A painter's progress; being a partial survey along the pathway of art in America and Europe with sundry examples and precepts culled from personal encounter with existing conditions and reference to the careers of many artists both ancient and modern: six discourses forming the fifth annual series of the Scammon lectures, delivered before the Art institute of Chicago, April 1910

Front matter

BOOKS BY WILL H. LOW

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

A Painter’s Progress. Illustrated . net $1.50 A Chronicle of Friendships. Illustrated net $3.00 f

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Awakening of Vocation .... 1

II. The Education of the Artist ... 55

II

It was Laurence Sterne who first put into words the sentiment, which by overquotation has now become trite, that some things are “ordered better in France” than elsewhere. This is certainly true of all matters aesthetic. In the accumulation and conservation of wealth, in the encouragement of industries and commerce, in the preservation and cultivation of the natural resources of its soil, and in the advancement of science, France keeps pace with the highest modern demands of civilisation. At the same time and as an integral part of its social system, art and letters are given a more honourable place than in any other country of the world. In this enlightened land the spiritual efl&ciency of man counts for as much as his material power, and side by side with its great industrial, financial, and scientific interests the productions of its architects, painters, sculptors, musicians, poets, dramatists, and authors are fostered and protected. To some degree this is an affair of the government of the country, especially in all the initial educational processes; which are, however, carried beyond the limits of the schools, and by a system of rewards, definitely known as “prizes of encouragement,” the earlier efforts of the artist and author are helped forward.

But even more important than this systematised governmental encouragement is the resulting public spirit of France, which recognises the work of its artists, musicians, and authors as an asset to the national wealth, esteems their career as among the most useful and honourable [56]

pursuits of man, and by material and honorific recognition makes place for them in the national life.

The crass ignorance of the scope and aim of the artist, which may be found here the moment one steps outside of a very limited circle, is found nowhere in France. In the country, among the peasantry, ignorant though they may be of any special manifestation of art, the images of their churches, a chance visit to the nearest town and its almost universal museum, or an innate deference for any work of man which they see seriously pursued, have prepared them to accept the artist and his work with respect, if without comprehension. The fairly hostile attitude of the ignorant in English-speaking countries, which so frequently greets the artist, seems founded on a belief that his work is hardly worthy as the life-effort of a grown man; and when, on learning that his trivial productions are sufficiently [57]

esteemed in certain circles to be purchased and preserved, their wonder translates itself into the query, “ Where do you find fools to buy them?” This may possibly be an aftermath of the Reformation, which in these countries drove art from the churches and from the life of the humble; but here and now, as we mount the social scale, we find that, as Mr. Kenyon Cox, in a public address, once put it, “The majority of Americans still feel that they can be ‘fairly comfortable’ without art.”

Not so in France, where a child of humblest source will find even among his remote parentage or from his fellowvillagers encouragement and support, if his vocation be marked for any of the liberal professions, and from every round of the social ladder hands will be extended to help him upward.

He was a fortunate youth, therefore, who first saw the light of day on the 27th of [58]

November, 1828, in the little town of La Roche-sur-Yon, and was given the name of Paul Baudry. At the time of his birth there was little to foretell the brilliant future to which he was destined, but there is much in the story of his earlier years to mark the contrast between the conditions which, even now, confront the ugly ducklings of our art as they grow their plumes on their swanward way, and the manner in which such an evolution is “ordered” in France.

Baudry’s father was a maker of wooden shoes, the sabots of the countryside in France, and in the pursuit of his industry he had led a wandering life. In the company of other children he had first watched the flocks of his native village until it was time for him to learn a trade, when he was literally sent into the woods as apprentice to a sabotier. There like a gypsy he had lived until in turn, his trade acquired, he took his way over the coun- [59]

try roads, camping in the vicinity of each village, plying his craft in the shelter of the trees until the locality was furnished with its supply of wooden shoes, when he would take his simple work-bench and seek a new field of industry. As Monsieur Eugene Guillaume, Director of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux- Arts, said many years after, in an appreciative notice of Paul Baudry’s work, the father thus “passed his life in the woods, rising with the dawn, influenced by the passing hours and the changing weather, in closest touch with the infinite mysteries of nature, and having, as chief distraction from his toil, his violin which he played at night under the stars.”

Surely an existence like this was in some sense a preparation for the advent into the world, as one of the twelve children of this pastoral father, of a son who was an artist from his birth. The nomadic life of the elder Baudry had ceased upon his [60]

Paul Baudry

From a photograph

V-

.f marriage, when he established himself at La Roche-sur-Yon, a small town of about ten thousand inhabitants, but the wanderlust of his earlier years persisted. This desire was gratified by the habit of long excursions through the surrounding country, and from among his numerous children it was little Paul who was his chosen companion. Armed with fishing tackle as their ostensible excuse, these recreant anglers were above all devoted to seeking out picturesque sites, and to his latest years the painter retained the impress of the sensations then experienced, and avowed that from his father he had received his first sense of the beauties of nature. In the public school of the town meanwhile the little Paul was winning such modest success as the character of the school permitted, while much of his leisure at home was given to the study of the violin in obedience to the desire of his father, who wished him to become a [61]

musician. Only in obedience, however, for another form of art engrossed his childish mind. He had found for this taste a most effective ally in the person of a local artist named Antoine Sartoris, who served as the drawing-master in the school which Paul attended. Sartoris was originally a plasterer by trade, but having by economy put aside enough to keep him in Paris for a couple of years, he had bravely abandoned the trowel, and entered the atelier of Picot to study painting. His ambition was greater than his talent, and of all his art effort the memory of the service he rendered Baudry alone survives. This was always kept in mind by his grateful pupil, who, to the end of his life, when all the honours that France can bestow on an artist were his, never failed to inscribe himself as “pupil of Sartoris,” in the Salon catalogues, along with the more resounding titles of Member of the Institute, and Commander of the Legion [62]

of Honour, which custom demanded. When he was thirteen his father renounced the cherished wish to make a musician of his son, and acceding to Paul’s desire placed him in the studio of Sartoris. “It is your trade I wish to learn,” was his announcement to his good friend, in unconscious imitation of Correggio’s cry: “I, too, am a painter.” Under Sartoris’s direction Baudry remained three years, receiving such instruction as the modest painter could give him, until the master realised that this brilliant pupil had grown beyond his capacity to teach him further. It is well to bear in mind the small resources of a little provincial town such as was La Roche-sur-Yon, yet there were found among its inhabitants those who followed with interest the progress of this little lad and who, when there arrived a decisive moment in his career, stood ready to aid him in its further evolution.

Public sentiment and the constitution of

our laws forbid with us the expenditure of public funds for the benefit of the individual, but there was no such barrier to prevent Sartoris from addressing the following letter to the Mayor of La Roche-sur-Yon, in August, 1844:

“Among the pupils of my school there is one Paul Baudry, aged fifteen, bom in this city, who has been under my direction for the past three years, and has greatly distinguished himself. He is a youth of decided talent, and the progress which he has made now demands that his future art education should be confided to masters of greater distinction than mine. The parents of the lad are not in a position to extend him aid, but, as there is no doubt of his fortunate disposition leading him to a high place in art, his talent demands that his future progress should be assured ; for it is our duty to develop the arts by every possible means. I there- [64]

fore solicit that you, as mayor of this city, should explain this situation to your municipal council, and if you will add the influence you possess, the council may be disposed to grant a sum, small but sufiicient to send this youth to Paris to become the pupil of one of our great painters. The municipal council will undoubtedly seize with alacrity the opportunity to encourage art in the person of this child issued from the cradle of our city, and destined to be one of its glories hereafter, and it is with confidence that I venture to signalise this great opportunity to the mayor and the municipal council of La Roche-sur- Y on . ”

Did not our laws forbid, a petition of this nature would I fear appeal more to our American sense of humour than to any other sentiment, if it were addressed to the municipal authorities of any one of our cities, little or great, but it was effective with the governing powers of La Roche-sur- Yon, who from its meagre budget [65]

promptly voted the “small but sufficient” sum that enabled Baudry to begin his studies in Paris. Sartoris’s appeal was indeed typical of many like demands which in different localities in France have been granted, enabling the recipients of municipal encouragement to profit by the further advantages of their country’s system of education.

Here I am tempted to resume for a moment my own personal experiences and to tell how I, at one period of my studies, received from my master, Carolus-Duran, a letter somewhat similar to that just cited; and like that, in the intention of my master, designed to be presented to the municipal authorities of my native town. It was at a time in Paris when I had apparently exhausted every resource of a private nature, and was obliged to announce to my master my impending departure and consequent withdrawal from his influence.

Not the least of the gratitude I owe him [66]

is for the kind words he found to express his regret at my projected departure. “But,” he urged, “surely your city should do something for you, since you have shown considerable progress and have already exhibited in the Salon.” I tried in vain to explain that our cities took no such parental view of their children as did those of France. “I am sure,” he insisted, “that if I wrote a letter, explaining how important it is that you should remain in France for another year or two, it would bring some result.” And consequently he wrote a letter which, if less prophetic in tone than that of the early master of Baudry, contains nevertheless such proof of a generous intention that I look at its pages, yellowed by time, even to-day, with a grateful heart. It seems hardly necessary to say that it was never submitted to the common council of Albany, but it is pleasant to record, since a kind action deserves reward, that it was [67]

influential in a private direction in prolonging my studies in Paris.

Supported by the grant from his native city, Baudry went to Paris and entered the atelier of Drolling, a painter of repute at the time. The general interest he had excited prompted the prefect of the Department of La Vendee, in which La Roche-sur-Yon is situated, to supplement his meagre allowance from public funds at his disposal, though the entire amount was only sufficient to support him by the strictest economy.

Filled with devotion to his art, the necessary hardships of a student’s life weighed upon Baudry but little, and in his letters to his parents find slight mention. It is not necessary to transcribe his various school successes during the next six years, but in the competition for the Prix de Rome, the highest reward obtainable there, he succeeded in 1850. During these years his city and his de- [68]

partment had stood by him, and if only considered from a financial point of view, this investment in a future reflected glory was far from a financial loss; since afterward by gifts to the local museum of works from his brush Baudry more than repaid the sums advanced.

What can measure, who can count, the moral return of the assistance lent to a gifted son of this little town.? In his too short life, for Paul Baudry died before he was sixty, his upward career was followed by the succeeding generations of the place of his nativity, as successively he won the Prix de Rome in 1850, was awarded a first-class medal at the Salon in 1851, was given the cross of Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1861, and in 1869 that of officer, honours which were followed in 1870 by his election as Member of the Institute. In 1875 came his final promotion to the rank of Commander of the Legion of Honour, and in 1881 the [69]

reward of which he was the most proud: the unanimous vote of his fellow-artists, who that year for the first time awarded the great Medal of Honour of the Salon to the painter of the superb decoration for the Palace of Justice — the “Glorification of Law.” Throughout this period one after another of his numerous works had met with success.

He could easily have amassed a great fortune, as the favoured portraitist of the brilliant epoch of the Second Empire, and in fact from his choice among the commissions offered him there remain a series of masterly portraits. But his love for pure beauty was too great, his fancy too fecund, to restrain his effort to portraiture alone, and there resulted from these gifts a number of charming pictures. One of these, “The Pearl and the Wave,” has certainly never been excelled as a vision of the pure beauty of the nude since the days of Titian, while almost i

■Sa

“The Glorification of the Law”: Ceiling decoration by

Paul Baudrv in the Cour de Cassation, Paris i equally notable are the “Infant St. John,” “The Toilet of Venus,” or “Diana Repulsing Love.” These, mere titles of apparently trite subjects , as they appear here, are in reality works replete with a new and informing sense of beauty, translated by technical methods which from first to last show an unceasing progression, keeping pace with the advance with which painting has been enriched since Baudry’s earlier time through the efforts of the so-called Impressionists.

The high ideal which Baudry cherished controlled his action when, in 1865, he accepted the commission for the decoration of the foyer of the new Opera then being built in Paris. He was at the height of his success, in favour at the court, and the recipient of all that art-loving Paris could shower upon him, when this, the most important decorative work of modern times, was proposed to him. Its acceptance imposed relinquishing the life of [71]

Paris and renouncing all its material advantages, but already a year in advance of the official commission, he had learned from his friend and former companion in Rome, Charles Gamier, the architect of the Opera, that the task was reserved for him, and he had set about to prepare himself for it. Closing his studio in Paris he had returned to Rome, became once more an inmate of the Academic de France, in the Villa Medici, as in his student days, and began full-sized copies of several of the panels of Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, in order fully to penetrate the secrets of the master-decorator of the Renaissance.

It demands a nature of heroic mould thus to renounce the pomps and vanities of contemporary success, to consecrate every effort to a long and painstaking preparation, to be followed by the equally conscientious execution of so great a work. Ten long years, almost without [72]

diversion into other fields of production, did Baudry give to this task, refusing meanwhile commissions without number and working for the glory of his country — and little else. Little else indeed, for we find him in a letter to a friend whimsically computing that his work was paid at the rate of forty-two francs fifty centimes — about eight dollars — the square foot. The whole decoration, comprising three enormous ceilings and twenty-four panels of varying shapes and sizes, covering in all over three thousand five hundred square feet, was paid only twenty-eight thousand dollars — a sum which Baudry . could easily have earned in any one of the ten years that he gave to this work.

The history of art, so full of incidents of works accomplished at the price of great sacrifices, hardly shows a more notable instance of a task undertaken as a public duty than this effort of Baudry. Easily master of his craft to a point where whatever he would have been willing to give would have been accepted by his public and crowned with approbation, he approached his task, not with timidity, but with a single-hearted determination to add to his equipment of acquired knowledge all that the most searching study of great preceding works would yield. In addition to the eleven full-sized copies of the Sistine Chapel frescos, painted in Rome, he passed the evenings of an entire winter (1867-68) in laboriously tracing upon canvases of a reduced size the cartoons of Raphael now in the South . Kensington Museum, and the following summer found him in London, working ten or twelve hours a day copying upon these prepared canvases every detail of these famous works. Every corner of Europe that could show him decorative work was also visited, and the drawings from life, repeated studies in the research of action that models failed to give, the [74]

composition sketches, and the adaptation of these to form a harmonious whole, constitute in themselves a mass of work that would almost suffice for a life of endeavour.

During the progress of the work the war of 1870-71 alone drew him away from his task, when shouldering a musket as a private soldier he did his part in the heroic defence of Paris, passing nights in the trenches, suffering from cold and hunger; but sustained by the thought that there, no less than upon the scaffolding before his great canvases, he was doing his duty for his country.

At last in 1874 his task was finished, and before being put in plaee the great panels were exhibited for two months at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts. It was truly a national event and, thanks to the devotion of one of her children, France had added a noble work to her many treasures of art. No student who was present in [75]

France at that time, as I had the good fortune to be, could fail to take the lesson to his heart that, beyond the superb accomplishment of a noble work — noble in conception and noble in execution — there was the further sentiment of noblesse oblige, which radiated from this great achievement of one who at every step of his career had been sustained and encouraged by his people, and who now repaid the debt a thousand-fold.

“You speak most kindly of me, my dear critic,” wrote Baudry to Emile Bergerat, who had sent him a studied eulogium of his work, “but do you know those of your many kind words which have given me the most pleasure Those that expressed the thought you have had to speak of me as a Frenchman, and to award to our beloved country what little glory I might pretend to, if not as an artist, at least as her devoted and loving child. My love for France is the best part of my religion, and for your thought of joining my name to hers I thank you most sincerely.” And in this moment, when virtually his whole country applauded the happy termination of his effort, Baudry’s thoughts went back to the little town in La Vendee which had stood by him in his youth. The entrance fees to the exhibition at the Beaux-Arts were divided among various art societies of a charitable nature, but Baudry demanded and obtained that a portion — rather larger than the amount that the city had given him — be awarded to the poor of La Roche-sur-Yon.

Ten years of productive life were alone to remain to Baudry, for the physical hardships entailed by his great task had told upon him. They were ten fruitful years, marked by the growth of a nature which up to that time had shown a faithful allegiance to the precepts of the long line of great painters whom Baudry had [77]

so faithfully studied. Now in full possession of his powers, nature made a stronger appeal, and though his fidelity to the past had not proven a hindrance to his interpretation of the present, and though not only in his portraits but also in his pictures and decorative works his types had been of his time, he now developed a new and fresher sense of light and colour. As with many other painters in progress, he here left some of his contemporaries in a quandary, they hardly recognising the work which his new vision impelled him to create as equal to his earlier effort. Jules Breton, one of his earliest friends and a great admirer of his work, regrets the years that Baudry consecrated to the Opera, as robbing contemporary painting of the many charming pictures that he might have produced during that time, and deplores that the habits then formed gave to Baudry the freer brush, the larger style of the decorator, and lost for him [78]

the more suave qualities of his former manner.

It was but another instance of Baudry’s courage and devotion and, had longer life been accorded him, we should have seen a master possessed of all that scientific research and departure from accepted conventions of colour have given to the modern painter, allied to the sense of style, the accurate knowledge of form, and the comprehensive grasp of decorative line and composition that were already his.

It is interesting to follow in Baudry’s work this evolution as manifested in the repetition of one of his favourite compositions, that of “Diana Repulsing Love.” One might fancy that the master had taken this theme as a test of his successive theories of colour, for in the exhibition held in 1886 at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts, in which, shortly after his death, were shown all that were obtainable of his [79]

portraits and easel pictures, there were three or four replicas of this subject, varying little in composition and form, but greatly in effect of light and colour.

In the earliest, painted in 1864, the indignant goddess, with arm upraised ready to chastise a most mischievous Cupid, is of a fine amber tint, her lithe figure everywhere relieved by a dark background of woods ; a composition in effect of colour visibly inspired by Titian and the Venetian masters. In successive repetitions, in 1877 and ’79, Diana emerges in tones more nacreous, and the density of the background permits a ray of light to penetrate here and there. But Baudry’s final effort, where even in form the figure of the Huntress is more slight and finer in action, is everywhere permeated by the light of day. The air circulates around Diana, Cupid visibly soars athwart the foliage which rustles in the breeze, and there are figures more living and breathing, [80]

no

“Diana Repulsing Love,” by Paul Baudrv, 1882 in an atmosphere more livable and breathable, than in this last rendition of a favourite subject, which bears the date of 1882.

It was in the full flush of progression in the art to which he had consecrated a noble and useful endeavour that Paul Baudry was taken on January 17, 1886, and his place in modern art is not yet fully recognised. Misled by his constant allegiance to the schools, not only to those of his country to which he owed so much, but, in another sense, those of the great galaxy of masters by whose precepts he profited, too many critics consider him only as a result of academical training. On the other hand, since the academical powers of his country delighted to honour him, he is often referred to as possessing merely “official” talent.

But there was never a moment in his career when he was not alive to the world about him; and his art, cast voluntarily [81]

in the mould of the great preceding masters, he was able to rejuvenate and revivify by his intimate sense of the beauty which his eyes sought and found in the types of contemporary life. Ardent student of Raphael, like that master he painted from “a certain beautiful lady who lived in his memory,” but the memory was of a living type and not that of an ideal built up from other works of art. In his portraits one could easily follow not only the changing fashions of art, which caused him to paint M. Guizot in 1860 with all the severity of an Ingres, but the changing types of humanity that evolve during a generation. Thus his portrait of Madame Bernstein and her son in 1883 is a human document denoting the presence in France at that period of a luxuriant Israelitic type, depicted with a knowledge of painting that allowed his brush to fairly incise the Byzantine ornament of the chair on which the lady sits, [82]

Mme. Bernstein and her son, Robert, by Panl Baudry and then to flow with easy competence over the rich stuffs of her costume, while the whole is dominated by the life and expression of the heads of the mother and child. If greater portraits than these, and others of Baudry’s production, have been painted in the nineteenth century I know them not.

Great as was the effort, notable as is the success of the great decorations of the new Opera, the intention, the style of individual figures, and certain of the panels which are vastly superior to the others, do not suffice to prevent the whole achievement from taking a secondary place in Baudry’s work, in comparison with other of his later decorations. It is doubtful if any painter, even Paul Veronese, who so successfully vanquishes the overpowering mouldings in which his work is set in the Ducal Palace in Venice, could have overcome the unfortunate scale and weight of the gilded mould- [83]

ing which Gamier saw fit to provide for Baudry’s panels in the ceiling of the foyer of the new Opera.

In any case it is the memory of his work, as seen before it was fixed in place, that abides with me. In its definite setting the decoration appears confused in parts, and lacking in the definition of its pattern as a whole; which is perhaps the first and most essential quality of a mural painting.

This may be due in a measure to the height at which the works are seen, and even more to the shape and weight of their framing, but it was Baudry’s task to overcome these conditions and in this he has partly failed. The only other painter to whom Baudry can be at all compared in our time is Puvis de Chavannes, and he, though not possessed of a tithe of Baudry’s virtuosity, has never failed in this important quality of making his pattern clear.

It is evident, however, that Baudry perceived his error, for in other and later works no one has surpassed him as a decorator.

Fortunately there remain some half-dozen works, notably the great “Glorification of the Law%” which, possessing all the merits of beautiful design, presentation of types of austere dignity, exquisite feminine charm, and graceful artlessness of childhood, as well as vibrating colour, will serve to show to all time that, from the tiny panel portraits where he emulates Clouet, up to these great works in direct lineage from Veronese, Paul Baudry was of the race of great artists.

I have been led far afield in the consideration of Baudry’s later life and work, and have said too little of the man or rather of the youth; for it is from his earlier years that we can draw profitable reflection for our present purposes.

We have seen that from the first he set his purpose high, but it may well be a matter of conjecture how it was possible for a little peasant boy, who hardly received the rudiments of what we consider education, to arrive even in his extreme youth at so clear a perception of the nobler aims of art. It is also cause for wonder how he was able to express himself so intelligently and with such choice of language as even his earliest letters show. Before he was thirteen he was working in the studio of Sartoris, and presumably engrossed in an absorbing study, which offers to the neophyte so many and various technical difficulties that time for or thought of general education must be put aside.