time by Puvis de Chavannes and J. P. Laurens, in which
Benjamin Constant and Cormon also distinguished themselves,
had but a few adherents who tried to maintain its dignity, either
in combination with landscape, like M. Tattegrain, or with the
ineffectual aid of archaeology, like M. Rochegrosse. At certain
times, especially just after 1870, the memory of the war gave
birth to a special genre of military subjects, under the distinguished
guidance of Meissonier (q.v.), and the peculiar talents
of Alphonse de Neuville (q.v.), of Detaille (q.v.) and Protais.
This phase of contemporary history being exhausted, gave way
to pictures of military manœuvres, or colonial wars and incidents
in recent history; it latterly went through a revival under a
demand for subjects from the Empire and the Revolution, in
consequence of the publication of many memoirs of those times.
Side by side with “history,” religious art formerly flourished
greatly; indeed, next to mythology, it was always dear to the
Academy. Apart from the subjects set for academical competitions,
there was only one little revival of any interest in this
kind. This was a sort of neo-evangelical offshoot, akin to the
literature and stress of religious discussion; and its leader, a man
of feeling rather than conviction, was J. C. Cazin (d. 1901).
Like Puvis de Chavannes, and under the influence of Corot and
Millet, of Hobbema, and yet more of Rembrandt, he attempted
to renew the vitality of history and legend by the added charm
of landscape and the introduction of more human, more living
and more modern, elements into the figures and accessories.
Following him, a little group developed this movement to
extravagance. The recognized leader at the beginning of the
20th century was Dagnan-Bouveret.
Through mythology and allegory we are brought back to real life. No one now thinks in France of seeking any pretext for displaying the nude beauty of woman. Henner, perhaps, and Fantin-Latour, were the last to cherish a belief in Venus and Artemis, in naiads and nymphs. Painters go direct to the point nowadays; when they paint the nude, it is apart from abstract fancies, and under realistic aspects. They are content with the model. It is the living female. The whole motor force of the time lies in the expression, under various aspects, of real life. This it is which has given such a soaring flight to the two most primitive forms of the study of life, landscape and portraiture. Portraits have in fact adopted every style that can possibly be imagined: homely or fashionable, singly or in groups, by the fire or out of doors, in some familiar attitude and the surroundings of daily life, analytically precise, or synthetically broad, a literal transcript or a bold epitome of facts. As to landscape, no class of painting has been busier, more alive or more productive. It has overflowed into every other channel of art, giving them new spirit and a new life. It has led the van in every struggle and won every victory. Never was army more numerous or more various than that of the landscape painters, nor more independent. All the traditions find representatives among them, from Paul Flandrin to René Ménard. Naturalists, impressionists, open-air painters, learned in analysis or potent in invention. We need only name Harpignies, broadly decorative; Pointelin, thoughtful and austere; and Cazin, grave and tender, to give a general idea of the strength of the school.
Every quarter of the land has its painters: the north and the south, Provence and Auvergne, Brittany, dear to the young generation of colourists, the East, Algeria, Tunis—all contribute to form a French school of landscape, very living and daring, of which, as successors of Fromentin and Guillaumet, must be named Dinet, Marius Perret, Paul Leroy and Girardot. But it is more especially in the association of man and nature, in painting simple folk and their struggle for life amid their natural surroundings or by their homely hearth, in the glorification of humble toil, that the latest French art finds its most characteristic ideal life. (L. Be.)
Belgium
Belgium fills a great place in the realm of art; and while its painters show a preference for simple subjects, their technique is broad, rich and sound, the outcome of a fine tradition. Since 1855 international critics have been struck by the unity of effect produced by the works of the Belgian school, as expressed more especially by similarities of handling and colour. For the things which distinguish all Belgian painters, even in their most unpictorial divagations, are a strong sense of contrast or harmony of colouring, a free, bold style of brushwork, and a preference for rich and solid painting. It is the tradition of the old Flemish school. It would be more correct, indeed, to say traditions; for the modifications of each tendency, inevitably reviving when the success of another has exhausted itself, constantly show a reversion either to the domestic “Primitives” (or, as we might say, Pre-Raphaelites) of the Bruges school, or to the “decorative” painters of the later time at Antwerp, and no veneer of modern taste will ever succeed in masking this traditional perennial groundwork. In this way the prevailing authority of the French painter Louis David may be accounted for; as acknowledged at Brussels at the beginning of the 19th century, it was a reaction in antagonism to the heavy and flabby work of the late Antwerp school, an unconscious reversion perhaps to the finish and minuteness of the early painters of Bruges. Indeed, in France, Ingres, himself David’s most devoted disciple, was reproached with trying to revive the Gothic art of Jean de Bruges. Then, when David’s followers produced only cold and feeble work, Wappers arose to restore the methods of another tradition, for which he secured a conspicuous triumph. Classical tinsel made way, indeed, for romantic tinsel. The new art was as conventional as the old, but it had the advantage of being adaptable to the taste for show and splendour which characterizes the nation, and it also admitted the presentment of certain historical personages who survived in the memory of the people. The inevitable reaction from this theatrical art, with its affectation of noble sentiments, was to brutal realism. Baron Henri Leys (q.v.) initiated it, and the crudity of his style gave rise to a belief in a systematic purpose of supplanting the Latin tradition by Germanic sentimentality. Leys’s archaic realism was transformed at Brussels into a realism of observation and modern thought, in the painting of Charles de Groux. The influence of Leys on this artist was merely superficial; for though he, too, affected painful subjects, it was because they appealed to his compassion. The principle represented by de Groux was destined to pioneer the school in a better way; at the same time, from another side the authority of Courbet, the French realist, who had been for some time in Brussels, and that of the great landscape painters of the Fontainebleau school, had suggested to artists a more attentive study of nature and a remarkable reversion in technique to bolder and firmer handling. At this time, among other remarkable men, Alfred Stevens appeared on the scene, the finished artist of whom Camille Lemonnier truly said that he was “of the race of great painters, and, like them, careful of finish”—that in him “the eye, the hand and the brain all co-operated for the mysterious elaboration” of impasto, colour and chiaroscuro, and “the least touch was an operation of the mind.” A brief period ensued during which the greater number of Belgian artists were carried away by the material charms of brushwork and paint. The striving after brilliant efforts of colour which had characterized the painters of the last generation then gave way to a devout study of values; and at the same time it is to be noted that in Belgium, as in France, landscape painters were the first to discover the possibility of giving new life to the interpretation of nature by simplicity and sincerity of expression. They tried to render their exact sensations; and we saw, as has been said, “an increasingly predominant revelation of instinctive feeling in all classes of painting.” Artists took an impartial interest in all they saw, and the endeavour to paint well eliminated the hope of expressing a high ideal; they now sought only to utter in a work of art the impression made on them by an external fact; and, too often, the strength of the effort degenerated into brutality.
These new influences, which, in spite of the conservative school, had by degrees modified the aspect of Belgian art in
