Art

THERE has lately been on exhibition in Boston, at the rooms of Messrs. Doll and Rickard, a small but remarkable collection of French pictures. These paintings, we believe, are privately owned in Boston ; and united thus in a charming room they afford a pleasant suggestion and premonition of the artistic taste and wealth scattered, potentially, at least, through our Supposedly sordid American community. Several of the first names of the French school are represented, — Delacroix, Decamps, Troyon, Rousseau, Jules Duprez, Daubigny, Diaz. They form a group interesting in more ways than one,—as to the reciprocal light they shed upon each other as members of a school, and as to their opportune and almost pathetic testimony just now to the admirable æsthetic gifts of the French mind.

None of them are more eloquent in this latter Sense than the great Troyon, — the edge of a wood, seen on a dampish day in September. A cluster of magnificent forest oaks occupies the middle and left of the picture, rich with the waning maturity of summer, with their sturdy foliage just beginning to rust and drop, leaf by leaf, into the rank river-grass, streaked with lingering flowers, at their feet. The trees are a magnificent study, — or rather not a study, but a perfect achievement. They stand there solid and mighty, without the smallest loss of their hugeness and dignity. It is noteworthy too, that, vast and elaborate as they are, they are far from filling and crowding the picture ; they are only part of the great landscape beyond and beside them ; they seem really, as we may say, to irradiate atmosphere and space. The tone of color in this work is extremely subdued, yet consummately sustained, — sober and brilliant at once ; a powerful harmony of gray and gray-green, relieved with quiet russet and brown. The color plays along this narrow scale with a kind of rich melancholy, such as perfectly befits the drama of lusty summer just conscious of the touch of autumn. The especial ground of interest in the picture is its happy grasp of the medium between the hard definiteness of some of our recent English and American ultra-realists in landscape, and that exaggerated make-shift breadth and tendency to rough generalization which marks so many French landscapists, and of which the large Daubigny, in tins same collection, is so striking an example.

Its smaller companion, although of a more familiar and commonplace cast, is still very charming. It represents half a dozen cows, driven through a field by a young girl on a late summer day. The happy, crooked, scattered movement of the cattle ; the sweet midsummer whisper which seems to lurk in the meadow-side copse ; the rare and natural luminosity, without recherche, without a hint of that cunning morbidesza which marks the corresponding portion of the small Decamps near by, in the tender sky, dappled at cool intervals, —make of the work a genuine pastoral. It is, perhaps, as a whole, a little blank and thin ; but it is indefinably honnête. It reminds us of one of George Sands’s rural novels, — Français le Champi or the Petite Fadette.

By so much as Troyon is a diffuse painter is Theodore Rousseau, who is here represented by two extremely characteristic works, a concentrated one. The dogged soberness of his manner strikes us as the last word of the distinctively French treatment of landscape. We know of no painter who depends less on extraneous effects and suggestions, on the graceful byplay of a Diaz, or the almost literary allusiveness of a Decamps. His sole effort seems to be to enter more and more into his subject. Sometimes, we think, he gets l®st in it, as in the overwrought interconfusion of the trees and ground in the smaller of these two pictures. It wears, nevertheless, an admirable expression of size and space, of condensed light and fresh air. The sky, in spite of a thick, over-glazed look, is full of a natural cloud-filtered radiance. The picture, altogether, has more nature than grace. Its larger companion, however, is a thoroughly noble and perfect work. A broad low plain at dusk, with a small stone farm-house and its wall to the right, and, to the left, in mid-distance, a light screen of thin young trees, form the lower portion ; over this is erected as true a sunset as ever was painted. The field of sky is immense and the distribution of cloud most elaborate; but the composition is admirably free from that cheapness of effect which attends upon the common sunset of art. It is not an American sunset, with its lucid and untempered splendor of orange and scarlet, but the sinking of a serious old-world day, which sings its death-song in a muffled key. The tone of the clouds is gray, that of the light a deep grave crimson ; and this crimson and gray, this conflicting cold and warmth, play against each other in the vast realm of evening with tremendous effect. It is all admirably true; you seem, as you look, to be plodding heavy-footed across the field and stumbling here and there in the false light which is neither night nor day. The struggle and mixture of the dusk and glow in all the little ruts and furrows of the field is perfectly rendered. If we were asked for an example in painting of that much-discussed virtue “ sincerity,” we should indicate this work as a capital instance.

In just the same measure we should indicate the beautiful Decamps hard by as a signal instance of factitious art. Decamps won his spurs years ago as one of the first of the modern realists, and we fancy that we might trace in his successive works a vivid reflection of the private history of the movement he represents. Poor realism ! we can fancy the puzzled sadness with which she beholds herself imaged in this little canvas of Decamps. We can imagine her crying out with the old woman in the nursery song, who in her sleep was curtailed of her petticoats, “ Lord, have mercy! this is none of I.” Decamps represents that gifted class of artists — they exist in literature, is music, in the drama, as well as in the plastic arts — whose mission is the pursuit of effect, without direct reference to truth. Decamps was superbly endowed for this pursuit; the effect he sought he seldom missed. He has certainly not missed it in this little picture of “The Centurion.” A more subtle piece of painting we have seldom beheld,— a work in which skill and science and experience offer a more effective substitute for the simplicity of genuine inspiration, for that quality which is so strongly embodied in that least clever of fine pictures, the small Delacroix which hangs near it. It is in this respect a striking example of its class. In refinement of taste, in delicacy of invention, in a nice calculation of effect, it is incomparably fine; and up to a certain point it grows and grows upon the mind ; but it lacks tire frank good faith of the best masters. The nominal subject of the work is the incident related in the first gospel, of the centurion who comes to Jesus at Capernaum to demand that his servant be healed, and who finds that, inasmuch as he believed, in the selfsame hour it was done. There is something that provokes a smile in the attempt of a painter like Decamps to treat a Scriptural subject, — a painter who represents the opposite pole of art from even the most sceptical of the great pietistic masters. But in truth, he has shown his good taste by touching the theme as lightly as possible, and making it the mere pretext for a bit of picturesqueness. The face of Christ is not even painted ; faces were evidently Decamp’s weak point. It is as a fantastic composition that the picture must be judged. We know not what warrant the author has for his conception of the colossal architecture of Capernaum ; but, after all, what better warrant need one have in such a case than such a penetrating imagination ? The little group of figures occupies the middle of the scene, dipped, as it were, in a wash of cool purple shadow ; out of this rise mighty, into a glow of afternoon light, the walls and towers and ramparts and battlements of some visionary city of the antique world. The great success of the picture is in its hint of this pagan vastness (you see the heavy smoke from a perfumed altar rising in the distance) and in the golden luminosity with which the scene is suffused. It seems to us to bear about the same relation to probable fact as some first-rate descriptive titbit of Edgar Poe or Charles Baudelaire ; whereas, if we were to seek for a literary correlative for that sadly imperfect Delacroix near by, we should find in it some fragment of Shelley. Our Decamps, in its somewhat arbitrary and ambiguous air of grandeur and lustre, might have been painted by a kind of unimpassioned Turner. Say what we will, it is only a supremely vivid fancy that could have conceived those dizzy and mellowtoned walls and towers and distilled that narrow strip of morbidly tender sky. The predominance of the picturesque in painting is very possibly the token of a decaying system ; but this surely is the picturesque at its best; and when we think of all the antecedent failures, all the efforts and gropings the refined æsthetic experience implied by just such a success, the interest of the work is doubled.

It is still further increased when we compare the picture with the neighboring Debtcroix. We have left this work to the last, because it is the most difficult to characterize fairly, — because, indeed, we find it hard even to fix our impression of it. It is a signal example of the author’s strength and weakness, of the qualities which charm and those which irritate. These are so grotesquely combined in his genius that it is nearly impossible to separate them and open a distinct account with each. We may even say that he pleases, in certain cases, by virtue of his errors, — by reason, at least, of a certain generous fallibility which is the penalty of his generous imagination. Delacroix, mure than any painter we know, must be judged by the total impression. This, at least as a final one, is often very slow to come ; but it may, we think, generally be resumed in some such conclusion as this, — that here is a painter whose imaginative impulse begins where that of most painters ends. It is not that, as a rule, he selects grotesque or exceptional subjects ; but that he sees them in a ray of that light that never was on land or sea, — which is simply the light of the mind. This conceded, we must admit that the light of Delacroix’s mind produced some very singular optical effects. Some of the painter’s eccentricities of manner in the present work are so flagrant that any child can point them out. The scene represents a dozen men in Eastern dress, gathered about a camp-fire, before which one of them stands, with outstretched hand, delivering himself, apparently, of a story or a chant. The fire round which the Arabs are gathered emits no light; as a fire it is quite unpainted ; the faces and limbs of the men themselves are so many apologies for the things they represent ; the horses tethered in the background are indicated by the very simplest design that will decently serve. Yet in spite of these salient faults, the picture is singularly forcible and true. The sentiment of the attitudes, the accidents, the “ form and presence ” of the scene, throb there with such a vital warmth, that we, can imagine ourselves seeking and enjoying it, in its permanent human significance, long after the hundred literal merits ot certain other painters of mark have come to seem stale and soulless. We can imagine ourselves becoming intensely fond of a Delacroix,— never of a Meissonier. Delacroix takes you so frankly into the confidence of his faults, that you scarcely resent them, and by the very fact, indeed, stand in a closer sympathy with him. Like all really great masters, — like his great brothers in art, Turner and Tintoretto, — he can be described only by seeming paradoxes and contradictions. He is at once the most general and the most specific of painters. His drawing is in the last degree incorrect, and yet he produces unsurpassed effects of design, form, and attitude. As with Tintoretto, you fancy him one of the slightest of colorists, till you begin to conceive he is one of the greatest. His great merit, to Our mind, is that, more than any of his modern rivals save Turner, he has an eye for that which, for want of a better name, we may call the mystery of a scene, and that under his treatment its general expression and its salient details are fused into the harmony of poetry itself. But we stop short ; Delacroix must not be written about ; he must be seen and felt In speaking of him thus, we pretend merely to record a personal predilection.

Of the small Diaz and the Jules Duprez there is nothing especial to be said. Diaz is as usual a charming trifler, and Jules Duprez a very worthy rival of Rousseau. We should have liked, with more space, to devote a few words to three or four American pictures lately visible in the same rooms. The most important of these is a large landscape by Mr. John La Large, the view of a deep seaward-facing gorge, seen from above, at Newport. This is in every way a remarkable picture, full of the most refined intentions and the most beautiful results, of light and atmosphere and of the very poetry of the situation. We have rarely seen a work in which the painter seems to have stored away such a permanent: fund of luminosity. There are parts of the picture which might have been painted by a less sceptical Decamps. A portrait of a little girl, in the most charmingly quaint dress of black velvet and lace and pearls, by Mr. R. C. Porter, demands also very explicit recognition. In complexion and costume, and in the masterly treatment she has received, Mr. Porter’s bewitching little model reminds us of some swarthy Infanta of Velasquez. This work, at least, is a purely American product, the author’s opportunities for study having been such only as our own country affords. The firmness and richness and confidence of the painter’s execution, the excellent modelling of the face and neck, die hint of a sort of easy and spontaneous enjoyment of his materials, indicate that the artist has the real temperament of the painter. Mr. Porter has, in this and other cases, done so well that he may be considered to have pledged and committed himself. His admirers, in future, will be expectant and exacting. We must note, in conclusion, a small picture by Vedder,—a little pictorial lyric, as we have heard it called, on the theme of faded stuffs. A young woman, dressed in a charming bedimmed old silken gown, stands before an antique escritoire, in relief against a passe hanging of tapestry, opening a box of jewels. The tone of the picture is suffused by a hint of that elegant and melancholy hue which is known, we believe, by the name of ashes-of-roses. A certain flatness and semi-decorative monotony of touch is very discreetly apportioned, and operates as an additional charm.