into the trap of the 
 instantaneous photographic effect, and executed a work of art that is 
 practically but a colored illustration. Determined not to put his official 
 personages in the immediate foreground,—according to the new theories, 
 as we have seen in the case of M. Francois Flameng’s work,—he rele¬ 
 gates the Imperial and Presidential carriage and cortege to the middle 
 distance, lines up each side of his scene with mounted troops seen in 
 file, and for the centre of the foreground, which was formerly the place of 
 honor, he paints a wide gray empty space of road-bed. As composition, 
 
HENRI GERVEX 
 
 PORTRAIT OF Mme. G. 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 
~S / oJvyAiepJv6 4&66/lnff & it y. 
 

 
 
 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 it would be difficult to do worse, and, moreover, M. Detaille’s imagina¬ 
 tion being that of a military man, he presents all this literally and 
 realistically, redeeming it only by good design in the figures and a fair 
 rendering of atmospheric effect. 
 
 The painter of the Souvenir commemoratif de la pose de la premiere 
 pierre du pout Alexandre III also has never been classed among the 
 imaginative and mystical artists, his Hotel de Ville decoration being 
 singularly void of these useful qualities, and his highest previous 
 flight—as far as we are informed—consisting in giving to his very 
 vigorous study of a nude peasant-girl caressing a young bull the title 
 of “ Pasiphae.” Nevertheless, in face of this official command to paint 
 a hopelessly practical and realistic assemblage of modern figures in the 
 open air, he found a synthesis that was almost an inspiration. Pos¬ 
 sibly he was aided in this by the fact that he had not seen the cere¬ 
 mony himself, and relied for his memoranda on a sketch made by a 
 friend. Like the others, he placed the Emperor and Empress and 
 President Felix Faure in the middle distance, but he began by sub¬ 
 duing the garish light of day, with its vulgar accentuation of black 
 coats and red sashes, into a dulcet and discreet illumination that was 
 sufficiently probable, and that at once smothered down the mass of 
 spectators into inoffensive half-tones. Then in the foreground, mount¬ 
 ing the steps from the river-bank toward the high officials, filling nearly 
 half his scene, he painted the bevy of pretty young girls all in white, 
 all with amber and tawny hair, and lit up here and there with an 
 accent of golden sunlight. The technical rendering of all these whites 
 and ambers is admirable, and the pale yellow color of the Czarina's 
 dress as she stands at the head of the steps to receive them is so 
 exactly the right note that, as one critic said, it is a trouvaille. Finally, 
 not content with the commonplace, rectangular, gilded frame of com¬ 
 merce, he encloses his upright canvas in a heavy frame of carved oak, 
 breaking at the bottom into a double curve that enables the half-length 
 
64 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 figure of the Seine to emerge from her waves to “assist” at this joy¬ 
 ous ceremony. No wonder that, well content with his work, he painted 
 in, on the right, below the official spectators, the half of his own profile, 
 watching the scene. 
 
 M. Gervex also has been painting the Czar in the interests of the 
 Franco-Russian alliance, and his great canvas, ten metres by eight, is 
 exhibited in the Russian Pavilion on the Trocadero with all the neces¬ 
 sary surroundings to enhance its due effect. The subject is no less 
 than the Coronation at Moscow in the Cathedral of the Assumption, 
 and to complete the illusion as much as possible an attempt has been 
 made to give the spectator the impression of being in the cathedral 
 itself by painting on the wall figures in the Byzantine style, etc. The 
 exact moment depicted is that in which the young monarch takes the 
 crown from the Metropolitan of Saint Petersburg and crowns himself. 
 M. Gervex gives these details, in his own words: 
 
 “There was a profound sensation in the building. Up to that 
 instant, the Emperor was not a complete monarch,—it was necessary 
 that he should follow precedent and perform this ceremony. And what 
 a moment of importance! 1 saw gray-haired old generals weep, and 
 courtly dames, in tears, tremble with excitement. Emotion was natural; 
 it was like electricity—I felt this very deeply myself. This act of the 
 coronation was the essence of the ceremony, and my endeavor has 
 been to communicate, as far as possible, to others these impressions— 
 these sensations of May 26, 1896. 
 
 “The idea of painting this picture was my own, and, thanks to the 
 Grand Duke Vladimir, I obtained the necessary permission to take part 
 in the ceremony. I subsequently made sketches, and a year afterward, 
 when I visited Saint Petersburg again, I made portraits of the various 
 persons who figured in the ceremony. The projet which I had made 
 was shown to the Emperor, who came to see it, together with the 
 Empress. They were so pleased that they sat for their portraits, as 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 69 
 
 did also the Grand Duke Vladimir, the Grand Duchess, and, in fact, 
 all the great dignitaries of the Court, as well as the Metropolitan and 
 the clergy of high rank.” 
 
 It cannot be said that he has succeeded very forcibly in conveying 
 
 LEON BONNAT. A BASQUE LANDSCAPE. 
 
 to the spectators the “ profound sensation ” of the moment. On the 
 contrary, though this is a very clear presentation of the arrangement 
 of the ceremony, it leaves the ordinary spectator impressed by nothing 
 so much as the good painting of the cloth-of-gold backs of the high 
 clergy drawn up across the foreground and facing the Czar at the 
 other end of the composition. It would probably be very difficult to 
 avoid this anti-climax so long as this point of view is chosen,—David 
 did better in his great canvas of the coronation of Napoleon by taking 
 the whole scene in profile, and thus being able to give his principal 
 personages their due importance. On the Russian canvas, M. Gervex 
 
66 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 is said to have spent four years of continuous labor, and his painting is 
 valued at a million of francs. It may be doubted whether he has 
 been more successful with another of these big official machines, a 
 distribution of awards at the Palais de l’Industrie and the defile of the 
 representatives of the French colonies, with their banners, before Presi¬ 
 dent Carnot,—but as they are official machines, the property of the 
 State, and intended to commemorate these great administrative cere¬ 
 monies, as in them, if ever, art ceases to be interpretation and becomes 
 clear and exact record, there is much to be said in favor of M. Gervex’s 
 bold and literal rendering. In looking at this latter canvas, we are im¬ 
 pressed with the bareness of the vast space of the Palais de V Industrie 
 and with the shining planks of the flooring,—these facts will be very 
 interesting to the future historian—from New Zealand, or the moon— 
 who reconstructs the nineteenth century. Any one who has pored 
 over the Egyptian or Assyrian bas-reliefs will be able to testify to the 
 pleasure he receives in discovering some homely little detail which 
 serves to bring these immemorial ages into such close contact with 
 his own. M. Roll, as we have seen, has another theory,—either he is 
 not concerned at all about posterity, or he prefers to endeavor to give 
 it a general report, and not a detailed one, which shall inform it of the 
 principal matter concerning his ceremony,—that it was a striking and 
 handsome event. 
 
 The future historian above referred to will indeed be called upon 
 to experience a very considerable amount of gratitude toward M. Gervex, 
 whose contributions to this pictorial record of manners and customs 
 de die in diem have been varied and important. Fie was among the 
 first, if he were not the first, to find in the tragic and frequently 
 dramatic episodes of the hospitals and the operating-rooms themes 
 for important, almost monumental, canvases; the History of Art is 
 indebted to him for that collection of incidents, the Jury de Peintnre in 
 the Luxembourg, in which is presented with great ingenuity the annual 
 
PAUL-ALBERT BESNARD 
 
 Mme. REJANE 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
 
 
 
 
S c^i yAA^k,C } dc* 
 

 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 67 
 
 event once attended by all the artists of the civilized world as the 
 most important occurrence in the year in their general annals, and hy 
 a very considerable fraction of them with, literally, breathless anxiety. 
 In this picture, from the Salon of 1887, we see the bearers of most 
 of the great names in contemporary French painting engaged in the 
 supreme exercise of their official functions, voting on the canvases to 
 be admitted to the Salon!—Cabanel, and Bonnat, and Lefebvre and 
 Chavannes, Tony Robert-Fleury, Maignan, Laurens, Vollon, Carolus 
 Duran, Bouguereau, Henner, Barrias, Harpignies, Frangais, Hector Leroux, 
 Humbert, Cormon, Benjamin-Constant, Roll, Gervex himself, Cazin and 
 Protais, Detaille and De Neuville. All these immortals are presented in 
 natural and plausible attitudes, with no thought of posing for their 
 portraits,—M. Vollon votes in favor of the painting under consideration, 
 a nude female figure twisting up her hair, by lifting his umbrella in 
 the air, handle uppermost, and M. Rapin by lifting his cane, M. Maignan 
 passes his arm through the open back of his chair, and M. Pille and 
 M. Duez are endeavoring to see a picture which one of the attend¬ 
 ants is withdrawing from among several others. It would be difficult 
 for a layman to comprehend the eager interest taken by a very great 
 many young artists of all countries in every detail of this large and 
 crowded canvas, in being thus admitted within the sacred enclosure 
 and being permitted to witness the very manner in which the great 
 ones of the earth administered life and death. It is well that Gervex 
 painted this picture at the date it bears,—those were the great days of 
 the Paris Salon, before the division of 1889 and the subsequent debacle. 
 At the present hour, it would be a far less important contribution to 
 history. 
 
 Slighter and less documentary canvases, however, also at times 
 claim this painter’s attention. In the Luxembourg, too, he is repre¬ 
 sented by a very different work, a white-skinned bacchante of the 
 happy days of fable, lying across the knees of a satyr in a grove of 
 
68 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 oaks and pulling his ivy-wreathed hair. This fondness for softer themes 
 and blonder tones appears also in many of his portraits of women and 
 children,—as in the large upright one of Madame Gervex, of the Salon 
 of 1899, in a park landscape, very white and fair, notwithstanding her 
 most unbecoming costume, or of little Mademoiselle S . . ., sitting 
 
 on the beach and looking out from under the shadow of her big hat 
 with the earnest eyes of childhood. A still greater charm and richness 
 of color, a somewhat better painter-quality, may be found in other 
 canvases, as in the small picture of the nursing-mother belonging to 
 the collection of M. Lutz. 
 
 M. Carolus Duran, to give him the sonorous title by which he re¬ 
 placed his much more bourgeois patronymic, has long enjoyed a repu¬ 
 tation as one of the great portrait-painters of the day,—not precisely 
 of the school of Holbein or Rembrandt, but perhaps more of that of 
 Rubens, though it was said of him in former times that it was the 
 laurels of Velasquez which prevented him from sleep. A certain opu¬ 
 lence and bravura of color, a certain ease and style in placing his sitters 
 on the canvas, have long secured for him the favor and patronage of 
 the wealthy and proud, transatlantic and cisatlantic, and, in his later 
 years, he has even made one or two voyages to the land of dollars to 
 meet his clients more intimately. His portrait of his wife, in the Lux¬ 
 embourg, La Dame an Gant , of the Salon of 1869, very much more 
 sober in color and perhaps more discreet as painting, remains one of 
 his best works. To vary the monotony of these innumerable commis¬ 
 sions, M. Duran occasionally permits himself excursions into lighter fields, 
 landscape studies, on the Oise or in Provence, paintings of the nude, as 
 his Lilia in the Luxembourg, or his Danae, of the Salon of 1891. This 
 latter, however, cannot be said to be one of his most brilliant works, 
 though in a review of that date the critic (one in authority) descanted 
 upon the pleasure which the painter had evidently experienced, a voir 
 son nor les chairs opnlentes snr des tentnres noircs. This is that which 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 69 
 
 HUBERT-DENIS ETCHEVERRY. THEY READ NO MORE. 
 LOANED BY THE CITY OF LYONS. 
 
 naturally would be expected from a painter of M. Duran’s talent and 
 reputation, but—though he has almost repeated the Renaissance refine¬ 
 ment, recorded by Dumas, of bedding his lady upon black satin to en¬ 
 hance her pearly whiteness—it would seem that his white flesh, leaden 
 in the shadows, was not “opulent,” and did not “ring” very true. 
 Well grounded in the history and precepts of his art, and an excellent 
 discourser, M. Duran has formed the budding talents of a multitude of 
 eleves, of very many nations, supplementing his direct technical instruc¬ 
 tion with excellent advice concerning the general conception and com¬ 
 position of important works, historical or decorative. Of the three or 
 four of these that he has himself executed, one is in the museum of 
 Lille, his native town, a large plafond, executed in 1877-1878, in one 
 of the galleries of the Louvre; and, later, a “Triumph of Bacchus” 
 
70 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 was perhaps too closely inspired by Titian’s masterpiece in the London 
 National Gallery. Even more, he occasionally descends to still-life, as 
 in 1897 we find him exhibiting a study of fruit and game. 
 
 Of these great names of twenty years ago, one of the greatest, 
 that of Meissonier, seems to be disappearing from contemporary records. 
 His son, Jean-Charles, endeavors to maintain somewhat of the methods 
 and traditions of his father, and is represented by three pictures in the 
 Exposition, but his glory is not the same, and, indeed, it is said that 
 the pecuniary value of the masterpieces in little of his illustrious pro¬ 
 genitor began to diminish in the eyes of dealers and connoisseurs, 
 almost from the date of his death. His widow, who died in the 
 summer of 1898, was unable to secure the approbation of the State 
 for her plan of a complete museum of his works, bearing his name, 
 and by her last testament she bequeathed to the nation a collection 
 of her husband’s paintings, designs, and sketches which is destined to 
 enhance the riches of the Louvre. This collection, in accordance with 
 his wishes, she had saved from dispersion, at the cost of a consider¬ 
 able portion of her fortune, and it includes the ebauches, designs, and 
 water-colors, studies of landscapes, figures, and costumes, for a very 
 large portion of his finished work. In it are the Madona del baccio, the 
 Chant, the famous portrait of himself exhibited in 1889 and that exe¬ 
 cuted in 1872, a large Vue de Venise and many studies made in the 
 same city, the portrait of Madame Meissonier, a Messe a la Chapelle de 
 la Vierge miraculeuse a Saint-Marc, an Orage a Antibes, a Soleil couchant 
 dans la fond de Saint-Germain, a Clair de tune d Venise, Cavaliers 
 Louis XIII en route, Jean-Jacques descendant Vescalier de bois de Lau¬ 
 sanne, Samson abattant tes Philistins, and two or three of his later works 
 recording the disasters of the Commune, the Ruines des Tail cries and 
 the much discussed Siege de Paris. These last two and the Samson, 
 it appears, were those which he himself valued the most highly. In 
 the Luxembourg, in addition to six of his works, two minor ones 
 
ALBERT AUBLET 
 
 MORNING 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 7 i 
 
 painted on wood, the Chant and L'Attente (a richly furnished Holland 
 interior of the seventeenth century, with a young cavalier looking out 
 of the open window), Napoleon III a Solferino and Napoleon III entoure 
 de son etat-major , there are preserved three or four studies in color of 
 horses and one of the cuirassier lifting his sabre to cheer, of the 1S07 
 in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. It is to be noticed that 
 the completeness of technical equipment for which these masters 
 of the contemporary French school are famous does not extend to a 
 knowledge of the permanent qualities of their pigments,—the 1807, 
 though by no means an old painting, was cracked so generally and so 
 disastrously that it was necessary to restore it, two or three years ago; 
 and in the Luxembourg, such comparatively modern canvases as the 
 Write of Lefebvre, the Diane of Delaunay, and the Dame an Gant of 
 Carolus Duran, are all seamed with cracks in the dark shadows. The 
 oldest of these was painted in 1869. Gerome’s Combat de Coqs, of 1846, 
 on the contrary, is in very good order. 
 
 In that admirable little book, Nos Peintres dti Specie , Jules Breton 
 appreciates very justly the defect of Meissonier’s genius and the pos¬ 
 sible judgment of posterity upon his work. “ No artist during his life¬ 
 time has enjoyed a glory comparable to that of this painter. It is 
 perhaps this fact which has given rise to the acrimony with which 
 certain vexed critics have attacked his memory, without taking into 
 account the consideration due to all earnest conviction. Such brilliant 
 success, in dazzling some, could not fail to blind and offend others. 
 One man only found it insufficient, this glory, and this man was Meis- 
 sonier. He even lost confidence in it if a few hours went by without 
 his hearing it spoken of. Strange to say, this was the chagrin of his 
 life! He had generous instincts; he was not jealous; and yet, if a 
 visitor to his atelier forgot to manifest incessant admiration, his silence 
 was considered to be an offence. And our painter would begin to treat 
 him coolly, after having, but a moment before, received him with the 
 
7 2 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 greatest cordiality. And this susceptibility, which made him appear 
 ridiculous to his best friends, originated quite as much in his extreme 
 conscientiousness as an artist as in his pride. At the bottom, he was 
 unquiet and anxious, and he had constant need, like some actors, of 
 the applause of the claque.” 
 
 Speaking of the extreme conscientiousness which he brought to 
 bear upon working out all the details of his canvases, of his Retraite 
 de Russie, the author continues: “All the portraits, all the accessories, 
 are reproduced with the same jealous care. It is a complete reconsti¬ 
 tution, and one extremely interesting. The illusion of this fatal end¬ 
 ing of an epoch is almost perfect; but there is wanting the great wave 
 of heroic horror which may be felt before the Retraite de Russie of 
 Charlet. And yet it must not be thought that Meissonier was wanting 
 in imagination 1 I have seen him depict his ideas in figures very strik¬ 
 ing in design and character,—but his memory and his intuition of things 
 were as minutely exact as his direct sight. He saw details too clearly, 
 and his near-sighted eye exaggerated the perspective like the pho¬ 
 tographic camera. His vision was too sharp, not apt to perceive the 
 diffuse harmonies, dear to the poets. He painted in planes set like 
 facets, accentuating all the forms somewhat too vigorously. He exe¬ 
 cuted little panels which are incontestably jewels of execution, fine and 
 distinct, but as though they were chiselled in wood. He was quite 
 without the sentiment of the suppleness and the velvet qualities of the 
 flesh; and for this reason he never succeeded in rendering women. 
 He was quite ignorant of the infinite charm of their flexible graces, of 
 their exquisite modelling. He saw everything—except the mysterious. 
 There was no sacrificing, his indefatigable curiosity searched incessantly. 
 
 “He is still too near our time for us to be able to classify him 
 definitely. Will posterity ratify the admirable place of honor accorded 
 to his statue? It is such a fine thing, the absolute conscientiousness 
 of an artist, even when it lacks a horizon 1 ...” He was known 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 73 
 
 to destroy panels with which he was not satisfied, though he could 
 have sold them for high prices, and yet he was never free from the 
 need of money, for he was proud of his carriages, his horses, and his 
 luxury. On one occasion, he was showing the author his caleches, on 
 which he had painted 
 animals as armorial 
 bearings, and said to 
 him: “ Kings are not 
 rich enough to have 
 Meissoniers on their 
 carriage panels.” When 
 he was elected mayor 
 of Poissy, one of his 
 ambitions was real¬ 
 ized. With his very 
 short stature, his big 
 head, and his immense 
 beard, he loved to at¬ 
 tract attention to him¬ 
 self wherever he went, 
 strutted in his walk, 
 and uttered loud ex¬ 
 clamations. “ He had 
 committed one great 
 error in his life, which, 
 
 I have been told, he 
 regretted at his death,—this was that of rendering possible, by its im¬ 
 portance, the fatal rupture which separated the artists into two camps, 
 to the great injury of the general cause of art.” 
 
 The monument to Meissonier, to which allusion is made, has indeed 
 an honorable location,—in the garden on the river side of the Louvre, 
 
74 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 known as the Jardin d’Infante. Directly opposite it is the spirited monu¬ 
 ment to Raffet, the designer, by Fremiet, and farther along, facing the 
 Rue du Louvre, his handsome equestrian statue of Velasquez. That of 
 Meissonier, in white marble, is by Mercie,—determined to avoid the error 
 committed by another statuary in reproducing the painter upright, and 
 thereby perpetuating his want of heroic proportions and the inward 
 curve of his legs, the sculptor has fallen back upon the commonplace 
 and the intime, and represented the painter seated, in robe de chambre 
 and in the familiar attitude of meditation, head on hand. This latter 
 was evidently selected as the appropriate corollary of the big beard 
 (in French, always, belle barbe ele fleuve, river-god’s beard); the robe de 
 chambre cannot be considered “ a find ” as a motif for the sculptors, 
 its thick, woollen folds have neither dignity nor sculptural quality. In 
 this case, the costume was suggested by the portrait which the painter 
 executed of himself, in 1889, and the seat is a reproduction of the great 
 Renaissance arm-chair which occupied a prominent place in his atelier 
 and in which he was in the habit of seating himself to contem¬ 
 plate his work. His left hand, holding his palette, hangs loosely over 
 the arm of his seat; on the pedestal is arranged a trophy recalling the 
 Napoleonic episode to which he devoted so many of his important 
 works,—a cuirass pierced by balls, a helmet of the First Empire, a fag, 
 and the chapeau of the Little Corporal. To these is added a less heroic 
 symbol to represent one of his most famous anecdotic pictures, the 
 Jo/teitrs de bottles. Notwithstanding all this ingenuity of arrangement 
 and the genius of the sculptor, the statue fails to inspire, and it suffers 
 considerable from the immediate vicinity of Raffet’s drummer of the 
 Old Guard, beating the charge so furiously that the walls of the Louvre 
 seem to re-echo. The monument to Meissonier was erected by popular 
 subscription, and was inaugurated in October, 189^. 
 
 The younger Robert-Fleury, Tony, still lives and works, and his 
 modern work is modern, though his Dernier Jour de Corinthe, in the 
 
EDOUARD TOUDOUZE 
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 
CONTEMPORARY ARP 
 
 IS 
 
 Luxembourg, Salon of 1870, somehow or other, seems at first glance 
 to be the relic of a vanished age. It is not really so very ancient in 
 spirit,—not any more so, excepting that it is somewhat more academical 
 and has some science of composition, than Roybet’s Charles le Teme- 
 raire. Compared with the massacres of MM. Tattegrain, Rochegrosse, 
 Buffet, and Thivier, however, it must be confessed that it is vieux jeu, 
 in the slang of the day. This, in itself, is no disqualification,—if the 
 modern tenseness of feeling does not make itself evident in the painter’s 
 more modern canvases, it is replaced by a certain moderation and dis¬ 
 cretion which are quite acceptable. His Perquisition sous la Terreur, 
 the lady roused from her slumbers, not having had time to throw her 
 gown over her, almost paralyzed with apprehension as she endeavors 
 in the futile feminine manner to defend the chamber door, is a very 
 good, simple, and effective presentation of the scene. The spectator 
 does not experience a very disturbing thrill of suspense and fear before 
 the canvas, but he recognizes the situation, he appreciates the dignified 
 and artistic manner in which the story is told, the absence of hyster¬ 
 ics and violent action,—which would be naturally absent in the actual 
 occurrence. Much the same qualities mark the artist’s larger scene, 
 taken from American history,—the farewell of Washington to his offi¬ 
 cers after the signing of the peace and his resignation as commander- 
 in-chief of the army, December 4, 1773. “After taking leave of them 
 all, he departed for White Hall, where a boat was in waiting to convey 
 him to Paulus Hook.” In the foreground is seen the boat, the oarsmen 
 pulling steadily out into the stream and the general sitting in the stern- 
 sheets, looking out of the picture with eyes that evidently see nothing. 
 On the shore behind him is the group of officers standing bareheaded, 
 and the guard of escort drawn up in line after the salute. The gray, 
 misty light in which everything is enveloped, the arrangement of the 
 composition, the expression of Washington’s face, all combine to render 
 the situation very clearly,—it is not a very striking situation, it has the 
 
7 6 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 air of being painted for an American purchaser, but it is dignified, 
 sober, acceptable art. 
 
 In the Leda, of some ten or twelve years ago, an important life- 
 size figure, the design and the painting seem to be at variance, as 
 sometimes happens, and the latter is wrong in being out of sympathy 
 with the theme. It is exactly as though another man had completed 
 the work,—a painter coloring the illustration. The wife of Tyndareus, 
 a very graceful nude figure, comes out of the lake in a stately Arcadian 
 landscape, and as she walks, turns to repel the obtrusive swan which 
 follows her. It is a theme in which “atmospheric envelope” would 
 have been in order, but the painting seems to be somewhat too literal 
 and imaginative to be in accord. 
 
 Cormon, pupil of Fromentin and Cabanel, took his first medal thirty 
 years ago, and the Prix du Salon five years later, but his greatest work 
 will probably remain the Cain of the Salon of 1880, now in the Lux¬ 
 embourg. In this case, the painter and the designer were one, the bare 
 and desolate landscape and the sordid and primeval figures hurrying 
 through it are alike enveloped in gray and hopeless tones,—it is not 
 too much to say that in this tremendous presentation on canvas the 
 full force of the terrible Bible story was first brought home to the con¬ 
 sciousness of many an irreverent spectator. Afterward, in a much lighter 
 theme, the return of the victorious Greeks after Salamis, the painter 
 sought to renew his triumph, but achieved a less dramatic success, 
 possibly largely because of his less inspiring subject. Recently, his 
 most important work has been a series of paintings for the decoration 
 of a salle of the Museum of Paris, a very important establishment of 
 the Jardin des Plantes, devoted to natural history. In these he has 
 represented prehistoric man, in his surroundings, in his various ages 
 and his various occupations, with vast ingenuity and with due archaeo¬ 
 logical and geological research, but not to the extent of interfering 
 with artistic presentation,—graceful limbs and white skins in the 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 77 
 
 PASCAL-ADOLPHE DAGNAN-BOUVERET. THE CONSCRIPTS. 
 
 LOANED BY THE STATE. 
 
 younger females, etc. Still another of these pseudo-scientific restora¬ 
 tions is his large canvas depicting the funeral ceremonies of a chief 
 of the iron age, of the Salon of 1892, one of the most dramatic of 
 modern canvases and one in which the artist's peculiar ability in ren¬ 
 dering comprehensive action, as in the Cain and the Salami's, is strongly 
 displayed. In the two latter, the whole multitude sweeps forward with 
 
78 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 a sort of irresistible rush; in the Funerailles, the movement is universal, 
 but it is scattered and widely varied, and the sense of clamor and awe 
 is quite in keeping with the subject. Exhibited at the Guildhall of the 
 London Corporation, in 1898, as part of a representative collection of 
 contemporary French art, which was accompanied by a representative 
 delegation of French painters and officials, this picture was received as 
 a masterpiece. “ For the most admirable demonstration of the skill 
 that is the glory of the modern French school, we must turn to M. Fer¬ 
 nand Cormon’s ‘Funeral of a Chief in the Iron Age,’” said one critic. 
 “ Here we have at his best one of the most able and brilliant painters 
 of the day. The subject is not lost in the handling, nor does the 
 handling overweigh the subject. Here, in the vast crowd surrounding 
 the lurid pile, we see consummate mastery of drawing and composi¬ 
 tion, an easy power of suggesting movement such as is not given to 
 many, a powerful dramatic sense, and an ability to render, not a passion 
 only, but every variety of it, whilst sobriety of color is not, as with 
 M. Roybet, illegitimately acquired.” 
 
 Not content with these triumphs, the artist has gone still farther 
 afield, and at the Salon of 1891 exhibited a scene from the “Thousand 
 and One Nights,” the famous story of the marriage of Hassan-Badred- 
 dine (according to the latest spelling). As will doubtless be remembered, 
 this handsome youth strays into a wedding in which the beautiful bride, 
 through some misfortune, is to be joined to a wretched humpback, to 
 the great scandal of all the assistants,—even to that of two or three 
 of the friendly djinn who happened to be present. One of these 
 accordingly appeared in the shape of a mouse before the crook-backed 
 groom as he was sitting in the corner waiting the summons to the 
 bridal-chamber; the groom made a motion to drive the mouse away, 
 but to his great surprise it swelled to the size of a cat, then to that 
 of a dog, a calf, and finally a great buffalo, breathing fire. The buffalo 
 took the speechless wretch and stood him on his head in the corner 
 
GABRIEL GUAY 
 
 WOODLAND IDYL 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 I 
 
 
 
 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 79 
 
 it is not explained how), bidding him remain there without sound 
 until daybreak, under penalty of death; then the fortunate Badreddine- 
 Hassan was directed to present himself to the lady as her lawful spouse, 
 and was joyfully accepted. This cheerful Oriental tale is presented with 
 great vivacity and beauty of color, the handsome lover, all in red, seated 
 on one end of a rich divan, is presented by the ladies of honor to the 
 bride, and takes adoringly in his one of her lily hands; on the stairway 
 behind them the musicians make a joyful noise with flutes and cas¬ 
 tanets, and little black slaves bring on golden trays katai’efs an sirop, 
 generously farcis, and baklawa beautifully puffed and divided into loz¬ 
 enges, and mahallabia perfumed with oranges and sprinkled with broken 
 pistachio-nuts and with cinnamon I 
 
 But sometimes all this admirable technical skill of the painters 
 seems to go hopelessly astray and to be wasted on the grossly unar- 
 tistic. One of the most unworthy of these works is the so-called 
 EAmour an Banquet, painted by Gustave Courtois, who made his repu¬ 
 tation in much more lawful canvases, one of Gerome’s most distin¬ 
 guished pupils and old enough and learned enough in his art both to 
 have some sense of composition and ordering in a picture and some 
 feeling for due style and reticence in presenting even an unpleasant 
 and threadbare theme. But for technical rendering of the substance and 
 quality of flesh, its pearliness, its translucency, its gently resisting quan¬ 
 tity when pushed, its elasticity, its fibre, and its generally “ meaty ” 
 character, it would be difficult to find a more brilliant example than this 
 canvas presents. And all this rendered by the most lawful, the most 
 conservative of methods of brush-work,—no tactics, or points, or stip¬ 
 pling, or hatchings, or any of the violent means of the new art of 
 painting by which a dozen qualities—generally all the suave ones—are 
 sacrificed in a (generally) vain attempt to secure one or two others. 
 The shapeless pile at the left of this canvas, which represents two 
 particularly carnal lovers, is a wonderful piece of technical skill,—beside 
 
8o 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 it, most of the other flesh-painting of contemporary art looks like the 
 painting of tinted wood, or ivory, or celluloid, or some other inanimate 
 matter. M. Courtois’s Amour is unpleasant enough in countenance to 
 make his unnecessary allegory sufficiently plain; his arrangement of the 
 green silk bed or couch is sufficiently vulgar, and the grinning skeleton 
 in the background, showing the hour-glass, adds the last touch of the 
 banal. 
 
 This ability to paint, naturally, serves him well in other cases, in 
 his portraits and in his studies of the nude, as the Jeune Fille a la 
 Source, of the Salon of 1899. His well-known portrait of the handsome 
 Madame Gautreau—she of the auburn hair and the aquiline profile, 
 and the pearly shoulder from which the shoulder-strap of the corsage 
 slips down—remains one of his most distinguished works. The Arab 
 proverb of the uneven distribution of plausible lies—the sack which 
 contained the supply for all nations of these indispensable quantities 
 having been stolen and opened in their happy peninsula, so that most 
 of them remained there for all time—would seem to be peculiarly 
 applicable to painters. While so many of them throughout the world 
 remain constrained inevitably to paint that which shall always be recog¬ 
 nized as paint and nothing else, others, a few, dwellers in a species of 
 Arabia Felix, juggle with their pigments and make us deceitfully believe 
 that we see forms and colors and visions of all kinds, good and bad. 
 
 To employ this plausible skill in the calling up of evil and unpleas¬ 
 ant sights seems to be unnecessary, and it is probable that the painting 
 of sordid horrors, such as massacres and famines, is distinctly bad art, 
 —whatever may be the sophistications employed to defend it in these 
 modern times. To contend, as does the Russian painter Verestchagin, 
 that in presenting on immense canvases, and with all the detail and 
 vraisemblance that he finds possible, the horrors of war in order to 
 inspire mankind with aversion for it and to hasten the day of universal 
 peace, is to mistake the artist’s mission. To present scenes of dread 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 81 
 
 MAURICE BOMPARD. ARABIAN HOSPITALITY. 
 
 in which there is some other quality present than hopeless misery, 
 some display of finer human traits, as courage, or devotion, or resigna¬ 
 tion, or some pomp of the eye, as is very frequently the case in these 
 scenes, may be much more allowable. An ingenious plea has been put 
 forward recently by one French artist, M. Emile Bayard, in condonation 
 of the scenes of horror on a grand scale painted by another, M. Tatte- 
 grain,—that, in effect, the latter has been tempted and attracted by the 
 varying degrees of success which attend efforts in various lines of 
 the imagination, by the great diversity in the choice of themes on 
 which to exercise his imagination, that he has found it “too simple” 
 to confine himself to those subjects in which his facility was the 
 greatest, that, finally, par coquetterie also the mind frequently goes 
 straying away into other fields, only to return in the end to those of 
 
82 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 its intimate adoration. Hence, M. Tattegrain, who is, really, tin timide, 
 in whom “the work and the man present themselves as inseparable in 
 their equal timidity,” has gradually progressed from his early studies 
 of twilights and early mornings on the sea-beach, with fishermen and 
 women and verotiercs engaged in their peaceful avocations,—studies in 
 which he still excels,—to the representation of the horrors of the 
 battle-field, of the starving and cannibalistic wretches between two 
 armies in a mediaeval siege, of the massacre and exile of a whole 
 population in a city taken by storm. The timid souls have these elans 
 favorables, says M. Bayard. But the painter, being thus constituted, is 
 necessarily inadequate, it is recognized, to depict as they should be 
 depicted, with sufficient vigor and courage, these sterner themes, and 
 accordingly the commentator regrets the “ unreal horrors ” of the Bouches 
 Inutiles. This is true enough, it is scarcely possible to paint literally 
 such a subject; but it is also true that the group in the immediate 
 foreground, on the left, of this picture is quite sufficiently real, and has 
 no possible justification for being painted at all. 
 
 Verotiercs , notwithstanding their unpleasant name, are only harmless 
 folk who seek worms for bait for the fishers along the beach in the 
 early dawn, and consequently present excellent subjects for a painter 
 who passes most of his time on the coast, who delights in identifying 
 himself with the natives, and who renders these semi-marine themes 
 with true artistic judgment. Sometimes he puts boldly out to sea and 
 paints such scenes of whelming wave and tempest, seen in the clear 
 gray light of a sea storm, as his Sauvetage en Mer of the Salon of 1897. 
 From these Verotiercs ail petit jour, Alt Large, and Retour de Peche, he 
 gradually progressed to a Louis XIV aux dunes, inspecting the gray and 
 purple corpses of the battle-field, then to an Incendie, the Bouches 
 Inutiles, and, finally, the Saint-Qiientin of the Salon of 1899, for which 
 he was awarded the Medaille d’Honneur. Incidentally, he occupied him¬ 
 self with mediaeval themes in which there was no horror,—a Casselois 
 
JEAN-PAUL LAURENS 
 
 SAINT JEAN CHRYSOSTOME REVILING 
 THE EMPRESS EUDOXIA 
 
 Loaned by the City of Toulouse 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
• 'fA 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 83 
 
 se rendant an duo Philippe le Bon , a very ingenious and spirited com¬ 
 position in which vanquishers and vanquished are alike swept by an 
 indiscriminating torrent of wind, and the Entree de Louis XI a Paris. 
 The “ useless mouths ” are those of the non-combatants turned out of 
 the Chateau Gaillard, at Les Andelys on the 'Seine, built by Richard 
 Coeur de Lion, during its siege in the year 1203,—refused by the 
 besiegers a passage through their lines, they gradually starved and froze 
 between the two opposing forces. A half-dozen phrases in a history 
 would give us all the information we need concerning this fact,—it 
 seems to be equally useless and stupid, this elaborate and costly revival 
 of a forgotten horror, nearly seven centuries in the tomb. The very great 
 skill with which the painter has presented the big lines of his tragedy— 
 the sombre winter day, the desolate valley of the Seine, the stone turrets 
 of the castle and their palisades rising high on the left and the wooden 
 towers of the besiegers on the right—only aggravates his offence. The 
 background of his picture is imposing, and the foreground is revolting. 
 
 It is perhaps an indication of the condition of the contemporary art 
 in France that the Salon medal of honor was awarded to the Saint- 
 Oiientin pris d'Assaut, I’Exode, 29 A out , 1557, rather than to the Serenite 
 of Henri Martin, a canvas almost equal in size and by an artist of equal 
 importance. As works of the painter’s technique, there was not much 
 to chose between them; Tattegrain’s methods are free from the man¬ 
 nerisms and tricks of the other, while his composition, in this case, is 
 not so well balanced. The Serenite was bought by the State, and the 
 Saint-Qiientin was destined for the decoration of the Hotel de Ville of 
 that city. Unless it were intended to keep alive the seeds of hatred 
 between French and Spaniard (which in this particular year of grace 
 was peculiarly inappropriate), or to perpetuate in the memory of the 
 citizens a day of ruin and humiliation, it is difficult to comprehend 
 the choice of this theme for a great municipal decoration. As a “decora¬ 
 tion,” in any legitimate use of the word, it is not entitled to recognition. 
 
8 4 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 The midsummer sun pours down its untempered rays on the wretched 
 throng of women and children, widows and orphans, half-clad and 
 filling the air with their lamentations, striving to save some few rem¬ 
 nants of their worldly goods, driven down the long street of the city 
 between the smoking ruins on either side by the Spaniards. “After 
 two days of murder and pillage and incendiarism,” said the official 
 tablet, “ the remnant of the population were conducted outside of the 
 ruins by order of Philip II, king of Spain. The Germans, the English, 
 and the Spaniards committed acts of great cruelty upon the women 
 and children. The men had been killed. On the 29th, about two 
 o’clock in the afternoon, the order was issued that all the women 
 should be sent off to France. It was truly heart-breaking to see thirty- 
 five hundred women uttering their lamentations on recognizing the 
 corpses, naked and pierced with wounds.” It is one of these groups 
 that the painter has placed in the centre of his immediate foreground, 
 the two children, followed by their mother, finding in the ghastly road¬ 
 bed the body of their father. The effect of the blazing sunlight on this 
 multitude of half-clad figures is rendered with great technical skill,— 
 indeed, some of the critics of the Salon reproached the painter for his 
 too abundant prodigality of light. Others complained of the confusion 
 of the scene, “as vexing to the eye as it is confusing to the brain.” 
 In the following December, a banquet was offered to M. Tattegrain by 
 his friends, in Paris, in honor of his medal at the Salon for this painting; 
 the company was largely composed of members of the Societe des 
 Rosati, that is to say, of Parisians natives of Flanders, Artois, and 
 Picardie. Speeches were made, and M. Tattegrain “replied in a voice 
 full of emotion.” 
 
 The practice of seriously criticising the paintings of Detaille began 
 about the date of the exhibition of his great official canvas of the 
 Distribution des Drapeaux some few years ago, his work, up to that 
 time, having been received with almost undiscriminating eulogy,—even 
 
CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 85 
 
 his Le Reve, one of the most empty and formal of possible paintings, 
 being accepted with fervor and placed in the Luxembourg. The “ Dis¬ 
 tributing the Flags” was destroyed by the author as soon as the Salon 
 closed, he reserving only 
 a small portion of it, a 
 group of officers. These 
 big machines have not 
 generally brought him 
 fortune; though his two 
 panoramas painted in 
 conjunction with De 
 Neuville, that ot Cham- 
 pigny and that of Re- 
 zonville, were singularly 
 successful as paintings. 
 
 De Neuville seemed to 
 have not only a greater 
 power of rendering ex¬ 
 pression and action, but 
 also much more skill in 
 painting atmospheric ef¬ 
 fects,—many of his can¬ 
 vases owe much of their 
 power of impression 
 to the vivid sensation of 
 the chill discomfort or 
 
 ADRIEN MOREAU-N^RET AUTUMNAL HARMONY. 
 
 the bracing exhilaration 
 
 in the air,—the drama being thus insinuated, as it were, presented subtly 
 as well as directly. In his paintings, and in his many illustrations,—of 
 which the best are probably those for Guizot’s history of France,—he 
 also displayed great fertility and talent in composition. Detaille’s very 
 
86 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 best works show a quality which is perhaps finer, that of conveying 
 the dramatic sensation when there is no dramatic action, as, notably, 
 in his Regiment qui passe, probably his masterpiece. Here, though the 
 scene represented is merely that of a regiment of infantry on a winter 
 day passing the Porte Saint-Martin and preceded and followed by a 
 crowd, the tenseness and thrill of patriotic fervor, hope and fear and 
 dread, which animated the capital during the siege, is suggested with 
 curious force. But, generally, like his master Meissonier, it might be 
 said that the general effect intended to he produced by his canvas 
 was weakened, not by the excessive minuteness of detail—of which 
 the general run of critics complain, but by that very great care for 
 clever drawing, for a sort of over-accentuation of accuracy and style of 
 design—quite ignoring Nature’s slurrings and want of neatness—which 
 attracts the spectator’s attention and admiration in detail, and so prevents 
 him from appreciating the scene as a whole. 
 
 These qualities, and most of his best ones, may be found in one 
 of his later large canvases, the Sortie de la garnison de Hiniingiie, pur¬ 
 chased by a group of anonymous subscribers at the Salon of 1892 and 
 presented to the State, now in the collection of the Luxembourg. This 
 little frontier town held out against the Allies after Waterloo, and only 
 surrendered, on the 20th of August, 18up to an overwhelming force of 
 Austrians. Here we see the decimated and exhausted garrison, in their 
 worn and soiled uniforms, their wounded and heroic general, Barbanegre, 
 at their head, marching out proudly between the double ranks of Austrian 
 soldiers, presenting arms, and saluted reverentially by the Austrian chief 
 of staff. It would seem impossible to put more skill and ingenuity of 
 design into this representation,—every figure is alive with character and 
 expression, and exactly fitted for the particular situation which it occu¬ 
 pies in the general effect, from the two drummers leading the march 
 to the bearded sapeur in the middle distance and the impudent rake 
 of the cocked hats just passing under the archway in the background. 
 
PAUL GERVAIS 
 
 TITANIA’S FOLLY 
 
 Loaned by the State 
 
 PHOTOGRAVURE 
 

 
 
 
 

CONTEMPORARY ART 
 
 87 
 
 It may also be noticed that the bent bayonets of the heroic garrison 
 are placed in the defile just where they will contrast most effectively 
 with the straight and shining blades of the Austrian guards. The con¬ 
 trast of color, between the stained, spotted, and faded uniforms de grande 
 tenne of the French and the brilliant and unspeakably neat and martial 
 appearance of the victors, is no less striking. It would seem, indeed, 
 that the latter, at the end of a long campaign, were marvellously white 
 and shining,—though it is related that Napoleon’s Guard made it a point 
 of honor, no matter what the weather, the marching, or the fighting, to 
 present themselves at the morning review spotless, from gaiter to shako. 
 
 This abounding talent for detail and characterization is noticeable 
 in all his most valuable canvases,—the character of the heads, both of 
 those of the officials and of the firemen, in his Victimes du Devoir , 
 of the Salon of 1894, and the action of the wrists of the pompier in 
 the central foreground who is lifting the hose; the waxed moustache 
 and the skilful distribution of the artillery cartridges on the ground 
 under the horse of the colonel of the battery de Vassoigne, in the En 
 Batterie! It is somewhat inopportune to reflect that this artillery of 
 the Imperial Guard went thus magnificently into action in 1870 only 
 to find itself hopelessly outranged by the German field-guns. In his 
 designs more than in his large paintings, Detaille seems to get more 
 of the spirit and the character of the scene, as well as the uniforms 
 and the heads, more of the atmosphere, the souffle, the inspiration; the 
 admirable series of drawings he made some years ago for the publi¬ 
 cation L'Armee frangaise left nothing to be desired in the way of accuracy 
 and artistic intelligence. But in his large canvas shown at the Exposition 
 of 1900 and which had been ten years in his studio, he presents a scene 
 which is rendered with very much more lire and dramatic inspiration by 
 a much less well-known painter, Jules Rouffet, at the Salon of 1900,— 
 the presentation to the Emperor, after the battle, of the flags taken at 
 Austerlitz. In M. Rouffet’s more recent canvas, the approaching Emperor 
 
88 
 
 FRANCE 
 
 is almost unperceived in the distance, but the two converging lines of 
 horsemen in perspective which lead up to him, all of them waving their 
 hats in the air, against the sky, culminate in the foreground in a tre¬ 
 mendous group of cuirassiers, grenadiers, and hussars, their horses still 
 fierce-eyed and wide-nostrilled from the charge, lifting high over their 
 heads the taken standards in an infinite variety of forms and colors, and 
 all of them, horsemen, horses, and banners, bathed in the red and fierce 
 light of the sunset. As a presentation of LEpopee, a synthesis and an 
 apotheosis, this seems to have a certain logic and directness. 
 
 GABRIEL FERRIER. ANGE GARDIEN. 
 
JEAN VEBER. GOLD. 
 
 TABLE OF ENGRAVINGS 
 
 FULL PAGE 
 
 AUBLET, ALBERT. Morning . 
 
 BESNARD, PAUL-ALBERT. Mme. Rejane . 
 
 CHABAS, PAUL. Happy Frolic. Etched by A. Ardall 
 
 CORMON, FERNAND. The Marriage of Hassan-Badreddine ■ 
 
 DAMERON, EMILE-CHARLES . End of the Harvest . . 
 
 DEBAT-PONSAN, EDOUARD-BERNARD . Christ on the Mount ■ ... 
 
 DETA1LLE, EDOUARD. The Garrison of Huningue . 
 
 DUPRE, JULIEN . In the Shade .... 
 
 ETCHEVERRY, HUBERT-DENIS. Les Nounous 
 
 PAGE 
 
 70 
 
 66 
 
 46 
 
 5 ^ 
 
 14 
 
 30 
 
 ... l8 
 
 ... 50 
 
 89 
 
90 
 
 TABLE OF ENGRAVINGS 
 
 FERRIER, GABRIEL. The Flower of the Seraglio . 
 
 GERVAIS, PAUL. Titania's Folly . 
 
 GERVEX, HENRI .. Portrait of Mine. G. . 
 
 GORGUET, AUGUSTE-FRANCOISE-MARIE Garden of the Hesperides . 
 
 GUAY, GABRIEL. Woodland Idyl ... 
 
 HENNER, JEAN-JACQUES. The Levite of Ephraim . 
 
 JAMIN, PAUL JOSEPH .. . .... Le Brenn and his Share of the Booty . 
 
 LAURENS, JE AN-PAUL. Saint Jean Chrysostome Reviling the Empress 
 
 Eudoxia . 
 
 LEFEBVRE, JULES-JOSEPH. Lady Godka . 
 
 MARTIN, HENRI-JEAN-GUILLAUME ■ ■ • . Clemence Isaure Appears to the Troubadours ■ ■ ■ 
 
 MUENIER, JULES-ALEXIS. A Sunday at Fribourg . 
 
 PARIS. JEAN-MARIE-ALFRED. An Intrusion . 
 
 RIVIERE, THEODORE. The Sunna Virgin. Statuette. Etched in four 
 
 plates by Auguste-G. Thevenin ■ Fronts. 
 
 ROYER, LIONEL. Marbanx; Eylau, February 8, iSoy . 
 
 TOUDOUZE, EDOUARD. October . 
 
 WAGREZ, JACQUES.. . A Chapel-master of Saint Mark's, Venice, Fifteenth 
 
 Century . 
 
 TEXTUAL ENGRAVINGS 
 
 BIVA, HENRI. 
 
 BOMPARD, MAURICE. 
 
 BONNAT, LEON. 
 
 BOUCHARD, PAUL-LOUIS. 
 
 BOUGUEREAU. WILLIAM-ADOLPHE 
 
 BOULARD, EMILE. 
 
 BULAND, EUGENE . 
 
 CARRIER-BELLEUSE, PIERRE . . . 
 
 Villeneuve-L'Etang: Evening ■ ■ 
 
 Arabian Flospitality . 
 
 A Basque Landscape ...... 
 
 House of the Romanoffs, Moscow 
 
 Admiration . 
 
 Study . 
 
 Bretons Praying . 
 
 Danseuse Recovering her Slipper ■ 
 
 PAGE 
 
 38 
 
 86 
 
 62 
 
 10 
 
 78 
 
 42 
 
 54 
 
 82 
 
 34 
 
 v 
 
 32 
 
 26 
 
 74 
 
 6 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 7 
 
 8 l 
 
 65 
 
 41 
 
 I 
 
 29 
 
 45 
 
 56 
 
TABLE OF ENGRAVINGS 
 
 9 1 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CAZ 1 N, JEAN-CHARLES . Mesnival . 21 
 
 COURTOIS, GUSTAVE. Jeune Fille d la Source . 73 
 
 DAGNAN-BOUVERET, PASCAL-ADOLPHE The Conscripts . 77 
 
 ETCHEVERRY, HUBERT-DEN 1 S 
 
 PERRIER, GABRIEL. 
 
 FIX-MASSEAU. 
 
 GERVAIS, PAUL. 
 
 GERVEX, HENRI . 
 
 GUYON. MAXIMILIENNE . . . 
 
 LAMY, P.-FRANC. 
 
 MACHARD, JULES . . . ■ 
 
 MOREAU-NERET, ADRIEN . - 
 MUENIER, JULES-ALEXIS . - 
 RAFFAELLI, JEAN-FRANCOIS 
 SINIBALDI, JEAN-PAUL 
 TOUDOUZE, EDOUARD 
 VEBER, JEAN. 
 
 They Read No More . 
 
 Ange Gardien . 
 
 The Secret. Statuette of Wood and Ivory . . 
 
 The Judgment of Paris . 
 
 Portrait of Mile. S. . 
 
 The Toilet . 
 
 Portrait . 
 
 La Reve d 'Eros . 
 
 Autumnal Harmony . 
 
 Sea-urchin Fisher . 
 
 Saint-Germain-des-Pres . 
 
 Manon Lescaut 
 Autumn Flower 
 Gold .... 
 
 69 
 
 88 
 
 9 
 
 48 
 
 4 
 
 33 
 
 53 
 
 85 
 
 13 
 
 61 
 
 37 
 
 24 
 
 89 
 

 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 ; 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
Pouo 
 
 SPBoAL- W'ft 
 A/ 3^3 
 
 HZoi 
 
 uja<-l 
 
 /•7 flPd 
 / / 
 
 fcfcUY CENTER LIBRARY