Personalities in Art
by Royal Cortissoz
1925
Contents
I. THE ART: CRITICISM
II. THE ART CRITIC AS ICONOCLAST . . . , 15
I* PROFESSOR VAN DYKE ON REMBRANDT 17
It, PROFESHOR VAN DYKE ON VBRMEER . . 37
IIL THE THIRTY-NINTH VERMEER ..... 45
IV. LEONARDO'S LEGACY os BEAXJTY . . , . 51
V. RAPHAEL AND THE ART OF PORTRAIT PAINTING 63 ,
VL RELIGIOUS PAINTING ........ 77
VII. THE CULT or TUB DRAWING ..... 93
VIII, VKNICK AS A PAINTING-GROUND . . . . 107
IX. SILHOUETTES OF OLD MASTERS ..... 123
i. VAN DYCJC'S "DJEDALUS AND ICARUS" 125
it. VELASQUEZ'S "DYING SENECA" ... 128
III. TWO POfcTfcAXTS BY REYNOLDS AND GAINS-
BOEOUGH ......... T--
........... 139
XI. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ...... 149
X. HUBERT ROBERT ........ 151
U. A POftTJtAIT BY DAVXD ...... 155
XXX. PRim*KOK ... ...... 165
XIX. OAVARHI ........... 167
XIIL DAUUXRR ........... i8t
XIV. COURBKT ........... 193
V
vi Contents
XV* Puvxs DP, CHAVANXKS
XVI. DEGAS ........
I- AS PAXNTKIt AN'H I>KAFTSMAV II* AS A MAX
III. AS? A SCULPTOR
IV, AS A COLLKC'TUK
"XVII. MONKT
XVIIL SKVKK RKNOSSR
XIX* ODXtoN KKDON
XX. CZANNK ..
XXI. CiAtrCVIK - .
XXI L VAN (}oa ..... . .... 315
XXIII* KABLY AMKKICAN* PoimtAiTrieK . . , ^ji
XXIV. TKK AICKCXICAN WIMr iKnirsrRCAr, AKT , , , .
XXVII. THK ("KNTKNA&Y OK GI;U;K INKKSS . . jSj
XXVIIL J. ALUKN WKW ........ ,507
XXIX. ROBKXT Bum *,-.,.,. 407
XXX. "391" ....... . . . . 417
XXXI. F0BTUNY .,.,...... 4St4
XXXII.
Illustrations
Head of the Virgin Frontispiece
From the Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci
FACING PAGE
Head of a Young Boy 48
Ftom the Painting by Vermcer
Raphael 66
From the Portrait by Sebastiano dd Piombo
GiuIJano de Medici, Duke of Nemours 68
From the Portrait by Raphael
The Ascension 4 88
From the Fainting by John La Farge
Paulus HofhaJmcr JOO
From the Drawing by Albrecht Bunsr
Venice ng
From the Painting by John Sargcat
Dirclalus and Icarus I2 6
From the Painting by Van Dyck
The Dying Seneca . , . ,
From th Fainting- by Velasquez
Mr*. Vcre of Stonebyrcs *,,,..... 144 From the Painting by Raebum
Lavoisier and His Wife 160
Fn>m the Painting by David
Le Cambriolcur * 174
From the Drawing by Gavarni
Portrait of a Man in the Studio of an Artist ... 222 From the Painting by Degas
e from "The Duo'* 232
from the Drawing by Degas
vii
viii Illustrations
PAOR
Dancers ........ *... 246
From the Bronzes by
Matinee sur la Seine ..........
From the Painting by Claude Monet
Danseuse .......... .
From the Painting by Renoir
Mrs- Richard Yatcs ..... ..... 330
From the Portrait by < Gilbert Stuart
Rus&ek's ........... ,
From th Buildlrtf!: by MrKirn, Mead & While-
The Moorish Knife Grinder ....**. 432 From the Painting by Fortuity
Personalities in Art
I
The Art of Art Criticism
I
THE ART OF ART CRITICISM
Tm>: most Interesting thing in the world for the art critic in the summer of 1923 was the play of the limelight around ~~~ the art critic. Ordinarily he is one of the leant conspicuous of mortals. In a practical age he fa dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of ideas having no practical value. He exercises functions which have nothing on earth to do with the affairs engaging the majority of mankind. He is to u captain of industry what an astronomer is to a movie star, lie could not, if he would; buy an old master; he can only talk about it. But in the year it)2& this talk of his for a little while shared public attention with the occupation of the Ruhr, the divagations of SJgnor Mussolini, and all the other higherected themes of a distracted period. With the tidy sum of half a million dollars involved, it was deemed worth while to call in the art critic, a circumstance almost giving him a " practical " status, almost allying him with "big business/'
I refer to the cause cti&bre of "La Belle Ferronnir," the lady otherwise known as Lucrezia Crivelli, whose portrait by Leonardo da Vinci has long been
Personalities in Art
one of the treasures of the Louvre. Mrs* Andrfic Hahn, of Kansas City, owns a |>ortrait <*f the $*am<? subject which she attributes to the* name master, and which she projx>sed to sell to the Kansas City Museum fur $500,000- Sir Joseph Duveen's assertion that the painting was not a Leonardo held up the transaction, whereupon Mrs. Hahn brought suit to recover from him the amount named. I have not ecn the picture* I have no opinion lu express upon It. But I have been fascinated by that other picture presented by the situation developed in preparation for the trial.
Mrs. Ilahn's painting wan submitted in Paris to the scrutiny of a galaxy of all the critical talents, gathered together by Sir Joseph Duveen. Mr. Bernard Bcranson came over from Italy- Sir Charlt** Holmes, of the National Gallery, arrived from London, Herr Bode was expected from Berlin, hut, I believe, could not come. This was, j^rhapH, a* well, since Mrs, Hahn's attorney, who was present at all these proceeding*, might have drugged in disconcert* ing allusions to another Leonarde*que incident, that of the famous wax bust. But it fo not my object to enumerate here the entire personnel of the critical clan. The {x>int is simply that the dan was summoned, ami that the world on both sicta* of the Atlantic respectfully listened to what it had to t&ay, And while they waited to see which side should prevail, many observers were doubtless moved to wflro
The Art of Art Criticism
tion ami inquiry on the whole broad question of the rAIc of the critic. IF he Is to play his part in court along with the other experts familiar there, with the authorities on chemistry* engineering, lunacy, and so on* how far do his credentials go and what is the story of their establishment?
In the eyes of a multitude of artists the critic is an enemy of mankind, and it is easy to see how this notion has arisen. Consider the difference between the chemist and the art critic, functioning as experts. It embraces a crucial element. One deals with insensate thing*; the other with the works of human beings. The chrmist hurts no feelings; the art critic sometimes rasps them horribly. Judge Parry, in a delightful pa|>er on the celebrated case of Whistler t>s. Ruskin, m which his father, Sergeant Parry, appeared for the plaintiff, recalls an apposite story, Ruskin wrote to a friend that he hoped a devastating criticism he had published on that Individual's picture would make no difference in their friendship. "Dear Ruskin/ 1 replied the artist, ** next time I meet you I shall knock you down, but I hope it will make no difference in our friendship/* There is the nubbin of the question an it lies between the artist and the critic. Wounded amour pr&pre lian never yet permitted a man to reason impersonally. The validity of criticism as an art parses right out of the consciousness of an artist who ha* been rubbed the wrong way* TMs leads to some droll attitudes. An actor, for example, will tell you
Personalities in Art
that the fate of a play, by which we may him to mean judgment on its merits, depends upon the opinions passing in conversation among theatregoers. He will respect the simple statement of ** Goml " or "Rotten/* which may be heard as the audience disperses. The statement, of course, may be made by an auditor who knows nothing about the art of the stage, who knows only what he Kkt*s, who knows only whether he has been entertained or bored. On the other hand, the trained critic who not only say* that the thing is bad but gives his reasons, gets the actor's goat*
It is in the nature of things. It will always be 30. But it sheds no light on our problem. Let UH return to Whistler. He won damages of but a farthing out of the trial. Forthwith he set out to get even in hi* own way. Summing up what he called " the fin mot and spirit of this matter/* he proceeded to belabor Ruakin and, through him, all art critic*. Ho rained some good laughs, laughs to be enjoyed with him to this day by any open-minded reader, whtttlutr he IH: artist or critic; but he failed to contribute a feather** weight to the philosophy of the subject, I may note his principal fallacy: "He [the critic) brands himself as the necessary blister for the health of the painter, and writes that he may do g<*xl to hi* art." The critic does nothing of the sort. The point that Whistler overlooked is that evaluation Is description. To say that a picture is bad in thin or that w**|x*et 1%
The Art of Art Criticism
only incidentally to admonish the artist; the real purpose is to tell the lay reader what it is like.
Whistler is the salient exponent of the argument that the artist alone is the person to tell you what a work of art is like, or worth, "Shall the painter then decide upon painting? Shall he be the critic and sole authority? Aggressive as is this supposition, I fear that, in the length of time, his assertion alone has established what even the gentlemen of the quill accept as the canons of art and recognize as the masterpieces of work." It is a plausible dictum and only gains in plausibility as you turn to some of the sayIngs of artists. Read the "Pensees" of Ingres, or Delacroix, or Rodin, Read one of the most beautiful books on art ever printed, "Les Maitrcs d'Autrefois," written by Fromentin, an artist. Whistler himself, in his "Ten o'clock/' delivered some precious observations* In t*>e invaluable "Impressions sur la Pcinture" of Alfred Stevens, the Franco-Belgian master, there is a reflection which it is impossible to deny: Un grand artiste est en g&n&al un bon critique, parce qii*il p&netre mieux dans les arcanes des chases* The most illuminating talk on art to which I have ever listened wan that of John La Faxge. I need not labor the subject- From Leonardo down there have been artists who were magnificently eloquent and instructive on their mystery. But that, I maintain, means simply that from time to time and not very often "~ the artist has been doubled with the philosr-
8 . Personalities in Art
opher and the critic. He has happened to possess, in addition to his-artistic gift, the critical faculty, which is a thing by itself. He has been a good critic not merely because he has been an artist but because the gods have given him a dual nature.
There is the familiar hypothesis that the critic is an artist who has failed, but I need not dwell on this. It is refuted by the testimony of uncounted exhibitions that, along with his betters, the artist who has failed goes right on painting. Nor is the artist who has succeeded necessarily a profitable guide. Stevens has noted the intense preoccupation of the successful painter with the formulas through which he has won his success. It is the foible of most artists, standing forever in the way of their exercising a catholic and sympathetic judgment in matters of art. They see things too much in the light of what they have themselves done. I speak here not from theory but from observation. No, we must seek elsewhere than among artists for criticism. Stevens himself gives us a help* ful dew when he says: V opinion d'un connoisseur est -plus flatteuse que les suffrages de lafoule ignorante* In connoisseurship resides the key to criticism, in knowledge, vitalized by natural taste and flair. It corresponds in art to what Matthew Arnold was driving at in letters when he talked about the critic's knowing the best that had been thought and said in the world.
In knowing. It is the corner-stone of criticism. I
The Art of Art Criticism
have at my elbow one of the classical achievements in art criticism, the yellowed pages of a series of articles printed long ago in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. They were written by the French critic Thore, over the name of "W. Burger," and they announce his reconstitution of the works of Vermeer of Delft. Jan Vermeer was known before him, but his works were largely hidden under other names in the galleries of Europe. Thore divined him and restored to him his lost masterpieces. With inexhaustible patience and industry in research, with "conviction, ardor, and passion/' as Havard says, with intuition and with knowledge, he plodded through the museums, spotted the previously unknown Vermeers, and gave a great painter to fame. I wonder if any painter, in the r61e assigned to him by Whistler in the passage I have quoted, has ever performed a similar service to the cause of art? How often does the painter have the time, or the temperament, to delve as the critic delves? How much pains does he take to know?
Thor6 ? s great coup dates from 1866. It was in the early seventies that Giovanni Morelli, an Italian writing in German over a Russian name, that of "Ivan Lermolieff," made his first excursions in the art of art criticism and demonstrated that if it was an art it was also to some extent susceptible of approximation to an exact science. In studies of the works of certain masters in German and Italian galleries he developed a method as painstaking as that
Personalities in Art
of There, with traits of its own placing the whole matter upon a firmer basis than it had ever had before. He analyzed the characteristics of a painter with the systematic thoroughness of an anatomist. He turned comparison from an odious thing into a source of illumination. His method has been in use ever since, and largely through its influence art criticism, in the modern sense, has been as fully professionalized as art itself, strong in research and documentation, coming into court with emphasis upon facts as well as upon imponderables.
Art criticism is not a matter of casual and capricious impressionism, but a reasoned activity of the mind. The indisposition of some commentators to regard it in that light is partly explained by the fact that once in so often the critic perpetrates a perfectly gorgeous howler. In 1909 Bode bought in London, for 8,000, for the Berlin Museum, a wax bust of "Flora" which he attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. It presently turned out to be the work of a deceased British sculptor named Lucas. When the inside of it was explored it yielded a fragment of a mid-Victorian bed quilt. In 1910 Mr, James Grieg, an English critic, tried to persuade the world that the famous "Rokeby Venus' 7 was painted, not by Velasquez, but by Raphael Mengs. Decidedly your art critic is, like everybody else, a fallible creature, and he is never so near to discrediting himself as when he sets up to be a pope. But that is an error which may
The Art of Art Criticism n
overtake a man in any walk of life. It doesn't touch the essentials of valid art criticism, which are knowledge, experience, research, scientific system. all endued with a force sprung from that mysterious thing called flair. For art criticism is nothing if not, with all its other resources, clairvoyant. One of Berenson's comments on the Hahn picture, quoted in the cables, provides a useful illustration. "It hasn't/ 3 he said, "the severity of a true Leonardo." Severity, no less. How are you to weigh and measure that? Can you touch and handle it? How are you to prove or disprove its presence in a given picture? You can't settle the question by rule of thumb. Either you feel Leonardo's severity or you don't. I remember looking some thirty years ago at the "Madonna of San Onofrio," on the Janiculum, and wondering why it was called a Leonardo. It seemed to me, as it seemed to others, to have been painted by Boltraffio. But nobody that I know of has ever been able conclusively to demonstrate that attribution, which is nevertheless now generally accepted. Imagine a drawing, falsely given to Botticelli, and submitted to a critic of Italian art. Ask him why he rejects it* If he tells you that the line is rigid, inelastic, where Botticelli's line is supple, flowing, do you expect hi to tell you how he knows? How, save through a power of perception residing only partly in his eyes, Knowledge of Botticelli's drawings helps him. So does instinct, flair.
Personalities in Art
I thought of the effect of the play of that instinct when the death of Sorolla revived discussion of his. art. Everybody remembers the sensation that he made when an immense collection of his works was shown at the Hispanic Museum some years ago. The foule ignorante hailed him tumultuously as the opener of a new heaven and a new earth. He was an accomplished painter. He knew how to depict figures moving in the open air and in the water, under blazing sunshine, and he turned his clever trick to something like perfection. There never were more joyous pictures. Only they were not the evidences of a great creative art. It was the business of the art critic to enforce that point, to enforce the discrimination which is the central principle in the enjoyment of works of art; and as he reflects upon the altered status of Sorolla, abundantly honorable but not by any means what it was at the Hispanic show, he may be forgiven if he smiles at the Whistlers of this world, with their ipse dixits as to who shall and who shall not open his mouth about painting. I see Berenson in my mind's eye as he was described in the despatches, "with immaculately white-gloved hands," pointing out what he saw in the picture before him. I am aware of his learning, of his long study of Leonardo. Speaking of the picture in the Louvre, he said that forty years ago he had been just ignorant enough to doubt its authenticity. Now the doubts were all gone. Greater knowledge had worked the change in
The Art of Art Criticism 13
his opinion. Also the source of his later thought was that instinct which guided him in the matter of Leonardo's "severity," a thing not so much to be seen as felt. This, as I have said, has come to be a factor in tangible affairs, a factor to be reckoned with in courts. Study of facts has come to fortify a spiritual thing. With the passage of time, a new sanction has been conferred upon the great saying of Keats: "When I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine."
II
The Art Critic as Iconoclast
I- Professor Van Dyke on Rembrandt II- Professor Van Dyke on Verrneer
II
THE ART CRITIC AS ICONOCLAST
I PROFESSOR VAN DYKE ON REMBRANDT
WHEN Professor John C. Van Dyke's "Rembrandt and His School" was published, it achieved notoriety in something quicker than the proverbial leap; it made its sensation even before it was read. On the day of its appearance in the fall of 1923, the salient point it assumed to prove was given out to the world, the point thus succinctly stated on the wrapper: " There are eight hundred pictures given to Rembrandt by experts and authorities, but Professor Van Dyke can give him only a scant fifty." That, by itself, was enough to excite talk. It was as though some one had suddenly announced that Shakespeare could have only six of his plays, Beethoven only three of his symphonies. The outburst of scepticism provoked was perfectly natural. But it included remarks which only served to cloud the issue.
The assertion was made in some quarters that Professbr Van Dyke was not a recognized authority on Rembrandt, and consequently did not deserve a hearing. He is not a recognized authority on the
17
1 8 Personalities in Art
subject, It is true. He has not fought in the lists as such. Previously he had published no formal contributions to it of which I had any knowledge. But he has been known as an intelligent writer on art for many years, during which he has functioned also as a teacher of the history of art in Rutgers College. He tells us in his book that he began to question certain Rembrandt attributions as far back as 1883 and that he has ridden the hobby ever since. Humanly speaking, he ought by this time to have something to say about the Dutch master, and there is no earthly reason why he shouldn't say it or why it shouldn't receive courteous attention. Also, it is apposite to point out that the reservation of a topic for two or three sacrosanct orades may be overdone. There is nothing presumptuous, nothing unlawful, in Professor Van Dyke's differing with Bode, Bredius, and De Groot. They know their Rembrandt well, and it is fitting that their judgments should be received with respect* With respect, yes, but not with obsequious awe. A cat may look at a king.
The truth is that behind this thwacking of Professor Van Dyke with names there lies more than the substantial repute of the men who own them. There lies also the overweening confidence of the American in the foreigner. There is a type of collector in the United States whose conduct in the presence of a European expert resembles that of a rabbit in the presence of a hungry boa-constrictor. What impresses
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 19
him about the old master for which he is negotiating is especially the "certification" from some foreign authority that is offered with the picture. It would be interesting to get these experts in a row and extort from them a list of the documents with which they have thus fortified the art market for the last thirty or forty years. Their good faith is, of course, unimpeachable, but, as Doctor Johnson said, the author of a lapidary inscription is not upon oath, and neither is the author of one of these " certifications." I wonder, anyhow, if all of them have the value of Mosaic revelation. Doctor Bode, for example, is the man who bought a mid-Victorian wax bust of " Flora " under the impression that it was a Leonardo. The Kaiser, with his omniscient wisdom, backed him up in this hypothesis, and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the sculpture figures as a Leonardo in the Berlin Museum to this day. It would be foolish to regard this episode as invalidating Bode's learning where Rembrandt is concerned, but it may fairly be taken as justifying Professor Van Dyke in having opinions of his own, even though they are not in exact harmony with the opinions of the German director. He has arrived at these opinions by prolonged study in European and American galleries, public and private, and he has organized them for the purpose of his book by the comparative method. Little by little the whole Rembrandt ceuvre took on for him the aspect of "a huge snowball that had gathered
2O Personalities in Art
to itself the work of the school/* and in attempting to reduce that ball to its original ingredients he would assign each one to the painter whose characteristics seemed to him to proclaim themselves. Say he found a picture given to Rembrandt which struck him as looking like a Bol. He would turn to the admitted works of Bol, make a comparison, and, while using the originals in his study of the subject, he would also employ photographs, placing them side by side. This is what he does in the book. He uses the "deadly parallel." His general discussion occupies only six brief chapters, filling about forty pages. The bulk of the volume is made up of tersely annotated lists, accompanied by plates. Here it is not Rembrandt, but the pupil, who comes, so to say, into the foreground; the master is impoverished that the pupil may be enriched. Take Eeckhout as a specimen. Each one of four admitted pictures by him has beside it a picture which Prbfessor Van Dyke also assigns to him, parenthetically noting that it is otherwise "given to Rembrandt."
This method the author evidently regards as being so efficacious as practically to take the burden of proof off his hands. All you have to do is to study his photographs with others to be obtained by yourself, for those ca*es which he does not illustrate identify resemblances, and call it a day. "In rearranging the pictures/' he says, "I have allowed them to fall where they would. I have had no tJieory to en-
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 21
force and have sought merely that pictures of a kind, aestheticaJly, mentally, and technically, should go together. Names have not prejudiced me, and in the distribution Rembrandt has been allowed to fare the same as Bol or Horst or Eeckhout. The result of the rearrangement has been that thirty or more groups of pictures have formed themselves rather than been formed by me." This passage is not altogether persuasive. "I have had no theory to enforce." Not consciously, it would appear. But in effect, I should say, if he has not been ridden by a theory he has been the victim of an obsession, of an id&e fixe. It is said that we usually have some difficulty in seeing ourselves as others see us. A red-headed man admits that he is red-headed. A woman equally rufous will call herself auburn-haired and think herself into the conviction. Professor Van Dyke may repudiate the notion that there is any theory in his book, but it is hard to see what else has so steadily lured hrm into the trick of jamming square pegs into round holes.
Let us turn, however, from his method to his results, endeavoring to make a just test of his findings. I have studied the book from beginning to end with the utmost care,, not contented to draw alone upon memories of great numbers of the Rembrandts in question, but consulting also a voliijninous collection of photographs. I have made endless comparisons in the manner xlf ged by the author, seeking always to give his argt&nent the utmost possible weight. It is
22. Personalities in Art
essential in an examination of this kind to meet the iconoclast half way, to give him every possible advantage, and to keep an open mind. At the same time one must realize in this case the peculiar gravity of Professor Van Dyke's assumption. His denudation of Rembrandt is terrific. It entails a proportionate responsibility. If he is to be listened to at all he must advance very solid reasons*
On the principle of allowing Professor Van Dyke to put his best foot forward I touch first upon the most plausible comparison he makes. It is between the portrait of Rembrandt's sister which hangs in the Liechtenstein gallery at Vienna and the version of the same subject which hangs in the Brera at Milan. I may cite part of his analysis:
The Liechtenstein portrait is profound. The face is an epitome of all that is typical, sensitive, noble, refined in Dutch girlhood. It Is a wonder and a marvel and becomes more wonderful and marvellous the longer you look at it. Keep on looking at it for five or ten minutes and let it unfold to you its own depth, subtlety, and penetration, No one but a great master could do such a work as that. Now turn to the Brera portrait and do you not instantly feel a great loosening of the mental grasp, a falling down in the mental conception? The personality of the sitter now appears shallow. She is merely an empty-headed girl posing for her portrait. She epitomizes nothing, stands for nothing, reveals nothing but a superficial exterior, such as any Dutch girl from the burgher quarter might show. The emptiness of the conception, the lack of thought or of reflection in the painter, even the lack
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 23
of comprehensive vision, is too apparent for further argument. That alone might be sufficient to convince one that the two portraits were not painted by the same man.
The distinctions he draws in the matter of mental conception he confirms when he discusses the emotional significance of the two portraits, and he is equally shrewd in the discussion of purely technical differences. His conclusion that the Brera portrait was painted not by Rembrandt but by Jan Lievens is so persuasive that one is inclined to regard the matter as settled. Professor Van Dyke is unmistakably confident in this case, so confident that he puts it in the forefront of his study. Impressed by it, we go on to a systematic survey of his lists. Immediately we begin to scent trouble not for Rembrandt, but for his critic. The scheme is alphabetical, so I will begin with Jacob Backer. The "Young Dutchwoman " by Rembrandt, in the Metropolitan Museum, is placed side by side with a portrait by Backer in London. The comparison moves Professor Van Dyke to give the Rembrandt to Backer. What promptly strikes me about it is that it discloses a vitality which the Backer conspicuously lacks. An exactly similar impression is left when the author compares Mrs. Havemeyer's "Portrait of an Old Lady" with a Backer in Berlin. The New York painting is alive, the other is not. Then Professor Van Dyke takes up the famous "Elizabeth Bas," at Amsterdam. It has been doubted before. Doctor Bredius advanced
24 Personalities in Art
the hypothesis that it was painted by BoL Professor Van Dyke gives it to Backer. If Rembrandt must be robbed of this great portrait, then Bol might better have it than Backer. Once in this sheaf of photographs Professor Van Dyke bolsters up his case. The "Wife of Alenson," in Paris, is far more credible as the Backer that he calls it than it is as a Rembrandt. But in the other instances I have cited he carries no conviction whatever.
The explanation cuts deep into the authority of the author. In these matters the imponderables are profoundly important. Models, costumes, modes of composition, technical methods, may all be related to the solidarity of a school and period. It is the subtle, indefinable quality of genius that counts, the matter that you cannot stick a pin through but that you feel instinctively. This is what Professor Van Dyke seems to have missed, a circumstance which I note not only in the chapter on Backer but elsewhere. The harshest but, as it seems to me, the truest thing to say about this book is that it is insensitive, that it wants imaginative insight. Professor Van Dyke seems so curiously blind to what jumps to the eye that his evidence turns against himself. I go on tabulating the luckier hits in his illustrative scheme and I find a few. It is believable that Eeckhout painted the "Ascension" at Munich, as he says, and not Rembrandt. I can sympathetically entertain the idea that the "Portrait of a Man 77 in the Schwab collection
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 25
might better be given to Carel Fabritius than to Rembrandt. The Petrograd "Saskia as Flora " is more probably by Flinck than by Rembrandt. I can follow the argument that gives the "Portrait of an Old Woman/' likewise in Russia, to Koninck. But there are two significant points about these various attributions. They make, in the first place, a very slender group, a mere drop in the great sea of Rembrandtesque painting. And secondly they are intrinsically of no great importance. When Professor Van Dyke settles down to strip Rembrandt the removals that seem reasonable have no great meaning. In the larger sphere of the master's activity he leaves me absolutely sceptical.
Reverting to the introductory matter in this catalogue there are one or two remarks that require to be noticed. In disintegrating his " snowball/' in taking apart what he designates "the present hodgepodge" embodied in the Rembrandt cewore, Professor Van Dyke is governed by a strange idea. It is so strange that I must quote the author's exact words:
"The Night Watch," more than any other picture, seems to confirm the tale told by his pictures, that Rembrandt was a portrait painter and little more. He could not do the historical picture in a satisfactory way, and probably after some trials gave it up. I have gone over the figure pictures assigned to him, again and yet again, in the hope that I should find in some one of them the trace of his mind and hand, but I have been almost com-
26 Personalities in Art
pletely disappointed. The dramatic, the pathetic, the spectacular, the grotesque things set down to him are the pictures of pupils in which he had no more than a guiding voice perhaps not even that. There is doubt about even the few compositions that can be set down to him.
One picture alone offers sufficient commentary on this pronouncement, the sublime " Supper at Emmaus" in the Louvre, a picture which Professor Van Dyke himself admits is a Rembrandt and characterizes as "of much emotional feeling and great pathos." If there is one thing more than another which is disclosed in the Shakespearian pell-mell of Rembrandt's works it is that he was a master of great creative imagination, ranging from low comedy to tragic solemnity. It is Professor Van Dyke's unawareness of this that largely vitiates his thesis. This is, I repeat, an Insensitive book. The author's sense is sealed where the inner fires of Rembrandt's genius are concerned. Teasing his mind with surface matters, he remains untouched by paintings from which greatness emanates with a kind of tangible electric force. Repeatedly as I trace his path through the ceuwe I see how it is just the magic of Rembrandt that is forever eluding him.
He does not see that the " Tobias and the Angel," in the Louvre, which he would give to Bol, has infinitely more energy in it than the "Three Marys" of Bol placed beside it. Over and over again I note this Rembrandtesque superiority in the picture which
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 27
the author would take from the master and give to the pupil; there is a perceptible lift in vitality, in quality, in beauty, and it is particularly noticeable in those very paintings which, from their subjects, Professor Van Dyke would give to pupils. The "Blinding of Samson," at Frankfort, is a case in point. It is a work of thrilling furia, one of the most impressively dramatic things Rembrandt ever painted. Professor Van Dyke finds it coarse and brutal in technic, and in giving it to Horst adds that it "represents Horst rather at his worst." Now, that I differ from Professor Van Dyke on the merits of this work is not the point on which I would dwell. What I more especially commend to the reader is a comparison of the "Samson" with the recognized works of Horst. How Professor Van Dyke can regard it as supporting his argument is simply incomprehensible. The artist of the Frankfort "Samson" is obviously a bold, swinging technician, a master of the brush, a powerful painter. The artist of the "Isaac Blessing Jacob," reproduced beside the "Samson," which is to say Gerrit Horst, is obviously a mediocrity. He couldn't have painted the "Samson." Neither could he have painted the Petrograd " Danae," which the author would take away from Rembrandt to give to him.
When I say that at times this critic is merely "incomprehensible" I am not speaking lightly, but out of a genuine bewilderment. An instance is supplied
28 Personalities in Art
by his comment on the masterpiece at Dresden, "Manoah's Offering." I remember that painting as I might remember a great strain of organ music. The genius of Rembrandt fairly glows in it. Professor Van Dyke says: "The picture (as regards the two figures) is superb. I tried to fit it in the Rembrandt group again and again, but without success. It is too black in the shadows, too hard in the contours. 5 ' He prefers to think it by an unidentified pupil. All this, I maintain, is incomprehensible. Suppose we grant, for the sake of argument (though I am not otherwise inclined to do so), that the shadows are too black, the contours too hard, the light uncertain, the angel poorly drawn. What does all that amount to against the overwhelmingly Rembrandtesque beauty and style of the picture? And why assume that he was impeccable and that an imperfection condemned a picture as not his? Professor Van Dyke holds oddly contradictory views on this point. On page 20 we are permitted to believe that Rembrandt was not "always and infallibly right." On page 107 we are told where the real Rembrandts proclaim themselves "they are absolutely right from start to finish." That is a fearfully dangerous attitude to take toward any master. No master invariably strikes twelve. Rembrandt didn't do so. But, as Professor Van Dyke himself observes, "some touch of his genius will be apparent in his most indifferent performance/' Unfortunately, the author's decisions seem to be based
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 29
on the point of view I have cited from page 107. He has a preconceived notion of the typical authentic Rembrandt as a thing "absolutely right from start to finish,' 5 and apparently when a picture fails to meet this touchstone he straightway assigns it to some one else, even if it must be, as in the case of "Manoah's Offering," a,n unidentified pupil. All the time the Rembrandts go on glowing, if I may so express it, proclaiming their authenticity not by flawlessness in detail but by the organic life in them, the accent of power they bear.
I cannot too often reiterate that in this "accent of power " lies the crux of the matter. Tn the conventional and I fear rather superficial view of the matter the art expert has some sources of knowledge unavailable to the vulgar, which enables him to decide absolutely as to the authenticity of a given picture. This is a fallacy. Knowledge of a master's works in detail, extending to nuances of color, habits of composition, character of surface, peculiarities of brushwork, and so on, will carry him far and enable him to dogmatize where the layman is left dumb. But when he has studied all these things, when he has documented his picture to the utmost, he must admit, if he is honest, that what finally determines his judgment is the operation of his instinct. Bode must depend upon that. That, in the long run, is what Professor Van Dyke must depend upon, and that, I feel more and more as I study his book, is where he
30 Personalities in Art
is unreliable. I have been at pains to tabulate some of his attributions and will give the list here, stating the name of the Rembrandt, the place where it hangs and the painter to whom Professor Van Dyke ascribes it:
"Portrait of Titus." Metropolitan Museum. B. Fabritius.
"Portrait of Woman." National Gallery, London. B. Fabritius,
"Hendrickje Stoffels." Metropolitan Museum. B. Fabritius.
"Portrait of Man." Fricfc Collection. B. Fabritius.
"Man With Golden Helmet." Berlin Museum. Aert de Gelder.
"An Oriental." Metropolitan Museum. Solomon Koninck.
"Old Woman Cutting Her Nails." Metropolitan Museum. Nicolaes Maes.
"Portrait of Woman." National Gallery, London. Nicolaes Maes.
"An Architect." Cassel Gallery. Nicolaes Maes.
"Portrait of Man." Metropolitan Museum. Nicolaes Maes.
"Portrait of Girl." Art Institute, Chicago. Unidentified pupil.
The list might be extended, but I select the foregoing pictures because they are illustrated in the book, and may therefore easily be referred to by the reader. Let him make the comparisons that Professor Van Dyke makes, and let him be especially careful to remember the "accent of power" to which
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 3 1
I have ventured to call his attention. I should be surprised if he did not invariably find it present in the pictures named, in vivid contrast to the quality of the pupil in each case cited by the author. On two pictures in particular I find it irresistible to pause. One is the exquisite "Portrait of Titus/' at the Metropolitan Museum, given by Professor Van Dyke to Bernaert Fabritius. It is one of the loveliest portraits of youth in all European painting. It has extraordinary psychological interest, and technically there rests upon it what I can only describe as a Rembrandtesque bloom, a fairly magnificent patina. Bernaert Fabritius never in his life painted anything half so flowerlike, so masterly. If there is one other attribution made by Professor Van Dyke which more than this one falls to the ground as emphatically not proved, it is that which he essays in the matter of the "Old Woman Cutting Her Nails."
Professor Van Dyke begins by attacking it very unjustly, I think in technical details. The lights, he says, are forced and out of value. The shadows are too dark. The nose " jumps " forward. The handling is hasty, heavy, ineffective. The drawing is not correct. Then the model resembles a model used by Nicolaes Maes many times. Ergo, the "Old Woman Cutting Her Nails " is by Nicolaes Maes. To clinch the matter the author reproduces beside this picture the "Sleeping Woman," by Maes, in the Brussels Museum. Only he doesn't clinch it at all,
32 Personalities in Art
for, with that fantastic blindness to which I am compelled to allude again and yet again, this critic misses the perfectly obvious fact that the "Old Woman Cutting Her Nails" has a breadth, a monumental majesty, a cloudy splendor, to which Maes never even remotely approximated. Rembrandt's old woman in this picture has the imposing grandeur of an antique statue. Her dignity superbly triumphs over the technical details which Professor Van Dyke so grossly exaggerates. And the painting has, above all things, that indefinable cachet to which I am always returning, the cachet of genius, the cachet of Rembrandt. Do not stop at the comparison the author makes between this work and the three pictures by Maes he prints on the same page. Consider the ceuvre of Maes in its length and breadth. Include such thoroughly characteristic things of his as "The Listening Girl," at Buckingham Palace. Look to the core of each painter's character. You cannot avoid the conclusion that Maes could no more have painted the "Old Woman Cutting Her Nails " than that he could have pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
There is something deeply interesting about the manner in which Professor Van Dyke's comparisons recoil upon himself. The master is too strong for him.
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still.
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 33
Thus Shakespeare in Arnold's sonnet. Thus Rembrandt as the iconoclast seeks to rob him of some of his noblest achievements.
Traversing the lists of works which Professor Van Dyke would give to the pupils, I come back with heightened curiosity to the list to which he would confine Rembrandt, the restricted list which has occasioned all the recent uproar. "Fifty are all that I can now definitely place to his name/ 5 he says. But he also says: "The list of Rembrandt pictures which follows does not pretend to completeness. Some of the works attributed to Rembrandt are in private hands, where I have not been able to see them/' I rub my eyes. The thing seems almost incredible. Here is a book which undertakes to sift the ceuvre of Rembrandt; the author draws up a list of the pictures which he "can now definitely place to his name " ; he assails what may be called the recognized canon of the master's works, and yet he does not "pretend to completeness"! Completeness, in the circumstances, amounts to a point of honor. Is it fair to attempt to riddle the integrity of the admitted ceuvre and then to leave quantities of the pictures that make it outside the inquest, hanging, so to say, in mid-air? Professor Van Dyke observes that "to gain a right conception of Rembrandt, Bol, Eeckhout or Horst it is not necessary to run down and catalogue every indifferent head or half-finished picture of their doing." He thinks that his list of fifty "will give a
34 Personalities in Art
comprehension of the man almost as well as a hundred." It Is as though a literary historian were to announce a theory that Balzac had been served by a corps of ghosts and give us for touchstones nothing but "Pere Goriot" and "Seraphita." It may not be necessary to run down, as Professor Van Dyke suggests, "every indifferent head or half-finished picture," but what of the great masterpieces? What of "The Shipbuilder and His Wife," at Buckingham Palace; the Devonshire and Westminster Rembrandts, and divers other pieces in England? What of certain pictures here, like the marvellous "Scholar With a Bust of Homer," in the Huntington collection, or Mr. Morgan's great "Nicolaes Ruts," or the "Lucrezia" which the late M. C. D. Borden owned? Professor Van Dyke knows the Frick collection, adding the Ilchester Rembrandt therein to his list, but after a laborious search for anything he might have to say about "The Polish Rider" I have run to earth nothing more than an allusion in a note on another picture "the 'Polish Rider' which has been attributed to Eeckhout," To give this cavalier treatment to a canvas of the eminence of this one is sheer wanton presumption- After all, there is such a thing as "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." If Professor Van Dyke thinks that that glorious equestrian portrait is not a Rembrandt, at least he should offer his reasons. He may be dubious about the authority of "experts," but he cannot brush them aside in this
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 35
airy fashion not, at any rate, if he wants his book to be taken seriously.
I do not believe his canon of Rembrandt can be taken seriously. It is too slim and sketchy. Specific subtractions which he would make from the accepted canon in the majority of cases, as I have indicated, remain not proven, and the omissions concerning which he says nothing are too numerous and too important. A canon which merely ignores such outstanding canvases as I have touched upon in the preceding paragraph (and many more could be named) collapses of its own arbitrariness. There is another point which demands comment. There is nothing difficult to believe in the assertion that Rembrandt painted hundreds of pictures. He was that kind of a painter and he lived a fairly long life. What is hard to believe is that that busy career of his produced only about fifty works. The truth is that Rembrandt had the power of a force of nature, pouring forth an immense mass of paintings, drawings, and etchings. There are things in the mass as we know it which doubtless he never saw. Professor Van Dyke, as I have admitted, occasionally bags an error in the accepted canon. But the great bulk of the mass remains unaffected by his book. If there are discrepancies between one picture and another as regards ability they are to be accounted for by the elemental fact that, as I have said, no master always strikes twelve. But there runs through his art like a ground-
3 6 Personalities in Art
swell the energy of genius. It leaves upon his paintings that accent of power which not all the expertise in the world can rub out.
It is a mistake to pooh-pooh Professor Van Dyke's book as unworthy of consideration. It is, for the lover of Rembrandt, an intensely interesting production. The ceuvre constitutes a cosmos of never-ending fascination, and it is always stimulating to explore it anew. Professor Van Dyke is shrewd, ingenious, and ardent. I am sorry for the reader who gets only indignation out of its pages. There is genuine interest to be got out of them. But to be interested is not necessarily to be convinced. The author has written, I. imagine, to be discussed. He cannot have the inordinate vanity to expect that his arguments will be swallowed whole simply because he makes them and supplies some photographs to boot. That would be to adopt the preposterous attitude of the experts with whom he so stoutly disagrees. He cannot speak ex cathedra, and his book embodies no final judgment, only a series of opinions. They are not by any means conclusive opinions, largely because, with all his excellent equipment, Professor Van Dyke lacks the " seeing eye,"
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 37
n
PROFESSOR VAN DYKE ON VERMEER
In studying "Rembrandt and His School" I came upon a chapter relating to Vermeer of Delft, that is one of the most curious contributions to the literature of Dutch art I have ever encountered. There is a foreshadowing of it earlier in the book, in the chapter on Carel Fabritius, the master of Vermeer. Apropos of the "Portrait of a Man" at Munich, which the author would take from Rembrandt and give to Fabritius, a reproduction of Vermeer's " Geographer, " at Frankfort, is printed. "The same model and some of the pose" were probably used by both painters, Professor Van Dyke thinksxa far-fetched hypothesis and one on which we can build no confidence in the influence which the author here assigns to Fabritius, But I glance at this matter only in passing. What is really interesting is the assertion that "this Fabritius influence is apparent in certain famous portraits put down to Vermeer of Delft hereafter." I turn with zest to the Vermeer chapter, wondering what in the world will develop therein. I find, as has been indicated, an amazing bedevilment of the subject.
The Vermeer ozuvre has been in debate for a long time. When Burger rescued him from obscurity in 1866 .the catalogue terminating his study in the Gazette des Beauoo-Arts ran to more than seventy
38 Personalities in Art
numbers. * That has since been cut almost in half. Van Zype, in his authoritative monograph, gives a list of but thirty-eight works of incontestable authenticity. It may still reasonably be enlarged or diminished. If Professor Van Dyke had some persuasive things to say about it he would be listened to with extreme interest. What he actually has to say only puzzles me. Here is part of it:
Vermeer's pictures have been, sought for everywhere except in the Rembrandt ceuvre. Perhaps it is not strange that he should appear there, since he was of the Rembrandt school once removed. He was a pupil of Carel Fabritius, who, in turn, was a pupil of Rembrandt. It is by an understanding of Fabritius that we shall possibly arrive at a better understanding of Vermeer. I frankly confess to my inability to follow the Vermeer writers and authorities or agree with the present arrangement of his pictures. I seem to see several painters in the pictures put under Vermeer's name. The small pictures given to him contain things supremely fine and things supremely tMn, small, and hard. Such pictures as the "Girl Reading," in the Dresden Gallery, are beyond criticism. The "Young Woman Reading a Letter" and the "Cook/ 7 at Amsterdam; the "Lady With a Pearl Necklace/' at Berlin; the "Girl at a Window/* of the Marquand Collection, Metropolitan Museum, New York, are in the same class of excellence. There are, perhaps, ten or a dozen pictures by this hand. I shall call their painter, for convenience herein, Vermeer No. i. There are, however, as many more pictures that superficially look to be in the class, but they are brittle, cardboard affairs with false high lights, airless rooms, and color that has no quality. Two pictures, each showing a "Young Woman at the Virginals/' in the National Gallery, London; "The Letter/'
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 39
at Amsterdam; the "Allegorical Subject," at The Hague, are the illustrations of this latter class. I have called their painter, in my "New Guides," a pseudo-Vermeer, meaning by that that he may be an imitator some one like Verkolje or Ochtervelt or possibly Vermeer himself in decline and grown hard in manner. These small pictures form the first group given to Vermeer, and I shall consider them as done by a Vermeer No. i and a pseudoVermeer.
Vermeer was undoubtedly a pupil of Carel Fabritius, but that is no reason why we should believe that "it is by an understanding of Fabritius that we shall possibly arrive at a better understanding of Vermeer." As well say that, as Whistler was a pupil of Gleyre, who in turn was a pupil of Ingres, it is by an understanding of Gleyre that we shall possibly arrive at a better understanding of Whistler. That would be absurd. Whistler was his own man. , Vermeer likewise was his own man, and one of the fascinating things about his art is its establishment of him as a figure apart, a figure extraordinarily detached from the whole Dutch school. The passage I have quoted takes on even stranger turnings. In the game of solitaire that Professor Van Dyke plays, shuffling the cards about and about to see which of them match, he makes some staggering combinations. The pictures which he does not feel sure of he thinks may be by an imitator, or they may be by Vermeer in a declining phase! It is, perhaps, an amusing speculation, but why print it? It comes rather under
4 Personalities in Art
the heading of workshop meditations and has no tangible value. Especially because of what follows. Professor Van Dyke goes on to confusion after confusion.
The "Diana," at The Hague, he says, "does not agree with any Vermeer picture of any group/' and forthwith he asserts that "it was not done by Vermeer, but by Jacob Van Loo," with certain of whose works he thinks it does agree. It is difficult to be patient over this question of "agreement." Let us suppose, for example, that some Van Dyke of the future were to be set the task of straightening out the ceuwe of Saint-Gaudens, dislocated by the passage of two or three hundred years. Grant that he has pretty satisfactory evidence about the "Lincoln/* the "Farragut," the "Sherman," the "Stevenson/' and so on, but has only internal evidence to go on where the Adams monument is concerned. We can imagine what would happen to him if he sought for any obvious "agreement." The Adams monument occupies a place in the sculptor's ceuvre that is unique. So it is with the nude "Diana" that he made for the tower of the Madison Square Garden. But these two works would, nevertheless, be recognized as his by a really penetrating analyst of his style. In the case of Vermeer, as in that of Rembrandt, Professor Van Dyke uses the most cleverly fabricated machinery but fails to enliven it by the right instinctive spark. The painter he cites in this instance gives him simi-
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 41
larities "in subject, type, drawing, grouping." But we have only to put a Van Loo side by side with a Vermeer to see that what the minor man lacks is the master's quality and beauty.
The author proceeds to the great "Procuress/' at Dresden. He will give it neither to his Vermeer No. i nor to his "pseudo-Vermeer." In order to account for it he calls into being a painter whom he calls Vermeer No. 2. To the same unknown he would assign the "Young Girl/' formerly at Brussels, which was in New York for a time, and the "Old Woman" in the Johnson collection, which figures there as a Nicolaes Maes. I know all three of these paintings well and can only feel astonishment at Professor Van Dyke's attitude toward them. The "Procuress" is a glorious picture, glorious in color and in what I can only describe as the Vermeer touch. That is present also, in more jewel-like mood, in the "Young Girl." And why the Johnson picture should be dragged in is a mystery past finding out. Placed beside the "Procuress"* it simply crumples up, a mediocre picture beside a brilliant one. But the author has more surprises in store.
He passes next to a painter whom he calls Vermeer No. 3, making great play over the "Portrait of a Woman" at Budapest. With this painting, a masterpiece by Vermeer if ever there was one, he can find no other picture in the Vermeer ceuvre to "agree," except, possibly, the "Head of a Young Girl" at
42 Personalities in Art
The Hague. (So that, also, is to be detached from the real Vertneerl) Hence the "Number 3*" He is a distinctly obscure person. "Whether his name is Vermeer or whether he is some other pupil of Carel Fabritius or Rembrandt I am not now able to say/' It is extremely doubtful if he will ever be able to speak with greater certainty. Meanwhile he proposes that to this painter shall be given Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Lady" at Petrograd and the two Rembrandts in the Widener collection. As for the robbing of Rembrandt to enrich Vermeer, even an hypothetical Vermeer, I am not for a moment convinced. The Petrograd and Budapest portraits, placed side by side, reveal not resemblances (of handling, of style), but differences. They are clearly not by the same painter, Professor Van Dyke's "Vermeer Number 3" or any other single man. Vermeer, the Vermeer we know, painted the Budapest portrait, and Rembrandt the other. The new attribution which Professor Van Dyke would make in respect to the Widener portraits remains likewise "not proven/ 7 Furthermore, he says something about one of these portraits that utterly complicates, as in a climax, the whole complicated business.
We have seen that in the author's view certain works which he would assign to Vermeer No. i, such as the Marquand Vermeer, are "beyond criticism. " They are, it is to be inferred, the authentic Vermcers. But the Widener Rembrandts "are superb portraits,
The Art Critic as Iconoclast 43
perhaps by the same hand that did the ' Portrait of a Woman 5 at Budapest that is, Venneer No, 3, the best and greatest of my so-called three Vermeers." You see where we have arrived? There is a Vermeer, a Vermeer we have all known, the Vermeer who painted what we mean when we talk about Vermeer, and his works are "beyond criticism." But all the time there is another Vermeer, one of three, and he, as it happens, is "the best and greatest 5 * of all of them. Both of the Widener portraits, we are told, are "more important in art, more valuable in history, and even in commerce, as Vermeers than as Rembrandts." But as which Vermeers? The Vermeers that are valuable in art, in history, and even in commerce are the Vermeers the world cherishes as such. How can Professor Van I>yke expect to secure the same status for an unknown painter he has invented, even though he calls him by the same name ? The Vermeer chapter in this book is, in short, one of the most unfortunate it contains. It does not clarify the subject; it only darkens counsel. In attempting to revise the Vermeer canon, as in attempting to revise the Rembrandt canon, Professor Van Dyke leaves his reader a little more than sceptical.
Ill
The Thirty-ninth. Vermeer
Ill
THE THIRTY-NINTH VERMEER
EVER since Burger rehabilitated Mm fa the Gazelle des Beaux-Arts in 1866, the ceuvre of Venneer of Delft has fluctuated in volume under the sifting processes of criticism. Burger's catalogue runs to seventy-three numbers. When Henry Havard published his brochure in 1888, he cut the list down to fifty-six. It has been shortened repeatedly in later years. Van Zype, in the definitive edition of his book, brought out in 1921, accounted for but thirty-eight paintings. One of these, the "Young Girl With a Flute," was discovered by Doctor Bredius as recently as 1906. Vermeer is one of those masters about whom you can say almost anything save that their history has been conclusively written. He is an evertantalizing mystery. One never knows when something new of his is going to be brought to light. Apropos of which I would refer to the thirty-ninth Vermeer.
The first news of it reached the world as a discovery made by Doctor C. Hofstede de Groot, the well known Dutch connoisseur. He announced his find in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, explaining that it belonged to M. Yves Perdoux, in Paris. Then it
47
48 Personalities in Art
passed into the possession of Sir Joseph Duveen. The subject is a curly-haired boy in his teens. The hair is dark brown, and enframes a face in which the flesh tints are of a pearly, almost grayish, pallor. The white collar falls over a doublet of yellowish silver gray. The cloak, whose folds make the base of the composition, is of a reddish brown, which Doctor Hofstede dc Groot allies with color in the famous " Christ at the House of Mary and Martha/' which has always been reckoned an early work of the master.
The face is drawn and modelled with the fine suavity always characteristic of Vermeer in painting the features of his sitters, but elsewhere the portrait is remarkable for its flowing breadth. The collar is a little miracle of painter-like notation, brushed in with a generous but not too thick impasto and very beautiful in tone. The costume is not otherwise so rich or so resonant in color quality. In this and in the handling it departs from the key which might superficially be assigned to the typical Vermeer. But as a matter of fact he had more than one manner, corresponding to more than one mood. When he made most of his pictures he labored in the spirit of still life and gave a special significance to painted surface as such. The famous Marquand Vermeer in the Metropolitan Museum is an apposite example. When he fell into the stride of pure portraiture, as in the wonderful half-length at Budapest or the curious
HEAD OF A YOUNG BOY THE PAINTING BY VERKEER
The Thirty-ninth Fermeer 49
clavecin player in the Beit collection, he got away from his consummate preciosity and thought not only of tone but of a large definition of form. This is the distinguishing point about the Duveen picture.
It hasn't, save in the collar, the jewel-lite depth and density of facture which we usually think of when we think of Vermeer. That waits upon the dignity and vitality of the portrait as a whole, upon the broad swing in the workmanship. The master's gift for ensemble comes out nowhere more impressively than in his dealings with the single figure. His design is sometimes fairly monumental in such contributions to this category as the Budapest portrait just mentioned or the great "Dentelltere" in the Louvre. If he is not precisely monumental in the "Head of a Young Boy" he at any rate reveals in it a finer sense of scale, a more imposing effect, than is ordinarily associated with the figures in his more familiar interiors. Vermeer didn't paint many portraits. There is a whimsical suggestion in the circumstance that in "Le Peintre," at Vienna, which he may have intended as a memorial of himself, the artist is seated with his back to the spectator. But when he did essay portraiture he had a way of gripping his subject. There is no mistaking the character of the woman at Budapest, or that of the Arenberg " Jeune Fille," or that of the grave gentleman with the mustache in the museum at Brussels, So in the "Head of a Young Boy" he gives us a personality interest-
Personalities in Art
ing even under the simple traits of adolescence. That is one reason why it is so persuasively a Vermeer; it has so subtle a reality. You feel at once the touch of the master, not only registering a form but evoking a presence.
IV
Leonardo's Legacy of Beauty
IV LEONARDO'S LEGACY OF BEAUTY
IN spite of her precoccupation with the problem of Fiume, Italy found time in 1919 to commemorate the name and fame of Leonardo da Vinci. He died in France on May 2, 1519, and in the four centuries that have elapsed since then there has been only one man of a kindred type of universal genius known to the world, Shakespeare, who died almost a hundred years later. The learned and artistic bodies of Italy hailed him as one of the supreme memories of the nation, and everywhere those who care for the things of the mind shared in their fervor. He is a classic beyond peradventure, and, like all true classics, he embodies ideas and principles in which the most modern of the moderns may renew his artistic vitality.
There are, in a sense, two Leonardos. One is the property of the scholar whose researches are directed more especially into the complex aspects of the subject. In Scribner j s Magazine at the time of the celebration there was an interesting and valuable paper by Mr. George Sarton, of the Carnegie Institute, on "The Message of Leonardo." He is engaged on the establishment of a standard text of Leonardo's writings, and, accordingly, I was not surprised to find his
53
S4 Personalities in Art
essay an analysis of the master's "relation to the birth of modern science/* In our time, and in view of its prevailing drifts of thought and activity, there are bound to be many tributes to the scientific aspects of Leonardo's career. Mr. Sarton well brought out their solid importance* In the anticipation of the flying machine, we have only one of a host of points of contact which may be established between the fifteenth century Florentine and ourselves. But the other Leonardo is he who is more quickly brought to mind by mention of his name among people at large in the twentieth century, and he is the property of the lover of beauty. When we speak of " the Leonardesque" we think not of his achievements as scientist but of the ideal of loveliness which he created. It towers above all that the scholars may seek to force upon our attention. It is true that he left behind him but a comparatively small number of works of art, and that he himself, as Mr. Sarton reminds us, was no less proud of being an engineer than of being a painter. Nevertheless, for the bulk of mankind, the paintings and drawings will continue to mean Leonardo as the plays continue to mean Shakespeare*
The only portrait we have of him is the drawing in the library at Turin, which shows us the head of an old man, and the power of the association of ideas is such that one hardly ever thinks of him save as an aged type of wisdom. He appeals to the imagination
Leonardo's Legacy of Beauty 55
not simply as old in knowledge and thought, indeed, but as a kind of ancient seer, a mystic, living aloof from the common world. Yet it is desirable to check such an impression, to keep a firm grasp upon the very human foundations of this colossal genius. His manuscripts yield a helpful passage in the note he writes apropos of one of the apprentices he was wont to take into his bottega at five lire the month. "Giacomo came to live with me on the Feast of St. Mary Magdalen, 1490," he says. "He was ten years old. The second day I ordered two shirts, a pair of hose, and a doublet for him. When I put aside the money to pay for these things he took it out of my purse. I was never able to make him confess the robbery, although I was certain of it. A thieving, lying, pigheaded glutton." Remembrance of the every-day side of life which these lines illustrate will keep the student from visualizing Leonardo too much as a rapt Olympian, with his singing robes always about him. He went to and fro among men in homespun, so to say, with an intensely human curiosity about all the things of the visible world. If he painted the "Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper" he drew also the most appalling profiles of hideous, malformed peasants. When Baroncelli was hanged in Florence for his share in the conspiracy of the Pazzi, Leonardo made a drawing of him at the end of the rope, and something of the dispassionately artistic trend of his temperament is shown by the note he added on the
56 Personalities in Art
sheet: " Small tan-colored cap, black satin doublet, lined black jerkin, blue cloak lined with fur of foxes 5 breasts, and the collar of the cloak covered with velvet speckled black and red; Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli; black hose." A confirmed realist, we say, must have made that sketch and that note. One can see him ignoring the emotionaJ horror of the spectacle, looking only to the accurate registration of the facts. Most characteristic of all is the touch about the " black hose/* hastily jotted down after he had thought the portrait complete.
Leonardo was a realist in that he never undervalued what he could see and touch, handle and measure. He was peculiarly a master of ponderable things. Here it is interesting to turn for a moment to the scientist in him, the man of practical affairs, a famous letter in which he offered his services to the Duke of Milan supplying just the needed light on what we might call the prosaic turn of his mind. "I have a method of constructing very light and portable bridges," he says, "to be used in the pursuit of or retreat from the enemy. I also have most convenient and portable bombs, proper for throwing showers of small missiles, and with the smoke thereof causing great terror to the enemy, to his imminent loss and confusion." In these and in other lines he shows how useful he could be in time of war, and then he goes on as follows: "In time of peace I believe that I could equal any other as regards works
Leonardo's Legacy of Beauty 57
in architecture. I can prepare designs for buildings, whether public or -private., and also conduct water from one place to another. Furthermore, I can execute works in sculpture: marble, bronze or terra-cotta. In painting, also, I can do what may be done as well as any other, be he who he may." How revealing, and, again, how human, is that return to the ruling passion, that transition from canal-cutting to the art of the painter ! It is profoundly inevitable. The play of Leonardo's intellect knew no boundaries. He studied acoustics. He was a seasoned anatomist. Botany fascinated him, and so on through an alphabetical list one might follow his imagination, ranging through all the interests of man. But, then, we would veer toward the Leonardo who is, as I have said, the property of the scholar. The Leonardo who is the property of the world is the Leonardo who is the property of the artist, the man who is remembered because of the way in which he drew the ripple of a woman's hair athwart her cheek.
As he drew it the searching observation of the realist magnificently sustained him, but in the same instant all that is materialistic in realism fell from him, and he functioned as a poet. The result was a work of art that is incomparably beautiful and that also is, I believe, the most successful manifestation of .Leonardo's genius. There is, after all, a sharp distinction to be recognized between his universality and the universality of Shakespeare, The poet, tak-
5 8 Personalities in Art
ing the world for his province, bodied forth creations in which his purpose is clearly realized. His energy is concentrated upon a task which he completes. Leonardo, undeniably putting to his credit specific achievements in science, at the same time varies them with an infinite number of inconclusive experiments. His energy is diffused. It is in his curiosity rather than in the actual things he accomplished that the universality of his mind is declared. He survives in his writings as a Goethe rather than as a Shakespeare, But as an artist he knows no diffusion, no incertitude. There it would seem that he most triumphantly expressed himself. A significant testimony to the fact that he was, indeed, an artist far more centrally than a scientist lies in the paradox that he needed no great mass of works to affirm his immortality in the sphere of painting. The "Leonardesque" lives in a touch. It is an ideal of beauty communicated through the channel of a style.
Legend clusters around the "Mona Lisa," and famous tributes to that portrait, composed by such skilful writers as Gautier and Pater, have led thousands to the conviction that in this painting as in no other the quintessence of the Leonardesque is to be found. It is there, of course, but it also is in other works, and some of them offer perhaps a simpler path to his secret. It was the secret of exquisitely subtle expression, of delineating the facts of nature with so spiritualized a grace that the facts take on a
Leonardo's Legacy of Beauty 59
kind of divinity. Leonardo had it in the time of his pupilage, when he painted the celebrated angel in the foreground of Verrocchio's "Baptism of Christ." He had it all his life long. Through all the multifarious activities of his career he was the clairvoyant draftsman, using his art as though it were a sort of magic in the service of pure beauty. As a painter he employed color and tone as subtly as in the drawings he employed line. The "Virgin and Child With Saint Anne," in the Louvre, is even more comprehensible than the "Mona Lisa" as an instance of his powers of expression. It is clothed in beauty as in a vaporous garment. The forms are defined with an almost melting suavity. The style would remain merely sensuous in another hand. With Leonardo all that is sensuous in it is raised to a higher power, made spiritual. Because he was a complete technician he could do anything, and among the drawings which are indispensable to study of his art there are many which reveal in him a tremendous power. Battle scenes, for example, notably inspired him. He could draw their broad movement, and he could draw the faces of individual fighters, distorted by passion. But it is in his finer subjects that he leaves the finest impression. The "Head of Christ" in-the Brera is a miracle of beauty because it is a miracle of tenderness. We are thrilled by the swinging strength in the great "Head of a Warrior" in the British Museum, but we are bewitched and haunted by those heads of women and
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maidens, scattered through the galleries of Europe, in which Leonardo unites to what he sees in life a beauty of which we feel he must have dreamed.
It is an infinitely delicate beauty, sprung from truth, but refined to a point which leaves it, indeed, well-nigh beyond interpretation in words. Leonardo flings it over the heads of his feminine types; he plays with it unceasingly, as I have indicated, in defining the tendrils of their hair. Over mouth and eyes and other features it hovers like a sacred atmosphere. A hand or an arm, as he draws it, is more than a bodily appurtenance; it is the vehicle for a kind of aesthetic enchantment. Alluding to these studies of details that he made I feel tempted to linger on the force of his technic, the superb knowledge at the bottom of his treatment of form, of drapery. But everything is used by this tremendous realist as a means to an end the evocation of beauty. Never did a technician more steadily throw us back upon the subtler elements of his work. It is in these that the modern artist has his lesson. Leonardo sets before him an heroic standard of workmanship. He was, in mastery of the processes of art, a positive demigod. As a draftsman, for example, Michael Angelo alone is his peer. It is hopeless to try to match him, to borrow his skill. But "the Leonardesque," considered as an inspiration, has had and must always have a marvellously leavening influence. There were Renaissance painters in Lombardy who recaptured
Leonardo's Legacy of Beauty 61
something of its glow. In the paintings of Boltraffio, of Cesare da Sesto, of Solario and others you can see how his tenderness, his grace, his spiritualization of tangible things were extraordinarily emulated. No one in his senses could imagine their revival to-day in terms modelled closely upon Leonardo's practice. The time for that kind of emulation is gone. But in recalling us to beauty he performs a service by which the modern artist can profit as well as did the artist of the Renaissance. Leonardo, who could delineate with overwhelming eloquence the ugliness of life and the terror of death, has left us, more than anything else, a tradition of the radiant, flower-like loveliness that is to be found in nature and that can be expressed in art. In my own sense of him I reckon with nothing as with his unmistakable belief that beauty is the goal of the artist. The proof of its validity lies in his works for all men to see.
V
Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting
V
RAPHAEL AND THE ART OF PORTRAIT PAINTING
AMONG the anecdotes relating to Ingres which, have come down to us there is one illustrating the attitude that he held toward his demigod Raphael. He sat at dinner with his friend Thiers, and the latter undertook to demonstrate that the fame of the Italian master rested chiefly upon his Madonnas. Ingres was furious. "I would give them all," he exclaimed; "yes, monsieur, all of them, for a fragment of the 'Disputa' or of the ' School of Athens' or of the ' Parnassus/" The episode is symbolical of a conflict which has long persisted in the modern world of taste. If the "Sistine Madonna 35 is the most famous painting in the world, it is because it embodies the most universally appealing of all pictorial ideas of the mother of Christ. It seems conclusively to exalt Raphael as an interpreter of sentiment both human and divine. But that very painting points to the equally potent element in his genius which accounts for the enthusiasm of Ingres; the " Sistine Madonna 3 ' is nothing if not a masterpiece of design. It reveals the same transcendent power of composition which makes immortal the decorations in the Vatican.
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Nevertheless the conflict aforementioned will still go on. Laymen will think first of the Madonnas. Artists return to the mural paintings. In the meantime, of course, Raphael's art remains all of a piece, and true appreciation of it depends upon our realization of the unity binding together its different aspects. He was one of the most versatile men who have ever lived. The important thing is to follow him sympathetically into every field, and then to seize upon the central force which animated him in them all.
The American student has had the opportunity to study here one of Raphael's important religious subjects ever since Pierpont Morgan placed the Colonna "Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints" in the Metropolitan Museum. Now there seems to be every likelihood that we will have in this country a monument to a very different phase of the master's activity. In the spring of 1925 there was a tremendous to-do in the press over the purchase by the Duveens of a great portrait by Raphael. It belonged to a collector in Berlin, Mr. Oscar Huldschinsky. His sale of it grievously excited the Germans, who looked upon it as one of the national treasures, and its exportation, if that had been heard of in time, might possibly have been prevented. However, it got to London. Once in this country it is almost certain to be acquired by an American collector, and, though it would then pass to a private gallery, precedent justifies the supposition that sooner or later one of our
Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 67
museums will possess it. It would be a little more than welcome, for it would serve to enlighten the student where most he needs enlightenment as regards Raphael, that is, on his purely human side, on that side which brings him down from the clouds and makes the Prince of Painters one of the raciest figures of the Renaissance. The Raphael of legend is a portent, a worker of miracles, who in a brief life of thirty-seven years achieved a mass of work most of it flawless large enough to have occupied several giants of art through a period three times as long. But he was a man like other men, save for his genius, and his work is to be apprehended in very human terms. That is where his portraiture helps, * * This example of it is a portrait of Giuliano de Medici to which Vasari refers as one hanging in his time in the palace of Ottaviano de Medici at Florence. From that home it disappeared for centuries, nothing being known of it save a copy by Alessandro Allori in the TJffizi. Then, some time in 1866 or 1867, the German critic Liphart went one day with the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia to the house of a Signor Brim in Florence, to look at some paintings that he had to sell. They were struck, by this portrait of Giuliano, and after the dust upon it had been sponged off, were only the more impressed. Brini apparently did not regard it as of exceptional importance. He could not have paid very much for it when he had got it from the firm of Baldovinetti, for he sold it to the
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Duchess at what Liphart characterizes as a very modest price. She took it to her villa at Quarto, and she brought in the restorer Tricca, who transferred the canvas, and in the process of cleaning it discovered the initials of the painter and the fragments of a date. In 1901 the Duchess sent the portrait to Paris, where Eugene Muntz, one of the biographers of Raphael, pronounced it the lost portrait of Giuliano de Medici, Duke of Nemours, Later Doctor Bode confirmed this opinion. We next hear of it as belonging to the Sedelmeyers in Paris> and then in the gallery of Mr. Huldschinsky.
Giuliano, the younger brother of Leo X, was lucky in his artists. Michael Angelo made his stupendous monument in the sacristy at San Lorenzo, and Raphael painted this portrait. I must quote most of what Crowe and CavalcaseUe have to say about it, for it revives something of the atmosphere in which it was produced^ besides throwing some light upon the subject of the painting:
Giuliano de Medici was the highest personage in the Papal State for whom Raphael could paint a likeness. All the arts of Leo X had been exerted to raise this prince to a station worthy of his birth and pretensions. He was Duke of Nemours in the peerage of France; the Pope had given him a principality, Louis XII a wife of royal lineage. The ^marriage took place early in February, 1515* and Giuliano returned to Rome to form a court over which his wife presided. Within less than five months after these events occurred, the French Duke was commanding
GUTLIANO DE MEDICI, DUKE OF NEMOTJRS FROM THE PORTRAIT BY RAPHAEL
Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 69
the papal forces against France. Illness alone prevented him from leading the troops in person, and a fatal decline soon deprived him of his life. But before leaving Rome, Giuliano had apparently had the wish to leave a portrait behind him which should adorn his wife's drawing-room. Raphael, as the Duke's "familiar," was selected to paint it. ...
Giuliano's repute is good among the princes of the Medicean house. He is said to have been weak. But he had a quality which other members of his family wanted. He was grateful to those who had favored "Mm in adversity. His features, handed down to us in several examples, are of the genuine Medicean type, including a long hooked nose, almond-shaped eyes, and a beard and mustache kept short to suit a small chin and upper lip. Great breadth and flatness marked the plane of the cheeks, which, in every extant specimen, are seen at three-quarters to the left, with an oval black eyeball looking to the right. According to the fashion of the period, a coif of golden net drawn obliquely over the head to the level of the left ear, and a wide toque set aslant over the right ear, leave the whole of the forehead bare. A ticket of lozenge shape and three gold buckles are affixed to the toque. The low dress displays a long neck fringed with the border of a white shirt covered by a red vest, all but hidden by a black doublet over which a fawn-colored watered silk pelisse is thrown, adorned with a collar and facings of brown fur. A black patch conceals the forefinger of the left hand, which lies on a table partly hidden by the right, holding a letter. ... A green hanging half conceals an opening through which the sky appears cut out by the broken outline of the Castle of St. Angelo, to which the secret approach is shown by a covered way.
There is a significant phrase employed in the foregoing passage, the one designating Raphael as the
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duke's " familiar," It, recalls us to the splendor of the painter's life, his intimacy with popes and all their gorgeous satellites. His biographers glance at the notabilities who were his sitters, not only the princes of the church but statesmen, diplomatists, and poets. He would portray not only such men as Julius and Leo but a lettered courtier like Castiglione. His net embraced all manner of men. He had but one prejudice as regards a sitter. As Muntz remarks, "the artist was unwilling to transmit to posterity the features of any but those who were worthy of sympathy or admiration." I am strongly tempted to pause upon this matter of Raphael's discrimination, and especially to pursue him as a denizen of the highest circles in Roman society. But it is well to diverge here upon the foundations of his work in portraiture. It is well to go back to his pupilage, to those early years in which he felt the influences of Timoteo Viti and Perugino. He has left portraits of both painters, a superb drawing of Viti in the British Museum, and a similarly moving head and shoulders of Perugino in the Borghese Gallery at Rome. The first is particularly to be admired just for its broad, sweeping draftsmanship, but the thing that still further touches the imagination in both portraits is their intense realism. Raphael's portraits, indeed, from the very beginning, completely expose the fallacy of regarding him as even tinctured by that unreality which we associate with so-called " academic "
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art. I recall an odd conversation about these portraits with a very capable artist. They were, no doubt, very fine, he said, but it was a great pity that Raphael "didn't know how to paint." Seeing me rather stunned by this cryptic remark, he hastened to add that, of course, what he meant was that Raphael was neither a Rembrandt nor a Manet, that the Italian didn't know anything about brush-work. I have to smile a little when I remember that and think of the sheer tecknical maestria in the portraits I have just mentioned, the linear breadth in the "Viti" and the nervous flowing brush-work in the "Perugino." The truth is that Raphael is only superficially an artist of an academic cast. Essentially he was as keen a realist as any in the history of art.
Look only to that question of school currents, of formative influences, of which the exhaustive historian is bound to make so much, and you get to thinking of Raphael as dabbling in more or less abstract principles all his life long. Trace "Him from his labors in Umbria under Perugino and Pintoricchio, watch him as he is stirred by the magic of Leonardo, observe him shrewdly taking a leaf from the book of Fra Bartolommeo, and study above all the impetus he draws from contact with the manner of Michael Angelo, You forthwith call him an eclectic, which is a freezing enough label to affix to any man, and you wonder how through all those mutations he had anything to do with life* He had everything to do
Personalities in Art
with it, as the portraits in particular clearly show. They testify to nothing so much as to the master's grasp upon the deep sources of vitality, the thrilling actuality with which he could endue his every stroke. There is an apposite passage in a letter of Bembo's to Bibbiena. "Raphael/' he says, "has painted a portrait of our Tebaldeo, which is so natural that it seems more like him than he is himself. 3 " His contemporaries put his realism among the first of his merits. Vasari, paying a tribute akin to that of Bembo, writes these words, in the course of his comments on the decorations in the Vatican: "And at this time, when he had gained a very great name, he also made a portrait of Pope Julius in a picture in oils, so true and so lifelike that the portrait caused all who saw it to tremble, as if it had been the living man himself." In this matter of embodying a formidable personality in a portrait I know of nothing more impressive, not even the great "innocent X" of Velasquez. There must have been something in portraiture which poignantly appealed to Raphael, for even when he was dealing with personages long dead and gone he had a way of lending to his images of them an extraordinary verisimilitude. When he painted the Vatican decorations he had to deal with numerous historical figures, with Sappho and Plato, with Virgil and Pindar, with Ptolemy. The task never gave him a moment's hesitation. He painted them with a vividness that makes them seem almost his
Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 73
contemporaries. Speaking of the "Parnassus," Vasari says: "There are portraits from nature of all the most famous poets, ancient and modern, and some only just dead or still living in his day; which were taken from statues or medals, and many from old pictures, and some who were still alive, portrayed from the life by himself." It is like Vasari to speak of them all as "portraits from nature," for no matter what he used, whether a document or the living model, Raphael made a living and breathing presentment of his subject. When he had the model before him he was merely incomparable, as witness the portrait of Bramante introduced into the foreground of "The School of Athens." As you may see from the sheet of drawings in the Louvre, when he came to study the lineaments of his architectural friend he got such a grip upon them that they seem fairly to vibrate with character. Over and over again Vasari returns to this motive. He loves to speak of the power that Raphael had "to give such resemblance to portraits that they seem to be alive, and that it is known whom they represent." I confess that I find it hard not to emulate Vasari, lingering repeatedly on the simple truth, the almost artless animation, in Raphael's portraits. One point that is pertinent I cannot neglect. It is the triumph of this truth over the purely decorative motive pursued as an end in itself. It is especially noticeable in his portraits of women, such as the "Maddalena Doni," the "Donna
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Velata," and the "Joanna of Aragon." They have a freedom and a solidity making them strangely predominant over the typical Florentine profile, consummately exquisite though that may be.
His genius was too great to wear the shackles of a convention, to be confined within the linear bounds of a pattern. But I indicated at the outset of these remarks that Raphael's genius was all of a piece, that one pervasive inspiration went to the painting of the Madonnas, the decorations, and the portraits. To return to that issue is to enforce the unity of Raphael's art by exposing its corner-stone where the portraits are concerned. He couldn't have sustained in them that virtue of lifelikeness on which I have dwelt if he had not known how to build for it a perfect scaffolding of design. That is where the painter of three great types of pictorial art affirmed himself a master of one great secret. It is the secret of composition. Raphael had it in its simplest form when he made his early four-square portrait of Perugino. Rapidly he developed it and richly exploited it, achieving, as he placed a figure within the rectangle, the same freshness and felicity which you observe in such a decorative gem of his as the "Jurisprudence." Look at the "Angelo Doni," look at the "Cardinal Bibbiena," look at the "Baldassare Castiglione " and look finally at the " Giuliano de Medici." If they throb with human life, their beauty springs also from the supreme composition that is in them.
Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 75
Raphael could meet, through his grasp upon that art, the last test of the portrait-painter. He could make of a portrait a really great picture. The point is appreciated by Vasari when he comes to describe the famous "Leo X with Two Cardinals/' now in the Pitti:
In Rome he made a picture of good size, in which he portrayed Pope Leo, Cardinal Giulio de Medici, and Cardinal de Rossi. In this the figures appear to be not painted but in full relief; there is the pile of the velvet, with the damask of the Pope's vestments shining and rustling, the f ur of the linings soft and natural, and the gold and silk so counterfeited that they do not seem to be in color, but real gold and silk. There is an illuminated book of parchment which appears more real than the reality; and a little bell of wrought silver which is more beautiful than words can tell. Among other things, also, is a ball of burnished gold on the Pope's chair, wherein are reflected, as if it were a mirror (such is its brightness), the light from the windows, the shoulders of the Pope, and the walls round the room. And all these things are executed with such diligence that one may believe without any manner of doubt that no master is able, or is ever likely to be able, to do better.
Was any other master ever able to do better? Muntz seems to have been a little in doubt. "Nor can we place before him," he says, "any but the greatest masters of portraiture, such as Jan van Eyck, Holbein, Titian, Velasquez, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt." For my own part, I cannot see why any of these save Rembrandt should be placed "be-
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fore 5 ' Raphael in portraiture. The Dutchman, to be sure, is hors concours. No one in the whole range of portraiture can touch him for pathos, for the dramatic, even tragic, presentation of character. But for the rest, Raphael's portraits seem to me to stand among the greatest. They do so by virtue of force in characterization, distinction in design, and, above all, a certain serene beauty.
VI
Religious Painting
VI RELIGIOUS PAINTING
exhibition held not long ago in New York set me thinking anew on an old subject. It was one of pictures by Mr. H. Siddons Mowbray, and the subject they brought up was that of religious painting. The artist dealt with the life of Christ. He did so in a remarkably persuasive manner. Mr. Mowbray is a good draftsman and a good designer. His episodes were composed with both dignity and vitality, and his justly organized groups were set against a deep blue background realistically enough and at the same time with a decorative felicity recalling the traditions of Pintoricchio and the earlier Florentines. This was a fairly long and well-sustained flight in Biblical illustration. There were fifteen panels given to the main theme, with several others allied to the series. They were beautiful and convincing. They disclosed true devotional emotion. Their technical merits, too, were impressive, but what especially interested me was that they should have been painted at all, that in the present period, dedicated to the apotheosis of materialism, an artist should arise devoting himself to the delineation of purely spiritual realities. The incident revived the whole problem of
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religious art and the change which has come over its fortunes with the passing of the centuries.
I remember puzzling over this problem years ago in the sacristy of the cathedral at Montauban before that "Vow of Louis XIII" which is one of the most ambitious of the religious paintings of Ingres. I am an Ingres man and ready, I suppose, if anybody is, to meet him half-way. But I confess that despite the elements of grandeur in this composition it would not occur to me to cite it among the great pictures of the Madonna. He returned to Scriptural subjects again and again. Witness the "Christ before the Doctors " at Montauban. Witness the "Virgin and the Sacred Host" in its two versions, one of them in the Louvre, or the "Christ Committing to Peter the Keys of Paradise" in the same museum. But I have never seen those things without amusedly recalling the retort of Ingres, cited earlier in these pages, when Thiers tried to prove to him that the Madonnas of Raphael constituted his chief title to fame. "I would give them all," cried the artist, "for a fragment of the 'Disputa.'" Who would not give all of the religious paintings by Ingres for one of his nudes? For my own part I feel that way not only about Ingres but about most of the more devoutly minded men of his generation and later in, France, and in England too. Flandrin and Ary Scheffer were elevated spirits but never triumphant masters. Puvis alone climbed the heights, yet, when all is said, one
^ Religious Painting 8 1
reveres him rather as a great decorator than as an interpreter of Scriptural story; his indubitable inspiration is poetic rather than divine. When you glance cursorily over the rank and file in France you are arrested here and there by interesting things. You note a memorable "Madonna" by Dagnan-Bouveret. You find Cazin, of all people in the world, painting a "Hagar and Ishmael." You discover Beraud portraying a Biblical scene in sensationally modern terms, or you come upon the famous illustrations of Tissot. Bouguereau once painted a "Madonna" in his polished academic way, and it wasn't a bad picture in its polished academic way. I could go on indefinitely enumerating French excursions into this field. But hardly any of them are fundamentally pertinent to this discussion. I can recall only two modern Frenchmen who have seemed to me to be imbued with authentic religious emotion. One of them was Millet, when he painted "The Angelus." The other is that brilliant satirist of our own time, Forain, who has drawn from the Bible compositions of a Rembrandtesque poignancy.
The failure of England in this matter is curious, for the genius of the race, addicted in literature at least to the play of ideas, would seem to be peculiarly favorable to the development of religious painting. Why did not George Frederick Watts conclusively prove it? To the painter of "Love and Death/' to say nothing of divers other imaginative conceptions,
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it would seem as if anything might have been possible. And why did not the Pre-Raphaelites put the subject on a firmer basis? Holman Hunt created a certain furore in his own country with "The Light of the World." One of the best of Rossetti's paintings is one of the earliest, his charming "Ecce Ancilla Domini," of 1850. But in England, as across the Channel, the status of religious art is essentially subordinate. It is a striking historical circumstance in the assertion of which I might or might not have foreign support that the greatest religious painting of our own time was produced by an American, the late John La Farge. His "Ascension" in the church of that name in New York is a veritably sublime work of art. We are a strange people, sometimes very slow to appreciate our own, and I am not at all store that as many Americans know of this masterpiece as know of, say, Munk&csy's "Christ before Pilate." But I would defy anybody to name any religious painting of its epoch anywhere in the world that is comparable to it in beauty and grandeur. I can hear some reader murmuring at this point : " Well, if an American was the greatest religious painter of his time, why isn't America the scene of more and better religious painting?" There is an obvious answer. It is only once in so often, anywhere, that a John La Farge is born. Incidentally, that answer excites many reflections on the broad problem to which I have referred, the relation of religious painting to a given period.
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It has often, I think, been grievously misunderstood because of the error made in ascribing to a given period a talismanic potency that it never possessed. The unwary student, happily beguiled by the glamour of an innocent world, conceives of mediaeval mysticism as a kind of holy elixir imbibed by generations of painters. It is as easy as it is delightful to fall into this misconception. Certain types like the Sienese and Florentine Primitives irresistibly invite it. An age of faith and nothing else is mirrored in the tenderness of a Duccio or a Giotto. There is something pervadingly celestial about early Italian art. The pictures of Fra Angelico are of so much saintliness all compact, and the man is as childlike as the spirit of his immortal work. Seeing the tremendous force of religious exaltation by which his art and that of a host of his contemporaries were energized, it is natural to assume that exaltation as exclusively animating a school. The student comes to think of it as a kind of general, communal possession. It was, as a matter of fact, an element depending for its perfect exploitation wholly upon -the individual, a truism which, as I have said, is sometimes overlooked.
These observations are assuredly not directed at the revival of ancient scandals. I have no disposition to dip the brush in earthquake and eclipse, retelling sad stories of the death of private reputations. But I may be permitted to touch upon the classical in-
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stance of Fra Filippo Llppi and his well-known levity. Vasari has some drastic things to say upon the painter's more earthy mood and adds the following passage: "When he was in this humor he gave little or no attention to the works that he had undertaken; wherefore, on one occasion Cosimo de Medici, having commissioned him to paint a picture, shut him up in his own house, in order that he might not go out and waste his time; but, after staying there for two whole days, one night he cut some ropes out of his bed sheets with a pair of scissors and let himself down from a window, and then abandoned himself for many days to his pleasures.' 3 A scurvy wretch, no doubt, as he lives in the pages of Vasari or in Browning's poem. Human; in short, one of the most human creatures that ever lived ! It is for that that I signalize him. It is not his peccadilloes that make him representative but his humanness; he was a man before he was a mystic.
It is the story of the whole of Renaissance painting. Religious exaltation was a part, but only a part, of religious painting at its zenith, and sometimes it was only vicariously present, so to say. I can imagine the words of John Milton on the lips of Fra Angelico :
What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That, to the highth of this great argument, I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men*
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I cannot for the life of me imagine this cry from the depths on the lips of, for example, Titian, the bosom friend of Aretino. One must lay hold of an* other clew to the majesty of great religious painting. You find it, looking to the human aspect of the question, in the conception of the painter as primarily a craftsman and a temperament. The church was there to supply the theme and the occasion. The artist w : as there to make the most of both according as he was a man of imagination and, transcendently, a man of his hands. There is no such thing, says Swinburne, as an inarticulate poet. There is no such thing as a great painter who cannot paint and paint superlatively well. He must feel, too, he must have creative power, yet the tale of his exploits is all sound and fury if it is not a tale of his craftsmanship. I know of no more moving illustration than that supplied by the "Sistine Madonna/* By some fantastic slip of the memory Ingres must have forgotten that when he offered to give all of Raphael's "Madonnas" for a fragment of the "Disputa." He was thinking of Raphael as the prodigious designer, draftsman, and master of form, and he forgot for the moment that in the "Sistine Madonna" Raphael is the consummate exemplar of all three elements. The picture survives as a triumph of religious exaltation and an interpretation of divine motherhood chiefly because, to express it bluntly, it is so magnificently and monumentally put together, because the man who made it was so intensely the artist.
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Religious art is so much tlie more quickly and refreshingly appreciated if one begins by grasping it from within in these more tangible aspects of its character. Its beauty is the more thrilling as it deepens, and takes on more of spiritual mystery, but that very mystery only grows the more enkindling as you search out the fabric of personal and technical traits on which it rests. It is an article of my belief that the artist as artist is paramount, that he is greater than the school, the movement, the epoch, and I would transpose the familiar phrase "adventures among masterpieces" into " adventures among artists." Inevitably and in a measure justly you read into a painting of a given period the pressure of external influences. All the time you have to reckon also with the strength of personality and the play of taste* How crushingly this sometimes overrides the sway of convention ! There hangs in the museum at Bile one of the masterpieces of Holbein, his "Dead Christ." It is for me one of the most beautiful things in sixteenth-century painting, a miracle of draftsmanship and modelling. It has tragic pathos, too. But it comes straight from the charnel-house, and you trace in it not so much of religious emotion as you do of the canny, clear-eyed Holbein, the man with a passion for form that had about it something of scientific objectivity. To turn about this phenomenon of personalized artistry, like a many-faceted jewel in one's hand, go from Bile to Milan and hunt
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up Mantegna's "Pieta" in the Brera. Again you behold a dead body, but this time the connoisseur of form who has drawn it is one who has not paused in the charnel-house but has spent a lifetime in the company of antique marbles. This painting, too, has pathos, but it is the personal equation of the artist that in the long run validates it; what we are first and last conscious of is just the idiosyncrasy of Mantegna, wreaked upon a special accent in the treatment of form. The student will be repaid who will pursue this motive as it is exposed in the works of this or that master. Let him pass from Holbein to Mantegna and from Mantegna to that ineffable "Pieta" of Michael Angelo's at St. Peter's. Let him contrast Michael Angelo's handling of form with Signorelli's, or with that characteristic "of Rubens. Just as one voice in a choir differs from another in color, so you find the style differing as you go from one passage in the great symphony of form to another. Once in his closing years La Farge walked through the Louvre with a medical friend, who, from time to time, felt his pulse. Afterward the doctor said that, trusting merely to this indicator, he could tell which picture had most affected the artist. It was, he said, the famous "Dead Christ " from Avignon. " And," said La Farge to me, "he was right." The authorship of that painting has been much in debate, but I have no doubt about the source of my friend's emotion. If he owed it to the theme he owed
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it even more to the genius of the French Primitive. Brander Matthews, by the way, once gave me a suggestive, anecdote on this matter of the invincible persistence of personality. He and La Farge were talking at the dinner table about the Morellian hypothesis and the painter said:
Let us suppose the testing of a picture of my own sometime many years hence. The Morelli of the future might look at it narrowly and after a while conclude that the hands and eyes in the picture showed a Japanese conception of form. He would remember that I had kept a workshop, a bottega, after the old Italian fashion, and he would have heard that I had had Japanese people with me. So he would say that the picture was a studio piece, the work of a Japanese assistant. Then the Berenson of that day would come along and look it all over very carefully and get much interested in the spirituality of the face. He would say that there was something very soft, very feminine about it, and he would wind up by attributing it to Miss So-and-So, another pupil, But it would be a La Farge, all the same.
It is by reference to La Farge also and to his experience in the making of his masterpiece, the painting of "The Ascension" I have already mentioned, that I may throw a little further light on the profoundly personal origin of a work of art. He wrote me a long letter about it, describing his methods, how he studied the matter of proportioning his figures to the given space, how he pondered over the naturalistic appearance which he wished to establish in the landscape, and so on. In the effort to make
i
a
I i
1
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some of his figures look at their ease floating in the air, "I studied what I could," he wrote me, "of the people who are swung in ropes and other arrangements across theatres and circuses." He had certain geometric conditions in his mind which his composition had to meet if it was to make the right pattern in the space awaiting it. The landscape especially troubled him, and on this point there is a passage in his letter which I must quote intact:
At that moment I was asked to go to Japan by my friend, Henry Adaxns, and I went there in 1886. I had a vague belief that I might find there certain conditions of line in the mountains which might help me. Of course the Judean Mountains were entirely out of question, all the more that they implied a given place. I kept all this in. mind and on one given day I saw before me a space of mountain and cloud and flat land which seemed to me to be what was needed. I gave up my other work and made thereupon a rapid but very careful study, so complete that the big picture is only a part of the amount of work put into the study of that afternoon. There are turns of the tide which allow you at times to do an amount of work incredible in sober moments; as you know, there are very many such cases; I do not understand it myself. When I returned I was still of the same mind. My studies of separate figures were almost ready and all I had to do was to stretch the canvas and begin the work.
Now this artist had one of the richest minds and one of the subtlest souls ever known in art. His "Ascension" is the noblest work of his extraordinary imagination. Its appeal is that of religious painting
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in its highest estate. Yet you see from the foregoing out of what human perplexities and expedients it was developed. And if I allude to La Farge's procedure it is not of course to deny hmi a spiritual inspiration and to contrast his methods with those of the Old Masters, but, on the contrary, to emphasize his solidarity with them. A great religious painting grew under his hands precisely as it grew under the hands of a Titian or even a Leonardo, We talk about the man of action as though he had traits decisively separating TiTrn from the artist. The artist is a man, of action in that at least while a dreamer he is also a doer, a maker. La Farge, slowly fashioning his picture so that it might become an organic part of an architectural ensemble, sends me back with a heightened sympathy to the great company of his August predecessors. I seem only 'to apprehend a more vital character in the beauty of their works when I trace behind their unquestioned mysticism endless traits of a more mundane and personal origin."
I love to watch the natural every-day habit of mind belonging to a Ghirlandajo or a Carpaccio, adjusting itself to a realistic gait and achieving its pleasant, friendly narrative effects without any thought of the emotions indispensable to the Primitives. I love to observe Fra Angelico's affection for the flowers and Crivelli's artless sumptuosity. It is delightful to savor the wistfulness of Botticelli, the
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paganism of Mautegna, the intellectuality of Raphael, the sheer splendor of Titian, the terriWita of Michael Angelo, the dramatic fire in Tintoretto, the inexhaustible bravura of Tiepolo, and so on through the long list of what I would not call phases of religious painting but just the individualized moods of men. Consider the increased intimacy with religious art which we gain through this mode of approach. It is a mistake to be too metaphysical, too recondite, in the study of religious painting. It is a mistake to -assume that at some places in the morning of the modern world, in Italy, in Flanders, or elsewhere, art sat at the feet of the church and profited by a mystical laying on of hands. Even on that hypothesis it is to be noted that the religious inspiration depends for its fortunes utterly upon the caprice of fate that illumines one man and not the other. Look at Spain. There is something like religious ecstasy in the paintings of Zurburan and again in those of El Greco, whereas the religious compositions of Velasquez are negligible, though he was, as a painter, the master of them all. Look at the Low Countries. They were the scene of the most pronounced realism, yet the tenderness of the Van Eycks is unsurpassed and Rembrandt was one of the most moving religious painters of all time, as witness alone his "Supper at Emmaus," in the Louvre. It all comes back to the generosity of the gods, who may or may not project into the world a man with the genius of religious
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painting in him. A long time ago they dowered the earth with numbers of such masters. They and not their time account for what they did. Let us not forget, either, that most of these men were also great mural painters, great portrait-painters, as much at home with a secular as with a sacred subject in other words, simply great masters of a craft- This may not be an age of faith, but if a master arose to-morrow, a man of ideas and imagination, emotional and creative, wielding a compelling brush, he could fill the churches with immortal illustrations of the divine story. The case of La Farge's glorious picture proves that.
VII
The Cult of the Drawing
VII THE CULT OF THE DRAWING
IN the "Souvenirs du Diner Bixio" of the late Jules Claretie there is a passage which rather amusingly illustrates the attitude occasionally held by one eminent man toward another, and incidentally it gives us a clew to the status in French art of one of its most famous figures. The passage reports a colloquy between Meissonier and G6r6me, about Leon Bonnat, which ran as follows:
MEISSONIER. Qui va-t-on nommer comme vice-president aVInstitvi?
GER6ME. Bonnat.
MEISSONTER. A quel propos? C'est done un peintre?
GER6ME. Oui . . . maintenant.
Thus we see that even an Academician may sometimes be a little acrid toward another Academician. But, as I have indicated, besides what is droll in the anecdote there is a suggestion of Bonnat's character as an artist. He was one of the salient painters of his day, but was he, in the esoteric sense of the term, a painter? He promised to be one when he was a young man in Italy, a pensionnaire of the Villa Medicis in the early sixties, the ardent soul painted by
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Degas at that time in one of the most interesting of his portraits. Bonnat delineated then the models who hang about the Scala di Spagna in Rome wearing their most picturesque garments, and he made capital pictures out of them. Even then, however, there was working in him a deleterious influence. Born at Bayonne and spending part of his youth just across the border in Spain, he had conceived a great admiration for Ribera. In one of his Italian pictures he invented a scene in which that master sat on the steps of a Roman church drawing the monks issuing from the edifice; and besides commemorating his hero in this way he emulated him in method when he came to paint the portraits that occupied a large part of his career. He went in for a simple but dramatic play of light and shade and put forth a series of extraordinary images. It is resplendent with great names. He portrayed Pasteur and the Due d'Aumale, Gounod and Pasta, Thiers and Victor Hugo in short, all the celebrities of an epoch. They live magnificently upon his canvas. You look, for example, at such a portrait of his as that of L6on Cogniet and for a moment you feel that you are looking at a masterpiece. On second thoughts you revise this judgment, for you observe that the portrait is as hard as nails, as rigidly defined as though it were cut out of iron. What was it, in addition to the vitalizing characterization in them, that nevertheless gave them high rank in modern French portraiture ? They
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were superbly drawn, drawn academically; no doubt, but still with the touch of a master.
Apropos of this matter of Bonnat's draftsmanship I may recite a very curious incident. Gambetta died on December 31, 1882. In its issue for February, 1883, the Gazette des Beauoc-Arts published an article about him as a man of taste by Jules Claretie, and accompanied it by a reproduction of an etching from the head of the statesman drawn the day after his death at Ville d'Avray by Bonnat. It was signed and dated. I tucked it away among my prints and years afterward, in 1898, when Bodley published his book on France, I reprinted the portrait in a review of that work. This fell under the eye of my friend the late Samuel P. Avery, the old art-dealer, connoisseur, and collector. He wrote to me with astonishment, saying that Bonnat himself had aided him to complete his collection of his (Bonnat's) etchings, sending him an impression of any new plate he made, and this one had never turned up. Avery said he would send my reproduction to his agent in Paris . with instructions to make inquiry. The report came back stating that Bonnat declared he had never etched the plate, and scrawled across the reproduction were these words: "Bonnat swore by the point of his knife that he never made etching of this in his life." Now what could have caused that amazing repudiation, made under the most sacred of Basque oaths ? I call it a repudiation because the documen-
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tation of the print is conclusive. Its mere, publication in the Gazette, one of the sedatest periodicals on earth, would by itself be fairly conclusive, but besides that it bears the familiar signature and Claretie specifically ascribes it to Bonnat in his text. That the artist didn't see it in the magazine at the time is next door to incredible, and that he never protested to the Gazette is shown by the fact that when the "Tables G6n6rales" of the magazine were subsequently compiled by Charles de Bus the etching was attributed therein to Bonnat- It will be interesting if some day, in some passage of social or political reminiscence, a ray of light is thrown on this little mystery.
Bonnat triumphed, we have seen, through draftsmanship. The point has a dual significance. He not only drew well himself, but he had a cult for the drawings of others; and if he left one monument to his art in the body of portraiture to which I have referred, he left another to his taste in the Musee Bonnat at Bayonne. That little town in the extreme south of France was good to the artist in his youth, subsidizing his studies, and he never forgot it. As he rose in the world and prospered he collected paintings and drawings, and he gave a prodigious collection of these to the municipality in 1901. I remember that when I visited Bayonne the drawings in the museum made me catch my breath. Nowhere else in the provinces could one encounter quite such riches. It was as though one were in an annex to the Louvre.
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Bonnat made memorable gifts to that great national institution especially one of a priceless sheaf of Rembrandt drawings but the Mus6e Bonnat was very close to his heart and it possesses most of his finest gems. These are now being made accessible to a wider public. There is an admirable co-operative organization in Paris, Les Presses TJniversitaires de France, which exists to supply its members with books at reasonable prices. It also engages in publishing, and it is issuing a series of portfolios under the title of "Les Dessins de la Collection L6on Bonnat." Four times a year subscribers receive a group of from twenty to twenty-Jive drawings, and publication will go on until the best at Bayonne have been reproduced. This means that in the long run we will have in facsimile some of the greatest drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michael Angelo; Rembrandt, Holbein, and Diirer; Claude, Poussin, and Watteau. Nor is the collection confined to the ancient masters. Bonnat had a passion for the drawings of Ingres, and, with his fine catholicity, he showed the same ardor in assembling souvenirs of that master's romantic rival, Delacroix. Other moderns are present. The Geiman Menzel, for example, is represented by six beautiful drawings. The first portfolio, which lies before me, well brings out the wide range of the affair. It opens with Guardi and Signorelli. There follows a brilliant sanguine attributed to Maes, and from this we pass to an exquisite Rem-
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brandt. Then come Diirer and the elder Holbein, followed unexpectedly by a brilliant drawing in colors from the hand of Sir Thomas Lawrence. The eighteenth-century French School is glitteringly represented by Clodion, Fragonard, Lancret, and Gabriel de Saint-Aubin. Barye, Corot, Delacroix, G&ricault, Ingres, and Millet round out the company.
The important thing about these reproductions is that, thanks to the development of modern processes, possession of them is tantamount to possession of the originals, and I note the fact with the more appreciation because it plays into the hands, if I may so express it, of a hobby which I would urge upon every lover of art. Of course there are, I suppose, people quite interested in pictures for whom drawings as such have no great appeal. Well, frankly, I'm sorry for them, and, indeed, I will go so far as to assert that their equipment is sadly incomplete. The world is divided, for me, into two groups, formed respectively of those who care for drawings and those who do not. For those who do care there is nothing so thrilling as a good drawing. I have ridden this hobby all my life and I know. Some old Frenchman it may have been Mariette once said that in a drawing you get an artist's idea in its premiere eclosion. You get more than that. You get in its most revealing autographic expression the very breath and pressure of his individuality, you come into the most intimate possible contact with the very essence of
PAUXTJS HOFHAIMER
PROM THE DRAWING BY ALBRECHT DTJRER
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his genius. Pater and the rest of them have uttered their dithyrambs
