One hundred masterpieces of painting

Front matter

FRANS HALS

REUNION OF THE OFFICERS OF THE ARCHERS OF ST. ADRIEN (1663)

BY

Preface

The contemplation of art is a form of study of the history of man and a very certain one. Its records are absolutely disinterested from any attempt at proving anything. All the more certain is the testimony of what we usually call art — that is to say, the representation of fact and feeling by the image of these facts — when it contradicts our usual beliefs derived from literature or what is called history and the record of opinions. In such a view it makes an accurate manner of measuring. And, besides, the work of plastic art records in the same way as real life does the mass of feelings that belong to the moment of its production. It is all the more accurate that it is confused like life itself. We have felt this when we have looked at monuments of the past, which bring up, unspoken and without details, the habit of life and the manner of thinking of the people among whom the work grew. The wrork of art also grows slowly. As it used to take a long time to build a cathedral, as even a painting is the result of much combination of thought, so is there time to have the work accumulate the many impressions which the artist has received, and which he places in his work

vii viii ONE HUNDRED MASTERPIECES OF PAINTING without being aware of the multitude of impressions which he has received, and which he hands to us. He hands them to us with a greater unconsciousness than is given to us by the forms of writing. He is not suspected of intentions; perhaps he has none. The tyrant, who is the subject of the congratulations and praises of the poet and the clergyman and historian, is handed down to us in the bare fact of his nature by the portrait painter of whom he has no suspicion. For similar reasons, the greater forms of art are not affected by fashion, which belongs only to the few, and the record of human life is, therefore, deeper and more continuous. We see man as he was from the beginning, carried through many changing forms, which in the written record are made to appear more important and less transient than they really are. We gain, therefore, through plastic art, the most sincere of all expressions by document, because of its dealing with external facts, and its giving us innumerable statements which are not meant to be given, and which the sincerity of the artist unconsciously places before us. We are slowly beginning to recognize these facts, and to understand that the record of art passes beyond the record of the historian. It does so because it is not a useful record; it does not live from necessity, but from choice, and it avoids the pressure of necessity.

PREFACE ix

We obtain from the work of art parallel and different statements. We learn how our ancestors — that is to say, all mankind — lived, externally, and their ideas concerning that external life; what things they did to carry on the form of their civilization, what shapes of building they used, and how they liked to have their life, in and out, ordered; what their ideas were of propriety and behaviour. But we also get what were their desires, their aspirations, their ideas concerning matters of feeling, of the higher life, and their relation to a life beyond. Thus we know what they thought of life; we know also wThat they thought of death. We have before us the mirror of life at a given moment. It is with this impression of art being the' mirror of life that I have selected certain works of the art of painting, choosing, as far as possible, such as might well be called masterpieces, or works of extraordinary merit, partly because the greater works carry on more thoroughly the life of all mankind, apart from small fluctuations of fashion or disturbances which are evanescent, however important they have seemed for a time.

I have tried in the comments to connect these works with the life of their time, and while insisting that they have not merely dropped off as fruit from a tree, but are the results of much effort and personal study, application, experience, and knowledge of humanity, I have tried to show that they are

X ONE HUNDRED MASTERPIECES OF PAINTING inseparable from the heart of the moment. I have tried to divide and classify them in some way by a reference to the currents of perpetual sentiments, of ideas which man has always had, under many different forms, and which have had in these works an expression — sometimes, indeed, for the first time after indefinite centuries. I have avoided any very strict technical explanations. I have shown some of the larger points in the construction of each work, according to the perpetual laws which belong to the special art I have chosen to illustrate. It is often unjust to a public to ask it to enter into the minor points of art, which it is incapable of appreciating, and which are often debatable points. Too many critics indulge in discussion of smaller technical points which at various times are debated, sometimes violently opposed, and very often finally accepted forever. I have tried, however, to so write from a long experience in the study of art that a student, or any one sensitive to the impression

of a work of art, might learn more about its methods, its ori-

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gins, and the special circumstances which have helped to make it; the personality of the maker, the habits of his time, and those matters which allowed him freedom or tied him down. I hope, in this way, to help to dissipate false ideas which limit our enjoyment of the work of art and which also limit and cramp our mental action. The study of art is a

PREFACE xi

great education. I have, of course, used the word art as it is usually narrowed down to certain forms of plastic representation and ornament. Of course we know, or we ought to know, that art is a human function used by every one, more or less, even where plastic art is forbidden by religion or prejudice, or does not exist from habit. The nations which have objected to certain forms of plastic art have carried art into expression very fully, through ceremonies and dress, even into the minutest details, as we know by the story of the Bible and the habits of all churches; as also, for instance, the manner through which the monastic orders of the Middle Ages, during an efflorescence of plastic art, objected to the distractions of the great art of stained glass, painted walls, and melody and colour and pomp of all kinds. They were doing what later the Quakers did, or the Puritans, in their whitewashed places of meeting, wherein the simplicity they sought for was merely a manner of expression through art.

I repeat that I have chosen masterpieces or beautiful examples, not only because they are beautiful, which in itself is all-sufficient, but because they escape, in that way, the touch of the bad taste of fashion — that is to say, of momentary intentions. I have been obliged to be very arbitrary in the divisions, self-imposed, made to limit and direct a choice in so few examples as one hundred. But I have xii ONE HUNDRED MASTERPIECES OF PAINTING tried to make these divisions very different in intention, with the hope of covering a larger field of life and of art. It would be impossible to cover the entire subject with any manner of division to which some other division could not be added. For most of the divisions which I have chosen — or which are imposed upon me by the facts — the whole number of subjects might often be inadequate.

But, to use an antique illustration, if one corner of the field is adequately described, it is for the interested reader or student to find out for himself and fill the others.

Contents

PAGE

PREFACE vii

CHAPTER

II Portraits Of Civic Life — Part Two

1664 — Frans Hals, who painted so joyfully the gay companies of militiamen, some few years back, is now over eighty years old and has only two more years to live. It is fitting that he should paint the old ladies who are the Regents of the Home for the Aged at Haarlem. These are their portraits. They lose ever so much in the photographs, which cannot give us the extraordinary refinement which he has perceived and made us feel in the painting of these sober and even austere dresses. The whites and blacks have all the elegance of a beautiful choice of colours. The elderly painter’s touch is no longer supple and caressing as it once was in younger days — it has become a little impatient of time, but it still renders character, and, in this particular case, in the rendering of the subject, a long experience of life, the putting aside of frivolity, is told by the painter’s manner, even as he must have seen it in the old ladies here presented. Their hands, each one of which is indicative of character and of what they may be saying and listening to, are now bony and shrivelled or knotted. A certain slowness of movement one feels in the few that have much to do.

18 ONE HUNDRED MASTERPIECES OF PAINTING The lady on the left who is speaking to the visitors, I suppose; the old dame in the centre who ruffles her fan calmly over the bag containing money perhaps, or the medals which are proofs of attendance, and the servant bringing a memorandum, each move in a rhythm of patience and carefulness. The unoccupied hands are folded back as if taking a rest. As for the faces, we know each type; we know which are severe and which are gentle, and that they are observant one of the other. Accident seems to have placed them about the table at which they sit, but the painter has so combined them that they make something like a chord of lines, or blacks and whites, beautiful in its peaceful harmony.

Some years back, in 1641, one year before Rembrandt painted what we call the “ Night-Watch/5 Frans Hals had painted the “ Regents of the Hospital of St. Elizabeth.” For some reason probably, though it seems mere chance, the Regents about their table recall a little in arrangement the seating of the “Syndics” in Rembrandt’s great picture. However splendid and important they are, they have yet, in all their wonderful painting, a slight reminiscence of the lightness of heart of the brave boys, the militiamen, whom Hals painted as we saw some years before — but they are seriously painted. The portrait is evident behind the action of each man. That must have been the way that each one used when speaking or arguing, and one forgets almost that they are in reality nothing but gentlemen’s portraits. They might be part of some historic event, and their discussion be the meeting of some government cabinet, some ambassadors settling a state matter. All honour to them; notwithstanding the richness of their dress and the picturesqueness of hair and beard, and wide-brimmed hats, they are types of the men who made New Amsterdam and whose descendants we have about us. As we see more and more of the Dutch portraits of a later date than these, they give us more and more an impression of sedateness. The types of the warrior, of the adventurer, which mark the backward history, are less and less frequent later. It would seem as if they had been eaten up by the action demanded of these people, and that the more sedentary, the more prudent types, remained. Could we gather here, as explanatory, other portraits of Hals, we should see still more personal independence and self-assertion, amounting to bravado. And the gay, almost impudent portrait of the painter himself, at Amsterdam, where he sits in the garden beside his second wife, is the climax of the expression of a joyful temperament. Something of that joy perhaps went into most of his representations. In the last paintings of his old age he has come himself to a more sober sense. Of his life and that of Van

20 ONE HUNDRED MASTERPIECES OF PAINTING der Heist we have little but what is merely external. No such legends compass them as those about the story of him whom Thackeray has called “The Moody Tenant of the Mill” — Rembrandt. We know to-day that they were all made up of jealous hearsay, from the necessity of accounting by strange anecdotes for the otherwise sober existence of genius.

The romance, the extraordinary reach of sympathy in all directions of Rembrandt’s painting, seems to justify some manufacture of imaginary anecdotes: something to carry on the legend of the eccentricities of genius, as if genius were not in itself sublimated common sense. And as if also the creator of imaginary situations or the observer and recorder of the vicissitudes of life must also be a victim, a subject, of similar emotions. Better knowledge shows us that art is the manner of a reasonable outpouring of sentiment where it should be placed — that is to say, within the limits of an imaginary world. We can see the great example of this more prosaic but certain view in what we know of Shakespeare: a mind not so far apart from Rembrandt’s and capable, like Rembrandt’s, of using romance for reality and reality for romance. And we forget too easily that such men have not worked merely to please themselves, to establish for the outside world some manner of looking at it, but that in the

FRANS HALS

THE REGENTS OF THE HOME OF THE AGED AT HAARLEM (IN 1664)

most ordinary way they worked within their trade, doing what was asked of them; but informing that task-work with the passion, the sympathies, that life had called up within them, and which their memory placed inside the framework of the task. In the school days of the older ones of us these legends still continued concerning Rembrandt. That they were strange, and not only did not explain, but often contradicted what facts were known, seemed to have made no difference. It was said that at the very beginning of his life, with his first one hundred florins, he became a miser. That would account for the fact that during succeeding moments of his life neither his dress nor his table showed his opulence. The constant pursuit of painting at all moments of happiness or distress was used as a proof that he lost not a moment, from the love of gold. Could there be another reason for the three hundred and fifty paintings, the three hundred and seventy engravings, and the multitude of drawings which are the result of his life? Hence, also from his enormous work, the belief that he must always have worked easily, while we of the trade know by the marks of his brush how often he stuttered or stammered, by expression of new truth or anxiety for better statement of what he knew already. Thus, every little while, he risked to some extent his reputation by some new manner of painting, while the old manner had all

22 ONE HUNDRED MASTERPIECES OF PAINTING the needed purchasers. He was supposed to have married a poor girl, another proof of avarice, while, on the contrary, he had married well and later managed to spend unconsciously the fortune of his wife, besides what he had acquired himself. He was said to have bidden up his own engravings at auctions, or to have given them to his son to sell, with the statement that they had been stolen. It was said that he had disappeared, this hidden man, and had sent abroad the news of his death, to use the only sure method that artists have to earn much money . Then the forced sale of his paintings and studio effects had brought him a fabulous sum, and the dead man had appeared again among the astonished purchasers. And his admirers apologized for this ingenious proceeding by the natural statement that nobody had lost, and that things were worth what they would bring in the market. We know, of course, to-day, that he saw his paintings and his household goods and his rich collections sold for a trifle, and that he returned to hard work in his later age, protected from creditors by the receivership of his son. His singular use of Eastern costumes for Eastern subjects was supposed to be the result of ignorance, while we know that his collections were composed of pictures and engravings by others, so that he had within his studio, without going any farther, the images of what had been done in ways not suitable to

FRANS HALS

THE REGENTS OF THE HOSPITAL OF ST. ELIZABETH AT HAARLEM (IN 1641)

himself. On the contrary, he had made curious studies of far-away costumes and manners, beyond the men of his day. He no more erred than have done those who used what information they could get. It was even a reproach to him that he charged for his teaching, and that, like every one else about him, his pupils helped him in his work. What is true is: that he passed from romantic handling of facts to the most accurate transcription of life. And that occasionally, as we saw in the analysis of the “Night-Watch,” he may have risked a great deal in the choice of the moment. In the art of writing we see how natural this is, and we do not ask of the “Tempest” or “Midsummer Night’s Dream” the accuracy of the historical play. In the painting of the “Syndics” we shall see Rembrandt the recorder of usual nature, and test him alongside of Frans Hals as the painter of the history of Holland seen in portraits.

Nothing more could be said to express the ancestral character in its every-day gravity than this other painting by Rembrandt, painted three years before Hals painted those last ones of his old age. Rembrandt is no longer young. He has eight more years to live, and he paints the corporation piece known as the “Syndics of the Cloth Merchants of Amsterdam.” By the Dutch it is called “De Staalmeesters ” — “The Stampmasters” — who affixed a mark to certify the

24 ONE HUNDRED MASTERPIECES OF PAINTING origin of the cloth and the payment of certain duties. The figures in the picture are the size of life. Placed at its exact height, it has an extraordinary appearance of something seen. The syndics are five in number. Three of them are seated on the other side of the table, which is covered by a heavy Eastern carpet, most beautifully painted, but absolutely unobtrusive. One needs to watch it to perceive the accuracy of the rendering, which disturbs one no more than nature itself. One of the syndics on the right, seated somewhat crossways to the table and less important in the deliberation, has placed upon the table, with a momentary gesture, a bag, containing the stamps most probably. Before the other two is an open register. Of these two, one turns gently, or, rather, is ready to turn over one of the leaves. The other one, with hand reversed, explains, apparently, some point in the record. All three behind the table, with expressions varied by individual character and their relation to the business on hand, look toward their fellows, or whoever they are (and of which we are a part), outside of the frame. The argument is partly addressed to us. One can almost imagine a feeling of impatience in the features of the syndic who holds the sack with the stamps; and so, for each one, the movement of the eye and the eyebrow represents as nearly as has ever been rendered the slight variations of thought which our common intentions must have. However direct the look of the eyes, which with Rembrandt at his best are always extraordinary as to meaning, the look is a general one addressed to a great many people. The fourth syndic is an older man, who rises slowly from his chair, on the left of the table, resting his hand on a book hardly seen. He is perhaps about to speak to the public, and his eyes take in the assemblage. Still further to the left, the fifth syndic, apparently the presiding officer, looks at us with a certain air of waiting for the statements; the look, perhaps, of a little superiority of knowledge and position. This notwithstanding that the character of the head is not so important as that of the others. These two gentlemen are dressed in the older way. Their collars are smaller and they wear their natural hair. Though they are already a little behind the time, they are far away from the splendid costumes which we saw in the paintings of Hals and of Van der Heist, and of Rembrandt in the “ Night- Watch.” No more of the great plaited ruffs, and frilled and lace collars; no more the feathers, silks and satins — remnants of the sixteenth century. No more full hair and hair cut in every personal way. We are now closing the seventeenth century, and a puritanic wave has added to the natural sobriety of business men. On the contrary, the three younger syndics wear the long hair which succeeds the cropping of

26 ONE HUNDRED MASTERPIECES OF PAINTING puritanic days, and begins the full-bottomed wig of the age of Louis XIV. They have cut off the little imperial which is such a mark of the middle century: the Stuart and the Van Dyck moment. We must not forget the sixth personage, whose position does not allow him to wear a hat, and who smiles with the discreet smile of a secretary behind the scenes. If ever there was a lesson in the difference between posing and acting, it is here. The whole impression is as momentary as reality. Each one of the five figures is in reality doing something, and yet you know that this is a collection of portraits.

Alongside of it the great Van der Heist is thin and theatrical, and we see in the latter, as it were, too distinctly a scene that the eye could not really grasp in such detail. If one could see the great Hals’s alongside, they too would probably appear a little more the result of much knowledge, much practice, astonishing technique, but still not so near the singular contradiction of a natural sight, that sees only certain things distinctly but is aware of all of them. Our photograph gives fairly an idea of all this. The unity and sobriety of the tone is so great that though we miss in the copy much beautiful colour, we get a fair idea of the manner of Rembrandt’s colour; that manner of transposing it into relations of light and dark which is of the essence of painting;

THE SYNDICS OF THE CLOTH MERCHANTS OF AMSTERDAM (IN 1661)

.

an art which with deficient materials has to represent the enormous gamut of the world of light. Though we get some idea of it by the photograph, yet the painting is one of the very great paintings as mere technique. It is, so far as this can be from what I have just said, a perfect piece of work. Rembrandt could not have painted this extreme success in the representation of an every-day subject had he not also worked in imaginative conditions, and fully freed his thought and given rein elsewhere to that universal sympathy with all the chances of life that invented stories allow. The feeling of contained reticence is a real one; is in the artist as well as in his models. Conversely from the “ Night-Watch/’ he has kept himself entirely within the bounds. But the river is a deep and strong one that runs within this narrow canal. His rivals, the other painters, are giving us their best. But with him there is what belongs to the higher artist — that this is only what the occasion required — and that we do not know, and never shall know, the full powers that might have been exercised if life gave the chance.

It is well that these paintings of Corporation Pictures remain in their native land. Not only are they there seen in the light that they were meant for, almost in the places they were born in, but we do not suffer, as in many museums, from the fact that another light, another position, dimin-

28 ONE HUNDRED MASTERPIECES OF PAINTING ishes the effect which the painter had really achieved. And, morally, the effect of this testimony to a past history is powerful upon those who see the works in place. All the more if, as in quiet Haarlem, these paintings be the only record of a once active life. The little museum, where the Hals’s are strung along the wail, has more energy, more testimony to struggle and success than the living town itself. And their testimony to the value of Holland is greater than we get even through written records. They tell us of the solid reasons of a little country holding its own against its gigantic enemies — England, Spain, Austria, and France. The solidity of character represented carries us to our own day, and explains for us the strenuous resistance of Dutch descendants in South Africa and the value of the blood which stiffened the courage of the Boers against gigantic odds.

Ill

WAR

The very earliest records of all the arts, the arts of speech and sound, the arts of sculpture and painting, the mere beginnings of architecture, are memorials of successful war. The earliest verse is that of battle and of battle-cry. From the beginning, the Pharaohs drive their chariots through the slain; the Assyrian kings number the captives, and Hokusai, the Japanese, wishing to recall the ancient stories of China, makes a picture in which the conquerors, tired with murder, toss into vast heaps the bloody heads of the slain. Later, when art has found a place in Greece, the descendants of greater men saw pictured on temple friezes the mythological struggles of gods and heroes in which they could feel their own triumphs over their own home rivals, or the Persian and the barbaric world. Later still, in a more prosaic and official age, the Roman column and the Roman arch tell the story of actual Roman triumph, preceded by a struggle in which the Roman could recognize the cohort to which he had belonged, and, in a rude way, something of the scheme of battle that had been successful. Most of this record has been of sculpture. What else that may have been painted

32 ONE HUNDRED MASTERPIECES OF PAINTING is a mere statement of abstract fact, not far from the brevity of a telegraphic report in its earliest forms. There is also one single fragment of mosaic where Alexander charges into the Persian mass. Except for those stories that are symbolic, in which the struggle is only a type, the art is rarely of a great character, and when it rises higher it is the record of personal hand-to-hand struggle, based on the most primitive needs of fight, and not such a record of the art of war as might make a difference between the planning of one success and another.

Such pictures came slowly, and when we have them, when in the seventeenth century we see in such pictures as Van der Meulen’s the tactical account of Louis XIV’s victories, whatever there is that is true loses its artistic human interest. One mass of men, being like another, and seen at a great distance, we cannot tell through such means much more than the theory of the movement. And as the very principle of the meaning is a sort of immobility or mechanical action, we are too far away from the human feeling to care for one mass more than another. Any amount of single individuals galloping about only make the effort at creating art more absurd and frigid. It is not so different at our very day; and we come to this astonishing result: that the number of pictures of historic battles which have

WAR 33

a value in art is extremely limited. We may have accuracies, and then they take away from the feeling of life; we may have attempted archaeologies, and then the great living facts, which are the same for furious Frank and fiery Hun, disappear in the so-called appeal to history. A few exceptions in what might have been an enormous field are all that can be marked, and a few of these I shall place before the reader.

We must remember that it is not the choice of subject that makes the value of the work of art. Otherwise the story of the Bible would always be full of sesthetic beauty instead of the indefinite tedium which haunts the religious picture. So, evidently, in the smaller dramatic situations, the fact that so many brave men have held a small post with their last cartridges, that certain men have made a last ineffectual charge, whether English or French, at Fontenoy or Waterloo, does not make a work of art. The meaning of the heroism should be told in painting by the arrangement of line and mass and colour, embracing, more or less, within its net, the human courage which is the story of the picture. No poet laureate, because he has the task of telling a great national story, thereby succeeds in a heroic ode. Rare indeed, even in poetry, are the stories of great successful battles. It might almost seem as if the stories of defeat, of how “the flowers of the forest are all wede away,5’ carry with them more