The Present State of European Painting

A GENERATION has passed since Edouard Manet painted his picture of Le Mendiant, a full-length portrait of a broken-down old blouse. He was then at the height of his unpopularity, applauded by a few of his fellow painters and defended by one or two critics, but contemned by officialdom in French art, and laughed at by the public. Last summer I saw Le Mendiant, hung in a place of honor in the exhibition of the Secession at Berlin. It was surrounded by the works of men devoted to Manet’s memory, looking upon him as one of the great liberators of modern painting — if not the greatest of them all — and feverishly emulous of his ideal of independence. With so much zeal had the young Germans served that ideal that they had outHeroded Herod, and made Manet look like a classic lost amongst barbarians. It was as though one had found a drawing by Ingres in a sheaf of caricatures by the artists of Montmartre, or a Greek bust amid a group of Rodin’s most audacious sculptures. It was like turning the pages of an anthology and finding a poem of Landor’s on the same page with one of Whitman’s yawps. It was like a sudden change in a musical programme from a quartette of Beethoven’s to a cacophonous symphony by Richard Strauss. In short, Manet looked in this gallery like a Samson among the Philistines. Under any circumstances the spectacle would invite reflection as well as mirth, but it kept recurring to my mind with a special point as I traveled over Europe looking everywhere for “signs of the times” in the art of painting. Even in my peaceful hours with the old masters there would come back the tormenting question, — “What have the schools made of the liberty of which they are so boastful ? ” Before I offer an answer to that question I must glance briefly at the situation which produced Manet.

In the turmoil of the Revolution, French art lost its hold on the romantic glamour and the exquisite mundane charm of Watteau and his group. Proceeding to put its house in order under the Napoleonic régime, it accepted the guidance of David and dedicated itself to his principle of classical discipline. How much there is to be said for that principle was shown when a man of genius arose in the person of Ingres, a pupil of David’s, equaling his master in the exploitation of the grand style, and surpassing him in draughtsmanship and feeling for beauty. But in that transitional period men of genius were rare, and when, presently, in the first half of the nineteenth century, they began to come to the surface, they found a large body of Academicians, of very unequal merit, in possession of the field. We are apt to underestimate the value of the academic idea, and to scorn its exponents as, all of them, necessarily mediocre. As a matter of fact there is a distinction not to be despised about the work of men like Flandrin, Amaury Duval, Delaroche, Chassériau and the rest, and Ingres, of course, is a master. But we must not pursue this tempting issue. The important point for our present purpose is that a generation of artists arose to whom temperament was everything, the classical hypothesis a delusion and a snare, and nature a mistress worth all the gods and goddesses in the academic Pantheon. Géricault turned his back upon antiquity and painted The Wreck of the Medusa. Decamps saw no reason why he should sit in a Paris studio, painting in a gray light, while he could go and bathe in the sun-saturated colors of the Orient. Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny, and Diaz, all looked for a new vein in landscape, and found it. Delacroix, being born a romanticist, left Greek form and repose to take care of themselves and gave passion its chance. Millet preferred a peasant misshapen by toil to the fairest vision on Olympus. The mere enumeration of these names is enough to recall historic battles fought and won. They did not, however, make further conflicts unnecessary. On the contrary, there was much work left for even more drastic innovators to do.

Manet was to weary of the routine of Couture’s studio, and instead of adding to the statuesque figures painted there, was to scandalize the Academicians by his Olympia. Degas, who worshiped Ingres and, it is said, still goes on worshiping him, was to turn from admiring La Source and to use what it taught him in the realistic delineation of laundresses, ballet girls, and jockeys. Whistler was to enter a world of which Gleyre, his master, knew nothing, and to develop, along lines of his own, the tonality invented by Velasquez. Monet was to show that the Barbizon school had hardly grazed the problems of light. And all these men were bent upon demonstrating what, by this time, needed repeated demonstration, that the great thing to do was to paint well, to practice a technique expressing the very soul of pigment. They succeeded in their aim. They extended the boundaries of modern art, indicating new ways of using its instruments, and they are today the recognized chiefs of the more progressive painters everywhere. What Manet meant to the Berlin Secessionists when they honored him after the fashion I have described, he means to the younger generation — and to many of its elders — throughout Europe, in England and in America. Through him and through his companions the painter of liberal tendencies feels that he comes into touch with the right tradition, the tradition of Rembrandt, of Velasquez, and of Hals. There is the crucial point, — that the hater of academic convention, the lover of individuality and freedom, has had his battle fought for him, that he is able to do as he pleases in full enjoyment of the inspiration once disdained, as that of 1830 had been disdained, but now respected even where it is not adopted. What is the result ? We have been told ad nauseam how the public and the critics have failed to do justice to Whistler, for example. It is interesting to ask what the artists have done to prove themselves worthy of him and his old comrades.

In France the Salon remains, on the whole, the inviolable stronghold of canonical authority. I well remember the organized rebellion which led to the opening of the Salon of the Champs de Mars. With what jubilation it was hailed! At the time, the contrast between the “new” and the “old ” Salons was really striking, and there was a thrill of excitement to be got out of the quarrel. I have never been able to recapture that thrill. In fact I have gone through Salon after Salon only to see the “new” and the “old” little by little settling down into comfortable harmony. French art rubs along in the good old way, and you may look at thousands of the pictures now being painted, without being reminded by any of them that Manet “fought, bled, and died” for the cause. If one looked foolishly for little Manets he would deserve to be disappointed ; but what one looks for, of course, is quite another thing, — it is the broad lesson that Manet might have been supposed to enforce, without robbing any man of his individuality, upon those who praise him so glibly. It is never through their crass imitators that the masters fertilize the art coming after them; it is rather through the establishment of general principles that they make their influence felt. Thus it is reasonable to expect, when Manet is a name to conjure with, a deep general interest in simplicity, in the direct handling of pure color, in the bold and truthful manipulation of values. But to expect these things is to expect a little too much, in Paris. I speak, of course, of French art in the mass, and there is the more reason for so doing as the individualities of the moment are neither numerous enough nor, apparently, potent enough, to leaven the lump.

Smart dexterity is at a premium, and the instinct for beauty seems to have lost a good deal of its vitality, when it has not suffered absolute atrophy. The average French picture suggests that modern taste has been transformed into a part of the nervous system and is concerned altogether with sensation, not with principle. The outcome is work of a rather vulgar cast, vulgar both in substance and in style. What survives that is ingratiating in the bulk of French painting is the purely professional quality, that can be acquired by reasonable application in the schools; on all sides we see the fruit of methodical teaching attentively followed. The salonnier knows how to put his great “machine” together, — his mere craftsmanship is a credit to him. But it is too often void of any serious significance. I cannot see that there has been any widespread improvement in the handling of form as form, any happy loosening of the bonds created as though by an impersonal government and bearing a government stamp. The majority are faithful to the immemorial, competent, but humdrum method of the big overcrowded ateliers to which the young idea comes, in hundreds, to be taught how to shoot. Looking at one canvas after another the inquirer murmurs, “Was it for this that the heroes of the Salon des Refuses did their best to augment the language of art?” Similarly he asks, in the presence of most of those huge decorations which the French so generously order for their public buildings, “Was it for this that Puvis de Chavannes wrought out his noble conception of mural painting ? ”

In form and in design, then. French art is stationary. Such gains as have been made have been largely in respect to the treatment of light, a fact pointing to the greater influence of Monet than of any of his colleagues. Impressionism has filtered its way down into modern painting, and the younger men have learned the value of sunlight, if they have learned nothing else, from the revolutionists of the sixties and seventies. Not so many of them, on the other hand, have known just what to do with their new resource; they do not create, they mark time. Only here and there among the French has the precious lesson resulted in a rich addition to contemporary art. It is not the rule, but the exception, to find work as delightful as that of Henri Martin, one of the most engaging talents which have appeared in a long time. He has a charming decorative vein, and in the luminous quality of his canvases, which is a chief element in their appeal, you can see that he has profited in the right way by the example of his seniors. He has a note of his own, thus emphasizing my contention that one does not need to imitate in order to make use of what Monet and his colleagues brought into modern painting. Even more exhilarating testimony on this head is offered by the salient figure now at work in Paris, Albert Besnard. He is the one man the French have who not only has something to say but says it in a fresh and powerful manner. He has been the better for having shared in the later impressionistic movement, but, with the authority of the true artist, he has subdued to his own purposes whatever has been suggested to him by others. Some ten or twelve years ago a friend hurried me in a frenzy of enthusiasm half across Paris to see Besnard’s decorations in the Ecole de Pharmacie, then recently completed. It was a dark, rainy day, but one forgot the gloom in contemplation of Besnard’s ebullient nervous force and robust color. He was always a colorist, and as the years have passed he has used the language of color with more and more sinewy strength, with more and more fire. Incidentally he has given freer play to his imagination. He was a realist pure and simple when he did the panels in the Ecole de Pharmacie; now he is a poet as well, a standing rebuke to those narrow-minded artists who fancy that their technique will go to pieces if they permit themselves the expression of an idea. What I like best about him though, better than his color by itself, or his decorative gift by itself, or his workmanship by itself, is the virility with which everything in his art is fused into a rich, brilliant chord.

Besnard is a “first-class man,” a master of form, of light and air, of style. But you will look far in France before you will find another Besnard. Beside him a man, say, like Gaston Latouche, with his golden glow, his vaporous stained-glass effects, seems just a clever dealer in artifice. That is the prevailing note in Paris. For one man whose work is, like Besnard’s, “of the centre,” you have scores, hundreds, who are facile and sometimes even accomplished, but, in the grain of their work, incurably factitious. They have made no better use of the freedom from formula, won by Manet and the others, than to put more formulæ — usually very hollow ones — in the foreground. Little groups are formed, each one devoted to the unfolding of a trick which some new man has made temporarily popular. They wax and wane, and you wonder why they ever flourished at all. A sensation is made at the Salon, not by an honest piece of painting with an original accent, but by some prismatic audacity having no relation to nature, by some purely arbitrary scheme of chiaroscuro, or, as in one case that I have in mind, by a return to the “ brown sauce ” of the old masters for which Manet had such a loathing. There has been some provocation for these pseudo-original experiments in the public success of certain artists. Rodin, taking his cue from Michael Angelo, seeks to make a figure emerge like an exhalation from the marble block. His disciples immediately proceed to make their figures “emerge,” forgetting that the main thing is to show, as Rodin has shown, that as your figure comes out you must justify it by strong modeling. He is apt at writhing bodies, carrying the note, in his later work, to absurd lengths. The writhings and contortions are accepted as having something talismanic about them, and as being certain to sell, and they are served up by any number of dabsters with an effrontery that would be disgusting if it were not funny.

Constantin Meunier, the Belgian sculptor, having done interesting work in the realistic portrayal of workingmen, it seems to have occurred to many artists that all they need to do in order to “make the bourgeois sit up” is to model ugly types of labor, — it does not matter if there is not an ounce of Meunier’s power in the modeling. In painting, one of the most pernicious exemplars was the late Eugène Carrière, who long ago attracted favorable attention, and in some quarters incited silly panegyrics, by his studies of figures enveloped in a dark, smoky mist. His portraits and types of maternal sentiment were pleasing, for a time. Then they wore out their welcome. He overdid his formula until he left it a formula and nothing more. But the mischief had been done; he had helped to confirm the unthinking in the notion that a picturesque surface effect may legitimately be used over and over again for its own sake, that nature may be forced into a pattern. France is now engaged in the making of such patterns to an enormous extent. Clever mediocrity, the characteristic product of our age, momentarily catches the eye, but leaves no lasting impression. At a time when the artist is nothing if not individual, there is an extraordinary lack of really significant individuality.

Signor Alfredo Melani, in a recent article on the works of art at the Milan exhibition, describes them as “the triumph of the young men,” and speaks in fervid terms of “this artistic youthfulness which is no longer wasted in academic formulas, but pursues its way with courage, sure of the strength which dwells in its independence.” The italics are mine. It was for that that I searched last summer, the strength which dwells in independence. I saw the Milan exhibition, and, to tell the truth, I did not discover any great stores of strength among Signor Melani’s young men. No doubt they have, as he says, “buried the academic once for all,” but the question is, What have they put in its place ? They have put the craze of the moment, cleverness, cleverness, always cleverness, the same sort of thing that reigns in other countries, the same straining after effect that we have seen in Paris, the same contortions of the sibyl without the oracle. There is technique in the South, but it is technique without style.

I was especially struck by two rooms, one occupied by Ettore Tito and the other by a group calling themselves “Young Etruria.” Tito has “arrived,” he is one of the popular leaders. I recollect seeing at one of the international exhibitions in Venice some of his earlier things, and looking for his work thereafter with curiosity,— it seemed likely to bring pleasant surprises. But at Milan this year, where I encountered both old and new paintings by him, he seemed to have risen, after all, little above the ordinary level of the Salon. “Young Etruria,” highly resolved to spurn that level, had nothing more to brag of than the piquancy of youth, and made the observer wonder very hard if anything of substantial worth would come of its febrile strivings. The room was prettily decorated and furnished, — raising a point to which we shall have to return,— but I could find in it no promise of genius. That was the trouble with the whole show. It had one merit. It promised the ultimate, and perhaps speedy, disappearance of the old petty, brittle style of the days when Fortuny was adored, and feebly imitated, in Rome and Naples. A broader convention is coming into vogue. Unfortunately it does not appear to have brought out an artist of the first rank.

There was in the grounds at Milan, by the way, a special little exhibition of works by Segantini, that painter of the Brianza who found, as Millet had found before him, a poetic inspiration in the humblest motives of rustic life. Like every man of talent in this epoch of frantic publicity, he has had some prodigious eulogiums pronounced upon his art. Well, he is not one of the giants. I have seen his pictures again and again, and it occurred to me as I saw them in Milan a few weeks since, as it had occurred to me when I saw them in the Paris Exposition of 1900, that they do not wear any too well. The hard, grainy surface of his big Alpine landscapes — too big, I think, since mere bulk of canvas will not suffice to express the atmosphere of the mountains — throws off nothing of that impalpable charm of beauty which is the great secret of eternal freshness in art. But Segantini, if only by the force of contrast, seemed a grievous loss to Italian painting. At least he had a large way of looking at his subject, a fine sincerity, and a complete incapacity for being simply clever. There was something that made for sardonic amusement in the fact that Bistolfi’s monument to his memory, visible in the same pavilion, showed a nude female “emerging,” à la Rodin, out of a huge block of marble. It is wonderfully well done. Bistolfi knows his craft. But one thought neither of him nor of Segantini, but of the French sculptor, not of an idea or a style, but of a fashion.

It is a time of small things in the north, as in the south. Menzel has left no successor in Germany, nor has he exercised an appreciable influence upon his countrymen. The latter pay him all possible tribute. You come across his works in all the museums, and only the other day there was published in Munich a superbly illustrated volume of his productions, a monumental kind of catalogue. But I wondered as I turned its pages why so few of the young Germans seemed to have sat at his feet. An artist like Menzel proclaims at once an inimitable individual style, and broad fructifying principles, but for all the good he has done to modern German art Menzel might just as well not have existed. The group of paintings and studies by him in the retrospective wing of the Berlin Salon formed as curiously suggestive an episode there as was formed by Manet’s picture in the show of the Secession. Of course there is, in the last resort, no accounting for the richness or the poverty of a country in great artists. A man is born a genius or a journeyman, and there’s an end to it. Nevertheless, an influence is an influence, and it is hard to see why, with Menzel in their midst, the Germans have gone on painting in a state of utter blindness to the rudimentary lessons he was all the time teaching them. There hung in the Berlin Salon a painting by him of a falcon and another bird, fighting furiously in the sky. It was painted in 1843, and I dare say it has been seen in the long years that have elapsed since then by thousands of native artists. It is a masterpiece of movement, of texture, of draughtsmanship, and, I had almost said, of color. It is so painted that he who runs may read. The simple demonstration that this picture gives of the way in which to go to work with your brushes might at least tell a youth what, roughly, to try for. But the sense of the German is sealed. He continues to fill his canvas with crude garish color and turgid drawing. As for beauty, for sensuous charm, for grace and subtlety, they have suffered unmitigated shipwreck. This is a hard saying, yet it is borne out to the bitter end by the documents of the case. Go to any of the permanent galleries. Their treasures of earlier European painting have been gathered with remarkable judgment, and they are splendidly arranged. The new Berlin Gallery is a triumph of installation and administration; nowhere, not in Vienna, in Paris, in London, will you find the old masters more effectively assembled and displayed. But enter the rooms devoted to the moderns, the natives, and your heart sinks into your boots, dismayed by the tastelessness and dullness of what you see. Now and then some one has appeared to shame the men in the ruck, — a genius like Menzel, a portrait painter almost a genius, like Lenbach, or men of talent such as Liebermann and Leibl. For the rest, the mission of the German painters seems to have been to set the teeth of the connoisseur on edge.

It has been the proud boast of the Secessionists that they have changed all this, and at Munich especially their large claim is upheld by sympathetic foreigners to the extent of exhibiting with them. The final justification of the claim is, however, another matter. It is true that the Secessionists have, like the young Italians, “buried the academic once for all.” It is true that they are broad in method where the majority are niggling. It is true that they have ideas, of a sort; an ambition to be imaginative and poetic, if not the actual power to be the one or the other; a desire to rise above the stupid painting of sentimental subjects. It is true, finally, that they are often very clever. But they are afflicted with a deplorable earthiness, a downright coarseness, which, apart from all question of subject, reacts upon the whole fabric of their art. Consider again, for a moment, that apparition of Manet among the Berlin Secessionists. His Mendiant is certainly not a beautiful figure, but just for that reason it the more aptly illuminates our situation. It is a beautiful piece of painting. The color is fine, the facture is masterly, the style is distinguished. Truth is here, if ever truth was set upon canvas, but it is truth made beautiful by art. All around it the Secessionists riot in nerveless brutal drawing, in gaudy or morbid color, in thick opaque tone, and in the most dubious taste. Like the young Etrurians they are sublime in furnishings. Whistler’s notion of hanging a gallery with some light stuff has taken them captive. Like him, they are fastidious in frames and battens. In the disposition of “æsthetic” chairs and settees, with bay-trees for the middle of the room or in the corners, they are beyond reproach. In some German exhibition I found a fountain containing water colored a blue to disconcert the Mediterranean, — it was the last word of decorative ingenuity. Unhappily these things are as naught if the pictures on the walls are poor. Not all the pearly backgrounds in the world will pull an exhibition through if the painters bring raucous reds and greens, unspeakable yellows and blues, to the making of their pictures.

Franz Stuck, the hero of the Secessionist movement, is a strange type. He has a warm imagination and a remarkable pictorial faculty. You could not look at the Dead Christ he exhibited in Berlin this summer, or at the Bacchanale he had at Munich, without feeling that the painter had a temperament, an outlook peculiar to himself. The Bacchanale, a night scene with the rout alone illuminated, the pillared porch in the foreground and the murk of trees in the distance being in romantic shadow, was in intention, at least, a thing of poetic emotion. But in these pictures, as in many others I have seen, Stuck loses all the lyric charm at which he aims, or all the tragic force which is more often his ambition, through harsh drawing and modeling and through color that I can only describe as livid when it is not blatant. He is representative. After overhauling the works of the Secessionists from end to end, you come to the sorrowful conclusion that they do not understand color at all. Neither, for that matter, have they any true sense of form. In both respects it is a coarseness of fibre that seems to tell against them, a coarseness that belongs alike to the weakest and the strongest of the technicians among them. Their nudes are the nudest things in modern art. It does not matter with what dainty idea they start. Like Arnold Böcklin, the Swiss painter, whose overrated work is much liked in Germany, they will invent a good design, with a delicate idea at its core, and then keep it from making its full effect by using colors brilliant but without quality, and making their contours as inelastic as lead. Secession and Salon alike are thus heavy-handed. It is the national trait in art. There was reason enough for the outcry in Berlin over the statuary of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Sieges Allee. It is fearsome stuff. But there is nothing exceptional about it. You find statuary like it all over Germany.

English art, official English art, stands just where it has stood these many years, and the Royal Academy is lucky inasmuch as it can count upon the work of one foreign master for its annual exhibitions. I once met an artist friend on the steps of Burlington House. Each wondered what in the world the other was doing there, — if he was in search of pleasurable artistic sensations. I had just been in to see Sargent’s contribution. He was going in for the same purpose. I thought of him this summer when I saw once more that without Sargent the Academy would be an overwhelming bore. What is it made of ? Furlongs of canvas without any elements of interest whatever. Laboriously built up compositions, historical, sentimental, “conscientious” beyond words, and ineffably flat. Gaudy, pompous portraits. Commonplace landscapes. At long intervals a creditable piece of painting, strayed in as if by accident, but in general a disheartening mass of mediocre routine work. Criticism beats in vain against that fortress of reaction. There is something pathetic and droll about the efforts made to disturb its inertia. One thinks of Sidney Smith and the boy who scratched the turtle’s back to give it pleasure. “You might as well stroke the dome of St. Paul’s to please the Dean and Chapter.” What does the Academy make of Mr. Sargent ? What did it make of the late Charles W. Furse, who was an Associate when he died, only a short time ago ? Such artists must be very embarrassing. Furse, like two or three others, seems an anomaly in the Tate Gallery, where two of his pictures have been hung, one of them having been purchased under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest since his death. This large picture, The Return from the Ride, gives an excellent idea of what the new school in England has been doing. It represents a young man on horseback, with a woman in flowing light modern dress walking by his side. The group is set against a landscape background, loosely painted and full of light and air. The canvas breathes energy and a passion for fresh, outdoor beauty. It is painted with knowledge and ease, and it discloses an original, sincere temperament. There are not many painters in England to-day who give, as Furse gives, the impression of having taken advantage of the best developments in nineteenth-century art, and of having “found themselves” into the bargain. But there are enough of them to raise lively hopes of English art, unofficial English art.

If it is a question of hopes rather than of present realization, it is because the school seems to be going through a period of transition, and in so eclectic a mood as to be a little uncertain as to its best course. It has been learning from Manet and from Monet; one of its most interesting figures, Charles Shannon, appears to have started under the influence of Legros, and to have since ranged pretty freely among the old masters; and then there are, of course, the adherents of Whistler. These last, to be sure, like so many of their fellows in America, and, for that matter, throughout Europe, have often an odd way of missing the point. Mr. A. Ludovici, the latest historian of that quaint episode in Whistler’s career, his presidency of the Society of British Artists, tells how seriously the veterans of Suffolk Street took their new leader’s reforms in the matter of hanging. Instead of being happy because pictures were confined to the line, they murmured at the financial loss they saw in mere empty space. They calculated that the square feet wasted around one of Whistler’s own pictures were potentially worth £400 to the Society. The anecdote is not out of date. Many of Whistler’s followers, who fondly believe they are treading in his path, are as busy over trifles and as blind to essentials as were the malcontents of the British artists. They “go in” for Whistlerian “arrangements,” for the careful spacing of the composition, for an esoteric disposition of light and of accessories. Meanwhile, they overlook the one thing of transcendent importance that Whistler had to teach them, the beauty to be got out of consummately manipulated tone. That is a thing absolutely independent of the design, the motive, of a given picture. With it Whistler would still have been Whistler though he had made the famous portrait of his mother as anecdotic a painting as any that ever drew crowds in the Royal Academy. It is the quality of his surface that counts first, the quality of his color and tone. He chose to adopt the kind of composition that we see in his portraits and nocturnes, because it was suited to his character as an artist. His disciples, to whom it is often not natural at all, go on using it with a childlike confidence in its efficacy, and very rarely reveal any flair for his tonal virtues. It is the old story of borrowing a formula for the sake of a formula, to which I have had to allude more than once. The surface idea is caught; the central inspiration is missed. Sargent’s example is misunderstood in the same way. A trick of brushwork is all that is developed by the innumerable portrait painters who try to follow his lead. Yet it is precisely his freedom from mere trickery that accounts for his eminence.

Sargent’s big group portrait of Dr. Osler and three of his colleagues, for Johns Hopkins University, loomed in this summer’s exhibition of the Royal Academy as a giant looms among pygmies. It is a masterpiece worthy of the historical periods. Painted largely in blacks and on an imposing scale, it involved the solution of a problem beset with heartrending difficulties, yet there was not an inch of it that hinted at hesitancy or effort. The simple broad surfaces have now a splendid quality which time will only improve. The interesting heads are modeled with a combination of learning and spontaneity almost unique in contemporary painting. Sargent is, indeed, the master of them all, towering above the painters of his time everywhere. But how many of his juniors listen to what he has to tell them ? How many, looking at this wonderful piece of portraiture in the Academy, paused to think of the hard work concealed beneath the stately unity? How many, in the effort to profit by the inspiration to be found in the work of a great leader, go really to the heart of the matter? I wondered again when I went to see the exhibition of Flemish art at the Guildhall in London in July. There were half a dozen pictures there by the modern old master of Belgium, Alfred Stevens, whose death is reported in the papers as I write these lines. One panel in particular I recall, a study of a woman in yellow, sewing. It looked like a piece of honey turned to lacquer, indescribably soft and rich. An early work, it had already taken on a quiet mellowness, a subtle distinction. It could have held its own beside a Ver Meer, so magnificently was it painted. Have the Belgians taken a leaf from their master’s book ? No, they oscillate between the realism (very much in the mode of the primitives) which Baron Leys used to teach, and the flashiest sensationalism of the Paris Salon. Their neighbors, the Dutch , are wiser. They remain detached from the main currents of European art, and content themselves with the admirable tradition established by Mauve. He and the other founders of the school having beaten out a good method, they are loyal to it, and at the same time manage somehow to put individuality into their work. One source of their success is their unwearying devotion to nature. That is what explains the extraordinary power of the sole important figure in the Spanish art of our epoch. When I first became acquainted in Madrid with the open-air studies of Joaquin Sorolla, some years since, he was beginning to be talked about as a man who would go far. The adventurous spirits in the studios looked up to him as the man who would lead them out of the land of bondage, away from the outworn style created by Fortuny. At the Georges Petit galleries in Paris last summer he showed about five hundred portraits, pictures, and studies, and they made it plain that he has indeed gone far. The sunshine blazed in his work. His drawing is almost uncannily fluent, yet it is sound. He is a notable personality, one of those who give modern European painting its vitality. If he can do this, as Besnard does it, as Sargent does it, is it not because he is a genuine temperament,a man dealing passionately with first principles, with the things that count, and not with the pretty odds and ends that furnish forth the equipment of your merely clever artist ? It is because there are so few painters of this stamp that European painting is to-day in a chaotic condition, drifting hither and thither, indulging in all manner of amusing experiments, but doing next to nothing to show its loyalty to Manet and the other emancipators.

I suppose the foregoing pages have something of the air of a Jeremiad, and that they could be “answered ” by an interminable list of Europeans who paint, as painting goes, very well. I could compose such an answer myself. But it would be beside the point. When all is said, it is not sufficient that a man should paint very well, as painting goes, if we are to take him seriously. It is not sufficient that a clever student, having won golden opinions from his instructor, should go on indefinitely producing clever student’s work. The brilliantly executed morceau, no matter how brilliant, is, after all, only a morceau ; it may be the begin ning, it is certainly not the end of art. What we want is work with brains and individuality in it, new minted work, alive and beautiful, and quivering with emotion. It is comforting to know that hundreds of painters can win their way into the exhibitions. The great thing is that, having got there, each of them should be able to present a really interesting reason for his presence.