The writer recalls the sensations once evoked by a close view of Fortuny's Choice of a Model at Paris years ago, and at that time in the possession of Mr. Stewart. Psychology is not missing in this miracle of virtuosity; the nude posing on the marble table, the absolute beauty of the drawing, the colouring, the contrast of the richly variegated marble pillars in the background, the eighteenth-century costumes of the Academicians so scrupulously yet so easily set forth, all made a dazzling ensemble. Since Fortuny turned the trick a host of spurious pictures has come overseas, and we now say "Vibert" at the same time as "Fortuny," just as some enlightened persons couple the names of Ingres and Bouguereau. In the kingdom of the third rate the mediocre is conqueror.

Listen to this description of La Vicaria (The Spanish Wedding), which first won for its painter his reputation. Begun in 1868, it was exhibited at Goupil's, Paris, the spring of 1870 (some say 1869), when the artist was thirty-two years old. Theophile Gautier—whose genius and Theodore de Banville's have analogies with Fortuny's in the matter of surfaces and astounding virtuosity—went up in the air when he saw the work, and wrote a feuilleton that is still recalled by the old guard. The following, however, is not by Gautier, but from the pen of Dr. Richard Muther, the erudite German critic: "A marriage is taking place in the sacristy of a rococo church in Madrid. The walls are covered with faded Cordova leather hangings figured in gold and dull colours, and a magnificent rococo screen separates the sacristy from the middle aisle. Venetian lustres are suspended from the ceiling, pictures of martyrs, Venetian glasses in carved oval frames hang on the wall, richly ornamented wooden benches and a library of missals and gospels in sparkling silver clasps, and shining marble tables and glistening braziers form part of the scene in which the marriage contract is being signed. The costumes are those of the time of Goya. An old beau is marrying a young and beautiful girl. With affected grace and a skipping minuet step, holding a modish three-cornered hat under his arm, he approaches the table to put his signature in the place which the escribano points out with an obsequious bow. He is arrayed in delicate lilac, while the bride is wearing a white silk dress trimmed with flowered lace and has a wreath of orange blossoms in her luxuriant black hair. As a girl friend is talking to her she examines with abstracted attention the pretty little pictures upon her fan, the finest she ever possessed. A very piquant little head she has, with her long lashes and black eyes. Then, in the background, follow the witnesses, and first of all a young lady in a swelling silk dress of the brightest rose colour. Beside her is one of the bridegroom's friends in a cabbage-green coat with long flaps and a shining belt, from which a gleaming sabre hangs. The whole picture is a marvellous assemblage of colours in which tones of Venetian glow and strength, the tender pearly gray beloved of the Japanese, and a melting neutral brown each sets off the other and gives a shimmering effect to the entire mass."

Fortuny was a gay master of character and comedy as well as of bric-a-brac. Still life he painted as no one before or after him; if Chardin is the Velasquez of vegetables, Fortuny is the Rossini of the rococo; such lace-like filigrees, fiorturi, marbles that are of stone, men and women that are alive, not of marble (like Alma-Tadema's). The artificiality of his work is principally in the choice of a subject, not in the performance. How luminous and silky are his blacks may be noted at the Metropolitan Museum in his portrait of a Spanish lady. There is nothing of the petit-maitre in the sensitive and adroit handling of values. The rather triste expression, the veiled look of the eyes, the morbidezza of the flesh tones, and the general sense of amplitude and grace give us a Fortuny who knew how to paint broadly. The more obvious and dashing side of him is present in the Arabian Fantaisie of the Vanderbilt Gallery. It must be remembered that he spent some time copying, at Madrid, Velasquez and Goya, and as Camille Mauclair enthusiastically declares, these copies are literal "identifications." They are highly prized by the Marquise Carcano (who owned the Vicaria), Madrazo, and the Baron Davillieu—the last named the chief critical authority on Fortuny.

In the history of the arts there are cases such as Fortuny's, of Mozart, Chopin, Raphael, and some others, whose precocity and prodigious powers of production astonished their contemporaries. Fortuny, whose full name was Mariano Jose Maria Bernardo Fortuny y Carbo, was born at Reus, a little town in the province of Tarragona, near Barcelona. He was very poor, and at the age of twelve an orphan. His grandfather, a carpenter, went with the lad on foot through the towns of Catalonia exhibiting a cabinet containing wax figures painted by Mariano and perhaps modelled by him. He began carving and daubing at the age of five; a regular little fingersmith, his hands were never idle. He secured by the promise of talent a pension of forty-two francs a month and went to Barcelona to study at the Academy. Winning the prize of Rome in 1857, he went there and copied old masters until 1860, when, the war between Spain and Morocco breaking out, he went to Morocco on General Prim's staff, and for five or six months his brain was saturated with the wonders of Eastern sunlight, exotic hues, beggars, gorgeous rugs, snake-charmers, Arabs afoot or circling on horseback with the velocity of birds, fakirs, all the huge glistening febrile life he was later to interpret with such charm and exactitude.

He returned to Rome. He made a second trip to Africa. He returned to Spain. Barcelona gave him a pension of a hundred and thirty-two francs a month, which amount was kept up later by the Duke de Rianzares until 1867. He went to Paris in 1866, was taken up by the Goupils, knew Meissonier and worked occasionally with Gerome. His rococo pictures, his Oriental work set Paris ablaze. He married the daughter of the Spanish painter Federigo Madrazo, and visited at Madrid, Granada, Seville, Rome, and, in 1874, London. He contracted a pernicious fever at Rome and died there, November 21, 1874, at the age of thirty-six. His funeral was imposing, many celebrities of the world of art participating. He was buried in the Campo Varano.

In 1866 at Rome he began etching, and in fifteen months finished a series of masterpieces. His line, surprisingly agile and sinuous, has the finesse of Goya—whom he resembled at certain points. He used aquatint with full knowledge of effects to be produced, and at times he recalls Rembrandt in the depth of his shadows. His friend the painter Henri Regnault despaired in the presence of such versatility, such speed and ease of workmanship. He wrote: "The time I spent with Fortuny is haunting me still. What a magnificent fellow he is! He paints the most marvellous things, and is the master of us all. I wish I could show you the two or three pictures he has in his hand or his etchings and water-colours. They inspired me with a real disgust of my own. Ah, Fortuny, you spoil my sleep!"

Standing aloof from the ideas and tendencies of his times and not a sweeper of the chords that stir in human nature the heroic or the pathetic, it is none the less uncritical to rank this Spaniard as a brainless technician. Everything is relative, and the scale on which Fortuny worked was as true a medium for the exhibition of his genius as a museum panorama. Let us not be misled by the worship of the elephantine. It is characteristic of his temperament that the big battle piece he was commissioned by the Barcelona Academy to paint was never finished. Not every one who goes to Rome does as the Romans do. Dowered by nature with extraordinary acuity of vision, with a romantic, passionate nature and a will of steel, Fortuny was bound to become a great painter. His manual technique bordered on the fabulous; he had the painter's hand, as his fellow-countryman Pablo de Sarasate had the born hand of the violinist. That he spent the brief years of his life in painting the subjects he did is not a problem to be posed, for, as Henry James has said, it is always dangerous to challenge an artist's selection of subject. Why did Goya conceive his Caprichos? The love of decorative beauty in Fortuny was not bedimmed by criticism. He had the lust of eye which not the treasures of Ormuz and Ind, or ivory, apes, and peacocks, could satisfy. If he loved the kaleidoscopic East, he also knew his Spain. We have seen at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts a tiny picture, the court-yard of a Spanish inn through which passes a blinding shaft of sunlight, which would make envious Senor Sorolla. Fortuny has personal charm, a quality usually missing nowadays, for painters in their desire to be truthful are tumbling head over heels into the prosaic. Individuality is vanishing in the wastes of an over-anxious realism. If Fortuny is a daring virtuoso on one or two strings, his palette is ever enchanting. Personally he was a handsome man, with a distinguished head, his body broad and muscular and capable of enduring fatigues that would have killed most painters. Allied to this powerful physique was a seductive sensibility. This peasant-born painter was an aristocrat of art. Old Mother Nature is an implacable ironist.



SOROLLA Y BASTIDA



We might say of the Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida that he was one of those who came into the world with a ray of sunshine in their brains—altering the phrase of Villiers de l'Isle Adam. Senor Sorolla is also one of the half-dozen (are there so many?) great living painters. He belongs to the line of Velasquez and Goya, and he seldom recalls either. Under the auspices of the Hispanic Society of America there was an exhibition of his works in 1909, some two hundred and fifty in all, hung in the museum of the society, West 156th Street, near Broadway. The liveliest interest was manifested by the public and professional people in this display. Those who saw Sorolla's art at the Paris Exposition, 1900, and at the Georges Petit Gallery, Paris, a few years ago need not be reminded of his virile quality and masterly brush-work. Some art lovers in this city are aware of his Sad Inheritance, the property of Mr. John E. Berwind, which has been hung in the Sunday-school room of the Ascension Church, Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. It is one of the artist's few pictures in which he feels the Weltschmerz. His is a nature bubbling over with health and happiness.

He is a Valencian, was born in 1863 of poor parents, and by reason of his native genius and stubborn will power he became what he is—the painter of vibrating sunshine without equal. Let there be no mincing of comparisons in this assertion. Not Turner, not Monet painted so directly blinding shafts of sunlight as has this Spaniard. He is an impressionist, but not of the school of Monet. His manner is his own, cunningly compounded as it is of the proceeds of half a dozen artists. His trip to Rome resulted in nothing but a large eclectic canvas without individuality; what had this pagan in common with saints or sinners! He relates that in Paris Bastien-Lepage and Menzel affected him profoundly. This statement is not to be contradicted; nevertheless Sorolla is the master of those two masters in his proper province of the portrayal of outdoor life. Degas was too cruel when he called Bastien the "Bouguereau of the modern movement"; Bastien academicised Manet and other moderns. He said nothing new. As for Menzel, it would be well here to correct the notion bandied about town that he discovered impressionism before the French. He did not. He went to Paris in 1867. Meissonier at first, and later Courbet, influenced him. His Rolling Mill was painted in 1876. It is very Courbet. The Paris Exposition, 1867, picture shows the influence of Monet—who was in the Salon of 1864; and Monet was begat by Boudin, who stemmed from Jongkind; and Jongkind studied with Isabey; and they came from Turner, idolater of the Sun. Remember, too, that Corot and Courbet called Eugene Boudin "roi des ciels." Monet not only studied with him but openly admitted that he had learned everything from him, while Boudin humbly remarked that he had but entered the door forced by the Dutchman Jongkind. Doubtless Sorolla found what he was looking for in Bastien, though it would be nearer the truth to say that he studied the Barbizons and impressionists and took what he needed from them all.

He is a temperament impressionable to the sun, air, trees, children, women, men, cattle, landscapes, the ocean. Such swift, vivid notation of the fluid life about him is rare; it would be photographic were it not the personal memoranda of a selecting eye; it would be transitory impressionism were it not for a hand magical in its manipulation of pigments. Brain and brush collaborate with an instantaneity that does not perplex because the result is so convincing. We do not intend to quote that musty flower of rhetoric which was a favourite with our grandfathers. It was the fashion then to say that Nature—capitalised—took the brush from the hand of the painter, meaning some old duffer who saw varnish instead of clear colour, and painted the picture for him. Sorolla is receptive; he does not attempt to impose upon nature an arbitrary pattern, but he sees nature with his own eyes, modified by the thousand subtle experiences in which he has steeped his brain. He has the tact of omission very well developed. After years of labour he has achieved a personal vision. It is so completely his that to copy it would be to perpetrate a burlesque. He employs ploys the divisional taches of Monet, spots, cross-hatchings, big sabre-like strokes a la John Sargent, indulges in smooth sinuous silhouettes, or huge splotches, refulgent patches, explosions, vibrating surfaces; surfaces that are smooth and oily surfaces, as in his waters, that are exquisitely translucent. You can't pin him down to a particular formula. His technique in other hands would be coarse, crashing, brassy, bald, and too fortissimo. It sometimes is all these discouraging things. It is too often deficient in the finer modulations. But he makes one forget this by his entrain, sincerity, and sympathy with his subject. As a composer he is less satisfactory; it is the first impression or nothing in his art. Apart from his luscious, tropical colour, he is a sober narrator of facts. Ay, but he is a big chap, this amiable little Valencian with a big heart and a hand that reaches out and grabs down clouds, skies, scoops up the sea, and sets running, wriggling, screaming a joyful band of naked boys and girls over the golden summer sands in a sort of ecstatic symphony of pantheism.

How does he secure such intensity of pitch in his painting of atmosphere, of sunshine? By a convention, just as the falsification of shadows by rendering them darker than nature made the necessary contrasts in the old formula. Brightness in clear-coloured shadows is the key-note of impressionistic open-air effects. W.C. Brownell—French Art—puts it in this way: "Take a landscape with a cloudy sky, which means diffused light in the old sense of the term, and observe the effect upon it of a sudden burst of sunlight. What is the effect where considerable portions of the scene are suddenly thrown into marked shadow, as well as others illuminated with intense light? Is the absolute value of the parts in shadow lowered or raised? Raised, of course, by reflected light. Formerly, to get the contrast between sunlight and shadow in proper scale the painter would have painted the shadows darker than they were before the sun appeared. Relatively they are darker, since their value, though heightened, is raised infinitely less than the parts in sunlight. Absolutely, their value is raised considerably. If, therefore, they are painted lighter than they were before the sun appeared they in themselves seem truer. The part of Monet's pictures that is in shadow is measurably true, far truer than it would have been if painted under the old theory of correspondence, and had been unnaturally darkened to express the relation of contrast between shadow and sunlight."

Like Turner, Monet forced the colour of his shadows, as MacColl points out, and like Monet, Sorolla forces the colour of his shadows—but what a compeller of beautiful shadows—forces the key to the very verge of the luminous abyss. Senor Beruete, the Velasquez expert, truthfully says of Sorolla's method: "His canvases contain a great variety of blues and violets, balanced and juxtaposed with reds and yellows. These, and the skilful use of white, provide him with a colour scheme of great simplicity, originality, and beauty." There are no non-transparent shadows, and his handling of blacks reveals a sensitive feeling for values. Consider that black-gowned portrait of his wife. His underlying structural sense is never obscured by his fat, flowing brush.

It must not be supposed that because of Sorolla's enormous brio his general way of entrapping nature is brutal. He is masculine and absolutely free from the neurasthenic morbidezza of his fellow-countryman Zuloaga. (And far from attaining that painter's inches as a psychologist.) For the delineation of moods nocturnal, of poetic melancholy, of the contemplative aspect of life we must not go to Sorolla. He is not a thinker. He is the painter of bright mornings and brisk salt breezes. He is half Greek. There is Winckelmann's Heiterkeit, blitheness, in his groups of romping children, in their unashamed bare skins and naive attitudes. Boys on Valencian beaches evidently believe in Adamic undress. Nor do the girls seem to care. Stretched upon his stomach on the beach, a youth, straw-hatted, stares at the spume of the rollers. His companion is not so unconventionally disarrayed, and as she has evidently not eaten of the poisonous apple of wisdom she is free from embarrassment. Balzac's two infants, innocent of their sex, could not be less carefree than the Sorolla children. How tenderly, sensitively, he models the hardly nubile forms of maidens. The movement of their legs as they race the strand, their dash into the water, or their nervous pausing at the rim of the wet—here is poetry for you, the poetry of glorious days in youth-land. Curiously enough his types are for the most part more international than racial; that is, racial as are Zuloaga's Basque brigands, manolas, and gipsies.

But only this? Can't he paint anything but massive oxen wading to their buttocks in the sea; or fisher boats with swelling sails blotting out the horizon; or a girl after a dip standing, as her boyish cavalier covers her with a robe—you see the clear, pink flesh through her garb; or vistas of flower gardens with roguish maidens and courtly parks; peasants harvesting, working women sorting raisins; sailors mending nets, boys at rope-making—is all this great art? Where are the polished surfaces of the cultured studio worker; where the bric-a-brac which we inseparably connect with pseudo-Spanish art? You will not find any of them. Sorolla, with good red blood in his veins, the blood of a great, misunderstood race, paints what he sees on the top of God's earth. He is not a book but a normal nature-lover. He is in love with light, and by his treatment of relative values creates the illusion of sun-flooded landscapes. He does not cry for the "sun," as did Oswald Alving; it comes to him at the beckoning of his brush. His many limitations are but the defects of his good qualities.

Sorolla is sympathetic. He adores babies and delights in dancing. His babies are irresistible. He can sound the Mitleid motive without a suspicion of odious sentimentality. What charm there is in some of his tiny children as they lean their heads on their mothers! They fear the ocean, yet are fascinated by it. Near by is a mother and child in bed. They sleep. The right hand of the mother stretches, instinctively, toward the infant. It is the sweet, unconscious gesture of millions of mothers. On one finger of the hand there is just a hint of gold from a ring. The values of the white counterpane and the contrast of dark-brown hair on the pillow are truthfully expressed. One mother and babe, all mothers and babes, are in this picture. Turn to that old rascal in a brown cloak, who is about to taste a glass of wine. A snag gleams white in his sly, thirsty mouth. The wine tastes fine, eh! You recall Goya. As for the boys swimming, the sensations of darting and weaving through velvety waters are produced as if by wizardry. But you never think of Sorolla's line, for line, colour, idea, actuality are merged. The translucence of this sea in which the boys plash and plunge is another witness to the verisimilitude of Sorolla's vision. Boecklin's large canvas at the new Pinakothek, Munich, is often cited as a tour de force of water painting. We allude to the mermaids and mermen playing in the trough of a greenish sea. It is mere "property" water when compared to Sorolla's closely observed and clearly reproduced waves. Rhythm—that is the prime secret of his vitality.

His portraiture, when he is interested in his sitters, is excellent. Beruete is real, so Cossio, the author of the El Greco biography; so the realistic novelist Blanco Ibanez; but the best, after those of his, Sorolla's, wife and children, is that of Frantzen, a photographer, in the act of squeezing the bulb. It is a frank characterisation. The various royalties and high-born persons whose counterfeit presentments are accomplished with such genuine effort are interesting; but the heart is missing. Cleverness there is in the portraits of Alphonse; and his wife's gorgeous costume should be the envy of our fashionable portrait manufacturers. It is under the skies that Sorolla is at ease. Monet, it must not be forgotten, had two years' military service in Morocco; Sorolla has always lived, saturated himself in the rays of a hot sun and painted beneath the hard blue dome of Spanish skies.

Sorolla is a painting temperament, and the freshening breezes and sunshine that emanate from his canvases should drive away the odours of the various chemical cook-shops which are called studios in our "world of art."

One cannot speak too much of the large-minded and cultivated spirit of Archer Milton Huntington, who is the projector and patron of the exhibitions at the Hispanic Society Museum. Sorolla y Bastida, through the invitation of Mr. Huntington, made this exhibition.



IGNACIO ZULOAGA



We are no longer with Sorolla and his vibrating sunshine on Valencian sands, or under the hard blue dome of San Sebastian; the two-score canvases on view in 1909 at the Hispanic Museum were painted by a man of profounder intellect, of equally sensual but more restrained temperament than Sorolla; above all, by an artist with different ideals—a realist, not an impressionist, Ignacio Zuloaga. It would not be the entire truth to say that his masterpieces were seen; several notable pictures, unhappily, were not; but the exhibition was finely representative. Zuloaga showed us the height and depth of his powers in at least one picture, and the longer you know him the more secrets he yields up.

In Paris they say of Sorolla that he paints too fast and too much; of Zuloaga that he is too lazy to paint. Half truths, these. The younger man is more deliberate in his methods. He composes more elaborately, executes at a slower gait. He resents the imputation of realism. The fire and fury of Sorolla are not his, but he selects, weighs, analyses, reconstructs—in a word, he composes and does not improvise. He is, nevertheless, a realist—a verist, as he prefers to be called. He is not cosmopolitan, and Sorolla is: the types of boys and girls racing along the beaches of watering places which Sorolla paints are cosmopolitan. Passionate vivacity and the blinding sunshine are not qualities that appeal to Zuloaga. He portrays darkest—let us rather say greenest, brownest Spain. The Basque in him is the strongest strain. He is artistically a lineal descendant of El Greco, Velasquez, Goya; and the map of his memory has been traversed by Manet. He is more racial, more truly Spanish, than any painter since Goya. He possesses the genius of place.

Havelock Ellis's book, The Soul of Spain, is an excellent corrective for the operatic Spain, and George Borrow is equally sound despite his bigotry, while Gautier is invaluable. Arsene Alexandre in writing of Zuloaga acutely remarks of the Spanish conspiracy in allowing the chance tourist only to scratch the soil "of this country too well known but not enough explored." Therefore when face to face with the pictures of Zuloaga, with romantic notions of a Spain where castles grow in the clouds and moonshine on every bush, prepare to be shocked, to be disappointed. He will show you the real Spain—the sun-soaked soil, the lean, sharp outlines of hills, the arid meadows, and the swift, dark-green rivers. He has painted cavaliers and dames of fashion, but his heart is in the common people. He knows the bourgeois and he knows the gipsy. He has set forth the pride of the vagabond and the garish fascinations of the gitana. Since Goya, you say, and then wonder whether it might not be wiser to add: Goya never had so complicated a psychology. A better craftsman than Goya, a more varied colourist, a more patient student of Velasquez, of life, though without Goya's invention, caprice, satanism, and fougue.

Zuloaga was not born poor, but with genius; and genius always spells discontent. He would not become an engineer and he would paint. His family, artists and artisans, did not favour his bent. He visited Italy, almost starved in Paris, and after he knew how to handle his tools he starved for recognition. It is only a few years since he exhibited the portrait of his uncle, Daniel Zuloaga, and his cousins. It now hangs in the Luxembourg; but Madrid would have none of him; a Spanish jury rejected him at Paris in 1900, and not possessing the means of Edouard Manet he could not hire a gallery and show the world the stuff that was in him. He did not sulk; he painted. Barcelona took him up; Paris, the world, followed suit. To-day he is rich, famous, and forty. He was born at Eibar, 1870, in the Basque province of Viscaya. He is a collector of rare taste and has housed his treasures in a gallery at his birthplace. He paints chiefly at Segovia, in an old church, though he wanders over Spain, sometimes afoot, sometimes in his motor car, often accompanied by Rodin in the latter, and wherever he finds himself he is at home and paints. A bull-fighter in the ring, as was Goya—perhaps the legend stirred him to imitation—he is a healthy athlete. His vitality, indeed, is enormous, though it does not manifest itself in so dazzling a style as Sorolla's. The demerits of literary comparisons are obvious, yet we dare to think of Sorolla and Zuloaga as we should of Theophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire. In one is the clear day flame of impersonality; the other is all personality, given to nocturnal moods, to diabolism and perversities, cruelties and fierce voluptuousness. Sorolla is pagan; Gothic is Zuloaga, a Goth of modern Spain. He has more variety than Sorolla, more intellect. The Baudelairian strain grows in his work; it is unmistakable. The crowds that went to see the "healthy" art of Sorolla (as if art had anything in common with pulse, temperature, and respiration) did not like, or indeed understand, many of Zuloaga's magnificent pictorial ideas.

He paints in large coups, but his broad, slashing planes are not impressionistic. He swims in the traditional Spanish current with joy. Green with him is almost an obsession—a national symbol certainly. His greens, browns, blacks, scarlets are rich, sonorous, and magnetic. He is a colourist. He also is master of a restrained palette and can sound the silver grays of Velasquez. His tonalities are massive. The essential bigness of his conceptions, his structural forms, are the properties of an eye swift, subtle, and all-embracing. It seems an image that is at once solidly rooted in mother earth and is as fluctuating as life. No painter to-day has a greater sense of character, except Degas. The Frenchman is the superior draughtsman, but he is no more vital in his interpretation of his ballet girls, washerwomen, and grisettes than is Zuloaga in his delineations of peasants, dwarfs, dogs, courtesans, scamps, zealots, pilgrims, beggars, drunkards, and working girls. What verve, what grip, what bowels of humanity has this Spaniard! A man, not a professor of academic methods. He has no school, and he is a school in himself. That the more serene, poetic aspects and readings of life have escaped him is merely to say that he is not constituted a contemplative philosopher. The sinister skein to be seen in some of his canvases does not argue the existence of a spiritual bias but is the recognition of evil in life. It is not very pleasant, nor is it reassuring, but it is part of the artist, rooted deep in his Spanish soul along with the harsh irony and a cruel spirit of mockery. He refuses to follow the ideals of other men, and he paints a spade a spade; at least the orchestration, if brutal, is not lascivious. A cold, impartial eye observes and registers the corruption of cities small and great and the infinitely worse immoralities of the open country. Sometimes Zuloaga's comments are witty, sometimes pessimistic. If he has studied Goya and Manet, he also knows Felicien Rops.

The only picture in the Zuloaga exhibition that grazes the border-land of the unconventional is Le Vieux Marcheur. It is as moral as Hogarth and as bitter as Rops. It recalls the Montmartre days of the artist when he was acquainted with Paul Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. Two women are crossing a bridge. Their actuality is impressed upon the retina in a marvellous ly definite way. They live, they move. One is gowned in dotted green, the other in black. There is a little landscape with water beyond the iron railing. A venerable minotaur is in pursuit. He wears evening clothes, an overcoat is thrown across his left arm, under his right he carries waggishly a cane. His white tie and hat of sober silk are in respectable contrast with his air of fatuousness—the Marquis of Steyne en route; the doddering hero of Mansfield in A Parisian Romance, or Baron Hulot. The alert expression of the girls, who appear to be loitering, tells us more at a glance than a chapter of Flaubert, Zola, or De Maupassant. Is it necessary to add that the handling takes your breath away because of its consummate ease and its realisation of the effects sought? Note the white of the old party's spats, echoed by the bit of stocking showing a low shoe worn by one of the girls; note the values of the blacks in the hat, coat, trousers, shoe tips of the man. The very unpleasantness of the theme is forgotten in the supreme art of its presentation.

M. Alexandre, the French critic, may argue valiantly that Zuloaga must not be compared with Goya, that their methods and themes are dissimilar. True, but those witches (Les Sorcieres de San Millan) are in the key of Goya, not manner, but subject-matter—a hideous crew. At once you think of the Caprichos of Goya. The hag with the distaff, whose head is painted with a fidelity worthy of Holbein; the monkey profile of the witch crouching near the lantern, that repulsive creature in spectacles—Goya spectacles; the pattern hasn't varied since his days—these ladies and their companions, especially that anonymous one in a hood, coupled with the desperate dreariness of the background, a country dry and hard as a volcanic cinder, make a formidable ensemble. Zuloaga relates that the beldames screeched and fought in his studio when he posed them. You exclaim while looking at them: "How now, you secret black and midnight hags!" Hell hovers hard by; each witch of the unholy trio has the evil eye.

As a painter of dwarfs Zuloaga has not been surpassed by any one but Velasquez. His Gregorio, the monster with the huge head, the sickening, livid, globular eye, the comical pose—you exclaim: What a brush! The picture palpitates with reality, an ugly reality, for the tall old couple are not prepossessing. The topography of the country is minutely observed. But this painter does not wreak himself in ugliness or morbidities; he is singularly happy in catching the attitudes and gestures of the peasants as they return from the vintage; of picadors, matadors, chulos, in the ring or lounging, smoking, awaiting the signal. The large and celebrated family group of the matador Gallito—which is to remain permanently in the Hispanic Society's museum—is a superb exemplar of the synthetic and rhythmic art of the Spaniard. Each character is seized and rendered. The strong silhouettes melt into a harmonious arabesque; the tonal gamut is nervous, strong, fiery; the dull gold background is a foil for the scale of colour notes. It is a striking picture. Very striking, too, is the portrait of Breval as Carmen, though it is the least Spanish picture in the collection; Breval is pictured on the stage, the lights from below playing over her features. The problem is solved, as Besnard or Degas has solved it, successfully, but in purely personal manner. It is the picture in the Metropolitan Museum that is bound to attract attention, as it is a technical triumph; but it is not very characteristic.

We saw dark-eyed, graceful manolas on balconies—this truly Spanish motive in art, as Spanish as is the Madonna Italian—over which are thrown gorgeous shawls, smiling, flirting; with languorous eyes and provocative fans, they sit ensconced as they sat in Goya's time and centuries before Goya, the Eternal Feminine of Spain. Zuloaga is her latest interpreter. Isn't Candida delicious in green, with black head-dress of lace—isn't she bewitching? Her stockings are green. The wall is a most miraculous adumbration of green. Across the room is another agent of disquiet in Nile green, Mercedes by name. Her aquiline nose, black eyes, and the flowers she wears at the side of her head bewilder; the sky, clouds, and landscape are all very lovely. This is a singularly limpid, loose, flowing picture. It has the paint quality sometimes missing in the bold, fat massing of the Zuloaga colour chords. The Montmartre Cafe concert singer is a sterling specimen of Zuloaga's portraiture. He is unconventional in his poses; he will jam a figure against the right side of the frame (as in the portrait of Marthe Morineau) or stand a young lady beside an ornamental iron gate in an open park (not a remarkable portrait, but one that pleases the ladies because of the textures). The head of the old actor capitally suggests the Spanish mummer. And the painter's cousin, Esperanza! What cousins he boasts! We recall The Three Cousins, with its laughing trio and the rich colour scheme. Our recollection, too, of The Piquant Retort, and its brown and scarlet harmonies; of the Promenade After the Bull-fight, which has the classical balance and spaced charm of Velasquez; and that startling Street of Love overbalances any picture except one in this exhibition, and that is The Bull-fighter's Family. The measuring eye of Zuloaga, his tremendous vitality, his sharp, superb transference to canvas of the life he has elected to represent and interpret are at first sight dazzling. The performance is so supreme—remember, not in a niggling, technical sense—a half-dozen men beat him at mere pyrotechnics and lace fioritura—that his limitations, very marked in his case, are overlooked. You have drunk a hearty Spanish wine; oil to the throat, confusion to the senses. You do not at first miss the soul; it is not included in the categories of Senor Zuloaga. Zuloaga, like his contemporary farther north, Anders Zorn, is a man as well as a painter; the conjunction is not too frequent. The grand manner is surely his. He has the modulatory sense, and Christian Brinton notes his sonorous acid effects. He paints beggars, dwarfs, work-girls, noblemen, bandits, dogs, horses, lovely women, gitanas, indolent Carmens; but real, not the pasteboard and foot-lights variety of Merimee and Bizet. Zuloaga's Spain is not a second-hand Italy, like that of so many Spanish painters. It is not all bric-a-brac and moonlight and chivalric tinpot helmets. It is the real Spain of to-day, the Spain that has at last awakened to the light of the twentieth century after sleeping so long, after sleeping, notwithstanding the desperate nudging it was given a century ago by the realist Goya. Now, Zuloaga is not only stepping on his country's toes, but he is recording the impressions he makes. He, too, is a realist, a realist with such magic in his brush that it would make us forgive him if he painted the odour of garlic.

Have you seen his Spanish Dancers? Not the dramatic Carmencita of Sargent, but the creature as she is, with her simian gestures, her insolence, her vulgarity, her teeth—and the shrill scarlet of the bare gum above the gleaming white, His street scenes are a transcript of the actual facts, and inextricably woven with the facts is a sense of the strange beauty of them all. His wine harvesters, venders of sacred images, or that fascinating canvas My Three Cousins—before these, also before the Promenade After the Bull-fight, you realise that by some miracle of nature the intensity of Goya and his sense of life, the charm of Velasquez and his sober dignity are recalled by the painting of a young Spanish artist who a decade ago was unknown. Nor is Zuloaga an eclectic. His force and individuality are too patent for us to entertain such a heresy. A glance at Jacques-Emile Blanche's portrait of the Spanish painter explains other things. There is the physique of a man who can work many hours a day before an easel; there are the penetrating eyes of an observer, spying eyes, slightly cruel; the head is an intellectual one, the general conformation of the face harmonious and handsome. The body is that of an athlete, but not of the bull-necked sort we see in Goya. The temperament suggested is impetuous, controlled by a strong will; it has been fined down by study and the enforced renunciations of poverty-haunted youth. Above all, there is race; race in the proud, resolute bearing, race in the large, firm, supple, and nervous hands. Indeed, the work of Zuloaga is all race. He is the most Spanish painter since Goya.



IX. CHARDIN



Zola, as reported by George Moore, said of Degas: "I cannot accept a man who shuts himself up all his life to draw a ballet girl as ranking co-equal in dignity and power with Flaubert, Daudet, and Goncourt." This remark gives us the cue for Zola's critical endowment; despite his asseverations his naturalism was only skin deep. He, too, was swayed by his literary notions concerning the importance of the subject. In painting the theme may count for little and yet a great picture result; in Zola's field there must be an appreciable subject, else no fiction. But what cant it is to talk about "dignity." Zola admits ingrained romanticism. He would not see, for instance, that the Degas ballet girls are on the same plane as the Ingres odalisques; that a still-life by Chardin outweighs a big canvas by David; and it must be admitted that the world is on the side of Zola. The heresy of the subject will never be stamped out, the painted anecdote will always win the eye of the easily satisfied majority.

It may be remembered that the great Spaniard began his apprenticeship to art by copying still-life, which he did in a superlative manner; his Bodegones, or kitchen pieces, testify to this. Chardin, who led as laborious an existence as Degas, shutting himself away from the world, studied surfaces with an intensity that Zola, the apostle of realism, would have misunderstood. Later the French painter devoted himself with equal success to genre and figure subjects; but for him there was no such category as still-life. Everything of substance, shape, weight, and colour is alive for the eye that observes, and, except Velasquez, Vermeer, and a few others, no man was endowed with the eye of Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, an eye microscopic in intensity and that saw the beautiful in the homely.

Edmond Pilon has published a comprehensive little monograph in the series Les Maitres de L'Art. M. Pilon is as sympathetic as he is just in his critical estimates of the man and his work. There is not much to relate of the quotidian life of the artist. His was not a romantic or a graceful figure among his contemporaries, the pastellist La Tour, Fragonard, and the rest, nor had his personality a jot of the mysterious melancholy of Watteau. His artistic ancestry was Dutch; in the footsteps of De Hooch, the younger Teniers, Vermeer, Terburg, Kalf, he trod, rather plodded, producing miracles of light, colour, finish. A long patience his career, he never indulged in brilliancy for the mere sake of brilliancy; nevertheless he was an amazing virtuoso of the brush. He was born in the Rue de Seine, Paris, November 2,1699. His father, Jean Chardin, a joiner, was a man of artistic instinct whose furniture and marquetrie were admired and in demand. The lad began his tuition under Cazes, but soon went to the atelier of Coypel. Later he worked under the eye of Carle Vanloo in the restoration of the large gallery at Fontainebleau. His painting of a barber-chirurgeon's sign drew upon him the notice of several artists of influence and he became a member of the Academy of St. Luc. When he exhibited for the first time in public, in the Place Dauphine, 1728, Watteau had been dead seven years; Coypel, Allegrain, Vanloo, Troy, and the imitators of the pompous art of Le Brun were the vogue. Colour had become a conventional abstraction; design, of the most artificial sort, the prime requisite for a sounding reputation. The unobtrusive art of Chardin, who went to nature not to books for his inspiration, was not appreciated. He was considered a belated Dutchman, though his superior knowledge of values ought to have proved him something else. Diderot, alone among the critics of his epoch, saluted him in company with the great Buffon as a man whom nature had taken into her confidence.

In 1728 he was received at the Academy as painter of fruit and flowers. He married his first wife, Marguerite Saintan, in 1731, and his son, J.B. Chardin, was born the same year. In 1735 he lost his wife and infant daughter, and the double blow drove him into retirement, but he exposed his pictures from time to time. He was made counsellor of the Academy in 1743, and in 1744 married the second time, a widow, Francoise Marguerite Pouget by name. This was a happy marriage; Madame Chardin, a sensible, good-tempered bourgeoise, regulated the household accounts, and brought order and peace into the life of the lonely artist. Hereafter he painted without interruptions. He received from the king a pension of five hundred francs, his son obtained the prix de Rome for a meritorious canvas, and if he had had his father's stable temperament he would have ended an admirable artist. But he was reckless, and died at Venice in a mysterious manner, drowned in a canal, whether by murder or suicide no one knew. Chardin never recovered his spirits after this shock. The king offered him lodging in the gallery of the Louvre (Logement No. 12). This was accepted, as much as he disliked leaving his comfortable little house in the Rue Princesse. As he aged he suffered from various ailments and his eyes began to give him trouble; then it was he took up pastels. December 6, 1779, he died, his wife surviving him until 1791.

He was a man of short stature, broad-shouldered and muscular. Liked by his friends and colleagues for his frankness, there was a salt savour in his forthright speech—he never learned to play the courtier. His manners were not polished, a certain rusticity clung to him always, but his honesty was appreciated and he held positions of trust. Affectionate, slow—with the Dutch slowness praised by Rodin—and tenacious, he set out to conquer a small corner in the kingdom of art, and to-day he is first among the Little Masters. This too convenient appellation must not class him with such myopic miniaturists as Meissonier. There are breadth of style, rich humanity, largeness of feeling, apart from his remarkable technique, that place him in the company of famous portrait painters. He does not possess what are called "general ideas"; he sounds no tragic chords; he has no spoor of poetry, but he sees the exterior world steadily; he is never obvious, and he is a sympathetic interpreter in the domestic domain and of character. His palette is as aristocratic as that of Velasquez: the music he makes, like that of the string quartet, borders on perfection.

At his debut he so undervalued his work that Vanloo, after reproaching the youth for his modesty, paid him double for a picture. Another time he gave a still-life to a friend in exchange for a waistcoat whose flowery pattern appealed to him. His pictures did not fetch fair prices during his lifetime; after more than half a century of hard work he left little for his widow. Nor in the years immediately subsequent to that of his death did values advance much. The engraver Wille bought a still-life for thirty-six livres, a picture that to-day would sell for thousands of dollars. At the beginning of the last century, in 1810, when David was ruler of the arts in Paris, the two masterpieces in pastel, now in the Louvre, the portraits of Chardin aux besicles, and the portrait of Marguerite Pouget, his second spouse, could have been bought for twenty-four francs. In 1867 at the Laperlier sale the Pourvoyeuse was sold for four thousand and fifty francs to the Louvre, and forty years later the Louvre gave three hundred and fifty thousand francs to Madame Emile Trepard for Le Jeune Homme au Violon and l'Enfant au Toton. Diderot truly prophesied that the hour of reparation would come.

He is a master of discreet tonalities and a draughtsman of the first order. His lighting, more diffused than Rembrandt's, is the chief actor in his scene. With it he accomplishes magical effects, with it he makes beautiful copper caldrons, humble vegetables, leeks, carrots, potatoes, onions, shining rounds of beef, hares, and fish become eloquent witnesses to the fact that there is nothing dead or ugly in nature if the vision that interprets is artistic. It is said that no one ever saw Chardin at work in his atelier, but his method, his facture has been ferreted out though never excelled. He employs the division of tones, his couches are fat and his colour is laid on lusciously. His colour is never hot; coolness of tone is his chief allurement. Greuze, passing one of his canvases at an exhibition, a long time regarded it and went away, heaving a sigh of envy. The frivolous "Frago," who studied with Chardin for a brief period, even though he left him for Boucher, admired his former master without understanding him. Decamps later exclaimed in the Louvre: "The whites of Chardin! I don't know how to recapture them." He might have added the silvery grays. M. Pilon remarks that as in the case of Vermeer the secret of Chardin tones has never been surprised. The French painter knew the art of modulation, while his transitions are bold; he enveloped his objects in atmosphere and gave his shadows a due share of luminosity. He placed his colours so that at times his work resembles mosaic or tapestry. He knew a century before the modern impressionists the knack of juxtaposition, of opposition, of tonal division; his science was profound. He must have studied Watteau and the Dutchmen closely. Diderot was amazed to find that his surpassing whites were neither black nor white, but a neuter—but by a subtle transposition of tones looked white. Chardin worked from an accumulation of notes, but there are few sketches of his in existence, a sanguine or two. The paucity of the Velasquez sketches has piqued criticism. Like Velasquez, Chardin was of a reflective temperament, a slow workman and a patient corrector.

The intimate charm of the Chardin interiors is not equalled even in the Vermeer canvases. At the Louvre, which contains at least thirty of the masterpieces, consider the sweetness of Le Benedicite, or the three pastels, and then turn to the fruits, flowers, kitchen utensils, game, or to La Raie Ouverte, that magnificent portrait of a skatefish, with its cat slyly stealing over opened oysters, the table-cloth of such vraisemblance that the knife balanced on the edge seems to lie in a crease. What bulk, what destiny, what chatoyant tones! Here are qualities of paint and vision pictorial, vision that has never been approached; paint without rhetoric, paint sincere, and the expression in terms of beautiful paint of natural truths. In Chardin's case—by him the relativity of mundane things was accepted with philosophic phlegm—an onion was more important than an angel, a copper stew-pan as thrilling as an epic. And then the humanity of his youth holding a fiddle and bow, the exquisite textures of skin and hair, and the glance of the eyes. You believe the story told of his advice to his confrere: "Paint with sentiment." But he mixed his sentiment with lovely colours, he is one of the chief glories of France as a colourist.



X. BLACK AND WHITE.



I

Some Frenchman has called the theatre a book reversed. It is a happy epigram. By a similar analogy the engraving or mezzotint might be described as a reversed picture. And with still more propriety black and white reproductions may be compared to the pianoforte in the hands of a skilful artist. The pianoforte can interpret in cooler tones orchestral scores. It gives in its all-formal severity the line; the colour is only suggested. But such is the tendency of modern music toward painting that the success of a pianoforte virtuoso to-day depends upon his ability to arouse within his listeners' imagination the idea of colour—in reality, the emotional element. The engraver evokes colour by his cunning interplay of line and cross hatching; the mezzotinter by his disposition of dark masses and white spaces. Indeed, the mezzotint by reason of its warm, more sympathetic, and ductile medium has always seemed more colourful in his plates than the most laboriously executed steel engravings. In this sense the scraper beats the burin, while the etcher, especially if he be a painter, attains a more personal vision than either one of these processes. "The stone was made for the mystics," say the Pennells. The revival of lithography by contemporary artists of fame is very welcome.

Above all, the appeal of engraving, mezzotint, and etching is to the refined. It is an art of a peculiarly intimate character. Just as some prefer the exquisite tonal purity and finished performances of the Kneisel String Quartet to the blare and thunder of the Philharmonic Society; just as some enjoy in silence beautiful prose more than our crude drama, so the lovers of black and white may feel themselves a distinctive class. They have at their elbow disposed in portfolios or spaced on walls the eloquent portraiture, the world's masterpieces, marine views, and landscapes. There is no better way to study painting historically than in the cabinet of an engraving collector. Furthermore, divested of bad or mediocre paint—many famous pictures by famous names are mere cartoons, the paint peeled or peeling off—the student and amateur penetrates to the very marrow of the painter's conception, to the very skeleton of his technical methods.



PIRANESI



I

"Battlements that on their restless fronts bore stars" is a line from Wordsworth that Thomas de Quincey approvingly quotes in regard to his opium-induced "architectural dreams," and, aptly enough, immediately after a page devoted to Piranesi, the etcher, architect, and visionary. You may find this page in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, that book of terror, beauty, mystification, and fudge (De Quincey deluded himself quite as much as his readers in this autobiography, which, like the confessions of most distinguished men, must not be taken too literally): "Many years ago," he wrote, "when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, which record the scenery of his own soul during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (described only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase, and upon it, groping his way upward, was Piranesi himself. Follow the stairs a little farther and you perceive it to come to a sudden, abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onward to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi? You suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eyes, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi on his aspiring labours, and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall."

This plate was evidently one of the Carceri set—sixteen in all—which the etcher improvised after some severe cerebral malady. What would we not give to have heard the poet of Kubla Khan describing the fantastic visions of the Venetian artist to the English opium eater! The eloquence of the prose passage we have transcribed has in it some faint echoes of Coleridge's golden rumble. That these two men appreciated the Italian is something; perhaps they saw chiefly in his work its fantastic side. There was no saner craftsman than Piranesi apart from certain of his plates; no more solid construction in a print can be shown than his various interpretations of the classic ruins of Rome, the temples at Paestum. He was a great engraver and etcher whose passion was the antique. He deliberately withdrew from all commerce with the ideas and art of his own times. He loved architecture for architecture's sake; not as a decoration, not as a background for humanity, but as something personal. It was for him what the human face was for Rembrandt and Velasquez. That he was called the Rembrandt of Architecture is but another testimony to the impression he made upon his contemporaries, though the title is an unhappy one. Piranesi even in his own little fenced-off coign of art is not comparable to the etcher of the Hundred Guilder print, nor are there close analogies in their respective handling of darks and lights.

It might be nearer the mark to call Piranesi—though all such comparisons are thorns in the critical flesh—the Salvator Rosa of architecture, for there is much of Salvator's unbridled violence, fantasy, and genius for deforming the actual that is to be encountered in some of Piranesi's works. His was not a classic temperament. The serene, airy, sun-bathed palaces and temples which Claude introduced into his foregrounds are seldom encountered in Piranesi. A dark Gothic imagination his, Gothic and often cruel. In his etching of public buildings at Rome or elsewhere, while he is not always faultless in drawing or scrupulous in observation, such was the sincerity and passion of the man that he has left us the noblest transcriptions of these stately edifices and monuments. It is in the rhythmic expression of his personal moods that his sinister romantic imaginings are revealed, and with a detail and fulness that are positively overwhelming.

It should not be forgotten that in the eighteenth and in the early part of the nineteenth centuries Piranesi achieved widespread popularity. He was admired outside of Italy, in England, in France, and Germany. A generation that in England read Vathek and Mrs. Radcliffe, supped on the horrors of Melmoth and Frankenstein, knew E.T.W. Hoffmann and the German romantic literature, could be relied on to take up Piranesi, and for his lesser artistic side. Poe knew his work and Baudelaire; we see that for De Quincey he was a kindred spirit. The English mezzotinter John Martin must have studied him closely, also Gustave Dore.

The Carceri (1750) of Piranesi are indoor compositions, enclosed spaces in which wander aimlessly or deliriously the wraiths of damned men, not a whit less wretched nor awful than Dante's immemorial mob. Piranesi shows us cavernous abodes where appalling engines of torture fill the foreground, while above, at vertiginous heights, we barely discern perilous passageways, haunted windows peering out upon the high heavens, stone-fretted ceilings that are lost in a magic mist. By a sort of diabolic modulation the artist conducts our eye from these dizzy angles and granitic convolutions down tortuous and tumultuous staircases that seemingly wind about the axis of eternity. To traverse them would demand an eternity and the nerves of a madman. Lower barbaric devices reveal this artist's temperament. He is said to have executed the prison set "during the delirium of fever." This is of the same calibre as the clotted nonsense about Poe composing when intoxicated or Liszt playing after champagne. It is a credible anecdote for Philistines who do not realise that even the maddest caprice, whether in black and white, marble, music, or verse, must be executed in silence and cold blood. Piranesi simply gave wing to his fancy, recalling the more vivid of his nightmares—as did Coleridge, De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire, and the rest of the drug-steeped choir. We recall one plate of Piranesi's in which a miserable devil climbs a staircase suspended over an abyss; as he mounts each step the lower one crumbles into the depths below.

The agony of the man (do you recall The Torture by Hope of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam?) is shown in his tense, crouching attitude, his hands clawing the masonry above him. Nature is become a monstrous fever, existence a shivering dread. You overhear the crash of stone into the infernal cellarage—where awaits the hunted wretch perhaps a worse fate than on the pinnacles above. It is a companion piece to Martin's Sadak searching for the Waters of Oblivion. Another plate depicts with ingenuity terraces superimposed upon terraces, archways spaced like massive music, narrow footways across which race ape-like men, half naked, eagerly preparing some terrible punishments for criminals handcuffed and guarded. They are to walk a sharp-spiked bridge. Gigantic chains swing across stony precipices, a lamp depends from a roof whose outlines are merged in the gray dusk of dreams. There is cruelty, horror, and a sense of the wickedly magnificent in the ensemble. What crimes were committed to merit such atrocious punishment? The boldness and clearness of it all! With perspicacity George Saintsbury wrote of Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony: "It is the best example of dream literature that I know—most writers who have tried this style have erred, inasmuch as they have endeavoured to throw a portion of the mystery with which the waking mind invests dreams over the dream itself. Any one's experience is sufficient to show that this is wrong. The events of dreams, as they happen, are quite plain and matter of fact, and it is only in the intervals that any suspicion occurs to the dreamer."

Certainly Piranesi remembered his dreams. He is a realist in his delineation of details, though the sweep and breadth of an ideal design are never absent. He portrays ladders that scale bulky joists, poles of incredible thickness, cyclopean block and tackling. They are of wood, not metal nor marble, for the art of Piranesi is full of discriminations. Finally, you weary. The eye gorged by all the mystic engines, hieroglyphs of pain from some impossible inquisition—though not once do we see a monkish figure—all these anonymous monkey men scurrying on what errand Piranesi alone knows; these towering arches, their foundations resting on the crest of hell (you feel the tremendous impact of the architectural mass upon the earth—no mean feat to represent or rather to evoke the sense of weight, of pressure on a flat surface); the muffled atmosphere in these prisons from which no living prisoner emerges; of them all you weary, for the normal brain can only stand a certain dose of the delirious and the melancholy. This aspect, then, of Piranesi's art, black magic in all its potency, need no longer detain us. His Temples of Paestum sound a less morbid key than his Carceri, and as etchings quite outrank them.



II

Giambattista Piranesi was born at Venice in 1720. Bryan says that about 1738 his father sent him to Rome, where he studied under Valeriani, through whom he acquired the style of Valeriani's master, Marco Ricci of Belluno. With Vasi, a Sicilian engraver, he learned that art. Ricci and Pannini were much in vogue, following the example of Claude in his employment of ruins as a picturesque element in a composition. But Piranesi excelled both Ricci and Pannini. He was an architect, too, helping to restore churches, and this accounts for the proud title, Architect of Venice, which may be seen on some of his plates. He lived for a time in Venice, but Rome drew him to her with an imperious call. And, notwithstanding the opposition of his father, to Rome he went, and for forty years devoted himself to his master passion, the pictorial record of the beloved city, the ancient portions of which were fast vanishing owing to time and the greed of their owners. This was Piranesi's self-imposed mission, begun as an exalted youth, finished as an irritable old man. Among his architectural restorations, made at the request of Clement XIII, were the two churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and Il Priorato. Lanciani says that Il Priorato is "a mass of monstrosities inside and out." It is his etching, not his labour as an architect, that will make Piranesi immortal. He seems to have felt this, for he wrote that he had "executed a work which will descend to posterity and will last so long as there will be men desirous of knowing all that has survived the ruins of the most famous city of the universe."

In the black-and-white portrait of the etcher by F. Polonzani, we see a full-cheeked man with a well-developed forehead, the features of the classic Roman order, the general expression not far removed from a sort of sullen self-satisfaction. But the eyes redeem. They are full, lustrous, penetrating, and introspective. The portrait etched by the son of Piranesi, after a statue, discovers him posed in a toga, the general effect being classic and consular. His life, like that of all good workmen in art, was hardly an eventful one. He married precipitately and his wife bore him two sons (Francesco, the etcher, born at Rome, 1748—Bryan gives the date as 1756—died at Paris, 1810) and a daughter (Laura, born at Rome, 1750—date of death unknown). These children were a consolation to him. Both were engravers. Francesco frequently assisted his father in his work, and Bryan says that Laura's work resembled her father's. She went to Paris with her brother and probably died there. She left some views of Rome. Francesco, with his brother Pietro, attempted to found an academy in Paris and later a terra cotta manufactory.

The elder Piranesi was of a quarrelsome disposition. He wrangled with an English patron, Viscount Charlemont, and, like Beethoven, destroyed title-pages when he became displeased with the subject of his dedications. He was decorated with the Order of Christ and was proud of his membership in the London Society of Antiquaries. It is said that the original copper plates of his works were captured by a British man-of-war during the Napoleonic conflict. This probably accounts for the dissemination of so many revamped and coarsely executed versions of his compositions. His besetting fault was a tendency toward an Egyptian blackness in his composition. Fond of strong contrasts as was John Martin, he is, at times, as great a sinner in the handling of his blacks. An experimenter of audacity, Piranesi's mastery of the technique of etching has seldom been equalled, and even in his inferior work the skilful printing atones for many defects. The remarkable richness and depth of tone, brought about by continuous and innumerable bitings, and other secret processes known only to himself, make his plates warm and brilliant. Nobility of form, grandeur of mass, a light and shade that is positively dramatic in its dispersion over wall and tower, are the characteristic marks of this unique etcher. He could not resist the temptation of dotting with figures the huge spaces of his ruins. They dance or recline or indulge in uncouth gestures. His shadows are luminous—you may gaze into them; his high lights caught on some projection or salient cornice or silvering the August porticoes of a vanished past, all these demonstrate his feeling for the dramatic. And dramatic is the impression evoked as you study the majestic temples that were Paestum, the bare, ruined arches and pillars that were Rome. It is Paestum that is the more vivid. It tallies, too, with the Piranesi plates; while Rome has visibly changed since his day. His original designs for chimneys, Diverse Maniere d'Adornare i Camini, are pronounced by several critics as "foolish and vulgar." He left nearly two thousand etchings, and died at Rome November 9, 1778. His son erected a mediocre statue by Angolin for his tomb in Il Priorato. A manuscript life of Piranesi, which was in London about 1830, is now lost. Bryan's dictionary gives a partial list of his works "as published both by himself in Rome and by his sons in Paris. The plates passed from his sons first to Firmin-Didot, and ultimately into the hands of the Papal Government."

De Quincey's quotation of Wordsworth is apposite in describing Piranesi's creations: "Battlements that on their restless fronts bore stars"; from sheer brutal masonry, gray, aged, and moss-encrusted, he invented a precise pattern and one both passionate and magical.



MERYON



Until the recent appearance of the Baudelaire letters (1841-66) all that we knew of Meryon's personality and art was to be found in the monograph by Philippe Burty and Beraldi's Les Graveurs du XIX Siecle. Hamerton had written of the French etcher in 1875 (Etching and Etchers), and various anecdotes about his eccentric behaviour were public property. Frederick Wedmore, in his Etching in England, did not hesitate to group Meryon's name with Rembrandt's and Jacquemart's (one feels like employing the Whistlerian formula and asking: Why drag in Jacquemart?); and to-day, after years of critical indifference, the unhappy copper-scratcher has come into his own. You may find him mentioned in such company as Duerer, Rembrandt, and Whistler. The man who first acclaimed him as worthy of associating with Rembrandt was the critic Charles Baudelaire; and we are indebted to him for new material dealing with the troubled life of Charles Meryon.

On January 8, 1860, Baudelaire wrote to his friend and publisher, Poulet-Malassis, that what he intends to say is worth the bother of writing. Meryon had called, first sending a card upon which he scrawled: "You live in a hotel the name of which doubtless attracted you because of your tastes." Puzzled by this cryptic introduction, the poet then noted that the address read: Charles Baudelaire, Hotel de Thebes. He did not stop at a hotel bearing that name, but, fancying him a Theban, Meryon took the matter for granted. This letter was forwarded. Meryon appeared. His first question would have startled any but Baudelaire, who prided himself on startling others. The etcher, looking as desperate and forlorn as in the Bracquemond etched portrait (1853), demanded news of a certain Edgar Poe. Baudelaire responded sadly that he had not known Poe personally. Then he was eagerly asked if he believed in the reality of this Poe. Charles began to suspect the sanity of his visitor. "Because," added Meryon, "there is a society of litterateurs, very clever, very powerful, and knowing all the ropes." His reasons for suspecting a cabal formed against him under the guise of Poe's name were these: The Murders in the Rue Morgue. "I made a design of the Morgue—an orang-outang. I have been often compared to a monkey. This orang-outang assassinated two women, a mother and daughter. Et moi aussi, j'ai assassine moralement deux femmes, la mere et sa fille. I have always taken this story as an allusion to my misfortunes. You, M. Baudelaire, would do me a great favour if you could find the date when Edgar Poe, supposing he was not assisted by any one, wrote his tale. I wish to see if this date coincides with my adventures." After that Baudelaire knew his man.

Meryon spoke with admiration of Michelet's Jeanne d'Arc, though he swore the book was not written by Michelet. (Not such a wild shot, though not correct in this particular instance, for the world has since discovered that several books posthumously attributed to Michelet were written by his widow.) The etcher was interested in the cabalistic arts. On one of his large plates he drew some eagles, and when Baudelaire objected that these birds did not frequent Parisian skies he mysteriously whispered "those folks at the Tuileries" often launched as a rite the sacred eagles to study the omens and presages. He was firmly convinced of this. After the termination of the trying visit Baudelaire, with acrid irony, asks himself why he, with his nerves usually unstrung, did not go quite mad, and he concludes, "Seriously I addressed to Heaven the grateful prayers of a pharisee."

In March the same year he assures the same correspondent that decidedly Meryon does not know how to conduct himself. He knows nothing of life, neither does he know how to sell his plates or find an editor. His work is very easy to sell. Baudelaire was hardly a practical business man, but, like Poe, he had sense enough to follow his market. He instantly recognised the commercial value of Meryon's Paris set, but knew the etcher was a hopeless character. He wrote to Poulet-Malassis concerning a proposed purchase of Meryon's work by the publisher. It never came to anything. The etcher was very suspicious as to paper and printing. He grew violent when the poet asked him to illustrate some little poems and sonnets. Had he, Meryon, not written poems himself? Had not the mighty Victor Hugo addressed flattering words to him? Baudelaire, without losing interest, then thought of Daumier as an illustrator for a new edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. It must not be supposed, however, that Meryon was ungrateful. He was deeply affected by the praise accorded him in Baudelaire's Salon of 1859. He wrote in February, 1860, sending his Views of Paris to the critic as a feeble acknowledgment of the pleasure he had enjoyed when reading the brilliant interpretative criticism. He said that he had created an epoch in etching—which was the literal truth—and he had saved a rapidly vanishing Paris for the pious curiosity of future generations. He speaks of his "naive heart" and hoped that Baudelaire in turn would dream as he did over the plates. This letter was signed simply "Meryon, 20 Rue Duperre." The acute accent placed over the "e" in his name by the French poet and by biographers, critics, and editors since was never used by the etcher. It took years before Baudelaire could persuade the Parisians that Poe did not spell his name "Edgard Poe." And we remember the fate of Liszt and Whistler, who were until recently known in Paris as "Litz" and "Whistler." With the aid of Champfleury and Banville, Baudelaire tried to bring Meryon's art to the cognisance of the Minister of Beaux-Arts, but to no avail. Why?

There was a reason. Bohemian as was the artist during the last decade of his life, he did not always haunt low cafes and drink absinthe. His beginnings were as romantic as a page of Balzac. He was born a gentleman a la main gauche. His father was the doctor and private secretary of Lady Stanhope. Charles Lewis Meryon was an English physician, who, falling in love with a ballet dancer at the Opera, Pierre Narcisse Chaspoux, persuaded her that it would be less selfish on her part if she would not bind him to her legally. November 23,1821, a sickly, nervous, and wizened son was born to the pair and baptised with his father's name, who, being an alien, generously conceded that much. There his interest ceased. On the mother fell the burden of the boy's education. At five he was sent to school at Passy and later went to the south of France. In 1837 he entered the Brest naval school, and 1839 saw him going on his maiden voyage. This first trip was marred by the black sorrow that fell upon him when informed of his illegitimate birth. "I was mad from the time I was told of my birth," he wrote, and until madness supervened he suffered from a "wounded imagination." He was morbid, shy, and irritable, and his energy—the explosive energy of this frail youth was amazing; because he had been refused the use of a ship boat he wasted three months digging out a canoe from a log of wood. Like Paul Gauguin, he saw many countries, and his eyes were trained to form, though not colour—he suffered from Daltonism—for when he began to paint he discovered he was totally colour-blind. The visible world for him existed as a contrapuntal net-work of lines, silhouettes, contours, or heavy dark masses. When a sailor he sketched. Meryon tells of the drawing of a little fungus he found in Akaroa. "Distorted in form and pinched and puny from its birth, I could not but pity it; it seemed to me so entirely typical of the inclemency and at the same time of the whimsicality of an incomplete and sickly creation that I could not deny it a place in my souvenirs de voyage, and so I drew it carefully." This bit of fungus was to him a symbol of his own gnarled existence.

Tiring of ship life, he finally decided to study art. He had seen New Zealand, Australia, Italy, New Caledonia, and if his splendid plate—No. 22 in M. Burty's list—is evidence, he must have visited San Francisco. Baudelaire, in L'Art Romantique, speaks of this perspective of San Francisco as being Meryon's most masterly design. In 1846 he quit seafaring. He was in mediocre health, and though from a cadet he had attained the rank of lieutenant it was doubtful if he would ever rise higher. His mother had left him four thousand dollars, so he went over to the Latin Quarter and began to study painting. That he was unfitted for, and meeting Eugene Blery he became interested in etching. A Dutch seventeenth-century etcher and draughtsman, Reiner Zeeman by name, attracted him. He copied, too, Ducereau and Nicolle. "An etching by the latter of a riverside view through the arch of a bridge is like a link between Meryon and Piranesi," says D.S. MacColl. Meryon also studied under the tuition of a painter named Phelippes. He went to Belgium in 1856 on the invitation of the Duc d'Aremberg, and in 1858 he was sent to Charenton suffering from melancholy and delusions. He left in a year and returned to Paris and work; but, as Baudelaire wrote, a cruel demon had touched the brain of the artist. A mystic delirium set in. He ceased to etch, and evidently suffered from the persecution madness. In every corner he believed conspiracies were hatching. He often disappeared, often changed his abode. Sometimes he would appear dressed gorgeously at a boulevard cafe in company with brilliant birds of prey; then he would be seen slinking through mean streets in meaner rags. There are episodes in his life that recall the career of another man of genius, Gerard de Nerval, poet, noctambulist, suicide. It is known that Meryon destroyed his finest plates, but not in a mad fit. Baudelaire says that the artist, who was a perfectionist, did not wish to see his work suffer from rebiting, so he quite sensibly sawed up the plates into tiny strips. That he was suspicious of his fellow-etchers is illustrated in the story told by Sir Seymour Haden, who bought several of his etchings from him at a fair price. Two miles away from the atelier the Englishman was overtaken by Meryon. He asked for the proofs he had sold, "as they were of a nature to compromise him"; besides, from what he knew of Haden's etchings he was determined that his proofs should not go to England. Sir Seymour at once returned the etchings. Now, whether Meryon's words were meant as a compliment or the reverse is doubtful. He was half crazy, but he may have seen through a hole in the millstone.

Frederick Keppel once met in Paris an old printer named Beillet who did work for Meryon. He could not always pay for the printing of his celebrated Abside de Notre Dame, a masterpiece, as he hadn't the necessary ten cents. "I never got my money!" exclaimed the thrifty printer. Enormous endurance, enormous vanity, diseased pride, outraged human sentiment, hatred of the Second Empire because of the particular clause in the old Napoleonic code relating to the research of paternity; an irregular life, possibly drugs, certainly alcoholism, repeated rejections by the academic authorities, critics, and dealers of his work—these and a feeble constitution sent the unfortunate back to Charenton, where he died February 14, 1868. Baudelaire, his critical discoverer, had only preceded him to a lunatic's grave six months earlier. Inasmuch as there is a certain family likeness among men of genius with disordered minds and instincts, several comparisons might be made between Meryon and Baudelaire. Both were great artists and both were born with flawed, neurotic systems. Dissipation and misery followed as a matter of course.

Charles Meryon was, nevertheless, a sane and a magnificent etcher. He executed about a hundred plates, according to Burty. He did not avoid portraiture, and to live he sometimes manufactured pot-boilers for the trade. To his supreme vision was joined a miraculous surety of touch. Baudelaire was right—those plates, the Paris set, so dramatic and truthful in particulars, could have been sold if Meryon, with his wolfish visage, his fierce, haggard eyes, his gruff manner, had not offered them in person. He looked like a vagabond very often and too often acted like a brigand. The Salon juries were prejudiced against his work because of his legend. Verlaine over again! The etchings were classic when they were born. We wonder they did not appeal immediately. To-day, if you are lucky enough to come across one, you are asked a staggering price. They sold for a song—when they did sell—during the lifetime of the artist. Louis Napoleon and Baron Haussmann destroyed picturesque Paris to the consternation of Meryon, who to the eye of an archaeologist united the soul of an artist. He loved old Paris. We can evoke it to-day, thanks to these etchings, just as the Paris of 1848 is forever etched in the pages of Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale.

But there is hallucination in these etchings, beginning with Le Stryge, and its demoniac leer, "insatiable vampire, l'eternelle luxure." That gallery of Notre Dame, with Wotan's ravens flying through the slim pillars from a dream city bathed in sinister light, is not the only striking conception of the poet-etcher. The grip of reality is shown in such plates as Tourelle, Rue de la Tisseranderie, and La Pompe, Notre Dame. Here are hallucinations translated into the actual terms of art, suggesting, nevertheless, a solidity, a sharpness of definition, withal a sense of fluctuating sky, air, clouds that make you realise the justesse of Berenson's phrase—tactile values. With Meryon the tactile perception was a sixth sense. Clairvoyant of images, he could transcribe the actual with an almost cruel precision. Telescopic eyes his, as MacColl has it, and an imagination that perceived the spectre lurking behind the door, the horror of enclosed spaces, and the mystic fear of shadows—a Poe imagination, romantic, with madness as an accomplice in the horrible game of his life. One is tempted to add that the romantic imagination is always slightly mad. It runs to seed in darkness and despair. The fugitive verse of Meryon is bitter, ironical, defiant; a whiff from an underground prison, where seems to sit in tortured solitude some wretch abandoned by humanity, a stranger even at the gates of hell.

Sir Seymour Haden has told us that Meryon's method was to make a number of sketches, two or three inches square, of parts of his picture, which he put together and arranged into a harmonious whole. Herkomer says that he "used the burin in finishing his bitten work with marvellous skill. No better combination can be found of the harmonious combination of the two." Burty declared that "Meryon preserves the characteristic detail of architecture... Without modifying the aspect of the monument he causes it to express its hidden meaning, and gives it a broader significance by associating it with his own thought." His employment of a dull green paper at times showed his intimate feeling for tonalities. He is, more so than Piranesi, the Rembrandt of architecture. Hamerton admits that the French etcher was "one of the greatest and most original artists who have appeared in Europe," and berates the public of the '60s for not discovering this. Then this writer, copying in an astonishingly wretched manner several of Meryon's etchings, analysing their defects as he proceeds, asserts that there is false tonality in Le Stryge. "The intense black in the street under the tower of St. Jacques destroys the impression of atmosphere, though at a considerable distance it is as dark as the nearest raven's wing, which cannot relieve itself against it. This may have been done in order to obtain a certain arrangement of black and white patches," etc. This was done for the sheer purpose of oppositional effects. Did Hamerton see a fine plate? The shadow is heavy; the street is in demi, not total, obscurity; the values of the flying ravens and the shadow are clearly enunciated. The passage is powerful, even sensational, and in the Romantic, Hugoesque key. Hamerton is wrong. Meryon seldom erred. His was a temperament of steel and fire.



JOHN MARTIN, MEZZOTINTER



The sitting-room was long and narrow. A haircloth sofa of uncompromising rectitude was pushed so close to the wall that the imprints of at least two generations of heads might be discerned upon the flowered wall-paper—flowers and grapes of monstrous size from some country akin to that visited by the Israelitish spies as related in the Good Book. A mahogany sideboard stood at the upper end of the room; in one window hung a cage which contained a feeble canary. As you entered your eyes fell upon an ornamental wax fruit piece under a conical glass. A stuffed bird, a robin redbreast, perched on a frosted tree in the midst of these pale tropical offerings, glared at you with beady eyes. Antimacassars and other things of horror were in the room. Also a centre table upon which might have been found Cowper's poems, the Bible, Beecher's sermons, and an illustrated book about the Holy Land by some hardworking reverend. It was Aunt Jane's living-room; in it she had rocked and knitted for more than half a century. There were a few pictures on the wall, a crayon of her brother, a bank president with a shaved upper lip, a high, pious forehead, and in his eyes a stern expression of percentage. Over the dull white marble mantelpiece hung a huge mezzotint, of violent contrast in black and white, a picture whose subject had without doubt given it the place of honour in this old-fashioned, tasteless, homely, comfortable room. It bore for a title The Fall of Nineveh, and it was designed and mezzotinted by John Martin.

Let us look at this picture. It depicts the downfall of the great city upon which the wrath of God is visited. There are ghastly gleams of lightning above the doomed vicinity. A fierce tempest is in progress as the invading hosts break down the great waterways and enter dry-shod into the vast and immemorial temples and palaces. The tragedy, the human quality of the design, is summed up by the agitated groups in the foreground; the king, surrounded by his harem, makes a gesture of despair; the women, with loose-flowing draperies, surround him like frightened swans. A high priest raises his hand to the stormy heavens, upon which he is evidently invoking as stormy maledictions. A warrior swings his blade; to his neck clings a fair helpless one, half nude. There are other groups. Men in armour rush to meet the foe in futile agitation. On temple tops, on marble terraces and balconies, on the efflorescent capitals of vast columns that pierce the sky, swarms affrighted humanity. The impression is grandiose and terrific. Exotic architecture, ebon night, an event that has echoed down the dusty corridors of legend or history—these and a hundred other details are enclosed within the frame of this composition. Another picture which hangs hard by, the Destruction of Jerusalem, after Kaulbach, is colourless in comparison. The Englishman had greater imagination than the German, though he lacked the latter's anatomical science. To-day in the Pinakothek, Munich, Kaulbach holds a place of honour. You may search in vain at the London National Gallery for the paintings of a man who once was on the crest of popularity in England, whose Biblical subjects attracted multitudes, whose mezzotints and engravings were sold wherever the English Bible was read. John Martin, painter, mezzotinter, man of gorgeous imagination, second to De Quincey or the author of Vathek, is to-day more forgotten than Beckford himself.

Heinrich Heine in his essay, The Romantic School, said that "the history of literature is a great morgue, wherein each seeks the dead who are near or dear to him." Into what morgue fell John Martin before his death? How account for the violent changes in popular taste? Martin suffered from too great early success. The star of Turner was in the ascendant. John Ruskin denied merit to the mezzotinter, and so it is to-day that if you go to our print-shops you will seldom find one of his big or little plates. He has gone out of fashion—fatal phrase!—and only in the cabinets of old collectors can you get a peep at his archaic and astounding productions. William Blake is in vogue; perhaps Martin—? And then those who have garnered his plates will reap a harvest.

Facts concerning him or his work are slight. Bryan's dictionary accords him a few paragraphs. When at the British Museum, a few years ago, I asked Mr. Sidney Colvin about the Martins in his print-room. There are not many, not so many as in a certain private collection here. But Mr. Colvin told me of the article written by Cosmo Monkhouse in the Dictionary of National Biography, and from it we are enabled to present a few items about the man's career. He was born at Hayden Bridge, near Hexham, Northumberland, July 19, 1789. His father, Fenwick Martin, a fencing-master, held classes at the Chancellor's Head, Newcastle. His brothers, Jonathan (1782-1838) and William (1772-1851), have some claim on our notice, for the first was an insane prophet and incendiary, having set fire to York Minster in 1829; William was a natural philosopher and poet who published many works to prove the theory of perpetual motion. "After having convinced himself by means of thirty-six experiments of the impossibility of demonstrating it scientifically, it was revealed to him in a dream that God had chosen him to discover the great cause of all things, and this he made the subject of many works" (Jasnot, Verites positives, 1854). Verily, as Lombroso hath it, "A hundred fanatics are found for a theological or metaphysical statement, but not one for a geometric problem."