obtained, not only by palette-knife painting, but by squeezing
the colour straight from the tubes on to the canvas.
See Ashton R. Willard, History of Modern Italian Art (London, 1898). (R. Mr.)
Spain and Portugal
Modern Spanish painting began with Mariano Fortuny (q.v.), who, dying as long ago as 1874, nevertheless left his mark even on the following generation of artists. During his residence in Paris in 1866 he had been strongly influenced by Meissonier, and subsequently selected similar subjects—scenes in 18th-century costume. In Fortuny, however, the French painter’s elaborate finish is associated with something more intense and vivid, indicative of the southern Latin temperament. He collected in his studio in Rome the most artistic examples of medieval industry. The objects among which he lived he also painted with incisive spirit as a setting for elegant figures from the world of Watteau and of Goya, which are thrown into his pictures with amazing dash and sparkle; and this love of dazzling kaleidoscopic variety has animated his successors. Academic teaching tries to encourage historical painting. Hence, since the ’seventies, the chief paintings produced in Spain have been huge historical works, which have made the round of European exhibitions and then been collected in the Gallery of Modern Art at Madrid. There may be seen “The Mad Queen Juana,” by Pradilla; “The Conversion of the Duke of Gandia,” by Moreno Carbonero; “The Bell of Huesca,” by Casado; “The Last Day of Numantia,” by Vera; “Ines de Castro,” by Cabello.
It is possible, of course, to discern in the love of the horrible displayed in these pictures an element of the national character, for in the land of bull-fights even painting turns to murder and sudden death, poison and the rope. However, at least we must admit the great power revealed, and recognize the audacious colouring. But in point of fact these works are only variants on those executed in France from the time of Delaroche to Jean Paul Laurens, and tell their story in the style that was current in Parisian studios in the ’sixties. What is called the national garb of Spain is mainly the cast-off fashion of Paris. After all this magniloquent work Fortuny’s rococo became the rage. The same painters who had produced the great historical pictures were now content to take up a brilliant and dazzling miniature style; either, like Fortuny himself, using small and motley figures in baroque subjects, or adapting the modern national life of Spain to the rococo style.
Here again we observe the acrobatic dexterity with which the painters, Pradilla especially, use the brush. But here again there is nothing essentially new—only a repetition of what Fortuny had already done twenty years before. The Spanish school, therefore, presented a very old-fashioned aspect at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. The pictures shown there were mostly wild or emotional. Bedouins fighting, an antique quadriga flying past, the inhabitants of Pompeii hastily endeavouring to escape from the lava torrent, Don Quixote’s Rosinante hanging to the sail of the windmill, and the terrors of the Day of Judgment were the subjects; Alvarez Dumont, Benlliure y Gil, Ulpiano Checa, Manuel Ramirez Ibañez and Moreno Carbonero were the painters. Among the huge canvases, a number of small pictures, things of no importance, were scattered, which showed only a genre-like wit. Spain is a somewhat barren land in modern art. There painting, although active, is blind to life and to the treasures of art which lie unheeded in the road. Only one artist, Agrasot, during the ’seventies painted pictures of Spanish low life of great sincerity; and much later two young painters appeared who energetically threw themselves into the modern movement. One was Sorolla y Bastida, by whom there is a large fishing picture in the Luxembourg, which in its stern gravity might be the work of a Northern painter; the other was Ignacio Zuloaga, in whom Goya seems to live again. Old women, girls of the people, and cocottes especially, he has painted with admirable spirit and with breadth. Spain, which has taken so little part in the great movement since Manet’s time, only repeating in old-fashioned guise things which are falsely regarded as national, seems at last to possess in Zuloaga an artist at once modern and genuinely national.
Portugal took an almost lower place in the Paris Exhibition. For whereas the historical Spanish school has endeavoured to be modern to some extent, at least in colour, the Portuguese cling to the blue-plush and red-velvet splendours of Delaroche in all their crudity. Weak pictures of monks and of visions are produced in numbers, together with genre pictures depicting the popular life of Portugal, spiced to the taste of the tourist. There are the younger men who aim at availing themselves of the efforts of the open-air painters; but even as followers of the Parisians they only say now what the French were saying long years ago through Bastien-Lepage, Puvis de Chavannes and Adrien Dumont. There is always a Frenchman behind the Portuguese, who guides his brush and sets his model. The only painter formed in the school is Carlos Reis, whose vast canvas “Sunset” has much in common with the first huge peasant pictures painted in Germany by Count Kalckreuth. One painter there is, however, who is quite independent and wholly Portuguese, a worthy successor of the great old masters of his native land, and this is Columbano, whose portraits of actors have a spark of the genius which inspired the works of Velazquez and Goya.
See A. G. Temple, Modern Spanish Painting (1908). (R. Mr.)
Denmark
Denmark resembles Holland in this: that in both, nature presents little luxury of emphasized colour or accentuated majesty of form. Broad flats are everywhere to be seen—vague, almost indefinable, in outline. Danish art is as demure and staid as the Danish landscape. As in Holland, the painters make no bold experiments, attempt no pretentious subjects, no rich colouring, nothing sportive or light. Like the Dutch, the Danes are somewhat sluggishly tranquil, loving dim twilight and the swirling mist. But Denmark is a leaner land than Holland, less moist and more thinly inhabited, so that its art lacks the comfortable self-satisfied character of Dutch art. It betrays rather a tremulous longing, a pleasing melancholy and delight in dreams, a trembling dread of contact with coarse and stern reality. It was only for a time, early in the ’seventies, that a touch of cosmopolitanism affected Danish art. The phase of grandiose historical painting and anecdotic genre was experienced there, as in every other country. In Karl Bloch (b. 1834), Denmark had a historical painter in some respects parallel with the German Piloty; in Axel Helsted (b. 1847), a genre painter reminding us of Ludwig Knaus. The two artists Laurits Tuxen (b. 1853) and Peter Kröyer (b. 1851), who are most nearly allied to Manet and Bastien-Lepage, have a sort of elegance that is almost Parisian. Kröyer, especially, has bold inventiveness and amazing skill. Open-air effects and twilight moods, the glare of sunshine and artificial light, he has painted with equal mastery. In portraiture, too, he stands alone. The two large pictures in which he recorded a “Meeting of the Committee of the Copenhagen Exhibition, 1887,” and a “Meeting of the Copenhagen Academy of Sciences,” are modern works which in power of expression may almost compare with those of Frans Hals. Such versatility and facile elegance are to be found in no other Danish painter. At the period of historic painting it was significant that next to Bloch, the cosmopolitan, came Kristian Zahrtmann (b. 1843), who painted scenes from the life of Eleonora Christina, a Danish heroine (daughter of Christian IV.), with the utmost simplicity, and without any emotional or theatrical pathos. This touching feeling for home and country is the keynote of Danish art. The Dane has now no sentiment but that of home; his country, once so powerful, has become but a small one, and has lost its political importance. Hence he clings to the little that is left to him with melancholy tenderness. Viggo Johansen (b. 1851), with his gentle dreaminess, is the best representative of modern Danish home-life. He shows us dark sitting-rooms, where a quiet party has met around the tea-table. “An Evening at Home,” “The Christmas Tree,” “Grandmother’s Birthday,” are typical subjects, and all have the same fresh and fragrant
