French art

“ French art during the second half of the 1800s is noted for its innovation and its diversity. Yet, although the paintings produced during this period differ in their visual effects, the artists of these works were all largely concerned with the same problem: how to treat nature and how to define reality. Thus, in reaction to the neoclassicists, who stressed line and color, and the romantics, who favored lush hues, exotic or unusual subject matter, and emotionalism, the realists sought to paint only what was before them, free from embellishment. ”

“ For, if the artist sets his art at the highest spot that his powers permit, keeps it secluded from the passing traffic of the world, unsullied, fresh, that it may give clear reflection to the figures of the imagination which, in the calm elation of this upper air, he brings to its margin, then he has done something for which the world is infinitely better.{60}
It is an art of this kind which French, if I mistake not, represents—elevated, but passionless; always true to its noblest and sweetest promptings; mingling intellectual grace with the graciousness of pure emotion. ”

“ In this quest of beauty, our curious minds, which know so many things and which have been able to compare the works of the most diverse civilizations, are perpetually seeking novelty, eager for rare forms, and inimical to everything banal and to everything that ordinary life brings before our eyes. And in our fin de siècle we have been so much the more prone to subtle pursuits because for some time our French art has seemed to take delight in the forms of a gross realism. ”

“ Take only the painters of the realistic modern French school—can we not tell at a glance, in going through the Louvre, whether it is nature according to Corot, to Rousseau, or to Millet that we are looking at? For whether the realists like it or no, the world will reflect itself in their brains according to the laws of their peculiar individuality, and the preciousness of all art expression seems precisely to consist in this rare flavour which the artist’s self impresses on nature outside himself. ”

“ No; it is not art—but it is the atmosphere in which art lives, and outside of which it cannot live. It is the regulating principle of all art, of the art of dress and of manners, and of living in general, as well as of sculpture or music. It is because the French have always been so innately sure of this, that, without burdening themselves with formulas, they have instinctively applied to living the same rules that they applied to artistic creation. ”

“ A peasant art, I say, and it clung fast to the life of the people, and still lived among the cottagers and yeomen in many parts of the country while the big houses were being built ‘French and fine’: still lived also in many a quaint pattern of loom and printing-block, and embroiderer’s needle, while over-seas stupid pomp had extinguished all nature and freedom, and art was become, in France especially, the mere expression of that successful and exultant rascality, which in the flesh no long time afterwards went down into the pit for ever. ”

“ French art still maintains its neat precision, the colours more vivid than those of England and the faces delicately indicated without much modelling. The productions of the Low Countries, still keeping to the heavier style of drawing, appear coarse beside the works of the other schools. ”

“ Deep in their quest of that borderland beauty which is common to life and art French painters are once again deeply concerned with life: to borrow an idea from my next essay, they have chosen a new artistic problem. ”

“ In the pictures of the modern school of French painting, this peculiarity is pushed to an extravagant length, and, fortunately for the art, displays the false principles on which the system of their composition is founded. The moment seized is uniformly that of the strongest and most violent passion; the principal actors in the piece are represented in a state of phrenzied exertion, and the whole anatomical knowledge of the artist is displayed in the endless contortions into which the human frame is thrown. ”

“ This last stage, in which art is as it were identified with nature, an English painter shrinks from with strange repugnance and peculiar abhorrence. The French style is the reverse of ours: it is all dry finishing without effect. We see their faults, and, as we conceive, their general incapacity for art: but we cannot be persuaded to see our own. ”

“ Under such conditions it is difficult for an art to struggle into existence. French art is to a Frenchman the finest and best the world ever saw. Englishmen support English art because it is their own. ”

“ The French painters of the eighteenth century were numerous, and on the whole superior to those of the same era in Italy. Throughout the whole, however, we detect the principles of the school of Louis XIV., as respects the individual qualities of the art; while in the philosophy of taste, more especially as affects painting, are discoverable the effects of the mechanical and systematic criticism—the mere pedantry of learning, which, originating with the writers of that age, spread over Europe, nor, in art, is yet entirely exploded. ”

“ The French classical tradition in sculpture and painting, which is not merely academic, having become a part of public taste, prevented the production of the frightful crudities which passed for art in Germany and England during the present and past centuries. By helping to create a freer and more intelligent atmosphere for the artist to be born and educated in, and finer demands upon him when once he has begun to produce and is seeking recognition, the student of aesthetics may indirectly do not a little for him. ”

“ But it is more especially in the association of man and nature, in painting simple folk and their struggle for life amid their natural surroundings or by their homely hearth, in the glorification of humble toil, that the latest French art finds its most characteristic ideal life. ”

“ I don't know what is meant by French art and English art and American art; those seem to me mere cataloguers' and reviewers' and tradesmen's names, representing preoccupations utterly foreign to the artist. Art is art in every country, and the novel (since Bonus mentions that) is the novel in every tongue, and hard enough work they have to live up to that privilege, without our adding another muddle to the problem. The reader, the consumer, may call things as he likes, but we leave him to his little amusements. ”

“ Painting will again become creative, constructive, personally expressive. Its basis having been established as scientifically impeccable, its superstructure will exhibit the taste, the elegance, the imaginative freedom, exhibited within the limits of a cultivated sense of propriety, that are an integral part of the French painter's patrimony. ”

“ On the whole, French painting is to me an exponent of the great difficulty and danger of French life; that passion for the outward and visible, which all their education, all the arrangements of their social life, every thing in their art and literature, tends continually to cultivate and increase. Hence they have become the leaders of the world in what I should call the minor artistics—all those little particulars which render life beautiful. Hence there are more pretty pictures, and popular lithographs, from France than from any other country in the world ”

“ After the French Revolution of 1789, a school of neoclassical artists dominated painting, using themes of patriotic heroism and stressing severe beauty of line and firm modeling, over light and color. ”

“ On the other hand, these exquisite Greek and Roman works, models of plastic art for all time, including two or three of the greatest masterpieces which have come down to us from antiquity, have yet no organic connection with French history, or even, save quite indirectly, with the development of French art. ”

“ But the French and the German public approximate more to the English—as is natural—than do their respective artists. I use the word literary as it has often been used by others in characterizing the popular art-criticism of the time—and in England much of the professional criticism also—to denote a prominence given to the subject, the idea, the story—l'anecdote, as a French critic calls it—over the purely painter's work of a picture. It denotes the theory that a picture is not first to please the sense, but to catch the fancy or the intellect or to touch the heart. ”

“ For this reason, if an English and a French painter shall each take the same scene, and that a wholly foreign one, say an Oriental group, although the subject be a foreign subject and identical in each canvas, you can discern at once that one picture is English, the other French in treatment. Each artist has stamped upon his work the impression of the influences of the people to which he belongs. ”

“ If ever there were models of the Fine Arts fitted to give an impulse to living genius, these are they. [34] With enough to teach the truest, highest style in art, they are not in sufficient numbers or preservation to distract or discourage emulation. With these and Nature for our guides, we might do something in sculpture, if we were not indolent and unapt. The French, whatever may be their defects, cannot be charged with want of labour and study. ”

“ This revealing power of art is not restricted to the individual appreciator. It is said that the French are an artistic people and that Americans are not. The explanation is that for generations the artists of France have been discovering to their countrymen the beauty that is around them at their very door, and have taught them to appreciate it. ”

“ A French artist, on the contrary, has none of this uneasy, anxious feeling—of this desire to master the whole of his subject, and anticipate his good fortune at a blow—of this massing and concentrating principle. ”

“ Of these comparatively independent branches of art, the greatest is, as far as I know, the French sculpture of the thirteenth century. No words can give any idea of the magnificent redundance of its imaginative power, or of the perpetual [Pg 11] beauty of even its smallest incidental designs. But this very richness of sculptural invention prevented the French from cultivating their powers of painting, except in illumination (of which art they were the acknowledged masters) , and in glass-painting. ”

“ Painting, an art which one could hold fast with one's eyes, and follow step by step with the external senses, seemed more favourable for such an end; the English and French had already theorized about plastic art, and by a comparison drawn from this, it was thought that poetry might be grounded. The former placed images before the eyes, the latter before the fancy ”

“ Here the arts which bring Art home to the multitude have found no entrance. Engraving, printing, carving, ornamental work in metal, wood, or pottery, gardening, or artistic husbandry, are graces that have not crossed this dirty threshold. The aesthetics, which have had some part in the government of the country have never developed the blessed aesthetic of home.
Physically, you find a race of great capacity. The frame, if wanting the compactness of the French and the solidity of the English, is large and shapely ”

“ Its artists selected, in general, some scene of humour or amusement, in the discovery of which, the most ignorant spectators might discover other sources of pleasure than those which the merit of the art itself afforded. They did not pretend, in general, to aim at the exhibition of passion or powerful emotion: their paintings, therefore, are free from that painful display of theatrical effect, which characterises the French school ”

“ It is essential that there should be perfect harmony between the natural attitude of the figure and the space it lives in—that a square saint should not be put in a round hole. Range through plastic art, from Chaldæa to France, and you will see how this principle of adaptation has always ruled composition. ”

“ Difficulties of this kind, and others like them, which have been raised in respect to a thoroughly scientific treatment of fine art have been borrowed from current ideas, points of view, and reflection, the more systematic expansion of which we may read ad nauseam in previous literature, in particular French literature, upon the subject of beauty and the fine arts. ”

“ And surely at this time of day it ought not to be necessary to remind people, especially French people, that any-87- subject, provided the artist is thoroughly possessed by it, is as good as any other; that the forms and colours, and their relations, of a pot of flowers or fruit on a table, passionately apprehended, are capable of inspiring as sublime a work of art as the Madonna or the Crucifixion. ”

“ It is in Keats that the artistic spirit of this century first found its absolute incarnation.
And these pre-Raphaelites, what were they? If you ask nine-tenths of the British public what is the meaning of the word æsthetics, they will tell you it is the French for affectation or the German for a dado; and if you inquire about the pre-Raphaelites you will hear something about an eccentric lot of young men to whom a sort of divine crookedness and holy awkwardness in drawing were the chief objects of art. To know nothing about their great men is one of the necessary elements of English education. ”

“ Nevertheless, the taste for both painting and sculpture was rapidly extending in all countries, and especially in France, which, though it never produced a great man in either branch of art, had always an admiration of that which is fine when produced by others. ”

“ On the other hand, when thought has been independently exercised, refinement, engrafted upon its bold, though perhaps rude strength, will receive novel combinations and freshness of character, while the reception of more perfect modes in the same walk, will but improve the faculties, without oppressing the powers, of native genius. Again, the fluctuations of painting observable during its progress in France, appear to have arisen chiefly from the influence which favorite masters have been able to exercise over the art universally in that country. ”