Art and Common Sense

Contents

PAGE ArT AND CoMMON SENSE . A A . 5 5 I

Incres: A PILGRIMAGE TO MONTAUBAN . ° wees

Tue Macic or MERE PAINT . . : : eA 7, I, THE OLD TRADITION AND THE NEW . 5

II Ingres: A Pilgrimage To Montauban

For those who revere the name of Ingres, the little town of Montauban, in the southwest of France, is a shrine. There he was born in 1780, and _ there, since his death, in 1867, his collections have been assembled, including a vast number of his works and many souvenirs of a personal character. I cannot count the times that I have pored over the map and speculated as to how I might make a pilgrimage to the spot, but it always seemed very remote from Paris, and once, when I was near enough, at Marseilles, to make the journey, other plans bore me away to Rome. Montauban was forever receding into the distance, but as more and more it appeared inaccessible the desire to go there only grew the stronger. In a recent winter, travelling down from Paris to Madrid, I found it hard to avoid turning off at Bordeaux to follow the Garonne past Agen and Moissac to where the Tarn hurries beneath the walls that I longed to see. I resisted this temptation and went on to the Prado, but even while I rested there, content among the masterpieces of Velasquez, it was an ever present joy to have at the back of my mind a sense of the fact that Montauban was only postponed, to know that I should presently be sitting at the feet of Ingres.

I

The transition from the Spaniard to the Frenchman is easily made. It is always easy to pass from one great artist to another. There are many modern painters who can see only an impassable gulf between Velasquez and Ingres, but then there are others who are conscious of no gulf at all, a fact of which I was delightfully reminded when, on the road back into France, I paused at Bayonne. Léon Bonnat was born in that old Basque town, and to show his gratitude for the municipal aid that had enabled him to pursue his artistic studies in his youth he has given to his fellow citizens a rich collection of pictures, drawings, sculptures and other objects. This distinguished painter has all his life long had a passion for Velasquez, and has done much to foster appreciation and emulation of the master in France. But, like Degas, he also worships Ingres, and the Musée Bonnat contains some perfect souvenirs of the latter. Among the paintings there is a replica of the exquisite “Mme. Devaugay,” one of the triumphs of the painter’s earlier period in Rome. It is a study in black and yellow, almost Whistlerian in the purity of its tones and the simple effectiveness of their arrangement. There is, by the way, a touching anecdote relating to this portrait. Many years after Ingres painted it an aged lady, shabbily dressed, called upon him in Paris. ‘‘ You do not recognize me,”’ she said, “‘and yet you have painted my portrait. But,” she slowly added, with manifest embarrassment, ‘‘I was young then, and, they said, beautiful. I am Mme. Devaugay.” She went on to explain that ill fortune had harassed her and that she needed, to her great regret, to sell the portrait he had made of her. Ingres was profoundly moved, and with characteristic energy found a purchaser for the painting.

- Bonnat secured several other important replicas for his collection and he was even luckier in respect to the drawing , gathering together fifteen or twenty of these, among them several of the finest that Ingres ever produced. It was exciting to be in their presence, and thus to have a foretaste of what awaited me at Montauban; and the experience was repeated at Toulouse. In the museum there hangs one of the ‘master’s most famous compositions, the ‘‘Tu Marcellus eris,”’ in which he figured Virgil as reading the sixth book of the A‘neid to the Emperor Augustus. In substance and in form it illustrates the very essence of his genius as a classicist, and, though I suspect that it has suffered a little through the “restoring” intervention of some later hand, it has a notable significance in regard to his traits as a colorist. Color was not by any means his forte, and there is a suggestive point made by the German critic who drew a parallel between the color of Ingres and the mathematically balanced chords in an Oriental rug. It would be well, however, for those who would dismiss his color out of hand to look first at the Toulouse picture. The flesh tints, it is true, are at once too hot and too dull, but in the draperies there are some fine tints of rose and yellow, and the cool but not hard grays which predominate in the work give it a surprising softness and depth. I was doubly glad to see this picture on the threshold of Montauban.

It.is, figuratively speaking, but a step from Toulouse to Montauban, and the brief journey takes one swiftly from the present into the past. The city is large and prosperous, and, though it possesses many noble antiquities, its atmosphere is, on the whole, determined by the business activities of to-day. The town wears another aspect. According to the judicious Baedeker, its affairs are sound, and I assume, therefore, that its people are comfortable, but the physiognomy of Montauban is somewhat severe if not actually forbidding. It struck me as a page out of one of Balzac’s studies of provincial life, a place of cheerless, incommunicative facades, of dispirited streets, ill-kempt and uninviting to a degree not altogether explained by the gray, wintry weather. There is scarce any architecture of interest in the place, the tower of the old Church of St. Jacques, the double arcades around the Place Nationale and the great bridge across the Tarn being the sole monuments having any weight or picturesqueness. The ancient chateau of the Counts of Toulouse, which is now the Hotel de Ville, has passed through many vicissitudes, and its present character, fixed in the seventeenth century, is in no wise impressive. One turns to the building only because it contains the Musée Ingres. Not alone in thus sheltering his works has the town sought to do honor to its great man. At one end of the Promenade des Carmes he has his monument, a colossal affair by Etex, one of his pupils. It is a seated figure in bronze, set against a relief reproducing the master’s “‘Apotheosis of Homer.” The portrait is tolerable. The background is beyond description inartistic and repellent. Hand on heart, I do not believe there is a more deplorable monument in all Europe. One regrets this the more because they gave M. Etex a glorious site. The view from the promenade sweeps the country for miles, and it is a lovely view, which in clear weather, it is said, includes the distant Pyrenees.

I found the museum locked and seemingly deserted, but from his retreat in a corner of the huge, silent courtyard I routed out the concierge, a terrific and explosive personage, accompanied by an infinitesimal and madly excited puppy. In an instant the noise in the place was deafening, and it was with difficulty that I learned that the museum was closed. I will not pretend, however, that I felt at all discouraged, for there was, indeed, too much humor in the idea of ending my long pilgrimage just outside a locked door, so I sat down to play with the dog and give the concierge time to finish his roars. When he had at last lost his breath I told him how to go and find the conservator, and in a little while all the reverberations had died away, a lean and pensive gardien had turned up from nowhere, the doors had been opened and shut behind me and I had begun to realize my cherished wish.

As it turned out I was to suffer only the smallest shadow of a disappointment. There are not among the drawings as many of the finished portraits as I had expected to find. But there were enough of them, in all conscience, and besides there were thousands of those even more personal studies which show the draughtsman at his daily work, preparing for his exploits with the brush. There are numerous paintings also, renowned originals, and in certain cases where great canvases of his have not been available good copies have been substituted. In the room that is first entered, containing his portrait and partially embellished with decorations in relief made by his sculptor father, there is a glass-enclosed alcove where his desk and violin, the gold crown bestowed upon him in his old age, medals, manuscripts and other relics are brought together. The very spirit of the man fills these quiet old rooms. His whole career is illustrated. Musing here, one follows him literally from his boyhood, amid the clash of Napoleonic developments, to those last days in the 60’s when he carried himself in Paris like an ancient Roman Senator, and, as the late Alphonse Legros loved to remember, his entrance into the Ecole des Beaux- Arts caused all those present to rise bareheaded to greet him.

His life may be reconstructed with facility, for he has had more than one zealous biographer. The first, and in some ways still most authoritative memoir, was written by his friend, the Vicomte Henri Delaborde, whose book not only traverses the painter’s life, but reproduces a voluminous series of his own notes and reflections, catalogues the works and adds a number of letters. It is curious that this precious volume, printed in 1870, has never passed into a new edition, and that copies of it are still to be had at the publisher’s. One would have supposed that there would have been a demand sufficient to have exhausted several editions long ago. M. Boyer d’Agen has produced a good book, useful for the documents it contains, in his ‘‘Ingres d’aprés une correspondance inédite.” Invaluable services have been rendered to the fame of the master by M. Henry Lapauze. Some years ago he published a monumental work on the drawings, accompanying his volume of text with a portfolio of six hundred facsimiles, and only last year he printed a copious and well-illustrated biography.

In “Le Roman d’amour de M. Ingres” he has told the rather cynical story of the painter’s passing infatuation with Julie Forestier, and he has in preparation two volumes of the letters of Ingres, a volume of hitherto unpublished documents, and a descriptive catalogue of all the works. M. Lapauze, in short, has made Ingres his own, and in the process has put us all in his debt. But one must always turn, as I have said, to Delaborde, and there is one little book which is better worth having than all the rest. This is ‘‘L’Atelier d’Ingres,” the collection of souvenirs which Amaury-Duval, one of his pupils, published in 1878. Amaury, as he preferred to call himself in his own pages, was a disciple no less observant than loving, and through his tenderly sympathetic descriptions and anecdotes we are brought close not only to the painter but to the man.

II

As a child at Montauban Ingres felt within him the stirrings of his destiny. He was only twelve when he saw by accident some copies after Raphael and some fragments of antique sculpture. He fell upon them, as he was wont to say, just as a cat falls upon its prey. Delaborde tells, too, how the lad used to weep with admiration as he shared with his violin in the performance of some of Gluck’s music, when he earned his bread in the orchestra of the theatre at

Toulouse. Two arts claimed him in his youth, but he and his father both appear to have realized soon enough that he was meant to be a painter and not a musician. He was, no doubt, a fairly competent violinist. As a boy he won applause at Toulouse with a concerto of Viotti’s, and later he liked to recall that he had played the second violin part in the Beethoven quartets organized by Paganini during his sojourn at Rome.* But it is to be gathered from Amaury that Ingres never exaggerated his musical proficiency. That, as a draughtsman, he had the root of the matter in him he showed when he was only nine years old. M. Lapauze has in his collection a drawing, from the cast, that Ingres made then, a drawing astonishingly good for one so young; and so far as one may infer from the earliest relics at Montauban his hand thenceforth never faltered. His father gave him his first training, and then sent him, at the age of twelve, to study under Roques, at Toulouse. He also had at this time some instruction from Briant, a landscapist, remembered not so much for his works as for his energy in saving many of the artistic treasures of Toulouse from the vandalism of ’93. The student made rapid progress. At sixteen

* Tt is interesting to compare the drawing that he made of the virtuoso with the portrait painted by Delacroix. ‘There is more mystery, more of the bizarre thrill of one of Paganini’s conjuring performances, in the romanticist’s “‘temperamental” impression than there is in the cool linear study by Ingres; but it is by the latter that one would be inclined to swear, on the point of truth, and it is, besides, a very beautiful thing.

he was on his way to Paris, where he entered the atelier of David, and in five years he had won the Prix de Rome. Technically he was then one of the bestequipped young artists of his time, and already he had begun to think for himself.

Those were long, long thoughts of his. David never had a more loyal pupil, but when Ingres settled down in Rome, young, ambitious and happy, his artistic character was as wax to receive the impress of Raphael’s genius, and Raphael, he felt in his soul, was an immeasurably greater man than David. Between the two influences he proceeded to beat out a style of his own, compounded of Greek idealism and the truth of nature as he saw it. If we are to believe his detractors, and he has had many of them, he froze these elements into a formula; but when you come really to trace his familiar walk and demeanor you find it impossible to regard him as an artist who lived by any given set of rules, devised by himself or by anybody else. He lived, rather, by instinct, by enthusiasm, and both were for beauty and the world well lost. He had, of course, his theories, his principles, but it is, I think, misleading to take them too seriously. Beauty, he liked to say, as so many others have said before him, resides in truth, but when truth confronted him in an ugly shape he turned his head away. There was nothing in him of that scientific passion for the exact fact which has been so widely developed in modern art since his day. He knew all the muscles in the human body, but it was his boast that he did not know any of them by name, and this nice distinction between artistic and anatomical authority was very characteristic. ‘‘In the construction of a figure,’ he would say to his pupils, ‘“‘do not proceed bit by bit, but build it up at a stroke; get the ensemble.” And again: ‘Draw purely, but with largeness. Purity and largeness, voild le dessin, voila Part.” Once he was prevailed upon to authorize the purchase of a skeleton for the studio used by his pupils. Amaury told his comrades that he would give them fifteen days to retain their “property,” but by the end of the first week Ingres had had the abhorrent thing thrown out.

That last episode might seem to suggest an incurable unwillingness to come to close quarters with nature, and there are sayings of his which nominally point to a narrow, arbitrary conception of truth. “In the images of man in art,” he says, “repose is the first beauty of the body, just as in life wisdom is the highest expression of the soul.” He chose his subjects accordingly. But that surely was his right, and having made his choice he proceeded on the hypothesis that he could not be too faithful to the actual object before his eyes. An old pupil of his, one Granger, was looking at the “(&dipus,” and, recognizing the model, remarked that it seemed to him an idealized portrait. Ingres nearly lost his temper. ‘You may think what you like,” he said, “‘but it is my effort to copy my model as a very humble servant and not to idealize it.” ‘‘Idealized or not, it is very beautiful,” retorted Granger, and there we have the art of Ingres in a nutshell. Others may see what he could not or would not see himself, that his sense of beauty irresistibly governed him. Whether he could not or would not, it was idle to argue with him. ‘“‘He was incapable of discussion,”

says Amaury, and the remark brings up a fact which is not perhaps generally appreciated. The classic calm pervading his work and the gravely dignified figure that Ingres presented to the world, especially in his later Parisian years, have withdrawn attention from the southern passion of his nature. He was a true Montalbanais, fiery, impatient, and having small use for consistency or logic. Over and over again Amaury illustrates the tempestuous habit of his master when contradicted or in any way annoyed. When the conversation took a turn distasteful to him he would move uneasily in his chair and beat with his fingers on the table. At dinner one night M. Thiers undertook to develop the thesis that the Madonnas of Raphael constituted his chief title tofame. ‘I would give them all,” violently exclaimed Ingres, “‘yes, monsieur, all of them, for a fragment of the ‘Disputa’ or of the ‘School of Athens’ or of the ‘Parnassus,’” and it was with difficulty that his outraged temper could be soothed.

That volcanic way of his was often harmless enough. There was the case of the industrious young Lefévre,

Ingres: A Pilgrimage a”, who was very poor and suddenly absented himself from the studio because he was in arrears with the massier. He had been missed for two whole months when Ingres met him on the Pont des Arts and wormed the truth out of him. ‘What, monsieur,” he exclaimed, ‘‘would you insult me? Have I given you the right to speak to me in this manner? Am I a shopkeeper? Do I sell my counsel? Monsieur, you will come to-morrow to the studio or I shall consider your conduct as a personal insult. Never let this question arise between us again.” But against this noble wrath it is undeniable that we have to set many an instance of almost incredible intolerance. “You are my pupils,” he would say to Amaury and the rest, “‘and in consequence my friends. You would not salute one of my enemies if you passed him in the street. Turn then from Rubens when you pass him in the museums, because if you do not do so you are treacherous to my teaching and to me.” When he found Delacroix in a room containing one of his pictures he could hardly wait for the hated Romanticist to leave, so that he might open the window and purify the air. It is pathetic and a little amusing to read the references to him in Delacroix’s journal. The earliest of them is favorable enough. He goes to the Luxembourg and sees there a picture, probably the “Roger délivrant Angélique,” and notes simply “Jngres charmant.” But Delacroix got over that. The time came when he could say of an exhibition of his rival’s work that “it is the complete expression of an incomplete intelligence.” Every biographer of Ingres finds it necessary to apologize for his attitude toward Delacroix, just as every biographer of Delacroix seeks to explain away his observations on Ingres.

There is, however, a profitable suggestion in that remark of Delacroix’s about “‘intelligence.” Ingres painted the kind of picture with which one not unnaturally associates ideas of intelligence, of reason, of carefully pondered construction. He was, emphatically, a man who mixed brains with his colors. But it is even more important to remember that a pictorial idea, with Ingres, as with Delacroix, stands for a jet of emotion. He was not a native of Montauban for nothing. Impulse, a sudden and swift inspiration, the conviction whose springs cannot be analyzed — these things were forever influencing his work. Take, for example, that masterly portrait of M. Bertin in the Louvre which ranks among his highest achievements. I have heard it contemned by no less a person than Whistler, who met my enthusiasm for it with the round assertion that it was no better than a figure by Meissonier, laboriously and nervelessly built up inch by inch, with every button on the coat in the right place, but with no life left in it. Now, as a matter of fact, Ingres did work like a slave on a portrait of Bertin. The latter, telling Amaury of the master’s despair through sitting after sitting, said, “He weeps and I pass my time consoling him.” At

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Montauban there are a number of drawings showing the false and heartbreaking steps he took toward his goal, But when he reached that goal it was by a leap. One night at dinner he observed Bertin in the pose that we know, “Come and sit to-morrow,” he whispered as they parted; “your portrait is made,” and the next day, abandoning all that had been previously done, he attacked his canvas with the certainty of success. In less than a month the portrait was finished, He could take infinite pains. He recognized his mistakes when he made them, crying like a child as he cleaned them off the canvas and started again; but at bottom it was an affair of vision, not of hand, that thus delayed him. He had to see his subject in the right way. So far as mere dexterity went, Ingres could work miracles. Horace Vernet used to say to those who thought that he painted with rapidity that they ought to see Ingres at work, . Beside him Vernet felt that he was no better than a tortoise.

One measure of his greatness is accessible in the resolution with which he refused to presume upon his facility. Master of line that he was, he insisted upon remaining its master. No technical resource would ever be brought by him into the foreground. “Touch,” of which some of his contemporaries were prone to make so much, struck him as only an abuse of execution, a quality belonging to false talents, to false artists, who painted pictures merely to show their own adroitness. To magnify the function of “touch” was, he maintained, to draw attention from the object represented to the technical process used in representing it, to make more of the painter’s hand than of his thought. Flippant cleverness he merely loathed, and woe betide the pupil who sought “Je chic.’ The mere utterance of that phrase in his hearing was likely to provoke a storm. “Les chefsd’euvre,’ he would say, ‘“‘are not made to dazzle. They are made to persuade, to convince, to enter into us through the pores.” Well might he say in that sentence of his which has been quoted, perhaps, more than any other, “‘ Le dessin est la probité de V art.” If he said this as a draughtsman he said it also as an artist in the fullest, most comprehensive sense of the term. It is of his rectitude that one is always thinking in the museum at Montauban. You do not miss there the movement which he rejects in that saying I have cited about the value of repose in art. Neither do you miss anything in the nature of ‘‘touch.” All is serene and beautiful, and the dignity of Ingres, his smooth, pure surfaces, like his astounding draughtsmanship, seem just the right and natural expression of a great original genius.

III

I found it very interesting to follow the construction of some of his pictures through the sheaves of studies made for them. Many of these are concentrated in portfolios, which somehow makes it the more illuminating to study them. Turning them about and about, handling them at leisure, they seem to exhale his mood, to bring back in some mysterious manner the hours of patient and ardent labor which was not labor, after all, but the happy exercise of a gift. Amid these warm personal souvenirs the very last shreds of any pedantry that may have appeared to cling to Ingres seem to fall away. I make no pretence of describing the thousands of drawings in the museum. What impressed me about the mass was the strain of beauty, of sheer beauty, running through it. In drawing after drawing I could read the artist’s conscientious search after truth, his tireless interrogation of form, his loving research into the structure of a hand, the bend in a leg, the play of a muscle. But never was I conscious of the quest for truth alone. Every touch recording a fact seemed also to recapture some fleeting trait of beauty, to envelop form in an exquisite, linear grace. More than ever, as it seemed to me, I could appreciate the force of that profession of faith which Ingres wrote when he was nearing his prime: ‘‘I am for the arts what I have always been. Age and reflection have, I hope, confirmed my taste without diminishing its warmth. My adorations remain what they have always been, Raphael and his century, the ancients and, above all, the divine Greeks. In music, Gluck, Mozart and

Haydn. My library is composed of a score of immortal volumes. With all this life is full of charm.”

He preserved down to the end that candid, wellpoised faith, and he had his reward. When asa youth he won the Prix de Rome, his sojourn in Italy developed some trials. He stayed on, unwilling to tear himself away from Raphael, and though he was painting masterpieces he found it next to impossible to earn a living. That was the period of the innumerable little portraits, the drawings made for sixty francs which are now fought for by the collectors. Madeleine Chapelle, his first wife, whom he married at _that time, used afterward to tell of the straits to which they had been reduced. When he was painting ‘The Vow of Louis XIII” there was not money in the house to buy a ladder on which to work at the upper part of the picture, and they were obliged to do the best they could, piling one bit of furniture upon another. But at that very moment Ingres had the courage to refuse a commission to go to England and draw more portraits, a commission which would have paid him well, and the gods confirmed the decision of the distracted pair. In Paris this picture made a tremendous success, and carried Ingres to fortune. Thenceforth his course was clear. The romanticist might rave, but Ingres was secure. He throve in Paris until he returned to Rome to take Vernet’s place at the head of the Villa Medici, and every day, as time wore on, his position in Italy and at home in France was that of a kind of demigod. I have already quoted the reminiscence of Legros, showing the veneration in which Ingres was ultimately held. This veneration ran through many of the studios, but decidedly not through them all. There were artists aplenty to take their cue from Delacroix, and in the world at large there were other malcontents. The late John La Farge, who was a young man in Paris in the 60’s, used to tell me how bitter was the feud between the two camps, that of Ingres and that of Delacroix, and how Chassériau had infuriated the former by breaking away from his tradition and seeking an independent path. There. was much wild talk to and fro, there were sayings that were full of passion and of malice, and there were others that were only witty and gay. Among these last there was one by Laurent Jan which it is worth while to recall. This ingenious homme d’esprit found an anagram for the painter’s name, turning Ingres into engris. It was a clever stroke, and, as Amaury admits, “in France a thing wittily said has soon the force of a law,’’ but, as he adds, though this was amusing it was no more than that.

Ingres was not a colorist, he never pretended to be one, and in his remarks on the subject it is plain that he had not been initiated into its mysteries. It is prettily said that one should consult the flowers to find good tints for draperies, but the secret of his weakness lies in that very counsel, for it points to an arbitrary mode of procedure. Studying his work in color at Montauban, the most important of the paintings in the museum, the large “Jesus Among the Doctors,” and his picture in the sacristy of the Cathedral, that ‘‘ Vow of Louis XIII” which has been already mentioned, I found what I had always found in his pictures at Paris and in divers provincial museums, that he was curiously indifferent to the play of light and the absorption of light by objects in nature. The evidence at Montauban, and at Dampierre, that he had his moments of insight into the secret of landscape, is not weighty enough to suggest that he was even dimly on the track of those discoveries in light-saturated color which the Impressionists were to make. On the other hand, as I have noted in regard to the beautiful picture at Toulouse, the flat tints of Ingres are not really as hard or as opaque as they seem, and, above all, they are very pure and wonderfully harmonized. There is a superb glow in the upper and lighter portion of ‘‘The Vow of Louis XIII,” a golden glow which for a moment inclines you to think that the art of Ingres had indeed its sensuous aspect. And yet it would be idle to say that this or any other painting by him has the luminous quality which belongs to color in its best estate, the transparent depths, the subtle modulations, which make color in its penetrating appeal akin to music. No, it is vain to look in Ingres for what, flatly, is not there. No man can add a cubit to his stature, and Ingres, for all his greatness, was deprived of one prodigiously important resource. “Le dessin comprend tout,” he says, ‘‘excepté la teinte,”’ and there is, perhaps, an unconscious pathos in the exception that he admits. I felt its force, even under the spell of Montauban. But genius is a mysteriously potent thing. In those still rooms, consacré, as his countrymen would say, by illustrious achievement, it seemed fitting to murmur only those proud words of his, “Le dessin comprend tout.”