Modern Painting (Illustrated Edition). S.S. Van Dine
years, is far more intelligent than present-day academic precepts.
Let us regard Delacroix as a great pioneer who fought against the zymotic formalism of his day and by so doing opened up a new era of expression. He is the link in the chain which holds the brilliant gems of painting. If he himself fell short of genius, he nevertheless fulfilled a destiny which intrinsically is in many ways more fine: he made genius possible for those who were to come after him.
The other man who contributed vitally to modern colour theories was J. M. W. Turner, born in 1775, one year before Constable. Like Delacroix he had ardent and influential defenders; and the coincidence is emphasised by the fact that between these two great colour innovators there existed a striking thematic similarity. Ruskin took care that Turner should taste those beneficent honours which the world generally withholds from a painter during his lifetime. He accomplished this feat by praise which was largely enthusiasm and by criticism which spelled partiality. But a panegyric not founded on accuracy and authenticity defeats its own object in the end. Turner himself remarked that Ruskin discovered recondite points in his painting of which he, as the artist, was ignorant. This might have been true, or it might have been sarcasm. But whether Ruskin or Turner knew more about the latter’s art, the fact remains that the author of Modern Painters overestimated the painter for a reason totally inapposite to æsthetic consideration:—the almost photographic perfection of his canvases. Later, when the spirituel Whistler tarnished this English didactician’s reputation for infallibility, the latter’s pronunciamentos were questioned, in some quarters ridiculed. And Turner, accepted because of Ruskin’s assurances, became suspect.
But no amount of effulgent literary criticism can obscure the authentic accomplishments of this poor barber’s son. Turner’s contributions to the colour methods of the eighties were too large, and his imitators too bold, for the fact to be longer ignored. In his Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, The Fighting Téméraire and especially in Rain, Steam and Speed, he had begun to divide the surfaces of his objects into minute touches of different colours—not, perhaps, for the purpose of heightening the emotional qualities of the paintings as a whole, but for the primitive reason that the device gave accuracy to them as representations of nature. These pictures Monet and Pissarro studied closely during the Franco-Prussian War, and there is no doubt that the result of this study determined the direction taken by the Impressionists. Turner’s earlier pictures had been too sombre to meet the demand for brilliancy in that first great modern school, and the canvases in which his vision of sunlight began to take form had not yet been painted. These later pictures, with their light tonality and their full use of misty blue and gold, had a further influence on the Impressionists’ conception of colour.
When Monet and Pissarro went to London in 1871 they had been habituated to the use of broad flat tones, and were astonished at Turner’s extraordinary snow and ice effects which were obtained by juxtaposing little spots of diverse colour and by the gradating of tones. On their return to France they both made use of this striking artifice, and developed it, in conjunction with Delacroix’s theories, into what later an unknown humorist of the Charivari named Impressionism. This process was given further impetus by another Frenchman, Jongkind, called the European Hiroshige. There is more than a superficial analogy between Jongkind and Turner; and the Impressionists, first under the influence of Corot and Courbet, found the effects they sought by using the purity of Turner with the facture of Jongkind. It was thus they were brought back to the theories of Delacroix which they had partially abandoned. This return had a profound raison d’être, for between the last phase of Delacroix and the later sketches of Turner there is a similarity which was apparent even to their contemporaries. But though the resemblance was as pronounced as that between Turner and the Impressionists, the eulogists of that movement chose to ignore and, in some cases, to deny it.
This new method of using colour did not constitute the only debt the Impressionists owed Turner. They also found in him an added inspiration toward freedom of arrangement and unconventionality of design. The landscape painters before Turner’s day conceived their out-of-door pictures in more or less definite moulds. A tree in one man’s canvas, being an idealistic conception, was difficult of differentiation from a tree in another’s. All their pictures were permeated by the same motif. But Turner, along with Constable and Bonington, began putting character into landscapes. As a consequence their pictures exuded a new freedom of arrangement.
To appreciate Turner fully we must overlook his astonishing ability for transcription—a heritage from his architectural days—and consider him as a man who loved nature so ardently that it was impossible for him to approach it intellectually. His sketches, both in water-colour and oil, were, unlike those of the Impressionists, rarely done in the open. He conceived them in pencil, wrote upon his clouds, trees and stones the colours he saw in them, and later, in the solitude of his studio, “worked them up.” Had the Impressionists, after their frenzied séances before models, taken their canvases home, organised and modified them, they would no doubt have produced greater net results artistically. Organisation, in its finest sense, comes only through contemplation and reflection; and while Turner did not possess the genius for rhythm in any of its manifestations, he nevertheless realised that mere truth does not make a picture. The Sun of Venice Going to Sea is as excellent as anything Monet or Sisley has ever done. In Turner there is a feeling for the grandiose such as few moderns possess. Did this gift come from Claude whom he delighted in imitating? Even Constable spoke of a Turner canvas as the most complete work of genius he ever saw. But this was the beau geste of a contemporary who wished to appear broad-minded. The truth lay further down the slope. Turner undoubtedly showed genius in his competent copying of even the most insignificant of of nature’s accidents. The composition of The Devil’s Bridge is the foundation on which are built many of Monet’s pictures; and the Rain, Steam and Speed canvas can hang beside La Gare St. Lazare without loss to either.
Delacroix re-established an Italian mode of expression and tried to make of it a modern language. Turner, in a new language, spoke of ancient things. But Courbet ignored all method, and withal became the father of latter-day art. In him was the embryo of that distinctly modern spirit which demands visible proof before believing. Like William of Orange, he arose triumphant above every opposition. His art stemmed temperamentally from the Dutch and Spaniards, for while he imitated no one, he was unconsciously influenced by many. So complete was his assimilation of great men that in his expression they all had a place. He himself says that he studied antiquity as a swimmer crosses a river. The academicians were drowned there. So was Delacroix. Courbet learned in his passage that in adaptation is the confession of sterility. But though he avoided paraphrasing and copying the old masters, we find throughout his life recurring traces of Van Dyke, Zurbarán, Delacroix, Rembrandt, El Greco, Géricault, Ribera, Velazquez and that little known Valencian master, Juan de Juanes.
Courbet was considered an ignorant, vulgar and brutal peasant. But this judgment was the outgrowth of public miscomprehension rather than of any authentic evidence in the man himself. Courbet was the epitome of that unstudied naturalism which is antipodal to the hypocrisies of society. France, during his day, was governed by the dictates of theatricalism. Its ideals were those of Renaissance Italy, and its artistic attitude reflected a refinement of vision approaching decadence. Courbet’s deportmental crudities alone were a source of antagonism, and when to these were added scorn and indifference the hostility against him became violent. But temperamentally he was aristocratic. The peasant mind is fundamentally traditional: Courbet was violently revolutionary. Nor did he lack fineness of mind. His early portraits embodied the subtleties of modelling in Rembrandt as well as the extraordinary niceties of characterisation in El Greco. The compositions of his pictures alone belie any coarseness of fibre in the man. They are founded on a weakened S which, since the decay of Byzantine art, had done valiant service for the most exalted painters such as Rubens and Tintoretto. This compositional figure appears, either exact or varied, in his Le Combat de Cerfs, Le Retour de la Conférence, Chien et Lièvres, and L’Enterrement à Ornans.
Courbet’s reputation for vulgarity was derived more from his lack of facile fluency, so common in the French tradition, than from a basic understanding of the structural synthesis of his work. And this misconception of him was aggravated by his being the first painter unwilling to accept praise as the public chose to dole it out. He was a self-advertiser, and such men as