House, the Cour des Comptes and a few churches—St Sulpice,
St Vincent de Paul and St Germain des Prés—no serious attempts
had been made in this direction. Excepting in the Hôtel de
Ville, where Cabanel was winning his first laurels, and in the
Opera House, a work that was progressing in silence, a few
chapels only were decorated with paintings in the manner of
easel pictures. But two famous exceptions led to a decorative
revival: Puvis de Chavannes’s splendid scheme of decoration at
Amiens (all, with the exception of the last composition, which is
dated 1882, executed without break between 1861 and 1867),
and his work at Marseilles and at Poitiers; Baudry, with his
ceiling in the Opera House, begun in 1866 but not shown to the
public till 1874. There was also a movement for reviving
French taste in the industrial arts by following the example of
systematic teaching set by some foreign countries, more particularly
by England. Decorative painting felt the same impulse.
Philippe de Chennevières, curator of the Luxembourg Gallery
and Directeur des Beaux Arts (from 1874 till 1879), determined
to encourage it by setting up a great rivalry between the most
distinguished painters, like that which had stimulated the zeal
of the artists of the Italian Renaissance. Taking up the task
already attempted by Chenavard under the Republic of 1848,
but abandoned in consequence of political changes, M. de
Chennevières commissioned a select number of artists to decorate
the walls of the Panthéon. The panels were to record certain
events in the history of France, with due regard to the sacred
character of the building. Twelve of the most noted painters
were named, with a liberal breadth of selection so as to include
the most dissimilar styles: Millet and Meissonier, of whom one
refused and the other did not carry out the work; Cabanel and
Puvis de Chavannes. The last-named was the first to begin, in
1878, and he too was the painter who put the crowning end to
this great work in 1898. His pictures of the “Childhood of
Ste Geneviève” (the patron saint of Paris), simple, full of feeling
and of innocent charm, appropriate to a popular legend, with
their airy Parisian landscape under a pallid sky, made a deep
impression. Thenceforward Puvis de Chavannes had a constantly
growing influence over younger men. His magnificent work at
Amiens, “Ludus pro Patria” (1881–1882), at Lyons and at
Rouen, in the Sorbonne and the Hotel de Ville, for the Public
Library at Boston, U.S.A., and on to his last composition, “The
Old Age of Ste Geneviève,” upheld to the end of the 19th century
the sense of lofty purpose in decorative painting. Besides
the Panthéon, which gave the first impetus to the movement,
Philippe de Chennevières found other buildings to be decorated:
the Luxembourg, the Palace of the Legion of Honour and that
of the Council of State. The paintings in the Palais de Justice,
the Sorbonne, the Hotel de Ville, the College of Pharmacy,
the Natural History Museum, the Opéra Comique, and many
more, bear witness to this grand revival of mural painting.
Every kind of talent was employed—historical painters, portrait
painters, painters of allegory, of fancy scenes, of real life and of
landscape. Among the most important were: J. P. Laurens
and Benjamin Constant, Bonnat and Carolus Duran, Cormon
and Humbert, Joseph Blanc and L. Olivier Merson, Roll and
Gervex, Besnard and Carrière, Harpignies and Pointelin, Raphaël
Collin and Henri Martin.
II. Impressionism.—In 1874 common cause was made by a group of artists drawn together by sympathetic views and a craving for independence. Various in their tastes, they concentrated from every point of the compass to protest, like their precursors the realists, against the narrow views of academic teaching. Some had romantic proclivities, as the Dutchman Jongkindt, who played an important part in founding this group; others were followers of Daubigny, of Corot or of Millet; some came from the realistic party, whose influence and effort this new set was to carry on. Among these, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) holds a leading place; indeed, his influence, in spite of—or perhaps as a result of—much abuse, extended beyond his circle even so far as to affect academic teaching itself. He was first a pupil of Couture, and then, after Courbot, his real masters were the Spaniards—Velasquez, El Greco and Goya—all of whom he closely studied at the beginning of his career; but he soon felt the influence of Millet and of Corot. With a keen power of observation, he refined and lightened his style, striving for a subtle rendering of the exact relations of tone and values in light and atmosphere. With him, forming the original group, as represented by the Caillebotte collection in the Luxembourg, we find some landscape painters: Claude Monet, the painter of pure daylight, and the artist who by the title of one of his pictures, “An Impression,” gave rise to the designation accepted by the group; Camille Pissarro, who at one time carried to an extreme the principle of dotting with pure tints, known as pointillisme, or dotwork; Sisley, Cézanne and others. Among those who by preference studied the human figure were Edgard Degas (q.v.) and Auguste Renoir. After long and violent antagonism, such as had already greeted the earlier innovators, these painters, in spite of many protests, were officially recognized both at the Luxembourg and at the great Exhibition of 1900. Their aims have been various, some painting Man and some Nature. In the former case they claim to have gone back to the principle of the greatest artists and tried to record the life of their own time. Manet, Degas and Renoir have shown us aspects of city or vulgar life which had been left to genre-painting or caricature, but which they have represented with the charm of pathos, or with the bitter irony of their own mood, frank transcripts of life with a feeling for style. For those who painted the scenery of nature there was an even wider field. They brought to their work a new visual sense, released from the clinging memories of past art; they endeavoured to fix the transient effects of moving life, changing under the subtlest and most fugitive effects of light and atmosphere, and the play of what may be called the elements of motion—sunshine, air and clouds—caring less for the exact transcript of motionless objects, which had hitherto been almost exclusively studied, such as the soil, trees and rocks, the inanimate features of the landscape. They introduced a fresh lightness of key, which had been too subservient to the relations of values; they discovered for their ends a new class of subjects essentially modern: towns, streets, railway stations, factories, coal-mines, ironworks and smoke, which they represent with an intelligent adaptation of Japanese art, taking new and audacious points of view, constantly varying the position of their horizon. This is indeed the very acme of naturalism, the last possible stage of modern landscape, covering the whole field of observation, doubling back to the starting-point of imagination. Notwithstanding—or because of—the outcry, of these views, peculiarities and tendencies soon penetrated schools and studios. Three artists in particular became conspicuous among the most individual and most independent spirits: Besnard, who had taken the Grand Prix de Rome, and carried to the highest pitch his inexhaustible and charming fancy in studies of the figure under the most unexpected play of light; Carrière, a pupil of Cabanel, who sought and found in mysterious gloom the softened spirit of the humble, the warm caress of motherhood; and Raffaëlli, a pupil of Gérôme, who brought to light the unrecognized picturesqueness of the lowest depths of humanity.
III. The “Plein-air,” or Open-air, School.—The same causes explain the rise of the particular class of work thus commonly designated. Between Millet and Courbet, both redolent of the romantic and naturalistic influences of their time, though apart from them, stands an artist who had some share in establishing the continuity of the line of painters who combined figure-painting with landscape. This is Jules Breton (b. 1827, q.v.). More supple than his fellows, less harsh and less wilful, caring more for form and charm, he found it easier to treat “masses,” and contributed to diffuse a taste for the artistic presentment and glorification of field labour. He was the chief link between a past style and Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884, q.v.), who was in fact the founder of the school of open-air painting, a compromise between the academic manner and the new revolutionary ideas, a sort of academic continuation of the naturalistic evolution, which therefore exerted considerable influence on contemporary art. As a pupil of Cabanel and the Academy schools.
