AR T.
VAN BEERS.
-THERE has been an exhibition opened lately at the lower end of Bond Street, called Le Salon Parisien, which is chiefly concerned with the work of a well-known Belgian painter, Jan Van Beers. 'There are here six or eight of his larger figure-pictures, a score or so of smaller ones, and three hundred very minute landscape sketehes,—these last, notes made in the studio from recollection. All the papers, with scarcely an exception, have taken considerable notice of this gallery; and Mr. Van Beers' work therein, and
it is no doubt worthy of attention. Whether it be also worthy of the somewhat hysterical admiration which has been so freely lavished upon it, is another question, and one which we should answer in the negative; and, passing from the technical point of view to that of the moral and intellectual, we have no hesitation in saying that the motive of the pictures, and the style of life they illustrate in their subjects, is artificial and degraded in the highest degree. It is worth noticing, for those who take an interest in contemporary manners, that such an exhibition as this, is one which could scarcely have been held in such a locality as Bond Street, except during the last few years. The peculiar compound of dress and indelicacy, which forms the staple subject of Mr. Van Beers' work, would hardly have been appreciated in England till opera-bouffe, Paris fashions, and society journalism had educated us up to it. Even now we think there are some of us left neither very prudish nor very insular who will feel disgust at this public treatment of the courtesan.
Mr. Van Beers is a young man of great ability. Is it too late, we wonder, to warn him, that for his art he has taken the wrong road? If Art be not consciously moral, it is even less consciously immoral. No great art over came, or ever could come, as a pander to those appetites which lower us to the brute, instead of " raising to the angels." The degrada tion of a noble passion is no tit subject for men who seek to paint great pictures, unless it be done with the object of showing us how horrible is such a fall,—how great is the " pity on't." What is it, then, that Mr. Beers has done to deserve such a condemnation ? It is simply this. He has taken the fairest faces and fornis he could find, mostly of young girls, and depicted them in dresses and in attitudes, and amidst surround ings, which leave no doubt of his intention,—the intention, that is, of depicting beauty only to suggest its fouler uses. With a really wonderful skill of handicraft; with an occasional power of colour combinations which, for daring and originality, has been unapproached since the death of Fortuny ; with an imagination of wonderful fertility and resource, he yet lays all his powers and all his gifts at the feet of the great goddess " Lubricity," as Mr. Matthew Arnold calls her. There is a picture here, which may well serve as a type of all the rest, of a young girl half-sitting, half-lying upon a chair, which is, without exception, for its combination of beauty, skill, and indelicacy, as odious a work as we have ever seen,--a picture which, in the interests of Art. no less than in the interests of all decent people, should be utterly condemned.
Do our readers think we exaggerate in saying that it is pitiful, and maddening, at the same time, to see a man who might be a great artist, doing work which makes his genius a slave to the worst passions of the worst men,—to see him, in the prime of his manhood and the height of his power, wandering, with a ghastly grin upon his face, down the Valley of the Shadow of Death ? And scarcely less painful is it to go to the Gallery and see decent English women and men enjoying its degradation ; for, if there be any truth in this world, it is true that to deify the cocotte, as Mr. Van Beers does here, is to degrade woman kind. There is a verse of Wordsworth which we quoted many years ago in the Spectator, in a somewhat similar connection, and which, despite its familiarity to most of our readers, we venture to quote again, as showing the opposite ideal of the sex to this ideal of lace-petticoats and liberally-displayed silk stockings :
" Then healthy as a shepherd-boy, And running amidst flowers of joy Which at no season fade, Thou, whilst thy babes around thee cling, Shall show us how divine a thing A woman may he made."
We hare said enough, perhaps more than enough, on the moral and intellectual quality of these pictures ; let us say a few words on their technical peculiarities. There is oue—a portrait of Peter Benoit—which reminds us very much of Tadema's work. We feel as we look at it, not so much that it is like Tadema, but that no other artist than Tadema could have done it in the same way. Parts of the background of this are very unfinished, as is indeed the case with nearly all the pictures here, it being Mr. Van Beers' habit apparently to finish the faces of his figures very highly, and leave other parts in various stages of incompletion. The method is, to our thinking, a very objectionable one ; it is at once careless and insolent ; it takes
away all sense of that completeness and perfection which is, perhaps, the chief secret of great Art. It may be suggested as worthy of consideration whether the chief charm of a
picture or statue—the chief abiding charm, rather—is not the unspoken conviction on the part of the beholder that it could not have been better or otherwise done. But to have a work of art practically saying to you, " Look here, you know, I might have been very much better, but that I thought I was good enough as I am," is almost equivalent to being told our inferiority. If one looks at the work of the old masters, we never find a trace of this. The work may have every other imperfection, but it is always wrought-out to the end, not left in indolence or completed in baste. But Mr. Van Beers scratchesout bits of his work, scrubs-in others ; here the paint scarcely covers the panel, there it sticks out in lumps an eighth-of-aninch thick ; here there is a cheek modelled as minutely as if a microscope had been employed, there there are arms and hands which have no trace of modelling from one end to the other,— and so on throughout.
The largest picture in the gallery is in this respect the most perfect, though it is in other ways unsuccessful. It is called " Peace with Honour," and represents a nursemaid and a Lifeguardsman sitting under a tree in Kensington Gardens. The woman is French enough, but in the man Mr. Van Beers has caught the type more successfully; and the picture is like a well-coloured photograph in its careful completion, and narration of every accuracy of dress and uniform. Like a coloured photograph,—that is at once the merit, and the eternal drawback, of this art of Mr. Van Beers ; it shows the barrier beyond which he cannot pass. And yet in some ways this, too, is untrue ; for the man has fancy and imagination of a strong, almost tragic, kind, when he allows himself to make use of them. The coloured-photograph part of his art is almost wholly that which refers to costume; wanting, perhaps, to be the Meissonnier of the Bois de Boulogne, he has attained to being its photographer. After all, if an artist deliberately sets himself to make jupons and bas-de-soie, his chief subjects, we can hardly expect him to get much spiritual meaning into his work ; it can scarcely be more than coloured photography. Perhaps it is the artist-nature of the man, which, dimly perceiving this fact, so frequently leads him to leave features of his work barely indicated,—to put in fanciful backgrounds full of all sortsof dimly-suggested fancies and peculiarities. This may be so ; but we should rather imagine that the bizarrerie of this artist's work springs not so much from personal feeling as from a deliberate design. He is a Belgian, and began and failed as a historical painter. He went and settled in Faris, and has, we may imagine from what we see here, set to work to become more Parisian than the Parisians themselves. At all events, he has succeeded. His work is eagerly sought for, admired, and bought, in France ; it is the perfect expression of one of the sides of the French character, in which taste, elegance, and wit go hand-in-hand with coarseness, cynicism, and recklessness. What the French call " Tout Paris" will appreciate the work, and very likely " Tout Londres " will go and see it. That does not prevent our thinking that the talent which it shows is such as to sadden any honest man, and to disgust every refined woman.
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